'I
The really ironic thing is, I hadn't been thinking about sex at all. I'd been
thinking it would've been the perfect day to murder your wife, and I'd probably
have got into less trouble if I had. You can get away with murder, if you keep
your head, but stonking great errors of judgement don't get forgiven, ever.
When I got on the road that morning, I'd made the unwelcome
discovery that every single policeman in Aberdeenshire was out clutching a
hand-held speed camera. The place was crawling with them; there were
pulled-over cars in every lay-by. You could only hope they'd rung round the
criminal element and told them to take a day at the seaside. Thank God I'd
decided to go down by train, I thought to myself; if the traffic on the
Edinburgh road was observing the speed limit for the first time in human
history, it must be adding forty minutes to the run, if not more. I'd had a site
meeting in the morning, for which I had been twenty minutes late, and due to
further buggering about from the polis, I caught my train by the skin of my
teeth. I just chucked myself on as the doors were shutting, and fell into the
first seat I saw.
But once I'd caught my breath a bit, I started to notice the woman
sitting opposite. Her legs were crossed, and she was wearing brown velvet
trousers, very tight round the thighs and hips, so that the straining seam
emphasised that emphatic feminine curve from knee to waist. We were
sitting across from each other in the 'disabled' space with no table sticking
out between us, so it was a view well worth looking at if you're a man that
likes hips, which I do, and I admired it for some time before my eye drifted
upwards. She was wearing a suede jacket, expensive; and a linen shirt under
it, just transparent enough to show the bra beneath, an elegant lacy affair of
impressive capacity. Her hands were relaxed, resting loosely on her thighs,
small and plumpish with short fingers; the left one was wearing a wedding
ring, and a hefty diamond. Finally I flicked a glance up at her face. She was
looking straight back at me, so I dropped my eyes at once. Not quite a
beauty, but very attractive. She had dark eyes, wide set, under straightish,
heavy brows, in a broad, fair-skinned face. Chin beginning to go a bit, she
wasn't a girl, but a very confident fortyish and looking good on it, a bit
younger than me, but not much. She had a greedy little red mouth,
unsmiling; she put just the tip of her tongue out as I looked at it, and licked
her lips deliberately.
So much has happened since then that it's hard to be sure I'm
remembering exactly what I felt at that first meeting, but the absolutely key
thing which stuck with me was the intensely feminine quality of her presence.
She was the kind of woman who made herself into a challenge simply by
existing in the same space. I risked another look up, and felt an electric
shock as our gazes clashed. She was the first to look away, but it was for a
long, ostentatious look-up-and-down; and as her eyes travelled slowly over
my body, I have to say, I knew perfectly well I was starting to give her
something to look at. I could see that the reaction was mutual; her nipples
had popped up, and she was nibbling her lower lip. She had unusually small
teeth, square and very white, they looked sharp.
Some time went by. The train pulled into Stonehaven, then out
again. I could feel her looking at me, trying to provoke me, but I was
determined not to get drawn into her wee game. I had plenty to think about,
so I stared out of the window for fifteen minutes working out what I was going
to say to my client; then something drew my attention back to her, willy-nilly.
It was hard to think what it was that had caught me, at first, and then I
realised that she was breathing a little more heavily – with a chest like that,
of course, it was hard to overlook. She was also getting a tiny bit flushed,
eyes and lips soft and shiny. The small, short-fingered hand resting on her
leg tensed, and then suddenly the penny dropped, and I realised what she
was doing. If you were observing really closely, you could see the slight
rhythmic play of her thigh muscles, clenching, holding for a moment,
releasing. I had a girlfriend once who confided to me that if she was on a train
and she was wearing really right trousers, she could bring herself off like that,
just by crossing her legs tightly and sitting forward a bit, due to the vibration.
Diddly-dee, diddlydum, diddly-dee, diddly dum . . . Bitch. Cow. Whore. I
thought. She was doing it on purpose; she'd damn well made sure that I'd
noticed, and she knew I couldn't do likewise without getting myself arrested. I
could've killed her. She was starting to rock fractionally in her seat, her spine
tense; she wasn't far off . . . I couldn't make myself move, or speak; I just
stared at her as if I'd been hypnotised, knowing I was going scarlet, waiting
for it to be over. She was staring through me blankly, seeing nothing at all.
The wet red lips parted, she gave a little sigh. The end, and nobody else had
noticed a thing.
There was an elderly couple sitting across from us: she was
reading Bella, and he was reading the Angling Times and they were sharing a
bag of smoky-bacon crisps. Not a rustle or a twitch suggested that they were
aware of the drama going on across the aisle, but I could sense the animal
heat coming off her in waves. I grabbed my raincoat to hold in front of me,
and fled to the loo to get myself decent. As I'd pretty well expected, I came
just about the moment I'd unzipped, though I stopped long enough to have a
pee, just to be on the safe side.
I washed my hands, and went back to my seat, absolutely furious
with her.
'Well, I think that's us introduced, don't you?' I said icily. 'I'm
David Laurence.'
She smiled, slow and secret. 'I know.' We must have met; though
for the life of me, I couldn't remember where, and I wasn't going to give her
the satisfaction of asking. Fortunately, she couldn't resist telling me. 'My
husband went to one of your maintenance workshops. He was dead
impressed, and he showed me your brochure. My name's Freda
Constantine.'
I couldn't recall the husband, not that it mattered. I'm an architect,
part of a partnership in Inverurie, and several times a year I run weekend
surgeries on how to keep an old house in good nick. Our webdesigner had
talked us into putting out a snazzy brochure with pictures; there was a very
good one of me on a roofing ladder in jeans and a tattersall shirt peering at a
welded steel bracing on an old chimney stack. I'd always assumed it had
been a total waste of money and effort, since we were a highly competent
outfit and custom basically came by word of mouth, but it had just paid off in
the most unexpected way. 'What were you thinking of doing in Edinburgh?' I
asked her.
'Haircut at Charlie Miller's.'
I took my mobile out of my pocket, and tossed it into her lap.
'Cancel it.'
'Why?'
'Because I say so. I've got a meeting with a client. Only, just as
soon as you're finished with the phone, I've been unavoidably detained.
Railtrack's screwed up again, and I'm stuck in Montrose, so sorry, can we
reschedule?'
'What makes you think I'm the sort of girl who obeys orders,
David?'
'I don't. You look like my idea of an awkward bitch, to be frank.
But I think you'll go along, because you owe me, and you want to see what's
going to happen next.'
She picked up the phone and dialled the hairdresser's, and I knew
I'd won. In some corner of my mind, I was crossing my fingers I could still
rise to the occasion, but she moved me so strongly, it was worth risking it. In
the event, I needn't have worried.
Look, you don't need the next bit. We got off the train and
crossed the road to the Old Waverley Hotel, which is just the other side of
Princes Street; passed through a blur of tartan and silk flowers, and went
straight up to an absolutely null little room which I barely saw. I was still livid
with her for what she'd put me through and determined to make her pay, and
she was just as wonderful as I'd expected: avid and greedy, a perfectionist of
pleasure. But she was more than that. I'd never had sex like it. For me, she
was the inescapable woman, the goddess, the other half of my whole self as
a man. It was enough to make you religious.
'You're very good,' she observed quite coldly, somewhere round
four o'clock. I was flat on my back, absolutely drained, and she was sitting
on top of me, her dark brown hair tumbling down round her shoulders. Her
skin was very white, with just a dusting of freckles on the chest and upper
arms like the chocolate on cappuccino, and she had the most wonderful
thighs. Muscled like a horsewoman; you could feel the grip in them, but
softly padded, sleek and smooth. Above the rounded hips, the waist nicked
in sharply, then the ribcage came out again like a bolero. A figure like an
Indian goddess. She was absolutely right to stay pale, I thought, a tan
would've looked common on her, she'd just've looked as if there was too
much top and bottom, though in her own way, she was perfect. 'You're better
than Malc,' she went on. 'Better than anyone I've had, if I'm going to be
honest.'
'You're fabulous.' I meant it, too. There was a sort of wholebody
communion, an instant rapport, which I still felt dazed by. She felt like the
woman I was meant to have. 'I want more, I'm warning you. Lots and lots.' I
shifted slightly, feeling her body sway as she adjusted automatically. 'But tell
me. Do you make a habit of picking up total strangers?'
'I knew who you were,' she pointed out. 'I know people who know
you.'
'Such as?' She was busily answering the wrong question, sure
mark of a practised deceiver, but I was intrigued.
'Sheena Johnstone.'
Ah. Yes. I remembered her well. 'And what did she say about
me?' 'Said you were a grade A, ocean-going shit, of course. What d'you
expect?'
'On which basis you picked me up?'
She shrugged, an impressive manoeuvre in the circumstances
which caused her breasts to lift and shift mysteriously. 'That wasn't all she
said.'
She climbed off me then, and padded to the loo, leaving me
thoughtful. I'd had a bit of fun on the side with the winsome Sheena a year or
so back, which had started very well and ended in tears after she started
getting the idea that I owed her something. It looked as if Foxy Freda had
deduced that I would do nicely for her own purposes, which seemed on the
whole like good news. I heard the flush, then she reappeared, standing
unselfconsciously naked in the doorway with her hip thrust out and her arms
folded, like a cross between Dürer's Eve and Andy Capp's Flo, and looked at
me sombrely.
'It's so piss-awful boring in Newburgh, you start thinking your
brain'll just rot one day and trickle out of your ears,' she said
suddenly. 'We've got a very good lifestyle, of course. It's a lovely house.'
'Which one is it?' I was interested.
'Calicut Lodge, on Main Street.'
'Oh, I know.' Newburgh runs to retired shipmasters' houses, some
of them very handsome, and it's dead handy for Cruden Bay where the
pipelines come in, so naturally it's been taken over by the higher echelons of
BP and Shell. I'd done a number on Shanghai House, a few doors down from
Freda's place, back in the Nineties, so I knew the town well. It seemed a fair
deduction that she was an oil wife. I'd seen something of the breed, and I
knew from experience that her choice of hobbies was not absolutely unknown
as a response to life in the corporate meatgrinder.
'We travel a lot. And when Malc's home, we do a lot of
entertaining.'
'And when he's not, you make your own entertainment?' She
couldn't resist a sly wee smirk, for all that she was preoccupied by her sense
of grievance. 'I take it he's away?'
'He's in Nigeria. He's with Shell-Exxon,' she explained, confirming
my initial leap to conclusions. 'They told me not to come along this time.
Something sensitive's going down, and the advisers are worried about
kidnapping or something. They never really tell you. I hate Nigeria anyway.
They don't let you go anywhere.'
Suddenly a picture of Malcolm Constantine popped into my head.
Tall, lean, deeply tanned, with a Tom Cruise smile which had to represent a
fortune in orthodontics – no Briton ever had a mouth like that as nature's gift.
But it'd been a total waste of money, because the eyes were still saying, 'Do
you approve of me yet?' No wonder I'd forgotten him. The thing is, once
you've had your teeth capped, you can't actually bite anything all that hard. I
could see wee Freda taking dainty lumps out of him with those sharp little
fangs till he fell over and bled to death. More fool him for letting her, and more
fool him, too, for leaving her at home to get into mischief. She wasn't a
woman to take your eyes off. But if I hadn't known she was going home to an
empty house, I don't know how I'd've let her go that day.
Fast-forward. I thought about Freda nearly all the time, waking and
sleeping. I'd never really been jealous before, at least not on this scale, but
now I lay awake in the small hours, wondering if she ever played her game
with anyone else. There were nights when for two pins, I'd've got out of bed
and driven the thirty-odd miles to Newburgh just to see if she was there. She
kept her answering machine on all the time, so I couldn't check on her that
way, and the one thing I knew about her for sure was that she was a woman
you couldn't trust if you couldn't see her. I was always on tenterhooks: she
really wanted the sex, she liked the extra edge which came out of the risk
involved, and the passion; but fundamentally, she was seriously pissed off
that I'd fallen in love with her. That hadn't been part of her game-plan at all, so
there was always that fear in the back of my mind that she'd drop me and
find herself someone easier to manage. It all made for Olympicstandard
rumpy-pumpy, but it was driving me insane.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn't long before my wife was certain I was
seeing someone. She's no kind of a fool, and I must have been behaving as if
I was absolutely demented. Unfortunately, after one of Freda the Bitch's
magical mystery tours, it was hard to summon up much interest in Lilias.
There were tearful scenes and tantrums, but I found I was caring less and
less; I couldn't even lie with conviction after a while. My attention was
somewhere else, and there was nothing I could do about it.
In the end, Lil threw me out, and I can't say that I blame her.
Scots law being what it is, I fully expected to be taken to the cleaner's, so I
simply went and lived in the office in the interim – the architectural
partnership of which I am a third works out of a respectable Georgian house
in the market square in Inverurie, so there were modest washing and cooking
facilities on the premises: all I had to do was move a futon into the back attic
among the filing cabinets of obsolete drawings, and there I was, cushy
enough to be going on with, physically speaking. Just me and my guilt.
I saw Freda as often as I could. I never set foot in Newburgh – the
place is full of oil execs and their bored and sharp-eyed wives, so it was far
too risky. We met in Edinburgh sometimes, and there's a flat my brother
owns in Stonehaven which I could get the use of once in a while, but it all
took a bit of negotiation. When Freda left a message on my work email,
pretending to be a client, and saying she wanted to meet urgently, there was
nothing for it but to tell her to go to Tarlair, the last resort, in more senses
than one.
Angry and anxious as I was, I found Tarlair, as always,
inescapably touching. A disused Thirties swimming pool along the coast just
west of Macduff; a great place for assignations. I turned right at the Inshore
Fisheries, and drove out of the end of Macduff down a narrow winding road
between dramatic rock-formations, black pillars of striated stone stacked up
like plates, jagged pyramids, and even, at one point, a natural archway
framing the sea. I pulled up in the scruffy little carpark, and was not wholly
surprised to find someone else already there, a brittle-looking, thinlipped
blonde chainsmoking in a BMW with vanity plates. A fisherman's wife, at a
guess, from one of those introverted wee villages on the north coast where
the trawler-owners make huge money and the wifies spend it as fast as they
can. Or did; they must be something of an endangered species now that the
EEC's pulled the plug on Scottish fishing, but last year, their problems were
of quite another order. Her eyes flicked over me without interest. I wasn't her
man.
The swimming pool itself was a bit further along, in a natural
amphitheatre carved into the cliff by some ancient cataclysm. There was a
boxy Modernist white concrete villa which had presumably once held a café
and facilities, and the pools were so formally arranged that they extended in
front of it precisely like an Italian terraced garden; a shallow pool in front of
the house, a concrete retaining wall, a deep pool, another wall, and then the
open sea; three textures of water and a stupendous view framed by cliffs.
With just a couple of concrete obelisks where the cypresses should have
been, the effect would have been complete. There were broad, shallow
shelves curving out from the house and embracing the pools, conjuring up
visions of pretty shingled girls in sagging stockinette bathing costumes,
vanilla ice-cream and interwar optimism – the whole place ought to have been
sparkling white and clean, or to be absolutely precise, hygienic.
But it was out of its time, nobody in the Noughties would even
consider bathing in unheated seawater. The concrete was cracking and
greying, the paddling pool an uneasy slough of kelp stems and decaying
leaves; it was as sad as Cinderella. I loved the place, and wished it well; even
with Freda on my mind, I could not but canvass for the umpteenth time whom
I might persuade to rescue it.
As it was, in its neglect and isolation, it had its uses. I was
mooching around the theatrical semicircle of shelves which girdled the pools
when I saw Freda hurrying towards me with her dark hair lifting and wafting
round her face. She looked a little preoccupied, but that wasn't unusual; she
wasn't free with her smiles, and in any case, she took her pleasure seriously.
I was severely pissed off with her, but as always, my heart started beating
faster the moment she came into view. She was manifestly dressed for
adultery, in a blouse which unbuttoned down the front; with, at a good guess,
a front-opening bra underneath. Flippy skirt blowing round her lovely bare
legs, pink kitten-heeled slingbacks. If she was mine, I thought, and I saw her
leaving the house dressed like that, she'd be cruising for a bruising, as they
say in Glasgow.
'I hope it's urgent', I said as she came up to me, looking as if she
had something on her mind. 'I ought to be in Huntly.'
'It's urgent.' Without another word, Freda set off across the short
grass, and I followed her. If you climbed out of the scoop in the cliffs where
the swimming pool was, scrambled up the steep bit and went along the
clifftop path for a hundred yards or so, there were various nooks and dells
furred with short, seaside grass within reach of the pathway where you could
be fairly sure of privacy. Since there was a right of way along the top, there
was always a risk of free-range dogs and/or children, of course, but Freda
seemed rather to enjoy it. She had an exhibitionist streak, as I'd known since
day one.
We slid down into a dip we'd used before, well concealed from the
cliff path by an overhanging granite outcrop. It was a nice wee spot, a dry oval
bowl carpeted with grass and wiry little tufts of thrift and thyme. A fringe of
harebells nodded against the horizon, and the sea carried away the sound of
voices. We sat down, and then Freda put an arm round my neck and pressed
me onto my back.
I was wondering, of course, what she had on her mind, but if she
wanted to do things that way round, I was agreeable; I pushed my various
worries out of my awareness, and let the mood of the moment take over.
Snogging in the open with most of my clothes on always tickled me, the daft,
teenage, retro feel of it, like being fifteen again. I got the impression that she
was dead worried about something, but there was an undercurrent of
excitement; once I got my hand up her skirt, she had an orgasm almost
immediately. I had a sudden, dreadful thought: dear Christ, could she be
pregnant?– which had the effect on my libido of a sudden bucket of cold
water. But no, I thought, collecting my scattered wits, it couldn't be that. Her
reactions were all wrong, and anyway, she'd had the curse just about a week
ago, there'd been a chance of meeting and she'd passed it up because she
was feeling like death. I didn't think she'd been lying. So, whatever it was, it
could wait, while I returned my concentration to the task in, as it were, hand.
I always tried to keep actual sex to a minimum in these al fresco
encounters. I hated the feeling of exposure; I wanted her on top, and not for
too damned long either. Something about the thought of someone watching
my naked bum bobbing up and down absolutely froze me. Fortunately, Freda
likes fingers just so long as that's not all she gets, so it all worked out. I
came; she rolled off me, and I made myself decent as rapidly as possible. I
propped myself up on one elbow, and looked at her where she lay sprawled
in the sun with her eyes shut, her dark hair tangled in the grass, round white
breasts spilling magnificently out of her blouse. I was aware of a dry, warm
herby tang in the air, a corrective to the primeval odour of hot woman and the
too-sweet perfume which Freda favoured; there was a tuft of thyme under my
hand, so I picked it and rubbed it between my fingers to intensify the smell.
Then, on a sudden impulse, I flipped her skirt up and parted her knees so
that I could look at the source of all the trouble. She was as shameless as a
cat, and spraddled obligingly. I crumbled the flowers and scattered the tiny
pink petals on the black, moist hair where they clung like confetti. I was
vaguely imagining that she'd find the odd flower in her knickers later on, and
think of me.
'What are you doing?' she asked, not bothering to sit up.
'Footering about. It's rosemary that's for remembrance – I don't
know what thyme's for.'
'A reminder we haven't got all day,' she said tartly. She got to her
feet, brushing herself off, did up some buttons, and went and tossed the
condom over the cliff into the sea: she was neat about things like that. A
dislike of leaving evidence, I suspected.
She came back and sat down sideways like the Little Mermaid,
leaning on her arm, and looking down at me seriously.
'I wish I knew how you really felt about me,' she said.
'I love you to pieces, darling,' I replied automatically, but privately,
I was struck by her shrewdness. I wished I knew how I felt about her, in fact;
the only thing I wanted to know even more was how she felt about me.
'What would you do if I said it was over?' she asked. Her eyes
never left my face.
'Christ.' I looked back at her, stricken, realising that I was
completely unable to imagine life without her. I'd rather kill her than lose her.
I'd rather die. 'What's going on?'
'They're sending Malc to Caracas. We're through with Scotland.'
'I see.' I was filled with a sort of despair, or was it anger?
Whatever it was, it was rising in my throat, suffocating me. I wasn't sure what
she was telling me. 'Freda, you're not going. I won't let you.'
'You can't stop me.'
'Oh, can't I?' I came up off the ground and grabbed her, pinning
her down with my full weight. I didn't know myself what I meant to do. Her
shoulders felt small and brittle under my hands.
'David!'
I'd really frightened her. Her eyes were quite black, the pupils
huge, and I could feel her heart hammering.
'I'm sorry,' I said, letting go of her and starting to weep. 'I love you.
I didn't mean to hurt you. Don't go. Divorce him. We belong together.'
'I don't know', she said, rubbing her neck and shoulder. 'How can I
trust you? I'm going to have the most God-awful bruises.'
'Oh, Freda. There's more to life than lifestyle. You were bored out
of your brain when you picked me up. Okay, you won't be as well off. But
you're not bored, give me that.'
'No,' she conceded.
'Marry me, Freda.'
'I might.' She slipped her knickers back on then, and I let her go,
watching her walking away till she disappeared round a bend in the path.
Twenty minutes ago, she'd been rutting like a weasel, and now she was just
a pretty woman in the sun, neat and sweet. There was something appalling in
the way nothing actually showed. You could meet any woman, any time, and
under her dress, she'd be all hot and liquid, only you'd never know it. I leaned
my back against the rock, and stood watching the sea for five minutes,
arranging the facts in my mind like a row of bricks. I'd thrown away my
marriage, my kids. Freda was absolutely necessary to me. She'd said she
might marry me. The whole thing was a disaster. Except, except . . . just for
those moments when I was inside her, life and the universe seemed to swing
on that one pivot, and that never changed.
Once I was sure she was well on her way, I climbed up onto the
cliff path, and walked back to the car. The Beemer had gone. When I was
about halfway down the track, I passed the blonde's fancy-man, a smug-
looking sod in a Vectra. You'll be looking a bloody sight less pleased when
you get to Tarlair, I thought to myself. Serve you right for keeping her hanging
around.
Meanwhile, of course, my divorce was rumbling through; I was
deeply unhappy and guilty about it, but I wasn't contesting, of course. The
house was Lil's anyway, morally speaking, her parents had gifted it to us,
and of course she had custody of the kids. I had to contribute to
maintenance, though her parents helped out with school fees. Losing Helen
and Effie was a wrench; I was astonished how badly I felt about it. It had
been an old-fashioned marriage where I earned the money and Lil stayed at
home messing about with the garden and a couple of pampered nags, so the
girls were basically Lil's project. I didn't see all that much of them, but all the
same I knew I was going to miss them like hell. They were leggy and cheeky
and pretty, and knew how to get round me; I was proud of them, and I'd found
I was enjoying seeing them getting more confident, growing up. But there
was nothing to be done; I'd blown it with Lilias, so I'd lost them.
I don't know how much the girls actually understood about what
was going on – they did a bit of shouting and throwing things, but as far as I
could see, they were more worried about keeping the ponies than anything
else. I reckoned that, given time, the wounds would heal, and I'd see them
again. Practically everyone's got a divorce behind them these days, it's not
as if they'd be the only ones at St Margaret's with trouble at home. I felt
pretty much of a shit when I thought about them, and I was desperately sorry
to be losing them, but I wasn't all that worried about their future. There were
grandparents, after all, and Lil's not any kind of helpless little princess. She's
got plenty of gumption in her own way. She'd been running a mail-order hand-
baked fruitcakes business for about five years at that point, and it was
starting to do surprisingly well; she more or less covered the ponies' costs
just treating it as a semi-hobby. She could build on that. She'd get on, and
she'd make a good job of the girls, and she'd marry again, she's a heck of a
good-looking woman.
At least there weren't any kids on the other side. I was so
obsessed with Freda I'd've carried on regardless even if she'd been a mother
of ten, but the Fredas of this world, thank God, are strictly ornamental, like
those strange toys you're not supposed to give to children. A perfumed
garden, not a fertile field. She'd never wanted kids, she told me, to my
unspeakable relief. I've got a couple of pals who've settled into this grotesque
pattern of finding someone new around the time that the current wife's just
about got Number Two potty trained, and starting all over again. What a carry-
on. There must be some kind of death wish involved – fifteen or twenty years
of Pampers and sleepless nights, it's a thought to freeze the blood. Anyway,
Freda's breasts were mine. I found the mere notion of them being used to
feed an infant weirdly unpleasant.
Scottish law is quite good when it comes to swings and
roundabouts: on the one hand, Lil and the girls did well out of me, which they
deserved to, but Freda also did surprisingly well out of Malcolm, all things
considered. And that, in short, is how Freda Constantine, née Hatchin,
übercow and bitch from hell, became my lawful wedded wife, me being of
sound mind and under no duress.
Once the dust had settled, financially speaking, I found that we
had just about enough to make an offer on Kilmollich House. It was in the
middle of nowhere, miles too far from Inverurie, let alone Aberdeen, and in the
most terrible nick. But on the other hand, it had what estate agents call
potential to no uncertain extent. It was a tower-house built in about 1580,
standing in three or four acres of woodland and granite outcrop, and I could
see just what to do with it. . . How to describe it? It was not quite a castle,
though it was heading that way: a tall, high, intensely Scottish stone house
with small, deepset windows, crowstep gables and a couple of wee conical
turrets on the corners of the west face, beautifully positioned in a dell above a
stream with a drift of silver birches around it. As picturesque as a whisky
advertisement, and highly desirable in its peculiar way. I'd been deeply
relieved when I heard about it on the grapevine. While I had no doubts that
Freda had got bored with Malcolm, she hadn't got bored with his money, and
she was a high-maintenance sort of girl. I had no illusions: in her ideal world,
she'd have kept me as her bit on the side indefinitely. If I'd moved her into a
miserable wee farmhouse somewhere up the Gairie, there'd have been hell to
pay. No amount of good sex would've made up for it.
Of course, the downside was that Kilmollich was practically on
the point of collapse, or we wouldn't have been able to afford it. The roof was
dropping to bits, there was no central heating and, as I had discovered, no
septic tank – the household's ordure just seeped into the ground, as it had
done since the place was built. It was when I got this last detail pieced
together out of the Land Registers and so forth that I knew I'd got the vendors
on toast; it's not everyone who thinks to worry about shite, but that's the
advantage of a professional training. The vendors had been, till recently,
farmers, in a somewhat Old Macdonaldish fashion by all accounts, but they
were well past it, fed up with living in a collection of weeny rooms up winding
stairs, and anxious to retire to somewhere more manageable. I pointed out to
them that the place was not, as it stood, legally habitable, and they had a
spirited try at bluffing, but not for long. They'd lied to the estate agent, of
course, and the letters after my name put the wind right up them. They knew
I knew all the right people, and that if I set the Public Health onto them,
they'd never get it shifted.
In a whole lot of ways, punning aside, it was as crappy a house
as the early seventeenth century has left us. Sizing it up, I reckoned it had
originally been built on quite a modest scale as little more than a defensible
farmhouse, but in the second generation, around 1600, there'd been a burst
of prosperity, and a major refit. The second lot had taken the kitchen out of
the basement, where there were still the remains of a mighty vaulted
fireplace, and resited it on the ground floor at the opposite end of the building,
with a vast new chimney stack which did wonders for the general
picturesqueness. Looking at the whole set-up professionally, I did wonder if
the unoptimistic attitude of the first generation had been entirely misplaced.
The new stack was on the side which got the worst of the weather: you could
tell quite easily, even in the middle of the summer, because most of the
harling had been scoured off it over the centuries, exposing the bare grey
stone underneath. Four hundred years of Aberdeenshire winters had, I
strongly suspected, taken most of the strength out of the mortar. It might
need pinning, and in an ideal world, the whole thing would be re-harled,
preferably with crushed shell and quicklime, an unspeakably vile and
expensive job, especially if you need to erect a fifty-foot scaffold to do it off,
but, at the very least, it'd have to be repointed with lime mortar just as soon
as I could find the money. We could pretend we had a septic tank for a while,
and the roof would last another year, but lime was the top of the 'To Do' list,
whatever Freda might think. I consoled myself, meanwhile, with the thought
that anything that's been up for four hundred years tends to stay up out of
sheer force of habit. The first hundred years are the worst, with any building.
One thing hugely in Kilmollich's favour was that it didn't really
have a garden, just a bit of lawn round the house and a couple of
rhododendrons. It's common for old Scottish houses to have a walled garden
located purely pragmatically in order to catch every available photon of solar
energy, regardless of the convenience of the laird and his lady wife, and, not
unusually, Kilmollich's was the best part of a mile away. Another stroke of
luck: due to the ridge of granite which protected all but the north-eastern
corner of the house from the prevailing wind, the farm-buildings complex had
similarly not been built absolutely on top of the house; they were well on the
other side of a cordon sanitaire of woodland. The garden had long since
become a separate property, a weird-looking place with a hideous modern
breezeblock house dropped into a rectangular enclosure formed by ten-foot-
high, sixteenth-century stone walls. If I knew who the planning officer was
who'd let the builders get away with it, I would personally have taken out a
contract on him, but the really important thing was, it was not my problem.
The woodland wanted a bit of work, but it looked all right; it could wait till I got
round to it. The farm buildings had been sold to a property developer and
were even then in the process of becoming a cluster of foul little homes, but
they had a separate access road, thank God, and because Kilmollich was in
a dip in the hills, one couldn't even hear the work going on.
Copyright © 2005 by Jane Stevenson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.'