To the Hilt (25 page)

We finished our round lightheartedly, and in the clubhouse I wiped clean my woods and irons and stowed them upright in the bag in my locker, sentinels guarding King Alfred’s Gold Cup.

Owing to the rigid divisions at the top of the golf bags, which held the clubs apart to prevent their damaging each other, I had had to buy a bag that could be taken apart at the bottom-for cleaning-and in the castle’s drying room I had undone the necessary screws to take the bag apart, and had lodged the Cup inside. It fitted there snugly: and as a bonus for having to undo the bag to get it out again, it could never be tipped out by accident.

The locker’s flat gray doors were uniform and anonymous. Changing my shoes, I put the black-and-white studs on the shelf and closed everything unremarkably away, and with amusement returned with James to the castle.

By midmoming the next day my life in the bothy had taken shape again, and in greater comfort than before when it came to mattress and armchair. A rental truck stood outside my front door, the portable phone (with spare batteries) was working, and Zoe Lang’s portrait stood unwrapped on the easel.

With a thankful feeling of coming home I set out the paints I needed, feeling their texture on knife and brush, darkening the background again, adding the shadows that had flashed into imagination in my travels, putting a glow on the skin and life-lights in the waterlike surfaces of the eyes.

The woman lived on the canvas, as vital as I knew how to make her.

At five o’clock, when the quality of the light subtly changed, I put down the brushes, washed them for the last time that day and made sure that all the brilliant colors were airtight in their pots and tubes, a routine as natural as breathing. Then I lit my lamp and put it by the window, and took my bagpipes out of their case, and walked with them up the rocky hillside until the bothy lay far below.

It was weeks since I’d played the pipes. My fingers were rusty on the chanter. I filled the bag with air and tuned the drones, swinging them along my shoulder and waiting for such skill as I had to reawaken in my ear; and at length began to feel and to remember the fingering of one of the long ancient laments of a time earlier than Prince Charles Edward. The sadness that had enveloped Scotland for centuries before him, the untamable independence that no Act of Union could undo, all the dark Celtic mysteries, pulsed in the old elemental endlessly recurring tunes that slowly wove a mood more of endurance than hope.

I had learned to play laments—the pibrochs-as a boy, chiefly for the unromantic reason that their slowness meant I had more time to get the notes right. I’d progressed to marches later, but a lament suited my painting of Zoe Lang better, and I stood on the Monadhliath Mountains while the moon rose, and played for her a mixture of an old tune called “The King’s Taxes” and a new one that I made up as I went along. And it was just as well, I thought as stray squeaks and wrong notes made me wince, that my old army teacher wasn’t there to hear.

Scottish piping laments could go on for hours, but earthly hunger put a stop to them usually in my case, and I returned in the dark to the bothy, filled with a pleasant melancholy but with no feeling of despair, and cooked paella in contentment.

I always woke early in the mountains, even in the dark winters, and the next day I sat in front of the easel watching the slow change of light on that face; the growth, as it almost seemed, of the emerging personality taking place before me. And I wondered if anyone would ever again see that gradual birth. If the picture was successful, if it ever hung in a gallery, passing visitors might give it a glance under a bright light and view it as a conjuring trick; now you see youth, now you don’t.

When daylight was fully established I still sat comfortably in my new armchair, trying to tap into that courage I was supposed to have. It was one thing to imagine, another to do. And if I didn’t do, I wouldn’t know forever that I’d failed in courage, even though, as it now stood, the portrait of an unknown woman was complete and workmanlike.

I had ransacked my mother’s kitchen for a sharp-pointed knife, and in the end I’d borrowed from her not a knife but a meat thermometer. This unlikely tool had proved to have a spike whose tip was both sharp and abrasive. The spike was for sticking into joints of meat: the round dial from which it protruded measured the inner heat and the state of cooking-rare, medium, well-done.

“Of course you can borrow it,” my mother said, puzzled, “but whatever for?”

“It’s scratchy. It’s rigid. The dial gives it good grip. It’s pretty well perfect.”

She sweetly humored her unfathomable son.

So I had the perfect tool. I had the light. I had the vision.

I sat and quaked.

I had the pencil drawing of the real Zoe Lang. I’d drawn her at the same angle. It should have been easy.

I had to see the old face over the young.

I had to see it clearly, unmistakably, down to the soul.

I had to play the lament for time past. I had to play the lament as a fact but not necessarily as a tragedy. I had to depict the persistence of the spirit inside the transient flesh.

I couldn’t.

Time passed.

When I finally picked up the meat thermometer and stood in front of Zoe Lang and made the first scratch down to the Payne’s gray, it was as if I had surrendered to an inner force.

I started with the neck, conscious that if the whole concept was in fact beyond my ability, I could overpaint a fluffy scarf or jewel decoration to conceal the failure.

I saw the outer shell of age as larger than the face within, as if the external presentation were the cage, the prison, of the spirit. I held the pencil drawing beside the painting and put dots of reference at pivotal points: at the outer lines of the eye sockets, at the upper edges of the jawbones, at the rear extension of the skull.

With almost an abandonment of rational thought I swept the sharp scratching point across my careful painting. I let go with instinct. I drew the old Zoe in gray scratches, as if the flesh colors weren’t anything but background; I scratched the prison bars with the cruelty she’d sensed in me, with the inability to soften or compromise the brutal conception.

I left as little to chance as I could. I traced the direction of each line in my mind until I could see the effect, and that could take ten minutes or half an hour. The result might be a sweeping stroke that looked spontaneous and inevitable, but in nerving myself each time to scrape down to the gray I was cravenly aware that a mistake couldn’t be put right.

It was a cold day, and I sweated.

By five o’clock the shape of Zoë Lang’s old face was clearly established over the inner spirit. I put down the meat thermometer, stretched and flexed my cramped fingers, took the portable phone with me and went for a walk outside.

Sitting on a granite boulder, looking down on the bothy, looking away down the valley to the tiny cars crawling along the distant road, I phoned my mother. Bad reception: crackle and static.

Ivan, she assured me, was at last and slowly shedding his depression. He had dressed. He was talking of not needing Wilfred any longer. Keith Robbiston had paid one of his flying visits and had been pleased with the patient’s progress. She herself felt more settled and less anxious.

“Great,” I said.

She wanted to know how the meat-thermometer picture was coming along.

Medium rare, I said.

She laughed and said she was pleased Himself had insisted on a phone.

I told her the number.

She was calm, cool and collected, her normal serene self.

I said I would call her again on Sunday, the day after tomorrow, when I had finished the picture.

“Take care of yourself, Alexander.”

“You too,” I said.

I went down again to the bothy and ate the remaining half of the paella, and sat outside in the dark thinking of what needed to be done to the picture to complete its meaning; and chiefly I thought of not muddling the outlines by too many more strong gray scratches but of not going down so deep, not nearly down to the canvas but only as far as the ultramarine blue layer, so that the wrinkles and sagging areas of old skin would be gentler, though still unmistakable. And I would end, if I could manage it, with a blue-gray mistlike top portrait, so that the eye could see both portraits separately, the outer or the inner, according to the chosen focus, or could see both together as an interpretation of what all life was like, the outward relentless change of cell structure decreed by the passing of time.

I slept only in snatches that night and dreamed a lot and in the morning again watched the light grow on Zoe Lang, and spent the day with rigidly governed finger muscles until my arms and neck ached with tension, but by late afternoon I had gone to the limit of what I could understand and show, and whatever the picture might be judged to lack, it was because the lack was in me.

Only the eyes of the finished portrait looked blazingly young, whichever other aspect one chose to see. I put suggestions of bags under the lower lids with a few blue lines, and drooped upper lids in faintly, but that unchanging spirit of Zoe Lang looked out, present and past identical.

 

 

I couldn’t sleep. I lay for a while in the dark wondering what I could have done better, and coming to a realization that I would probably go on wondering that for weeks and months, if not for my whole life.

I would wrap the picture in its sheet and put its face to the wall, and when I looked at it again, when I’d forgotten the strength and direction and feeling of each individual brushstroke or scratch, when I could see the whole with time’s perspective, then I would know if I’d done something worth keeping, or whether the whole idea had been a mistake and beyond me.

Restlessly I got up at about four in the morning and, locking my door behind me, took my bagpipes up into the mountains, seeing my way by starlight, humbled by the distance of those flaming unvisited worlds, melancholy with the insignificance of one self in the cosmos and thinking such unoriginal thoughts as that it was much easier to do harm than good, even unintentionally.

As always the melancholy drifted away into space and left acceptance. Some people clung to angst as if it were a virtue. I let it go with relief. Optimism was a gift at birth. Bottles were half full, not half empty. When I took up the pipes in the dawn and blew the bag full of air, it was marches and strathspeys I played into the brightening silence, no longer the sad regrets of the piobaireachd.

Zoe Lang, the real Zoe Lang, now lived in an old body. Through all her ages, persisting into her fanaticism, the essence of Zoe Lang had triumphed. The shell was but a crab’s carapace, grown, hardened, shed and grown again. I played marches for her this time as a salutation.

She would never find the Kinloch Hilt if I could prevent it, but I would pay my foe the most intense respect (short of capitulation) that I could.

I never counted time up there on the granite heights. The gray dawn turned to a brilliant blue sparkling day and I reckoned I would go down to the bothy only when the lack of breakfast gave me a shove. Meanwhile I played the pipes and marched to the beat and filled the whole optimism bottle slowly with uncomplicated joy at being there in that wilderness, alive.

Too good to last, I supposed.

I was aware first of a buzzing noise that increasingly interfered with the drone of the pipes, and then a helicopter rose fast over the ridge of the mountain at my back and flew overhead, drowning out all sound but the deafening roar of its rotor.

I stopped playing. The helicopter swooped and wheeled and clattered and circled, and while I still half cursed its insistent penetrating din and half wondered what on earth anyone would be looking for in that deserted area at that early time on a Sunday, the helicopter seemed like a falcon spotting a kill, and dropped purposefully towards its prey.

The prey, I realized in dismay, was the bothy. I sat down and folded the pipes across my knees, and watched.

The helicopter made a sort of circuit and approached the bothy from in front, hovering unsteadily over the small plateau there, sliding through the air to one side of my parked replacement truck and finally settling onto the ground the longitudinal bars of the landing support.

The noise of the engine faded, and the speed of the rotor fell away.

I watched in extreme apprehension. I sat as motionless as the mountain itself, aware that unless I moved or put my head above the skyline I was invisible from below against the jumble of rocks.

If the four robbers had come ...

If the four robbers had come they wouldn’t catch me up in the mountains, but they could again break into my house.

They could destroy my painting.

I felt as if it were a child I’d left there. A sleeping child. Irreplaceable. I wondered how I could bear it, if they destroyed it.