The kitchen was filled with a clear plain light. When she rinsed the white plates and
set them up on the rack, when she wiped the draining board, she saw how all the subdued colours of the room – the pale wood of the rack and board and table, the red tiled floor, the faded blue of the tea towel hung over the range – were unified by this light, all of a good plain piece, and this pleased her, because so much of the house was dark.
It stood by the church, and the shadow of the tower fell over the garden. Yew, and a great dense fir spread over the churchyard, and the yew was as tall as the tower.
That was the side on which her bedroom lay. All through her life, the clock had chimed, and the wind had moved through the boughs of the fir, and when she was a child she had often been afraid of a winter’s storm at night, and everything blew and creaked and rang, and had cried out for her mother.
‘Here I am.’ Her mother came along the landing in her red woollen dressing gown, with her hair let down and a candle. ‘Here I am.’ She smoothed Morag’s hair and sat down in the chair, and together they listened to the wind and rain as the candle dripped and burned.
‘Fire and sleet and candlelight, and Christ receive my soul,’ said her mother.
‘My grandfather used to say that, when we had a storm at home.’ She kissed her, and said it would soon be morning. Then she went out, and back to her own room, where Father was. It was thirty-four steps away, with not a gleam of light between here and there.
‘Fire and sleet and candlelight,’ said Morag, as the wind blew over the churchyard and her window shook. She held fast to the quilt, and her heart hammered.
The house stood in such a strange position. She knew of no other like it. That was why her parents had come here: that’s what her mother used to say: We have come to a house unlike any other. On the one side there was the church, and the towering trees; on the other, beneath the highest wall, was a great broad grassy path, running all the way past the garden to the village street at one end and a farmer’s field at the other. The field led down to the river, and in summer the cattle sometimes stood in it, cooling down beneath the trees at the end of the day. When Morag was a child, she used to hang on the gate and watch them, after school. Everything down here opened out beneath the sky.
The stone wall which ran by the path was twelve feet high. On the other side lived a childless couple who kept themselves to themselves. So all through her childhood, it had been just she and her parents. Standing in the kitchen now, her whole being concentrated into these momentous hours, she let herself into the past.
‘Morag! Morag!’ Their voices were like church bells, calling from this place and that within the house. ‘Morag!’
‘Here I am!’
There were things to be done which she must do. Even when she was little she had her duties: to help take down the washing from the line, to put it away when her mother had ironed it all. To clean out the rabbit hutch. Oh, what a splendid great fellow he was, that rabbit. He would have been a comfort in a storm at night, but of course he couldn’t come into the house.
‘Please! He might be afraid, out there in the dark.’
‘He’s a good strong rabbit. He’ll be just fine.’
What else did she have to do? Tidy her bedroom, take her father’s cup of tea to him, when he came home from school. She carried the cup and saucer carefully across the hall, never spilling a drop. She set it down on the hat stand, knocked on the door of the study.
‘Come in.’
Her father sounded as if he were miles and miles away. She turned the handle, carried the cup, watched him complete a sentence. Then he looked up. The draught from the hall stirred the flames in the fire, lifted the page on his desk. Carefully, carefully, she set down the cup. He took off his glasses; she let him kiss her. ‘Thank you, Morag.’ The books on his desk were like tombstones, so heavy and old. His beautiful handwriting went on for page after page. The room smelled of wood smoke and ink.
‘Go and have your tea now.’
‘Yes, father.’
She sat at the plain wooden table and ate her sandwich, and her mother sat beside her.
‘What did you do today?’
The noise of the schoolyard faded: the beat of the skipping rope, the shouts of the boys, the jangle of the big brass bell. Now she was home again, an only child. I am an only child, she said to herself, tucking her ankles together, drinking her milk. I live in a house unlike any other.
‘We made a frieze,’ she said. ‘A frieze of Switzerland. We all had to draw Swiss things, and cut them out. I drew an alpine flower called a gentian. Ninian MacRae drew a cow with a bell. Miss MacHardy stuck everything up on the mountainside with glue.’
Her mother smiled. She rolled out pastry for a pie, fluting the edges. Morag watched her. Her hands were always busy, sewing on buttons, basting a seam, addressing envelopes. Everything came from her, everything was plain and calm.
‘When I grow up, I shall be like you,’ said Morag.
The pie went into the oven, and she sat on her mother’s lap and leaned against her. She wound a skein of hair round the top button of her mother’s cardigan, so she would have to be untied.
‘You might be like your father. You might be a scholar.’
Morag did not say, I am a little afraid of my father. She did not dare. He mother held her close. The years of her childhood went by.
When she was ten, her mother fell ill. When she was twelve, she died. When this happened, Morag felt all the darkness of the world heave up from the yawning depths of the earth and take her into it. Then, because she had been brought up with certainty and solidity and endless love, she grew up very fast, and learned to keep house for her father. She learned how to be with him, in his great loneliness and grief. They did the garden together, they ate together in the kitchen, and on Sundays in the dining room, where all the portraits were: grandparents, great-grandparents, great aunts and uncles, all in oil and sepia, all such a long way away in the past, or a long way down over the border. Her father was the last Scot to stay up here: everyone else had gone south. He used to say that everything he needed was in this house: his books, his wife, his daughter. When Morag grew up, she knew she could never leave him.
But now –
Ah, now –
Her mother had died in 1921. The twenty-third of March, 1921. Ever since, when they got the new calendar at Christmas, and hung it on the hook beside the range, Morag had felt the date burned into it, scored into it, printed in darker type than all the other days, waiting for her and her father to get through it. Then they got through it, and she made herself think of other things.
Now it was September 1933, and now she had another thing to think about.
She put up the last white plate in the rack, and watched it catch the light. Then she let all the water gurgle away, and dried her hands. The grandfather clock in the hall struck two; just a second later the clock in the tower rang out. We are ahead of the church in this house, thought Morag, and hoped it was true. And now she had only two hours to wait.
She leaned against the railing on the range and felt its warmth against her back, and pressed her lips together on a smile, feeling happiness and excitement rise within her, stronger than the fear.
It was three o’clock. Her father was in the study. Out here in the garden, through the open window, she could hear him: turning papers, opening drawers in his desk. She was weeding, and raking the first fall of leaves. She put everything into the barrow and wheeled it down to the corner where they’d always had their bonfires. She tipped it all up, felt the weight of it all, and wondered for a moment if she should be doing these things, just now, if perhaps she should be careful. Then she thought: I am strong, and my mother is watching over me, just as she had said to herself all her life.
And she stood at the bottom of the garden, and felt the first wind of autumn blow over everything: the house, her mother’s grave in the churchyard, the garden and the field beyond, where the cattle were; as she had done all her life. She lit the bonfire.
At the back of the house, here on the garden side, was its other distinctive feature: an arbour, pressed up against the wall, leafy and secret, in which you could sit, and watch the garden grow, and hear the approach down the grassy path of anyone who came calling.
Who came calling?
Her heart began to hammer.
When did a friend become a lover? How had someone she had known all her life – watched kicking a ball about with the other boys in the schoolyard, drawing a cow with a bell, greeted after church, waved to as he spun past on his old black bicycle – how did that person all at once seem different? And she had seemed different to him, he’d told her, lifting her hand to his lips. They’d both been down in the village one day, a day like any other, he with his bicycle propped up against the wall, the post office cat asleep on the counter, a couple of magpies making a racket, up on the roof.
‘Two for joy,’ he said, as they waited in the queue, he with a great big parcel he was posting for his mother to her sister in Edinburgh, that was what he said, and she for her father’s stamps and sealing wax. And they were just passing the time of day, as you did, there in the queue with everyone she knew, the magpies going chatchatchatchatchat outside – and then, when she came out, he was just there in the sun with his bicycle, waiting.
Four o’clock. Deep inside the house came the chime of the grandfather clock. Then came the clock in the tower. Tonight they would be ringing the bells, in the weekly practice. She waited. Smoke from the bonfire was rising to the sky. She heard in the quiet the squeak of his brakes as he pulled up, then the steady tick tick as he wheeled the bicycle up the grassy path. He propped it up against the great high wall; he pushed open the gate; he walked up here to the arbour.
He looked like an angel in that old white shirt with the light behind him, so tall as he stood before her. And she thought again: this is love, this is love, as they said to one another over and over again, lying down there in the field by the river, gazing at one another, seen only by the cattle filing slowly past; kissing and doing –
Everything.
He looked down at her; she looked up at him. The air was full of smoke and silence.
‘I have something to tell you,’ she said.
Win a signed copy of Last Fling
Annunciation is taken from Sue Gee’s new collection of short stories Last Fling.
The Dabbler has two copies, signed by Sue, to give away to our Book Club members.
If you have not already joined the Dabbler Book Club, just sign up here (it’s free).
All members will be automatically entered and the draw will take place on Monday 30 May 2011.
