The Silver Bough Read online

  From the huge bunch she carried, Kathleen isolated the stubby little key that unlocked the bookcases, and allowed herself the fantasy of discovering a first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, or something beautiful, hand-lettered and illuminated on vellum by some long-ago monk. In fact, she knew how far-fetched her fantasy was, because the contents of these bookcases had been listed in a small, hard-backed notebook by an earlier librarian, and transcribed in the last year by some council employee to be submitted with the draft resolution. There could be nothing obviously, famously valuable here, or she’d have heard about it. She thought it likely that it was the distinct lack of anything really “sexy” that made their Edinburgh-based expert reluctant to make the long, tedious journey across country to spend a day holed up in here. Which didn’t mean there weren’t a few books worth more than a hundred pounds apiece to the right collector; only that this consignment wasn’t going to make anyone’s fortune.

  None of the books had been marred by reference numbers on their spines, but guessing that it would have gone against the grain of a professional librarian to shelve the journal of Alexander Wall out of alphabetical order, she looked for the far end of the alphabet, and very quickly spotted a slim, pale brown book without a title, almost invisible between Country Rambles by Malcolm Waddell and The Collected Sermons of the Rev. S. Wallace.

  “Aw, there you are, darlin’,” she murmured, feeling pleased with herself as she extracted the little book. The first page confirmed her discovery. Handwritten in clear, although rather faded, brown ink on creamy paper was:

  Recollections

  of

  Alexander (McNeill) Wall,

  member, R.I.B.A.

  and long resident

  in

  Appleton

  She turned to the next page:

  I have never claimed, nor wanted, any homeland but this, my beloved Appleton. My parents both were born here, and my father’s father and his father before him. I, however, was born on the other side of the world, on my father’s sugar plantation on the island of Trinidad, and did not set foot on Scottish soil until the ripe old age of ten when, after my father’s untimely death, my dear mother removed us to Appleton. I had been a somewhat sickly child, but I flourished as never before in the cool, balmy ocean air, like a sapling transplanted to more nourishing soil. However, barely had I put down roots before they were wrenched up again; after only four years in Appleton I was sent away to Glasgow, where I was apprenticed to a firm of architects, and thus learned my trade. Lost and lonely as I often felt in the big city, I cannot truthfully regret it, as it is that training which prepared me to become the architect I am now, and fitted me not only to make a living, but allowed me to return at last, to live and flourish in Appleton, and, as well, to make my own contribution to the ‘wee toon’.

  Reading the words written so long ago by the man who had built this library gave her a thrill; it was as if the building did contain a secret room, and he was still alive inside it. His handwriting was neat and clear, almost as easy to decipher as some printed books. She closed it and held it pressed for a second against her chest, deciding that she would read it quickly herself before mentioning to Graeme Walker that she’d found it.

  The rain was still coming down in sheets, so that when she went out the back door of the library she had the impression that it had been built behind a waterfall. A contrary wind even blew it into the shelter of the loggia that ran between the library and the house, so she was showered with spray in the few moments it took her to lock up and wrestle the heavy storm doors into place before dashing home.

  The Library House was a charming miniature, built with the same attention to decorative design as the bigger building and echoing its architecture. Although the rooms were small, she loved all the doll’s house details. There was a stained-glass panel above the front door, an Art Deco-style fireplace in the living room, and a decorative glass domed cupola on the roof, which filled the stairway and the tiny upstairs hallway with light. There wasn’t room for half her furniture, but she reasoned that selling it off had not only saved her money on moving and storage, but gave her a welcome excuse for buying new things that were not saturated with memories of her failed marriage.

  Originally the house had been occupied by a caretaker who had tended the garden, seen to cleaning and repairs, and acted as a night watchman, but that job had gone to an earlier round of budget cuts. The house was not tied to the librarian’s job, but when she’d been told that she could rent it from the council, Kathleen had eagerly accepted. She reasoned that she’d been impulsive about accepting the job and should not also rush into buying a house. If life in remotest Scotland was not to her taste, she might want to move again after only a year. She’d be better off without the burden of a mortgage; it would be wise to wait and look around a little.

  This, at any rate, was what she told her concerned friends.

  But, really, what other house could compete with this one? She’d achieved her childhood dream of living in a library.

  She let herself in and switched on the light, admiring the reproduction Art Deco chandelier she’d installed only two weeks ago. It was so much nicer and more in keeping with the style of the house than the ugly, utilitarian plastic fixture that had been there before. The long hallway had looked gloomy and unwelcoming when she’d first seen it, but she’d painted the walls a fresh, pale lilac and given the yellowish woodwork a coat of fresh white gloss, then hung a couple of framed Mucha prints, and thought that Alexander Wall himself might have approved.

  IT WAS WELL past midnight when Mario turned off the lights and locked the chip shop, his working day finally at an end. The last customers had come in not long after eleven, as he’d expected: young men who’d shouted or made slurred, incomprehensible remarks as they ordered battered deep-fried sausages, meat pies, and large portions of chips to add to stomachs distended with beer. Once they’d gone, he might just as well have turned the door sign over to CLOSED and hurried through the cleaning, but his uncle—free to leave when he felt like it and untroubled by the need to pay a decent wage to the blood relative he’d taken in as a favor—set the opening hours and the menu, and didn’t respond well to helpful suggestions.

  “You’re not here to tell me my business,” he said sharply. “You’re here to learn. Do your work, pay attention, and maybe you’ll gain some understanding of how to make a living.”

  One thing Mario understood perfectly well was that he hadn’t been sent to this remote backwater to learn anything. If his English improved—as it had—that was a bonus; but his parents thought no more than he did of the importance of the arcane mysteries of preparing, serving, and selling cheap and disgusting fried food. He was here for no other reason than to be kept out of harm’s way. It was true—as some ignorant drunk had once shouted at him, meaning to give offense, probably imagining it to be some new term of racial abuse—he was an asylum-seeker, although not for the usual reasons.

  In his final year of school, Mario had fallen in love with his music teacher, and she with him. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened, and he’d thought he was in heaven on earth until, quite suddenly, she told him that her husband was getting suspicious and she couldn’t see him anymore. He’d refused to accept it, even when she insisted it was too dangerous. His life was at risk—her life, too. She pleaded with him not to call; her husband was monitoring the phone. Together, he was sure they could overcome all obstacles; her timidity maddened him. Why didn’t she just leave the brute? Who cared what the world thought? If the age difference hadn’t mattered at the beginning, why should it matter now? She couldn’t explain, and she wouldn’t fight. It was all down to him. If he didn’t act, he’d lose her—and having once tasted paradise, he wasn’t prepared to let it go. So he’d become ever more cunning in arranging “accidental” meetings, at first by hanging around in all the places he knew she was likely to visit, and later, when leaving it to chance stopped working, by following her. A
nd although, in the end, he’d been forced to stop, at least she was safe, she still had a job, and her marriage was preserved. Her husband might be suspicious, but he had no proof of his wife’s misconduct. Mario had taken all the blame; he’d let them brand him a stalker, a confused, fantasizing youth, never revealing the truth, that Anna had seduced him. And his reward? An even deeper loneliness, and exile to this bleak, wet Siberia.

  After locking up, Mario went for a walk, as he usually did, to get the stink of frying out of his nose and the stiffness from long standing out of his legs. It was raining hard, as it had been for most of the week, but he couldn’t face going directly from the chip shop to the narrow, damp-smelling spare bedroom in his uncle’s house yet again, and nowhere else in the town would be open to him at this hour. Walking—which had never held much appeal for him at home—was his major leisure activity in this foreign backwater. Walking, listening to music, and writing letters to his love—letters which, of course, he could never mail.

  He put on the baseball cap his sister had given him, back when a year of study at an American university had been a beckoning opportunity, and shrugged into the denim jacket still damp from his afternoon’s dash down the street. He could have bought a waterproof jacket—his parents had given him money for things like that—but that would have felt like giving in, accepting his fate as the resident of a rainy country. He preferred to do without, like someone merely passing through, forever surprised by the weather.

  Head down, hands in his pockets, he walked through the driving rain, heading for the harbor. Anna, he thought, in time with his footsteps. Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna.

  He was soaking wet and shivering before he reached Front Street. The rain hurled itself against him with a fury that seemed personally vindictive. He pulled the bill of his cap lower to protect his eyes and made his way across the harbor parking lot. The rain on the few cars parked there sounded like the work of a demonic drummer. When he reached the metal guardrail he gripped it hard, as if the force of the weather might just lift him up and throw him down into the water if he wasn’t securely anchored.

  The routes of his walks varied, but they always ended with the same view. On his first night in Appleton he’d been drawn instinctively to the sea. Tears had pricked behind his eyes as he stared out at the water. It was greyer and wilder than the sea at home, and yet he’d imagined it was the same sea and that somewhere…over there…Anna might at the very same moment be looking at it, too, and thinking of him.

  There was no globe in his uncle’s house, and the only maps were concerned with British motorways, so it was a few days before he found out how wrong he was. He’d gone to the library—a strangely magnificent building that struck him as being completely out of place in this dour little northern town—and looked into an atlas. It had made his heart sink to see how far Sicily was from Scotland. And despite his fond wishes, their sea was not this sea, and when he gazed out from Appleton harbor his view went due west, completely opposite to the direction home. Traveling west there was nothing but the great, wide, cold Atlantic Ocean for miles and miles until you came to Canada. Only by turning his back on the ocean and aligning himself to face, roughly, southeast, would he be gazing in the direction of Sicily, and with that came the heavy knowledge that between him and his heart’s desire lay almost the entire landmass of Britain, all of France, most of Italy, not to mention certain legal, social, and economic barriers, the disappointment of his family, and the vindictiveness of Anna’s.

  He was so cold and wet now that he hardly felt it. The rain ran down his face like tears, and as he stared out at the water he could scarcely see through the night and the heavy curtains of rain, he remembered again, as he often did, that cold winter’s day standing on a rocky beach overlooking the Mediterranean with Anna; how she’d taken his hand and played with his fingers and then, while he was still paralyzed with confusion, how she’d reached up to touch his face, then pulled his head down to kiss him. Her warm, soft, open mouth. How she’d guided his hand to her breast, and the suggestions she’d whispered in his ear: the instructions and promises. And, a little while later, making love with her for the first time in the backseat of her car.

  That was the real Anna; the warm, passionate, half-naked girl trembling with desire, clutching and clinging to him; that was the Anna he’d always remember and believe in, not the cold, older, respectably married woman who spoke so coolly of her “concern” about his “inappropriate attachment” to her, pretending she had never shared it.

  The rain drumming on the cars behind him now sounded like mocking laughter. She never loved you, fool. She used you. Forget her.

  He shoved a hand into his jacket pocket, closing it around the little bottle. It was a vodka miniature he’d found in the street in front of the chip shop a week ago, empty and missing its cap, but whole. It was filled now with a tightly rolled-up letter to Anna, and sealed with a piece of whittled-down candle and a piece of strapping tape. He’d been meaning to throw it out to sea for days, but between the bad weather and his changeable, rotating shifts, he’d kept missing the tide. He thought it should be going out now, but he wasn’t sure, and he couldn’t see well enough to guess.

  But did it matter? Whether the tide was going in or out, the chances of this little bottle—or any of the others he’d launched in previous weeks—actually reaching any Mediterranean shore in his lifetime must be vanishingly small. He wasn’t worried about some local lout reading it—how many people around here could read Italian?

  It didn’t matter. It was a meaningless gesture; he was going through the motions of unrequited love for nobody’s sake but his own. He might as well burn the letters after he wrote them as throw them in the sea.

  He brought his hand out of his pocket, hauled back, and threw the little bottle as hard as he could into the darkness, toward the unseen empty west. Then he turned his back on it and, head down in the blinding rain, unable to see where he was going, retraced his steps, heading for his uncle’s house. He’d so often thought, since he came here, that he couldn’t get wetter, or colder, or feel any worse, and still it seemed there were new depths of misery and further extremes of bad weather to be experienced. He didn’t think he could bear to write and throw away another yearning love letter to someone who didn’t care, but he also didn’t know how he could survive without that last, small pretense at communication.

  Later that night, when a small seismic shock woke him abruptly out of shallow, unhappy sleep, he dreamed for a moment that what he’d felt was his own heart breaking.

  From What Grows in Scotland

  by Mairi Smith and F. B. Lockhart

  (Baillie, 1991)

  Apples

  ALTHOUGH the native crab-apple (Malus sylvestris) was known to the Celts, who associated it in their mythology with love, fertility, immortality, and the existence of an earthly paradise, it was the invading Romans who planted the first cultivated orchards in Britain. This tradition was revived and expanded by the Church, particularly Benedictine monks, who planted apple orchards wherever they settled….

  …An exception to the connection between monasteries and established orchards lies on the west coast, not a location usually hospitable to fruit trees, in aptly named Appleton. There are no abbeys or medieval settlements in the area, which was only sparsely populated in early times, without even a named village on the peninsula dubbed “Apple Island” (Innis Ubhall) by the Gaelic-speaking natives. When the first apples were grown there is a matter of some dispute, but by Victorian times Appleton was famous for cider and several particularly fine varieties of eating apple. However, despite a folk tradition that the Lowland settlers named their new town after the wild apple orchards they found there, it seems likely the first apple orchards were planted no earlier than 1669, with stock imported from eastern and central-southern Scotland. The annual Apple Fayre, which attracted visitors from many parts (see picture, below), was almost certainly a Victorian invention inspired by similar English festivals, with a few
Scottish traditions rather obviously grafted on. (The “dark stranger” who brings good fortune to the whole town by crowning the Apple Queen will be recognized as the preferred “first-footer” of New Year celebrations.)

  Mass importation of apples from America and Australia hit the home-grown industry in Britain hard, but Appleton remained miraculously immune from the worst effects for many years, with a growing demand for Appleton cider in all parts of Great Britain right up to 1950; in addition, a small but loyal group of buyers continued to favour “Appleton’s Fairest,” an eating apple never successfully grown outside the orchards of Appleton and now, sadly, lost forever.

  NELL WOKE SUDDENLY in the depths of night, alarmed out of sleep by a noise that was more than mere sound, as if an invasive, physical presence had shaken the house. For a moment, disoriented, she thought a drunken stranger had broken in and commenced smashing furniture in the rooms below. The noise continued to die away with a bouncing, pattering sound, as of bits and pieces falling and sliding across the floor. There was something visceral and deeply disturbing about it.

  As she became more alert, she recognized how unlikely this nightmare scenario was. She lived in the peaceful countryside, with no enemies or drunken relatives to fear. Even if some mad stranger had made his way up the hill to her house, there would be no need to break in, as she’d almost certainly left her door unlocked, as usual. Besides, the noise was not coming from inside.