‘Catriona, Victoria has just spent two days at the bedside of a gently reared young boy who, for reasons known only to the powers that be, has spent the last several months fighting for his life in a rat-infested hell-hole known as a trench. He has been hideously disfigured and is now fighting a second, even tougher, battle. Victoria was calm and supportive. She will not see what has happened to you as the end of the world.’
‘What are you talking about, Dr Currie? What has happened?’ Victoria was standing in the doorway, the hat and gloves that an office girl could wear with impunity grasped unceremoniously in her hands, her eyes anxious.
They had not heard her come in.
Ignoring Catriona’s protestations, Dr Currie told Victoria truthfully and simply what had happened.
Victoria went white and then red, first with shock and then with barely suppressed anger. Sex . . . Violation . . . She had never given either one much thought. Sex was something that married people did occasionally. It had to be done, of course, or there would be no children, but to think of it in terms of her mother and her new-found father. No, it could not be. There was some horrible mistake. She looked at her mother, grown old and frail again in the space of a night, and Victoria went to her and, as she had done on the very first morning in the house, took the older woman in her arms. ‘How could he, how could he?’ she seethed. ‘It’s my fault, Mamma. I forced you to take him in. I should have been here to protect you.’
‘Enough,’ said Dr Currie. ‘What a pair for overloading yourselves with guilt and responsibility. John Cameron is responsible for this, and no one else.’
‘Can we have him arrested for assault, doctor?’ Victoria could see only the need to punish someone for her mother’s pain. She was ready to rush to the nearest police station.
The two older women exchanged glances over her bowed head. A divorced woman who takes in her former husband as a lodger and then claims that she has been assaulted might not be dealt with too sympathetically.
Dr Currie, more sophisticated and worldly wise than Catriona, tried to answer as diplomatically as possible. ‘It would be too unpleasant for your mother, Victoria. He was her husband . . .’
‘They are divorced,’ Victoria reminded her, and felt her mother wince even at the sound of that shameful word.
‘He was living here, Victoria. Some people might find that fact . . . interesting.’
‘I could explain that it was for my sake, that I wanted to get to know him, that I hoped . . .’ Victoria’s voice trailed off. What had she hoped? Was she a child who believed in fairy stories?
All three women were silent while unpleasant thoughts chased around in their heads.
‘Where has he gone anyway?’ asked Victoria at last. ‘He needs money. He never paid for his lodgings and the next rent from the farm isn’t due until the September quarter-day. I’ll check his room.’ She jumped up and hurried out.
Dr Currie leaned over her patient and adjusted her coverings. ‘Excuse me for a moment too, Catriona. I’ll heat up that fish pie . . . No, I’m perfectly capable of seeing that it doesn’t burn.’
But the doctor did not go to the kitchen. With a heart beating faster than it had done for some time, and a feeling of disaster threatening to overcome her, she hurried downstairs to her own quarters. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it while she tried to calm her heart. He had, oh dear God, he had. Several times in the past few months she had felt that someone besides Catriona had been in her room. A ten-shilling note had been removed from her purse, but never all the money, so that a busy woman might think she had spent it; or a shilling had disappeared from the pile she kept on her dressing table for emergencies. She had decided to say nothing to Catriona, in the hope that she and Victoria would soon see the true worth of John Cameron. But now this.
Like an old woman, she stumbled to her bed and looked at the small space beside her pillow, where the exquisite gold half-hunter watch with the words Sandy loves Flora picked out in diamonds had kept her brave for twenty lonely years.
Oh, they could have a warrant made out for his arrest now. But would it bring back her watch, her carefree girlhood?
For the first time in those twenty years Flora Currie sat down on her bed and allowed the tears to roll down her cheeks. A few hours ago she had been remembering with pleasure the days of her girlhood, the days when young Sandy Fotheringham had spent every minute he could in her home; she had remembered fondly the excuses he had made to find himself beside her at a tennis party or a ball. Every day for twenty years she had seen the watch he had given her on her eighteenth birthday, just a few days before Julia swept through London society like a comet. And now it was gone. And to think that its sale would line the pockets of a wastrel like John Cameron. Feeling that she too had been violated, Dr Currie sniffed loudly, blew her nose soundly and, after washing her face, went back upstairs to comfort her patient.
And who is to comfort me? she thought. I cannot add to Catriona’s guilt, and if I tell her she will blame herself. There must be something I can do. Or must I let him get away with it?
*
Nellie Bains sometimes wondered if she had been right to exchange the drudgery of the jute mills for the somewhat dubious pleasures of motherhood. Wee Jimmy was quite a handful for a lassie not yet eighteen years of age, and now that Tam was away in Flanders with the Black Watch, the cramped room and kitchen up the stairs in the Hilltown was often a lonely place.
Perhaps she should have married Tam, then at least there would have been some money coming in. He had promised to arrange things and at first there had been a few shillings regularly every week, but since he had been away, she supposed that he had been too busy marching and saluting officers to worry about his family. That was all he had done, he said, during his three-week training period. He had learned to salute his superiors, and heaven knows but it seemed that everyone was more important than eighteen-year-old Tam Sinclair; and he had learned to slope arms, whatever that meant. He had not yet seen a machine-gun and he had never fired a rifle, but now he was off defending the Empire and Nellie was left behind to look after his son. She decided to take him for a walk in the lovely June weather. They would walk down the High Street and look in the windows of all the posh shops.
Victoria saw Nellie as she left the office for her lunch break and called out to her.
Nellie was surprised, but delighted to be hailed by her one-time schoolmate. She only wished that any one of her neighbours was there to see her well-dressed friend.
‘Well, Victoria, that costume definitely says: I work in a nice clean office.’
‘Oh, I know, Nellie. I’m so lucky. I love the work and I go to Bruce’s College one day a week for shorthand and typing. But what about you?’ Victoria looked down and was rather disconcerted to find herself being grinned at by a very gummy little face. ‘Is this your wee boy?’
‘He’s teething,’ explained Nellie, wiping the child’s cheeks with a far from clean handkerchief cut from an old sheet. Nellie looked at her son through the eyes of this well-fed, sophisticated friend from her childhood. ‘He’s a bit washed-out looking, isn’t he?’ she said critically but honestly. ‘I wish I could get him out to Birkie, Victoria. The air was different out there, wasn’t it?’
Victoria smiled. Even to think of the air of Birkhill cheered her. ‘Nothing like it anywhere, Nellie. A tonic for what ails you, my grandfather used to say.’ For a moment she thought of her mother, still unable to cope fully with what had happened to her barely a month ago. She smiled brightly at Nellie again. ‘Can’t you move in with your mother while your . . . man is at the war?’
‘Move in with my ma and seven other weans, and two of them with bairns, in one room and a kitchen? You must be kidding. I have a room just for the two of us . . . and Tam, when he’s home. I like my independence and my privacy.’
Victoria looked at Nellie. The snotty-nosed ragamuffin had grown into a handsome woman. Her clothes were
well pressed and mended, and it was only the child’s face and the over-used hankie that were dirty.
She spoke spontaneously. ‘Let’s take the bairn to Lamb’s for coffee, Nellie. My treat.’
‘Goodness, are the waitresses there no as stuck up as the clientele, Victoria? They’ll no be happy to see me in there, especially wi wee Jimmy. I read in the paper once that Mrs Pankhurst – you know, the Mrs Pankhurst, the votes-for-women lady – she ate at Lamb’s. They’ll think they’ve come doon in the world serving me and wee Jimmy.’
‘You have as much right in there as anybody else. Besides, he looks like a well-behaved wee laddie.’
Nellie hoisted her son on to her hip, where he settled contentedly. ‘Oh, he’s grand, just greets a bit when the pain’s bad, but a wee nip of whisky soothes the gums.’
Victoria looked at Nellie in horror as she ushered her charges across the tramlines. ‘The bone of a lamb chop is better, Nellie, and has nourishment in it, too . . . So the doctor that lodges with my mother tells her patients.’
‘Aye, well whisky’s easier to get, Victoria. My, isn’t this a bonny place?’
They had arrived at Lamb’s and were shown to a table that Victoria could not help but notice was hardly the best seat in the restaurant. Should I make a fuss? Am I brave enough to ask for a better table? Nellie and the baby seemed perfectly happy, so Victoria sat down. Since she had no experience of small children, she was interested to see how the boy accepted being in a different environment. He accepted it as he accepted everything. He stared around at the green plants, the tables with their starched white cloths and the waitresses in their starched white aprons, and he grinned cheerfully at anyone who looked at him.
‘He’s a happy baby, Nellie,’ said Victoria with a tinge of jealousy in her voice.
‘Och aye, he’s a nice bairn, and my family is great with him. Granny, my ma, my sisters . . . everybody helps.’ Nellie deposited her son on the floor at her feet, helped herself to a cream-filled cake and leaned across conspiratorially.
‘You’ll never guess what I did the other day? The wean had a hen: you know, we were all told to have hens and eggs to help the war effort. Well, we got this tough old hen from the Priory – don’t ask how, Victoria – and we put it in a pen on the drying green. I gave it tattie peelings and scrapings from the porridge pot, and it laid three lovely brown eggs, no all on the same day, but then the thrawn old thing stopped laying and just ate me out of house and home. So, says I to myself: We’ll hae a good bowl of soup. I wrang its neck, but wee Jimmy saw it before I had the thing plucked, and you’ll never guess what I tellt him.’ She leaned across the table, her eyes sparkling with humour and pleasure at being in such a nice place with a friend.
Victoria humoured her. ‘I hardly dare think, Nellie Bains.’
‘I tellt him the Germans got it. We buried it on the drying green, with a cross and everything, and when I’d put him down for a sleep, I went to dig it up to cook it.’ She stopped talking and started laughing uproariously.
‘Nellie,’ said Victoria. ‘You didn’t eat the child’s pet, especially after you had buried it in the ground?’
Nellie wiped her eyes with the same cloth she had been using for Jimmy’s nose, and for his wet and now cream-covered cheeks, before answering. ‘I would have done, but old Maggie Thomson up our close had dug it up as soon as my back was turned. I made her give me the carcase for soup.’
Nellie held no grudge towards the neighbour who had stolen her dinner: she would probably have done just the same herself. Victoria thought again how well Nellie handled hardship. Sometimes, in the years since her grandfather’s death, she had felt that the Camerons had hit rock-bottom, but they had never yet had to dig up a dead hen. Nellie had nothing . . . except happiness.
‘And how are you all, Victoria? Yer mam?’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t recognize the house, Nellie.’ Victoria could not tell her the truth; she could not say that Catriona was a shadow who floated around the house or sat dully, staring into space, and who started at any sound, especially the noise of an opening door. ‘We have a lady doctor living with us, but you knew that. She’s wonderful. You wouldn’t believe the hours she works. She has a motor car and she smokes cigarettes but, it’s funny, Nellie, she’s still a lady.’
‘I’ve seen her. Don’t get in her road if she’s heading for the Dundee Royal,’ said Nellie feelingly. ‘Must be great to know a real live doctor, even if it’s a woman. Dae ye get free medical care?’
Victoria thought of the care and attention her mother was receiving. ‘Me, Nellie? I’m as healthy as one of Grampa’s Clydesdales.’
‘Oh, I loved to see him sitting up there on a Sunday in his tall hat and his frock-coat. Whae has the horses now?’
‘One or two were sold off when Grampa died, but Glentanar and the Cutty Sark still work the farm. Tam Menmuir loves them just as much as my grandfather did. It’s almost like seeing Grampa. He speaks to them in the same way. I’ll need to go, Nellie. You wouldn’t believe the demands for jute with this war going on and on. I’ll be lucky if I get all the letters and bills typed in time to catch my tram.’
Victoria paid the bill, said goodbye to Nellie and hurried back to the office. She loved being there. She loved the dark wallpaper, the heavy polished wood, the feeling of usefulness and especially of accomplishment at the end of the day. If only everything in life was as easy as neatly typing a column of figures.
8
LORD INCHMARNOCK SAT BESIDE HIS son’s bed and waited for the surgeon. They were going to take off the bandages that had been applied after the first of many operations that they had told him Robert would have to undergo. He was not expecting much. Unlike his wife, he had sat there day after day while Robert, his face an unrecognizable mass of bone and bloody tissue, waited to heal sufficiently and grow strong enough to endure surgery. Lord Inchmarnock knew what lay under the bandages. If it even looked a little better than it had done; even, please God, just a little better . . .
From which ancestor had the boy’s beauty come? He looked like his mother, but stronger, and he looked like his father, but finer. He resembled the seventeenth-century portrait of a dilettante Inchmarnock, but there was nothing dissolute about Robert’s finely carved features or about his character. What a lovely, happy little boy he had been. His father looked at the still figure in front of him, and his mind filled with pictures of an ethereal child in a sailor suit, running to him across the great lawns of Inchmarnock House, filling his life with love and joy.
There had been precious little joy during the last few months: there had been that first, almost unbearable joy when he had heard that his son, although wounded, was alive, but now the boy did not want to go on, had to be coaxed, cajoled and convinced that life could still be sweet. For me it’s sweet, to have you here alive, my son.
‘Beauty is only skin-deep, Robert.’ To his abject horror, he heard himself mouthing platitudes and he tried to repair the damage. ‘I mean, dear boy, the people who love you won’t care . . . It’s you, laddie, the essential you that matters, and you’re still there, Robert. And, in time, you’ll feel better and . . .’
Did the slit in the bandaged mask move? The voice was a snarl.
‘Don’t talk rot, Father. It may not matter to you . . .’ The bandaged hand reached towards his father and the voice grew gentler, no longer the horrible caricature of Robert’s well-modulated tones. ‘No, Pa, it doesn’t matter to you.’ The wounded boy-soldier sighed softly and stopped to gather his strength. ‘But it sure as hell matters to me,’ he said, and the anger and pain in his voice made his father wince.
‘Robert, Mummy—’
‘Can’t even bear to look at me. What girl is going to look at me, Pa, if my own mother finds me so abhorrent?’
Lord Inchmarnock did not try to defend his wife. The boy had gone through too much already. Besides, try as he might, he could not forgive Julia for running away, for that was what she had done.
It was not Robert she had been considering, but herself. Safely in London, she could pretend that all was well.
‘There are nice girls . . .’
‘Who won’t mind being seen with a horror?’
‘It’s only the first operation, laddie. Each time it will get better.’
His whole body moved as Robert sighed deeply. ‘It hurts,’ he said simply. ‘And I wonder how many operations I can take, Pa, and for what?’ He stopped and there was silence for a time, while Sandy sat and tried to will his own strength into the broken body of his child. Then the voice came again. ‘Is it the cricket season yet? If I’d stayed at Eton, I could have been captain. Winterton joined up – bought it, poor devil – and Nash and Thomson-Smythe. Not a decent batsman left in the side.’ Again silence fell, and the father sat with his heart breaking. ‘Has Victoria come back?’ Robert asked after a time.
‘She’s a working girl.’ Lord Inchmarnock tried to sound as calm and reasonable as possible. ‘She’ll come again as soon as she has a chance. Jolly decent girl. I’ve never met anyone who has worked in a factory before. Very educational experience. Good for the likes of us to meet real people, laddie. Puts a different perspective on life, don’t you think? Flora Currie – you remember Auntie Flora?—She’s like your Victoria. Brought up to believe that the sun rose and set on her head, and look at the work she does now.’ ‘Yes,’ said Robert bitterly. ‘She’s a doctor. Horrid job for a decent woman, isn’t it, dealing with all that ugliness and misery, and death.’
‘And wonder, miracles and birth, laddie. She’ll bring Victoria back just as soon as she can.’
‘But I could feel her hands shaking, and she hadn’t even seen my face. Her letters said I was like a knight in shining armour, Father. You must bring me a helmet from the staircase – to hide her hero’s face.’
‘She seemed like a nice girl, Robert,’ said his father desperately. ‘Flora thinks highly of her, and she always was a splendid judge of character: I mean, she adored me when we were youngsters.’ He tried to laugh, but even to himself it sounded hollow.
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