The Headstone

The confirmation that the cancer had spread did not have the effect upon her that Anne had expected. Instead of her thoughts turning to the future, she found herself dwelling on times past. Instead of drawing up a ‘bucket list’ of things to do before it was too late, she began to sort out the significant episodes in her life. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised by this. She’d read how the anticipation of death can inspire people to reflect on the shape of their life as a whole.

Anne tried to focus on the periods of her life when she had felt most fulfilled and happy – the times, in effect, that had made her life worth living. There were not, she feared, many candidates to choose among. Perhaps the two years, after graduating with a degree in Modern Languages, when she’d lived in Spain, teaching English to Spanish children and Spanish to English expats. Memories of the sun, Flamenco guitar music, yacht trips with her Spanish boy friend, and days of hiking alone in the Sierras, were easy and pleasant to summon.

Not on her list were the following five years in London, translating Spanish and French textbooks for a major educational publishing firm. Still more emphatically excluded were the subsequent years of her marriage with one of the senior partners in the firm. While she worked from home in their house in Essex, he was constantly travelling to book fairs in the UK, Europe and the USA – to cities in most of which, Anne discovered, he had at least one lover.

The only thing that stopped her moving out straightaway was the two chocolate Labrador twins – Bruno and Brownie – whom she and her husband had bought. But this didn’t stop her for long. She successfully applied for a job teaching languages at a private school near Inverness. One bright morning, she packed her belongings and the two dogs into her car and set off, with a sense of exhilaration, for the Highlands. She left a brief note of farewell for her husband to read on his return from the Frankfurt book fair.

Once she recalled Bruno and Brownie, memories of the dogs crowded in, and it was really a ‘no brainer’, as they say, which period had been the happiest of her life. This was the time, over thirty years ago, spent with her dogs in the Highlands. For a start, she’d enjoyed teaching languages to classes of enthusiastic pupils, as well as the evenings spent translating Ted Hughes and other English poets into Spanish for a Madrid publisher. Then there had been the satisfying and even flattering romance, over two years, with the PE teacher at the school, a man considerably younger than her. When, partly through her encouragement, he left to take up a position in the Sports Studies Department of an English university, Anne’s gratitude for those two years outweighed the sadness she felt at their coming to an end.

Best of all had been the days and nights spent with the dogs in the solid stone house, with its large garden, that she’d bought in Kingussie. Clear images flooded in of the dogs tearing round the garden, snuffling through their favourite forest on the hill above the house, or quietly snoring on the rug in front of a wood burning stove in the sitting room. On days when she had to be at the school until late afternoon, she’d arranged with a local man, Ian, for him to take the dogs walking. Retired from the Fire Service, Ian had also looked after the garden and done whatever jobs needed doing around the house. Despite his taciturnity, beneath which a gentle humour sometimes showed, Anne had come to regard him as a friend to rely upon.

She had been in Kingussie for four years when, suddenly, the two dogs died in quick succession – Bruno from a bullet fired by a drunken deer stalker who’d mistaken him for a fox, and Brownie a few weeks later from kidney failure. Anne had been convinced that this had been brought on by a broken heart, for the two dogs had been, from birth, inseparable friends and playmates.

Ian, who’d loved the dogs almost as much as Anne, had then dug graves for the dogs, right next to one another, in a corner of the garden where heather and ferns grew next to a dry-stone wall. A week after Brownie’s death, Ian had arrived with a roughly cut granite stone: on the front of it, he’d chiselled a simple cross and, beneath this, the names ‘Bruno’ and ‘Brownie’. As Anne watched, unable to restrain her tears, he’d sunk the stone a foot deep into the ground above the graves.

In the following days, Ian had urged Anne, in his quiet way, to get another dog: he knew just where to get a good one. Perhaps she would eventually have done so. But before she’d been able to decide, she was unexpectedly informed by the school that it could no longer afford a Spanish teacher, and that the teaching of French could be done by the English teacher and his Belgian wife. She’d had no choice but to sell the house in Kingussie and find a job elsewhere. This turned out to be Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where a College of Adult Education had advertised for a teacher of French and Spanish.

The house sold quickly to a couple who, before Anne would accept their offer, had agreed to leave the dogs’ grave and the headstone undisturbed. They too, they’d told her, were lovers of dogs. On her last day, after the removal van had left, Anne had driven to Ian’s cottage by the river Spey, to say goodbye. She’d found herself crying as she hugged him, her face against his bristly chin. She could tell that he was himself struggling not to cry. As she left, she’d promised to keep in touch and to see him soon, though even as she’d spoken these words, she’d been sure that this would not happen. The years in the Highlands had, until the last few weeks, been good ones, but it was now time to begin a new episode.

Thirty three years later, in her Newcastle flat the day after the news about her cancer, Anne woke up with the certainty that she must return to Kingussie. Those years in Scotland had been the best of her life, and how better to bring them closer, to make them even more vivid, than to see her old home again. The dogs had been the best companions, the most loved creatures, in her life. To travel up and see again the headstone above their graves for one last time would be a tribute to that companionship and love. Anne had never regarded herself as especially sentimental or pious, but ‘piety’ seemed the right word for the act of remembrance and gratitude she now felt compelled to perform.

By 11.30 am, she was sitting in a train from Newcastle to Edinburgh, where she’d change for Kingussie, arriving at 4.00 pm. This would give her time to drop her case at the hotel she’d booked and walk up to her old house to look at the headstone while it was still light. The train from Edinburgh was on time, and by 4.10 Anne had checked in at the hotel, only a couple of hundred yards from the station. Despite her illness, Anne was a fit woman who jogged every morning along the Tyne quayside. So it wasn’t hard for her to walk up the steep road that led to the narrow lane where the house stood.

As she turned into the lane, she could see the house and, as she approached it, the changes that had been made around it. In front of the house, tall black railings had been erected. The rest of the garden’s perimeter was no longer a low dry-stone wall, but a 5 ft high ginger-coloured fence. When she reached the house, Anne could see through the railings that a large plastic, bouncy castle-like swimming pool stood where the rose bushes had once been. To the right of the house, a yellow and blue gazebo had been constructed on what was formerly a vegetable bed.

The change that really mattered, however, was in the far right-hand corner of the garden. The ground where the dogs were buried was now covered over with bright green decking, on which stood a huge striped sofa, two loungers and a long, low table. In exactly the spot where the headstone had been placed there was now a gleaming black and silver barbecue grill.

Several emotions accompanied Anne as she walked slowly back down the hill. Disappointment and sadness, of course, at the disappearance of what she had come to see. And anger – at the people, naturally, who had got rid of the headstone to make room for a barbecue, but even more at herself. What had been intended to resurrect beautiful images had succeeded only in creating a new and ugly one – that of the barbecue on its vulgar platform. Why, she asked herself, hadn’t she heeded those clichés that warned people against revisiting the past, against trying to resurrect precious times?

Although it was only 6.00 pm, Anne went into the small bar of the hotel and asked the manager for a large malt whisky. She took the drink to a table in the corner, her back to the two other drinkers, from where she could look out onto the street. The whisky, she hoped, would calm the anger and bitterness she felt.

She had almost finished the drink when she became aware of a figure standing close to her left shoulder.

‘Is it you, Miss?’ asked the man.

The voice was thinner and reedier than of old, but it was unmistakeably Ian’s. Anne, who’d put him at around sixty when she’d lived in Kingussie, had assumed he was long dead. It was wonderful to find that she was wrong.

‘Ian!’ she almost shouted as she turned round and looked up at him. ‘It’s really you. Sit down. We both need a drink!’

When they both had their drinks – another whisky for her, a beer for him – Anne explained why she’d come to Kingussie and what she’d found at the house. Ian, of course, knew what had happened there, but listened quietly and nodded before speaking.

‘When you’ve finished your glass, Miss, come with me. I now live only a wee way down the road there.’

She joined him as he walked, slowly and stiffly, to a tiny, terraced house at the end of the street. She followed him inside and then, through a back door, into a handkerchief-sized garden in the rear. There she saw why Ian had brought her to his house. Surrounded by small clumps of heather, against a background of ferns, stood the headstone.

As the two of them stood looking at the stone, Ian explained how the people to whom Anne sold her house had honoured their pledge not to remove the headstone. But they’d then eventually moved away and sold to a well-heeled Glaswegian couple, who wanted the place as a holiday retreat. When Ian had seen what they were doing to the garden, he asked them if they would please leave the headstone in place. They’d refused, but told him that he was very welcome to take it away with him.

‘So that’s how it got here, Miss,’ he said. ‘Now it’s yours to take home with you. We can have it shipped to where you’re now living.’

That, Anne replied, wouldn’t work. She lived in a small flat, with no garden. And, anyway, the proper place for the stone was Kingussie, where the dogs had enjoyed such happy lives.

‘And, Ian,’ she concluded, as she took his rough hands in her own, ‘you loved the dogs just like I did.’

Ian remained silent, and Anne could tell that something worried him. Eventually he spoke.

‘But Miss, you see … Well, I’m not so … so young anymore. What … what will …’

Anne interrupted him. ‘I know what you’re going to say, Ian. That you don’t have many years left to live, so what will happen to the stone when you’re no longer here. Well, actually, I may not live so long myself – but that’s another story. But, yes, I see your point. Let me think about it overnight.’

She then asked him if he’d join her in the morning for breakfast at the hotel.

‘We’ll decide what to do then, Ian.’

Ian, Anne knew, was not a man who liked to talk while eating. So she waited until he’d finished his last mouthful of sausage and egg before speaking.

‘Do you know a good strong man – with a 4-wheel drive, preferably – Oh! And a spade?’

‘Ken’, came the monosyllabic reply.

‘Who’s Ken?’

Ian explained that Ken was a nephew, who lived in Kingussie and worked for the Forestry Service. He was indeed strong, and drove a pick-up truck.

‘Sounds just the man’, said Anne. ‘Could we get hold of him today?’

Instead of replying, Ian took a mobile phone from a pocket and typed out, then sent, an SMS message. Anne couldn’t help being struck by the incongruity between Ian’s slow, venerable, almost Victorian manner and his skill with the iconic symbol of our hi-tec era. The reply came within half a minute. Ken, Ian informed Anne, could meet them at 11.30. She then explained to Ian what she had in mind, and why they needed Ken. He nodded slowly, saying only ‘Ay! That’d be proper.’

When Ken arrived, promptly, at Ian’s house, Anne expressed her thanks to him for his help, and told him what she would like him to do. He listened quietly and by way of a reply even shorter than Ian’s simply said ‘Ay!’ He then went into Ian’s garden and returned a few minutes later with the headstone which, despite its weight, he carried as if it were a loaf of bread.

The three of them then sat together in the cabin of the pick-up truck and drove up the hill, past the lane where Anne’s old house stood, and past the golf club. Ken, on Anne’s instruction, then turned off down a track that bordered a woodland area. She then asked him to stop at a place where a faint path led into the woods.

The two men followed her along the uneven, sometimes muddy path until she stopped at a point where, to her right, there was a dense tangle of brambles, fallen larch trees, bracken and rocks.

‘This is the place!’ Anne exclaimed. ‘It hasn’t changed in thirty years. This was the dogs’ favourite place. They’d always stop here, sniffing around, sometimes scratching the ground. Maybe there were foxes, badgers or something that lived here.’

She clambered through the branches and rocks, inspecting the ground. She then stopped and pointed.

‘Just here, Ken, please. Nobody’s likely to see it here, and if they did, why would anyone want to disturb it?’

Ken walked back to the truck and returned a few minutes later with his spade and the headstone. He’d soon made a hole 18 inches deep, in which he placed the headstone. He packed the space around the stone with a mixture of soil and small rocks.

‘That’ll nae move,’ he announced.

He and Ian then retreated a few yards, to let Anne be alone with the headstone. As she stood looking at it, she knew that, for many people, what she was doing – this fuss over a gravestone – would be just sentimental and silly. But, she also knew, they’d be wrong. There was nothing silly in commemorating the happy lives of two creatures that had themselves brought happiness, lives that had exemplified a simple, natural goodness. She’d been wrong herself, the day before, to be angry for thinking that the past could be revisited. The stone in front of her was doing what she’d hoped it would do – summon up joyful images of days that, although gone by, were not lost.

Late that afternoon, Ken drove Anne and his uncle to Kingussie station. She shook hands with him and thanked him for what he had done. Since he refused to take any money, she had almost to force him to accept the gift of a bottle of fine malt whisky.

Ian walked with Anne to the platform. As the train drew in, she hugged him, just as she had when she’d left over thirty years before. The scraping of the bristles on his chin against her cheek was no different. But this time, she made no unlikely promises about seeing him again. She knew, as no doubt Ian did too, that they would not meet again. But she knew, as well, that the memory of their reunion, and her gratitude to him, would – like the images of the dogs and their headstone - remain with her.

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