Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [43]
“But if you stay here, then you’ll be staying just with Daddy,”
shouted Antonia into the foliage.
“Exactly,” came a disembodied voice from above. “That’s what we want to do.”
Antonia left him where he was. Those who climbed trees usually came down from them after a short while, although in the back of her mind she remembered Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees, a favourite book of hers. Calvino’s hero, the twelveyear-old Baron Cosimo Piavosco di Rondo, takes to the trees after a row at the dinner table over the eating of snails. He never comes down, and thereafter leads a full life in the treetops, covering considerable distances by moving from tree to tree; impossible, of course, but a very affecting story nonetheless. Murdo could hardly remain where he was for very long. Cosimo lived in a more forested age; Murdo had only the one tree, with sky on every side.
She returned to call him down an hour later. He was still On the Machair
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there, though uncommunicative, and an hour after that she returned with the eighteen-year-old son of the stockman. “I’ll get him down for you,” muttered this young man, and he promptly scaled the tree, worked his way out onto the bough on which Murdo sat, and grabbed at the young boy’s shirt. In his attempt to avoid capture, Murdo hung for a moment on the branch and then fell, crashing through lower branches on his descent. Antonia screamed and ran forward to attempt to catch him. She could not, of course, and the boy fell heavily on a grass-covered mound of earth at the base of the tree, winded and unable to cry, but otherwise unharmed. For the next five days, he refused to talk, and turned his face away from Antonia whenever she addressed him.
She had little alternative. The children stayed on the farm with their father and the Dress Shop Assistant. Antonia went to live in St Andrews, which made it possible for her to see the children regularly and also to look after her father. It was an arrangement that seemed to make everybody content, and Antonia, rather to her surprise, found that she was inordinately happy. Even the formal ending of the marriage was amicable, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not her fault. In this state of blessedness, she began to write her novel.
29. On the Machair
The idea of spending several months in Edinburgh appealed to Antonia. Novels – and other works of the imagination – are sometimes best written in unfamiliar surroundings, where the mind can wander without being brought back to earth by the constant interruptions of one’s normal life. In Domenica’s flat in Scotland Street, separated from St Andrews by the green waters of the Firth of Forth, she felt quite free of distraction. She knew one or two people in Edinburgh, it was true, but she had not told them that she was there and there was no reason 90
On the Machair
why they should find out. If she walked up Scotland Street, if she wandered about Dundas Street, which was about as far as she intended to go, nobody would know who she was nor have any reason to speculate. Of course there was Angus Lordie, who had let her into the flat. She was not sure about him: she had not encouraged him, but one never knew with men. They could become interested without receiving any invitation, and some of them were very slow to take the hint. Really, men were most tedious, she thought, and a life without them was so much simpler.
When Harry had first gone off with the Dress Shop Assistant she had missed him painfully; but that feeling of loss had faded remarkably quickly and had been replaced