Coronach, p.67
Coronach, page 67
I fell into a bottomless pit of sleep, still clothed, lying across the bed.
I woke at some unknown hour. The moon had passed its zenith, and Malcolm, strangely and fiercely elated, had come home.
He had touched nothing, drunk nothing: his intoxication was his triumph over the bitch, Glen Sian. A still night now, although bitterly cold; the cold was nothing, the work was nothing; he would cut the seventy acres himself, and leave the rest for the devil to glean.
He came to me as he had always come, darkness within darkness, a faceless lover, powerfully aroused, drawing me down into darkness. I was a prisoner of the darkness above me, darkness moved within me, spilling the hot flood of his semen into the mouth of my womb, possessing me so deeply that orgasm was neither of body nor spirit, and surpassed pleasure, and became death, an infinitesimal death of the senses. Again and again, and yet again, now drifting, giving me secret, intense joy, loving me as he had loved me in virginity, with exquisite fingers, now taking from me the pleasure he had taught me, which he adored and of which he was ashamed, spilling the sweet salt gift, the life gift, against my opened lips. And then he who had imprisoned was my prisoner, and I arched above him like a goddess, and wreathed him in the darkness of my hair, and watched orgasm transform his face.
There were no hours, there were no secrets. I was goddess and whore and lover, passionately beloved; he was darkness incarnate, god and devil who possessed me, and his possession of me was ecstasy.
We lost our souls in one another, and to a sleep as profound as death. And in that night and in that sleep, the devil, challenged, burned the oatfields not with fire but with ice, and had his harvest.
And in that night, and of that tumultuous darkness, I conceived Malcolm’s child.
XIV
He blamed me for what had happened, as I would blame him, as though, had we not held one another in sexual thrall for that fragment of time, our lives would have remained unaltered.
I was not certain of my pregnancy until the middle of December, and by then it was impossible to approach him. Impossible to know if he suspected: perhaps. Under normal circumstances he who was so sensitive to the rhythms of my body would have marked any aberration, but these were not normal circumstances. His powerful sexuality was extinguished, and his attention concentrated upon Glen Sian’s catastrophic harvest; and the monthly subterfuge became a pattern of deception, hiding from him first my desperation when the flow failed to appear, and then the malaise and fatigue that afflicted me within weeks of conception.
No child could have been conceived at a less auspicious moment, by a woman with fewer maternal instincts, of a man whose experience of paternity was more bitter or more grudging. Malcolm’s illegitimate offspring had been as unwelcome as himself, and he had never regarded the prospect of issue of our marriage with other than resignation and resentment. I believed that the memory of his childhood had so scarred him that he thought himself incapable of paternal love. What had caused my own revulsion was less certain: perhaps the fear of entrapment which had always haunted me, the loss of myself to this unwanted child, the fear of the loss of Malcolm. In the darkness of those weeks, in the death of the year, with Glen Sian feeding on his life’s blood, we seemed to live increasingly apart: we slept together but seldom touched, and the bonds between us seemed tenuous at best. He blamed me for the loss of the harvest, as though the land had betrayed him in the space of a night’s inattention: if he had been aware of my condition he would have considered that a more insidious betrayal. Alone, I constituted a liability, yet one more responsibility in a multitude of crushing responsibilities. With child, I was the hostage to fortune he had always feared to give.
There was no immediate shortage of food. What grain could be saved was dried over kilns, and threshed and winnowed and ground, although the resulting meal was almost unpalatable. The barley was inedible, unfit even for brewing, the bere similarly affected. We had root vegetables, and potatoes stored in straw-lined pits across the estate, and cattle, the Highland economy’s other staple, not for consumption but sale. At the Martinmas tryst the price of cattle had risen as the markets scented war; it would not fall for fifteen years. The sale yielded a little cash, and enabled Malcolm to appease the estate’s more persistent creditors, but grain was unavailable for purchase. Crop failure was general throughout the Highlands.
After Martinmas heavy snowfalls closed the passes, sealing Glen Sian into the tomb of winter. There was no mail, nor news, nor offer of help: beyond the Highlands, the world was ignorant or indifferent. Years of scarcity were not uncommon here and occured as frequently as one in three. The scale of this disaster would remain unknown, at least until the spring.
I refused to consider the possibility that I would not live until the spring.
The atmosphere in the house was funereal. When Malcolm was at home, which was seldom, he was not restless but preternaturally still, as though driven deep within himself, not in the grip of melancholia but in a raging silence, his mind hurling itself against inalienable facts, insoluable problems. He believed himself responsible for what had befallen Glen Sian: he had foreseen it and lacked the will to impose his foresight upon James and others; he believed, irrationally, as he had of Ewen’s death, that he alone could have prevented it. He did not ask for counsel now, or reassurance; nor could he allow me the comfort of naïveté when I told him I found his behaviour, the monosyllabic curtness, the complete asexuality intolerable, and that for the sake of my sanity some normal relations must resume.
He had been sitting in his study for two or three hours. There were no candles; there was no heat. He had not moved except to refill the cut glass tumbler on the secretaire with whisky, which he drank increasingly. It had no effect on him.
When I had finished what I realized was an hysterical diatribe, I wept, out of weakness and self-pity. He had always had a singular capacity for ignoring tears.
He said, “And where the hell have you been all these weeks, with your mind closed against me like an oyster? Christ, in all the world I have only one living soul to talk to, and where are you? Where are you, Margaret?”
“I cannot bear the coldness of your manner.”
He dragged back the heavy drapery and light strained through the frost on the glass. My garden was a dead place beyond it, a wasteland of drifting snow, buried, frozen roots.
“There will come a time when you and I will be grateful for that. There will come a time when men and women will beg at your door, and steal from you, and try to strip your garden, or take the oats from your horse’s mouth. There may come a time when your horse or mine will die, or I will put them down. There may come a time when your father will fall ill, or your aunt, or yourself, or me— and God help us both if that day comes, because I would give you the very blood from my veins. So don’t tell me what you find intolerable. Your life has been a dream, Margaret. Christ, we must have all been dreaming.”
I tried to reach him, comfort him, insist upon my own reality, and strengthen my claim upon him when every hour of daylight seemed only for Glen Sian. Do you not think I understand you? Do you not think me capable of understanding?
And always, always the rejection, the icy withdrawal, or an unexpected ferocity which had become his only expression of the fears that haunted him.
“Jesus Christ, how many times do I have to say this? I have nothing to give these people. Do you understand?”
“I have money! Take it, for God’s sake―”
“And what would your money buy, or mine for that matter? Nothing, Margaret, nothing. There is nothing to buy.”
“How shall we live, then?”
“By my wits. And the grace of God, if you want to believe in it.”
I was losing him... in body and spirit, he was turning away from me.
“Malcolm, I cannot bear this without your help.”
“I have no help to give to anybody. I cannot even help myself.”
“You must help me. I have no courage... I remember the last time. I was ill. I was... so afraid. Malcolm— I am so afraid now.”
He said, with surprising gentleness, “What are you afraid of, Margaret?”
Of dying, of bearing your child... the summer of my life with you, such evanescent sweetness, is descending into hell.
“I have not the courage to watch my life— our life— falling away from us. We had so little time to be happy. So little time....”
He said, “Life is the instrument by which we are hurt, and our lives are not our own. We are pawns of circumstance. You knew that when you married me. You knew there was no possibility of happiness.”
Is it my fault? Will you never love me again? Do you not love me now?
In the last week of 1771 I drank this bitter cup down to the lees. My pregnancy was confirmed by a visit to Glen Mor and consultation with my aunt: my father was out in the parish and knew nothing of the ensuing conversation. I was asked if the child was wanted, and if Malcolm knew. I told her I could not lay this burden upon him at so inopportune a time; and although I was aware that there was no love lost between Malcolm and my elders Deirdre spoke of him with an unprecedented compassion, as though she knew the nature of our days and nights and the strangers we had become to one another.
Then she asked if I were fully cognizant of the dangers of abortion. This was the darkest territory of my mind, into which we did not venture further. My immortal soul was not a subject for her judgment, nor accountable to Malcolm, who had never considered himself morally accountable to me. But my life and my sanity seemed a frail thread, and death was too nearly perceptible in the future to invoke it now.
Conception and birth and maternity remained incomprehensible. I did not believe in the reality of the child, or the transmogrification of myself into the mother of a child. I never believed in its future, or my own in connection with it: I never sought to divine its sex or called it by any name. It remained unloved and unacknowledged by me, a subject of willful blindness, so perhaps I condemned it before birth to nonexistence, nonentity.
And with it all things I cherished, all love and all hope of love, passion and all hope of passion, safety and the hope of safety, were lost. It seemed that the very essence of myself as Margaret was falling into the void.
On Thursday January second, 1772, the moon was rising over snow, throwing a naked tracery of branches across the trodden courtyard; moonlight stained the fantastical patterns on casements sealed with ice. It might have been midnight: it was five in the afternoon, and the cold was so intense that flesh exposed to it was frost-bitten within minutes. The temperature had fallen below zero on the last night of the old year, and remained there as if the very mercury had frozen in the bore.
A single candle burned in the estate office. The room was deeply cold, and the ink had solidified in the standish. He sat smoking, drifting in a current of thought so removed from the present that he might have been sleeping: he who was always upright hunched like a great bird of prey in the chair, and the coldness of its wood could be felt through the doeskin of his breeches. Every day without some catastrophe, without the familiar, shattering cold, without news carried of illness or death, every day when there was still enough to eat was a victory, one day less in the year’s imperceptible crawl toward spring. The unnatural orderliness of the table would remain until then, as though the normal business of administration had been suspended: the quill, the ledger, the perennially echoing strongbox had been superseded by these, the knife, the pistols, the sabre, insurance of order in a different dimension, of justice where necessary, and of his own survival. He had never feared death and did not fear it now, but his life was a safeguard for other lives for which he held himself responsible, and murmurs of disaffection had already been heard. The sword alone would be a potent symbol of authority if rumour ignited into riot.
For the moment, there was silence: the killing cold had stifled the voices of dissent. There was no peace but there was no violence either, only the mailed fist of winter tightening upon Glen Sian. Nor was there peace here, within the confines of this room; nor peace nor solace in his bed; nor peace in sleep, now gnawed with nightmare and pierced by shards of memory, senseless and alarming. Nor peace in solitude, in the wasteland of his mind or in the blinding white wasteland of the hills.
He was summoned to the morning room a little after half past five: the sealed square of paper had been pushed under the door. He swore and snuffed the candle and went out, fumbling with the key. The estate office was now kept locked, a precaution against intrusion or mischief.
It appeared, to his incredulous eyes, that he had been invited to a tea party. The silver spirit lamp was hissing on the table: the blue and gold Sèvres service that evoked such poignant memories had been replaced with a set of more modern design, cream-coloured and measled all over with rosebuds. A perfume of tea, disconcertingly like roses, mingled in the damp air with the bitter scent of coffee.
He waited to be acknowledged, fighting the desire to send the whole dainty, insulting arrangement crashing to the floor. Charlotte was wearing the favourite kingfisher-blue gown with its brilliant pattern of chrysanthemums, which could no longer be fastened and had been left open to reveal a voluminous white silk sacque. Her dishevelled hair was insecurely pinned with a pair of tortoiseshell combs. She wore no other ornament.
“Ah, Mr. Scott. I see you are amenable to conversation, if it does not take too much of your time.”
Disarmed, he said rather stiffly, “I hope I find you well, madam.”
“I have never felt better in my life. This business is much exaggerated. Please avail yourself of my fire— the rest of the house is abominably cold.”
He went to it, not warming his hands but replenishing it for her with peat; he was intensely conscious of her eyes on him. Her hand, also swollen and without jewellery, was hovering over the tray.
“Will you take a dish of tea with me?”
“I would prefer coffee. I dislike tea, and never drink it.”
Her brows rose delicately. She selected a miniscule cup, and the coffee smoked as she poured it.
“And do you also dislike sugar?”
“I prefer most things uncandied, including conversation.”
She said, “I see that with you there is no possibility of dissembling. Sit down, Mr. Scott, and let us speak honestly, though the truth may choke us both.”
He sat rigidly opposite, the cup and saucer balanced on his aching knee, very aware of the absence of the sabre: considering it unsuitable for a lady’s presence, he had left it on the marble console in the hall. He focused his eyes and his fluid, ungovernable thoughts, haunted by the room and the perfume of the tea, and the ghosts of the child who was himself and the young man who had been Ewen; the ash-grey of Ewen’s damaged escritoire; the silk upon the walls; the vanished summer, the vanished sun, the vanished innocence. He concentrated his mind on her, above the clamour of ghosts.
“We find ourselves once again in this perilous situation, Mr. Scott.”
“I am glad you have the intelligence to perceive it as such. I had thought that neither you nor your husband, nor any one else, had grasped its gravity.”
“You do me an injustice. My thoughts are of little else.”
“Then I suggest you unburden your mind. The responsibility is mine, not yours, and your husband will not thank you for it.”
“Can anything be done?”
“What may be done will be done. I cannot provide supplements of corn as on the last occasion. The people must make shift with what they have, potatoes and so forth.”
She said, very earnestly, “Mr. Scott, have you lived an entire winter upon potatoes?” and he leaned forward and put the cup of cold coffee gently on the table between them.
“Madam, I have eaten the stubs of tallow candles. I have eaten maggots and putrefying flesh. I have eaten nettles. I did not then have the luxury of potatoes. I pray you do not talk to me of hardship.”
“I pray it does not come to that. I do pray, in all sincerity.”
“I hope your prayers will be answered. It is not my desire that you nor any of you should suffer unnecessary distress. And the people have great resilience. I will do what I can for them.”
She said, “You are very kind, far kinder than you think,” and he uncrossed his long legs in a subtle prelude to departure.
“There is no place for kindness in my business. What famine does not carry off I intend to encourage to emigrate. There is a list of prospective candidates in my office, those I consider suitable for removal. The estate can bear their loss— they are mostly undesirables and persons of no consequence.”
“I once called you an impertinent fellow, Mr. Scott. My opinion has not altered, but I cannot but be appreciative of your genius for administration.”
“I merely consider it sound business practise. Perhaps we may discuss it in the future, with other projects which have fallen temporarily into abeyance.”
She said, as though she had not heard, “I’ve a fancy to have this room rehung in the old colour. D’ ye think our pockets will run to it?” and the dark blue walls seemed to oppress him further. “I have many plans for the future, although sometimes I think they have no hope of fruition.”
He said nothing: a weight of coldness and deadness seemed to lie upon his tongue, a taste of cold earth and bitter coffee, and the easy lying reassurances refused to be spoken. In this seemingly inconsequential conversation he recognized valediction, and angrily, as he had rejected all Ewen’s similar attempts, he rejected it, and refused to answer when she said good-bye.
He turned from me, increasingly remote, confronting whatever darkness dwelled within himself. I lived within my own silence, and if he noticed that I who had attempted to offer him comfort and hope had become withdrawn and pessimistic, he did not comment on it. We lived, two physical shells in occasional proximity, our souls estranged, obsessed with matters of which we did not speak: perhaps we could not speak of them. Where he went was unknown to me; what occupied him was seldom discussed. His stamina remained immense, and immobility infuriated him: he believed that to be visible was vital to the stability of the estate, and when the weather permitted he covered many miles on foot and on horseback, but the situation in Glen Sian had already begun to deteriorate. He did not speak of what he saw either to me or to James, but his sleep was haunted by nightmare, and he became adamant that I eat well, dosing me with bitter infusions against scurvy that induced nausea in his absence, and opening the first dusty bottles of claret, insisting I drink it for my blood. He supplied me with game when it could be found, and for the first time since our marriage he prepared meals for me, coarse, simple food, sometimes savoury, sometimes repulsive, all rendered poisonous by the catharsis of revulsion in me.
