Chapter 13
trì-deug / thirteen
John entered the MacInnes house without knocking.
He was greeted by the smell of fresh bread and a rich tomato sauce simmering with herbs that he did not care for, but that Innes would have made a three-hour round trip just to buy.
The house was quiet but for the sound of bubbling pots.
Innes’s father was back in the hospital for more tests and Sorley had gone to Glasgow to be at his bedside.
They would be gone for almost a week and so Innes had seized the opportunity to invite John for dinner.
John found him hunched at the kitchen counter, the guts of a transistor spread across a towel. His head was bowed in concentration as he soldered a wire to the receiver. John watched him work for a while and imagined coming home to this every night and how that would be a welcome sight.
Innes didn’t bother to look up. “Thought I smelt rain.”
John shed his tweeds and hung them on the hooks in the hallway. He produced two small signal bulbs from his pocket. “I remember you said you needed just the thing. I took them from our old video machine.”
Innes stared at the bulbs a moment. Then he softened a little. “Well, thank you.”
It went like this, loving John Macleod. You did it against all your reason, against all your better judgement, and in that exact moment he starved the embers into submission, he had the skill to blow on them gently and ignite them again.
“May I use your toilet?”
“Of course,” Innes said. “You know where it is.”
There was only one bathroom and Innes listened as John went up the stairs.
The house gave up its tell-tale creaks as John entered each of the bedrooms. Innes knew how he would enter a room, turn on the big light and look around.
He couldn’t relax until he checked all the corners and all the cupboards just to be sure that each room was empty and they were truly alone.
There had been a time, years before, when he would have flushed the toilet without using it, just to maintain the pretence. But they had been doing this for decades now and so he no longer made the effort.
After a few moments, John came back into the room just as Innes was setting their plates on the table.
There were some stalks of montbretia in a vase.
Innes had picked the flowers that afternoon but they had already wilted in the glare of the fire.
John watched as Innes gathered some fallen petals and tossed them into the flames. “Will you take some tea with that?”
“Have you a tin of lager?”
Innes brought them warm lagers which they drank straight from the can.
They sat facing one another and bowed their heads while John said grace.
Dinner was a heap of Italian noodles slathered in a rich ragu.
John picked at his food. Although it was delicious, it was not to his taste, the sauce was too rich and was strangely grassy.
Innes had broken the spaghetti into bite-sized pieces but John still found it to be fiddly.
Each man concentrated on his food and ate like it was a chore until Innes pushed his own plate to John’s side of the table.
He got up, came around the other side, and sat next to John. He resumed stabbing his spaghetti and laid his free hand on John’s leg. He cupped John’s inner thigh. He held it firmly and pulled John a little closer.
“Better?” he asked.
“Better,” John replied.
They sat like this while they finished dinner.
Now and then, they spoke about ordinary things: the good lamb stew that Flash had been serving, the falling price of wool, the selling off of the outlying churches and mission houses, but every piece of talk felt like they had chewed it before and John began sighing instead of replying, and soon, neither man had the heart to keep the conversation going and they drifted into silence.
When they were finished, Innes cleared the plates and returned with a fluffy-looking cake.
It was dusted with sugared coconut but he had used too much yellow food colouring, so it looked like the colour of sheep’s piss in fresh snow.
John frowned at it, thought how dehydrated the poor ewe would be – copper poisoning, most likely.
Innes gathered his stack of QSL cards and handed them to John.
The first card was sky blue, plainly stamped with an alphanumeric callsign, marked with an address and licence number in Düsseldorf.
As John flicked through, he noted responses from Leighton-Buzzard, Barrow-in-Furness, Mont Saint-Michel, all the far-flung tokens Innes had received from the evenings he spent finely tuning his radio, searching, waiting for a response from the nothingness.
“God bless that new antenna.” Innes tapped the card. “Imagine. Berlin.”
“That’s great . . .”
Innes laughed because John had no talent for insincerity. He shuffled the cards and held one up like it was an eye test. “Venice, well, Verona. But that’s close to Venice, isn’t it?”
“Land of the Left Footer?”
“I’ll take you one day.”
John drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Innes set the cards to the side. He rose and came close to John. He placed his hands on either side of his face as if to steady him, and then he kissed him gently on the lips. “I know you want to go, but please stay, just a while longer.”
“I’m not good company this weather.”
“Don’t blame the weather.”
Innes lifted a brown paper bag from the sideboard and out slid a copy of Nana Mouskouri, The Girl from Greece Sings.
“I’ve been hiding this in my room like it’s a filthy magazine.
I told Beady it was a sermon from Caithness.
” He tapped the cover. “Do you remember this one?” The needle found the start of the song.
‘Don’t Go to Strangers’. The singer’s mezzo sharp and clear.
“You’re quieter than usual,” Innes said. “What’s eating you?”
“The usual. Money. Mother-in-laws. Sons.”
“That can all wait. Come on.” Innes took his hand and pulled John to his feet. “Nobody is watching. The doors are all locked.”
John’s head was pounding. He passed Innes like they were strangers, but Innes caught him by the wrist and spun him.
“I’m not feeling right in myself.”
“Aidh—a headache, is it? Perhaps we are more like a married couple than I thought.”
Innes wouldn’t let go of his hand and he swung it like John was a petulant child. John gave in and gave Innes his way, if only to stop him from treating him like a sulky little boy.
They slow-danced in the manner they had been forced to learn at school, where there were never enough girls to go around. Neither of them was well-practised but they held their bodies together and stepped, heavily, as one.
John looked up at the lightshade – he always looked to the overhead bulb first. He would look at every lamp and the direction of light it cast, then to the heavy curtains, the door, the lock, the dark corners of the room, all in that order.
Tonight, he made it as far as the curtains before Innes held his face and interrupted him with a kiss. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve closed them properly. I’ve pinned them and set a chair against the bottom – just as you like.”
He mumbled a quiet, “Thank you,” and then he added, “Will you remember and collect Lorna Duff in the morning? She’s complaining about her leg again.”
“Yes, John.”
They waltzed until the needle reached the end of the record and the speakers began to crackle. They came apart. Innes turned off the record player and returned the record to its brown paper sleeve. “Now,” he said, “will you take some of that cake?”
Innes had used the lemon curd that John liked. He cut a large slice for him. John ate it sitting in Old Innes’s armchair, while Innes leant against the sideboard and watched him eat.
There had been a time in their late twenties when it seemed John could no longer pretend.
He would come to Innes, his eyes rubbed pink with guilt and exhaustion.
It had become harder to disguise the ways in which Grace’s body repelled him.
He always considered their lovemaking as a series of consecutive actions that produced a useful result: a wife that would be still, a mother-in-law hushed, a good name upheld, a son.
In those days, John snuck away more frequently and it was a feast for Innes.
They led the dogs on long unnecessary meanders, until they found a hollow in the hillside, somewhere dry, somewhere away from the eyes of their neighbours.
The land was so bare it was a hard thing to find, but over the years they had come to map all the places they could be together and they came to know them by the flowers that grew nearby, or by the shape of the rocks that hung overhead.
In the summer months they had been lying near a constellation of bog asphodel, in a rift in the peat bogs, a sheltered place where the earth had split and made a soft bed for them.
John was tearing up handfuls of grass to wipe at the translucent mess he had left on Innes’s back.
The asphodel left a trace of saffron on his skin, vivid as a surgeon’s iodine.
John stopped cleaning him. He rubbed the scant fat around Innes’s lean middle and frowned.
He told him how he didn’t care for it, how womanly he found it.
And although John forgot it almost as soon as he said it, Innes never did.
He watched John eat his cake.