‘Nothing’s warm these days, Jock: nothing except the bathwater.’
‘Aye, aye.’
It was only after he had closed the flat door behind him that Jock remembered Charlie’s confession on the night the Colonel had arrived. He had said it was fresh water. But Jock did not feel very much like smiling. He was worried: worried first because it had been the sort of dream that leaves a man worried: worried because he should never have gone round to see her; worried because he had said what he had said to Charlie; and finally, but most immediately of all, worried because he should have said a lot more to Charlie. When Charlie had said that about the bathwater he should have had an answer, or thrown a drink in his face. The thought of the bath and the bathroom annoyed him particularly. It was not that he was particularly in need of Mary, or any other woman. He supposed it was just something he had missed. Presumably, amusing men did it in the bath.
He was just about to wander down the stairs when Mary appeared on the landing beside him.
‘Jock.’
He was surprised to see her, and she smiled kindly. She quickly closed the door behind her and she touched his wrist.
‘Jock, you’re all right?’
He stared at her slowly: at her eyes, and the set of the eyes, and at her hair. She smiled anxiously.
‘I shouldn’t have been cross like that.’
He cocked his head on one side.
‘I’m all right, lassie. Dinny fash yourself.’
‘I’m glad.’ She was almost like a mother, saying goodbye to a schoolboy son. She did not seem to know quite what to say, but she was anxious to say something. ‘It’s fine seeing you again.’
Jock smiled now and shook his head. ‘Will I call back?’
‘Of course. I’m always pleased to see you,’ she said looking away, and Jock began to chuckle.
‘Away you go back to Charlie. Charlie’s a bloody stoat.’
‘Och, Jock …’ There was his coarseness again.
‘Aye, aye.’ He touched her hand and started to walk downstairs.
Charlie did not move from his place on the sofa when she returned to the room, and poured herself a drink. At last he said with a silly smile, ‘Touching farewell?’ and she gave him a look.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you all. It used to be amusing, in the old days.’ She shrugged. ‘Och to hell.’
‘Jock’s certainly changed,’ he said at last, and she stopped and tapped her nails against the empty glass in her hand. She opened her eyes very wide, as if she were day-dreaming.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
Charlie swung his legs off the sofa, put his glass on the floor.
‘I reckon he’s heading for some sort of crack-up.’
‘Is he drinking an awful lot?’
‘That’s nothing new.’
She was dreaming again.
‘He was in a funny state today, no mistake. He came in here like an eighteen-year-old. Then he just faded away.’
‘Oh yep?’
She smiled warmly, and moved. ‘Jock’s a great man.’
Charlie twitched his moustache.
‘Let’s not go on about it,’ he said rather quietly, ‘old girl.’
She looked at him and she knew what she should say. She could have touched him, or joked him. She could have said, ‘He hasn’t your moustache’ or ‘I didn’t know you cared.’ She could have said, ‘For heaven’s sake.’ There were lots of formulae which would have fitted, but she somehow did not feel inclined to apply them. So they just left it at that.
ELEVEN
THE WEATHER HAD changed for the worst. The snow lay two or three inches deep on the causeways and in the wynds, and it was still falling. But there was nothing sleety about it now: each flake was a feather and the flakes fell thickly, with a silent perseverance. Above the yellow street lamps it was pitch dark, and people abroad that night wondered what would happen were it never to cease to snow. No footsteps rang on the pavements, and even voices were muffled and lost in a white felt world that was lonely and eerie. Echoes were suffocated by the same snow that falls each year and that fell so long ago, when the first Jacobites, routed, savage and afraid, retreated, burning the villages as they came. The women then – their lips moving and their voices lost – the women and the children escaped from their houses into this same white winter, and waited, moaning. Snow in those parts is altogether different from the Christmas-card showers in the South. It is more serious and more sinister. Snow once meant suffering and poverty, and even starvation: it brought sorrow, not Christmas. The conditions have changed, the storm is no longer a danger; but the memory of something that was experienced generations before lingers like a superstition. Snow comes not as a friend.
And of all men Jock was the most superstitious. A flake or two fell on his eyebrows so that he pulled his bonnet over his eyes and turned up the collar of his coat. He did not wear one of the short greatcoats that fashionable field officers wear: he wore the regulation officer’s greatcoat. It was long and the two rows of heavy brass buttons ran parallel up to the waist, then flung apart from each other, wider and wider, so that the top buttons were shoulder breadth and the lapels folded across the chest.
He walked down Seaton Street, across the corner of the park to the footbridge. Its surface is cobbled and as it is steeply humped he found it difficult to walk there without slipping. But at the crest he stopped in one of the bays in the stone walls and leant over to look at the black water swirling beneath. By the light of a single lamp he could see where the snow was lying on a foot or two of ice that curved in from the bank of the stream. And although there was nothing heroic about Jock’s face, the figure standing there in the long greatcoat had a splendour. The same figure had moved from platoon to platoon when the snow was falling on a flatter, duller land: in every war, back and back, in every siege and trouble that same figure existed and exists: the anonymous commander in the long coat moving through the night, alone. He is the guard.
Anxious, because it was a time for anxiety, he walked on towards his home, to see Morag. He always felt a little guilty when he returned from visiting Mary, but when he found the house empty, he stopped still in the hall, suddenly convinced that something was wrong. He reached out a hand and touched the coat-stand, then took a pace forward to switch on the lights.
‘Morag! Morag! Morag!’
He glanced behind him, as always when afraid, and seeing the door ajar, closed it with a brave bang. Then he went swiftly to the kitchen, and finding it neat and orderly, tidy and cleaned, with a little note propped up on a cup on the bare table, his shoulders dropped with relief, and he opened his coat with a smile of shame. The note read:
Father,
Gone out with Jenny. Back by eleven.
Morag.
It was written in a sane and slanting script, and was firmly underlined. Jenny was a neighbour, and a friend of Morag’s. Nothing could be more secure. Jock looked about the kitchen, and the larder. He looked in a tin and ate a biscuit, then he knew he could not bring himself to make some supper, so he buttoned his coat again, shoved his hands deep into his pockets and retraced his steps down the wynd over the bridge and back into the town. He decided to call into a small hotel which had long ago been one of his haunts but which he had not visited for a full year. In the hall he was about to sign the book on the table as a bona fide traveller – between London and Thurso – when the proprietor appeared, ferret-like and inquisitive.