dry flies. Names like Tup’s Indispensable, Little Claret, Wickman’s Fancy, Black Pennell and Cardinal floated like dust motes on the hot, somnolent air. “Sound like racehorses,” said Jeremy sleepily.
Alice felt her eyes beginning to close. The major was asleep, twitching in his armchair like an old dog; the Roths were leaning together, joined by fatigue into a fireside picture of a happily married couple. Lady Jane had her eyes half closed, like a basking lizard, and Daphne Gore was painting her nails vermillion.
Suddenly Alice jerked her eyes open. There was a feeling of fear in the room, fear mixed with malice.
While John droned on, Heather had stopped her demonstration to flip through the post. She was sitting very still, holding an airmail letter in her plump hands. She raised her eyes and looked at Lady Jane. Lady Jane raised her heavy lids and smiled. It was not a nice smile.
Heather’s face had gone putty-coloured. She put a hand on her husband’s sleeve and passed him the letter. He glanced at it and then began to read it closely, his lips folded into a grim line.
“Class dismissed,” he said at last, putting down the letter and assuming a rather ghastly air of levity.
“What was all that about?” murmured Jeremy to Alice. “And why do I feel it has something to do with Lady Jane?”
“Care for a drink before dinner, Jeremy?” came Daphne’s cool voice.
“Are you paying?” asked Jeremy, his face crinkling up in a smile.
“What’s this? Men’s lib?” Daphne slid her arm into his and they left the lounge together. Alice stood stock still, biting her lip.
“I told you you were wasting your time.” Lady Jane’s large bulk hove up on Alice’s port side.
Fury like bile nearly choked Alice. “You are a horrible, unpleasant woman,” she grated.
This seemed to increase Lady Jane’s good humour. “Now, now,” she purred. “Little girls in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. And I do trust our stone-throwing days are over.”
Alice gazed at her in terror. She
She turned and ran and did not stop running until she reached her room. She threw herself face down on the bed and cried and cried until she could cry no more. And then she became conscious of all that barbaric wilderness of Highland moor and mountain outside. Accidents happened. Anything could happen. Alice pictured Lady Jane’s heavy body plummeting down into a salmon pool, her fat face lifeless, turned upwards in the brown, peaty water. Abruptly, she fell asleep.
When she awoke, she thought it was still early because of the daylight outside, forgetting about the long light of a northern Scottish summer.
Then she saw it was ten o’clock. With a gasp, she hurtled from the bed and washed and changed. But when she went down to the dining room, it was to find that dinner was over and she had to put up with sandwiches served in the bar. Everyone seemed to have gone to bed. The barman informed her that the fat FEB had gone out walking and perhaps the other was with her – that Lady Whatsername. Alice asked curiously what a FEB was but the bartender said hurriedly he ‘shouldnae hae said that’ and polished glasses furiously.
¦
Charlie Baxter threw leaves into the river Anstey from the humpbacked bridge and watched them being churned into the boiling water and then tossed up again on their turbulent road to the sea. His aunt, Mrs Pargeter, thought he was safely in bed, but he had put on his clothes and climbed out of the window. His mother had written to say she would be arriving at the end of the week. Charlie looked forward to her visit and dreaded it at the same time. He still could not quite believe he would never see his father again. Mother had won custody of him in a violent divorce case and talked endlessly about defying the law and keeping Charlie away from his father for life. Charlie felt miserably that it was somehow all his fault; that if he had been a better child then his parents might have stayed together. He turned from the bridge and headed towards the hotel.
The sky and sea were pale grey, setting off the black twisted shapes of the mountains crouched behind the village.
Charlie walked along the harbour, watching the men getting ready for their night’s fishing. He was debating asking one of them if he could go along and was just rejecting the idea as hopeless – for surely they would demand permission from his aunt – when a soft voice said behind him, “Isn’t it time you were in bed, young man?”
Charlie glanced up. The tall figure of Constable Macbeth loomed up in the dusk. “I was just going home,” muttered Charlie.
“Well, I’ll just take a bit of a walk with you. It’s a grand night.”
“As a matter of fact, my aunt doesn’t know I’m out,” said Charlie.
“Then we would not want to be upsetting Mrs Pargeter,” said Hamish equably. “But we’ll take a wee dauner along the front.”
As Hamish Macbeth was turning away, a voice sounded from an open window of the hotel, “Throw the damn thing away. It’s like poison.” Mrs Cartwright, thought Charlie. Then came John’s Cartwright’s voice, “Oh, very well. But you’re worrying overmuch. I’ll throw this in the loch and then we can maybe get a night’s sleep.”
A crumpled piece of blue paper sailed past Charlie’s head and landed on the oily stones of the beach. The tide was out.
Charlie picked it up. It was a crumpled airmail. “You shouldn’t look at other people’s correspondence,” said Hamish Macbeth severely, “even though they may have chucked it away.”
“I wasn’t going to read it. It’s got a lovely stamp. Austrian.”
They passed the Roths, who were walking some distance apart. Marvin’s face was flushed and Amy’s mouth was turned down at the corners. “Hi!” said Marvin, forcing a smile.
“It’s a grand night,” remarked the policeman. The American couple went on their way, and Charlie hurriedly thrust the airmail into his pocket.
When they reached his aunts house, Charlie said shyly, “Do you mind leaving me here? I know how to get in without waking her.”
Hamish Macbeth nodded, but waited at the garden gate until the boy disappeared around the side of the house.
Then he made his way home to his own house where his dog, Towser, gave him a slavering welcome. Hamish absentmindedly stroked the animal’s rough coat. There was something about this particular fishing class that was making him uneasy.
? Death of a Gossip ?
Day Three
—The Psalms
Alice had reasoned herself into an optimistic frame of mind, although anxiety had first roused her at six in the morning. She had dressed and had taken herself out on a walk up the hill behind the hotel.
A light, gauzy mist lay on everything, pearling the long grass and wild thyme, lying on the rippling silk of the loch, and drifting around the gnarled trunks of old twisted pines, last remnants of the Caledonian forest. Harebells shivered as Alice moved slowly through the grass, and a squirrel looked at her curiously before darting up a tree.
Alice sat on a rock and talked severely to herself. The youthful peccadillo that had landed her briefly in the juvenile court was something buried in the mists of time. Why, her mother’s neighbours in Liverpool hardly remembered it! It was certainly something that Lady Jane could not know about. It had appeared in the local paper, circulation eight thousand, in a little paragraph at the bottom of page two. At the time, it had seemed as if the eyes and the ears of the world’s press had been on her when she had read that little paragraph. But now she was older and wiser and knew that she had been of no interest whatsoever to the media. That was the hell of being so hypersensitive. You began to think people meant all sorts of things because of their lightest remarks. Who was Lady Jane anyway? Just some silly, bitchy, discontented housewife. Jeremy had said she had been married to Lord John Winters, a choleric backbencher in Wilson’s government, who had died of a heart attack only two months after he
