brightly printed light cotton dresses, totally unsuited for rough
walking through the heather.
Not that I had originally planned to do a lot of that; my thoughts ran
more on the lines of sleeping late in the mornings, and long, lazy
afternoons in bed with Frank, not sleeping. However, it was difficult
to maintain the proper mood of languorous romance with Mrs. Baird
industriously Hoovering away outside our door.
“That must be the dirtiest bit of carpet in the entire Scottish
Highlands,” Frank had observed that morning as we lay in bed
listening to the ferocious roar of the vacuum in the hallway.
“Nearly as dirty as our landlady’s mind,” I agreed. “Perhaps we
should have gone to Brighton after all.” We had chosen the
Highlands as a place to holiday before Frank took up his
appointment as a history professor at Oxford, on the grounds that
Scotland had been somewhat less touched by the physical horrors of
war than the rest of Britain, and was less susceptible to the frenetic
postwar gaiety that infected more popular vacation spots.
And without discussing it, I think we both felt that it was a symbolic
place to reestablish our marriage; we had been married and spent a
two-day honeymoon in the Highlands, shortly before the outbreak of
war seven years before. A peaceful refuge in which to rediscover
each other, we thought, not realizing that, while golf and fishing are
Scotland’s most popular outdoor sports, gossip is the most popular
indoor sport. And when it rains as much as it does in Scotland,
people spend a lot of time indoors.
“Where are you going?” I asked, as Frank swung his feet out of
bed.
“I’d hate the dear old thing to be disappointed in us,” he answered.
Sitting up on the side of the ancient bed, he bounced gently up and
down, creating a piercing rhythmic squeak. The Hoovering in the hall
stopped abruptly. After a minute or two of bouncing, he gave a loud,
theatrical groan and collapsed backward with a twang of protesting
