CHAPTER SIX
It's been far more complicated than I had expected.
Taking him on was simple. He worked the day he came, industriously and without any questions. Agnes kept an outraged surveillance on him from a chair in the back garden. I kept to myself upstairs, restless, uneasy in my decision. But just before dinner he came sweat-stained and triumphant to stand, arms folded, at the kitchen door, where Rosalind blinked at him and Agnes handed him his day's pay, informing him reluctantly that he had done well, that I had decided the cottage was his to move into in the morning. We hadn't even argued: she'd said no and I'd said yes and left the room.
Early the next morning I leaned on the sill and watched him move in. From the trunk of a hire-car parked in the lane came one small and battered chest, a wool coat, an old canvas naval bag- this is how I learned his Christian name, by the Seamus Tulloch, Stromness, Orkney, painted in a blue sloping hand down its side- and a heavily-labelled suitcase with a pair of boots strung by their laces to the handle. He rested an elbow against the side of the car, leaning in the window where the driver, a craggy blond man I recognized from the town over, spoke to him intently. Or, perhaps, asked him questions: he shrugged, several times, stood back from the car and laughed, turned a palm. The driver shook his head. I watched Mr. Tulloch hoist the chest onto his shoulder, watched the driver give a brief wave and then swivel in his seat to peer up at the house. I pulled back from the window.
Mr. Tulloch strode down the path to the cottage as though he owned it, boots bumping against the side of the case. It was done, I realized, and now irreversible. From the library window the cottage is a small thatched mound buried amid the violent yellow-green of spring. I watched his rolling step disappearing around the side of the cottage. The window opening from inside.
I could not begin to imagine the whole of my world fitting in a chest and a suitcase. In that moment I realized how alone he must be, and I felt a touch safer in my choice, as well as a brush of pity.
Then I wondered what questions the driver had asked him. They could have been innocuous. But I doubted it.
.
The complication began as soon as I spoke to him. I hadn't intended to speak to him at all, really. In my concept, which was naive and which he immediately destroyed, I would merely exist beside him, both of us in our separate lives. Mr. Tulloch would take up Jepson's unfinished work. I would continue on much as I had, except for the sensation of disquiet he effected within me. We would nod to each other. Say "Good morning" and "Good evening." I would pay him, and he would, I assumed, do as he pleased.
The only part of that which I'd predicted correctly was the last. He'd been installed in the cottage a few hours when I heard heavy footsteps on the gravel outside the stable, where I was inside clearing out the stall.
"Sir? Ah- my lord?" he called to me, and then nodded to Easy, who was biting at a fly.
"Good morning," I said.
"That side gate wants lifting."
It did. It had 'wanted lifting' for the majority of my life. Jepson propped it up with stones years ago. After those sank the ancient gate drooped back into the garden, held up only by the ropes of the vines, and since then I'd just resorted to climbing the fence when I needed to leave. Over his shoulder the wreck of the gate was obscured by the cart full of trimmings I assumed he wanted to push through it.
Mr. Tulloch looked towards the house, speculatively.
"It's only yourself here, and the ol' missus?" A chip in one of his front teeth, I noticed. A pale star-shaped scar dented the lip above it.
"And our cook," I said. "Rosalind."
He frowned, turned, gestured behind him. "It's a two-man's job."
So it was. The gate was a monstrosity of Georgian wrought iron. He needed my help. I gazed at him, measuring. This was more than I'd asked for. I could feel the safety of my entire arrangement eroding, like standing on a ridge of a sand dune.
He looked back at me and his eyes smiled into mine, an amused, knowing smirk, the kind of look you give someone when you've just watched them knock their head. I was instantly irritated. My gloves were already on, and to deny him would be ridiculous, but it was the smirk that made me set the rake down.
In reality, I'd fallen in the hole I'd dug for myself. The belief that I merely stood on its edge was an illusion. So I set my teeth and nodded, and stepped forward.
He walked beside me toward the garden and immediately started in on me. I felt I had no choice but to answer to his questions, and that is how we began to talk.