CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I wake in the morning to birds singing and the distinct sensation of paranoia. What, exactly, did I see last night, I think, staring down at my bare feet on the floor at the side of the bed.
In those few seconds of clarity before my eyes opened I saw, in total, the implausibility of the situation. How did he do it? Does he not need to breathe, underwater? And how is it that the only person to answer my advertisement would be him?
Last night, in the forest. In the blue daylight it seems like a dream. Whatever his purpose there, it was secretive. Like all the rest of him. What is he? And is it possible that these two impossible things- first, that he arrived here seeming to know something of what I am, and second, that he seems to be unusual himself- are linked?
There is something in my paranoia- something validated by the very uncanniness of his being here at all- that rings true. Because it must. Because there is no reasonable explanation. Because nothing about his insertion into my life seems coincidental.
I wipe the crust from my eyes with a thumb. How did he find me? As for the why, I know that much. To blackmail you, he told me, lazily, swinging himself in his hammock. To blackmail me, perhaps not out of something- money, the estate- but into something? Perhaps into an act I would not otherwise commit. Or a disclosure I would not otherwise make.
I can wait around and find out. Or I take action now. At present I'm experiencing one of my least favorite sensations: that of entrapment while waiting for a change.
.
"If you wouldn't mind," I ask.
He's kneeling in the squash patch, tilting up to me, shading the sun from his eyes with his hand. However strange his nocturnal swim was, it's resurrected him. The grey pallor of his hangover is gone.
"Who's finishing this all, then?" He spreads one hand to indicate the pile of weeds at his side and waves the other out to the rest of the patch.
I squat down myself so that we're at eye level. "You," I tell him, "when you return, please."
He snorts and leans forward to tap me on the knee with the dandelion green in his left hand. "That's what you think. Demands like these are why we had George Square. Haven't you ever heard of the ILO?"
"Yes. They sent a man round yesterday, but you were asleep," I tell him, and he laughs in spite of himself and stands up, sighing, tossing the green into the pile, his head bowing before mine, and as the red of it is picked up by the sun and glows bright as electric filaments I cannot help but think of his bowed head in the dark, last night, traced over by moonlight.
.
His errand into the village would be unnecessary if I hadn't, upon entering the kitchen early this morning, dumped the remainder of the tea box into a bowl, then placed that bowl atop a cabinet she could never hope to reach without a tall chair and prior knowledge. There is only one provision that Agnes finds life unmanageable without. All I had to do was wait.
Not too long afterward I heard familiar, abrasive sounds of complaint coming from the kitchen and put down my pen, waited for her footstep in the hall.
"We've run out of tea," Agnes told me, scowling, and crossed her arms.
"We've run out of tea," I then went and told Seamus.
It will be, I calculate, forty minutes at the least that he'll be away, and to do what I've planned will only take half of them.
.
I haven't been inside this cottage since it was Jepson's. Back then everything in it had the murky yellow-brown tint of a portrait photograph, walls and windows included, the residue of a combination of pipe smoke, uncleared chimney, and neglect; back then it looked as though five men lived in it simultaneously and they fought every night. Even though Jepson's life constituted my sole example of mature masculinity I regarded most of his arrangements, including the cottage, with the disgusted wonderment that the young have towards the inevitable misfortunes of adulthood. I recall telling myself, for example, that when I was old I would never leave worn socks to harden on a windowsill, which he did out of an erroneous belief in the cleansing power of sunlight. At that age I had no idea that there were far worse indignities I would commit. Such as the one I am presently engaged in. Wherein I am sneaking around the home of the man for whom I hold regard, in order to paw through his life.
What I am pawing for, specifically, are clues: any fragment that will tell me who Seamus was before I met him, and who or what was the reason that sent him to my door. But what I am first experiencing is the shock of how greatly the cottage has altered in his care. He's even washed the low ceiling. Somehow now this medieval room, off-kilter and sloping and handbuilt of plastered cob, shares something of the austerity of a ship's cabin. It's orderly. Blanket taut on the narrow bed. Suit hanging brushed against the back wall. Everything spaced out and anchored down in preparation for the storm. Even his Sunday shoes under the bed have their laces looped together around the leg of the frame, a habit I suppose one forms from years of dressing in cramped, rolling darkness.
I look around. It doesn't take long, he doesn't own much. Spaced out on the little shelf at the foot of the bed are a stack of beeswax candles wrapped in butcher's paper, a fist-sized knot of old rope, a small bronze arrowhead. A book on his bedside table. I flip through it. Pressed between every other cheap onionskin page is a flower. Clovers, pansies, unidentified grey-green smudges, ghosts of petals crusted on the words beneath. My eyes stop on a line haloed by the stain of a rose petal like a wine droplet:
Vaster than the sea
The yawning distances o'er which we go
On our frail paths of sundering destiny
I flip through the rest and the flowers ruffle. No papers are hidden inside. It isn't the type of book I would expect him to have, this book of poetry; my assumption is that was a gift, but the frontispiece is blank and there is no inscription but the word Tulloch in his own oversized, sloping hand. I put it down.
The small writing desk where Jepson used to hide bottles now only holds a set of ivory dice, a sewing kit, a bottle of ink, an old-fashioned glass pen, a serrated knife in a sheath. Tobacco tin, half-full. Stub of grease pencil. Six handkerchiefs, clean. Wax-paper sack of penny candy, also half-full. A piece of cardboard folded over to make a cover for scraps of paper with a series of dates and numbers penciled on them: latitude and longitude, I suppose; his version of a diary perhaps. At the sink, a straight razor, a carved ivory comb. There's nothing in the desk's secret drawer but cold air. Nothing under the mattress.
His clothes look shabby when he's not in them. Trousers, grass-stained and threadbare. As I pick them up they unfold into the angular lines of his body and form a ghost of him, narrow-hipped and bowlegged, stained at the knees. There is nothing in the pockets but a handkerchief and coins. Nothing in the pockets of the coat, either, but for some smooth pebbles. Both woolen undershirts have patches in the underarms, mismatched scraps darned in with crowded, amateur stitches. He gave up on the elbows, I notice.
There is something I don't like about myself in this moment, standing in the half-dark of the cottage holding his shirt. Something about my grasping fingers. Something in the way I am reluctant to let go of his things once they are in my hands. I want to rub my mouth against the wool, into his good smell. I don't. I try to fold the undershirt back the way it was.
His smell. First, his skin, inimitable and complex, then: broken earth, sap, brine, sweat, pipe smoke; and underneath all that the scent I have always noticed on him but never been able to catalogue. It smells- I grope for a descriptor- like distance. Far-away. It smells alien. And although he hasn't been in here since early morning the scent hangs strong in the cottage, distinct, strange, not at all unpleasant. It's coming from the corner. I turn.
Nothing's there but his sea-chest, the only possession of his that I haven't yet rooted around in. Abruptly I recognize the gravity of what I am doing and its indisputable, straightforward wrongness. If there were such a thing as black-and-white, this intrusion of mine into his life is pitch-black. Wholly indefensible.
What you are doing, a voice somewhere just beneath the crown of my head says, is protecting yourself. What you are doing is only fair.
A competing voice, wordless, thrums up from my heart and argues. What I am doing is wrong, it tells me. But I've already broken into his privacy, and what if the answer is inside? My heart's voice wavers underneath the hammering of suspicion, and extinguishes, and I pull open the lid.