‘I wonder if I might trespass upon your patience just a little more,’ said Alec’s voice. He stood up and resumed his position by his canvas. ‘I have painted the mighty law, and I have painted the turbulent sky, but in between, around the hill, is the most important element of all… the beating heart of the land. The farms and cottages, the lanes and fields, the men and women who make this place sublime. If Mrs Gilver would be so gracious as to concede the floor a little longer, I could complete my expedition into the savage soul of Luckenlaw.’
Despite the scowls of Miss McCallum and the rolled eyes of some of the others there was no polite way to stop him. The Howies were entertained of course and Lorna was delighted, but even her heart could not have swelled with adoration like mine. On and on and on he droned, saving me.
He was still ladling on paint and blathering about inner space and the echo of the Lucken Law in the warm wombs of its daughters, when Miss Lindsay started to shift in her seat and consult her fob watch surreptitiously. Alec, spying her, immediately began to wind up.
‘Art!’ he declaimed. ‘In the looking, in the seeing, and in the knowing. Here I will leave you. You will be here singing the old songs and dancing the ancient dances and I shall go out into the darkness and know that life pulses inside as we know the beating of our own blood in our bellies.’
There was a humming silence after this, as might well be expected. Lorna Tait broke it.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you staying for the social?’
Vashti and Nicolette brayed like donkeys and a few of the others, fit to burst with pent-up hysteria from the long words and the sepulchral voice and the red socks over the tops of the bootlegs, gave up the fight and shook with laughter.
‘I am not offended,’ said Alec, his eyes dancing. ‘Laughter is the chorus of our humanity. Laughter holds away the pressing darkness and welcomes the stranger. Laughter is the spirit dancing.’ And he threw his scarf over one shoulder, picked up his bag of paints and all of his brushes and swept, magnificently, out.
The meeting was helpless for a good five minutes after he had gone; even Lorna Tait, feeling herself to have been given permission, indulged in a quiet chuckle or two.
‘Aye, you can laugh,’ said a young woman from across the room, ‘but I’ve been sittin’ here knottin’ elastics for his blessed skippin’ all night and he’s no’ even stayed to see it.’ She held up a long, brown, kinked chain of rubber bands and the laughter grew louder again.
‘Oh, let’s do it anyway,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘I hear those children at their skipping every day and I never get to join them.’
There were more titters at that, for who amongst us had not wondered when we were children whether the adults, especially the teachers, were really people like we were or whether they were just the boring grown-ups they appeared to be.
Willing hands cleared the chairs from the centre of the room and willing volunteers initiated the beginners into the mysteries of the Chinese ropes. When we had all gained a little proficiency, the singing began: the couple from the golden city, she of the black stockings with the wart on her nose, even (horribly) the thirteen grave robbers knocking at the door.
‘Or how about this one?’ said a plump young woman. ‘I mind of this one from when I was at the school.’ She stepped onto the taut bands strung between the ankles of the two ladies who were taking their turn at providing the structure, and began to hop and jump, pinging the elastic and stepping into the spaces.
‘Spring a lock o’ bonny maidie,’ she sang. Others picked it up and joined in.
‘Summer lock o’ wedded lady.
Harvest lock o’ baby’s mammy.
Who will be my true love?
Three times twist me,
All that I wish me.
First time he kissed me
He will be my true love.’
Before my eyes, the vision swam again of Alec plucking a hair from his head and putting it into his pocket, winking at me.
‘I’ve never heard that one before,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded steady. ‘Is it a Fife speciality?’
‘Heavens no,’ said Nicolette Howie. ‘That’s a well-known little song.’
She might have been half right: it might have been well known but it was far more than a little song. It was what the stranger was doing. It was the answer. The locks of three girls, three wives and three matrons, in order, in season. It was the recipe for a… there was no other word for it… a spell. I remembered all the women telling me how he had plucked and pinched, ripped off their hats, nipped at their heads. He was pulling their hair out; some of them had even said as much. He was gathering hair, on the proper night and in the required order to make, if the song was to be believed, a love potion.
Jockie Christie. Sorely in need of a wife and unable to attract one. I shuddered. He had fooled me that night in the jail cell with his forlorn look and his ruddy cheeks – there was nothing fresh and ordinary about him at all. On the contrary, he was desperate, pathetic and rather ruthless. Even Molly Tweed, who had no idea who the stranger was, had hesitated before exonerating him; perhaps she had intuited some truth about him that I had missed. I felt a twinge of conscience about Molly. Certainly, she had made up the story of her attack but perhaps Christie had been laying siege to her instead of the other way around and perhaps if I had been subjected to his attentions for five years – I remembered the sickly feeling I had got at his farm and shivered – I should have ended up imagining things too.
And did Mr Tait know what Christie was up to? I had been sure he knew something. Had his patience finally run out when faced with this pitiful and furtive little scheme? I nodded to myself. Mr Tait had decided to stop smiling at the old ways for once, and had turned to me to help him. Accordingly, as the rubber bands were rolled into a ball and the chairs were rearranged, I piped up.
‘Miss Lindsay, I hope you won’t mind me butting in like this. I’d like to say something.’
‘Oh, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘How can we refuse you anything now? Your wonderful talk that you’ve worked so hard on and you never got a chance to give it. We’re going to have to ask you to wait another month, I’m afraid. What a bitter disappointment for us all!’
‘Oh quite, quite,’ I said, thinking that I could certainly summon the strength to bear it.
‘But how can we help you?’ Miss Lindsay continued. ‘Ask anything.’
‘How many of you here tonight are mothers?’ I asked. A good few of them raised their hands uncertainly. ‘I wonder then, if I might prevail upon you to stay behind, just a moment, and listen to something I have to say. And I do apologise. Miss Lindsay – I know it’s your schoolroom, but I really must ask the others to step outside. What I have to say is not… for all ears, I hope you understand me.’
‘Watch out, Niccy,’ said Vashti, giggling. ‘The “phallic element” could be outdone yet.’
‘I shall make sure you all get home safely,’ I said as the women who had raised their hands looked at one another in confusion. ‘I won’t take a minute of your time.’
It quite destroyed the mood of the meeting, although not as much as my household budget talk would have done, I daresay. Miss Lindsay and Miss McCallum, feeling slighted, carried the canvas away carefully to set it to dry in Miss Lindsay’s private rooms. Niccy and Vashti mounted a spirited attempt to be allowed to stay, ridiculing the notion that there might be something I could say to the handful of matrons that I could not say to them, but I was adamant. The rest of the meeting melted away, although clearly beginning to feel as though what should be theirs had been comprehensively stolen from them by the outsiders tonight.
When everyone else had gone, I addressed the women remaining.
‘It’s about this dark stranger,’ I said. There were a couple of groans and a couple of nervous giggles. ‘He’s going to strike again tonight,’ I went on, ignoring all of it, ‘and he’s going to pick on someone who has children, a mother.’ I waited to see if the penny would drop in any of the rest of them about the skipping rhyme we had heard only minutes ago, but it was just as Mr Tait had said right back on the first day: no one ever listens to the words. ‘I am determined to get you all home safely, but there are too many for one trip in the motor car, so I propose we work out two sensible routes and in between times the second batch waits here.’