The Posy Ring Read online

  ‘I know another one. “Hail Queen of Heaven.” But it’s a song, really. A hymn.’

  ‘Say that one then. Or sing it. Can you sing it?’

  ‘I think so.’ She stood with her hands steepled, palms together, as they did in school, and she sang, ‘Hail, queen of heaven, the ocean star, guide of the wanderer here below, thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy care, save us from peril and from woe. Mother of Christ, star of the sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me.’ She repeated the last two lines and he joined in. He could always pick up a tune in no time.

  He nodded. ‘Yes. That’s better. That makes sense. Pray for the wanderer. That’s us.’

  At last, they turned away and retraced their steps down the hill. She had expected more. She had expected magic. A miracle. The heavens opening. A chorus of angels at least. She couldn’t help feeling disappointed, although she pretended that she believed in it. At the bend in the track they turned around one last time. She saw their pathetic flag of white silk, already blending with the other rags suspended there. So many wishes. Then they were walking downhill, slipping quietly past the house, past Auchenblae. He pulled her along, not letting her linger there.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Hurry. Hurry.’

  Once again, she had wanted to stop, fascinated by the obvious age of the house, like a mini castle, she thought. Even then, even though she was a little girl, it had seemed quite magical. Now it seems smaller, at least from this side, although she can tell that there is more of it on the sea rather than the landward side. But her father wouldn’t stop. The van was tucked away in a lay-by. They climbed in and drove off, drove straight onto the ferry and away. He didn’t even wait to make tea. ‘We’ll stop later,’ he said.

  He had reluctantly pointed the house out to her one last time, her third sight of it, when they were safely on the ferry, and then only in response to her excited questions. They were leaving it far behind, his relief palpable, the house and the hill and then the whole island of Garve dissolving into the mist. She had expected a miracle, but none came. Her mother lingered for a few more weeks only. The wish lasted longer than Jessica May.

  She has never been back since. In fact, she had almost forgotten about it until the unexpected arrival of the official letter. Daisy hesitates between the lane and the house, still convulsively clutching the keys in her pocket. There had been nothing random about her father’s knowledge of the house, the hill and the tree. He knew all about it, because he had been here before. And how, she thinks.

  TWO

  When the solicitor’s letter came, she had been doubtful at first, wondering if it was a hoax. She had called her father. He was playing at some festival down south. It’s what he does. One of the grand old men of folk. That’s what they call him, although he doesn’t think of himself as particularly old and he isn’t. Perhaps it’s just that he seems to have been performing, playing the fiddle, for years.

  ‘I’m a baby boomer,’ he says, grinning. ‘We don’t get old.’

  The young fans like him, give him the kind of respect that would have amused him when he was a young musician himself. Now he tolerates it. He has always been a kindly man. His music matters more to him than almost anything else. Except for Jessica May. Except for his daughter. After his wife died, he had sold the van, moved to Glasgow for a while, rented a flat so that Daisy could go to school. He had taken whatever work he could find and he had been reasonably successful. When the landlord decided to sell the tiny West End flat, he had managed to buy it so that Daisy would always have somewhere to call home. There had been gigs in pubs, session music, private tutoring. One year – a good year – he had played for a television advertisement and as well as the mortgage, that had bought Daisy new clothes, a bike, a school skiing trip. He played the fiddle, people said, as though he had sold his soul to the devil. Perhaps he had. He still does. But everyone knows the devil has all the best tunes.

  She had read the letter aloud to him over the phone. There was a long silence. He sighed.

  ‘Auchenblae,’ he said. ‘It means Flowerfield, I think. In Gaelic.’

  ‘Yes. The house. My grandmother died and, Dad, she left the house to me. Viola’s left everything to me. I had no idea. No idea it was hers. You never said a word. Never told me where Mum used to live. Gone away, you said. Lost touch. Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? I could have found her. Could have visited her. Could have got to know her.’ She could hear the resentment in her voice and tried to moderate it. He had never been less than caring where she was concerned. He must have had his reasons.

  ‘I didn’t know she was still alive. I didn’t see how she could be, really. She must have been a great age.’

  ‘She was. But that day. That day when we walked up the hill. That day when we made the wish. She would have been alive then. Viola. She would have been there then.’

  ‘Maybe. Probably. Yes.’

  ‘You wouldn’t let me stop. You never told me you even knew the place. Why?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I was afraid, Daisy. I was afraid.’

  ‘Of what, for goodness sake?’

  ‘Of losing you.’

  ‘How could you have lost me?’

  ‘Your mother was so ill. But she wouldn’t give in. I thought, if Viola knew, she would have wanted you. And back then, she might have got you. Your mother was dying, Daisy. I knew that. They wouldn’t have left you with me. Not if Viola had stepped in.’

  ‘I don’t see what difference that would have made. She was only my grandmother. You were my dad. Nobody could have kept us apart.’

  ‘I think they could have. I was a bit of a mess. After your mother died. And even before.’

  ‘You weren’t.’

  ‘Oh, I was. I was, you know. But I’m glad I never let you see it. Glad you never knew. She might have got you. You didn’t know her. I never knew her well. Jess wouldn’t have it. But Viola was a strong-minded woman. Like your mother. Once she set her heart on something, nothing would stop her. And that was just like your mother. I was so frightened of losing you. I’d lost your mother. I couldn’t lose you as well.’

  Daisy paused. She could barely take it in. ‘So why did we go back at all? Why did we risk it?’

  ‘Desperation. I’d have tried anything. I remembered the hill and the Clootie Tree. Your mother talked about it. She asked me if I would go. How could I refuse?’

  ‘The wish,’ she said, after a while. ‘Did you ever think the wish would work?’

  ‘No. Not really. I knew it wouldn’t work. Except…’ He hesitated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because I knew it wouldn’t work, because I knew how ill your mother really was, I kind of made another wish. A different one. It was a supplementary wish, if you like. I thought I might be allowed one more. In the circumstances. One for luck. That’s the way magic works, isn’t it? Tricky.’

  ‘What kind of wish?’ She was intrigued now, in spite of her shock, her anger. Besides, she loved him. Could never stop loving him.

  ‘Not for myself. Or for your mother. Just for you.’

  ‘And did it work? Did that one come true?’

  ‘You tell me. Are you happy? Happy enough, anyway?’

  ‘Of course I’m happy. You made sure of that.’

  He had too. He had given her as much security as his wandering soul could manage. He had given her unstinting love and support. An education. Self-respect. What more could she ask?

  ‘Sometimes these things take time,’ he said.

  The phone crackled a little. He would be somewhere in a sea of mud, with his new van and his old fiddle. There would be a new woman too. There always was. He was still an attractive man. Although in that respect, he had waited until Daisy grew up, waited until she had gone to university. She could hear music in the background. The thin sounds of a whistle. A bodhrán. A woman singing.

  ‘Som
etimes they take years.’

  ‘What do?’

  ‘Spells,’ he said. ‘Wishes. Sometimes they take years to come true.’

  *

  Today, she has come to see the house.

  ‘Let’s reconnoitre,’ her father would say. He still does. ‘Let’s reconnoitre,’ or ‘Let’s make camp.’ She feels she ought to reconnoitre first. Perhaps make camp later.

  It is earlier in the year than on that previous visit, but she’s pleased to find that the lane is already full of flowers, full of the yellow and blue and pale green of spring: violets, primroses, a few early bluebells. She drove here between hedges of dazzling golden gorse, so bright that she wished she had thought to bring sunglasses. Whin, they call it here. The birds are singing their hearts out after the rain. She can hear the beat and flutter of their wings among the leaves.

  She feels a throb of anticipation, and there it is. The house again, just as she remembers it: stone walls in a big rectangle, two and a half storeys from this side, with a mossy roof, a sturdy square tower at one end, three or more storeys high with a crumbling battlement at the top, two rows of casement windows in the main building reflecting the light like so many mirrors, all half hidden at the end of a green lane, beyond rusted iron gates. It seems largely unchanged, forlorn in the manner of all empty houses, but especially old houses. Even in spring, the garden seems to be making determined efforts to smother the building. Lord knows what it will be like in summer. It occurs to her that all this is now her responsibility. It is up to her to reject or to accept the responsibility of doing something about it. With what? says the sensible part of her mind. There will be very little money left once inheritance tax is paid. Just the house and its contents. The magnitude of it all overwhelms her. It seems unreal. What am I doing here? she thinks. There is a stillness about this house, a quietness about it that the birdsong, the low drone of insects, only serve to intensify.

  The hill can wait. The sad old tree, with its burden of other people’s wishes, other people’s desperation, can wait too. For now, the house is calling to her. She can hear its siren song. The answers to a hundred questions. She pushes open the rusted gate that flakes under her fingers, sets foot on the soft green path and walks towards the door. The place feels undisturbed, sunk deep in time. Dreaming. She senses that she is about to wake it. How will that feel? Maybe she should have brought a friend with her. People offered. Not her father, though. He had pleaded work. A gig, he said. She sensed his disapproval, although he would never admit it, never discourage her from doing something she felt passionately about. She had turned all of them down, thinking that this ought to be a private moment. Now she’s not so sure.

  She takes the bundle of keys out of her pocket. Almost hidden between the old iron keys is an ordinary Yale, incongruous among the rest, but that’s the one they’ve told her to use. There is no crime to speak of on the island and the house is well off the beaten track. There had never been any trouble ‘of that sort’ for Viola. Or so the lawyer had said, mysteriously. She had found herself wondering what other sort of trouble there might have been, but she didn’t ask. She remembers the solicitor, Mr McDowall, in his Glasgow office, a room so crammed with books and deed boxes and yellowing pieces of paper that she wonders how he ever manages to find anything at all in a place so Dickensian – such a throwback. The only other time she had ever been in a lawyer’s office was with her father, years earlier, when he had bought the Glasgow flat and had been asked to sign the documents. That had been quite devoid of books or papers – a sleek office furnished in pale wood. Nothing at all like this.

  Mr McDowall caught her bemused glance, chuckled, a laugh so dry that it sounded like the rustle of parchment. ‘We don’t subscribe to the paperless office here, Ms Graham. Never have. Never will now, I suppose. Once I’m gone, all this will go too, but not until then.’

  The other keys are a miscellaneous and anonymous bunch, long and short, fat and thin, including a heavy key with a brown label, upon which is written ‘back door’ in a thin hand. She wondered if this was Viola’s handwriting or even some long-ago housekeeper. Some were for internal rooms, some even for pieces of furniture.

  ‘These are the keys of your castle,’ said the lawyer. ‘I’m told these old keys have a value. What would people do with them, I wonder? Other than sell them as scrap metal.’

  ‘They’re quite decorative. People do buy them.’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s what you do, isn’t it, Ms Graham? Dealing.’

  She nodded. That word always sounded faintly suspicious, as though she were doing her deals with bags of white powder in the city’s less salubrious alleyways. ‘Antiques and collectables. Yes.’

  ‘Do you have a shop?’

  ‘Nothing so grand, I’m afraid. No. I do fairs and markets. And online. I’m small fry, really.’

  ‘Well, Auchenblae will be the ideal place for you. I expect you’ll have fun exploring.’ Mr McDowall angled his varifocals so that he could gaze at her through the right part of the lens.

  ‘Maybe.’ She looked doubtfully at the keys. ‘But I have no idea what’s there. Do you? Was my grandmother a collector?’

  ‘You might be pleasantly surprised. Although I must admit it’s more than a year since I was there myself. And I suspect she was more of a hoarder than a collector. I don’t know whether there’s very much value in the contents, except as an undisturbed record of a Scottish house with a very long history.’

  ‘How long has it been standing empty?’

  ‘Most of the winter. Although I think very little has been done to it for many years. It isn’t exactly falling down, but it certainly needs some attention. Miss Neilson had a bad fall in the autumn and was taken to hospital on the mainland. She was well into her nineties, you know. But until that time, she had been quite spritely. Surprisingly so. Her sight wasn’t what it had been. She complained of rheumatism. But she was, as they say, as sharp as a tack. A stubborn old lady. She only gave up driving five years ago, I believe. She told me that she knew the time had come when she mistook two dustbins at the end of somebody’s driveway for a pair of tourists.’

  ‘She had a sense of humour then?’

  ‘After a fashion. And sometimes at other people’s expense. Didn’t suffer fools gladly, that’s for sure. But she wouldn’t give up the house, even though her doctor and such friends as she had on the island told her that it was all too much for her. Told her she should sell up. Make herself comfortable. Doctor MacGregor tried to enlist my help.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t want to leave the island.’

  ‘Oh, she would never have left the island. But there was the possibility of one of the new affordable houses in the village of Keill: warm, dry, cheap and easy to run.’

  ‘She wouldn’t move?’

  He shook his head. ‘It was no more than a few miles away, but I knew better than to interfere. You couldn’t ever persuade Viola Neilson to do anything she had set her mind against. Or indeed to refrain from doing something about which she had already made up her mind. A few people rallied round – the way they always do on the island. I don’t think they liked her much but they always look after their own, and they considered her to be more or less built in with the stones. As is Auchenblae, of course. Forgive me, Ms Graham, but she wasn’t a particularly likeable person.’

  Daisy smiled. ‘I get that impression.’

  ‘There’s a shop in the village of Scoull a couple of miles along the road. They would bring groceries out for her. And a medical centre in Keill, farther south. They would fetch her into the surgery when she needed it. The postman would check up on her in passing, although I doubt if she got much in the way of mail, so he would even make a detour to make sure she was OK.’

  ‘It sounds like a lonely old age.’

  ‘Maybe, but she was used to her own company. I paid her the odd visit. I like to go fishing in that part of the world, s
o I would – as the Spanish say – kill two bulls with one sword. It was about a year ago that she summoned me for a more formal meeting.’

  ‘Mr McDowall, how come she found out about me? Well, I suppose I mean, how could she not know about me?’

  ‘You didn’t know about her.’

  ‘That’s true. But my father was very cautious. He had his reasons. I don’t know whether they were good reasons or not, but he was very wary of her. I would have thought curiosity might have got the better of her. It seems that she didn’t even know about my mother’s death. That’s tragic.’

  ‘I think she didn’t want to know. Your mother and she were very much alike in some ways. Stubborn. Easily offended. Your mother decided to cut all ties, both with the island and with Viola. As far as she was concerned there was no going back. Then, after she died, your father respected her wishes. Even though he could probably have done with some support. A wealthy grandmother might have been a godsend back then.’

  ‘I had a granny. My dad’s mum. She lived down in Ayr. She died only a couple of years ago. I loved her to bits. We were fine.’

  But she hadn’t been a wealthy granny, thought Daisy. She had a sudden pang of longing for her grandma Nancy’s living room in the wee council flat not far from the river: the gas fire, the ginger cat, Jimmie, sleeping on the fluffy rug, the television in the corner, the nest of tables pulled out to hold mugs of strong tea, caramel logs, teacakes and shortbread, always set out on the same old plate with daffodils, the sole survivor of some long-lost tea set. When she was younger she had spent weekends there when her father had the occasional gig. Later, she had gone regularly, once a month. She would sleep on the sofa and in the morning her grandma would make toast castles, slices of bread propped up into a tower shape, with battlements cut along the top and scrambled eggs in the middle. It was all gone now, new tenants in the flat, most of the furniture sold or sent to the charity shop, Jimmie rehomed with a kindly neighbour who had shared his care anyway. Oh God, she thought. I wish you were here right now, Grandma. I do want to talk to somebody sensible about all this.