The Silver Bough (7 page)

Originally the house had been occupied by a caretaker who had tended the garden, seen to cleaning and repairs, and acted as a night watchman, but that job had gone to an earlier round of budget cuts. The house was not tied to the librarian’s job, but when she’d been told that she could rent it from the council, Kathleen had eagerly accepted. She reasoned that she’d been impulsive about accepting the job and should not also rush into buying a house. If life in remotest Scotland was not to her taste, she might want to move again after only a year. She’d be better off without the burden of a mortgage; it would be wise to wait and look around a little.

This, at any rate, was what she told her concerned friends.

But, really, what other house could compete with this one? She’d achieved her childhood dream of living in a library.

She let herself in and switched on the light, admiring the reproduction Art Deco chandelier she’d installed only two weeks ago. It was so much nicer and more in keeping with the style of the house than the ugly, utilitarian plastic fixture that had been there before. The long hallway had looked gloomy and unwelcoming when she’d first seen it, but she’d painted the walls a fresh, pale lilac and given the yellowish woodwork a coat of fresh white gloss, then hung a couple of framed Mucha prints, and thought that Alexander Wall himself might have approved.

I
T WAS WELL
past midnight when Mario turned off the lights and locked the chip shop, his working day finally at an end. The last customers had come in not long after eleven, as he’d expected: young men who’d shouted or made slurred, incomprehensible remarks as they ordered battered deep-fried sausages, meat pies, and large portions of chips to add to stomachs distended with beer. Once they’d gone, he might just as well have turned the door sign over to
CLOSED
and hurried through the cleaning, but his uncle—free to leave when he felt like it and untroubled by the need to pay a decent wage to the blood relative he’d taken in as a favor—set the opening hours and the menu, and didn’t respond well to helpful suggestions.

“You’re not here to tell me my business,” he said sharply. “You’re here to learn. Do your work, pay attention, and maybe you’ll gain some understanding of how to make a living.”

One thing Mario understood perfectly well was that he hadn’t been sent to this remote backwater to learn anything. If his English improved—as it had—that was a bonus; but his parents thought no more than he did of the importance of the arcane mysteries of preparing, serving, and selling cheap and disgusting fried food. He was here for no other reason than to be kept out of harm’s way. It was true—as some ignorant drunk had once shouted at him, meaning to give offense, probably imagining it to be some new term of racial abuse—he
was
an asylum-seeker, although not for the usual reasons.

In his final year of school, Mario had fallen in love with his music teacher, and she with him. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened, and he’d thought he was in heaven on earth until, quite suddenly, she told him that her husband was getting suspicious and she couldn’t see him anymore. He’d refused to accept it, even when she insisted it was too dangerous. His life was at risk—
her
life, too. She pleaded with him not to call; her husband was monitoring the phone. Together, he was sure they could overcome all obstacles; her timidity maddened him. Why didn’t she just leave the brute? Who cared what the world thought? If the age difference hadn’t mattered at the beginning, why should it matter now? She couldn’t explain, and she wouldn’t fight. It was all down to him. If he didn’t act, he’d lose her—and having once tasted paradise, he wasn’t prepared to let it go. So he’d become ever more cunning in arranging “accidental” meetings, at first by hanging around in all the places he knew she was likely to visit, and later, when leaving it to chance stopped working, by following her. And although, in the end, he’d been forced to stop, at least she was safe, she still had a job, and her marriage was preserved. Her husband might be suspicious, but he had no proof of his wife’s misconduct. Mario had taken all the blame; he’d let them brand him a stalker, a confused, fantasizing youth, never revealing the truth, that Anna had seduced
him.
And his reward? An even deeper loneliness, and exile to this bleak, wet Siberia.

After locking up, Mario went for a walk, as he usually did, to get the stink of frying out of his nose and the stiffness from long standing out of his legs. It was raining hard, as it had been for most of the week, but he couldn’t face going directly from the chip shop to the narrow, damp-smelling spare bedroom in his uncle’s house yet again, and nowhere else in the town would be open to him at this hour. Walking—which had never held much appeal for him at home—was his major leisure activity in this foreign backwater. Walking, listening to music, and writing letters to his love—letters which, of course, he could never mail.

He put on the baseball cap his sister had given him, back when a year of study at an American university had been a beckoning opportunity, and shrugged into the denim jacket still damp from his afternoon’s dash down the street. He could have bought a waterproof jacket—his parents had given him money for things like that—but that would have felt like giving in, accepting his fate as the resident of a rainy country. He preferred to do without, like someone merely passing through, forever surprised by the weather.

Head down, hands in his pockets, he walked through the driving rain, heading for the harbor.
Anna,
he thought, in time with his footsteps.
Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna.

He was soaking wet and shivering before he reached Front Street. The rain hurled itself against him with a fury that seemed personally vindictive. He pulled the bill of his cap lower to protect his eyes and made his way across the harbor parking lot. The rain on the few cars parked there sounded like the work of a demonic drummer. When he reached the metal guardrail he gripped it hard, as if the force of the weather might just lift him up and throw him down into the water if he wasn’t securely anchored.

The routes of his walks varied, but they always ended with the same view. On his first night in Appleton he’d been drawn instinctively to the sea. Tears had pricked behind his eyes as he stared out at the water. It was greyer and wilder than the sea at home, and yet he’d imagined it was the same sea and that somewhere…over there…Anna might at the very same moment be looking at it, too, and thinking of him.

There was no globe in his uncle’s house, and the only maps were concerned with British motorways, so it was a few days before he found out how wrong he was. He’d gone to the library—a strangely magnificent building that struck him as being completely out of place in this dour little northern town—and looked into an atlas. It had made his heart sink to see how far Sicily was from Scotland. And despite his fond wishes,
their
sea was not
this
sea, and when he gazed out from Appleton harbor his view went due west, completely opposite to the direction home. Traveling west there was nothing but the great, wide, cold Atlantic Ocean for miles and miles until you came to Canada. Only by turning his back on the ocean and aligning himself to face, roughly, southeast, would he be gazing in the direction of Sicily, and with that came the heavy knowledge that between him and his heart’s desire lay almost the entire landmass of Britain, all of France, most of Italy, not to mention certain legal, social, and economic barriers, the disappointment of his family, and the vindictiveness of Anna’s.

He was so cold and wet now that he hardly felt it. The rain ran down his face like tears, and as he stared out at the water he could scarcely see through the night and the heavy curtains of rain, he remembered again, as he often did, that cold winter’s day standing on a rocky beach overlooking the Mediterranean with Anna; how she’d taken his hand and played with his fingers and then, while he was still paralyzed with confusion, how she’d reached up to touch his face, then pulled his head down to kiss him. Her warm, soft, open mouth. How she’d guided his hand to her breast, and the suggestions she’d whispered in his ear: the instructions and promises. And, a little while later, making love with her for the first time in the backseat of her car.

That was the real Anna; the warm, passionate, half-naked girl trembling with desire, clutching and clinging to him; that was the Anna he’d always remember and believe in, not the cold, older, respectably married woman who spoke so coolly of her “concern” about his “inappropriate attachment” to her, pretending she had never shared it.

The rain drumming on the cars behind him now sounded like mocking laughter.
She never loved you, fool. She used you. Forget her.

He shoved a hand into his jacket pocket, closing it around the little bottle. It was a vodka miniature he’d found in the street in front of the chip shop a week ago, empty and missing its cap, but whole. It was filled now with a tightly rolled-up letter to Anna, and sealed with a piece of whittled-down candle and a piece of strapping tape. He’d been meaning to throw it out to sea for days, but between the bad weather and his changeable, rotating shifts, he’d kept missing the tide. He thought it should be going out now, but he wasn’t sure, and he couldn’t see well enough to guess.

But did it matter? Whether the tide was going in or out, the chances of this little bottle—or any of the others he’d launched in previous weeks—actually reaching any Mediterranean shore in his lifetime must be vanishingly small. He wasn’t worried about some local lout reading it—how many people around here could read Italian?

It didn’t matter. It was a meaningless gesture; he was going through the motions of unrequited love for nobody’s sake but his own. He might as well burn the letters after he wrote them as throw them in the sea.

He brought his hand out of his pocket, hauled back, and threw the little bottle as hard as he could into the darkness, toward the unseen empty west. Then he turned his back on it and, head down in the blinding rain, unable to see where he was going, retraced his steps, heading for his uncle’s house. He’d so often thought, since he came here, that he couldn’t get wetter, or colder, or feel any worse, and still it seemed there were new depths of misery and further extremes of bad weather to be experienced. He didn’t think he could bear to write and throw away another yearning love letter to someone who didn’t care, but he also didn’t know how he could survive without that last, small pretense at communication.

Later that night, when a small seismic shock woke him abruptly out of shallow, unhappy sleep, he dreamed for a moment that what he’d felt was his own heart breaking.

 

From
What Grows in Scotland
by Mairi Smith and F. B. Lockhart
(Baillie, 1991)

 

Apples

 

A
LTHOUGH
the native crab-apple
(Malus sylvestris)
was known to the Celts, who associated it in their mythology with love, fertility, immortality, and the existence of an earthly paradise, it was the invading Romans who planted the first cultivated orchards in Britain. This tradition was revived and expanded by the Church, particularly Benedictine monks, who planted apple orchards wherever they settled….

…An exception to the connection between monasteries and established orchards lies on the west coast, not a location usually hospitable to fruit trees, in aptly named Appleton. There are no abbeys or medieval settlements in the area, which was only sparsely populated in early times, without even a named village on the peninsula dubbed “Apple Island”
(Innis Ubhall)
by the Gaelic-speaking natives. When the first apples were grown there is a matter of some dispute, but by Victorian times Appleton was famous for cider and several particularly fine varieties of eating apple. However, despite a folk tradition that the Lowland settlers named their new town after the wild apple orchards they found there, it seems likely the first apple orchards were planted no earlier than 1669, with stock imported from eastern and central-southern Scotland. The annual Apple Fayre, which attracted visitors from many parts
(see picture, below),
was almost certainly a Victorian invention inspired by similar English festivals, with a few Scottish traditions rather obviously grafted on. (The “dark stranger” who brings good fortune to
the whole town by crowning the Apple Queen will be recognized as the preferred “first-footer” of New Year celebrations.)

Mass importation of apples from America and Australia hit the home-grown industry in Britain hard, but Appleton remained miraculously immune from the worst effects for many years, with a growing demand for Appleton cider in all parts of Great Britain right up to 1950; in addition, a small but loyal group of buyers continued to favour “Appleton’s Fairest,” an eating apple never successfully grown outside the orchards of Appleton and now, sadly, lost forever.