The Silver Bough Read online

  “I want to take it personally. I want to learn something that matters to me.”

  “Like what?”

  How could he not know? “Art.”

  He looked even more pained. “Drawing pictures? Painting?”

  “I’ve always liked…”

  “I know that,” he jumped in. “Your drawings are good. But I thought it was more like a hobby. You never said anything about doing it professionally. Can you make a living from drawing?”

  She shrugged impatiently. She wasn’t ready for a big discussion about career possibilities, but it was her own fault for starting it. “I like looking at art, too, so maybe I should learn more about it. I could see myself maybe working in a gallery or something.” She imagined spending her days surrounded by beauty, saw herself moving confidently through a large, well-lit space, the white walls hung with paintings.

  “You want to be an art major?” His eyes flickered; she imagined him consulting a mental database of all the colleges in the area. “Where would you go for that? SMU? That’s good, I think, but pricey. Could your parents afford it? Could you get in there?”

  “I don’t know.” Majoring in art was something she’d decided against in high school, on practical grounds. Leaving aside the whole question of talent (if she could), she didn’t have the right temperament for an artist or a teacher. There were other possibilities, which she’d discussed with Freya, but she felt no need to rehearse them with him. “I need time to think. That’s why I’m going to take a year off. I can get a job and live at home.”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  “What do you mean? I am telling you.”

  “But you made up your mind without talking to me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She sighed heavily, bored and guilty. “But it’s my life, my problem, and I have to solve it.”

  “I thought I was part of your life.”

  There was nothing she could say to that. He had been a part of her life for almost four months, but really only in the way that a bandage or a wound dressing is after a major accident. It doesn’t replace the missing part, and eventually has to be peeled away and discarded. He was a nice guy and deserved better, but knowing that made her no less cold. “I need time to think. I need to get away from everything for a while.”

  “Including me. I see.” His shoulders sagged; he looked as if he would crumple and fall forward, grabbing on to her for support, but he stood up, steadying himself by resting his knuckles against the table where their two drinks waited, still untouched and sweating onto the pale Formica. “If it’d been me who’d died, I bet you wouldn’t have dumped your best friend like this.”

  She caught her breath. “She wouldn’t have tried to make me feel guilty if I needed to leave.”

  “So I make you feel guilty?” He groaned. “Is that supposed to make me feel worse, or better? I can’t win, can I?”

  “No, you can’t. I’m sorry, Brandon.”

  She’d expected to have a much harder time getting her parents to accept her decision; they’d always been so firm about the importance of college. For the first month she was home she worked hard at two jobs, at Kinko’s in the daytime and in the evenings as a waitress at Chili’s, and scarcely had time to talk to her parents. When it finally came out that she didn’t intend to return to school in the fall, she was surprised by how calmly they took it.

  “Only for a year,” she said quickly. “I just want a year off, to think about things and…well, I’d like to do some painting. Maybe I could take an art course somewhere.”

  “You were thinking of staying here?” asked her mother.

  “Yeah…if that’s all right. I mean, you weren’t planning to rent out my room, were you?”

  “The thought crossed our minds,” said her dad with a straight face. “But then I thought of how much it would cost to put all your things in storage and decided against it. But wouldn’t you rather go somewhere else? Travel?”

  She stared at him in surprise. “Well…yes. That’s kind of what I’m saving up for…”

  “I’ve got enough frequent flyer miles to get you to Scotland.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “To get me to Scotland?”

  “You’d like to see where your grandmother grew up, wouldn’t you? You could take pictures. Maybe even solve the mystery of why she left.”

  “Paint the Scottish landscape,” suggested her mother.

  “The Walkers would be happy to put you up. After you’ve tasted the delights of Appleton you could check out the museums and galleries in Glasgow and Edinburgh.”

  “You can be our advance scout. Tell us what to see and what to avoid—because we are definitely going next year.”

  It was completely unexpected, and, unexpectedly, she decided it was perfect: exactly what she needed. A complete break from the world she knew, yet with relatives to provide a link. Investigating her grandmother’s past would give her a project to work on, supplying a reason to be there instead of somewhere else.

  Now she gazed out the window at the famously beautiful Loch Lomond. She remembered learning a song about it in elementary school: a lifetime ago, in another century. The scenery beyond the bus window belonged to an even more distant past; it looked like something in a movie, and she felt rather as if she was watching one now, as if this bus was a theme park ride, and everything outside created to give pleasure. It was even her favorite kind of weather, cool, cloudy, and mysterious, with the tops of the hills—or were they mountains?—hidden in low cloud.

  The road narrowed and began to wind through the craggy heights. The bus slowed and grumbled with effort. Her ears popped.

  Some of the slopes were barren landscapes, the huge boulders jutting out of the thin soil reminding her of an illustration from a geology textbook. She decided they were definitely too steep to be hills, so must be mountains, the first she’d ever seen in real life. Hardy shrubs and tough grasses sprouted between the rocks, nibbled by big-horned, bedraggled-looking sheep or goats. Some of them looked up as the bus lumbered past, staring across the distance from slotted yellow devil’s eyes. Veils of mist shivered and parted, floating away like ghostly spirits. At any moment, she thought, a couple of animatronic skeletons should lurch out at them, clanking and moaning to give the passengers a pleasurable fright.

  Finally, the bus stopped laboring so hard as the road leveled out, but then, almost immediately, it began winding downward in a long, slow descent. She looked down at a mountainside covered in dark green pines like a pelt of thick fur, and up at a glittering, roaring cascade of water that tumbled steeply down over rocks. There were no buildings anywhere. It was all wilderness, with nothing man-made in sight but the long and winding road.

  Except for the traffic, there was nothing to fix you to a particular era. The scene was magically timeless. Wander off across that rocky meadow, or into the shelter of that dark forest, far enough to lose the sight and sound of the highway, and you might find yourself in another century, meeting some hunky, shaggy, kilted Highlander…

  The fantasy was barely taking shape when she noticed the solitary figure of a man walking by the roadside ahead of the bus. He had a purposeful stride, like a man who had been walking a long time with a clear aim in view, yet he wasn’t dressed like a recreational hiker. He wasn’t wearing a rucksack or a brightly colored windbreaker or hiking boots. His clothes were nondescript, but wrong for the setting; like his leather slip-ons, they belonged to an indoor life. He might have dashed out like that to pick up a pizza, but what is he doing out here in the mountains? Where is his car?

  She leaned forward, pressing her face close to the window, wondering if he’d signal to the bus driver to pick him up. Sure enough, she saw him stop and half turn, looking up at the noisy approach. But his look was not for the driver. Instead, it skated across the passenger windows until it found hers.

  The feeling—

  Later, trying to describe it to herself, she compared it to the description in one of the Harry Potter
books of the effect of the magical portkey. She remembered Harry’s feeling that a hook just behind his navel had been yanked to pull him forward—yes, it was like that, something at once magical and visceral, although for herself the location of the hook was somewhat lower down.

  It happened in an instant, when his eyes met hers, and it was over almost as quickly—and unlike the fictional portkey, it did not carry her out of the bus and to another place. It couldn’t have lasted, that connection, more than a second or two, because by then the bus had roared past, and although she twisted around in her seat to keep him in view, in a matter of moments, tilting vertiginously, the bus swept around another bend, and the walking man was out of sight.

  She fell back in her seat and tried to breathe normally. She felt herself throbbing all over. What the hell was that?

  But she knew, all right.

  Lust. Pure lust.

  She put her hand on the empty seat beside her, imagining Freya’s raucous laughter. Get over it! He was a hunk, so what? Do you think he spoke English? There’ll be another one along in about fifteen minutes, if you can wait that long.

  Maybe this was another product of jet lag and sleep deprivation, an emotion out of the same stable as the remote detachment with which she’d viewed Glasgow. It was movie time again, where a single, sexually charged look between strangers turned into the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

  Or maybe…maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe she’d been asleep and dreaming.

  Frowning, she sat up straighter. Now that was ridiculous. She would know if she’d been asleep. He had been real. She remembered a pair of dark, rather narrow eyes, and how they’d found hers. Like an aftershock, she felt the power of his look again: The feeling had been mutual.

  Yet, although she remembered how the sight of him—and his look—had affected her, she found it oddly difficult to recall what he had looked like. How would she describe him to someone? How would she draw him?

  A stranger, she thought. She felt sure he wasn’t Scottish—not with that dark, almost honey-colored skin and those faintly slanting eyes—but she’d be hard-pressed to assign him to any particular race. Maybe he was an American dropout, hitchhiking around the world; maybe he was one of the Romany, heading for his people’s encampment down some hidden byway; maybe he was an asylum-seeker fleeing an oppressive foreign regime, a romantic exile…

  She closed her eyes and took herself back to her first sighting of the solitary figure, determined to know more. She saw his back, wide shoulders in a drab-colored shirt worn over a dark-colored tee shirt and straight-legged, khaki pants. No hat; short, thick, straight black hair. Loafers on his feet.

  He stopped and turned as the bus approached and looked up, giving her a perfectly clear view of his face in the moment before his eyes burned into hers.

  “Inveraray. Fifteen minutes. Public toilets located directly ahead, across from the paper shop. No chips or other fried foods on the bus. Departing promptly in fifteen minutes. Thank you.”

  She woke when the throb of the bus engine cut out, in time to hear the driver’s announcement, and saw and felt the people around her getting up and moving slowly toward the door. She yawned, blinked, and stretched, disoriented. How long did I sleep? She remembered the solitary hiker she’d seen on the road and shivered with desire, even as she wondered if he’d been anything more than a dream.

  The bus had emptied out. She noticed that most people had left behind something to mark their seats: a newspaper, a scarf, a book, even handbags and one portable CD player, as if they’d just strolled out of their own living rooms and there was no danger of theft. She didn’t feel confident enough to do the same, and took her small rucksack with her as she made her way off the empty bus.

  Outside the air was chillier than she’d expected, and it was raining. The bus was parked beside a small shelter where several passengers were huddled, smoking cigarettes; others made their way toward the whitewashed concrete block of public conveniences. Zipping up the front of her brushed-cotton jacket and pulling up the hood against the rain, she stepped out onto soggy grass and strolled toward the water’s edge. She walked just long enough to stretch some of the kinks out of her legs, but by the time she got back to the bus her jacket was soaked through. The rain was not heavy, but it was unrelenting.

  The cool air and brief exercise woke her up for the rest of the journey. She was glad she didn’t suffer from motion sickness because after Inverary the bus never stopped swaying from side to side. Although they had left the mountains behind, the road ahead unfurled like a wandering river, never running straight, and full of switchbacks as it followed the natural line of the rugged coast, always taking the route of least resistance—going around lakes and the rockiest hills, never over or through them. Obviously, when this road was built, bridges and tunnels had not been budgeted for. It was narrow, too, not made with any large vehicles in mind. On occasion it ran along a narrow ledge, close to a rise of solid rock, with a drop down to the water on the other side, and very little in the way of verge or guardrails. She wondered what would happen if they happened to meet another bus going in the other direction on one of those bends, and hoped she would not have to find out.

  The bus made about a dozen stops along the way to let people on or off; usually in tiny villages, once at a ferry terminus, and once to let a man off in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere: no house in view, not even a bus shelter or a sign to indicate that there was any reason to stop. At first all the land between the villages looked like uninhabited wilderness: steep hills, empty rocky moorlands, or stretches of thick, dark conifer forest on the side of the road not bordered by the sea. But at some point this changed. The land became more obviously arable, and the rolling green fields were dotted with grazing sheep or cattle—including some long-horned, long-haired, ginger-colored shaggy beasts like a cartoonist’s notion of cows suitable for a cold climate—all looking rather miserable in churned, muddy fields beneath lashing rain.

  Although it still hugged the coast, the road became straighter and flatter for a short while. Then, about fifteen minutes before they were due to arrive in Appleton, the bus began to labor up another hill, shuddering slightly as it geared down and wobbled around yet another tight bend.

  Ashley felt her stomach lurch as she looked out at the precipitous drop to the sea below, lashed by rain that now fell in torrents, foaming and churning around the rough teeth of sharp rocks. More tall, jagged rock thrust up on the other side of the road in the narrowest hairpin bend she’d ever seen. Water gushed from a crack in the hillside, spurting down to splash against the side of the bus, and she flinched and shut her eyes, feeling that the journey had become just a little too much like a theme park ride: “Will the stagecoach make it through to Dodge City?”

  She didn’t open her eyes again until she could tell from the movement of the bus that it was again traveling a relatively straight and level path. They were back amid homely-looking farmland, with a few houses dotted here and there among the sodden green fields, a glitter of grey sea in the distance, but no sign of those weird rock formations.

  She sighed in relief and checked her watch again: Not long now.

  They passed what was obviously a working farm, big white house standing foursquare among a system of barns and sheds, and a strong smell of manure hanging in the air. Someone wrapped in bright yellow rain gear was leading a weary-looking grey horse across a field. Across the road, two black-and-white dogs and a man on a quad-bike were herding sheep.

  A row of multicolored cottages: pink, blue, and white. A very suburban-looking redbrick bungalow, with a garage beside it, a swing set and bicycles in the front yard. An abandoned stone house, the windows boarded over. A sign saying PRIVATE ROAD, then a gatepost with the name ORCHARD HOUSE. Then there was something that looked like an abandoned factory, and then the sign: WELCOME TO APPLETON on top, and below a line of foreign text: “failte a innis ubhall.”

  The road descended. Appleton was in a sheltered vall
ey, with high hills looming around it, but she saw them for only a few moments, for then she was in the town and the buildings, although none were more than three stories high, blocked them out. It was beginning to grow dark, and rain was falling harder than ever. The streets were empty of pedestrians, and the shops all seemed to be closed although it was only just five o’clock. In general, the impression was of a deserted and rather miserable town hunched in on itself, not offering anything to the visitor. Yet her heart began to beat faster as the bus carried her deeper into the narrow streets, and a tingling warmth spread throughout her body as if she’d been looking for something all her life and had just recognized the place where it might be found.

  From A Visitor’s Guide to Appleton

  (Women’s Institute, 1972)

  Appleton Public Library and Museum

  (Esplanade and Wall Street)

  UNDOUBTEDLY the most striking and memorable building in the whole town, and one no visitor should miss. Also known as “the Wall building,” it was a gift to the town and people of Appleton by the local philanthropist Lachlan Wall, and designed by his nephew, the Glasgow-trained architect Alexander Wall (1855–1930). It took more than three years to construct, and was officially opened in 1899. The golden dome is a well-known local landmark and this, with the elaborate carved stone pillars on the exterior (decorative rather than structurally necessary), led to a local wit dubbing the library “Solomon’s Temple,” a nickname you may find is still in use today. There are certainly Classical and Eastern influences in the exterior design which would make it look more at home in a country far distant from Scotland; however, the interior decorative details are very much in the famous “Glasgow Style” Art Nouveau. The symbol of an apple with the intertwined letters APL was designed by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (wife of Charles Rennie Mackintosh), and the stained-glass window in the towering foyer, as well as the classical frieze above the fireplace in the Ladies’ Reading Room, are by her sister, Frances Macdonald.