‘Strange to think of us ever being thought of as living long ago,’ mused Julia.
‘Yes, that indeed will be strange; I’m glad I won’t be living then,’ Emmy said finally. She was running about the room in her stocking-soles, postponing as long as possible the moment when she would have to put her shrinking toes into her slippers. ‘You know, if papa were wealthy, and I became engaged, I don’t think I would like him to give me a ball. It’s so like shouting your triumph to the world. Of course, I’m very glad Christine is giving hers. Do you think any one has been so excited as we? I felt almost ill when I thought something might happen to prevent my going. Do you know whom I think saw to it we were asked?’
‘Nicholas or Martin?’
‘No, that nice father.’
‘Yes—perhaps it was. What do you think Christine will be wearing?’
‘Something that will take all the shine out of me. And I know it was the father who thought of sending the carriage for us. It would never pass through Christine’s head we hadn’t a carriage. She would think you are born to have one as you are born to have arms and hair. I hope my hair won’t blow about before I reach the road. Do you think I’m ever going to be ready in time? Where’s my comb? I’ve lost my comb. Has any one seen my comb?’
‘There it is, goosey,’ said Julia, working her white gloves on to her fingers.
‘Where?’
‘Lying in front of you.’
Emmy put out both hands to find it.
‘Emmy!’ Julia said sharply, ‘whatever is the matter with you? It’s your eyes. Let me see your eyes. Why, you could swim in them. What have you been doing?’
‘S-sh,’ pleaded Emmy, ‘don’t tell any one, Julia, promise not to tell. I put in very little of the belladonna for papa’s poultices—only a very little. I know it was wicked and I’ve been punished for it, for now I won’t be able to tell one of my beaux from another.’
She could only see an indistinguishable image of herself in the mirror—as though she were looking at her reflection in rippled water, she confided to Julia, who scolded her all the time she helped her to finish dressing.
At last she was ready, with all her tapes and ribbons tied, her soft brown hair bunched into bright little curls on either side of her gay face.
‘The man has come to say the carriage is here, Blessings,’ mamma called up the stairs. She called each of us indiscriminately ‘Blessing,’ although, I am sure, none of us was praiseworthy enough to warrant it.
Nannie brought up my hot milk after they were gone and, while I drank it, she remained to tidy the room. Emmy’s old brown dress looked shabby and lonely with its arms hanging limply over a chair, almost as though it had felt flouted by that glowing figure who had forgotten all about it as she ran from the room. Nannie gave it a shake and hung it up in the wardrobe. The excitement had upset her and she was uncommunicative, only answering my questions in monosyllables. So I looked at the milky castle peaks and milky brides at the bottom of the drained tumbler and at the skin, lined like a bat’s wing, which clung to the side of the glass, until she was ready to go. She blew out the candle; the shadows quivered, then shrank and were obliterated by dark.
I lay listening to the scraping winds and piping creatures of the night. The fir tree touched the window again, only brushing it this time, making a sound like small tapping fingers. I fell asleep hoping Julia would forget to have the branch cut down.
I was awakened by their steps creaking on the loose board on the stairs. They had been away only several hours yet I seemed to have been sleeping for an eternity. I was too tired to sit up in bed to ask how they had fared and lay drifting on the tide between wakefulness and timeless sleep. One minute their whispering voices sounded jarringly loud, the next remote as in dream.
‘Julia, you must have noticed. He paid more attention to you than to any one. He is so charming and distinguished—much better looking than either of his sons. Do you think he will be so very old?’
‘He’ll be forty and a bittock, as Nannie would say—yes, he must be nearing fifty. He said you were so pretty, Emmy, he wanted to pick you and wear you in his buttonhole!’
‘He must be growing serious or he would never trouble to pay your sister compliments. Julia!’
‘Yes?’
‘What is the man like who is engaged to Christine? Every one’s face was a blurred lamp to me.’
‘He is good-looking in a young, fresh-coloured way— very fair and carries his head thrown back as though he were always breasting a hill.’
‘He could not possibly know, could he, that I had done something to my eyes?’
‘It’s most unlikely. Why?’
‘I felt he was staring so, even when I was not looking, but perhaps it was only my imagination. Anyway it doesn’t matter.’
There was silence for a space and I was about to slip into oblivion when Julia’s shocked voice recalled me.
‘Emmy! you can’t leave your clothes like that.’
‘Oh, yes, I can and I am going to,’ I heard my younger sister rejoin, and the sheets tugged as she climbed in beside me.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER THREE
Papa and mamma were paying their annual visit to Dr Malcolm on the other side of the loch, and the three of us sat with Nannie in the kitchen, as we had done since we had been children on the rare occasions they left the manse.
The leaping flames in the well of a fireplace lit the room, casting grotesque shadows on the raftered roof and walls, exaggerating Nannie’s hooked nose and the peaks of her cap. Her brow was so deeply furrowed it looked cut, but the rest of her face was unlined. As she sat at the fireside, a ball of wool stuck with knitting-pins on her lap, she looked as though at any moment she might go up the chimney in a whiff of smoke, leaving behind only two wrinkled boots with their laces out.
‘Do you think,’ said Emmy, ‘that the clock bothers striking when every one is asleep?’ She had toothache and was nursing her cheek on her arm. ‘Where do you think pain goes when it leaves you? I wish I was made of nothing and then I would have nothing to ache. I wish—I wish—oh, so many things!’
‘There’s no guid wishing your whole life awa’,’ remarked Nannie. ‘Time flies quicker than the deil kens.’
‘What is the very first thing you can remember, Nannie?’ Julia asked pensively.
‘The cockleshell on the window-sill and ma brither eating a bannock and no giving me any o’ it.’
‘The first thing I can remember,’ said Julia, ‘is papa rehearsing with zest his sermon before mamma.’
‘Ay, I mind that,’ Nannie said reminiscently, ‘and ye keppit up wi’ his voice wi’ your spoon on the table until he had to check ye.’
‘The first thing I remember,’ put in Emmy, ‘was wakening up mamma when she dozed to go on singing me to sleep.’
‘One of the first things I can remember,’ I said, ‘was the strip of light, like an upside-down L, on our bedroom wall at night which widened when the door was opened farther.’
I did not care to tell them, for some unknown reason, of my earliest memories when I used to lie in bed in the early morning and trace forms in the scrolled pitch pine of the mantelpiece. Then I would lie so motionless I might have been asleep or dead while I said over and over to myself, ‘What am I? Who am I? What am I?’ And always on the brink of discovery, when I had reached that peak where deadly knowledge lay just within grasp, I would bring myself, in the nick of time, with a breathless jerk