by Mark Neilson
His directness should have disconcerted her. It didn’t.
‘I have,’ she admitted.
‘Something you thought was settled, and is anything but?’
She stared at him. ‘Is it that obvious?’
He smiled. ‘It wasn’t hard to guess. All the ones who went to war are restless. The homes they were wearying to see again turned out to be nothing like they remembered. The jobs that were theirs, for life, felt more like a cage. Because, for each and every one of them, they brought their war back in their hearts.’
‘That’s about it,’ Mary admitted frankly.
‘You’re not alone; there are thousands like you. You’re no longer the schoolgirl who gutted herrings and hadn’t a care in the world. She’s gone. Now you are a woman, who has seen things and done things which have changed your life forever. Turned you into a square peg. Is that what it feels like, now?’
Mary didn’t answer.
‘The whole town was full of how you went into the hospital and helped the doctor with the worst emergency we’ve seen in years – taking over when young Elspeth fainted.’ The steady eyes, so like the colour of the sea, crinkled. ‘I’m guessing that, when you left the war, you thought your nursing days were over – and now, you aren’t sure.’
Mary sighed. ‘What did you say earlier about guilty as charged?’
‘So, are you going back to nursing?’
Strange how she could talk openly to this man, when she was walking on thin ice with Aggie. It was almost a relief to air the problem. ‘I can’t think straight,’ she said. ‘The more I try to make up my mind, the worse I go round in circles.’
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘When I came north, all I wanted to do was reach home and live like a normal person. Stop seeing people with horrendous injuries. Stop trying to cheer up men who will never do another day’s work in their life – not even selling matches at the street corner, because they have been left without arms or legs.’
‘We were a pretty disgusting-looking bunch,’ he agreed quietly.
‘You were still humans! With your hopes and plans destroyed! I felt so much pain for you. Wanted to magic you better, but there was no book to tell me how …’
‘Because there is no magic cure for war,’ he said. ‘Our power to kill and maim people grew faster than our skill at sticking them together again. For German lads, as well as us.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I nursed them too.’
He studied her quietly. ‘War scarred you. Left you wanting nothing more than to crawl home, get your job back from Gus. Settle down one day, and raise a family.’
Mary shrugged. ‘I just want to be normal.’
‘But you’re not normal, Mary Cowie. You stand head and shoulders above the normal. The war has made, as well as destroyed you. It has taught you how to help people through dark nights. Give courage back to men who are afraid. To hold their hands, and cry for them. Stand in for the mother, the wife, the girlfriend, the sister they had left behind – who is too scared to see them now. It taught you to be the vital difference in people’s lives. To be a nurse, where others are afraid.’
‘How do you know all this?’ she demanded.
‘Because I was there. I was one of them. Not in your hospital, but in one exactly like it.’
Mary had a strange sense of being totally equal, almost at one, with this man. No barrier between them. ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Something that a man could never understand.’
‘Try me.’
She fought to gather her thoughts: to make the clearest possible sense.
‘In these Scottish Women’s Hospitals, there was more at stake than nursing dying men. We nurses felt we were helping other women who were braver than ourselves. The ones who were pioneering being women doctors in a profession that was exclusively male. Breaking down the barriers. Proving that women doctors and surgeons were every bit as good. Almost fighting a war, behind the war. A war that’s still going on today … will go on for years.’
‘I know. It was an Elsie Inglis hospital that channelled me to convalescence. They were doctors first, and warriors for their cause second.’
Mary laughed. ‘Most of them would put it the other way round.’
‘I was being polite.’ There was wry humour in his voice.
‘Jonathon’s offered me the chance to be his nurse,’ she blurted out.
‘And you’re taking it? After the herring season?’
‘I don’t know. My head’s spinning. I can’t decide.’
He nodded. ‘Have you ever climbed a mountain?’
‘There’s not many mountains near Buckie.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘There’s a trick to it. I discovered it while I was healing, and found mountains I had to climb inside my head. When you start out, don’t look at the summit. That way you trip and fall. Take it one step at a time, and watch where you’re putting your feet.’
‘I don’t follow you,’ Mary said.
‘Help your doctor friend out. Stop fretting. Take it a day at a time, and see how you feel, when the season ends. By December, the decision may make itself.’
‘And if it doesn’t?’ Mary asked.
‘Follow your heart, not your head,’ he said simply. ‘Because your head will always find twenty different reasons for not doing something that scares you.’
Mary had never met a man to whom she could talk so freely. Someone who listened, and understood. Saw her more clearly than she saw herself.
She turned away. ‘You’re a dangerous man, Neil Findlay. You see straight into a person’s soul … then hold up a mirror.’
He watched her go, then called: ‘Mary Cowie?’
She turned. ‘Yes?’
‘While I’m holding your mirror, think about this. Why just be a nurse? It takes brains and courage to be a woman doctor. You have both to spare. Why not train to join these women warriors of yours? Be a pioneer, fighting for women’s place in the medical profession?’
She stared at him. ‘Me?’ she said. ‘Never!’
‘Why not?’
The sea-green eyes were level, steady.
She couldn’t answer him.
*
The news reached the gutting tables, long before Gus came to tell his teams. It passed like a ripple of water through the hundreds of quines on the quays of what was one of the biggest and busiest fishing harbours. A disaster touching everyone, but hitting hardest the teams from Buckie.
All work stopped, and the Buckie quines clustered round Gus when he plodded up, his head drooping. ‘So, ye’ve heard?’ he asked bleakly.
A murmur of agreement. Duncan Farquhar was well known, the youngest son of one of the main fishing families in the town.
‘What happened, Gus?’ Aggie asked.
He shrugged. ‘It was black night, now that we’re in August. Nobody knows what happened – or when. Maybe a wave took him from the deck … maybe his feet got caught in a rope, or the net they were shooting. One minute he was there, doing his job. The next time they looked, he had gone.’
‘Didn’t they turn back and search?’ one of the other women asked. Knowing that the worst time to fall overboard was when the boat was shooting net, and miles of rope and net stretched behind the stern, waiting to foul the propeller and leave the ship drifting helplessly.
‘They did a wide sweep,’ Gus said. ‘Then they put the stern lifeboat into the water. Half the crew rowed back and forwards where they’d been, while the other half hauled the net in. There was no trace of him.’
‘So, when did they find the body?’ Mary asked quietly.
‘An hour after dawn. They must have passed him a dozen times, in the dark.’
There was a heavy silence. Behind them, you could have heard a pin drop, as the other women listened. Accident and death were no strangers to any fishing community. That didn’t stop it from hurting, when it happened.
Gus scuffed his feet on the quay. ‘The loon had two brothers on that bo
at …’ he said, then couldn’t speak.
Aggie patted his back. ‘There now,’ she said. Tears in her own eyes.
Mary scrubbed her face with the sleeve of a fish-stained jersey. ‘What are the Buckie men doing?’ she asked.
‘Going home. To wait for the boy’s funeral.’ Gus shrugged. ‘I knew the boy. I know his family. I’d like to be there myself … but …’
‘But what?’ asked Aggie.
‘There’s you quines to think about. If I’m not here to buy, then there’s no fish to gut. And wages lost, when I pay you at the end of the fishing.’ The girls were paid for the total fish gutted, cured and packed, over each fishing. It had always been so: no work, no pay. Everything pivoting on the amount of herring landed.
Aggie planted her hands on her hips. ‘Well, I knew the loon, and his family too,’ she said fiercely.
‘And me,’ said Mary. ‘We want to go to the funeral, just like the men.’
‘Duncan was my half-cousin,’ Elsie said, in a small voice.
‘That’s right. On your father’s side,’ Gus said. These old families were so interlinked through marriage that it wasn’t easy to keep track.
‘We’re all going back,’ another Buckie woman declared, to a murmur of general agreement. ‘We want to be there, to support his family.’
Gus blew out his cheeks. ‘I knew you would, my quines,’ he said, with pride in his voice. ‘But I couldn’t ask you. Right, we finish tonight. Those of you who can, get a lift from the boats going back. The rest of you … I’ll pay half your rail fare home.’ He paused. These women were giving up wages, to pay their respects. His heart ahead of his head, he added: ‘No, I’ll pay your train fares home myself.’
He winced. ‘Just nobody travel first class, that’s all.’
His weak joke for once didn’t draw a single smile.
Nobody felt like smiling.
Elsie tugged at Mary’s arm. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Mary.
Elsie was halfway down to the boats already. ‘I’m going to see if Andy will take us home,’ she shouted over her shoulder.
‘Mmmm. Yes. I suppose so,’ Jonathon said absently. Frowning as he studied the case notes in his hand.
‘That means either he doesn’t know, or he wasn’t listening,’ Aggie translated.
‘What?’ Jonathon’s head came up, and he laughed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘What were you asking, Mary?’
‘Where did you learn to sniff a diabetic’s breath?’
‘Experience – no, the first time I heard it was from an old doctor I worked with in the Glasgow slums. The apple-sweet smell, he told me. “That’s the surest way of knowing you have a diabetic on your hands, boy”.’
‘He called you “boy”?’ asked Aggie. ‘When was this? A hundred years ago?’
‘No. It was when we were chiselling out the Hippocratic oath on stone.’
‘You should have had better things to do, than carve out a swearie word,’ Aggie scolded. She handed over some letters and small packages. ‘Here’s your post.’
‘Thanks.’ Jonathon glanced at the case notes again. ‘The temperature is coming down nicely, the pulse rate’s entering normal range. We keep up the treatment, I think. Plenty fluids … it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t feel like eating. If she does, only something light.’
‘Right,’ Mary said. She turned to Aggie. ‘Now that she’s recovering, I’ll show you how to give a bed bath. That’s a simple way of making her feel better.’
Jonathon turned away, idly flicking through the mail. He’d deal with it later, after the Farquhar boy’s funeral. He lifted out a crisp, white envelope with its neatly typed address. More official-looking than the rest. He hesitated, then laid down the others and eased open the envelope’s flap.
A lawyer’s firm, from Inverness? What were they wanting?
His frown deepening, he skimmed through the first paragraph. Then stopped: went back and read it again, slowly. Then a third time, shaking his head, as he finished the rest of the letter.
‘What’s up?’ Aggie asked.
‘Johnnie Meldrum is dead.’
‘Who?’
‘The man who gave us the cottage hospital – or at least this building, to be used as a cottage hospital.’
‘And?’ Aggie asked blankly.
‘This is from the legal firm winding up his estate. The heirs to the estate have instructed them to sell the property – it looks as if they’re wanting cash.’
‘Sell our hospital?’ Mary asked.
He nodded, too shocked to think clearly.
‘But they can’t do that! Not if the man himself gave it to you. There must be a contract, somewhere?’
‘That’s just it,’ said Jonathon. ‘The house was gifted for the benefit of the community, and the deal was sealed with a simple handshake. Like you and your fishing contracts, Johnnie’s word was his bond.’
‘But he must have left some instruction?’
‘No mention of that here. I’m wondering if he never got round to it. He was always such a fit and busy man – death might have caught him out. He probably thought it would be years before he needed to write his will.’
‘But, something so important …’ Aggie protested.
‘I can ask them to check,’ Jonathon said. ‘But I have a feeling that the only man who could confirm the gift is no longer with us. And I don’t know where that leaves us – unless it’s without a leg to stand on.’ He stared at them. ‘He must have made a note of it, somewhere … told his bank, his lawyer.’
Aggie shook her head. ‘What will happen to the town, without the hospital?’
‘I’m going to Inverness, to see them,’ Jonathon decided.
‘What if he didn’t leave a note?’ Mary asked.
‘The property will be sold from under us,’ Jonathon said heavily. ‘They have given us until the 3rd of January. Then that’s exactly what they intend to do.’
Chapter 6
‘What sort of people would steal a cottage hospital?’ exclaimed Chrissie. ‘Does anybody want another scone?’ She fussed round the small group who had gathered in her house after the funeral service, blessing the impulse which had prompted her to bake that morning.
Jonathon tried to wave her away, but found another scone had somehow transferred itself to his plate. ‘In fairness, they’re not stealing,’ he said. ‘It looks as if Johnnie Meldrum died before he got round to changing his will. That’s all.’
‘But surely, if somebody explained this to the lawyers?’ Aggie said.
He nodded. ‘I’m going to see the senior partner. Talk through our position.’
He hesitated, then picked up the scone and began to spread it. Most days, he had no idea where his next meal was coming from – or when. So he’d grown used to taking food where he found it.
Eric grimaced. ‘We can’t afford to lose our hospital. It would leave Banff or Elgin as the nearest place with one.’
‘If the heirs want cash, the only way we can keep the hospital is to buy it from them,’ Mary said. ‘We might have to negotiate a price … then raise funds to buy it.’
‘Where would we ever get that kind of money?’ Chrissie demanded.
‘They’ll want a king’s ransom – a big house, in its own grounds,’ Eric grunted.
‘Maybe if we explain how important the hospital is to the community, they’ll ask for less than the full price,’ Jonathon suggested.
‘Would other landowners be able to help?’ Mary asked.
‘By giving us another property? It took years to convert the one we have.’
‘I was thinking more about donating money. Nobody’s going to come up with the full amount. But if we could raise some money from local landowners, then more from businessmen in the town, maybe even the bank, then the townsfolk … if everybody gives something, it could all add up.’
‘Forget the bank,’ Eric said grimly. ‘And most fishermen have barely enough to live on
. Which means that local businesses are suffering too. This couldn’t have happened at a worse time.’
Jonathon pushed aside his empty plate. ‘We’ve got to do something,’ he said determinedly. ‘We can’t just sit and let it happen.’
‘Oh, we’ll fight,’ growled Eric. ‘If we lose that hospital, while the fishing’s bad … it could mean the end of Buckie as we know it. So we fight, as if our lives depend on it.’
‘We need to use our heads,’ Mary warned. ‘Not go off at half-cock. First, we must find out where we stand. Next, what courses of action are open to us. Then decide which looks the best.’
‘The only way to know where we stand is to ask people,’ Aggie said. ‘Why don’t we split up, each of us seeing different people? Then report back?’
‘Good idea,’ Jonathon said. ‘I’ll handle the lawyers. If Aggie and Mary rope in Gus, he might sound out the other businessmen in the town. And if Eric and Chrissie talk to as many townsfolk as they can reach. Just taking the temperature of the water, at this stage. Exploring the support we can expect, and looking for bright suggestions.’
‘There’s still the landowners,’ Mary said.
Aggie looked at Jonathon. ‘You’re the only one of us who can talk posh.’
‘Not that posh,’ Jonathon said. ‘But, if it comes to buying the place ourselves, then I’ll do it. It would be better if I took a couple of others, like Eric and Gus.’
‘Gus slurps tea from his saucer,’ Aggie cautioned.
‘I doubt they’ll be serving us tea,’ Jonathon answered grimly. He stood up, looking around the table. ‘We’ll start as this small group. But if it turns out as I expect, then we’re going to have to call the town together. Because this is going to affect each and every one of them.’
A few days later, Jonathon found them, with Eric plucking a silver threepenny bit out of the child’s ear, down in a sheltered corner of the harbour.
‘His granny can’t be washing them,’ Eric complained.
‘His granny was doing fine – until some daftie started that trick,’ Chrissie said.
Eric’s shrewd eyes studied Jonathon. ‘Well, did you see the lawyers?’
‘I did,’ said Jonathon. ‘It’s as bad as we feared. They’re sympathetic, say the promised gift was entirely in keeping with the man they knew. But they can only go on their documentation and Johnnie never formalized the gift. I don’t doubt for a second that he truly meant to – but he died before he got round to it.’