by A. D. Scott
Beech drove sedately down the steep hill to the big house on the river. When they got out of the car, Don glanced at the house next door and shivered.
“Cold?” Beech asked—for it was cold, and clear and crisp with air as sharp as a rapier—or a fish knife.
Don could not reply.
They went into the kitchen, where Countess Sokolov was waiting.
“A cup of real tea would be fine,” Don replied when asked if he wanted to eat.
They were sitting around the table, Don on his second cup, when he said, “I’d like your help arranging a memorial service for Joyce.”
“Consider it done,” Beech told him.
“I would be honored to help,” Rosemary said. “And I’d like to offer you a room here for as long as you want.”
“Thank you. I can’t face going home—not yet.” Don couldn’t look at them. Their kindness was genuine, and Rosemary had been Joyce’s dearest friend, and he knew they wouldn’t fuss. Besides, he thought, I’ve nowhere else to go.
* * *
A severely depleted Monday morning news meeting was about to start. Around the table were McAllister, Rob, Joanne, and Betsy.
Rob was still feeling drained—not physically but from emotion; all he had were a few cuts that hadn’t needed stitches and were healing nicely, but the memories of Eilidh were imprinted on his brain, and he would never be so trusting again.
He looked at McAllister. And Joanne. Saw lightness had begun to dawn on faces aged by the past weeks. I hope to goodness the two of them get together, he thought, we could do with some good news.
“Come off your motorbike?” Hector asked Rob when he came in.
Rob laughed. “Hector, read the paper on Thursday, that’ll tell you what happened.”
Hector was completely unaware of anything except the dire state of his beloved Clachnacuddin, who, having lost at home on Saturday past, were now in the bottom five of the Highland League.
Then Hector asked, “Where’s Neil? We canny do the paper without him.”
They had all been aware of footsteps on the stairs, but it was a newspaper office; it could be anybody.
“Now tell me Hector Bain, why would you be needing some Canadian when you have me?” Don McLeod was looking at Hector, smiling, and for an instant, Hector failed to recognize him, he was so shrunken.
“Mr. McLeod!” Hector was whispering, his eyes so round he looked like a prehistoric bug, scared the apparition might be Don’s ghost, not the real man—now minus a stone in weight, plus ten years added to his age.
“Don!” Joanne jumped off her chair. She hugged him. His face came not much higher than her breasts. He snuggled in, saying, “Now this is what I call a welcome.”
He ignored the questions from Rob, how, when, why didn’t you tell me, the squeals from Betsy of—goodness me, the repetition of Jings! from Hector.
He took the cigarette McAllister offered, examined it, gave it back, and lit one of his own.
He lifted up papers, searching, then, scrabbling around in his drawer, he found his wee red pencil, which he tucked behind his right ear. He sat in his usual chair. He did not look at the seat his late wife always occupied, which was left empty in tribute.
He looked around, and said, “Right, front page—I’m upping the font size on the heading. ‘Former Soldier Accused of Murder.’ That’ll do nicely.”
* * *
It took nearly two weeks before Don could bring himself to return to his house, and when he did, he hated the place. He unlocked the courtyard gate. He walked down the passageway. He unlocked his front door. He stepped inside. And he started to cry. He sobbed huge heaving sobs of pain of grief of loneliness. He went to sit on the sofa to recover and found he couldn’t bear to be in the house a minute longer. He ran the kitchen tap, washed his face, looked around, found nothing he needed except his mother’s Bible, which he put into a string bag. He walked out, not bothering to lock up—If a burglar takes the lot, he’s welcome—and left to catch the bus to the Ferry Inn.
Jimmy nodded as Don came into the public bar. “Don. I was just leaving, but let me shout you a drink.” He did not look surprised to see Don. He did not give the impression that anything of any significance was happening. He looked a moment longer than usual, taking in Don’s sobriety, his new suit, his new shirt, and the haircut and the string bag.
“I’m no’ drinking, thanks all the same,” Don said. “I’m wondering where I can find your mother.”
Jimmy did not remark on the absurd idea of a nondrinking Don McLeod. And he did not hesitate. “I’ll take you.”
He wanted Don to visit his mother. He knew she needed someone to talk to. And her son wouldn’t do.
Jimmy took the ferry across to the Black Isle. They branched off the shore road, taking the route that climbed up and along the hillside giving a view of the firth, the mountains at the westerly end.
The fields lying fallow were dark brown—from a distance almost black. The trees were skeletons on the hillsides, marking the courses of burns, lining a driveway to a farm, in all shapes and sizes and in sharp contrast to the ubiquitous pine trees now being planted throughout Scotland by the Forestry Commission.
An abomination, Don thought, all planted in rigid rows. What’s wrong with bare empty hills?
The car crested the spine of the Black Isle. The northern horizon was filled with the hibernating bulk of Ben Wyvis, now sporting a scattering of light snow, as though the mountain had a bad case of dandruff.
They crossed the bridge over the River Conon, took a right turn, and continued to the McPhees’ winter encampment, a place not far from the distillery and a fine spot to winter the horses.
Don had been here a few times before, but never in the winter. It looked forlorn without the delicate leaves of the birch and the rowan and the hazel to soften the round, seemingly derelict benders, the rusting vehicles, the caravans that looked as though a can opener could easily slice through them, and the abandoned washing machine, the old boiler that came from a tugboat, the scrap metal and sheets of corrugated iron, all piled up in a heap next to the whisky-colored water of the burn, which was now almost wide enough to be a river.
“Afternoon, missus,” Don said when he came into the warmth of the bender.
“How are you keeping?” Jenny asked.
“Fair to middling,” came the reply.
“Tea?”
“Aye.”
They were silent as Jenny made the tea using a huge black kettle but a new-looking gas cooker. Jimmy had left, and it took the two old friends a while to warm up to a conversation.
“So you’re out for good?” Jenny asked.
“The sergeant has been charged.”
“Aye.” Jenny sighed. “He was always a bad lot even as a bairn.”
They were sitting either side of a stove made from an old oil drum; the flue had a right-hand bend and poked out through the wall, but the joins were not tight, and an occasional backdraft sent miniature smoke signals into the room.
“I never met the Canadian,” Don started, “but I heard he was a decent fellow. Clever too.”
“Aye. Chrissie did a good job raising him.”
“Does McAllister know? And Jimmy?”
“Aye, they know about Neil. There was no keeping it from them.” She shook her head, and one of the numerous hairpins that trapped her hair in a bun came loose and fell into her lap. “But they don’t know about Chrissie.” Then, speaking slowly, Jenny added, “Anyhow, that’s nobody’s business but mine.”
“But Neil knows Chrissie was your daughter?”
“I never told him. He knows who his birth mother was. And who his father is. He found the record of his christening in the parish records in Inchnadamph. I saw him one night in the Ferry Inn. He looked at me. I said nothing. But he knew I knew. And that was enough.”
Neil had met Joyce, that Don knew, for she had told him not three days before she was killed. But Neil didn’t know then that she was his mother. That was
what he and Joyce had been talking about the night she was killed; Joyce had decided they had to tell Neil. Too late.
But after Neil discovered the truth of his birth, he never once made contact with the man he knew to be his father.
So be it, Don thought.
“It all happened a long time ago,” Jenny continued, “and I could see he’s done well for himself. An’ that’ll have to be enough.” She looked across at him, looking directly at him for the first time. “The woman in the orphanage in Glasgow said our Davey had been sent away, so we’ll never know what became o’ him.”
Don could feel her pain that had been kept alive over thirty-five years by hope.
“Aye, no one wants a three-and-a-half-year-old, ’specially a wild one who barely spoke English. But your wee laddie, he was that bonnie . . . Joyce told me she always kept his baby picture in her handbag—never went anywhere without it . . . ”
Jenny stopped. She saw how Don had curled up into himself, his arms folded across his chest, holding the pain in tight, in case the genie escaped and destroyed him.
“And our Chrissie, she loved that wee boy. When she was nursemaid to him, thon time when Joyce had to go to hospital when she was no’ right in her mind, and you had disappeared off the face o’ the earth, baby Neil, he was left wi’ Chrissie and he took to her like he never did wi’ Joyce. And a fine man he turned into—so it was all for the best.”
She said this like she meant it, but she wasn’t sure what she believed anymore. There had been something about Neil that bothered her. But he’s gone and I doubt he’ll be back.
“I sore wish Joyce hadn’t left me thon jewelry, though, I don’t know what on earth to do wi’ it now I have no daughter.”
“You sacrificed a lot for Joyce—even your own daughter.”
“And if it hadn’t been for him being mistaken for a tinker, the welfare would never have taken your son.”
“So that’s why you let Chrissie go to Canada?”
“Partly.” Jenny was remembering the sad wee soul her daughter Chrissie was before Neil came to fill her life. “There was a lad, Neil Hunter—a Dingwall lad, Chrissie never got over him being killed. The last week o’ the war it was, and her only fifteen, but she’d loved him since they were bairns and was affected bad by his death. She named the baby after him. And after they got him back, and Joyce was in hospital”—Jenny refused to call it the asylum or the loony bin—“I could see Chrissie was starting to believe the baby was really hers.”
And Jenny McPhee remembered that after a few months, and Joyce still not fit to care for her own child, not even showing interest in him, there was no parting her oldest child, her only daughter—born when she herself was fifteen—from baby Ian Donal Mackenzie McLeod, whom she called Neil. Neil Stewart.
Jenny knew that was why Chrissie barely kept in touch over all the years—only acknowledging the annual bank deposit through the solicitor, terrified Joyce might turn up to claim the child. But Joyce never would. She had vowed to Jenny that if her stolen child, her wee Davey, was returned, then, and only then, would Joyce travel to Canada to meet Chrissie and the boy.
Don needed to deal with one pain at a time, and the pain of his lost boy would wait, but never vanish. Thoughts of Joyce filled his days and nights; awake and asleep, it was always the same regrets and the same great big burning shame.
“I never knew, not till it was too late.” Don murmured this to himself, but Jenny heard.
“She always regretted lying to you,” Jenny said, although she knew there was no comfort in the thought.
“She only lied to me about defying her father. All the rest she told me when she returned from India.”
Jenny had often wondered if Don had known they had a son. Now she knew.
“And it was me who threw her out and . . . ”
“You were no’ yourself after the war, all those burns and everything, then you was locked up in thon institution . . . ”
He held up his hand to ward off the interruption from Jenny. “No, I said something unforgivable . . . ”
She saw he needed to tell someone, only she wished she wasn’t the one who had to listen. She wanted it over. She had had enough. But she cared for Don, so she said nothing, only nodding and inserting an Aye, or a Terrible, or a soft soothing noise as though she were hushing a frightened mare, while he recounted the saga of himself and Joyce McLeod, née Mackenzie.
“Joyce didn’t show me the letter from her father—the one where he banned her from marrying me, threatening to disinherit her. She insisted we get married. So we did. But we told no one.”
He wished he was drinking more than tea but held onto his vow to give up the spirits. “Then, only a couple o’ weeks after the wedding, I found the letter. I was furious, and sick to the stomach. What could I give her? I had no job, not then, I had no money—only renting thon pokey wee house that’s now mine. She said money didn’t matter, but I was ashamed I couldn’t provide for her. And I may have been poor back then, but I was rich enough for a bottle of whisky.”
Many bottles, he remembered.
“Not that I’m using this as an excuse, missus.” Don looked into Jenny’s eyes as he said this. “But I was hurting bad, a terrible pain it was, and I wasn’t sleeping . . . ”
The memories of floating in a burning sea of oil and debris, of his fellow sailors, some with their hair on fire, perishing within arm’s length of him, and the terrible struggle to avoid being sucked under in the whirlpool the ship created as she sank to her death in the Dardanelles, was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday, not forty years since.
“So there was I, newly married, drinking, nursing my grudge at her making me marry her when we didn’t have to, was how I put it, and all the while not noticing what was happening.” He rubbed his chin. He ran his fingers through his thick dark grey hair. He was steeling himself to say the unsayable.
And Jenny, watching him closely, could almost read his mind. Not the words, but she read that something she did not want to hear was about to be said.
“One morning, she was sick in the kitchen sink—she couldn’t make it to the lavatory, which was outside in the courtyard in those days. I asked her what was wrong and she said, ‘There’s nothing wrong, it’s wonderful news.’”
He could still hear her voice, in that posh educated accent that he so hated way back then, he could hear her saying wonderful news, and it had filled him with terror.
“If you’re saying what I think you’re saying . . . ” He remembered staring at her pale face; her bright eyes, looking into his, desperate for his approval. And he remembered, could never forget, how his words—slow, deliberate—had pierced her, almost as fatally as his filleting knife that had ended her life.
“‘I know an auld nurse,’” I told her. “‘She can put an end to all that—for a financial consideration.’” He was sitting as he said this, watching Joyce. Watching her slump onto a wooden kitchen chair, one hand on the table to stop herself falling.
Then he had delivered the coup de grâce—“Now I know why you were so keen to marry in spite of your father forbidding it”—and left the house without another word.
He returned a few days later to a note saying she had gone to Assynt, to her family home. He had embarked on a drinking session that lasted seventeen days, ending up in a police cell, where a doctor subsequently had him committed as a possible suicide threat. That, along with his burns, which had not healed properly, made the doctor sign the form sending him to the Princess Louise Hospital for Limbless Soldiers and Sailors.
“Even though I hadn’t lost a limb, I was crippled wi’ pain and I needed the counseling. I was nearly two years in thon place. I saw so many men worse off than me that I grew right ashamed o’ myself.” He shuddered at the memory. “I wrote to Joyce. But there was no reply.”
“She was in hospital herself that year. No’ in her right mind.” And she never wanted anything to do with her wee baby, Jenny remembered. “Then she took off to India
.”
“Where she, quite rightly, behaved as though the marriage had never happened,” Don said.
“And where Archie Smart was waiting, his father having told him Joyce had had a bairn—and no known father for her child.”
“She told me, years later, she had married him to keep the peace and avoid a scandal that would ruin her father’s reputation.”
“Her father was a good man. If he’d known, he’d have stopped her.” Jenny McPhee said this, not quite believing it. You should never say you know what the dead would have wanted. Who knows what’s in another’s mind? was her belief.
“The wonder of it all is how she forgave me.” Don leaned back in his chair, his eyes resting on a circular gap in the canvas where the flue of the fire reached out to the heavens. He was still in awe of his late wife’s capacity for forgiveness.
When he said this, she forgave me, Jenny heard the lifting of his voice and was glad. She too knew of Joyce’s capacity for forgiveness but wished Joyce had not included Archie Smart.
Don looked across at Jenny and, for the first time, smiled. “Joyce told me that all that mattered was love and that this time we would be together—as much as was possible. When Archie came back in a wheelchair, she wouldn’t abandon him, saying he was as injured as anyone.”
And she didn’t just mean his legs, Jenny knew, for she had once asked Joyce and received the same answer.
“And her old father sent the foreign manny to look out for his lass.”
“And from what I hear, he did his best,” Don added.
“Aye, he did, but I hear he’s beside himself that he didn’t do more.” Jenny was wrung out. She wanted to be left alone. She had grieving to do. Her Chrissie, Joyce,—and Neil.
Don noticed. Joyce had taught him to.
“We’re planning a memorial service for Joyce,” he said.
“Let me know where and when, I’ll be there.” Now it was Jenny smiling for the first time in a long time. “She was a good woman, your Joyce.”
“Aye. She was.” He stood, settled his hat on his head, tilted it back, and said, “Thanks, missus.”