It was a voice I remembered from childhood, booming but distinct and able to penetrate walls without yelling. Miss Kincaid shrugged her shoulders and ushered me in.
We crossed a dark lobby with a staircase and entered a very warm room of dark furniture with a bright coal fire. Beside it in a wheelchair sat Big Sam, now hideously fat, his legs covered by a tartan rug. A table at his elbow had books and papers on it, a jug of water, a glass and a decanter of pale golden liquid. He said, “Your name is? Valerio? Formerly Ferguson? Then your father had the excellent dry goods shop on the high street. I taught your uncles and your elder brother. Chrissie, offer our Mrs Valerio biscuits, cake and — tea? Coffee? Sherry? Why not sherry? I, you see, am a whiskyholic” — (he waved toward the decanter) — “but I never drink enough to become a total victim of my sister’s ministrations. No. I am careful to keep my mind intact, my intellect in control.”
I said I would like tea and Miss Kincaid left the room.
“Good!” he said on a more intimate note, “I am a crippled giant but not the ogre my sister has probably suggested to you. My sufferings derive from a strong intelligence diverted by those who hate me into the culde-sac of memory — a form of torture I assure you, Mrs Valerio. What a relief to meet someone with whom I can intelligently converse!”
He talked to me for a very long time. Miss Kincaid must have brought biscuits and tea but his flow of talk wiped out any sense of consuming them. He told me the social history of The Long Town in the lifetime of his father and himself, illustrating it with personal anecdotes, many of them interesting, but it is exhausting to be treated as an audience for over an hour by a single intense speaker. The more often I looked at the clock the more often he asked if he was boring me. I lacked the courage to answer truly but he was watching me far too closely to miss other signs of restlessness. They inspired him to talk faster and faster. Miss Kincaid must have learned not to hear Sam when not wanting to. She sat nearby calmly reading with a slight smile on her face that first struck me as mischievous then downright malicious until, after ninety minutes, she snapped the book shut, stood up and said, “Mrs Valerio has to visit some other people, Sam.”
I stood up too.
“Goodbye, Mrs Valerio,” he said, offering his hand. “I am at the mercy of a sister who is given to engineering these abrupt departures. My little holiday is ended but please visit the crippled giant again. Come again soon. Don’t be a stranger.”
I said I would come again. With something like a sneer he reached for the whisky muttering what sounded like, “I doubt it.” Miss Kincaid escorted me to the front door murmuring, “Serves you right,” but our later walks back from the evening class were as friendly as the first.
Years later I returned to The Long Town for my father’s funeral, then for my mother’s. Both had Church of Scotland services. The second was better attended because the Free Kirk congregation had by then joined ours, having become too small to maintain a separate minister of its own. I knew hardly any of the old people present so on leaving the church was pleased to see Miss Kincaid looking remarkably unchanged. I told her so and asked about her brother.
“Here he is!” she said, introducing a small compact man with eyes as blue and alert as her own. The complexion of his bald head and cut of his neatly trimmed beard showed this was Joe, the nautical brother. I asked how Sam was.
“As vocal as ever,” she said merrily. “We’ve moved him upstairs. Come home for a drink with us.”
So we three walked back to the old manse.
It was a chill November afternoon with occasional gusts of thin rain and I made a conventional remark about the weather. “Yes, a miserable climate,” said Joe cheerily. “I’ve seen much worse weather but for sheer dull depressing misery a damp Scottish November cannot be surpassed.”
He seemed highly satisfied with such Scottish Novembers. “I disagree,” said Miss Kincaid. “Autumn is Scotland’s most colourful season. Fresh spring leaves look lovely but they don’t look fresh for long. By the end of summer they’ve been tired and dusty for months. Then comes September and they start withering into golden greens, deep purples and all the rich colours I’ve seen in reproductions of Gauguin’s paintings. I’m sure they would damage our eyes if we saw them by the strong sunlight of Tahiti.”
“Those don’t look very dazzling,” said Joe, pointing to the pavement. Adhering to the tarmac and almost as black was a thin carpet of rotten old leaves with some recent ones the colour of dung.
“But what an excellent background for those!” said Miss Kincaid, pointing to a couple of fallen chestnut fans further on. Each leaf was a glowing yellow that blended through orange into crimson at the tip, with a pale green streak along the central veins.
As we entered the manse lobby we heard from above a vocal hullabaloo. Miss Kincaid looked at Joe who said calmly, “Yes, it’s my turn.”
Without haste he removed and hung up cap and coat and went upstairs. Miss Kincaid led me into the room where I had last seen Sam, switching on bright lights that made the dark furniture look solidly comforting instead of forbidding. The air was pleasantly warm.
“Home,” she said. “Home home home. Would you like a sherry? I’m having one.” We sat sipping sherry and watching the flames in the hearth. She said, “They’re gas flames now and no trouble at all. Sam loved the old coal fire, said the constantly changing flames were a more varied show than television. He also liked to see me poking it or adding coals every half hour. When Joe came home we outnumbered Sam. Our change to gas so enraged him that he retreated upstairs. We installed a lift attachment to the banister that can easily take the twenty stone of him up and down. Joe would gladly drive Sam and his wheelchair to the park or anywhere else he likes, but no. Sam says he will never let anyone see a Kincaid in a pitiable state, will never let Joe condescend to him, so he sticks in his room. Laziness masquerading as pride, you see. Sheer obstinate idiocy in fact. Yet Sam used to be a better Labour councillor than most of them.”
We had another sherry. She said, “Our father is to blame. He was a selfish monster who forbad us to play with other children. He damaged Sam most because Sam was his favourite so grew up like him, only happy with people he could bully. Thank God Joe and I had each other. We told each other all sorts of lovely stories and invented all sorts of exciting games when nobody was looking. Our affection made us quite unfit for matrimony. By going to sea Joe was able to sample other sorts of affection. He told me about them in letters because he knew I could never be jealous of purely temporary mates. He was living the life I would have led had I been a man, and I knew he would return to me at last. Another sherry?”
Joe entered and said, “Dinner-time. The Great I Am upstairs has grudgingly assented to oxtail soup, bangers and mash, tinned peaches with ice cream. What do you ladies want?”
We wanted the same. Joe prepared it and the three of us dined at the kitchen table with long chatty intervals between courses, the last of which was coffee with chocolates and liqueurs. Prompted by Chrissie Joe quietly recounted very entertaining comic or terrifying oversea adventures and every forty minutes he or she went upstairs and attended briefly to Sam. Sitting round the kitchen table was so agreeable that we ended the evening there playing scrabble. My companions showed a relaxed pleasure in each other that I have sometimes (not often) noticed in recently married couples, but such marital pleasure is usually exclusive. I felt part of this Kincaid domesticity and had not felt so happily at home for years.