‘You were?’ I stared at him instead of ahead of me, thinking hard.
‘The road!’ he cried as the Magnette sashayed a bit.
‘Fiddle, that was nothing.’ I straightened up.
It was time to visit Mary.
I was fed up with being angry with her. Sulking wasn’t mending things for anyone. I needed her help and I was going to get it.
I caught Mary in her study the next morning. Sandy was upstairs beavering away at the Murray Hoard, and Mary’s face lit up unguardedly when she saw me, then fell again as she immediately remembered the disaster of our last meeting.
‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ I said simply.
‘Oh, darling!’ She leaped up from her desk to embrace me with fond arms. ‘Julia, I have been meaning to come to see you …’
I saw that because I’d made the first move I was now playing a strong hand. By God, I was going to play it carefully.
‘Sit down, sit down.’ Mary fluttered. ‘I want to know how you’re feeling …’
She made me wait in her red leather armchair while she bustled about with tea and shortbread. I felt disloyal, between knowing that Sandy’s there all the time, and my fury over what Mary did to the McEwens. I knew she hadn’t many friends. But I wouldn’t pretend I wasn’t friends with the McEwens as well.
I needn’t have worried. She was glowing. She wasn’t thinking about the McEwens and she was scarcely aware of the sordid business which the Perth Mercury was now calling ‘the Strathfearn Suicide’. All she wanted to talk about was Sandy.
‘He works so hard, it’s a pleasure to be able to help him,’ she twittered. ‘And he’s so respectful of my own work. But the nicest thing for me is that it’s lovely to have company after supper. We’ve been reading to each other in the evenings, Burns’s poetry and Dickens – Our Mutual Friend. When Dr Housman was here, I always felt I was on my own. Isn’t that strange? Yet I’m constantly aware of Sandy upstairs, even though I can’t hear him. I so enjoy having him here.’
She poured tea and sat down on the footstool beside me, clasping her hands around her knees. I’d never considered what a world of difference it must be for Mary to have swapped Dr Housman for Sandy. I wondered if it had made her uneasy having Hugh Housman coming and going, right there near the rooms where she lived and undressed and slept all by herself.
‘What was Dr Housman like?’ I asked.
‘He was really very patronising, you know, Julia. He was dismissive of my interest in the catalogue and didn’t welcome suggestions. He made me feel a bit like a charwoman, there to bring him cups of tea and fresh pencils, rather than a trained librarian. It was the way he avoided looking at me when he spoke to me …’
‘What did you –’
She turned abruptly towards the window, so suddenly it made the gold pencil and the ear trumpet clatter together.
No, I’d better not ask that question yet. I could see she wasn’t ready for it.
Of course I knew why people avoided looking at her. But I realised suddenly that when she avoided looking at you it was like she was sticking her fingers in her ears, making it so that she didn’t have to know what you were going to say. Like Mémère, who has a trick of going foreign and feminine in situations requiring mental acumen, which shifts the difficult work on to other people.
I waited for Mary to turn back so she could see me speaking.
‘It’s good having people about you though,’ I said. ‘The river watcher isn’t here all the time.’
Mary nodded in fervent agreement. ‘I don’t like the tinkers being here. Every year they make me uncomfortable, me here all alone and them up at Inchfort piping and drinking into the wee hours.’
Ah, hurrah, I’d got Mary to bring up the McEwens herself.
‘You know those Traveller folk at Inchfort Field are part of Strathfearn just as much as my grandfather was,’ I said, still being cautious. ‘They own the willow beds at the mouth of the Fearn. They’ve been coming here for hundreds of years. Maybe longer than the library’s been here. My mother and Jean McEwen used to play together when they were wee.’
Mary looked away again. I reached across to pick up the trumpet and offer it to her so she could listen to me without having to look at me. After a moment she twitched it sharply out of my hand and I thought she was angry, but she held it to her ear and let me continue.
‘Mary, the McEwens love this place. And Ellen McEwen is a great deal like you. She helped Grandad with the typology he made for his spear tips. You must have seen those drawings – Ellen did them herself! She knows so much about the estate and its past, the land and – and the way the land has its own story. She just didn’t get to learn it at university like you did.’
Mary lowered the ear trumpet and turned back to look at me once more. Her smooth face was still expressionless.
‘It’s true not many young women are as lucky as I was about university,’ she said. ‘But I shouldn’t think tinker folk care for that kind of study.’
I gazed down into my teacup. I held my breath for a moment. I couldn’t allow myself to get angry with her again. And truthfully, I didn’t like it that the McEwens muttered superstitiously to bless themselves and make Mary feel self-conscious and peculiar.
‘You set an example for everybody, Mary,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if my folk care for that kind of study either – not for me. But I’m going to go to university. I love to read. I don’t want to run shooting parties all my life until my husband dies and makes me sell everything. I want to be like you.’
‘Oh, Julia.’
Her eyes were brimming. I felt cheap and manipulative, because although I’d meant it – I’d meant it with all my heart! – I had been trying to hit her hard, and I could see that I’d succeeded.
Mary said, ‘Julia, mine is a very solitary existence.’
‘All the more reason to let some more interesting people into it!’ I added warmly, ‘You let Sandy in.’
Mary stood up. She went to her desk and fiddled with the inkwell, very deliberately dropping blobs on to her big desk blotting pad.
‘It’s not been an easy summer for me, Julia,’ she said.
And here was the other opening I’d been waiting for.
‘All those police interviews! It must be dreadful for you. But they’re finished with you now, aren’t they?’
‘I might have to act as a witness if there’s an inquiry,’ she said unhappily. ‘I was the last to see Dr Housman alive, other than you.’
‘What did you tell Inspector Milne about that day?’ I asked.
She drew in a sharp breath.
‘Oh, Julia, why do you want to know more about that unfortunate incident?’
I answered with a fair amount of honesty: ‘I just wish I knew what happened to me!’