A Kind of Grief Read online

  “Bother you, does it? Och, you get used to it in my job. Calum is always teasing me, saying it’s a wonder I have any sense of smell working here for near twenty-five years.”

  “Calum? Are you Mrs. Mackenzie, Calum’s mother?”

  “I am that.”

  “Joanne Ross, from the Highland Gazette.”

  “Oh, aye, you’re here because o’ poor Miss Ramsay. Right terrible that trial was. Mind you, some folk have nothing better to do than gossip. Then again, the woman’s aye here there and everywhere.”

  “Really? I heard Miss Ramsay likes the quiet life.”

  “You should see the size of her petrol bills.” Even though Alice Ramsay was one of the garage’s best customers, Mrs. Mackenzie was tutting at another example of what she saw as Miss Ramsay’s deceptions. “No, she must cover a fair distance, as she buys at least a tank o’ petrol a week. Up to thon so-caa’d artist stuff, no doubt.”

  Joanne had to stop herself from staring. Telling this to a stranger? Has the woman no self-awareness? She considered herself a person who was not interested in gossip. Until Don McLeod, deputy editor at the Gazette, had asked her, in her early days as a fledgling reporter, how was a journalist to do their job without listening to gossip?

  The trick was to distinguish between gossip and facts, he taught her, so always check, then double check, and get at least two quotes, with names and ages and addresses.

  “You must know Miss Ramsay well, if you see her every week?”

  Mrs. Mackenzie sensed she had said too much. “There’s knowing, and knowing.” She took the pound note and went inside to fetch change. Examining Joanne through the window, she decided Mrs. Ross was another of those women who didn’t know her place.

  “Cheery-bye, nice meeting you,” she said as she handed over the coins. Watching the car pull out into the main road, Mrs. Mackenzie thought over what her son, Calum, had told her of this woman.

  “It’ll be good for my career to learn from Joanne,” he’d said, after he’d apologized four times for being late.

  Calling her by her first name indeed, Mrs. Mackenzie was thinking. That flighty fiancée o’ his is a bad enough influence. Now he’s listening to a woman who should be at home minding her family, not haring about the countryside on her own, asking after witches.

  The journey back felt shorter, though the drive took the same time. Joanne felt she had proved to herself, and to McAllister, that she was capable of an outing without someone hovering, their mere presence implying, Are you all right? Are you sure you’re up to it? Maybe you should . . . ?

  I’m fine! she wanted to shout. Completely well. All I need is inspiration, a story, a plot, anything I can lose myself in, and just write.

  Driving over the Bonar Bridge, glancing at the mudflats of the Dornoch Firth, the rotting-vegetation low-tide salt stench seeping in through a third-of-the-way-open window, a notion came to her, making her smile. If only I could ask a witch.

  She spoke to the mirror. “ ‘I haven’t been able to find a plot,’ I’ll say. ‘Aye, I have just the spell for plots lost and found,’ the witch will tell me. ‘That will be two silver shillings, thank you.’ ”

  CHAPTER 4

  Next day, in the minutes before the brain and the body were entirely awake, those minutes when the tea-making ritual was accomplished in a half-sleepwalking half-dreaming in dressing gown and pajamas state, Alice discovers there is no milk—she and Joanne finished it.

  “Damn and blast and drat,” she mutters. “Oh, well, it’s my day at the Old People’s Home. I’ll buy some at the Co-op, anywhere to avoid Mrs. Mackenzie.”

  After black tea, the routine with the hens, a quick sweep of the floor, she reaches for her portfolio, the one containing the watercolors for her book on the flora and fauna of the Highland glen—singular, her glen—a book she hopes to have published. One day.

  She spreads a selection on the kitchen table. Then puzzles yet again if she should include the drawings of skeletons and skulls. She remembers the trial, “that trial of a trial,” as she calls it, and the sheriff’s twisted face as he looked at the drawings, the way he drew out the word “art” when asking rhetorically, “Is this really aaart?”

  “Ha, what a fine mess that got me into,” she says to the wee dog still there, still on the rug, going nowhere.

  She is remembering Dougald Forsythe. She was scared he might come up the glen. The thought of his patent-leather shoes stepping over puddles attempting to find safe ground and failing makes her laugh.

  The wee dog cocks his head.

  “Don’t want him examining our pictures,” she tells the dog. “Though why I thought it a good idea to call Dougie as a witness I’ll never fathom. Still, he does recognize a piece of real art when he sees it. And he says good things about my work—so he can’t be a complete knave.”

  “Hello, the McAllister household.”

  “Joanne. Or should I say Mrs. McAllister?”

  “Sandy. Or should I say My Lord Editor-in-Chief?” When at last, after many a story, Joanne had met McAllister’s best friend and fellow conspirator, she had been apprehensive, nervous even. She compared herself—unfavorably—with female journalists on the Herald, women she was certain were worldly and sophisticated, in clothes bought in expensive stores, not run up on an old treadle sewing machine.

  Her first and only meeting with Sandy Marshall, editor of one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, was at her wedding. She liked him, liked his wife, liked his children too.

  At the wedding, Sandy was best man. He’d asked Joanne for a dance, and taking off his jacket, turning his sporran to the side, he’d led her onto the floor to join the eightsome reel. Kilt swinging, wheeching and skirling with celebratory cries worthy of warriors, he linked arms with her, throwing her around the dance floor, and she’d laughed till her jaws ached.

  His wife, Morag, had said, “Whew! Thanks, Joanne. It’s usually me who’s the victim of his dancing.”

  “So how’s that husband o’ yours?” Sandy asked now. “Still playing that screeching he calls music?”

  “He is.” Try as she might to like them, some of the more esoteric tracks from McAllister’s beloved jazz recordings bewildered her.

  “There should be Saint in front of your name,” he said. “Listen, I’m calling about the so-called witch trial. I spoke to McAllister. He said you’ve met this woman . . .”

  “Alice Ramsay.”

  “I understand she doesn’t want publicity, but Dougald Forsythe, who spoke for her at her trial, writes for us.”

  “Isn’t he a lecturer at the Art College?”

  “He is, and he’s also our art critic. To cut a long story short, I owe him a favor.” Sandy would never reveal the story of the previous art critic cum junior reporter caught plagiarizing copy from a London art journal. Dougald Forsythe had shown Sandy the original article, saving the editor and the newspaper much embarrassment and perhaps a court case.

  Then Forsythe had brazenly claimed the art column for himself. Aware of public opinion, with which he usually disagreed—he produced articles that were never less than entertaining, were often controversial, and usually resulted in irate letters from conservative art patrons and readers.

  “So how can I help?” Joanne asked Sandy.

  “Write me a think piece, based around what ordinary people see as art. Cite the trial. Mention the narrow-minded responses to anything modern the art galleries buy.”

  “Like the Salvador Dalí brouhaha.”

  “Exactly. Given what it’s costing the taxpayers for these works, it stirs up the readers no end. Forsythe suggested Glasgow’s next buy might be one of the weirder Picasso works; that stirred up plenty of controversy.”

  “Why me? No, don’t answer—I’m the ordinary person.” She was interested. An article in a major newspaper was a major coup. “Sandy, it’s a huge topic. I’ve no idea where to begin.”

  It had been Dougald Forsythe’s idea to publish contrasting opinions, ju
st as it had been his idea that Joanne Ross write them. But Sandy couldn’t figure out how the man knew of Joanne. Always has a hidden agenda, does our Dougald, was the opinion of one of his art colleagues. Sandy Marshall would perhaps have been more cautious if he’d heard that before hiring him.

  “Write in your natural style, perhaps write how modern art can offend but how tastes are changing, today’s failure is tomorrow’s masterpiece.”

  “Like Vincent van Gogh.”

  “Exactly. And just so you know, the fair Dougald in his next column is writing about women artists, how they are undervalued, their passion is never taken seriously . . .”

  “And they are judged if they have an eccentric lifestyle. Whereas men . . .”

  “Exactly. I’ll pop a brief in the post, plus Forsythe’s phone number if you want to chat. Best call him early. Later in the evening he’s . . . he’s hard to communicate with.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Aye, and maudlin, and full o’ himself. So, can you knock out fifteen hundred words? There’ll be a picture to go with it.”

  “Promise me no Highland cows in misty glens.”

  Laughing, Sandy said, “You’ve got the gist of it already. Forsythe suggested Starry Night as an example of work no one wanted when it was painted.”

  “Good choice.” Joanne liked how this would tie in with an article about art and the “eye of the beholder.” They settled on a publication two weeks away, delivery in five days’ time.

  Fluctuating between excitement and anxiety, fearing she wasn’t up to the standard of national publication, Joanne began mentally composing the piece the minute she put down the phone. She wanted to ask McAllister’s advice but suspected he would be less than helpful, saying Write it your own way.

  Curious about Forsythe, she phoned Calum Mackenzie to ask about the art critic.

  “Forsythe spoke in big words, he mentioned all sorts of artists no one up here has ever heard of, and he was wearing a strange outfit.”

  That was of no help. “Calum, do you know how, or if, he and Alice Ramsay are acquainted? And why she would have asked for him as the expert witness?”

  “No idea,” he replied.

  And you, a reporter, didn’t inquire? she wanted to say.

  “Quite a character, though,” Calum continued. “He turned up to court wearing an Inverness cape over a blue velvet jacket, a mustard-colored waistcoat, and tartan trews.” The wonder in his voice told Joanne that if it had been Oscar Wilde himself in the witness box, it would have caused less of a stir. “And he spoke pure Glasgow. When I asked around about Forsythe for my article, I found out he’d annoyed most everyone.”

  Calum mentioned him in the golf club bar. If the speaker was a man in male company, allusions to his sexual preferences were immediately joked about. In mixed company, the speaker chose to comment on his clothes. Or his shoes. Even Calum, a reporter supposedly trained not to use adjectives, couldn’t help returning again and again to Forsythe’s appearance and gestures, using the word “colorful.” When he’d asked Mrs. Galloway for an opinion, she’d said Forsythe was “full o’ himself,” an expression Joanne loved, it was so apt.

  Calum was unable to recall the essence of the man’s testimony. The disruption Forsythe caused to the flow of the case and the time wasting, with the sheriff constantly telling the witness to stick to the point, irritated the sheriff. It also, Calum thought, made him hurry his verdict.

  “I do remember one part clearly,” Calum told her.

  He recounted how the sheriff had asked, “Mr. Forsythe, are you are saying that anatomical drawings, including this exhibit . . .” He had held up and then quickly turned down the drawing of a fetus in the womb, as though the subject of pregnancy was distasteful. “That these are usual subjects for art students to study?”

  “Life drawing is an essential part of an artist’s education,” Forsythe had replied.

  The sheriff, who had never seen anyone naked, not even his wife of thirty-two years, had shuddered. “What you are saying is that this is a normal course of study at an institute of art?”

  “Just so. The great classical traditions of art, from the Greeks onwards—”

  “Thank you. That will be all.”

  It had taken some moments to dislodge Dougald Forsythe from the witness box. When he was gone from the courthouse, disgruntled because he was not allowed to give his speech on Scottish Philistinism, and when the atmosphere had returned to the solemnity expected in a court of law, the sheriff had summed up.

  “Taking the testimony of Nurse Ogilvie, an experienced midwife, plus the plaintiff’s medical history, and disregarding the prejudices of some in the medical community against more traditional remedies”—he was referring to the procurator fiscal, who had pressed the charges against Alice Ramsay—“I find no connection between a cup of herbal tea and the subsequent miscarriage.” He had not mentioned that the ointment his wife had persuaded Alice to concoct for his arthritis was, in his estimation, a miracle. “As for the art, I find no connection between Miss Ramsay’s work and the charges brought against her.” He could not bring himself to mention Dougald Forsythe’s name. “I therefore find the defendant not guilty.”

  “So,” Joanne now asked Calum Mackenzie, “what did you make of the trial? How did it go down with the locals?”

  “The trial was right interesting,” he replied, “Most locals thought the charges ridiculous. But some . . .” Mostly my mother and her friends. “They were not happy she ‘got away with it.’ ” Again a direct quote from his mum.

  “It must have been a big story,” Joanne commented.

  “Oh, aye. For months.”

  When she put down the phone, she was wishing she’d been there or that Highland Gazette reporter Rob McLean had covered the trial. Extracting information was a slow process with Calum.

  Plus, she was frustrated. There seemed to be no way into a longer story, one she could use as a plot.

  A few days later, when Dougald Forsythe telephoned, Joanne was surprised. And wary. But after the long phone call, she felt enchanted.

  “Hello, the McAllister household.”

  “May I speak to Joanne Ross?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Dougald Forsythe, Glasgow College of Art and the Glasgow Herald here.”

  “Oh. Hello. I’ve heard about you.”

  “Aye, people who are educated know of my work.” He laughed, and she thought he might be tipsy. “I’m calling to introduce myself and to ask if I can check your article before it’s published. Not that I think it will need changing. Sandy told me you’re an experienced journalist, but . . .”

  He blethered on, boasting of his role as arbiter of art for the Scottish nation.

  He must have heard her sigh, as he stopped and turned on the charm. “So, Joanne, I hear you’re a real writer, not just a small-town journalist.”

  “Don’t know about that,” she said, “but yes, I’m hoping to publish a novel.” She had no idea why she’d said this and was immediately cross with herself for sharing her ambitions. So she told him of her meeting with Alice, her delight at Alice’s home, her work, and her kindness.

  He listened, commented on her observations, and commended her appreciation of the paintings. “Not many recognize real artistic merit, especially when the artist is a woman.”

  When she put down the phone, she couldn’t decide whether to be flattered or furious. “Condescending” was one word that came to mind. And “charming.” So why she was suspicious of him she had no idea. Then telling herself not to be so distrustful, she went back to baking a Victoria sponge cake.

  That Saturday, a week earlier than Joanne had expected, an article on Alice Ramsay was published in the Herald.

  McAllister spotted it first. Breakfast finished, on his second cup of espresso made in the stovetop machine—a much-appreciated wedding present from their friends the Corelli family—he was reading the Glasgow newspaper.

  “See the Forsythe character is stirr
ing it up again: ‘neglected women artists.’ He’s right, but he leaves you wondering if he’s only out to impress his female students.”

  “Meow.” Joanne laughed, making a clawing gesture with her hands.

  “He has a lot to say about the Sutherland trial, specially his part in defending a poor misunderstood woman artist: ‘defending her from the uneducated gossips of a small Highland community.’ That won’t go down well.”

  “Let me see.” She grabbed the newspaper from across the table, skim-read the piece, then, staring at her husband, exhaled loudly. “How dare he! The man is appalling.”

  “His writing is a bit florid, I’ll grant you, but—”

  She scanned the article again. “He’s named her. He’s identified her, made clear where she lives. He’s stirred up the witch accusation, sensationalized the trial. All this is yet more gossip, a repetition of the ridiculous charges in the guise of defending an artist. It is everything Alice wants to avoid.” She read the piece again. “Some of these lines . . .” The newspaper was trembling. “He used me. He asked about her house, the glen, and her connection with the community. He told me he wanted a better picture of an artist’s life but only as background. I fell for it. I betrayed her. ”

  McAllister put a hand on her arm. “Joanne, it’s not your fault. You weren’t to know he—”

  She ignored him. “No. I promised Alice Ramsay I’d never identify her, never publish anything without her say-so. Reading this, Miss Ramsay will know the information came from me, know I’m just as much a gossip as those who accused her of witchcraft.”

  “Maybe Forsythe visited Alice after the trial and noted those details himself.”

  “No, he said he’d never been to the glen. That’s why he needed me to describe it.”

  She remembered Forsythe’s charm offensive: I’ve read your work; Sandy speaks highly of you; neglected women artists; time they were recognized; my article needs a female input. And she’d fallen for it.