The Goldenacre

Episode 66

Tallis was to visit Edie Bradley, who lived in the Glasgow suburbs, a place called Milngavie. He had been taught by Mungo how to pronounce the word – Mill-gye. He was on the mission from Theseus. He descended from the train in a haze, found a taxi and managed to correctly pronounce Milngavie. The taxi moved off, and he watched the city slide by.

There was noise and shouting, people shopping and moving, cars everywhere, and rain, drenching its gleam on metal and glass.

Water ran in new becks down the littery sludge at the edges of streets, past soaked homeless pleading for money, past neon betting shops and burger joints, past burned ruins and ruinous Victorian buildings, past ugly concrete and some shivers of fugitive grace and beauty.

Past the smoke drifting from the Mackintosh Building, past the embers and the destruction.

After a time, leaving the tenements and the noise behind, they entered wider streets and fields of silent geriatric bungalows. In the distance rose high rises and stark, bare, precipitous hills.

The taxi pulled into what could have been a country road and drove to the end, where a low, single-storey house sat behind a stand of trees.

“There you go, boss,” the driver said, and Tallis paid and alighted, and the taxi drove away.

The air was fresh and wet. The city hummed and groaned behind him. Ahead, the view was hills and trees and the long path to the Highlands. Cars flashed by on the main road.

A bell, somewhere, dinged as he moved through a small white gate. The garden was looked after but slightly overgrown. There were flowerbeds glistening with the new rain, some heavy trees, and toys for toddlers on the long grass of the lawn.

A woman stood at the door, white-haired, with a pan in her hand.

“Good morning, Mr Tallis,” she said. Her voice was clear and sharp.

Tallis greeted her, and she ushered him inside.

“Now, my son was here yesterday with his children – my grandsons – and they made a terrible mess, so I am afraid I am just doing some tidying up. And they used this pan, an old and much beloved pan of mine that has survived many burned scrambled eggs, the cooking of my husband, and many a house move, to melt something awful in. I have no idea what it was, but I think it’s ruined – don’t you?”

She showed Tallis the offending pot. It had something black inside it, something charred and evil.

“It may need a soak,” he said.

“I think it may need to be taken to the dump. And I do love going to the dump. Shall we have tea before work?”

They were in a large kitchen that had a broad cast-iron stove and a large, white ceramic sink.

The watery light gleamed on everything, on plates and cutlery, on glass-framed pictures on the wall, on a cat’s water dish, on Edie’s thick white hair.

She heaved a water-filled old kettle on to the stove, which pulsed with heat. The radio was playing classical music.

“Now tell me, Mr Tallis, are you related to Thomas Tallis, the composer?” she said, leaning back against the warm stove. She had sinewy arms and strong fingers. Her eyes glittered.

“No,” he said, his hands on the kitchen table. “No, sadly not. At least, not as far as I know.”

“You will have heard Vaughan Williams. “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”, of course. Divine music. Now my late husband and I disagreed on this; I think the Romanza in his Fifth Symphony is his most beautiful music. That Romanza is some of the most beautiful music written in the last hundred years. Now Reggie disagreed, but we disagreed on many things.

“He always said, ‘Oh, you’re not listening to me,’ and I would say, ‘I am very much listening, my darling Reggie, but I am disagreeing with you, and that is a different matter altogether.’ And so marriage goes, of course. I was blessed. I am alone now. So, how do you like your tea?”

Tallis said hot, brown and sweet. “Oh, me too,” she beamed. “This is going to be a terrific day. Now, Mr Tallis, you are not here to turn me from the path of righteousness, are you?”

“I might be,” he said.

Edie smiled, then served tea and said she was going to get documents.

She thumped up the stairs to a room above.

There was some kerfuffle and a large, white hairy cat bounded down the stairs and sloped into the kitchen. The cat came over to Tallis and rubbed itself on his leg, then jumped up on to the surface next to the stove. It licked its paws.

Five long white hairs stuck tremulously to Tallis’s calf.

“Now, Rosa there was just lying all over these, I am afraid,” Edie said, hauling in a large pile of papers.

“She, like me, mourns her own late husband, Karl, and Karl was a beautiful cat himself, but also rather fat and he got terribly... well, terribly motionless, and he quietly died a few years ago. He is now sleeping under that cherry tree in the garden. But, unlike me, Rosa has no children, so she rather thinks I am her child, which is funny, as in real years I am 60 years older than her, but I suppose in cat lives she is – 16 times seven, whatever that is – much older than me, so maybe she is right.”

“Cats often are right about these things,” Tallis said.

She smiled. “Indeed so.”

“Oh, Theseus did say I would like you. And Theseus, that gorgeous man, has sent you.”

Tallis nodded. “With an offer.”

“I am afraid, dear sir, I do not want to hear your offer. My mind is made up. I cannot abide these works of art being in your gallery, hung up like pelts or stuffed lions’ heads, any more. I cannot live with it. I cannot bear the weight of those works on my conscience. Can I tell you something strange?”

My mind is made up. I cannot abide these works of art being in your gallery, hung up like pelts or stuffed lions’ heads

More tomorrow.

Philip Miller lives in Edinburgh. An awardwinning journalist for 20 years, he is now a civil servant. The Goldenacre, published by Birlinn, follows his previous novels, The Blue Horse and All The Galaxies. His latest novel, The Hollow Tree, is to be a sequel to The Goldenacre.

By Philip Miller