The Going Down of the Sun (31 page)

By concentrating I managed to resolve the pencilled notation as a recipe of some kind, involving salmon and something else baked until crusty—although the possibility that the guest-list was to include an award-winning author could not be discounted. Of the figures in ink I could make no sense at all.

McAllister was watching with a curious mixture of expressions. I thought I saw both grief and a solemn amusement. I thought I must have been mistaken.

I showed him the blue figures. “What does it mean?”

“Share prices. My man in London phoned through with them just as I was coming in on Sunday night. I'd been away most of the weekend or he'd have got me earlier, so by now it was pretty urgent. I took the call on the call phone instead of in my study, and I took down the figures he gave me on a handy envelope. I did a couple of wee sums, then called him back and told him what to sell and what to buy.”

I couldn't think where this was leading us. “Did you make a good deal?”

“I made a quarter of a million pounds, thank you very much.”

What did he want me to say? “Congratulations. I hope you enjoyed the salmon pie as well.”

“Not yet. Mrs. Lilley hasn't made it yet, and now I'm not sure she will, though it was a great success when I ate with the Camerons last week. I asked their cook if she'd mind sharing her recipe with mine, and Mrs. Lilley was in the hall too when the phone rang early on Monday morning. The envelope was still lying on the table from the previous day, but she could see from the scribbles that I'd finished with it so she took down the recipe on the other side. Then she took it into the kitchen, to copy into her recipe book.

“And then news came in about Alison, so she never got it done. She put it to one side and only got round to it again this morning.”

As the confessions of a Scottish magnate, this was about as interesting as watching paint dry. I wondered if he would ever get to the point, and indeed whether there was one. “Really.”

McAllister smiled slowly. “And so neither I, who had used it as a ready-reckoner, nor Mrs. Lilley, who had used the other side as a Mrs. Beeton's filofax, ever actually thought of it as an envelope. It was only after Mrs. Lilley had copied her notes off it and went to throw it away that she was struck by the blindingly obvious that had eluded us both.”

It eluded me too. “Which was?”

“Which was that envelopes contain letters.”

It was Alison McAllister's last letter, the one she wrote to her husband after he left for his business trip and before she left for Oban. He'd said he wouldn't be back before Monday so she had no reservations about leaving it on the hall table to await his return. The fact that his business finished a day early could have thrown all her careful plans back into the melting pot, but for the timing of that first urgent phone call and the fact that there was no other paper beside the phone.

McAllister asked me to read it and I did, and before I finished, my tears were splashing the paper. She wrote:

My dearest,

I know that what I am about to do will hurt you. That is the only regret I have.

That idiot doctor of mine still won't admit that things are wrong with me that cannot be explained by motherhood alone. But I know what the problem is, and I have done for almost a year. It's that old devil MS. I knew he'd catch up with me some day.

You remember my brother George. The circumstances of his death caused enormous shock at home, not only in the family but around the island. Strenuous efforts were made to have it recorded as an accident, or failing that as the act of a man whose mind was temporarily unhinged.

I never believed it was an accident, or that the balance of his mind was disturbed. I believed then and believe still that it was a rational response to a diagnosis that meant he'd already enjoyed the best of any life he could hope for. I wouldn't keep alive a dog that was going to grow weaker every day until it finally lost control of its most basic functions, and I could never see why my brother was expected to suffer more than a dog.

Now I find myself in the same situation and I know he was right. Not for everyone perhaps—I can admire a cheerful cripple as well as the next person—but for himself and also for me. We would both have made terrible invalids.

It's important that you understand that this is what is right for me. If I wanted to live enough to put up with that degree of disability, I might be sorry for you and Peter but I wouldn't let your interests influence my decision. I'm not doing this to save you years of coping with an invalid wife, her temper growing shorter as her muscles weaken! I'm doing it because I don't want to live in a body that restrictive.

I've gone into the science of it. I know all about remissions, how the progress of the disease can seem to be halted or even reversed for a time. I'm not doing this in a state of shock or despair. I've thought it through, and the bottom line is that, realistically, there's only one way I'm going to end up and I'm going to get out while I'm ahead.

I know you don't care for the boat so I'm going to go George's way—the Viking way. I'm sorry you won't get the insurance.

I'm afraid this next bit will hurt you too. Or perhaps you'll understand it better than I do: you always did treat my hormones with greater respect than I thought they deserved. I'm going to see Alex again. I shalln't tell him what I'm doing, but I feel the need somehow to square myself with him before turning out the light. I'm sorry I didn't handle that better, for all our sakes. I hope you'll accept Peter as my apology.

By the time you read this the thing will be done. I hope you won't be dragged away from anything important to identify the remains. It's me all right.

Is this rather long for a suicide note? There's so much I want to say to you, I feel I could fill a book—if I had the words, which I haven't. A lot of it you can probably guess: the anger, the resentment, the sense of loss for what we could have had and weren't given time for. The profound gratitude that I was able to give you our son. The fear for what comes next, tinged—you may even have guessed this—with some curiosity, even anticipation.

What I do want to state in plain words, so that you never have to wonder how much of what you guessed was what I meant to say, is this. Neither of us married for love. I didn't expect to love you, had no right to expect you to love me. But oh my dear, if it isn't love I feel for you, and have done these four years, and if it isn't love I've had from you in return, then I don't know the meaning of the word. I think it's one of the reasons I can let go now: the fact that I've had enough happiness for a lifetime in these few years with you.

Forgive me that which needs forgiving. Remember what was worth remembering. I leave you our child, and my best hopes for both of you. Love again, if you have the chance. Be happy.

All my love,
ALISON

First published in 1990 by Piatkus

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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Copyright © Jo Bannister, 1990

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