The Wicker Tree Page 3

  'Delia, I want you to be ready to go to Glasgow tomorrow early,' he was saying. 'This wretched concert is so late this year it gives us very little time to do what must be done.'

  'But I've still got the feasts to plan,' said his wife a little plaintively. 'Unless you think we could persuade everyone to celebrate May Day a little later… well, people do it with birthdays.' She had seen the expression on his face and knew at once the absurdity of her suggestion. 'I'm joking, of course,' she added hurriedly.

  At breakfast, Lachlan's mobile cell phone rang repeatedly. Beame, a tall, corpulent butler with a mincing walk poured coffee while Lachlan fended off a series of business calls. Delia took the phone from him so he could finish his breakfast. It rang again almost at once and she answered it.

  'This is Lady Morrison. My husband is having breakfast, Mr Tarrant.' She put her hand over the phone and looked questioningly at Lachlan. He scowled and stretched out his hand for the phone. By the time he spoke his voice was quietly composed:

  'If you want a statement from me in reply to your article – in the Echo was it? Yes… you can have one. Call my office and make a time to come in, Mr Tarrant. It's Magnus isn't it? I am always anxious to be completely open with the press, you know that… Well you should. I'm away for a few days. But as soon as I get back… I look forward to it, Magnus.'

  Lachlan has been studiously polite with a journalist whose hectoring tone could easily be imagined by Delia, who had met the man more than once.

  'Does all this fuss they're making over the water worry you?' she asked.

  'No. Why should it? Every nuclear power station in the country, probably every one in Europe, has the local press cooking up stories about dangers to the local population. If it's not radiation, it's the hazard of some terrible accident. Nuada is no exception. Our accident was quite a while ago, and it wasn't as serious as it might have been. They never seem to quite accept that.'

  'Well it affected those fish in the river,' said Delia

  'They only ever got to photograph that one mutant fish out of the Sulis. But what real damage it has done they simply can't figure out. Listen, they'll keep on trying to get another story out of it. And we've got to keep on showing we've nothing to hide.'

  Beame had meanwhile reappeared.

  'The Glee Club have arrived, sir,' he announced. 'I've shown them into the music room. Coffee is already there, ma'am, so if I may be excused?'

  For a moment Delia looked puzzled. Then she remembered the task for which Beame needed to be excused.

  'Of course, Beame,' she said.

  The sound of the Glee Club singing drifted through the open doors of the music room, up the marble Jacobean staircase with its heavily carved balustrades and into the room where Delia was putting the finishing touches to the public uniform worn by most Scots women of her kind: sensible shoes and a heathery tweed suit over a pale purple cashmere jersey, a string of good pearls and a brooch of enamel and gold, framed in modest sized diamonds, in this case representing the arms of the Black Watch, a Scottish regiment to which a former husband had briefly belonged before she left him for the far more interesting and, it must be said, challenging Sir Lachlan.

  Delia lifted the house phone to call Daisy, the cook, but got no answer. She knew that Daisy, while unusually good at cooking anything but vegetables and a conscientious member of Alcoholics Anonymous, tended to fall off her wagon as the heavy responsibility of preparing the May Day feasts approached. Delia was about to hurry down to the kitchen when she was detained by her mirror (a seven-foot-high Victorian looking glass which reflected the whole six feet of her), not simply to confirm that her lipstick was on straight or that her tights showed no wrinkle at the ankle, but to check that the Lady Morrison face and figure, celebrated in paintings by Hockney and Annigoni, had not somehow faded away overnight.

  No more vain really than most people, Delia had originally believed she was cursed with being beautiful, because she had learnt to suppose that both men and women found it was her single most important characteristic. Perhaps some even thought it was her only real asset. It came, she thought, this mild paranoia of hers, from her observation that people simply stared at the few other beautiful women she knew, rather than listening to what they had to say.

  She paused again in her hurried journey down to the kitchen, at the open doors to the Music Room. Lachlan was playing the piano and intermittently conducting the Glee Club in the Amen section of Handel's Messiah. How unnecessarily long-drawn-out that Amen always seemed to Delia, who loved the music but cared nothing for the words. Lachlan was not at the moment singing, but of course would be in Glasgow Cathedral tomorrow. She was slightly disappointed. His singing voice always thrilled her. The Glee Club, a dozen local men from Tressock and six of Lachlan's employees from the Nuada nuclear power station, had their backs to her as they sang, but she recognised most of them.

  Delia never ceased to marvel at how Lachlan held the loyalty and respect of so many diverse people. In a Scotland where deference of any kind was long since banished, and lairds, like Lachlan, were very often distrusted as effete and too English sounding, he held his neighbours' and his employees' esteem. They continued to accept him as their leader, she believed, because he had always included them in his project, in his adventure. His seemingly effortless authority was perhaps part political, part priestly but really defied analysis. Whatever. It worked. She had waited for a moment, just in case he sang, and was rewarded, because Lachlan was now delivering Handel's last great crowning Amen in his glorious, deep bass voice. In Delia, this always produced a melting inner throb, as if from an intimate caress. She gave a little shiver of pleasure and hurried on down to the nether world of the castle's great kitchens.

  On one side of the long, wide passage that bisected the basement lay the main kitchen and another huge room, which was almost always locked. On the other side were the still room, the laundry, the larders, the freezers, the now defunct dairy, the sewing room and what had once been the servants' dining room and the cook's and butler's parlour. Where, sixty years ago, there had been twenty-five servants at Tressock Castle, the place was run now with a staff of five: Daisy, the cook, Beame, the butler, and three women who came in daily to clean the twenty-odd rooms still in more or less constant use. Half a dozen major modern appliances made the cleaning no more than a repetitive chore. The roaring whine that Delia heard as she reached the basement passage came not, she at once realised, from one of these machines but from Beame's workshop in the defunct dairy.

  Daisy was standing outside the door to the dairy encouraging a slightly tearful young Heather, one of the cleaners, to mop up a spreading pool of blood that was seeping under the door and onto the flagstones in the passage.

  'The door's locked of course,' said Daisy. 'I keep shouting at him to stop a minute but he canna hear me over that machine of his. Please be careful where you step.'

  Delia was relieved to see that her cook was perfectly sober and immediately wondered why Heather had her apron and hands covered in blood.

  'I slipped in it, ma'am. The blood is that sticky.'

  'Well go and wash yourself, Heather,' said Delia. 'And get out of those soiled clothes. Daisy, find her something else to wear. Give me that mop.'

  As the two other women hurried away, Delia started to mop up the blood. Just as she did so, a great splash of gore hit the farther side of the frosted glass panes set into the dairy door and started to trickle viscously downwards. Under the door, a fresh crimson flood streamed outwards while the howling, whining mechanical sound continued louder than ever. Delia hammered furiously at the door and shouted Beame's name at the top of her voice.

  After a few seconds, the sound behind the door stopped and there was silence. Then Beame's voice, cautious, suspicious: 'Who's that?'

  'It's me, Beame. The blood is flooding out into the passage. You've got plenty of room in there. Move what you're doing away from the door.'

  'I didna realise, ma'am. Sorry.'

&n
bsp; 'It's quite alright, Beame. Carry on the good work. We're off to Glasgow tomorrow early. Hope you'll be finished by then.'

  Delia and Lachlan

  DELIA'S CONFERENCE WITH Daisy over the May Day feasts was assisted by the fact that there were plenty of precedents. They had been planning for May Day every year for more than a decade and were used to catering for the whole little township when the celebration was at its peak. As usual, Delia detailed what would have to come from Glasgow, which she herself would bring back. Suckling pigs, for instance, were always hard to find locally. Daisy listed what she knew she could buy at the local supermarket.

  At nine o'clock, Delia and Lachlan walked into the castle's entrance hall, ready for their journey, to find Beame waiting for them with a curious air of expectancy that puzzled Lachlan.

  'Beame and I have planned a little surprise for you, Lachlan,' said Delia. 'We thought that truly magnificent Imperial you culled deserved some lasting recognition.'

  Beame at once turned his gaze from his employers and looked up at the wall above the great oak door. There, the noble head of a stag with sixteen points to his huge antlers gazed glassily into the hallway. But his nostrils seemed to be sniffing the air as if he sensed the nearness of his enemy.

  'The colour of those glass eyes is no exactly right, sir. But I can fix that later…' Beame was waiting for their reaction.

  'You're an artist, Beame. That's what you are. I think it is splendid. And it looks perfect up there, my dear,' Lachlan added, turning to Delia.

  'I really don't know where else we could have put it,' she laughed, looking around at the serried ranks of stuffed game's heads on the entrance hall's walls. Buffalo, moose and deer of different breeds and sizes, a white rhino, a Bengal tiger, a wild boar and even a giraffe, they were all the trophies several generations of Morrison lairds had brought back from a now defunct British Empire, where they and their relations had once played their small part in ruling a quarter of the world.

  Beame, pleased at their reaction to his artistry, had already hurried out to open the door to the big Phantom III, the 1936 model with headlights that looked like silver soup tureens, in which he was to drive them to Glasgow. For Beame, being a butler was playing a role, one in which, however suitable his costume, he was always slightly uneasy. Being a chauffeur was simpler, a peaked hat sufficed, but he still thought of it as a role and the flourish with which he opened the car door was one he had seen in an old Hollywood movie. Only in his capacity as a taxidermist was he truly in his element. Working for the Morrisons, he had occasion to do really interesting taxidermy, and his roles as chauffeur and butler were not all that onerous. Beame was a relatively happy man and Delia, who made a practice of observing everyone who worked for her and for Lachlan quite closely, believed that he was incapable of any lateral thinking whatever. She therefore trusted him and urged her husband to do the same.

  The back of the vintage Rolls had a cocktail cabinet in a burled walnut case, into which Lachlan had installed a sophisticated Danish sound system. There was also an elaborate contraption by which the passengers could communicate with the chauffeur on the other side of the glass barrier. This had not been used since before the Second World War. When communication with Beame was called for, Lachlan simply shouted.

  Driving through the rolling countryside they soon crossed a mediaeval stone bridge over the River Sulis and passed into one of the region's rare forests. Huge beech trees, under which very little but ferns and wild mushrooms grew, towered on either side of the road. Deer grazed here unconcerned by any passing traffic. The herd belonged to Tressock Castle and only Lachlan or one of his gamekeepers was authorised to cull them, this being done usually in anticipation of the May Day feasts. As the Rolls emerged from these woods, the huge smooth deciduous trees giving way to meaner spruce and fir, they were suddenly in an enormous clearing, where the river had snaked back to meet them.

  Upon the other side of the Sulis, monstrous in its scale, hideous in its utterly functional cacophony of steel pipes and concrete blocks, stood the Nuada Nuclear Power Station. Armed police idled outside its gates while two of the utility's own security guards came up to greet the Rolls and to escort Lachlan into the guardhouse, where one of his executives and his secretary were awaiting him for a brief conference.

  Delia remained in the car, allowing herself to think about the problems Lachlan faced as chairman of Nuada – and doing this to distract herself from the prospect of what must very soon be done in Glasgow. Chernobyl was a word no one ever actually mentioned in relation to Nuada. But the melt-down at the Soviet Russian power station in 1986 was a disaster that would probably always haunt the whole nuclear power industry. Since then, not only the press, but the public at large, tended to view nuclear power stations as accidents waiting to happen. Gazing out at the vast complex of buildings dominated by the cooling towers and encircled with walls topped with razor wire and punctuated with watchtowers, Delia thought how threatening it all seemed. Lachlan, on the other hand, enjoyed the game of protecting Nuada from all who conspired against it; the press, the Greens and quite often the government itself. On the rare occasions he had time to watch television, he tried to catch The Simpsons. He loved this series and pretended to identify closely with Mr Burns, the president of the nuclear plant, applauding every machiavellian scheme he cooked up. Delia was not amused. She hated and feared the always looming crisis at Nuada, reassuring herself only with the thought that it had loomed for ten years, since the accident, but had never materialised – so far.

  Lachlan finished his brief conference and they then headed for what is sometimes called Scotland's Second City, after Edinburgh – but which Glaswegians claim to be the first in both commerce and enterprise. Recently, encouraged by its nomination by Brussels as a European City of Culture, some have called it 'the Paris of the North'. For Beame, the Thai massage parlour on Glasgow's Portcourtauld Street provided as much international culture as he felt he needed or could afford.

  Cocooned in the rear section of the Rolls, Delia tried to feel insulated from that part of her life with Lachlan that most excited her, but which sometimes induced an odd kind of fear. She thought of it as a form of stage fright.

  'I will be alright on the night,' she repeated when Lachlan reproached her for looking tense and nervous. He started to stroke her hair, as one might that of a fractious, nervous cat, while humming a refrain from the Messiah. She suddenly felt one of her rare attacks of irritation with him.

  'It's alright for you,' she said sharply. 'The gods or your mother forgot to provide you with nerves. You behave as if we were on a trip to choose wallpaper for one of the guest rooms.'

  Lachlan ignored her and put the tape of Handel's Messiah on the sound system in the old cocktail cabinet. As its sound filled the well-upholstered rear of the Rolls, he prepared to sing along with the Vienna Boys' Choir.

  'Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!' the boys were singing in their sweet treble voices and Lachlan, counting beats with his fingers tapping on Delia's knee, found his cue and launched his great deep basso profondo voice to echo, 'Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!'

  When the singing briefly paused for the orchestra to work up to

  the next crescendo, she said: 'Did you know that those Redeemers are coming again this year? I had hoped that they'd send the Mormons or some of those wonderful black Gospel singers.'

  'So what difference will it make?' Lachlan asked.

  'There's Orlando, the new young policeman you met with Lolly. She says she thinks he's quite sharp. Peter, at the Grove, agrees. We know what he has been sent to do and it worries me.'

  'He struck Peter as a nice, average young policeman, very Glaswegian,' said Lachlan. 'Tressock will seem like a foreign country to him. He's nothing we can't manage.'

  The crescendo of Hallelujahs had arrived, heralding the end of the Messiah. Lachlan placed his left hand over Delia's, turning to sing to her. She did not snatch her hand away but slowly removed it.

 
'Everything will be as before,' he said reassuringly, and then sang:

  'As it was in the beginning…

  Is now and ever shall be

  Wo-orld without end

  Ah – ahmen! Ah-men! Ah – ah – ah men!'

  The Peace March

  THE FLIGHT OVER had provided only a slight preparation for the foreignness of Scotland. The air crew had those British accents you hear in movies, usually from upper crust bad guys. They called Beth 'madam' instead of 'ma'am'. Both she and Steve reread the pamphlet provided by the Redeemers about the Scottish people. Mostly white, speaking a sometimes hard-to-understand version of English, but usually friendly to visitors, it said. Known to admire America and Americans for achievements like Hollywood, Marshall Aid, Disneyworld, Jazz music, The American Constitution and, for some reason the pamphlet did not explain, everything to do with the late President John F. Kennedy and his family. Their knowledge of Dallas is confined to the TV series of that name and, for some older people, the place where Kennedy was shot.

  To someone as accustomed to hotel living as Beth, the Grand Hotel was, at first sight, unusually old for a five-star establishment. However, it belonged to a familiar American chain which had done a good job of modernising it. There were Gideon Bibles in the side-table drawers and, an unusual innovation, little foot-baths alongside the toilets in the bathroom. It was, for Beth, pretty much like a home from home.

  Steve thought his room, across the passage from hers, was like something out of an old European movie and just terrific. She had been given the Royal Suite, usually reserved for star football players, what you call soccer players in America, they'd told her. She had never seen so much chintz all in one place in her life but the TV was huge and the bed imperial-sized. Beth had considered it very cute of Steve to point out to the folks on the reception desk downstairs: 'That's my fiancée in that poster over there,' in case they didn't recognise her in the huge picture of the Redeemers Choir under the headline: 'This Year's Christian Choral Concert. Country Star BETH BOOTHBY Leads The Famous Redeemers Choir.' Steve was sometimes naïve, that was for sure. But she preferred to think of his occasional naïveté as purity of heart and plain old faith in the Lord and the God-given things.