Alice was making tea. There was no sign of either Diana or John.
“I love this house,” she said, running her hand along the grain of the worktop.
“I know,” I said.
“No, I really love it,” she said, looking out of the window.
I asked about the bedrooms and she confirmed they had used our room on all previous visits apart from the last one, when Virginia and Donald had sought to make amends for the confusion by offering Alice and John the upstairs suite.
Diana appeared dressed in loose flowing clothes and wearing a little make-up that helped to make her eyes shine. Her thick reddish-brown hair had gone wavy, as it always seemed to do when we went away anywhere; she hated it, but I loved it. I got up to give her a kiss and felt her body relax against mine. She needed this holiday. Over her shoulder I watched the crows moving about in a random pattern in the back field.
We went to a harbour on the north side of the peninsula where John and Alice swam and Diana read a book (as a reaction against creative writing students’ ever lengthening portfolios she had brought a number of very short novels and was currently rereading Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold) while I fished from the rocks, casting out a silver lure and retrieving it, a repeated action that seemed as if it might never end unless I actually caught a fish. This finally happened as Alice and John joined us on the rocks, Alice towelling the ends of her damp hair.
At first I assumed the lure had merely become snagged in weed, which had happened once every five or six casts. But on this occasion the weed pulled back. The rod tip bent and I felt that unique and familiar conflict — the desire to let the fish have its head and take line from the spool, thus extending the fight, balanced against the need to land the fish before it swam into weed. I managed a few turns on the reel and glimpsed the glimmer of a golden flank turning in the deep water just beyond the rocks. It was a decent size, but beaten. I used the lowest ledge of the rocks to land it and knelt to unhook the lure. I turned to display my catch to the others, who applauded.
“What is it?” Diana asked.
“It’s our dinner,” I said. “A pollack. Couple more like this and we’ll eat well.”
“Really?” Diana’s eyes were wide. Perhaps she had thought I might put the fish back.
Alice stepped forward.
“May I?” she said and took the fish from me. She grasped its tail in her right hand and turned it over. In one swift movement, she cracked the top of its head against the nearest rock. I heard Diana gasp and John spoke his wife’s name as if in reproach. Alice shrugged and dropped the dead pollack on the rocks. “Catch some more,” she said, making it sound like a challenge.
Grilled and served with lemon and steamed green beans, pollack proves a more than adequate substitute for cod or haddock. A New Zealand sauvignon blanc or a pinot grigio will be the perfect accompaniment. At some point as the sky darkens, the house martins and swallows swooping over the back field will be replaced by bats, but you will be unable to identify the moment when this happens, or even if it actually has. The one thing you can be sure of is that the black dots in the background, the murder of crows, will not go away. They may change their configuration, flapping in and out of vision, altering their numbers, but two or three will always remain.
Scented candles will burn, keeping midges and mosquitoes at bay and causing shadows to flicker over faces. Intellectual arguments will ripple back and forth as the precise meanings of words will be debated, assumptions about the nature of existence questioned. Doubts, fears, uncertainties at the back of your mind will fade and retreat, but not quite disappear.
Conversation will turn, as usual, to books, to art, to films. Someone will talk about a black and white Czech film they have recently seen, made in 1968 but set in the 1930s. They will say it deserves to be better known. Someone else will confess to not liking subtitles. Another person will say that The Third Man is their favourite film of all time and you will remember the scene in the Ferris wheel, Harry Lime talking to Holly Martins, describing the people below as dots and asking him if he would really feel any pity if one of them stopped moving for ever.
The four of us in one car, we drove past the harbour where I had caught the pollack and on uphill towards the forest. We passed a rustle of reed buntings dispersing from their perch on a barbed-wire fence. Cows chewed on the long grass, their huge jaws grinding and crushing and it suddenly hit me. Cows. Cattle. The cattle like them.
“What are you smiling at?” Diana asked.
I grinned at her. “I’ll tell you later.”
When the road petered out in a pine wood, we left the car and threaded our way between the trees, startling a jay, which clattered away with a telltale flash of white rump.
Diana’s question seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Don’t you miss being here with your other friends?” she said. “Only, because you normally come with them.”
I noticed John look at Alice, who merely grunted and made a dismissive gesture with her hand.
Leaving the wood, we tramped through bracken to the unmarked summit of Slievagh. Soon after we began our descent on the seaward side, I noticed a strange black disc on the surface of the promontory ahead of us. It reminded me of the black rubber mat a bowls player will drop on the green before starting to play. Because of the changing angle of slope and the lack of other topographical features, it was difficult to tell the size. I was walking with Diana; Alice and John had pulled ahead. We exchanged shrugs, puzzled looks.
It soon became obvious it was a hole, but how deep? Was it merely the result of peat cutting? Or a landslip? It was too big for a pot hole. Once we reached the plateau, the narrow angle meant the hole resembled a sheet of water sitting on the grass. Alice and John had reached the edge and were looking down. It took Diana and me a minute or so to join them and finally get a look over the edge.
“It’s a long way down,” Diana said.
Alice and John smiled.
“There’s an easier way down to the sea over there,” John joked, pointing to where the cliff edge and a series of huge boulders appeared to offer a reasonably easy climb down to the lower rocky ledges on to which the waves could be heard perpetually pounding. Diana left the edge of the hole and walked towards the boulders. John went with her.
I looked at Alice. We were both standing a few feet from the edge and several yards apart. Taking great care I knelt down, then eased myself on to my front so that I could see right over the edge. Alice followed suit. As I looked down at the waves sloshing against the rocks more than a hundred feet below, I could feel my heart beating against the cropped turf. I looked at the sheer rock face on the far side of the hole dotted with patches of grass that clung to the most negligible of ledges, running on a diagonal towards the bottom. Half-way up, my eye was drawn to the down-turned bright-red beak of a blue-black bird bigger than a jackdaw but smaller than a crow that was perched on one of the ledges. I caught my breath and looked up at Alice to see if she had seen it. She was looking at me and her scarlet lips formed a curve, but you couldn’t really call it a smile.
Driven
Ian Rankin
I’m the one you all hate, the one you’ve been hearing and reading about. I was a hero for a short time, but now I’m the villain. Well, not the villain. Do you want to hear my side of the story? I have this need to tell someone what happened and why it happened. Here’s the truth of it: I was brought up to believe in the sanctity of life, and this has been my downfall.
I am a son of the manse. A curious phrase; it seems to be used by the media as shorthand of some kind. But it happens also to be true. My father was a Church of Scotland minister in a career spanning nearly forty years. He’d known my mother since primary school. I was their only child. In my late teens, I calculated that impregnation (a word my father would probably have used) probably took place on their Isle of Mull honeymoon. Early July they were married (by my grandfather, also a kirk minister), and I entered the world on April 1st the following year. A hard birth, according to family legend, which may explain the lack of brothers and sisters. My mother told me once that she feared I’d been stillborn, so quiet was I. Even when the doctor slapped my backside, I merely frowned and gave a pout (family legend again).