*
Victoria Cameron was so used to being the centre of attention that it came as rather a shock to find herself ostracized at the local primary school. Only the other social outcast, Nellie Bains, who wore ragged clothes, smelled and had a constantly dripping nose, wanted to play with her. And Victoria, who had been brought up to know her own worth, did not want to be anywhere near a dirty, ragged child like Nellie Bains. When she was small, Victoria saw only the rags, the tangled hair, the runny nose. She did not see the smile of pure friendship; she was too young and self-centred to glimpse the reflection of a loving heart.
‘Nobody plays with me, Mamma,’ Victoria complained. She did not mention Nellie, who was a nobody and therefore did not exist.
Catriona’s eyes filled with tears. How dare they make her child suffer? She hugged her daughter so hard that the little girl pushed herself away. She put her balled-up handkerchief into the front pocket of her hand-embroidered apron and tossed back her dark hair.
‘Nellie Bains said a bad word, a really, really bad word. She said I was one and none of the nice girls is allowed to play with me.’ She leaned towards her mother and whispered the offending word so quietly into her ear that Catriona, taken by surprise, asked her to repeat it, and was then both shocked and mortified that her little daughter had ever uttered such a word.
‘You are not,’ said Catriona angrily. ‘Shallow minds, with not enough to do but make up stories. Just never you mind, Victoria. Some day a really nice little girl will want to play with you.’
‘Why some day? And what does that bad word mean, Mamma?’
But Catriona refused to tell her, saying that well-brought-up children should not know such words. Victoria was looking both upset and slightly mutinous. Catriona desperately tried to find a solution and then she found one, but one that frightened her, for she was not used to confrontation. ‘I know, Victoria. I’ll come into the school and have a word with Miss Spencer.’
But the word with Miss Spencer did not mend matters, for Miss Spencer looked down her educated nose and told Catriona that it was all highly irregular and she could not control what the children learned in their own homes.
Catriona had never disliked anyone in her entire life. Even her philandering husband had received no criticism from her, but this was different: this concerned her child.
Narrow spinster, thought Catriona angrily. No wonder no man’s wanted her. Thirty years old, if she’s a day, and trying to look like a lassie.
But she was no match for the contempt of the other woman. Besides, Catriona had been brought up to think teachers superior to ordinary mortals. Were they not full of book learning? Some had even been to a place called the university. That inbred feeling of inferiority, however, was warring with her own very justifiable anger.
‘Just make sure you control what they learn here, miss,’ she said furiously and, head up in defeat, she walked away.
And then Nellie, angry that her offers of friendship were constantly being spurned, took matters into her own rather grubby little hands and told Victoria exactly what the bad word meant.
‘You’ve no pa, you stuck-up wee child, and your ma’s no better than she should be.’
Victoria looked at Nellie, at her dirty face and her snotty nose. She was not quite sure what Nellie was saying, but she recognized the vindictiveness with which it was said. She slapped Nellie hard across her wizened wee face. Then she turned and ran crying from the playground, and she did not stop running until she reached the haven of the farmhouse.
‘Where is my father?’ she blurted out as soon as she could draw breath.
Catriona, who had felt the heart stop beating in her body as her distraught daughter almost fell in through the door, sat down on a kitchen chair, something she seldom did during the day. She took a deep breath and tried to steady the wild clamour of her heart. It had to come, of course. Father had warned her that she should have spoken of John, so that the bairn could grow up accepting his absence. But it was hard, so hard, to admit her failure. She took the angry, distressed child on her lap.
‘Your father was not a very good . . . not a very dependable family-type of man, Victoria, not like Grampa; but I loved him very much . . . Maybe I still do,’ she added sadly. ‘He had charm, you see, like Grampa, but he was never meant to be a farmer – more a man of the world. He has gone away: he went away before you were even born. He was Grampa’s son, but we don’t speak of him.’
‘Where is he? Didn’t he like me? Grampa likes me.’
Catriona looked at her daughter. Which question to answer? The memory of that awful evening when John had turned up at the farmhouse, only to find the door barred and his father standing there with a double-barrelled shotgun in his hands, made her wince. She could almost hear the angry voices. At first John had cajoled, in the way he usually did, to worm his way back into his wife’s or his father’s affections.
‘Father,’ Catriona had begged. ‘He’s sorry. He’s Victoria’s father. I cannot deny my bairn her father.’
‘I’ll see Boatman about more than my will the morn, Catriona. Lassie, you cannot still love him after the way he’s treated you.’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I hate him . . . sometimes . . .’
Jock had looked down at her compassionately. ‘That goes, lassie, believe me. You’re better off without John. He’ll break yer heart.’ He had turned back to the window and pushed the barrel of the shotgun through the opening. The blast had shattered the silence and caused the sleeping baby to awake, screaming.
Catriona had stared at her father-in-law and the blood had receded from her cheeks. ‘John,’ she had gasped on the point of fainting.
‘Lassie, lassie, away to the bairn. It was only a rat that was sunning itself at my very byre door. I was wanting to mind John on who it was that taught him to shoot.’
And now Catriona turned to her daughter. ‘He never knew you, sweetheart. When he did come home after you were born, Grampa wouldn’t let him in the house. He left us, sweetheart, but I will never leave you, never.’
Victoria had stopped sobbing. Still she shuddered, but now she was calmer.
‘And I will never leave you, Mamma, never.’
There was an earnestness in the young voice that almost frightened Catriona as the child added, ‘That’s a really truly promise, Mamma.’
2
1913
THE SEASONS CONTINUED IN ALL their varying splendour and the world moved just as steadily towards madness. Victoria finished at the little local school and went, every day, in the horse bus to the Harris Academy in nearby Dundee.
Grampa and Catriona, but not Victoria, had had many discussions about the form that the young girl’s further education should take. It was a momentous decision to make. After all, no one on either side of the family had ever gone beyond an elementary education.
‘Our lassie has a brain, Catriona,’ murmured Grampa in awe. He himself had had to leave school, where he had not been known for perfect attendance, just after his twelfth birthday. ‘Third prize and a special certificate for music. Clever and musical.’
Catriona was not sure that an ability to thump out marching tunes for the Boys’ Brigade on the old upright piano in the parlour could be classed as musical, but she, as well as her father-in-law, was quietly pleased with Victoria’s achievements.
She was, however, full of doubts about this new stage in her daughter’s development. ‘I wouldn’t want to push, Father. Victoria’s never talked about staying on at school. It’s not as if she’s always said she wanted to be a teacher, or a missionary or anything. Just happy to spend her days reading books and walking around the farm.’
‘I’m talking about a university education for my wee lassie, Catriona. So it’ll be the Harris Academy. I’ve met some fine people that got their schooling there. We don’t want to send her to the high school. I’ve walked by there some days when I’m in at the bank and, I’m sorry, but some of those bairns get a bit ab
ove theirselves. I wouldn’t want anything rubbing off on our wee lassie, but you’re her mother. If you want her at the high school, I’ll be more than happy to find the money, you know that, and I’ll rely on your good sense to keep her feet on the ground.’
Privately, Catriona thought there would be obstreperous children in every school, but Victoria herself had shuddered at the idea of going all the way into the city centre to Dundee High School. One or two of the friends she had eventually made at Birkie would be at the Harris. She wanted to be with them.
As it happened, her best friend at the Harris Academy was to be a girl she met on her first day. Elsie Morrison was the only girl in a large family and she fascinated Victoria. Her life, surrounded by parents and grandparents, brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins, was so different from Victoria’s own rather narrow existence. Every spare minute that the girls had they spent together, for while Victoria loved being exposed to the rough and tumble of Elsie’s overcrowded life, Elsie loved the peace and quiet of Priory Farm. In the evenings they would sit in the comfortably upholstered farm parlour (or sitting room, as Elsie insisted on calling it) and play the piano and sing, or wind up the old Victrola, put on a record and dance. Elsie knew all the latest dance steps; she had seven brothers, after all.
On Sundays after church, when Grampa was too tired or too busy, Victoria and Elsie would go rambling all over the countryside. Sometimes they took a tram and then walked to a well-known beauty spot, or they would pack a picnic tea into their saddle-bags and venture farther afield on their bicycles. It was during one of these rambles that Victoria met Robert.
*
It was one of those September days when the world was warm and golden. The trees were just beginning to turn, and green, yellow, scarlet and brown leaves danced, it seemed, on the same branches; brambles hung fat and juicy on the hedgerows, and rowans and rosehips vied with each other in colour and number; the friendly smell of wood smoke from a hundred cottage gardens hung on the air. It was a walnut shell day.
The girls, like countless other Dundonians, took the ferry across the Tay to the village of Newport, in the Kingdom of Fife. They left the others happy to laze on the Newport Braes, those pleasant grassy slopes, and were soon deep in woods near the estuary of the great river. Rowan, oak, pine, birch, beeches – everything that was beautiful – was growing in those woods and the girls were going to sketch them. At least Elsie was. Victoria played with her charcoal and then wandered off.
She sat down on a mossy bank, trying to memorize the colours and, as always, feeling inadequate. She could not possibly paint the autumnal tints, let alone the sighs that the boughs made when a breeze moved them or the rustle, like golden coins, as they fell.
‘Quite something,’ said a voice beside her.
His voice was what Grampa termed ‘county’. It belonged to the crested carriages that occasionally came to the wee village church. Normally Victoria would have curtsied quickly and moved away, but there was a power in the golden day that made her stay.
‘Quite lovely,’ she agreed, and looked up at him as he stood silhouetted against the pale autumn sun.
Her heart seemed to stop beating. He was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen – tall and slender; an aquiline profile with deep blue eyes and hair the colour of a raven’s wing, blue where the sun struck it. And how the sun was shining that day in September 1913.
She was suddenly breathless, and fought for control of her heart, which was beating so rapidly that her blood seemed to be rushing around her veins in the strangest, and yet most pleasant, way. ‘I was trying to sketch it,’ she managed at last, holding up her sketchpad with its virgin pages.
He looked at it measuringly, as once she had seen her art teacher do when the First Year Art Appreciation class had walked into the Dundee Art Gallery to view its masterpieces. ‘You sketch as well as I do,’ he said laughing, and they laughed together.
He helped her up, and at the touch of his hand her whole body seemed to burst into flame. She was afraid that her normally pale skin had turned red – so unattractive – but he appeared not to have noticed, and she turned away to pick up her drawing materials. Somehow it seemed right that he should stay beside her as she continued her walk. They talked easily of the beauty of the woods. The splendid boy (what was his name? Oh surely, surely, Hector or Lysander – something poetic) pointed out some especially fine specimens and Victoria wondered at a boy who could speak so easily and serenely about nature. Grampa might say that he liked flowers, but he was old. She could not imagine Elsie’s brothers admitting to a fondness for flowers.
They talked too of the ugliness of war, for the boy said that his father knew someone who said that there were evil people in the world, who would stop at nothing to force their views on others. Then, too soon, because the tides of the River Tay wait for no man, and certainly for no wee lassie who has just met her Sir Lancelot, it was time for Victoria to go home.
He watched her walk off through the great bushes of rhododendrons and then, as she reached the turning that would take her out of sight, he called, ‘What’s your name?’ She turned and saw him again, outlined against the sun as if he were not quite real, and she knew that this moment and this boy were important and had changed her for ever. She called back, ‘Victoria.’
‘I’m Robert.’
‘Robert.’ Not the name of a knight in a picture book. ‘Robert.’ Such an ordinary name for such an extraordinary boy. No, it was right, perfect. She had never met anyone who wore their name so well. She whispered Robert over and over again on the long journey back to Dundee. She wondered where he lived, and where he went to school, and whether she would ever see him again. For Robert’s face was the one she had given every knight and hero she had ever read about, and Robert’s slenderness and grace were theirs too. She did not say ‘I am in love’ because she was only thirteen years old, but wherever she went after that she looked for Robert, and each time she returned to the enchanted woods she felt a dull ache of disappointment that Robert was not there.
*
Not, that is, until Easter 1914. Victoria and Elsie were looking for spring flowers, and Robert’s woods were full of them. Elsie sat on a fallen log, happily sketching primroses while Victoria wandered off, as usual.
‘Hello, Victoria,’ said a voice, and there he was.
He was taller and thinner and even more beautiful than she remembered.
‘Hello,’ she said as calmly as possible, for her heart was beating so loudly that she felt he must hear it.
‘No sketching today?’
She gestured back to where Elsie was sitting. ‘I was, but I’m no better at sketching now than I was in September, so I decided to walk a little.’
He fell in beside her and they began to pick up where they had left off in that golden autumn.
‘There will be real trouble soon, Victoria, you’ll see,’ said Robert. ‘Lots of chaps at school are joining up. I wish I were old enough. I’d go, and we’d soon rout those Huns.’
The Huns. Everyone talked about them, but no one talked with relish, not in the the way Robert was talking, as if what was happening was a great game. Tam Menmuir, Grampa’s best worker, had sons, and Victoria had heard them talk about these people called Huns. They talked with sorrow, with anger, with despair. They worried that if these Huns were not controlled, there would be trouble. Then they went on to talk about record harvests and yields, and about the things that really mattered.
Suddenly Victoria felt older than Robert, older than Catriona, older than Grampa. ‘How old are you, Robert?’ she asked.
‘Sixteen – almost – but I’m tall enough for sixteen, don’t you think?’
He grabbed her hands and whirled her round in a mad dance. ‘That’s what I’ll do. I’ll lie about my age.’
How could he look so happy at the prospect of going to war? Victoria fought down a rush of fear. She hated the very idea.
Her scarf had slipped down from her neck and he bent to retriev
e it from the carpet of leaves.
‘I shall keep this, Victoria, as a favour from a lady. Perhaps I shall tie it round my rifle.’
Again he bent, but this time he picked two perfect primroses. ‘Take these in exchange.’
‘These are private grounds. It’s against the law to pick flowers here,’ said Victoria primly, although she took them.
Robert laughed. What a joyous laugh he had. ‘They’ll forgive a knight going off to the Crusades.’
Perhaps many of the boys and men who went to the carnage that was the Great War thought of themselves as Crusaders – knights in shining armour, fighting evil. Right was on their side and they would win. But at what cost?
‘I must get back to my friend,’ Victoria replied conscientiously, instead of expressing all the sensible things she wanted to say about the futility of war.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Victoria, may I write, if I get in, I mean? And you could write to me, about home fires and all that rot. Here,’ he snatched her sketchpad and tore a sheet from it. ‘Write your name and address and I’ll write mine.’
She scribbled them down, then they swapped papers and she blushed furiously when she saw his name. Of course he could pick the primroses on his own father’s land.
‘Au revoir, Victoire,’ he said grandly, and, taking her hand, he raised it, in what she thought of as a very Gallic gesture, to his lips.
‘Goodbye, Robert,’ she answered softly and another blush swept over her cheeks.
She returned to Elsie and very carefully put the primroses between the pages of her sketchpad. Later that night she gently pressed them between the pages of Mansfield Park. Her Bible, she thought, would have been a worthier repository, but she used it often and the primroses would have been sure to fall out.
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