Cloud

1

Where I was born it was the custom, when a baby was nine months old, for the mother to rub vinegar on her breasts. That was the tried and tested method for weaning babies away from breastfeeding, and I’ve often wondered if my mother used it on me. Not that I’d have dreamt of asking her. But I’ve always disliked the smell of vinegar.

I often wonder, too, if an experience like that might lead someone to expect even the purest love to end in bitterness.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES of my birth were, no doubt, peculiar: I was born outdoors, into a chilly night and a fog, in an area of Glasgow called the Tollgate, a slum even the police tried to avoid going into.

The month was December and the fog was caused mainly by smoke from the steelworks and shipyards that lined the banks of the River Clyde. The river itself was polluted from their poisonous drainage. Some of the old people claimed that one winter night long ago it actually caught fire and looked just like lava flowing out of a volcano, the way it does in movies. In summer, children who went into the river for a swim (as they sometimes did in the rare spells of warm weather) would lose a layer of skin a few days after.

On that December night, the foggy night of my birth, my parents left their apartment in the row of tenements they lived in and set out for the doctor’s surgery. They wanted their first child, at least, to be born in a clean place with a doctor and a nurse present, and they’d saved up the money needed. Mainly, children in the Tollgate were born in metal bathtubs in their apartments. If the mother received any assistance, it would be from an experienced family member.

But my parents had decided on another method, especially since they had no family member to rely on. So they were walking to the surgery two miles away, as fast as they could, for my mother had felt stirrings and was afraid something was going wrong.

Of course, they didn’t make it. My birth took place right there on the grime of the sidewalk, with my inexperienced father acting as midwife. There were one or two spectators who’d no experience either, so they couldn’t help. It seems I wasn’t keen on coming out and nearly killed my mother by my struggle to stay inside her. At last I did make my exit into the colder womb of the fog.

I discovered these bare facts from my parents years later. Naturally, I’ve no memory of the event myself, though I often think it must have had some effect on me.

IN MANY WAYS we weren’t a typical Tollgate family: I was an only child, for example, whereas most of the other families around were big. My mother would have liked a lot of children, too. Again, it wasn’t till I was much older when I realized that the damage I’d done to her by my struggles on the sidewalk had probably made her incapable.

She was a short, solid woman, and she didn’t have a job outside the house — few women at that time did. She had jet-black hair which was usually tied up in a bun, but at night when she let it down, it was the most exotic, beautiful sight. I loved to touch it, and when my father would compliment her on it, her face would turn pink with pleasure.

She was one of those people whose eye colours don’t match. Her right eye was blue, her left was green. Depending on which eye you looked at, it was as though two different people were in there. The woman behind the blue eye looked dreamy and happy, the one behind the green one often seemed worried and sad. When I grew older and pointed this out to her, she said there might be something to it: that often, for her, the world was a place of beauty and hope, but at other times, everything seemed black and desolate. She’d never told this to anyone else in the world except my father, and now me.

AS FOR MY FATHER, he was a thin man with thin hair, a hollow chest, and slightly tremulous hands. Even when he was only in his mid-thirties — I was ten years old by then — he looked older than most men of his age. He had a natural gift for numbers and was a bookkeeper at the offices of Random Mill, where steel plates were made for the shipyards. The mill’s huge chimneys belched smoke day and night.

He himself was a heavy smoker. Because of his quivering hands, he often had trouble guiding the cigarette to his mouth. Once he got it in he’d leave it dangling there till it was almost smoked out and the tip was a fraction away from his thin lips. Then he’d spit it onto the floor and stamp on it with his shoe. “Gotcha!” he’d say, as though it was one of the cockroaches that infested these tenements.

From living with him, I learned young, without anyone ever saying it outright, that it’s foolish to read too much into people’s appearances. Sometimes, the most unprepossessing of faces— like his, for example — belong to the kindest, smartest people. And vice versa.

He coughed a lot, even when he talked — which was usually to make wisecracks or disagree with what most people believed in. He also loved sitting by the fire, reading, as did my mother. They couldn’t afford to buy books, but borrowed them by the dozen from the public library. Long before I went to school they taught me the alphabet and showed me how magical combinations of these little marks could create in my mind the most fascinating images and people and events.

It was through my parents, then, that I too came to love reading.

LIKE MOST TENEMENT dwellers, we had a cat to keep control of the rats, mice, and cockroaches that lurked everywhere in the building. Penny, our ginger cat, was a stray with the tip of her right paw missing. That didn’t seem to affect the way she’d leap onto the window ledge to check out what was happening on the street below, or onto my mother’s shoulder when she was at the stove, making dinner.

When I was very young, we also had a black half-Labrador dog named Rex, a stray who’d lost his right eye somehow in the streets. My father coaxed him home one day and he settled in. Rex’s main job was to bark when someone came to the door, and he was very good at it. His other job, on winter nights, was to sleep on top of the sack of potatoes in the back room, keeping them warm so they wouldn’t rot. Penny would lie on top of him, purring noisily.

We called him Rex but he was actually a female. It was my father’s idea to give him the masculine name. He felt it was easier for males, whether human or animal, to survive in the Tollgate. He was wrong in this case. One day Rex rushed through the half-open door and down the stairs into the street to greet my father coming home from work. He went under the wheels of a passing coal cart and his back was broken.

We never had another dog.

FOR ME, MAYBE the oddest thing about our family was the fact that both my parents were orphans.

All my father knew about his parents was that they’d been refugees from somewhere. They’d been on an immigrant ship from Amsterdam to New York and, along with dozens of other passengers, they’d been stricken with the Great Influenza. They both died while the ship was anchored off Glasgow. Their only child, my father, who was then six months old, was deemed a Scottish national — his parents’ name, Steen, sounded quite Scottish. He was put in an orphanage ashore and stayed there till he was fourteen.

My mother’s story was more typical. When she was a baby she was found outside another orphanage one cold morning wrapped in a blanket. Nothing was ever known about her parents so a name was selected for her by the administration. After fifteen years, she left the orphanage and became an office cleaner at Random Mill. When she was eighteen she met my father there, they married, and in due course I was born.

In the Tollgate slum, families of ten or twelve children were common. We three, having no other living relatives, were obliged to be everything to each other. Even as a child, I was aware of that burden.

I was also aware that they loved me and each other, though love wasn’t a word you heard much in the Tollgate. Once in a while, my father, puffing at his cigarette and trying not to sound complacent, would say: “There are people born in palaces who don’t have what we have.”

AS I GOT OLDER, my parents asked me to call them by their first names: Joseph and Nora. They hoped I wouldn’t find that objectionable. My mother explained it was because, in the orphanages, children were mainly called only by their last names. My parents were trying to make up for that now.

I said I didn’t object at all.

But secretly I didn’t like being deprived of the use of those powerful words, “mother” and “father.” So, for my own sake, even though I did as they asked, in my mind that’s what I always called them.

I WAS NAMED HARRY. That was in memory of my father’s best friend in the orphanage, a boy who’d died of pneumonia shortly before his tenth birthday and so had never experienced freedom. My parents hoped I’d have a chance to live the kind of life Harry had been denied.

IN THE TOLLGATE, rows of tenements stretched as far as the eye could see. Our apartment was on the fourth floor of one of them. The worn stone stairs that ran up to the various floors were a daily obstacle course of broken bottles and tin cans and also served as latrines for passing drunks.

The apartment, like all the others, had one large living-room-kitchen-bedroom, with an inset bed where my parents slept. There was also a small unheated bedroom at the back, which was mine. The whitewashed ceilings of both rooms were permanently stained with damp.

Aside from the usual ravages of typhus and consumption, almost every row of tenements had something unpleasant in its history. Beatings and stabbings and domestic murders were commonplace. The Tollgate slum was particularly well known for its hereditary razor-wielding gangs, with fathers passing the mantle on to sons. Frequent battles took place over territorial rights.

Even during the war the gang violence continued. Some gang members did join the army, but many preferred to prowl the streets looking for trouble. My father wasn’t surprised.

“What’s the fun in having to shoot people from a distance when you could be slashing their throats from close up?” he said.

He himself had been rejected from military service because of his thin chest and his cough.

“They don’t know what a great warrior they’ve turned down,” he’d complain. Even my mother couldn’t help laughing at that, and he’d dissolve into a fit of laughing mixed with coughing.

AS THE WAR WENT ON, there were frequent air raids on the steelworks and shipyards near the Tollgate, so public shelters with concrete domes were built to give people a place to be safer. But pets weren’t allowed and the shelters leaked so much they were even damper than the tenements. After a while, most people just stayed at home during air raids and took their chances.

We stayed home, too.

“At least if we’re here, nobody can steal our things,” my father once said to me and my mother as he puffed on a cigarette. “That’s the kind of thing people do when too many of them are bunched together. Cities make human beings unnatural. During the outbreaks of bubonic plague in London, people who were infected would deliberately spread it amongst their neighbours. I just read that in a book.”

“But that was hundreds of years ago,” my mother said. “It can’t be the same now. Our neighbours wouldn’t steal from us.” She was looking very anxious.

“Well, maybe it’s not the same in London anymore,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be too sure about the Tollgate.”

She looked even more upset when he said that, and he noticed. He puffed on his cigarette for a while, then said, “On the other hand, maybe you’re right, Nora. You never know. Maybe you’re right.”

DURING THE ENTIRE WAR, none of the rows of tenements in our part of the Tollgate were actually hit by bombs. In the final air raids, though, a really big one didn’t miss by much. We all heard the thud of its impact into a piece of waste ground behind our building. But it didn’t explode.

Later, a group of soldiers came along and disarmed it, and then covered it up with a load of dirt. They put a barbed-wire fence around it along with a warning notice to keep away.

Not long after that, the radio and newspapers announced that the war was over. Soon men who’d been in the army came back, searching for work. My father met some of the job seekers at the offices of Random Mill.

“You can see from the look in their eyes they’ve had to kill people,” he told me one night when my mother was over by the stove out of hearing range. He didn’t follow up with one of his wisecracks, but just puffed at his cigarette. “Don’t tell Nora about that,” he said quietly.

2

The war hadn’t really affected me much — I had complete faith my parents would protect me from any of the physical dangers around us. But I was prone to other terrors much more frightening than a mere war — for example, I would have awful dreams, though I couldn’t remember most of them when I awoke.

My father tried to make a joke of them.

“Nightmares are very good training for life in the Tollgate,”

he’d say.

My mother would look at me anxiously when I mentioned my bad dreams. She wouldn’t say anything, but I suspected she had her own share of nightmares.

The Tollgate was also full of superstitions. When my mother would go to wash our clothes at the communal laundry, she’d sometimes hear women from other tenements talk about such things as sightings of ghostly figures, or loud groans and banging sounds coming from empty rooms. One woman even claimed to have seen a pot of stew from her stove float through the open window and drop with a crash into the street.

“Old wives’ tales,” my father used to say, snorting and puffing, when my mother would tell us about them. It was clear he enjoyed hearing them, however, and so did I, though they too gave me nightmares. I kept quiet about that, for I didn’t want my mother’s stories to stop.

THEN, WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I discovered that one of these frightening things had happened in a tenement near our own. Often, on my way to school, I passed a square, paved area the size of a little garden plot, full of broken beer bottles and litter. In the middle of the square, a stone marker stuck up — it was about three feet high with a greenish bronze plaque screwed onto it. Some words were engraved on it that were hard to make out. They were covered in grime with the usual obscenities and street-gang symbols scratched over them.

One overcast November morning, I was passing the marker when no one else was around. I took out my handkerchief and quickly wiped the plaque clear enough to see the words:

IN MEMORY

OF

— CAMERON ROSS—

WHO ONCE LIVED HERE

— MAY HIS SOUL FIND REST—

On my way home from school that afternoon I called in at the public library and, after some searching, found what I was after: a heavy, worn-looking book called A Miscellany of Authentic Characters, Scenes, and Incidents from the History of Old Glasgow. It was laid out like an encyclopedia and consisted of brief entries in small print on numerous topics. One of the entries was headed “The Tollgate: The Exsanguination of Cameron Ross.”

I took the book to a reading table, opened it at the page indicated, and was immediately on my guard: right in the middle of the page, an X shape had been slashed, maybe with a razor. A dark blotch on top of the cut had seeped into the page underneath. I bent over and sniffed, just in case, but there was only the usual book smell. Under the entry-title, a warning was printed:

Readers of a delicate sensibility might do well to avoid this section.

I’d never come across that in a book before. It made me even more curious and I began reading.

Little is known about Cameron Ross’s early life except that he lived in the Tollgate, was married to a local woman, and was thirty years old at the time of the incident that made him, for a short time, infamous.

On a January morning of the Glasgow winter of 1810 his wife discovered that the side of the bed on which Ross lay was soaked in blood. Indeed, the blood was still in the process of seeping through the blankets, oozing down to the floor where it coagulated on the cold wooden planks. Ross was not asleep but lay staring up at her in silence.

A physician was called and examined Ross but could find no source for the blood on his body. He was suspicious, for he well knew about the violence in these slums. He could elicit no satisfactory answers to his questions, so he merely left a bottle of cordial for Ross.

All was well for six days. On the morning of the seventh day just before dawn Ross felt the blood again and this time awakened his wife. She lit a lamp and brought it over to the bed, and so was able to witness what happened. The blanket at his chest had turned dark and blood was welling through it. She lifted it away and saw

that the tip of something sharp, like a knitting needle, was protruding from inside his body through the flesh of Ross.

The physician was again sent for and examined Ross, but though there was much blood it had ceased to flow, and he could detect no sign of any cut, or trace of any scar. He advised that at the first premonitory sign of any recurrence of the exsanguination Ross’s wife should fetch him, so that he might see for himself the cause of the blood.

Seven days later, in the early morning, Ross’s groans alerted his wife. She went immediately for the physician and they both hurried back, arriving at the bedside no more than a half hour after the commencement of the onslaught. But Ross was dead, his eyes staring up at them. The blood was of a lesser quantity than before and there was no sign of a wound. Though Ross had been dead only a short time, his body was so cold that the sheen of blood was as brittle as wax.

The Glasgow Royal Infirmary, later that day, was requested by the physician to conduct a post-mortem on the body in hopes of discovering the cause of this strange exsanguination of Cameron Ross. The request was denied on the grounds that no useful medical purpose would be served thereby.

On the day of Ross’s burial, a large crowd such as might have attended the funeral of some dignitary followed the coffin along the streets of the Tollgate to the city Necropolis. Some claimed Ross’s death was a miraculous event. When his body was lowered into the earth at the paupers’ area, many wept.

An editorial next day in the

East Side Tribune

noted the unexpectedly large crowd of spectators at the funeral of such an obscure man as Ross and made mention of the exsanguination said to have afflicted him. The editor expressed skepticism about the reality of the illness and conjectured that Ross had deliberately wounded himself, and eventually killed himself, as a means of garnering posthumous attention. In the view of the editor, the gullible masses were ever prey to such fraudulent practices.

Ross’s wife disappeared shortly after the funeral, and it was rumoured she had drowned herself in the Clyde or found employment in a brothel. Later reports alleged that the supposedly dead Ross and his wife had recently been spotted walking together, laughing, on a street in London.

Whilst the exact site of Cameron Ross’s grave is no longer known, a plaque in his memory placed near his former home in the Tollgate may still be seen.

Sitting there in the library, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I wondered if there was more of this kind of frightening stuff in the old book and skimmed through it, but no more warnings appeared at the tops of pages.

WHEN I LEFT the library and headed home that day, my mind was still full of the image of Cameron Ross, bleeding to death. After dinner, I must have been quieter than usual.

“Are you all right?” my mother said. She was sitting by the fire with Penny on her lap. The cat blinked at me in a friendly way. My father, in his armchair, glanced at me over the top of the newspaper, eyes narrowed against the smoke rising from his cigarette.

I knew what they were worried about now that I was fifteen. Any time I was a little late getting home from school, they thought I might be meeting a girl, that I might end up like some boys who weren’t much older than I was, marrying girls they’d got pregnant. These boys and girls were thereby condemned to live in the tenements, like their parents before them, doing the most unskilled work in the steel mills or the shipyards — if they were lucky enough to find jobs.

So, I immediately put my parents’ minds at ease. I told them I’d been at the library and was preoccupied thinking about a book I’d read there. It was about Cameron Ross, the man whose name I’d seen on a plaque down the street. They’d never heard of him, so I told them what I’d read and they listened with great interest.

I also mentioned that somebody had slashed the book, maybe with a razor.

“Well, that’s somebody I wouldn’t like to bump into on a dark night,” said my father.

I didn’t laugh and neither did my mother. I was curious about the people at the funeral who claimed that the way Ross died involved some kind of miracle. Maybe they were right?

My father spluttered, looking like a gargoyle with smoke belching out of its nose.

“Miracle?” he said. “If you ask me, the only miracle in this world is that so many people believe in miracles.” He liked that. “Am I not right, Nora?” he said, the way he often used to call for her approval when he thought he’d said something astute.

My mother didn’t answer him. She sat there, petting Penny and looking more worried than usual. So, my father left it at that and just puffed on the ever-shortening cigarette dangling from his lips till an inch of ash fell off. It slowly settled over his shirtfront, mingling with the evening’s already accumulated ash.

THAT NIGHT I LAY in bed staring up at the damp stains on the ceiling. Many nights I’d imagined they were tropical islands, like those I read about in adventure books. The sky was always blue there and the people were carefree and suntanned. Someday, when I was old enough, I intended to live in one of those idyllic places. I’d bring my parents with me and all three of us would stay in an airy bungalow overlooking the sky-blue ocean, far from these grim tenements.

But on that particular night the stains refused to be anything but Tollgate stains, pulsating in the dark like some kind of deadly fungus. In the end, I had to turn on my side, clench my eyes tight shut, and force myself to fall asleep.

3

At the age of eighteen, I became a student at the university— no fees were required of qualified applicants. It was in the west side of the city, a half-hour bus ride from the Tollgate. The massive, Gothic-looking structure, full of arched windows, dark stairwells, cold corridors, and drafty lecture halls, dominated the landscape.

I especially loved the library, with its spiral staircases and labyrinthine passageways between bookshelves. Some of the librarians were pale and otherworldly enough to be the ghosts of earlier librarians who’d lost their way amongst those passageways centuries ago.

In the middle of the library was a study hall completely hemmed in by ancient bookshelves full of the very oldest books. That study hall became my favourite place. It seemed almost to welcome visitors, breathing softly on them like some huge kindly animal. After morning lectures, I’d install myself at a table there and work happily all afternoon.

Then at six o’clock each night I’d squeeze onto a crowded bus for my journey home. Soon enough the elegant villas around the university, then the bustling, well-lit streets of the city centre, would be left behind and we would enter the canyons of grimy warehouses and tenements that constituted the Tollgate.

IN SOME OF THE STREETS we now passed along, murders and acts of violence were so commonplace they barely rated a mention in the newspapers. Even a glimpse through the bus window of the top floor of a certain tenement on Sheldon Street always made me shudder.

A thing had happened there before I went to university, but it had stuck in my memory, for my father had known the man involved. The man had lived in this tenement and was, by trade, a master carpenter. He’d built some cabinets and desks at the Random Mill offices where my father worked.

This master carpenter had been forced to retire from practising his trade because of chronic depression. Soon afterwards he’d brought some supplies of lumber into his apartment and spent most of his time in there, sawing and hammering. Some neighbours complained about the noise. He politely assured them that he’d been making some new furniture and was almost finished.

One day, the sawing and hammering ceased. After a week, a bad smell came from inside his apartment. The neighbours got no response when they knocked at the door.

The police were called, broke in, and discovered the true nature of the master carpenter’s work in his apartment. He’d been building an elaborate small-scale gallows in the living room, working from a complicated-looking set of blueprints.

The master carpenter himself was hanging from the gallows beam, quite dead. It seems he’d put the noose round his neck and used a broom handle to spring the latch of the trap door. His workmanship was precise: his toes dangled exactly three inches above the floor, ensuring that the fully extended rope would strangle him successfully.

A note was found on the floor beside him:

On this, my fiftieth birthday, I hereby find myself guilty on all counts and sentence myself to be hanged by the neck until I am dead. Sentence to be carried out immediately.

Exactly what he’d adjudged himself to be guilty of, no one was ever able to discover. My father, who’d spoken to the master carpenter only a few times and had found him a quiet, courteous man, was shocked at his death. But he couldn’t resist joking about it to my mother.

“If all the depressed people in the Tollgate start hanging themselves, there’ll soon be a national shortage of rope. Right, Nora?” he said.

She, as usual, looked anxious but didn’t answer.

A WIDELY REPORTED incident happened in another of the tenements during my first year at university.

The building in question was just a mile or so before my bus stop and was completely boarded up. Such a sight was not at all common. Despite the Tollgate’s reputation, its population kept growing and the demand for housing was always strong.

In one of the apartments in this particular tenement, a young woman, assisted only by her husband, had given birth to her first child in the traditional way — in a portable metal laundry tub on the floor of the back bedroom. But then, after the baby was born, the mother’s heart stopped and she died within minutes.

Once he understood what had happened, the husband proceeded to cut the baby’s throat. He then sat in a chair, drank a large glass of scotch, slit his own wrists, and bled to death.

At least, that was what the police and the neighbours concluded. The couple had been looking forward to the baby and the husband had seemed fond of his wife. All in all, his decision was understandable: he didn’t want to live without her and he didn’t want to leave an hours-old baby to the mercy of strangers.

But it wasn’t the tragic deaths of the three of them in that single apartment that emptied the entire tenement. No, the people of the Tollgate weren’t that sentimental. In fact, within a week of the deaths, after the apartment had been cleaned up, it was advertised for rent.

A young couple from a nearby tenement were first in line to look the apartment over. They’d checked the main living area and found it quite satisfactory. They were about to open the door of the back bedroom where the deaths occurred when they heard a strange noise. It sounded like a man’s voice coming from inside, sobbing and groaning. They quickly called some of the neighbours to come in, and when they did, they thought they heard the sound too. No one wanted to open the bedroom door.

In the following days, the apartment was examined by the city authorities and nothing was found or heard. But rumours spread and the exodus of the neighbouring tenants began. Within months the entire building was empty and boarded up. Whatever the people of the Tollgate may have lacked in sentimentality they made up for in superstition.

When this behaviour was duly reported in the newspapers, some of my fellow students laughed at it as the product of ignorance and illiteracy. I’d often heard them talking about the Tollgate, marvelling that civilized modern cities still contained such brutal slums. I, of course, didn’t advertise the fact that I lived there. I’d nod my head in agreement with their views. But I hadn’t forgotten my own reaction, as a boy, to the story of Cameron Ross, whose memorial wasn’t far from the haunted tenement. Even now, the thought of it gave me a chill.

Indeed, one day in the university library I was passing the Anthropology and Folklore area. Out of curiosity, I went in and found a large section devoted to the history of Scottish superstitions. The titles were scholarly enough, but some of the chapter headings contained such alarming terms as “the Evil Eye,” “maledictions,” “propitiatory sacrifices,” and “demoniac possession.”

A quick glance through some of these chapters led me to conclude that while the culture of the Tollgate might be inbred and violent, its proneness to superstition was as ancient as humanity itself.

ON MY NIGHTLY journeys home, by the time I arrived at my stop I was the only university student left aboard the bus. The stop was about a half-mile walk from our tenement. If the streetlamps were unbroken, I’d enjoy the way my shadow raced from one lamppost to the next, catching up on itself only to be outstripped again. I was also glad of the unbroken lamps for another reason— and it wasn’t for fear of ghosts. It meant I could keep an eye out for street gangs. Whenever I saw a group of men on a corner, I’d make sure to keep well away from them. The fact that I was carrying books would have been a good enough reason, in the Tollgate, for being beaten up.

4

During my years at university, when I’d get home my father would want to know what I was studying. After dinner we’d spend hours discussing the various ideas I’d picked up, especially in philosophy and psychology. I must admit I was more easily impressed than he was. I remember telling him one night that when ordinary people say “Life’s full of contradictions,” they actually mean “Life’s full of subcontraries.” And that to say “It’s not not raining” means exactly the same as “It’s raining.”

He puffed furiously on his cigarette.

“Ordinary people never say ‘Life’s full of contradictions’ anyway,” he said. “But if they did, you’d know what they meant. If you told them it was ‘full of subcontraries,’ they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. In fact, they’d think you were mad. Or should I say, ‘They’d not not think you were not not mad.’” He found that hilarious and turned to my mother. “Right, Nora?”

But I could see she didn’t find it funny. She didn’t much like the idea that language might be full of such snares. I’d tried to convince her of that once before by using some of the examples I’d learned in philosophy lectures. For instance: How many pieces of straw have to be heaped on top of one another before they become a haystack?

She just shrugged her shoulders in despair.

Once, she did laugh, though. I asked her: How much hair does a man have to lose before his wife considers him bald and not just thinning on top?

She glanced over at my father’s thinning hair, and they both began laughing. He was really enjoying her laughter at his expense. They were clearly so fond of each other, I might have gone on and asked: How much liking do two people need to have for each other before you’d say they were in love? Of course, that would only have embarrassed them.

ONE NIGHT AFTER DINNER I told my father how we’d had a discussion in a philosophy seminar on the Theory of Intelligent Design: the theory was based on the notion that this world is so marvellously structured and contains so many wonderful things that there must be a great Mind at the root of it.

He snuffled and snorted.

“Only someone who’d never lived in the Tollgate could come up with an idea like that,” he said. He shuffled over to the fireplace and brought back a book he’d been reading from amongst the pile of library books on the mantelpiece. He found a page in it and handed the book to me. It was called The Aphorisms of Pablo Renowski.

“Here, read out that section to us,” he said. So I did.

“‘Look at the world, with its thousands upon thousands of years of wars, plagues, famines, murders, public and private brutalities, injustices, parricides, genocides. One would have to be a supreme cynic not to believe there must be some great pattern, some great plan behind it all.’”

When I finished, my father was puffing away at his cigarette, very pleased with himself.

“What would your professors think of that?” he said. “The world only sounds great, depending on how you look at it. If you’re from the Tollgate, The Theory of the Big Blunder would fit better.” He laughed and turned to my mother. “A good one, eh Nora?”

She didn’t look happy. I think, for her, unpleasant ideas were bad enough without having to hear them put into words.

IN FACT, most of what I learned at the university seemed to upset my mother. On another night, I was talking about a lecture on the effects of psychological stress on soldiers returning from the war.

My father heard me out, choking and coughing on the smoke from his cigarette, and seemed impressed, which surprised me. He made what amounted to a little speech, punctuated with coughs and throat clearings.

“For once, your professor may be right,” he said. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if all the civilians in Glasgow during the war are suffering from psychological stress, too. I mean, the planes dropped bombs on us, trying to kill us day and night, didn’t they? The same goes for all the civilians in Europe and Russia and the other countries that were bombed too, right?

“In fact, when you come to think of it, it’s not just war that causes the psychological stress. If you consider the Black Death and all those other horrible things that have terrified people for centuries, your professor could include nearly everybody who’s ever lived — they’ve all suffered from psychological stress, including the kings and the prime ministers and the politicians and that whole gang.

“So, that would explain why everything’s such a mess. Psychologically stressed, every one of us! What hope is there for the world?” He turned to my mother. “And it’s even worse for us, eh Nora? On top of the war and everything else, you and I were brought up in orphanages and then had to live in these slums. I wonder what kind of mess the two of us must be in — just psychologically, of course.”

My mother looked so worried, he immediately backed off and laughed.

“Oh, Nora,” he said. “I’m only kidding. Harry and I are just having a bit of fun.”

INDEED, THOSE NIGHTLY discussions with him were fun, but they often opened my eyes. He had so many astute things to say— things I’d never have thought of. Talking to him was sometimes like opening an old shoebox and finding jewels inside.

5

My mother was much more interested in my social life at university, especially how I got along with the female students. I’d gone for coffee with a few girls from my various classes, nothing serious. So I was happy to tell her about those.

I didn’t tell her I had my eye on one girl in particular.

It was at the beginning of my second year when I became aware of her. She would come to the study hall only once or twice a month and, even though there might be vacant chairs at tables all around, she’d make a point of sitting opposite me at my favourite table. Without looking up I’d know, from the faint smell of lilac that accompanied her, that she’d arrived.

Once she settled down and was concentrated on her work, I’d sneak a glance at her. She had long brown hair and green eyes. Her handwriting, though I couldn’t make out the words upside down, looked elegant, unlike my own choppy scrawl. Whenever she rose to go to the bookshelves, my heart would beat at her graceful walk, the way her skirt swirled round her thighs and calves.

Again and again I made up my mind to speak to her but kept putting the moment off. It was clear to me she was from that privileged world that had nothing in common with the sordid streets of the Tollgate, or with me. Yet, for some reason, she’d pick my table in the study hall.

At home, in my bed each night, I used to imagine a thousand scenarios in which she lay in my arms — two lovers brought together by destiny. Under the damp stains of the ceiling, she was the focus of all my sensual fantasies.

ONE AFTERNOON near the end of that second year, I decided to say something to her. She’d come to the study hall, sat opposite me as usual, and had been reading and making notes for at least two hours.

I’d rehearsed over and over what I was going to say and was in the process of taking a few deep breaths before introducing myself. Just then the main doors at the end of the study hall swung open noisily and a man came in. He was a plump man of maybe thirty-five; he wore a formal dark suit and had a shiny face, his scalp showing through his thin, combed-back hair. He must have been a professor. He walked over to our table and put his hand on the shoulder of the girl opposite.

“Deirdre,” he said, “I’m sorry I’m late.” His voice was a bit loud for the study hall.

She smiled up at him and touched his hand with hers.

“I’ll just get my things together,” she said, barely above a whisper.

I kept my eyes on my book but heard her gathering her books and notes, putting them into her leather satchel. She stood up and he helped her on with her coat, which had been draped over a nearby chair.

I still kept my eyes on my book.

“Goodbye,” I heard her say.

I looked up and saw she was looking right at me, that it was me she was talking to.

“Good luck with your studies,” she said.

I mumbled a thank you.

She and the plump man then walked hand in hand to the main doors, which swung shut after them.

I WAS SO ELATED by her speaking to me that I didn’t at first realize what her goodbye might mean. In the weeks following, I went to the study hall every day as usual, looking for her — I thought of her now as “Deirdre”—but there was no sign of her. Then I began to worry.

In fact, the weeks became months, the months years — two whole years went by and she didn’t reappear. Even when I got to my fourth and final year, I still couldn’t quite accept the reality that I’d never see her again.

Over and over, I cursed myself for not having spoken to her during all the months she’d sat at my table.

Even though I’d only heard her voice on that one occasion, only heard her name once, barely knew her, I was sure I must be in love with her. I tried not to contaminate that love by wondering too much what her relationship to the plump man might be. For a long time, her exit from my life seemed to me the worst thing that could ever happen.

6

But something much worse did happen, at the end of March in my last year at university. It was on one of those early spring days when snow sometimes fell briefly on the city. It would even beautify the streets of the Tollgate for a short time before melting and laying bare their grim reality once more.

On the snowy morning in question, a Friday, my father had a day off work. As I was about to go out the door to catch the bus, he was standing at the window, smoking one of his morning quota of cigarettes and watching the snow fall.

“You’d better wear a cap,” he said. “It’s NOT NOT snowing outside.” He snorted this through a cloud of cigarette smoke— he’d adopted the double negative as one of his favourite jokes. “Right, Nora?” My mother was clearing up the remnants of breakfast. “Did you hear that? It’s NOT NOT snowing?”

My mother frowned, as ever, at these word games. Our latest cat, long-haired Milly, was clinging to Mother’s neck as she worked, loudly purring her love. She was a cat with so little faith in language she rarely responded even to her own name.

My mother came over to see me off.

“Do you have to go on such an awful day?” she said.

I nodded my head, though I wouldn’t have minded staying home. But today we’d have the last lectures of the term and there might be some hints of what would appear in the final exams.

I put on a wool cap to please them. When I got down the stairs into the chill wind and snow, I was tempted to climb back up into the warmth and comfort of home. But I didn’t.

AT THE UNIVERSITY, I attended final lectures. As usual, around one o’clock — by then, the snow had turned into a heavy, cold rain — I went to the study hall and prepared myself for an afternoon’s work.

I’d barely opened my book when the entire building trembled, ever so slightly, for three or four seconds. The students at other tables looked around, puzzled. The trembling stopped and we heard a rumble outside, perhaps a clap of thunder in the freakish winter weather. Everything became quiet again and we got on with our work.

At four o’clock, since it was the last day of term, I decided to take an earlier bus home. All traces of the snow had been washed away and the rain was now only a cold drizzle. The bus made good time, for the traffic was fairly light. I got off at my usual stop and began walking the last half mile home. My mind was so full of the upcoming exams that I wasn’t at all ready for what was in store for me when I went round the last corner into our street and saw a crowd of spectators gathered there.

They were looking at the tenement I lived in. The middle part of it — where our apartment as well as a dozen others ought to have been — was now only a ragged gap, as though a tooth had been ripped out of a huge jaw. All that was left was a deep crater and smouldering rubble. Fire trucks and soldiers and policemen were milling around. The crowd of spectators was watching the scene from behind a wooden barrier.

In a state of shock, I pushed my way through to the barrier and told a policeman standing there that this was where I lived. Did he know if my parents were all right?

All he knew was that a crew of city engineers had arrived in the morning to try and remove the unexploded bomb that had been buried behind our tenement since the war. Something had gone wrong and the bomb had exploded. The policeman took my arm and guided me to an emergency trailer parked along the street where I could inquire about survivors.

The soldier in charge of the trailer gave me the blunt facts: the crew of city engineers, along with all living persons in the affected apartments, had either been blown to pieces or incinerated in the resulting inferno. He was very sorry if my parents were in there. Soldiers and policemen were in the process, right now, of gathering whatever body parts they could find. They’d been at it since the explosion had occurred at one o’clock — the noise was so loud it had been heard all over the city.

That was just the time when I was settling down in the study hall, felt the trembling, and heard the rumble.

LONG INTO THAT EVENING I waited, hoping my mother or father might have gone for a long walk and were miraculously unscathed. Of course, I didn’t really believe it — they never went for long walks. They didn’t appear.

Near midnight, all work on the crater stopped. I was taken, along with the other remnants of families who for one reason or another weren’t at home when the explosion occurred, to a charity hostel where we were allocated rooms.

There, for two days, I spent most of my time sitting alone in the tiny room they gave me. My life seemed empty and pointless. At times, I could hardly breathe for sobbing. The two people whose love I’d taken for granted as the foundation of my existence had been obliterated. Yet I couldn’t quite grasp the absoluteness of their deaths. I particularly hoped my mother had managed to get to the end of the book she’d been reading. Nothing used to annoy her more than having to leave a book unfinished.

From time to time during those two days, I’d fall asleep from exhaustion in spite of my efforts to stay awake. I didn’t want to sleep because, in my dreams, my parents were still as alive as ever. Each time I’d wake I’d have to confront afresh the awful realization of their deaths. Like them, I was now an orphan.

On the third day after the explosion, a funeral service for all those who’d died was held in an area of the Necropolis called the columbarium. There, niches in the walls held urns containing the ashes of the dead. Only one urn was needed for the ashes of the bits and pieces of those who’d died in the explosion, for there was no way of knowing who was who. The service was attended by more than two hundred inhabitants of the Tollgate wearing their best suits and dresses. The names of the dead— there were seventeen in all — were read out to the accompaniment of weeping, mainly from the women and children.

I tried to be stoic, but when I heard “Joseph Steen and Nora Steen,” I lost control of myself and gratefully joined the chorus of weepers. In a way, I was glad my father and mother were included in this communal mourning, for we had no relatives or close friends. If my parents had been the only ones killed in the explosion, I would surely have been the sole mourner.

The way they died justified their beliefs about the world. My mother’s unspoken dread about the precariousness of everything had certainly been borne out. As for my father, he’d at least have taken some satisfaction from this unassailable evidence that his views were correct. I imagined him sitting at the bottom of the smouldering crater, his cigarette smoke mingling with the smoke of the bomb, calling up to me: “Well, Harry, wasn’t I right about The Big Blunder?”

7

After two weeks of mourning and moping in the hostel, I made up my mind to do what would have pleased my parents most: start preparing for my final exams. Using the allowance given to the survivors of the explosion, I bought some spare clothes and looked for a room near the university where I could hole up for a month till the exams.

I had trouble finding anything available for so short a period. Then I saw, in the window of a sprawling three-storey house, the sign:

Furnished Room for Rent — Student Only

A flagstone pathway took me past a scrap of lawn to the front door, which was badly in need of paint. The brass nameplate read J. & D. Nelson. I knocked several times, but there was no response. Just as I was about to leave I heard the click of an inside bolt and the door opened.

For the first time in weeks, an emotion stronger than grief took charge of me. Standing in the doorway was Deirdre— Deirdre, the girl I’d adored in the study hall, the girl who’d disappeared from my life two years before. She was wearing a grey skirt and sweater and I could smell the faint scent of lilac. Her green eyes were looking at me quite coolly.

“Yes?” she said.

I waited for her to remember me but she gave no sign of recognition.

“Are you here about the room?”

I almost blurted out something about her sitting across from me in the study hall. Instead, I told her I needed a place to study for my finals. Would the room advertised be available for rent for just the next month?

“Yes, it would,” she said. “Come in.” She opened the door wide into an enclosed hallway. Lying around were various pairs of boots and shoes. She herself had no shoes on.

“There’s something you ought to know,” she said. “We have a number of cats and they have the full run of the house— except the room for rent. If you don’t like cats you should look elsewhere.”

I assured her I did indeed like cats. I was thinking fondly of poor old Milly, how she used to sit in the evenings on my knee, or Mother’s, purring as we read.

Deirdre’s green eyes seemed to soften.

“I’m relieved to hear that,” she said. “Take your shoes off and leave them here. There are tails and paws underfoot.”

I took my shoes off and put them beside the others in the hall.

“Follow me.”

She opened another door from the enclosed hallway into the house and we went inside.

THAT FIRST INSPECTION of Deirdre’s house was memorable. The pleasant shock at seeing her again was only slightly negated by the fact that she didn’t seem to recognize me. Her lilac perfume made my head spin.

I quickly understood that “a number of” cats was an understatement. There were at least twenty of them of differing shades and shapes all around us, greeting us as we went through the inner door. I placed my feet carefully, tiptoeing through them as though we were crossing a stream with occasional stepping stones.

As we progressed through the house, she talked expertly about the cats, using terms for them I’d never heard: this one was a “patched tabby,” that one a “stripy mackerel,” the other a “torby.” Some were “blotched,” some were “ticked,” some were “bobtailed,” the biggest one was a “barn.” All the cats in the house were female. She called them her “girls.”

Because of the cats everywhere, but principally because Deirdre was my guide, I had trouble concentrating totally on the house itself. Yet one thing was certain: this was the biggest house I’d ever been in. The kitchen alone seemed to me to be the size of the entire apartment I’d been brought up in. The surface of its huge stove and its various counters were adorned with basking cats.

“Of course the kitchen will be at your disposal,” said Deirdre. She then led me up to the second floor by a staircase that seemed as wide as some at the university. Off the landing she pointed out the main bedroom. Its door was shut but several other doors were ajar, with cats wandering in and out.

We climbed on up to the third-floor landing. The nearest door was open and led into a large room.

“This is the music room,” she said. “My husband practises here.”

Inside I could see several old bookcases full of books, an armchair, and a tattered leather couch. A number of cats lay around, some on the closed lid of a grand piano. By the window that looked out onto adjacent roofs, an upright wooden chair and a music stand were situated.

I was still thinking about that “husband” as Deirdre led me along the hallway beyond the music room to a door that was closed.

“This is the room for rent,” she said. “We try to keep it cat-free.”

She opened the door, led me inside, and then closed the door to keep our accompanying group of cats out.

The room seemed as large as the music room, but more dramatic. The entire wall on the south side was built with opaque glass blocks that let in daylight. A bed, a wardrobe, and a big mahogany desk with a lamp and leather chair were the main pieces of furniture. Near the bed, three steps led up to a little bathroom and a shower.

“The previous owner’s hobby was oil painting and this was his studio. That’s why the light’s so good,” Deirdre said. “What do you think? Would it serve your purposes?” I thought she sounded a little anxious.

Of course, I told her I really liked it. I’d have enthused over any old rat hole just to be near her again.

“Good! Then that’s settled.” She looked pleased.

My worry was that the price might be too much for me, but when I asked her about that she shook her head.

“Don’t concern yourself,” she said. “Since you’re a student, whatever you can afford will be just fine. The room’s available immediately, so you can move in whenever you wish.”

I took her at her word, went back to the hostel, picked up my things, and moved in that very night.

I BEGAN TO STUDY HARD, making much use of the university library. But when I did work in my room in Deirdre’s house, I was always aware of her presence. Any conversations I had with her were brief, and mainly in passing, when I was leaving for the university or for a nearby café where I’d sustain myself on bread rolls and coffee (the kitchen cats were rarely disturbed by me).

I kept wondering if I should remind her of our days together in the study hall. Maybe what I’d been through had changed my appearance and she just didn’t recognize me. Or maybe I’d made no lasting impression on her at all. Rather than discover that, I preferred not to ask.

I met her husband for a few minutes on my first morning. He was, indeed, the same plump man I’d seen in the study hall.

“Jacob Nelson,” he said, holding out his hand. His face was shiny, as though he’d just applied polish to it. He had a confident, grown-up way about him. “I hope your room’s all right. As you can see, the house needs a lot of work but we haven’t got round to fixing it up yet. I inherited it a few years ago from my uncle, who was an artist. Deirdre probably mentioned that your room was once his studio.”

The idea of inheriting such a place — it would have held six families from a tenement — was almost incomprehensible to me.

“Students usually aren’t too fussy about little things like decor. That’s why we like to rent to them,” he said. “Deirdre was a student for a while, too. After we married she decided she’d rather stay home and look after me and the girls.” He laughed indulgently. “I play violin in the orchestra so I spend most afternoons rehearsing at Symphony Hall for weekend performances. But I’m afraid I have to practise here in the mornings. I trust that won’t disturb your studies too much.”

I assured him I’d be at the university in the mornings, so his practising certainly wouldn’t bother me. Nor did it. Some mornings, in fact, I’d linger for an hour or more, just to listen to him play. How he could extract such intricacies of sound from one instrument amazed me.

Indeed, most things about this new world I’d stumbled into amazed me. It was so different from the Tollgate it might have been another planet, what with inherited mansions and virtuoso musicians and beautiful women free to devote their lives to the care of a legion of cats. I realized that a woman like Deirdre had always been unattainable for the likes of me. She was a goddess to be adored, not an ordinary woman with everyday human needs.

DURING MY FIRST WEEK in my new room, a curious thing happened. It was around midnight on Saturday.

I’d just climbed into bed after several hours of studying the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, a thousand-year-old meditation by a solitary exile who’d lost everything. Some lines were stuck in my mind as I lay there:

There is now none living

To whom I dare

Clearly speak

Of my innermost thoughts.

Those words had stirred up once again the grief that overwhelmed me the day the explosion wiped out my parents, my home, and everything in it. I felt quite as miserable as that ancient exile.

Just then, a great screeching of cats from outside the room shattered my mood. I lay for a moment, then got out of bed and opened my door a crack to see what was causing the racket.

A crowd of about twenty cats, led by the big barn cat, was gathered outside the music room howling like a mad choir. Their tails were all upright, fluffed out like banners. Unusually, the music-room door was closed, though a sliver of light was visible along the bottom.

During momentary lulls in the howling, I thought I could hear other sounds coming from inside the room. It might possibly be Jacob, going over his music for the next day. Or maybe not. I was wide awake now so I decided to check for myself.

I edged my way out into the hall, closing my own door softly behind me. I waded through the electric bodies of the cats till I reached the music room. Even above the howling, I could definitely hear sounds now from inside. As quietly as I could I turned the door handle and pushed the door open ever so slightly to make sure there wasn’t enough space for the cats to slip through.

I put my eye to the narrow opening.

Jacob was lying on top of Deirdre on the leather couch. Their pyjamas and housecoats were scattered on the floor. Unclothed, he looked plumper than ever. She, on the other hand, was much thinner than I’d imagined, the bones of her arms, legs, and ribs quite prominent.

They were making love rhythmically. Deirdre looked up at him, making little squealing noises. At times, her eyes would widen and her squeal would become an outright scream, whereupon the cats’ howling would rise to a crescendo.

Since the door was now slightly ajar, I was afraid the howling of the cats must surely sound louder to the lovers. But they seemed not to notice. So for quite a few minutes I maintained my position at the crack, watching their activities. When their efforts began to wind down, I very carefully closed the door, negotiated my path through the cats back to my own room, and got into bed.

Sometime later in the night, the cats woke me with their howling. This time I stayed in bed. The howling went on and on, then, at a certain moment, the cats shrieked in unison. After that, all noise stopped and I managed to fall asleep again.

THE NIGHT HOWLING occurred on some weekdays and on all Saturdays while I stayed with the Nelsons. I must admit that most times I took the opportunity to reassure myself as to the cause, holding the music room door slightly ajar, watching and listening while the lovers and the cats performed.

On mornings after, I’d often meet them before I left for the university and they’d invite me to have coffee with them in the kitchen amongst the cats. They called me by my first name now and insisted I call them Deirdre and Jacob.

I was almost certain they were aware of my being a spectator at their nighttime activities in the music room. But no mention was ever made of it.

Perhaps nothing needed to be said. There was something quite pleasant in it for all three of us, as well as for the cats. But Deirdre was no longer a goddess to me — if anything, she was more human than I’d ever have believed. The sight of her emaciated body and the sound of her amorous screaming were responsible for that.

DUNCAIRN. I heard that name for the first time from the lips of Jacob. It was on one of those mornings over coffee, and we’d been talking about my plans after I graduated. I told him and Deirdre that I hadn’t really anything concrete in mind. The truth was, I’d been seriously considering the prospect of leaving Scotland entirely — perhaps heading for one of those warm, exotic places I used to visit in my imagination. But I didn’t feel inclined to confess that to anyone, yet.

“Have you given any thought to teaching?” said Jacob. “The reason I mention it is that a few weeks back I ran into an old friend who was at university with me years ago. He’s principal of the high school in a little mining town in the Uplands, and he happened to say he was on the lookout for a one-year replacement teacher to start in September. Duncairn, the place is called. Seemingly it’s hard to get an experienced teacher to go to these out-of-the-way towns, never mind just for a temporary job.”

I could see that he and Deirdre had come up with a plan, for she was nodding her approval as he talked.

“Look,” Jacob said. “We were wondering if I should send my friend a note suggesting you as a possibility — that is, if he’s still looking for someone. What do you think? I mean, probably nothing will come of it anyway.”

I was, of course, interested. The idea of being a teacher in a little country school sounded very attractive, but I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hire someone so utterly unqualified as I was. Still, I told Jacob to go ahead, if he thought it was worth a try. I didn’t give much more thought to the possibility than that.

MY STUDIES WENT very well during the rest of that month I stayed with the Nelsons — partly because my mind was no longer full of Deirdre. My romantic image of her had moderated sufficiently that I was able to concentrate on preparing for the finals.

In due course, the exams were taken and passed. A week after the results were announced, an official-looking letter came for me. I opened it and read the typed single page.

Principal’s Of fice

Duncairn High School

Dear Mr. Steen: On the strong recommendation of Mr. Jacob Nelson, you are herewith of fered the position of interim teacher at Duncairn High School, conditional on the successful completion of your degree. Since school commences two months from now, I require an immediate response.

In the event of your acceptance, I suggest you come to Duncairn without delay and arrange accommodation here for the upcoming term. The most convenient way of travelling from Glasgow is by the daily two o’clock train for Carlisle, which has request stops at Duncairn station.

On your arrival, go straight to the school where you will receive travel reimbursement and a partial advance in salary. I will be in touch with you on the matter of your teaching duties.

In anticipation of your favourable response, I remain,

Sincerely, etc.

Samuel Mackay, Principal

I was surprised and delighted. I immediately mailed my acceptance. I thanked Jacob for persuading the principal to offer me the job — he and Deirdre were very happy at the news, too, but sorry I’d be leaving them. For me, the idea of going beyond the boundaries of the city for the first time in my life — of actually living in the countryside — was exciting. I wanted Jacob and Deirdre to tell me more about Duncairn. But they knew no more about it than I’d already discovered from a map. Namely, that it was one of the many small mining towns amongst the hills of the Southern Uplands.

I’d made up my mind to follow the principal’s advice and go there immediately. If I found accommodation, I’d just stay on and get to know the town and its surroundings better over the two months before the term began. I told Jacob my intention and that I’d like to settle up the matter of my rent for the month I’d stayed with them.

He wouldn’t hear of it.

“The money will be useful to you,” he said. “Consider it a little gift from us.”

I was very touched and couldn’t think of anything to say.

ON THE FRIDAY of that week, they took me in a taxi to Central Station where I was to catch the two o’clock train for Carlisle. My bag contained all my belongings.

On the platform, Deirdre wished me good luck.

“Come and stay with us if you’re ever back in Glasgow,” she said. “We’ll miss you, and so will the girls.” Her eyes were a little moist.

Jacob put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

“You’re the best boarder we’ve ever had,” he said. “You’ve been so understanding of … our little habits.”

They both smiled at me knowingly.

“All aboard!” shouted the porter.

Jacob shook my hand warmly and said goodbye. Deirdre gave me a hug and whispered in my ear: “I knew you’d be a special friend — even in the study hall.”

At least I thought that’s what she said. But her whisper had to compete with the increased hissing of the engine.

The porter ushered me aboard and slammed the door behind me. I lowered the window, and as the train pulled slowly away I waved to Deirdre and Jacob. They waved to me till a long bend in the track obliterated them completely.

I found an empty compartment and sat down, still thinking about the implications of Deirdre’s final words — if in fact I’d even heard them correctly. Was her pretending not to have recognized me part of some game that thrilled her? Did she assume I was complicit in the game, and that was part of the thrill? Was that what Jacob believed too?

What a strange pair they were — but they’d been kind to me when I needed kindness. As to how my idolatry of Deirdre had declined, I didn’t dwell on that — though perhaps I should have. It wasn’t her fault if my fevered imaginings and distant adoration of her had diminished so much on contact with the reality of her as a woman of flesh and blood. But I was still too young to give up entirely on the belief that ideal love must exist somewhere in this world and that I would, in time, find it.

Now, as I watched the landscape whiz past the compartment window, I began to think of other things. Here I was with complete freedom to follow whatever path I chose, with no one else’s expectations to be taken into account now that my parents were dead.

Dead.

Coming to grips with their fate was still hard for me. Every so often the grief would spring at me from nowhere, like a cat pouncing on a mouse that had let its guard down.

NO MATTER, here I was, by a chance series of events, on a train to this little Upland town of Duncairn. The prospect thrilled me. Though perhaps after what I’d been through, I should have been more apprehensive. I certainly hadn’t the slightest suspicion that what was about to happen to me in Duncairn would complicate the entire course of my life thereafter.

1

Around four-thirty in the afternoon, the train pulled into the station of a small mining town in a high valley surrounded by hills whose tops disappeared into slate-coloured skies. DUNCAIRN said the sign on the platform. I got off, asked the station porter for directions to the school, and headed there immediately.

As I walked, I noticed that the wind was cooler up here and that the air was the freshest I’d ever breathed.

I was on what looked to be the town’s one major street, consisting mainly of single-storey brick rowhouses interspersed with a few bigger granite buildings. After ten minutes or so I came to the school, which was built entirely of grey granite. There was no sign of students around; it was closed for the summer. The caretaker who answered my knock on the main door had with him an envelope that had been left for me by Principal Mackay — he was, unfortunately, out of town at the moment. In the envelope, I was heartened to see the promised salary advance as well as a note from the principal advising me that above Kirk’s Pharmacy was a furnished room for rent that might suit my needs.

Kirk’s Pharmacy turned out to be a short walk away, in the town square. It was the lower part of a two-storeyed granite building and looked quite old-fashioned. The window contained a dusty display, according to the little cards in faded ink beside them, of some traditional tools of the medical trade — wooden mortar bowls and pestles, test tubes, and coloured bottles of all shapes and sizes. Other items were more ominous — trepanning saws, forceps, speculums, kidney basins, and lancets.

I pushed the door open and went in.

The chemical aura was as bracing as the air outside. A dour elderly woman in a white coat greeted me from behind a polished wooden counter as though she’d been expecting me. She introduced herself as Mrs. Kirk and presumed I was the new teacher. Principal Mackay had warned her I might be along to inquire about the room upstairs. Yes, it was indeed available for immediate occupancy, if I wished. She gave me the key to go up and inspect it.

Access was through a twin door beside the entrance to the pharmacy, then up a creaky stairway. The room itself was plain but clean, with faint traces of that chemical smell leaking through from the pharmacy below. A curtained window looked out onto the square. The furniture was fairly basic, but all in all, the room seemed fine.

When I went back downstairs, I told Mrs. Kirk that I didn’t intend to go back to Glasgow, so I’d take the room right away.

“Of course you will,” she said without a smile. “You’d have trouble finding another room to rent in Duncairn. There’s the hotel, of course, but it’s very expensive.”

OVER THE NEXT DAYS, I got to know Duncairn quite well, especially the square, which I learned was typical of town squares in any number of places in the Uplands. It was fifty yards by fifty yards with a grassy area in the middle, a few shrubs, and some scrawny trees. The focal point was a war memorial consisting of three bronze soldiers holding bayonets, staring with blank eyes up at the hills; many of the names carved into the plinth came from families with the same name, killed in various wars. On the far side of the square was an old-fashioned police station with a blue lamp outside. Next to it was a church with a low steeple. Its windows and door were boarded up as though it hadn’t been in use for a long time. Also noteworthy in the square were Mackenzie’s Café, where I would eat most of my meals, and a pub-cum-hotel called the Bracken Inn. And of course, Kirk’s Pharmacy.

With the help of a Baedeker lent to me by Mrs. Kirk, I explored the town’s surroundings. There really was only the one main paved road, which was fairly flat while it ran through Duncairn but then descended through many miles of moorland, east and west, to the two opposing coastlines. Another much narrower road ran south past the railway station and stopped at the entrance of the coal mine, its elevator looming up like a grimy Ferris wheel.

Along this road, at regular intervals each day, I’d see groups of men coming from or going to the mine. They all seemed to live in those rows of brick houses I’d passed when I first arrived. The miners on their way to work and those returning from it were indistinguishable in the matter of clothing: they all wore the same dark jackets and trousers, with worn-out boots. But the men on their way to the mine had clean, pink faces, and they talked and joked together. The men returning were hunched and quiet, their faces black with coal dust.

I TOOK MY EXPLORATORY walks into the rolling hills in no matter what weather. In Duncairn, even though it was summer, the sun rarely shone and rain fell a good part of most days. The slopes of the hills were relatively gentle, but the Baedeker noted that eons ago they’d been jagged mountain ranges whose edges time had since smoothed out. They were covered in heather and bracken and little blue and yellow flowers. There were various grey fungi that looked so revolting I kept well clear of them, though the book said they weren’t at all dangerous.

Other real dangers lurked in these hills, however. Quite innocent-looking areas of bracken were in fact bogs known to have sucked down the unwary, and to have done so for a long time. The Baedeker recorded that the body of a man wearing strange, tattered clothing had been burped up in recent years by a bog just south of Duncairn. Scientists estimated he’d been swallowed by the bog and stayed in there for three or even four thousand years. I myself saw a few carcasses of sheep unlucky enough to have wandered into the wrong areas. Their coats were slick and black.

On my walks I was also startled by creatures that never visited the Tollgate — deer of every size, and hares. There were also squadrons of small black birds whose wings were streaked with white feathers. They would fly at my head, squawking angrily, with greedy eyes I didn’t much like the look of.

A SECTION OF THE Baedeker that dealt with the Roman attempt to colonize this part of the world drew attention to the barely visible remains of an old road that ran from the southeast edge of Duncairn into the hills. Archaeologists had found pot shards, denarii, and a variety of mallets and nails near it. They’d also dug up several ancient skulls with nail holes bored into them. Whether this was a horrific form of execution inflicted by the Romans on the original inhabitants or vice versa, the experts hadn’t as yet established.

I only managed to find the outline of that old road because of the occasional moss-covered cobblestones that protruded from it. I followed its traces for about two miles to the foot of the Cairn Table — the highest hill in the area. The road came to a dead stop at the remains of a ten-foot-high wall made of stones and earth mixed. The wall itself stretched intermittently for many miles, so I came across parts of it on other walks.

As for the purpose of the road and the wall, my Baedeker noted only that hostile tribes hadn’t existed in sufficient numbers in the area to warrant such elaborate engineering. The book speculated vaguely that the Romans might have been afraid of something else and that the wall had been built for protection against it.

Certainly, on an overcast day up in these hills, a citified hiker with an imagination couldn’t help glancing nervously over his shoulder sometimes. It was easy to believe that up here there might be something so primitive and unpleasant that neither ramparts nor centuries could keep it at bay.

2

On my fourth morning at Duncairn I found a scribbled note that had been slipped under my door at the bottom of the stairs.

Please come and see me at the school any time after nine this morning.

Sam Mackay.

Accordingly, after a roll and coffee at Mackenzie’s, I made my way to the school. The inside was gloomy and smelled stale. The caretaker directed me to an office on the other side of an assembly area, and there I went, my shoes echoing loudly on the plank flooring. I knocked on the door.

A high-pitched voice called to me to come in.

The man who got up from behind the desk to greet me was one of the widest human beings I’d ever seen. Not fat, but wide. He almost seemed the width of two men, with everything— head, arms, legs — in proportion. Each of his big brown shoes could have accommodated my two feet.

“I’m Sam Mackay,” he said. “Welcome to Duncairn.” That reedy voice was a surprise coming from such a big man.

He reached out his huge hand and shook mine warmly. He looked about forty, with receding red hair. His face was freckled, his green eyes far apart, his smile wide and friendly.

“Mrs. Kirk told me you’d moved in,” he said when we were seated. “I’m very glad of this chance to talk to you. I was afraid I might miss you, since I’m back in Duncairn for only a couple of days. Then I’ll be on the road till just before the term starts— I’m with a travelling committee of the Board of Education.” He made a face as though he wasn’t too thrilled about that prospect. “It was a real stroke of luck for me to run across Jacob last time I was in the city. As I told him then, it’s so hard to get competent people to come and work in these country schools, especially on a temporary basis. So I was delighted when he recommended you and you agreed to come here.” I wasn’t so sure the word “competent” would apply to me. “Oh, I know you’ve never done any teaching, but don’t worry about it,” he said. “You won’t have to perform in front of a class. You’ll just be giving extra writing instruction to pupils with problems. It’s mainly done on an individual basis.”

I was relieved to hear that.

“I hadn’t seen Jacob in years,” he said. “From his letter, I could tell he thinks very highly of you. He and I were in a music history class together when we were at university. Of course, he was a real musician — a wonderful violinist — and I was just picking up an optional course. He was quite a ladies’ man in those days. So now he’s with the symphony — and has a wife, as well? Isn’t it funny, I never thought of him as the type who’d settle down to the boring, domestic life. His wife must be quite exceptional, I suppose?”

I assured him that Deirdre was indeed quite something — and was especially fond of cats.

He now began asking me questions about myself. I told him everything he wanted to know, even about the shocking deaths of my parents.

He listened to that with great sympathy. Some years before, apparently, his own father and his only brother, both coal miners, had been killed in a cave-in at the Duncairn mine. His mother had died, heartbroken, just a year after their deaths. He himself still lived in the family rowhouse, which was full of reminders of them.

“You won’t meet too many people in Duncairn who haven’t had a family member killed in the mines,” he said. “That’s the story in a nutshell of these towns in the Uplands. I’d have been sent down the mines myself, but I was just a bit too big.” He spread his arms, indicating his bulk. “So, I stayed at the books and here I am, principal of the school where I used to be a pupil.”

After that, we talked a while longer about what my teaching responsibilities would entail. He handed me a copy of an elementary grammar and composition book my pupils would be using.

“Take this along with you,” he said. “You’ve lots of time to get to know the contents. There’s nothing to it.”

AS I WAS LEAVING, I thanked him for all his reassurance.

“I have a feeling you’ll enjoy it here,” he said.

He lumbered along beside me to the door of the school. “When I get back from this Board of Education assignment, we’ll get together,” he said. “I often go to the Bracken for a pint in the evenings, if you’d like that. I’m getting married in October so I’ll be trying to make the most of my freedom while it lasts. Did I say a pint? Maybe we’ll have more than one.” He laughed — a reedy but pleasant sound.

He was so massive I guessed he could put away a fair number of pints without much trouble.

3

On most of the days following, I’d head up into the hills with a bag holding a waterproof shell in case of rain, the textbook Sam had given me, and a sandwich from Mackenzie’s, where everyone seemed to know I was the new teacher. I’d walk for a few miles and find myself a clear spot amongst the gorse bushes to sit down. After an hour or two of reading, I’d get out my sandwich. Invariably, at that point, a swarm of those small black birds with the white streaks on their wings would appear, shrieking and swooping. They were so bold I’d have to swat at them with my book to stop them from snatching the bread out of my hand.

Often, on those days, I’d make for a big rock I’d noticed on my first walk. It was an oddity up in the high moors — a lone, twenty-foot-high boulder, just sitting there with no other noticeable rocks around. Its northern side was smooth and mossy. But some indentations for climbing had been sculpted into its south face, and I made use of them. I discovered that the top of the rock was concave — a mossy depression four feet in width and three feet in depth at its lowest.

Sitting up there, I could see farther across the entire landscape below. A mile or two north lay the cluster of Duncairn itself, then nothing but isolated shepherds’ cottages, dots of sheep widely scattered, then more hills rolling away behind. To the south were just hills upon hills, except for one lone house about a mile away amongst a windbreak of trees.

The top of the rock became my favourite place for reading. Some days, when the wind moaning over the edge sounded like a great lullaby, I’d even stretch out in the mossy basin and nap.

AFTER LUNCH ONE overcast afternoon — it was well into my second week in Duncairn — I walked to the rock with my book. I climbed to the top and settled down to some syntactical problem. I must have dozed off, for I was startled to hear a voice over my head.

“Am I disturbing you?”

I looked up at a pair of cynical eyes, like a cat’s, staring down at me.

I was immediately wide awake.

The cat’s eyes were actually the inverted eyes of a woman, leaning over the parapet above me. When I sat upright, I realized that her eyes were most uncynical — in fact, they were blue and pleasing to look at. Indeed, her entire face was pleasing. She seemed around my own age, with fair hair and a fair complexion a little flushed from the moorland air.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know it isn’t always wise to fall asleep outdoors. Even on top of the rock.”

Her quiet voice, too, was pleasing.

“Have you noticed those little black birds with the white wing feathers?” she said. “The locals call them ‘eye-pickers.’ Someone should have told you about them. They sometimes peck the eyes out of sheep, but they’ve been known to go for the eyes of people who’re asleep.”

I was shocked to hear that, for the birds looked so pretty. “Even pretty things can be dangerous,” she said.

I thanked her for warning me. She was still on the outside of the rock and looked as though she was about to climb back down. So I quickly introduced myself and told her I’d be filling in at the school for a while.

“So I heard,” she said. “I’ve seen you climbing up here a few times. I thought I’d come up and say hello.”

I invited her, in that case, to visit with me for a while, as though this oval on top of the rock was my parlour. I reached out my hand and she took it, climbed over the edge, and sat down opposite me.

She wore hiking boots and a dark-blue wool sweater over jeans. She had the sturdy build of someone active.

“My name’s Miriam Galt,” she said.

I really liked the look of her. The oval wasn’t much larger than a bathtub, so our limbs couldn’t help touching quite intimately.

I was mystified at how she could have got to the rock without my seeing her when I first climbed up. I’d looked around the moorlands from the top before sitting down and could have sworn there was no human being for miles — just a few dozen sheep. I’d been asleep for only a few minutes. I’d already noticed, though, how distances in this area were somehow distorted. On my walks, the landscape would seem to me deserted, then a shepherd and his dog might suddenly appear so near I could hardly believe my eyes.

The mystery was solved for me by Miriam Galt.

“Do you see that gully?” She pointed at what looked like a narrow ditch a hundred yards or so from the rock, running to the southeast through the moors. “It doesn’t seem like much from here, but it’s six feet deep in most parts and easy for walking in. It goes past where I live — up there.” She indicated the lone house I’d noticed before, with the windbreak of trees. “I was walking in the gully when I saw you climbing up here today. And here I am.” She smiled.

I really liked her smile.

4

That was the first time I saw Miriam Galt. Before we parted, I told her I usually came to the rock each day, if she ever felt like company. She turned up the next day and we talked again for a while.

After that, we began to meet almost daily at the foot of the rock, and from there we’d go for long walks through the moorlands. She assured me that while the Baedeker was correct about the dangers of bogs that might suck an innocent wanderer down, there were other local dangers, too. Not far from the rock, in an area I’d walked through several times on my own, she showed me a hole wide enough for a man to fall into, so overgrown with bracken you wouldn’t have noticed it.

“Listen,” she said, and dropped a pebble. She counted slowly to twenty before we heard the clink when it hit bottom. “It’s an old mine shaft,” she said. “Some of the mines in this part of the world are centuries old and there are disused shafts all over the place, so you have to be very careful.” She paused. “You must have noticed how few trees there are around here. But in the past this whole region was a huge forest of evergreens, with herds of deer and wolf packs everywhere. When mining began, thousands of the best trees were cut down and used underground as props for the tunnels. So the forest’s underneath us now.”

She was surprised at my general ignorance of the natural world — that I didn’t even know the difference, for instance, between heather and bracken and gorse. I told her people like me from the Tollgate were experts at other things — for example, identifying different types of beer bottles even when they’d been smashed to pieces. I said this jokingly, but it was near to the truth and she was shocked.

So she took pains to introduce me to the wildlife. She identified the various birds — hawks and eagles, as well as others with such local names as “lady quaints,” “slit hens,” and those nasty little “eye-pickers.” With her guidance, I was soon able to spot foxes, wild cats, weasels, and even swamp rats from just the briefest glimpses of them amongst the bracken. She once took me into a deep, narrow cavern where, amongst the stalactites in the ceiling, hundreds of sleeping bats were hanging.

All of this was astonishing to me. I couldn’t get over how, in a landscape that looked so empty — just rolling bare hills and sheep — there were so many other living things you’d barely notice.

“They tend not to make a big display of their presence,” said Miriam Galt. “That’s because most of them eat each other.”

I’d never heard it put that way before.

“Yes,” she said. “Nature up here’s very beautiful from one point of view. But once you get to know it, it can also be quite a nightmare. For example, the ground animals eat the nesting birds and their eggs. Those very same birds eat pups and kittens and fish and any other animal young they can find. That’s why the wisest creatures camouflage their babies and teach them to keep quiet when they’re not around to protect them. So existence isn’t necessarily so great for the animals. Then there’s the whole horrific life cycle of the insects. Thank goodness they’re so small we scarcely notice the carnage that goes on amongst them.”

I was taken aback at this unsentimental description of nature.

“From what you’ve told me about the Tollgate, you ought to understand it quite well,” she said.

MIRIAM GALT soon got me to tell her all about my life before Duncairn, but she seemed reluctant to talk much about herself. From what she did say, I knew that her background was quite unlike my own.

She’d been born in Leith, the seaport of Edinburgh, and her mother had died not long after giving birth to her. Her father had been a partner in a small merchant-shipping line. When she was sixteen, he’d sold his share in the company, left Leith for Duncairn, and moved into the house out on the moors. It was called Duncairn Manor.

When she told me this we were sitting in the high heather, looking down over the great sweep of moorland, and could see her house in the distance. The landscape here was quite a contrast to the romantic pictures I’d seen of Edinburgh, with its castle and the sparkling sea as its backdrop. I wondered why her father had decided to bring her to such a remote place.

“It was for his health,” she said. “Maybe he wanted to get as far from the sea as he could. This is midway between the two coasts, after all.”

I didn’t get much more out of her except that she herself enjoyed the relative isolation. Her main occupation was to look after her father, so she’d received the bulk of her education through correspondence courses. A part-time maid-and-cook did the housework.

I tried to pin down what exactly was wrong with her father.

“Maybe someday you’ll see for yourself” was all she would say.

ON ANOTHER GREY afternoon as we sat in the bowl of the rock, I mentioned that, according to the Baedeker, many of the big rocks found in the Uplands were deposited there during the Ice Age that scoured the world two million years ago.

“Well, that may be the geological explanation,” said Miriam. “But there’s a local legend that’s a bit more colourful. According to it, this rock we’re on was hurled at Duncairn thousands of years ago by a demon. Fortunately, he just missed his target.” She told me how the same legend claimed that the indentations in the side of our rock had been gouged out by the Romans, who used it as a lookout. What they were looking out for was apparently something more than ordinarily fearful.

My Baedeker, I remembered, had made a mysterious allusion to the old Roman road and the remnants of the great wall — that it was built to keep out something terrible.

Miriam knew about that, too.

“The Uplands are full of that kind of mixture of fact and fantasy,” she said. “I don’t suppose it’s like that in cities?”

I assured her that even in the Tollgate occasional weird things happened. For example, there was Cameron Ross, and the thing that cut him open from the inside. And then there was the apartment that was haunted after the violent deaths of the family who lived there.

She listened attentively to these accounts.

“How awful,” she said. She was curious about the super-

natural elements in the stories. She wondered if I actually believed in them.

I tried to explain that I found her question difficult to answer, though I’d often thought about it. Perhaps rather than belief, my attitude towards such things was a kind of wishful thinking. If you come from a grim, cruel place like the Tollgate, at times it’s hard to convince yourself that there can be any real point to human existence. But I suppose most of us want our lives to mean something — in spite of what reason tells us. So, even though they’re not pleasant, the cases of Cameron Ross and the haunted tenement, and eerie things in general, seem like welcome proof that at least there’s more to the world than meets the eye.

She kept nodding as I babbled on, as though she agreed with what I said.

“Maybe that’s what fascinates me about a lot of the curious things that happen in the Uplands, too,” she said. “They may not be supernatural, but they’re weird enough to make you wonder. For instance, you must know about the goings-on at Carrick?”

I assured her I’d never even heard of Carrick and encouraged her to tell me more.

“Well, in the case of Carrick, no one’s managed to come up with a scientific explanation of what happened,” she said.

CARRICK WAS JUST another little town, thirty-nine hilly miles north of Duncairn. No one lived there anymore, but the town and all the buildings in it were still perfectly intact. Sightseeing was completely forbidden, and few were tempted to break the prohibition.

Ten years ago, the entire population of Carrick had been evacuated and the town itself quarantined. The cause of this was the so-called Carrick Plague, and the fear that, even today, it might still be in the air. The plague had manifested itself in a most unusual symptom: the need to talk. As the townspeople one after another were stricken, they wouldn’t stop talking. They’d talk and talk and talk themselves to exhaustion, many of them still trying to squeeze out a few more words as they died.

Investigators looking into the pathology of the plague were completely stumped. They recorded as much as they could of the sufferers’ endless monologues. They hoped that amongst the heaps of verbiage, certain patterns might emerge; certain words, certain names might recur. But as far as they could ascertain, there was nothing at all unusual — just the mundane, commonplace chatter of small mining-town life.

Some investigators refused to give up on that line of inquiry. They even conducted studies comparing what they called “Carrick Speech” with the everyday utterances of other parts of the country, especially cities. Even after all these years the inquiry was still underway, but nothing definitive, so far, had emerged.

Other investigators now suspected that the spreading of the plague was actually a case of mass murder — probably an act of revenge — rather than a natural phenomenon. Support was growing for this attempt at a rational explanation, though no evidence of method or motive had yet been found.

“YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN?” said Miriam when she’d finished. “What happened at Carrick isn’t supernatural, like your Cameron Ross story — it’s just weird and out of the ordinary. But when so many such instances occur in one region, you do start to wonder, don’t you?”

I agreed, of course, and asked her to tell me about more of these “out-of-the-ordinary” things, if that’s what she wanted to call them.

“You probably know about Stroven?” she said.

THE LITTLE TOWN OF Stroven was thirteen miles to the south of Duncairn over a few ranges of hills. It had for generations been the most prosperous of all the towns in the region. But now the access roads to it had been closed.

That was because, several years ago, a sinkhole had appeared right in the middle of the town square. It was small to begin with, but over a period of months the hole grew so wide and so deep that it took up the entire square. Within a year all the important buildings around the square, including the town hall and the church, began toppling into it. The hole became wider still, swallowing the inner parts of the town and moving on, insatiably it seemed, to the outlying areas. Then its monstrous appetite seemed satisfied.

By that time, of course, all the inhabitants of Stroven had long abandoned the town.

To government geologists, the cause was evident: the surface of the earth had gradually been weakened in the district by centuries of mining for coal and tin. This vast sinkhole, said the geologists, was the inevitable result.

But the local inhabitants had a quite different theory. They believed the town had been gobbled up as some kind of punishment; even the etymology of its name—“strove in vain”— was a prophecy.

“SERIOUSLY?” said Miriam Galt, when I assured her I’d never heard of the Stroven sinkhole. “You’ve led a very sheltered life in that Tollgate place.” Her expression was serious as she said this.

I’d never thought of it that way, but perhaps she was right. “Then it’s possible you don’t even know about the Muirton disaster — it was just recently all over the news,” she said.

THIS MUIRTON, she informed me, was a little town only twenty-one miles east of Duncairn. It still attracted sightseers because of a horrific mine accident and its effect on many of the town’s male population.

What happened was this. One morning the mine elevator cage, full of coal miners, both men and boys, was on its way down the thousand-foot shaft for the early shift. Halfway down, the elevator cable snapped and the cage plunged on downwards. The miners immediately put into effect the traditional safety method they’d been taught for just this situation. Each of them grabbed one of the leather straps attached to the cage ceiling for the purpose, then lifted one of their legs so that most of their body weight was on the other leg. They’d barely time to take a deep breath when the cage crashed into the bottom of the mine shaft. Many of the miners survived the impact, but the legs that supported their weight were smashed to a pulp. Most had sacrificed their left leg.

Since that day Muirton had become notorious as the town of the one-legged men. Sightseers wanted to know what a place looked like that had had such bad luck. In fact it looked much the same as any other Uplands town. Except for the number of men and boys you’d see hobbling along the main street on crutches or on wooden legs.

I WAS SHOCKED to hear about Muirton, and indignant at these heartless sightseers.

“You can’t really blame them,” said Miriam. “They’d all read about it in the newspapers. It was made to sound sort of bizarre — even charming, in a way. Though for the miners and their families it was devastating.”

I agreed with that, at least.

“If you want, I can give you an example of the same kind of thing, right here in Duncairn,” she said. “What happened could almost be out of a book — except that it’s true and awful.”

Of course, I did want to hear all about it.

“Then come with me,” she said.

WE DESCENDED FROM the rock and walked a mile or so into the hills till we arrived at a deep gorge with a rushing stream in it. An old stone bridge linked the two sides of the gorge.

We walked out onto the bridge and looked down cautiously over its crumbling parapet. The stream must have been fifty feet below, with rocks jutting out of it. Miriam explained that it was from this bridge that a man named Tam Halfnight had jumped, after he’d killed his newborn baby daughter.

Since that time the shepherds had called it Tam’s Brig.

“The suicide happened a long time before I came to live here,” said Miriam. “People who knew him said Tam was a good man and didn’t mean to kill his daughter. I don’t know all the details, except that he’d something wrong with his right arm and it was in a cast. He was at home, holding the baby in his arms, and she began to slip. He tried to stop her from falling, but because of the cast he held on to her too tight and broke her neck. After that, he came up here and killed himself. Everyone thought he’d done the right thing.”

From the way she said this, I knew she agreed with them.

“I’ve heard that when they found his body, it was faceupwards on the rocks down there,” said Miriam Galt. “His back was broken and the little eye-pickers had already taken his eyes.”

I was horrified. Together we stared down into the gorge.

“They say he really loved his wife and that baby,” she said. “Isn’t it strange what love can lead to?”

I’d no answer for that.

I ADORED Miriam Galt and, at first, talking to her and listening to her talk was enough. We’d been seeing each other almost every day for more than two weeks when all of that changed. We met at the foot of the rock one day as usual. She took my hand and without a word we began walking fast up into the hills, halfrunning, in fact so out of breath we couldn’t have talked even if we’d wanted to. We reached a sheltered hollow amongst the grasses and the high heather where we’d sat on occasion before, talking. But this time we threw ourselves desperately at each other. We feasted on each other, sank into each other, tried to become one new creature.

At last, exhausted, we lay back, breathing deeply and watching the passing clouds with their impenetrable dark gulfs. When occasional streaks of gold broke through, the sun would tantalize us with glimpses of hidden treasures. Then the clouds thickened again and all the colours in the surrounding hills fell an octave. The heather and even the little moor flowers seemed almost black.

Then for a few more seconds the sun burst completely through and I turned to Miriam Galt lying there beside me. She was like some ancient priestess, her face, her whole body sheathed in molten gold.

When the clouds blotted out the sun again, she was human. At that moment I felt brave enough to tell her I loved her. I hoped she’d tell me she loved me, too.

After a while she did speak, but it wasn’t to say what I wanted so much to hear. With a sigh she invited me to come next day, for the very first time, to her home — the house amongst the windbreak of evergreens.

5

The rows of evergreens that offered the house protection against the weather also helped safeguard the only deciduous tree — a wide but not very tall oak which stood in the middle of a sizable front lawn. The house was of a traditional two-storey rectangular structure, built with granite blocks. On either side of the front door were two symmetrical windows with dark curtains. The second floor had three curtained windows, one of them above the door. Ivy clung to the walls around them. Engraved on the lintel of the door was the formal name of the house:

DUNCAIRN MANOR

1885

Miriam Galt, who’d walked with me from our usual meeting place at the rock, had been unusually quiet. She now opened the heavy wooden door, we went inside, and she closed it gently behind us. From the hallway, she took me into a living room with the high wainscoting of the previous century and a lot of solid-looking mahogany furniture. A stone fireplace with no fire lit in it took up almost one wall. The room seemed unchanged since the house was built.

“He’ll be in the library,” Miriam said. We approached another door which matched the wainscoting so well that it was scarcely noticeable. Just before we entered, she said softly, “Now remember, he’s not well.”

She tapped the door three times and opened it.

We went into a very gloomy room. It had just one window in the southern wall with green stained glass in place of curtains, so not much daylight got through. The walls were lined with bookcases, and on a table in the middle of the room lay what looked like a brass telescope. There was a floor lamp and a sofa near a fireplace in which a low fire had been lit — no doubt to ward off the high moorland dampness. The only ornament on the walls was a dim photograph over the mantel. Pervading the air was a smell like incense.

At first, no one else seemed to be in the room.

Then Miriam spoke.

“Father,” she said. “I want you to meet my friend, Harry.”

My eyes were now becoming accustomed to the gloom. What had seemed at first like a pile of clothing on the sofa by the fireplace took on the shape of a flimsy-looking man in black pyjamas. He had thin grey hair, a thin face, and sad eyes. The thing I’d taken for a floor lamp beside the sofa was actually a metal pole on wheels with a bottle of some transparent liquid hanging from a hook. A tube from the bottle was connected to his left arm. I could also see now that he had a striped cat beside him.

I went forward to shake his hand. The cat arched its back and hissed at me.

Miriam’s father got slowly to his feet but didn’t shake my hand. In fact, he even drew his hand back from mine. I didn’t really mind. In the poor light, the fingers protruding from the pyjama sleeve looked shrivelled and dark, as though charred by fire — or, worse, they might have been the legs of a big spider.

From what Miriam had told me of his past, I’d associated her father with a life of action, exploring mighty oceans and exotic lands with his fleet of ships. Instead he looked more like a wreck being swept helplessly towards the reef.

“We won’t disturb your rest,” Miriam said to him. “I just wanted you to meet Harry.”

He nodded his head to me and shrank back into the sofa beside his cat.

“Let’s go,” Miriam said.

As we were leaving, I noticed that the photograph over the mantel was of Miriam Galt herself.

“I’M SORRY,” she said when we were outside the room again. “Sometimes he’s more sociable. Today, he wasn’t in the mood.”

Now that I’d seen her father and the state he was in, she was less reluctant to talk about him. Apparently, she herself would often sit with him for hours without his noticing her. Sometimes he’d spend all day on that sofa dozing, only nibbling at the meals brought to him. He even slept there most nights rather than go to his bedroom upstairs. On some of those nights, if the sky was cloudless, he’d disconnect himself from his pole and go into the garden. There, with his old ship’s telescope, he’d spend hours studying the heavens.

Miriam seemed to find this behaviour disturbing. But I thought it was, to an extent, understandable from someone who’d spent a lot of time at sea and might be familiar with celestial navigation.

“Yes, and it’s true I’ve learned a lot from him about the positions and motion of the stars,” Miriam said. “But now the main reason he watches them is that he believes a message might be written there — something especially for him. He often tells me so.”

That certainly made him sound a little mad, in addition to his physical illness, whatever that was. Out of politeness, I said maybe he’d recover and things would turn out all right in the end.

“There’s no chance of that,” she said.

Her reply made me think Miriam Galt wasn’t an optimist.

“I’ll show you some of his treasures, if you like,” she said.

We went up the staircase to a large room on the second floor. The ceiling light wasn’t very strong, so Miriam drew back the window curtain. The floor was of plain wooden planks and clear of all furniture except for a number of glass display boxes you might find in a museum. A bookcase stood against the far wall. There was also a stand with some sort of ship’s clock on it. Apparently its bell rang every half hour, day and night — I’d heard its high-pitched sound through the ceiling when we were with her father.

“Some of the collection’s worth a look,” Miriam said. “His officers used to pick things up for him on their voyages.”

Indeed, a number of the items were out of the ordinary. One box held two shrunken human heads, male and female, with long grey hair, their eyelids and lips stitched up. A longer box near the window held a collection of stilettos, machetes, and parangs with brown stains on the blades that didn’t look like rust. Another box was full of a variety of scrimshaws made of whalebone and narwhal tusks. They were skilfully incised with the usual kinds of romantic seafaring images, but also with scenes of hangings from yardarms and knifings in taverns.

In the bookcase against the back wall, most of the books were in poor condition, their covers warped, the print almost illegible. Some of them were just the kinds of things you’d expect to find on a ship: A Young Sailor’s Introduction to Seafaring, and Tides and Currents in the Straits of Malacca, and A Guide to Knot Making, and Travels in the Melanesian Islands. The others were an assortment of mildewed books such as you might find in any library on shore.

“All of them are from ships that foundered without survivors,” said Miriam Galt. “He doesn’t read them, he just likes to have them. For him the important thing is the idea that the last person to read them had drowned.”

What a grisly principle, I thought. This bookcase reminded me a little of the columbarium where my parents’ ashes were preserved. The neatly organized, outmoded books were the only memorials to their dead readers — and writers too, for that matter.

I said so to Miriam.

“In the end, that’s the fate of the contents of most bookcases,”

Miriam Galt said to me.

6

Six weeks of bliss had passed and now only a few days were left till school opened. Miriam knew I was becoming a little anxious.

“Come for dinner tonight,” she said one day. “It’ll be a special treat before school starts.”

Accordingly, around seven-thirty that night, I headed up over the moors and arrived at the manor just before eight o’clock. It was late summer but still daylight. For once, the only clouds in the Uplands sky consisted of millions of midges. Miriam welcomed me at the door and told me her father wouldn’t be joining us — he preferred to eat alone in the library.

I didn’t mind that at all.

“He told me to choose a gift for you — one of those books saved from a wreck,” she said. “I’m thinking of one in particular — I’ll give it to you before you leave.”

She’d cooked the meal herself: a roast beef that smelled and tasted delicious. We ate at the plain deal table in the kitchen then adjourned to the living room with a bottle of red wine. I was very aware of the presence of her father next door in the library, so I tried to talk quietly. Miriam assured me that the walls were thick and that our voices wouldn’t disturb him.

The curtains of the living-room window were open and it was dark outside now. We went over for a minute to look out. I could see that the night sky over the evergreens was clear and full of stars.

“They look so brilliant,” Miriam said. “But it takes so many eons for their light to reach us, the fact is they’re actually dead by the time we see them.”

People didn’t want to think about anything so sad when they were overwhelmed by beauty, I suggested.

“Truth’s truth,” she said. “Even on this earth, by the time we see anything it’s no longer the same as it was, and neither are we. Any scientist will tell you that’s so.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. So I took her hand and we went and sat on a couch before the big fireplace. A fire had been lit in it earlier to fend off the night chills. I had my arm around her and the wine gave me courage. I told her once again, as I had many times in the last weeks, that I loved her. Again I hoped she’d tell me she loved me too, and again she didn’t. But she looked me in the eye.

“Words are so easily mistaken for the real thing,” she said.

I denied that passionately. I wasn’t making any mistake. I knew I loved her and it had nothing to do with words. Anyway, my love was above words; it was an intuition. I just knew, from the very core of my being, that I loved her.

For the first time in all the weeks I’d known her, she laughed outright.

“You’re incorrigible, Harry,” she said. “Intuitions aren’t any more right about love than they are about stars. I mean, look at us. We think we’re sitting here quite securely talking, when we’re actually whirling around the sun at thousands of miles an hour. Our intuition lets us down all the time — what looks like a cat lying in a corner turns out to be a pair of socks, and vice versa.”

I could tell that the wine had affected her, too. At one point she deliberately leaned her body in against me.

“How do you know that what you think is love isn’t actually lust?” she said.

Even though the feel of her was enough to make me wonder if she might be right, I wouldn’t concede. So she became serious again.

“If you did love me, it would have to be on the basis of knowing the true me,” she said. “But there are many things you don’t know about me. If you knew them, they’d tip the scales and outweigh what you think is love. They’d turn it into something not quite so elevated.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d hinted that she might have secrets I wouldn’t like. But I just kept repeating I loved her as though it was an incantation. As though repeating the words would somehow make up for the lack of her saying them to me in return.

And she kept on looking into my eyes, her brow furrowed as though she couldn’t make up her mind about me.

“I wonder,” she said eventually.

IT WAS AROUND midnight and I was about to pour us another glass of wine when the bell on the ship’s clock upstairs began to sound.

“Listen,” she said. The bell rang eight times.

“The Middle Watch is about to begin,” she said. “My father told me that’s what the sailors call the watch between midnight and eight in the morning. I’ll go and settle him in for the night. Come with me — there’s something you need to see, and now’s as good a time as any.”

So I followed her through the door in the wainscoting and into the library.

Her father was lying on the couch by the fireplace, as before. That faint smell of incense was in the air. On a little table beside him were the remnants of his dinner. The striped cat was sitting beside one of the plates, cleaning its whiskers. It growled at me and slithered back onto the couch beside him.

“Ready for your medicine?” Miriam said to her father.

He smiled, showing uneven, yellowish teeth. His eyes looked feverish.

She went to a low cupboard near the fireplace and rummaged in a drawer while I thanked him for allowing her to give me one of his books. He paid no attention whatever to me, just watched Miriam intently as she came back to the couch. She was holding what looked like a jewellery box and some kind of old-fashioned smoking pipe — a thin tube about two feet long with a tiny bowl on the end.

Now she opened the box and took out a pouch of tobacco and carefully packed the pipe, which had what looked like oriental lettering engraved along its stem. She lit a match, put the pipe to her lips, and puffed on it several times till it was glowing. Her father now lay on his side on the couch, his head on a cushion, staring up at her. She handed the pipe to him and he held it with tremulous fingers and puffed on it.

From the jewellery box, she now took a little medicine bottle full of a black liquid. She tilted the bottle over the bowl and poured a slow, heavy drop of the liquid into it. The smoke immediately thickened and that incense smell became much more noticeable.

He sucked steadily on the pipe for a minute or two, sighing from time to time between puffs. We watched without speaking.

Over a period of about ten minutes, this procedure of filling the pipe was repeated twice more. The feverish look in his eyes began to dim so that now when he looked at Miriam and me, he seemed quite human. Even the cat, curled up beside him, was blinking contentedly.

Miriam at last took the pipe from his loose fingers.

“We’ll leave you now,” she said to him. “Rest well.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. She put the pipe and the box back in the drawer. We gathered together his used dinner things and took them to the kitchen. Once there, she answered my unasked question.

“Opium,” she said. “He got into the habit when he used to trade in the Far East. He has stock enough to last him a lifetime. His hands are too shaky now to deal with delicate things like his pipe, so I have to do it for him.”

I’d read about the perils of opium and was quite shocked. I was going to ask her more about his habit, and whether she ought not to try somehow to cure him of it. But just as I about to speak she put her hand on my arm and looked into my eyes.

“It’s a bit late now for you to be crossing the moors,” she said. “I’d really like it if you just stayed here with me tonight.”

My heart leaped.

Miriam then switched off the kitchen and living-room lights, and arm in arm we climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

EVENTUALLY, we fell asleep, despite the intermittent ringing of the ship’s bell next door.

But with the three a.m. ringing, I woke because of another noise coming from outside the house. Miriam was fast asleep, so I carefully disentangled myself from her and slipped out of bed onto the bare wooden floor. I tiptoed to the window and looked down into the garden. It was a moonlit night so I could see very clearly.

Her father, wrapped in a blanket, was sitting there on a garden bench peering up at the night sky through the brass telescope. I’d only been looking at him for a moment when he suddenly took the telescope away from his eye and stared right up at me before I could duck out of sight. He waved his thin hand and smiled. His face was hideous in the moonlight.

I quickly retreated to the bed. Miriam noticed and snuggled against me.

“You’re cold,” she said.

“I heard a noise outside,” I said. “It was your father out watching the stars. He saw me — he knows I’m here with you.”

“Of course he does. Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Here, let me warm you up.”

IN THE MORNING, I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. Miriam had gone to see to her father — apparently he’d slept in the library after his star-spotting was done. She came back after a while with the smell of incense on her clothing.

“He needed his medicine,” she said. “That’ll keep him happy for a few hours. I’m going upstairs to get you that book I mentioned.”

She climbed the stairs and was back in a moment with a small volume.

“Here you are.” She handed it to me.

The covers were warped and many of the pages were crinkled and salt-stained — I could smell the ocean in them. The book was called An Upland Tale.

“It’s one of those traditional stories from the Uplands,” she said. “Some of the pages are lost, but the main section’s there and it’s still quite legible for the most part, considering what it’s been through. I wonder what you’ll think of it.”

I thanked her for it and assured her I’d tell her next time we met.

She sipped her coffee, watching me.

“So, now you know all about my father and his problem.

Some families seem to be cursed with just one awful thing after another — I fear mine may be one of them. You say you love me, but how much more could you put up with? Wouldn’t there be a limit to your tolerance?”

We were sitting on chairs opposite each other at the kitchen table. From the way the light came in through the window, I could see miniature reflections of myself in her eyes, as though I was already a part of her. So I assured her I didn’t care about her father’s addiction, or anything else about her family, for that matter. I loved her and I always would. I thought, surely this time she’ll say she loves me too.

But she didn’t.

So I surprised myself and went even further. I asked her to marry me. I liked the sound of that so much, I asked her again.

If I’d surprised myself, Miriam certainly didn’t look surprised. Her eyes became almost as enigmatic as that first time I’d seen them upside down on the rock. I begged her for an answer.

“Let’s not talk about it any more for now,” she said. “I have a lot to think about.” Soon after that, rain began to patter against the window and it was time for me to leave. Miriam put the book she’d chosen in a plastic bag.

“It’s already had more than its fair share of water,” she said.

I WAS CONSCIOUS of the weight of the book in my pocket all the way down to Duncairn. I kept thinking of that weird old man, her father — I now understood Miriam’s fascination with those “bizarre,” “out-of-the-ordinary” events that took place in the Uplands. She herself was right at the centre of one of them.

I also kept replaying, as I walked, the last moments of our conversation. She knew I loved her and she hadn’t laughed outright at my marriage proposal — that was the main thing. I had great hopes. My heart was light even as the rain came down heavier and heavier.

7

For the remainder of that day the rain didn’t let up and the wind strengthened. From my window I could see the faces of the three soldiers on the war memorial being battered without mercy. My mind should have been fully occupied, going over yet again the lessons in the book Sam Mackay had given me. Despite his words of comfort, I couldn’t help being anxious about the school term about to begin.

Yet at the same time I was thinking about how I’d blurted out that proposal of marriage to Miriam. Not that I was having second thoughts. It was just that I’d begun to consider realistically what marriage to her might mean. She was wonderful, but we’d have to live in that isolated house with her hideous, addicted father. Wasn’t it possible that in time I’d become bitter and resentful about restricting myself to such a life in a small town like Duncairn — even with Miriam — just when the whole, exotic world I used to dream of was now available?

But I put such thoughts out of my mind. I was in love— that was all that counted! Meeting Miriam Galt was like a great romantic story from an old book. In the next chapter she’d admit she loved me and would marry me and we’d be happy forever.

ONE TASK I settled down to that evening was the reading of the book Miriam had chosen for me from her father’s library.

The book was in very poor condition, as I’d noticed when she gave it to me. Embossed on the inside cover were the words “Property of the SS Derevaun.” I pictured some poor ship of that name, shattered perhaps on a coral reef, the books from its library drifting like butterflies amongst the eddies.

The title page was certainly legible, the typeface old- fashioned and big:

There were no dates or any other information. I flicked through the pages and found they were in reasonably good condition, but not a single one of the ten sonnets had survived their ordeal under water. The pages where they had appeared were blank, the words all dissolved into the ocean where the ship had met its fate.

I began reading:

Gentle Reader:

This is an old story of which there are many versions. I record here that which has been known to me since childhood.

It was mid-winter in an Uplands village which was not much more than a group of hovels. Johnny Reed lived in one of these hovels with his wife. They were very poor and not very happy, and lived mainly on kale soup. They had six children.

On one of these winter mornings, Johnny awoke and told his wife of a strange dream:

“I saw myself walking through the hills, along the path to the old Roman bridge. It was snowing, and I was carrying my long-handled shovel in my right hand. When I got near the bridge, I saw a withered alder bush in the bog fifty yards off the path. I felt compelled to go there and I began to dig. My shovel struck something with a clang. It was a big iron cauldron. I lifted it out of the hole and opened it. It was full of gold coins.”

The dream was so lifelike, Johnny was sure he knew the very spot where it happened. He told his wife he would go there right now and have a look, just out of curiosity.

So he took his long-handled shovel with him and headed up into the moors.

The day was cold with a winter fog thick enough to stop him from seeing more than fifty yards around him. Still, when he got to the path to the old Roman bridge, he could see the outline of the alder bush in the middle of a dangerous bog — just as in the dream. He stepped off the path and onto the soft earth of the bog, which was bare of snow.

He had to go carefully, testing one step at a time, so it took him a while to reach a little island of solid ground where the alder bush grew. It had almost no leaves now except for a few wilted survivors clinging on, as though it were summer still.

Johnny Reed got to work. He dug and dug, and after a while his shovel struck something with a clang. He kept digging and eventually uncovered the object. It was entangled in the roots of the alder, so it must have been there a long time. With his hands he brushed more dirt away from its top and saw that it was a cauldron with a lid on it. He tried to lift the lid off by its arched handle, but it seemed to be stuck and he did not have enough space to grasp it. So with his long-handled shovel he levered the entire cauldron out of the hole, noting how heavy it was.

He looked the cauldron over and saw that it was made of dark red cast iron with an intricate pattern around the top rim. Again he tried to lift off the lid, without success. He thought it might be screwed on to the top of the cauldron, so he thrust the handle of his shovel through the arch of the cauldron’s handle and turned it with all his strength. At last, the lid began very slowly to turn and eventually

popped off, causing Johnny to fall backwards. He got back up and looked into the cauldron. Nothing. There was nothing in it.

Johnny told his wife when he got back to the hovel, “See, not a gold coin, not any gold of any kind.” For he had brought the cauldron down from the moors so that she could see for herself. All she could see was the smooth dark red inside of a dark red cauldron the size of an ordinary kale pot.

So Johnny and his wife returned to living their normal lives. Time passed and their six children all grew up and married and went to live in other nearby hovels.

Twenty dull years went by, then something out of the ordinary happened again to Johnny Reed.

On a winter’s morning, there was a loud knock at the hovel door. Johnny opened it to behold a man in a bearskin riding coat and a tricorn hat, his horse haltered a few yards away. The man apologized for the intrusion. He was a traveller from England, a scholar studying the local customs and traditions of the Uplands. He had been trying to find the main road and had wandered astray in the bad weather. He was now hungry and cold.

Johnny’s wife invited him in and sat him down on a three-legged stool at the table near the hearth. She ladled him a bowl of kale soup out of the dark red cauldron on the peat fire.

The soup warmed the traveller’s insides and soon he was ready to continue his journey. But before he left, he asked if he might examine the cauldron containing the soup. In all his travels, he had never beheld a dark red cauldron of this type. Johnny Reed’s wife, with some old dish

rags, moved the hot cauldron off the peat fire and onto the flagstone border of the hearth. Neither she nor Johnny told the traveller about the dream that had led to its discovery.

The traveller perched a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and looked the cauldron over. He was especially interested in a pattern he discovered around the outer rim, sooty from decades of peat smoke. He rubbed it clean with his kerchief.

“Well, well,” he said. “A Latin inscription. It’s very possible your cauldron is from the period when Romans were here. Let me see:

Sub hoc alia jacet

How very curious. It means

Beneath this, lies another

.”

The English traveller congratulated Johnny Reed and his wife on their unique cauldron. It might not be worth much in terms of money, but it was an archaeological treasure and he hoped they’d look after it. He thanked them for the food and warmth, got on his horse, and headed for the main road as they’d directed him.

As soon as he’d gone, Johnny took his shovel and set off once more to the place where he’d found the cauldron twenty years before. He was in a state of excitement as he picked his way across the dangerous bog to where the skeletal alder bush still grew. He began digging again deeper, much deeper than before.

CLANG!!

Sure enough, Johnny uncovered another dark red cauldron, and levered it to the surface. He inserted the handle of his long-handled shovel into the arch of the lid. The lid turned slowly, metal screeching on metal. With the final twist, Johnny again fell backwards. He rose to his feet and stared into the cauldron.

Gentle Reader:

As of this point of the story, a variety of versions exist. Out of an obligation to truth, I shall include them here for your delectation.

In the version I heard in my childhood, the second cauldron did contain a fortune in ancient gold. But when Johnny, exulting, tried to carry it back to dry land, his foot slipped. His coat snared in the handle of the cauldron and it pulled him down into the bog, where he slowly sank and choked to death. Many springtimes later, the bog heaved up his remains with his arms still encircling the cauldron, which was now quite empty.

In another version, when Johnny unearthed the second cauldron, he found nothing in it, just as before. But although he could neither read nor write, he recognized the Latin words on its brim:

Sub hoc alia jacet

So he dug again and he found another cauldron, again empty, with the same inscription. He dug once more and found another, also empty, with that inscription. He dug up another, then another. He is still digging, still finding cauldrons, all of them empty, all of them inscribed.

In another version, a very different outcome is presented. Johnny did indeed, after the English traveller left, go back up to the bog; he found the second cauldron with nothing in it. But that very night, after coming home disappointed, he dreamt once more about a cauldron. This time, however, it was not buried by the alder bush in the bog. Instead, it was buried deep below the kale patch directly outside his hovel.

When he awoke, he considered his dream for a long time and discussed it with his wife. They decided to do nothing. A dream was, after all, only a dream, and they

had no desire to ruin the little patch of ground where their kale, the food that sustained them, grew to ripeness each summer.

But if only Johnny Reed had taken his long-handled shovel and begun digging in that kale patch, he would certainly have heard that CLANG again. His shovel would have struck yet another dark red cauldron, and this one would have been full of gold. With all that, Johnny Reed would have built a palace for his wife and himself, and for his children and his children’s children. He would have planted tall forests again all through the Uplands, and filled them with birds of paradise and orangutans and other animals and birds from around the world. He would have hired a team of wise men to look for the secret of universal happiness. They would not have disappointed him. He would have instructed them to publish their findings for the benefit of all mankind. Everyone in the world would have lived and loved happily ever after.

When I’d finished reading the story, I wondered why Miriam had chosen it for me. It was certainly ingenious enough, but those variant endings were quite pessimistic: whether a man follows his dream or doesn’t, the outcome isn’t going to be all that great. For me, the additional thought that this little book had last been opened by some poor sailor whose bones were now scattered at the bottom of the sea wasn’t very cheering either.

All in all, aside from entertainment value, An Upland Tale seemed just as depressing in its way as the story of the Tollgate’s Cameron Ross, though definitely without the element of terror. When I saw Miriam tomorrow, we’d have a good discussion about it.

It was now past midnight and the rain was still lashing down. In the square the three soldiers, glistening in the street lights, stared off into the darkness of the hills. Their image remained in my head when I got into bed and switched off the lamp. I tossed and turned for a while and tried to think about Miriam and our future happiness. But tiny waves of uncertainty and even dread occasionally swept over me and it was a long time before I fell asleep.

8

I slept late, dreaming as usual about the Tollgate, with my parents alive and well. I was grief-stricken on awakening into a reality without them till I remembered Miriam and felt good again. I’d barely got out of bed and into my clothes when there was a knock at the door.

“Who’s there?” I called, buttoning my shirt.

“It’s me. I hope I’m not bothering you.” The high, reedy voice was unmistakable. I opened the door to Sam Mackay, massive and a little out of breath from climbing the stairs. He didn’t waste words.

“I just got back to Duncairn yesterday,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you. Let’s go over to Mackenzie’s for coffee.”

WE WALKED ACROSS the square to Mackenzie’s Café. The three soldiers were dry, for now. But it was another gloomy day and the sky was laden with dark clouds getting ready to disgorge themselves. The wind was chilly for the time of year.

Mackenzie’s dozen tables were mostly unoccupied. I usually sat at a small table by the window where I could look out onto the square, but Sam’s bulk would never have fitted there, so we took a roomier table near the back.

He’d been strangely quiet on our walk over, so I was feeling nervous and talked too much. Between sips of coffee, I told him I couldn’t believe the months had passed so quickly. I assured him that I’d gone over the grammar and composition book a few times and knew its contents quite well now. I assumed this was the kind of thing he wanted to talk to me about.

Sam nodded his head, letting me talk, his coffee cup like a miniature in his huge hand.

“That’s good,” he said.

Since I’d no one else to tell, I also decided to confide in him that something wonderful had happened to me in Duncairn while he was off on his Board of Education business. I’d met a girl and fallen in love with her. In fact, I’d asked her to marry me. She hadn’t said yes, yet, but I knew she would.

Sam wasn’t reacting, so I just kept on talking. I told him her name was Miriam Galt and that he probably knew her. She lived up at Duncairn Manor with her father, a strange old man.

Something in the way Sam was looking at me with those big green eyes was already beginning to worry me. But I kept babbling on about love and how it had transformed me. Without saying it outright, I implied that the love between Miriam and me was the rarest of things and how awful it must be for others not to have such a love as ours — a special, magical kind of love that would last forever.

In the midst of this torrent, Sam placed his toy cup down carefully on its toy saucer.

“You can’t marry Miriam Galt,” he said. “You can’t marry her because she’s my fiancée. Yesterday when I came home, I went up to the manor to see her and we finalized the date of our wedding. That’s really why I’m here. She made me promise to come and tell you about it this morning.”

9

I left him in Mackenzie’s Café and headed straight for the manor. I needed to talk to Miriam, to hear her contradict this absurdity.

As I half-ran across the moors, rain began pouring down so that by the time I reached the manor, I was soaked through. I knocked at the door and waited. No answer. I knocked again, louder. No answer. I pounded on the door and shouted, “Miriam! Miriam!” over and over. No answer. I stood back and roared her name at the house itself.

The curtains of the window just above the door were slowly drawn apart by Miriam Galt. With her arms still extended she stared down at me for a time, her face expressionless. Then she drew the curtains together again, as though at the end of a performance.

I stood for a while in a state of shock. I felt like one of those ancient warriors I’d read about, pierced by a spear and knowing that if he pulls it out, he’ll die. Then I began to make my way back down through the lashing rain towards Duncairn, which now seemed to me the most inhospitable of places. A few hours ago, I’d almost convinced myself I was as happy as a man could ever be. Now I was sure I’d never be happy again.

AT DAWN THE next morning, after a dismal night, I furtively slipped down the stairs into the street. A thick fog that made the world insubstantial suited my mood. I hurried to Duncairn Station with my meagre possessions stuffed in a canvas bag. I bought a ticket for the first train to arrive and found an empty compartment aboard. As it steamed away from the station, headed south, I could see almost nothing of Duncairn through the window for the swirling fog.

Thus, broken-hearted, I left Miriam Galt and Scotland behind me forever.