December (11 page)

      
'And when did
she
know?'

      
'Now there's a question. Maybe two days. Maybe two weeks.'

      
'Or maybe,' Moira said bitterly, 'it was written in her teacup
years ago. Donald, what did I do to her? Why could she no' tell me?'

      
She looked out of the end bay window, from which the Duchess
would sit and observe. The caravan was on a mound at the top of the site with
all the lesser caravans laid out below it, like a village around a castle. The
Firth of Clyde was a grey pencil line along the horizon; the hint of shading
was the Isle of Arran.

      
Donald wasn't looking at her. He had his disgusting old trilby
hat in his hands, a brown finger poking through the hole in the crown.

      
How much was he keeping to himself, this cousin who'd guarded
the Duchess for more than half a century, whose task it had been, as if laid down
in the stars, to watch over the Duchess since she was a wee girl and him not
that much older?

      
Who, thirty-eight years ago, had seen her through the awful
scandal of giving birth to the daughter of a young council official in horn-rimmed
glasses - the very man ordered to clear the gypsies from their summer site
overlooking the Clyde, the bureaucratic busybody so bewitched by her beauty, it
was said, that he couldn't hold his clipboard steady.

      
'She wis worried about you. I'll tell ye that much.'

      
'She'd no cause,' Moira said.

      
'Wisny easy for her, y'understand. You bein' away so much.'

      
Thirty-eight years ago, mysteriously, the gypsies had been
allowed to keep their autumn site overlooking the Clyde. Her father - and his
indomitable mother - had received the child.
      
'Rescued the child,' as her gran had
phrased it. A deal. The wee girl, abandoned to a starchy Presbyterian upbringing
in a genteel Glasgow suburb, abandoned to a weak and diffident father, a powerfully
narrow grandmother.
      
'Will ye go in now?'

      
Donald nodding at the sliding door to the wee hallway and, beyond
it, the bedroom where the Duchess was.

      
'I can't,' Moira said, 'I can't see her dead.'

      
Donald finally lifted his gaze to her, the lines deepening
around his mouth. 'She'll be offended. The nieces ha' been with her all the
morning. Until you came. It was assumed ...'

      
'I'll have no one make assumptions about me.' Moira shook her
black, nearly-shoulder-length hair, turned sharply and walked out of the
caravan door.

      
The old man followed her, clenching and unclenching his fists
around his hat, very agitated.

      
'Listen... stop.' Clattering down the steps after her. 'Wait.'
Pulling out an envelope. 'You wis to have this - when you saw her.'

      
'What is it?'

      
'Take it now,' Donald said, and she nodded.

      
But still walked away, pushing the envelope into a side pocket
of her tweed jacket.

The Duchess's death lay
over the site like low cloud, the colours the caravans dulled.

      
There was nobody much about as she wandered among the caravans
on this drab autumn morning, as she had a quarter of a century ago; a twelve-year-old
girl on her way home from the high school, a girl who'd been warned, since she
could toddle, to stay away from the old railway where the gypsies camped in the
autumn.

      
The woman in her early thirties with the long dark hair and
fingers of fire had been waiting, unsmiling, on the steps of the Caravan. Had
flicked disdainfully at the clipped hair of the plain, quiet child.
How is your father? Does he speak of me
often?
      
He
never speaks of you.
Defiant.

      
But he thinks of me, I
reckon, as he shuffles his papers in his, wee office. And he dreams.

      
A dozen rings on her hands: rubies and emeralds and sapphires,
glittering hypnotically. Moira had been so confused and her stomach churning;
she'd been having headaches on and off all day, had not wanted to get up, her
gran giving her the stern eye,
'Don't you
go telling your fibs, you're looking perfectly fit and well, did you no'
complete your homework, is that it?'

      
The woman with the rings had said,
Don't you worry yourself,
you'
re
not sick, you're just changing
. And had given her only child a present. An
old comb of dull, grey metal, like a dog's comb with teeth missing.

      
Take it. It's yours. For
a time.

      
What do
I …?

      
What would you expect to
do with it? You comb your hair. And 'member today, 'cause you'll never be a wee
girl again.
      
Twelve years old
 
Bewilderment. The excitement of the unknown.
Headaches and tummy pains. Blood on white cotton sheets.
Hush, now, you're no' dying, its only the curse.

      
The curse? The gypsy curse?

      
Don't
talk such nonsense, Moira, go back to your bed.
      
The comb, gliding through her
lengthening hair in the static electricity, blue sparks,

      
The
hair grew. And the rows began. You look like a damn gypsy, get it cut at once.

      
Never.

Moira walked off the site
now, past piled-up black rubbish sacks awaiting collection, one already
plundered by the crows. Well,, she'd known, of course, as a kid, that her
mother was with the travellers. Except that the way the story had been told to
her was, like: Your mother didn't want you. Your mother abandoned you and ran
off with the dirty gypsies. The words
,
that whore
, passing from grandparent to parent in times of stress.

      
It was a scrappy place. There'd been an industrial estate here
in the old days; now there were breezeblock walls and girders.

      
When she was rich, when she'd signed the contract with
Epidemic and got an incredible amount up front, she'd come here to see her exotic
mother and very foolishly offered to buy her a house of her own or at least a
nice place to put her caravan.

      
She remembered sitting in the china cave, so full of herself.
I've been asked to join a band on a two-album
contract, Mammy; the money's amazing.
So excited at being able to do
something for the Duchess. Hard to believe now that she'd ever been quite that
dense.

      
Even the jewels on the Duchess's hands had seemed to sparkle
with a cold rage.

      
I would not take your
money
(the Duchess with magnificent severity, a strong, cultured accent by
then)
even if it was good money. Don't
you dare insult me, girl. You were directed towards a spiritual path, and
you've forsaken it. You're dabbling. Deviating. You've taken the devil's
currency. You're a stupid, stupid girl. I cannot believe what you're doing …

      
She hadn't seen her mother for close on four years after that.

Moira wandered up the rubbly
lane which led to where the factories might once have been. The sky had gone
white, the sea had disappeared and the Isle of Arran was no more than an impression
on a tablecloth.

      
She sat on an upturned oil drum and took out the envelope Donald
had given her and stared at it for a long time.

      
There was nothing on the front except for one letter, in the Duchess's
familiar baroque scrawl.

M

She stared for several
minutes at the envelope.

      
Four years on, after the Abbey, she'd returned to the site
wearing dark, dowdy clothes and no make-up. Amid the tumble of her long, black
hair there was now a single, slender vein of white. A souvenir from the Abbey.

      
She'd walked boldly up to the door of the palace on wheels, looking
the Duchess in the eye.

      
And
then
she'd
broken down.

      
Just like now.

      
She slipped a hand inside her jacket, unzipped the breast
pocket and took out the cloth bundle. Slowly, sitting on the oil drum, she
unwrapped the comb; metal, grey-brown like stone. A thousand, two thousand
years old. Undistinguished, utility, like a doggy's comb.

      
Moira wept, sliding the envelope with M on the front back into
her pocket.

It was very dim in the
little hallway with all the doors closed.

      
She knocked on the plywood panel. The door slid back, and
there was Donald in his blue suit with his hat in his hands, the bobbing light
of candles at his back.

      
He said, very softly, 'The Duchess'll receive you hen.'

Used to put pennies on dead
people's eyes, didn't they, to the lids down?
      
Oh, Christ.

      
She looked around for Donald, to ask him why ... why?

      
But Donald had slipped away and closed the sliding door behind
him. She was alone in here with the curtains closed and candles, four of them,
at the head and the foot of the long, wide bed.

      
No china in here; the walls were clean white. Where Donald had
stood, behind her, his back to the wall beyond the bottom of the bed, shadows reared
in the dancing light. She stood watching these shadows, her back to the bed,
afraid to turn around again.

      
She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing. The air
had a scent of violets. She tried to speak, to pray, but it was if there was a film
of wax over her lips.

      
You are not supposed to
do this to me, Mammy.

      
Slowly she turned around to face the deathbed and started to
open her eyes, but she was too afraid and closed them tighter. And she could
still see the little candle flames, reddened through the eyelids, giving off
heat like the flames which, all those years ago, had engorged two mangled
vehicles in a country lane.

      
Remembering how the flames had risen through the hissing rain,
two columns of fire joining above the wreckage, forming a shape like a giant
blazing harp, its strings the gilded arrows the rain.

      
Why? Why this, now? Get me
out of this.
      
She took a breath and opened her
eyes.

The Duchess wore a satin
nightdress of grey, edged with silver, like cold sun behind rainclouds.

      
White pillows behind her shoulders, white pillows behind her
head, a bank of pillows. Her river of long white hair spread into a delta, her
lips slightly parted over grey-white, pearly teeth.

      
Moira's heart hung like a stone in her breast and beneath her jacket
and the sleeves of her silk blouse, she felt the goosebumps rise.

      
The Duchess was sitting bolt upright in her bed and her eyes
were wide open, still as glass and fixed coldly upon her only daughter.

      
You are dead. You are
supposed to be quiescent, on your back, with that marble, sculpted look so that
people can say. Doesn't she seem so peaceful? You are not supposed to challenge
me, Mammy. I'm too old to be afraid of a corpse.

      
There was electricity in the violet-scented air. Candlelight
flickered in the gems of the rings on the hands of the Duchess, a proud, vain
woman, a mother before twenty, dead now before sixty.

      
Dead? Was this thing dead? Was this how she'd been when Daddy
had come? Was this why, for Christ's sake, his glasses were misted?

      
No. This was for her.

      
The long, thin hands were rigidly clasped upon the sheets, her
little finger curled slightly outwards as if pointing at Moira.
      
You
have some damage to repair.

      
The Duchess had said this once. Now, as if the body on the bed
had opened its lips, she heard it whispered, with studio clarity, in her head.

      
Damage.