Love is blind, p.4
Love Is Blind, page 4
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The dinner passed off relatively well, Brodie thought. Doreen carved a big side of mutton—boiled potatoes and carrots as supplements—served by the Moncur housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Daw. A short grace was said (by Alfie) before the family picked up their knives and forks and ate with hungry enthusiasm. Jugs of water were served as drinks and Brodie, for once, was glad of his huge family—there were ten of them round the table—therefore many conversations took place outwith Malky’s orbit. Doreen and Ernestine flanked him and on the whole managed to confine him to his end of the table. But from time to time Malky would rise to his feet and leave the room for a couple of minutes; or he would wander down the table and affectionately squeeze the shoulders of one or other of his daughters and whisper in her ear; or, if he needed it, he would personally go in search of the salt cellar or water jug and carry it back to his seat. He seemed to like this perambulating way of dining: his mood improved—he seemed mellow, almost paternalistic, Brodie thought, as the meal progressed.
But it all changed with pudding—blancmange with raspberry jam—an offering that prompted Malky to expostulate that “I may be a confirmed bloody fool but I will not eat that shite!” and he strode out of the room, leaving the rest of the family to their dessert. The mood lightened, instantly.
After dinner the women all slipped away to their bedrooms but Brodie, Callum and Alfie decided they might confront Malky in his den if there was the prospect of something to drink. When they wandered into the drawing room the door to the butler’s pantry was open and Malky was inside.
“Anything to drink in this pub?” Callum called out and Malky appeared, jacket off, braces hanging round his rump.
“Is that the donsie loun clerk of a third-rate Peebles notary speaking?” Malky said aggressively, swaying slightly, brandy bottle in hand. Five-fifths drunk, now, Brodie thought.
“We’re away to bed if there’s no drink,” Callum continued, bravely.
Malky grudgingly provided them with small tumblers of brandy and they sat down on armchairs facing him as he sprawled on the Chesterfield.
“Here’s how, Papa,” Brodie said, raising his glass.
“ Sláinte,” Malky replied. “And I’ll have none of your Anglo-Edinburgh, pretentious claptrap in this house.”
“I’m allowed to wish you ‘good health,’ I assume.”
“Weeping God!” he said theatrically. “Weeping God that I should have three such sons.”
Brodie passed round his cigarettes and Malky reached forward to take one.
“And how is Ainsley Channon?” he asked Brodie. “The fornicating bottle-washer.”
“He’s very well,” Brodie said. “He asked me to convey his very best wishes to you.”
“He can shove his best wishes up his narrow arse, I say.”
Callum now had the brandy bottle and was refilling everyone’s glass.
“Ainsley Channon is a good friend to this family,” Callum said, keen to provoke more profanities. “Look what he’s doing for Brodie.”
“He’s an Edinburgh counter-jumper,” Malky said, “who had the good fortune to inherit a family business when his cousin died young. He sits on his bum in George Street and counts the money coming in.”
Brodie covertly signalled Callum to drop the topic but Malky spotted the gesture and turned on him.
“Just because he’s sending you to Paris doesn’t change a thing,” Malky said, coldly. “You black bastard.”
Brodie drained his brandy.
“Goodnight, Father dear.”
He left, not closing the door and not listening to the imprecations following him and climbed the stairs to his bedroom on the top floor. He didn’t feel angry—he felt strange. Why did his father—a complicated man, admittedly—resent him so? He went to the small oak bureau set opposite his bed and opened a drawer and took out the cameo of his mother that he kept there. Moira Moncur, 1842–1884.
She had died in childbirth when he was fourteen years old so at least he had strong fixed memories of her: a wan, loving but harassed figure burdened by her many children and constant pregnancies. From 1861 to her death twenty-three years later, Brodie had recently calculated, she had given birth to fourteen children, five of them stillborn or dead within days of their parturition. He wondered what his father thought about this woman, his wife. Was she just some sort of child-factory, a breed-cow? First came four daughters in five years, then the initial two stillbirths, then his, Brodie’s, arrival in 1870. She was twenty-eight years old. Two other boys followed (Callum and Alfie, with a dead brother between them) before the female cycle resumed again with the appearance of Isabella and Electra, also on either side of a dead infant. The stillborn child that hastened her death was another son, unnamed. Nine children living and she was dead at forty-two years old.
He looked intently at her face in the oval cameo but the dated formalities of the pose, the exposure’s long hold denied any sense of the real person emerging from the portrait. It was a mask, this image, really, not any depiction of a living, breathing human being. What was she like? What if she were alive now? She would have been fifty-two. How would things have been different? It seemed unimaginable: how could she have lived alongside the monstrous, self-obsessed spectacle that was Malky Moncur today? And he thought, not for the first time, that her premature death may have unleashed some devilry in her husband. Though that was too charitable, he corrected himself—Malky Moncur was a dark singularity, unique. He had always known which direction he was heading in: his destination was fixed.
Brodie put the cameo away safely in his trunk, wondering vaguely about his five dead siblings. He wasn’t entirely sure of their sex, he had to admit—they had been boys and girls, some named—a Hector, he recalled; a Marjorie—some just anonymous foetuses, as far as he was concerned. He felt guilt over his ignorance. There must be a parish record somewhere, he supposed. Maybe he should do their tiny memories a modicum of justice by finding out whatever bare facts there were about these lost children. But the prospect suddenly seemed overwhelming, futile, and he slumped on his bed, weary, exhausted by the multiple tensions of coming home. Think of Paris, he told himself—that is the gift that the gods of chance have given you. Paris was waiting.
4
The next morning, Saturday, Brodie—freshly shaved, nails cleaned with his penknife’s point, smoking his first Margarita of the day—walked the mile or so up the Liethen Valley to Dalcastle Hall to meet Lady Dalcastle. He had had a note delivered to her on his arrival and she had suggested by reply that a rendezvous at eleven o’clock in the morning would be ideal. She was “looking forward with anticipation” to seeing him again.
Dalcastle Hall was a strange hybrid of a manor house. Brodie walked through ornamental gates past a neo-Gothic lodge with polygonal chimneys, ridge tiles, gingerbread eave-trim and wheel-windows and then down a potholed drive through an avenue of ancient beech trees towards the hall. The first glimpse through the trees revealed what seemed like an old fortified tower, thick-walled, castellated, with small high asymmetrical windows. It was in bad repair. Moss and small ferns grew from the pointing of the stones and some of the windows were boarded up. But as he approached, the Georgian wing came into view—white stucco, three storeys, symmetrically placed sash windows and, adjoining that, was the extensive stable block and beyond the stables the high grey walls of two gardens, one for a lawn, flowerbeds and glasshouses, the other for fruit and vegetables. Lady Dalcastle lived here alone—alone with her staff, that is. Her husband, Hugo Dalcastle, had died in his thirties (“Of drink and debauchery,” Malky said) and their only child, Murdoch, a captain in the Scots Greys, had perished ten years later of yellow fever in Ashanti in West Africa in 1870 aged twenty-four. In her grief Lady Dalcastle had found solace and company with the minister’s wife, Moira Moncur, and the two of them had become fast if unlikely friends.
Brodie was born in the year Murdoch Dalcastle died and Lady Dalcastle had taken a special interest in him, as if somehow the soul of her dead son had transmuted into the infant Brodie. She singled him out for treats and presents and he was regularly sent to Dalcastle Hall to “play.” When it was discovered that he had perfect pitch and he began to sing in the St. Mungo’s Church choir it was Lady Dalcastle who had paid for further lessons and, as the pure integrity of his voice was recognized, it was she who had come up with the fee for him to be sent to Mrs. Maskelyne’s Academy of Music in Edinburgh when he was nine years old. There was talk of a foreign conservatoire; prospects of a brilliant operatic career beckoned. But when, at the age of thirteen, Brodie’s voice broke it became clear that the incandescent treble had mutated into a mediocre baritone. Brodie switched to the piano but although perfectly competent—he tried hard—he had no special gift. He could have taught the piano but the world was full of moderately talented piano teachers, he swiftly realized. His perfect pitch—his ear—was still there, however. It was an asset that could be cultivated. Lady Dalcastle spoke to her cousin, Ainsley Channon, and Brodie was taken on, after his leaving certificate examinations—he was a bright, intelligent boy—as an apprentice piano tuner at Channon & Co. It was a steady job that quickly became a vocation. He was eighteen, it was 1888.
All these memories clustered around him as he approached the front door of the hall, as familiar as the manse in its way, and with happier associations—he owed Lady Dalcastle almost everything, he acknowledged, including whatever good manners and gentility he possessed. There was a family joke that Brodie was destined to inherit the Dalcastle estate but every time the idea was entertained Malky would mock him, vigorously. “She’s in debt up to her oxters,” he would sneer. Hugo Dalcastle had drunk and gambled away the family fortune. The estate was mortgaged ten times over. “Ask your dunderhead notary-public brother. He knows all about it. You’ll not get a brass farthing, laddie!”
This information made Brodie relieved rather than cast down. He didn’t want to live in the Liethen Valley under an insuperable burden of debt a mile away from his family home and Malky Moncur. What a circle of hell that would be! He liked Lady Dalcastle and would be forever grateful to her that she had provided the means for his escape. The only aspect of her life that troubled him was that she was a constant attendee of his father’s Sunday sermons. She never missed a single one; she thought Malcolm Moncur was inspired and inspiring. Malky in his turn became atypically demure whenever he spoke to her. Brodie found this very amusing and, at the same time, somewhat repulsive.
He knocked on the front door and was admitted by Broderick, Lady Dalcastle’s butler, and led upstairs to the small drawing room. Broderick was an elderly man, he’d been in Dalcastle service for over fifty years and had a slight stammer. He paused on the landing.
“Lady D-D-D-Dalcastle is not well, Mr. Brodie.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“She mustn’t get tired.”
“I understand. I won’t tire her. Ten minutes—just to pay my respects.”
“Ten minutes maximum, Mr. Brodie. She mustn’t be fffffffatigued.”
“Consider it done.”
Broderick led him into the drawing room and left him there. Brodie wandered about, suddenly craving a cigarette. The room was panelled in a very light wood—ash? walnut? —and there were small dark landscapes hanging on the panelling from a picture rail. Two windows looked out over the walled garden. To Brodie’s eye it appeared somewhat neglected. A tree had fallen. The herbaceous borders were full of weeds, willowherb and nettles. There was a whitewashed glasshouse and a couple of tethered sheep grazed on the lawn—it was well cropped.
Brodie heard a polite cough behind him and turned to see that Lady Dalcastle had crept silently into the room. She offered her hand to be kissed. Since Murdoch’s death she had decided to wear only the gayest colours. Today she had on a cerise velvet jacket over a wide plum-coloured skirt. Her grey hair was tied back with a yellow silk scarf. She wore her hair long like a girl’s.
She was pleased to see him, she said, though it had been—what? —two years now, he was a scoundrel for neglecting her.
“But I’ll forgive you, come and sit beside me.”
They sat down together on a small sofa and Broderick brought in a tray of tea. He set the fine china cups and saucers out with such a rattle that Lady Dalcastle dismissed him and poured from the silver teapot herself, chatting away, talking about replacing Broderick but she hadn’t the heart, it would be the death of him, so she had to do more and more herself, C’est la vie.
She was incredibly thin, Brodie saw, thinner than ever, as if her wrists might snap from the weight of the full teapot she lifted. But she was bright and eager, eyes shining, a little lip rouge applied, her scent—of lime-tree flowers, Brodie thought—subtle yet pungent.
The tea was tepid; the shortbread biscuits crumbled under his fingertips like damp sugar.
“Do please smoke if you wish, Brodie. I know you like a cigarette.”
“No thank you, Lady Dalcastle. I’m trying to give up—it’s an expensive habit and I’ve foolishly developed a taste for American tobacco. There’s only one shop in—”
“Have you seen your father’s advertisement?”
“No. What advertisement?”
“In the Scotsman, no less.” She reached for a folded newspaper on the side table and handed it to him. There was a black-framed square advertisement in the bottom right-hand corner. “The Reverend Malcolm Moncur will preach on Sunday at St. Mungo’s Church, Liethen Manor. Transportation available at Peebles railway station. The text is from the Book of Baruch (Apocrypha). Admission free.”
“Callum told me about these advertisements,” Brodie said. “Sometimes they get five hundred in the church, I hear. Folk coming from Edinburgh, Selkirk, Biggar—”
“There are dozens of carriages. Dozens. The streets of the village filled. Charabancs at Peebles station. He’s quite the draw. Oh yes.”
“Well, he always wanted to attract—”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Lady Dalcastle said firmly, in case there was any doubt about her zeal. “It can be quite fascinating—his interpretations of these very obscure bits of the Bible. Very intuitive what he digs out.”
“Alas, I’m going to miss it, I’m afraid. I have to leave very early tomorrow morning.”
She wagged a skinny finger at him.
“You’re not an atheist, are you, Brodie?”
“To be honest…I do have doubts, Lady Dalcastle. I find my father’s faith…a paradox.” Brodie was happy to let her know he might be saved. But he was the son of Malky Moncur, therefore his atheism was devout, implacable.
“Do you know the poetry of Swinburne, Algernon Swinburne?”
“No, I don’t. I know his name but—”
“Very beautiful verse. He is an atheist, I believe.”
“Right. Aye. No. It’s just that—”
“Paris, Brodie, Paris! The city of light. La ville lumineuse. How I envy you!”
“It’s a rare opportunity. I’m excited to be going, I admit.”
“But is it an opportunity? Truly?”
“I believe so, yes,” he said. “I have to help Calder Channon with—”
“Or is it a trap?”
Brodie felt the cigarette craving come upon him again. He drank some of his cold tea.
“How could it be a trap, Lady Dalcastle?”
“Ah, Paris, Paris. She can be a difficult mistress. Hugo—my late husband—spent a lot of time in Paris. Yes, he was often there, towards the end.”
“Really?”
“It was his undoing.”
“I see.”
She wagged her finger at him again.
“Don’t let it be your undoing, Brodie. Promise me.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Have another cup of tea. I’m so enjoying our conversation.”
She showed him to the front door herself, half an hour later, making Brodie swear he would write to her from Paris and she would do the same by return. She squeezed both his hands and looked up at him, saying, “Bless you, dear boy, bless you. Your darling mother would have been so proud. So tall and handsome.”
Then she dug in the small reticule hanging from her belt and gave him a gold sovereign, pressing it into his palm and reminding him, in a whisper, as if it was their secret: “I await all the news from Paris.”
Brodie wandered up the pitted drive away from Dalcastle Hall feeling exhausted, a puzzle of conflicted emotions. The sun was breaking through a sky that had seemed full of lumbering, cumbersome clouds and the June day now appeared set fair. Back at the manse he went into the kitchen and drank three glasses of water.
Mrs. Daw was peeling potatoes, and a scullery maid was stirring a steaming cauldron on the range.
“I hear ye’re off tae Paris, Brodie,” Mrs. Daw said.
“That’s the plan, Mrs. D. I’ve been given a job there.”
“So we’ll ne’er see you back here again, like enough.”
“Of course I’ll be back. Why does everyone assume I’ll be gone forever?”
“Oh no. You willnae be back,” she said confidently. “No, no. You’ll get a taste for that life. I’ve seen it afore.”
“What life?”
“Foreign life. It’s nothing like our life here. Simple, strong, God-fearing.”
“So what’s it like there, Mrs. Daw? In Paris?”
She pointed her knife at him.
“It’s dangerous. It’ll make your head reel!”
“Maybe that’s good. Maybe it’s good to have your head reel from time to time.”
“Not for the likes of you, Brodie Moncur. I know you. If your mother was alive she’d be agreeing with me.”
Brodie assured her he had an important and responsible job to do in a piano shop. There was nothing head-reeling about that. Mrs. Daw shook her head and smiled sadly.
