Encounters. Barbara Erskine
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key; a large cold key; the key to sanity.
Her driver had the soft-spoken gentle ways of the west. He made her welcome and gentled her as he would a doe come down from the hills in the snow. She had the great dark eyes of a doe, he thought. And the unnamed terror. Was it life she feared, or herself? She sat beside him, her fingers clutching the purse she needed to pay him and he knew she dreaded the moment she must pay, for the human contact it involved. He told her the names of the mountains and the lochs and he soothed her with softly-aspirated vowels.
Skies as wide as for ever opened now above her head and she felt light and free again. There were no more buildings. The taxi was bumping and swerving away from yesterday and carrying her inexorably with it. There would be no more hospitals now, no more drugs, no more fears. But memories; there were still memories.
‘What you need now is a holiday, Miss Tansley,’ the psychiatrist had said, briskly misunderstanding. ‘Is there somewhere you could go, by the sea perhaps; someone you could go with?’ and he had looked at his watch. She wanted to cling; to stay; to come again. But he had finished with her. Her case was closed.
The sun reflected on a silver loch dazzling her eyes with its beauty. ‘There is Appin,’ she had said. ‘I can go to the cottage in Appin.’
‘Fine, fine. Do that.’ His mind had withdrawn from hers. He was already thinking of the next patient.
So she had done it. Slowly and methodically she had arranged it all. The cottage would be hers for a month with the seas and the lochs and the islands beyond the west where men go when they die and stay for ever young. All of it was hers.
But it had all been almost too difficult. The world was still a menacing place; a place of greys and blacks and angry red. She had had to fight to keep the panic away. And she had thought silently in her bed, her eyes fixed on the cracked crazed ceiling which was no ceiling in the dark, but an infinite chasm, of the silver and the blues of the western shore where she had spent her long happy childhood holidays and she grasped towards the healing and the reality which the salt air must bring to her soul.
‘Will you be all right, miss?’ The taxi driver’s face, beaten red by the wind and sun was crumpled with concern. He waved away the shaking hand which held a painfully calculated ten per cent and picked up her case to carry it to the door.
She proffered the key and he took it and opened it for her. The great stone hearth was unchanged. The rocking chair was still there. But the people were all gone.
She stretched her lips to smile at him and stood when he had gone, a shiver holding her in the centre of the floor. She could hear echoes. Echoes of her voice as a girl, pretty, carefree, happy as only the ignorant can be and of her brother, more raucous his and loud, but with the same intonation. And the Fairburn cousins, their two shouts indistinguishable twin from twin, and the gentle remonstrations of her mother; and her father putting his hands to his ears as he sorted out the lines for the sea trout. And the barks of Romany and Diddakoi, the two Battersea waifs, so long ago buried in the garden beneath the apple tree. She shivered again and felt the tears pricking her eyelids.
‘Cry, my child. The day you can cry you will be on the way to being cured,’ the psychiatrist’s level voice echoed in her head. The tears were there all right, but still they would not fell. As they had not fallen since the car had spun out of reality and into nightmare taking mother, father, brother, lover all from her in one clap of thunder.
Slowly she walked into the bedroom which had once been hers. It was the smallest and it overlooked the island, shimmering in the evening waters. She opened the window and looked out, breathing sweet thyme and lavender from the flower below. The stone was cold and hard to her elbows but she leaned there a long time watching for the luminous highland night which almost never came. Then at last she lay down on the bed, her coat still on, her shoes kicked wearily aside and she slept, not hearing the owls, the jumping fish and the hill noises of the night.
Instinct told her she had to walk each day. Exhaustion brought forgetfulness. It brought sleep and slowly appetite and a suspicion of colour to her sallow cheeks. She would take crumbs to the squirrels and sit for hours beyond the great rock gazing at the sky. She took a sketch book and slowly captured the growing beauty as it fought its way into her consciousness.
Once she saw a small boy looking at her from behind the rocks. When she looked again he had gone and she found herself half-smiling, sensing his peeking eyes. To her he was just another squirrel.
She watched the men with their boats, the tourists with their cameras, the children, shadows of her own past, as they crossed her path, but she stayed silent and withdrawn. In the village store they decided she was some kind of a natural, harmless, lonely, to be watched over with gentle unobtrusive care.
Then came the old man from over the hill. He knocked at the door and greeted her with a grin. ‘How are you, lass? I heard you were here. Would you be the same little Josie Tansley who came in my boat with her dad?’
She looked at him frowning, remembering. Strangers’ faces had gone; only the dead were with her. She grasped for a name: ‘Ruaraidh … Macdonald?’
And he shook her hand the harder. ‘You remember an old man, lass. Tell me. How are your family? Is your father well?’
He alone in all the world did not know, had not heard the thunder clap. ‘They’re all dead, Mr Macdonald.’ She felt her lips speak, as her mind receded from the truth. ‘Killed.’
She turned away blindly, but the old man came on. His arm was round her, his faded blue eyes near hers. She saw his spontaneous tears and suddenly her own came flooding. At last the dam in her heart which had held back all things broke and she knelt, her head on the knee of an old highland man and wept.
He knew about broken hearts. He knew about the loss which is too great to bear. He sat all night, her head in his lap, his eyes fixed on the embers of the fire as they died one by one to white ash. The night came through the open windows almost as bright as day, scented, warm, moonlit. Only owls were abroad. His dog lay on the mat, its ear pricked to the night noises, its eye occasionally opening, watching its master and the girl in her grief.
Then the dawn came; rosy, gentle, feeling with hesitant fingers round the undrawn curtains and she slept at last. He picked her up, laid her on the bed and sat beside her, his lined face sad with the knowledge of generations of death and grief, pondering on the words of comfort he alone must give.
When she opened her eyes at last she lay purged and dreamlike, and she listened to his quiet voice telling the stories of the centuries which console and heal and she smiled at him at last and reached for his hand. The pain had dulled; the scar inside her mind had begun to heal of its own. Sadness there would always be, but he gave her resignation and a little hope that day.
When the squirrels came again she looked round for the little boy and seeing him called out. He came, nervous, chubby, a wicked cheerful child and she ran with him down to the water and watched him throw stones that skidded and bumped on the glittering surface and after a while she tried to do it too. And when her pebbles sank with a plop into the water she laughed.
In the store they noticed the change and were glad for her. People stopped to look at her sketches now and she found she could talk again. The world was no longer hostile, no longer viewed behind a wall of thick black glass, against which she beat with bloodied fists. It was sweet and young and she could breathe again.
Slowly she found she believed once more in the future. She went to the phone box and dialled a friend. Once he had been more. He understood; he bore no grudges; he came to be with her and gently took her hand. He would be the first bastion against loneliness. The first positive step. She accepted too a puppy from Ruaraidh Macdonald and together the four of them, the boy, the girl, her friend and the dog ran on the sands amongst the ribbons of emerald weed.
Each night she cried a little less, each day she laughed a little more. The agony was numbed. Her eyes were learning how to shine again; she was beginning to know hope.
The friend saw that she had fallen to the bottom of a muddy pool wide-eyed and gasping, flailing with arms towards the