Short Story: Two Cottages

Short Story: Two Cottages

I stood a short distance from the cottage as rain threatened. I was frowning with narrowed eyes as I tried to see through the window. That this might be a metaphor for my life was not lost on me. I was always the outsider. No different now. Or any other time. I was ever in the margin - never on the page. And, even though the house was legally my own I had no sense or feeling of possession.

Long grass grew up against the stone walls and here and there weeds pushed up through cracks in the footpaths. The windows were intact though dirty and the corrugated iron roof showed little rust. I thought that the house was probably dry despite unoccupied years.

Behind the house the deep purple of Mt Allister was turning gray as cloud thickened in an opaque sky. The mountain seemed closer than I remembered. A pair of crows flew down from a willow tree that swayed in the cold wind and they began to strut, among the weeds and rotting apples.

There was a wrought iron gate set into the low stone wall to the side of the house and as I stood there my hands thrust deep within my coat pockets I watched a young woman open it and approach along the unkempt stone path.

She wore a long black coat and there was a white woollen scarf around her neck. Her head was uncovered and dark hair blew across her face. She pulled it back now with long pale fingers and there was something of a smile as she regarded me with narrowed eyes.

“Hullo Morgan......Remember me?” she asked. Her eyebrows were now raised, some concern or worry, creasing her forehead.

“My God. Catherine! Is that really you?”

I should have been ready for this. There was a soft rustle in the trees in the sighing wind and it was like it had passed right through me.

“It is. Am I that changed?” she asked.

“We all change,” I said and smiled

“It’s wonderful to see you looking so well”

She looked down.

‘I saw you get off the bus. I was in town.....I should have given you a lift. It’s quite a walk out here,” she said tentatively.

“No. That’s OK. I enjoyed the walk. After the bus I was glad of it.”

This was true. The walk out of town had given me the chance to reacquaint myself with the once familiar countryside and to reflect on the sensations I was experiencing at being back.

There was a hug that was tentative and somewhat formal. The awkwardness made us both smile and her face relaxed a little.

“I’m glad you’re here” I said.

And I was - although she was the sister of the man whose life I had ended.

“Are you going to go in?” she asked, looking toward the house where I could see red leaves drifting down past brooding windows that seemed like sad dark eyes that held a secret.

The temperature was dropping and I could feel a change in the air pressure. A colder wind now rustled through the trees. It was going to snow.

“Might be a good idea,” I said rubbing my hands together for warmth.

I felt for a moment that I was at a crossroad.

I had just arrived and felt like leaving. There was still time to catch the bus back to Glasgow. I could easily put the house in the hands of an agent. But given the worsening weather and Catherine’s presence it now seemed a better idea to take advantage of the cottage’s shelter.

The small iron key I had been turning in my fingers seemed to have life of its own as if it knew something and its time had come. Along the path sparrows hopped and scattered as we reached the door. I put the key in the dark metal of the lock and turned it toward the right. The door opened on to the floor of a small room.

I stood there in the doorway diffuse light dimly illuminating the chilly room. Catherine walked past me and stood there on the stone floor looking about. The room was empty apart from a wooden table upon which stood a chipped enamel jug. Two old hardback chairs stood slightly apart.

There was dry wood stacked against the wall next to the fireplace and kneeling, I set some in the grate and using some crumpled pages of an old newspaper soon had a fire lit. Part of the newspaper I set aside.It had a date that was four years old and the headline for an article read ‘Manslaughter Man Gets Three Years’ I could see that Catherine too had noticed the article. Our eyes met.

“It’s good to see you again. I’m glad you came. I thought you mightn’t ever come back,” she said and I could see only warmth in her dark eyes.

Outside snow began to fall from a leaden sky that was now turning dark. We drew up the wooden chairs to be close to the fire. Flickering shadows on the stone wall seemed alive as if people from a different time had gathered there to watch and listen - and maybe to judge.

“I don’t know if I can live here. I may just give the house away....” I said. Though, being close to Catherine again , I felt glad enough to be there at that moment.

Through the window I could see Mt Allister, its peak lost in cloud. A pair of black ducks flew by through the lightly falling snow toward sunshine that struggled to dispel the cheerlessness of the afternoon.

“The house is yours, Morgan. What’s done is done,” Catherine pointed out quietly.

"What must the neighbors think of me? What standing must I have in the community? “

It was a question I’d asked myself often enough during my years in prison.

“They’re good people Morgan. Nobody liked Brice. They despised the things he’d done. He was my brother but I hated him. I’m not sorry for what happened.”

I fingered the newspaper article and couldn’t stop my eyes from engaging with the print. Catherine was silent giving me space and she sat there now looking into the fire and her own thoughts. I held the paper to the light from the fire and I read through the story I’d lived a hundred times as I lay in my bunk during the troubled silence that follows lights out in prison.

The journalist had had a good time with the story and had detailed how Brice had initially inherited the two old farm cottages and how not long after this I had won one of them fairly in a game of chance.

It all came back to me once more like a gritty rerun of an old movie.

I remembered how he had seemed not to care. Of course I had no intention of accepting the house but his indifference and arrogance irked me and in the end I accepted the deeds which he passed to me in the estate agent’s office with his usual insouciance.

Perhaps this was a mistake on my part for as the weeks went by he sought my company more and more with a feigned friendliness as if our recent transaction had bonded us in some exceptional way. His company was always unwelcome and I avoided him wherever possible. There was a darkness about him that troubled me.

Two weeks after this there was an end of shearing party held in a big barn out by the mountain and scattered stands of oak. It was just coming up to full moon. I recollected how I’d danced with a girl I knew Brice had taken out and whom I suspected he fancied as his personal property. I was sure that there was no reciprocal feeling toward Brice on her side but as he watched us from the barn wall, a bottle of home brew raised often to his lips I sensed his hostility.

As the night wore on Brice drank heavily and in the early hours of the morning as the moon rose up over Mt Allister he sought me out, finding me outside with his sister in the shadows of an oak where Catherine was smoking a cigarette.

He was in a foul humour. Too much whisky had brought beads of sweat to his face and his eyes shone darkly. He began to taunt me about the cottage, his ‘girl’ - and now his sister, and when I began moving away he started pushing me. I pushed him back and next moment we were fighting. When he pulled a knife from his pocket I threw myself against him and he fell backwards his head striking a large rock, blood spilling and sinking into the lichen.

Witnesses to his death were unanimous that I’d acted in self defence but that didn’t stop my receiving three years jail time for manslaughter.

The paper fell to the floor and I shook my head to chase away the demons of dark memory.

I placed another log on the fire which now crackled, hissed and flared lightening Catherine’s face with a warm glow. For a while we both stared into the flames.

Then as teardrops fell from my eyes she reached out and held my hand. There were tears in her eyes too.

“Its ok Morgan. It’s over,’ she said, and there was strength in her voice.

And I knew she was right. I crumpled the newspaper and it left my fingers to fall into the welcoming flames where I watched it curl and turn black before an updraft from the fire sent it spiraling up the chimney and out of sight.

At that moment I began to feel freed from the past and when I looked at Catherine I was surprised to find that I felt free too, to wonder about a future that I had never dared consider.

We sat there for a while, content with the warmth of the fire and said little, lost in thought among the dancing shadows.

Outside the snow was easing up. There was one other thing to do and I spoke to Catherine quietly. Holding hands we left the house then, locking it again and passing back through the gate. We took a track that skirted a hillside to where there was a sloping cemetery. To where amongst the ancient yews and oak trees there were silent pale stone angels with up stretched wings presiding over weathered mausoleums and graves or with their hands outstretched toward the town below.

Brown and golden leaves that were faded as the epitaphs carved into the stone around us blew down from an old oak tree and across the grave in swirling eddies, and mingled with snowflakes that fell softly as we said our final goodbye to Brice.

We left then to return to the cottages as clouds began to break and sunshine fell along the path before us.