The Wicker Tree Read online

  'Who is the Laddie?' he asked.

  'Och, you've never heard tell of the Laddie?' Lolly seemed as surprised as if he'd never heard of Pete Sampras or Muhammad Ali. 'He's always the brightest and best. The handsomest, the goodliest, the kindest… perhaps the best rider. I have known him to be the best lover…'

  'No, I mean what is his name?' asked Steve. 'Does he live in Tressock?'

  'Didn't Lachlan tell you? Lots of Border towns have them; Selkirk, Hawick, Kelso and others, but ours is a bit different. The Laddie is elected, chosen each year. Like the May Queen. She's the real star of course, but it's the Laddie that crowns her and it is he who spends the day and the night by her side. Suppose she was your friend, Beth? Wouldn't you want to be her Laddie?'

  'Beth? May Queen? What the hell is that?' Steve thought the whole idea was so weird he could hardly take it in. He just knew that he really didn't want to think about Beth right now that he'd met Lolly. She had actually said that this Laddie guy – she'd known him to be the best lover. Sounded like she put out big time.

  'Is this like the prom at high school? Most popular gal goes with most popular guy?' he asked, because it sure sounded like it.

  'Well, a bit different from that. May Day is the spring feast round here. As important to us as your Christmas is to you. But you got the general idea. Look, if they were riding after the Laddie today, you could see it all from up there. C'mon, I'll show you.'

  Lolly had pointed to a higher eminence across some upland pastures divided, in some places, by hedges and littered, here and there, with boulders. She turned her horse and spurred it into a gallop as if to challenge Steve to ride just as hard up to their objective.

  Perhaps Lolly already knew that he would, this morning, follow her almost anywhere. She gave not a glance backward as Steve really put Prince to the test. They cleared several clusters of rocks, passed some Aberdeen Angus cattle who peered at them lazily, the horses stretching themselves to a pounding speed between jumps. Then, almost hidden in a declivity in the pasture, came a hawthorne hedge. Steve, hugely exhilarated by this chase, had taken his hat off and held it flapping in the wind when the hedge was suddenly upon him. Prince didn't wait for any signal from his rider. He simply soared up and over. But the other side of the hedge was a drainage ditch, quite wide and deep. Prince almost stumbled, stretching to avoid it. The stumble was sufficiently severe to catapult Steve out of his saddle and into a somersaulting landing in a pile of cow pats.

  Lolly had just reached the summit of the hill, a hundred yards beyond where Steve had fallen. She turned Pompadour just in time to see Prince nuzzling the recumbent figure of Steve, who was lying flat on his back. Appalled at what had happened, she rode back down the hill as fast as the mare could carry her. But just as she arrived level with Prince and slipped out of her saddle, she found Steve talking to the horse, and starting to stand up while trying to wipe some of the cow dung off himself with tufts of grass and handfuls of dock leaves.

  'Sorry to leave you sudden like that, partner,' he was saying. 'But I didn't figure you were goin' to do that. Leastways, not in quite that way.'

  Before Lolly had time to speak, he was back up in Prince's saddle and stretching what was certainly a rather sore back. Then they trotted the horses up to the summit of what Lolly called the Laird's Hill and she described the ritual ride of the Laddie to him, all the while wondering whether she had his full attention on what she was saying. Because, while he seemed to be listening, and asked the more or less appropriate questions, he was feeling an urge to touch her, to stop her mouth describing any more of this insane local ritual – with a long lingering kiss.

  'We give the Laddie three minutes, start from outside the Grove Inn over there, opposite the church,' she was saying.

  'Who's we?' asked Steve.

  'Anyone with a mount, a horse, a pony; a carthorse would do if that is all you can find,' she said, 'I reckon you'd see a racing ostrich if one was around.'

  'Kids?' asked Steve.

  'We don't really have any kids. But if we did, sure. D'you see that island in the river Sulis over there – where the steam is rising from the pool? That's known as the King's Island. The Laddie has to get there without our catching him and then he's won.'

  'Betcha I can get there before you!'

  Steve was aching to race her. Anything to quench his mounting desire. Lolly looked genuinely hesitant.

  'Are you scared for Prince?' he asked her. 'I promise I'll take good care of him. He and I made a deal. If he's goin' to dump me again it'll be in that nice soft old river. Then he can have a swim too.'

  Lolly suddenly nodded her head and spurred Pompadour down the hill towards the Sulis. She gave a little shout of laughter as she did this and Steve, trying to gather Prince for the start, knew that the joke was on him for thinking she'd play fair.

  But then she knew that he had much the more powerful horse. Quite apart from being at least two hands taller than the grey mare, Prince's bloodlines stemmed from champion steeplechasers. Without her stolen lead it would have been a most uneven contest. Even so, Steve showed that he was a quick learner. He revelled in the jumps he and Prince were able to achieve and he found the horse's speed on the flat, as they approached the river, to rival that of any horse he'd ridden back in Texas. Best of all, he won. Plunging Prince into the steaming river and emerging onto the little island, he turned to see Lolly just approaching the further bank.

  At the Sacred Pool

  THE ISLAND CONSISTED of a lush field of long grass, its banks lined with bull rushes and several willow trees weeping into the fast moving, vapouring Sulis. In its centre was some collapsed masonry, part of what might once have been a temple. It rather resembled a crude throne. Both Lolly and Steve dismounted, tethering their horses loosely to a bush and a willow respectively, allowing them to graze.

  'So you won, Steve,' she called through the mist. 'You'd make a good Laddie.'

  'I won?' laughed Steve. 'Prince won! Isn't Sulis, like, the name of some kind of goddess?'

  'How d'you know that?'

  'I already met up with Sulis,' said Steve, 'on the front of Lachlan's Rolls. I didn't realise goddesses could be that cute.'

  'I'm glad you approved of her. I posed for that little statue. It was a great honour… I like to come here and swim, especially when the air is cold like this morning – besides this is a sacred spring.'

  Steve now had the uncanny feeling that he was dreaming, that nothing he was seeing or hearing was quite real. As an average young man, even one committed to the Silver Ring Thing, he managed to desire several women every week. A waitress here, a girl in the Seven Eleven store there, a cheerleader seen at a football game. But even though he might visit them in his waking imagination or in his dreams, he never hoped for them to materialise, to throw off their clothes and beckon him on. Why? Because he knew it was just lust. And although this was, he admitted, a convoluted way of looking at it, the Lord never rewarded lust.

  But here was Lolly taking off her shirt and riding britches, her bra and her panties, as naturally and unhurriedly as anyone who had no other motive but that they were getting ready to plunge in for a swim. She looked ethereally beautiful in the mist, like one of those nymphs you'd see in very old Coca-Cola ads. This was not 'come and get it' nudity like you saw at the Big Bamboo club in Fort Worth, where the girls writhed down a slithery steel pole from the ceiling to bumps and grinds music. Notatall! This – hell, she, Lolly was beautiful and if she was doing this for anybody – well, he was that anybody.

  Still he must cling to reality. He was here on a mission with Beth. They were Redeemers come to save people like Lolly.

  'I think you're kidding us with all this Goddess shit,' he forced himself to say. He feared the spell he thought she was casting upon him. The cruder his denunciation the safer he'd feel from its effect. He went on: 'I guess you think Beth and me, we're a couple of retards. You're just kidding me – right? It's just a hot spring, Yeah, I think I can smell the sulphur –
right?'

  But Lolly had started to part the reeds and walk into the river.

  'You believe a certain virgin had a baby don't you?' Lolly paused, splashing her body with the warm water, before she went on:

  'You probably believe that your God made the world and everything in it in seven days; that your Jesus fed five thousand people on those few little loaves and fishes – why can't you believe, as I do, that this water has a holy power?'

  'I believe everything that is in the Bible, Lolly. That's Holy Writ. But, I am sorry, this is just hot water.'

  'People don't just bathe in it, Steve. They drink it. Some people say drinking it makes them horny as hell. Others say simply that it makes wishes come true.'

  Lolly had now plunged into the river and risen to the surface, breasting the ripples of the lightly turbulent water, gleaming with its salinity.

  'C'mon in Steve! It'll make you feel literally out of this world. Are you thinking about Beth? I can let you into a secret. Lachlan wants her to be the May Queen. How would you like to be the Laddie?'

  Beth was definitely on Steve's mind. Beth who wasn't there and need never know. He found himself getting out of his clothes as if impelled to do so. As if it was simply the thing to do. Like rubbing noses with the Inuit or smashing your glasses into the fireplace after toasts if you were – who did that – he'd seen it in a vodka commercial – a Russian? And this, in Steve's current case, without the benefit of alcohol.

  'If they'd let me ride Prince – hey, I'd be their Laddie in a New York minute.'

  He was developing a million goose bumps and it made him shiver.

  'Lolly! Are we insane? This isn't Texas. It is cooooold.'

  'Not in here it isn't,' she said.

  Steve stared at her for a full minute, as if enchanted. Then he plunged in, surfacing a few feet away from her. He stared again, but this time it was no longer a disbelieving stare but a devouring one. She opened her arms to him and they came together.

  His embrace was both passionate and urgent. The tiny scintilla of doubt that this was real never entirely left his mind, but she found ways to channel his passion and calm his frantic urgency.

  'No hurry, Steve,' she whispered. 'The Goddess is with us. She'll make it last and last so you'll always remember it – till your dying day.'

  Enclosing him in her arms, her hair floating around his face, she seemed to engulf him so that they drifted in the misty water like languorous flotsam.

  A Tressock fisherman, a retired clockmaker, was walking along the path on the far side from where Steve now lay, with Lolly kneeling beside him, both of them still naked, still steaming, although the day itself was warming as the sun shone fitfully from a mackerel sky. They were hazy figures, seen across the steamy water. He blessed them as he blessed everyone who had shared in the Goddess's bounty. He hoped she would now give him a trout or two in the cooler water just up stream.

  Steve, his head comfortably cradled on a tussock, saw Lolly's smiling face and wild, wind-blown hair so close to his that he thought 'now is the moment to remember every mole and freckle, every pore, every golden mote in her hazel eyes, the gap in her strong white teeth. What a face! What a woman! What a place!'

  'You were right,' he said. 'I did think it might go on for ever. I guess I hoped it would.'

  He had the odd feeling that Lolly too was committing his face to memory, as one might a map.

  'I always hope for something I know even the Goddess Sulis cannot give me – a child,' she said. 'And yet I cannot help hoping. If it ever happens – I know it will have been here.'

  'My God, a child! Did you say "always"?' Steve had absorbed so many shocks in such a short time that this 'always' seemed to introduce a reality he had not even considered before. How dumb was that, cowboy? He looked hard at Lolly, wishing it not to be so.

  'Oh yes, Steve,' she said, her smiling eyes still smiling. 'I am what the Goddess wants me to be. All things to all men.'

  The old clockmaker had settled at a point on the river bank where he had noticed another fisherman, a great grey-blue heron, often worked the river. It was a nice quiet place. Peaceful. But that peace was suddenly shattered by shouts from the direction of the loving couple. The man was rampaging about the place as he hurriedly dressed. The woman remained naked, calmly watching him and laughing a wonderful chuckling laugh. Lolly of course. It had to be Lolly.

  'All things to all men! Yeah, we got a word for that back in Texas. And it aint purty,' the young man had raised his voice.

  The clockmaker shook his head. All things to all men – a student of Scottish literature, it made him think of Robert Louis Stevenson: 'You will find some of these expressions rise on you like a remorse. They are merely literary and decorative…' But the clockmaker was not a cynic. He had known Lolly since her girlhood. She had become much more than the sum of her lovely parts. He was just congratulating himself for this happy thought when there was a tug at his line. It was a splendid pike and now his poor wife was condemned to making quenelles de brochet, a delicious dish but an awesome one to prepare on account of the numerous bones. Happily, the fisherman's wife was French, a cousin of Daisy up at the castle. She would welcome the challenge, he thought fondly.

  Meanwhile, Steve and Lolly rode back to Tressock, each silently thinking their own private thoughts. As they entered the town, she put her hand out towards him and, after a moment's hesitation, he rested the reins in the crook of his arm and took her hand and squeezed it. They smiled at each other, two tired people at the end of an unusual journey.

  It was when he gently retrieved his hand that he remembered his silver ring. It was gone.

  Nuada Keeps its Secret

  IN THE ECONOMY of Scotland nuclear power is a contentious commodity, as it is in many other nations, big and small. The French have managed to rely heavily upon it and, so far, no disaster has befallen them. In the United States, with its many earthquake zones and its prevailing fear of terror, nuclear has not fared well. The lands of the old Soviet Union have had their disasters and are likely to have more. How Nuada came to be built, using private and public finance, is a complex story in itself, much of it concerned with the fluctuating market in other competitive forms of fuel. That it survived, it owes to past governments not wishing to put all their power-generating eggs in one basket, and to the fact that a hostile Green movement and an ambivalent press had so far found no glaring fault with it.

  The presiding genius of Nuada was Sir Lachlan – it was built on his land; lobbied for by him at the local and United Kingdom ministerial levels. He had been unique among the chairmen of atomic plants in Britain in that he had displayed an evangelising zeal for the technology. No one had come nearer to describing the power of the atom as a kind of revelation of the god-head than this Borders laird. Even a much publicised accident at the plant a few years ago had been brilliantly handled with a PR operation personally directed by Lachlan.

  As Steve was experiencing several different kinds of bliss with Lolly in the Sulis pool, the Nuada plant hummed with its usual activity. White-coated scientists monitored and measured and noted carefully on their networked hand computers. Engineers in hard hats roamed amongst the giant turbines, inspecting and testing. Bureaucrats and clerks, secretaries and analysts, anchored for the most part to their desktops, communicated with each other and the outside world by telephone, fax, e-mail and even the Royal Mail. Somewhere, few of these people could have told you exactly where, electricity was leaving Nuada for the national grid.

  In the huge panelled chairman's suite that morning, a shirt-sleeved Lachlan was manning an overhead projector, clicking from bar chart to graph to carefully retouched photograph to optimistic conclusions written in several eye-catching colours, all part of his PowerPoint presentation. Sitting beside him at the board room table was the portly figure of Murdoch Craigie, area secretary of the Transport and Universal Workers Union, an official who had been born and bred in Tressock. Although his speeches at regional Trades Union congresse
s were noted for being savagely against the exploiting classes, treacherous landowners and other vermin, he had always known that, in an emergency such as this, his place was at Sir Lachlan's side, ready to repel boarders, as he put it.

  The emergency sat on the other side of the board room table in the shape of two journalists from different publications, who seemed to think that there was a cover up going on at Nuada of a story that could close the power station if exploited in the right way. In addition to a telephone book-sized report that had been placed before each of them, two drams of Nuada Directors' eight year old malt whisky had been poured and the decanter unstoppered in case of need. Both their glasses were ready to be refilled.

  'What you have before you,' said Lachlan, 'is the report on the work we have done, since the accident, to make the environment completely secure. You will naturally want to study this at your leisure – but I have asked you here to rebut some absolutely unfounded reports in the press… yes, Mr Tarrant?'

  Magnus Tarrant, a rumpled journalist with a purple drinker's face had raised a chewed pencil in the air to attract Lachlan's attention.

  'I think you may be referring to my story in last week's Echo,' he said. 'Thank you for the pretty pictures we just saw. The word is still that you haven't even begun to solve the nuclear pollution problem – people in Tressock are still not able to drink the tap water. Can you deny that?'

  'Completely,' Lachlan was calm and precise in his answer. 'You're twice as likely to die of urban pollution in Glasgow or Edinburgh as we are here. The accident was regrettable – due to human error – and it took place ten long years ago.'