The Farm Girl's Dream

by Eileen Ramsay

  Victoria sprang to her feet and in one swift movement went to stand behind the chair on which she had been sitting. She clenched her hands on the rose silk and stared across the chair and the little table, with the remains of their elegant afternoon tea.

  ‘How dare you?’ she almost screamed. ‘You are, without a doubt, the most insensitive and selfish person I have ever met in my life.’ She stopped for a second as a picture of another selfish human being rose in her mind – that of her father – and that made her even angrier. ‘You can’t begin to understand, but I could never be bribed into marrying your son. I liked a boy I met twice, twice . . . when we were children. To me he was St George or Sir Lancelot. I could have loved him, had I been given a chance, and perhaps he could have loved me – and wealth and power, and whether or not he is hideously disfigured would not have entered the equation. And nothing will ever get me to part with this dreadful suit – perhaps it’s not haute couture and needs a little silk something here, and a teeny-weeny diamond something there, to make it bearable to a fine lady like you, but to me it’s elegant and lovely, and a joy to wear, because someone who loves me and all my faults gave it to me, and you can’t understand that either. I’m sorry for you, Julia Fotheringham, and my pity is another thing you can’t understand. If Robert wants me to visit him in hospital I will go gladly, but I hope with all my heart that I never see you again.’

  Victoria turned and fled from the room. Lady Inchmarnock stood, shaking, as she watched the flight of the only person in the world who had ever shouted at her. Neither of them saw the bowed figure of Robert turn from the window, where he had been standing for five of the most miserable minutes that he had ever lived through.

  10

  ROBERT WATCHED VICTORIA LEAVE THE room, then he made his way slowly along the terrace until he reached the windows of his father’s study. How he had loved, as a small boy, to creep along here and then to jump in at the french windows. Each time his father had shrieked with fear. How old had he been before he had realized that Pa had expected the intrusion, had waited for it, lovingly. Dear Pa, thought Robert, dear old Pa.

  He smiled a twisted smile at the memory and entered the study through those selfsame french windows. He went to the desk and sat down for a moment to rest. How he loved this room. How it spoke to him of his father. He ran his scarred hands along the top of the highly polished mahogany desk, along the oak case of his grandfather’s favourite guns, and he breathed deeply, taking in that special smell of cigars and horses, books and Knight’s Castile soap, which spoke so eloquently of Lord Inchmarnock.

  How peaceful it was. He had always been safe here. As a small boy he had hidden – with Pa’s connivance – from Nanny and bedtime, under the knee-hole desk. Could I curl up there again, with Teddy under one arm and Pa sitting there, looking so patently honest? ‘Gosh, nanny, has that scamp gone missing again? Try the kitchens. They absolutely ruin him there. I’ll speak firmly to cook, I promise you I will.’ And nanny had looked at him with a look that told him that she knew perfectly well that he knew that the much-maligned cook had nothing to do with little Robert’s transgressions. Now Robert smiled at the panelled walls, as if they could see him and accept him – as he had been, and as he was now.

  He opened a drawer in the desk and took out some of his father’s heavy vellum crested notepaper. He fished in his pocket for his handkerchief and his trembling fingers encircled something. A walnut shell. He brought it out and struggled to open it. Even his fingers disobeyed him these days, trembling, trembling, like old Granny Inchmarnock’s. But she was eighty, he thought, and I am just nineteen. How he had hated her trembling hands: they had frightened the boy Robert.

  He had the shell open now and he smiled. She was right. Victoria was so very right. He could see the woods, first in their spring glories, then in their autumn dress, and always among the trees was a girl, a young girl, innocent, unaware. She smiled at him.

  ‘These are private grounds,’ she said primly, but with a dimple in her cheek, a dimple he had been able to see, almost to touch, in the bad days. ‘It’s against the law to pick flowers here.’

  ‘They’ll forgive a knight . . .’

  He glanced up quickly from the walnut shell and his own face looked back at him. Photographs, photographs in silver frames, everywhere. Robert, a plump baby beside the Christmas tree with its breathtaking array of candles; Robert so solemn and unafraid on his first pony; Robert, even more aware of the weight on his young shoulders in his cricket whites, when he made the team; Robert, terrified, expectant, reluctant, in his first dinner jacket at his first dance.

  He picked up a paperweight and smashed the shell, and the days of childhood and innocence disappeared and other days came flooding in. The Somme. The guns. The smell. The noise. The pain . . . The pain, and then Mother, Mother . . . buying him a wife.

  ‘You’re so right, Mamma,’ he whispered, touching his scarred face with trembling fingers. ‘No one could love this . . . except Pa. Oh, Pa, I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry.’

  For a few moments he bent and wrote quickly on the expensive paper. He finished with a flourish, Goodbye, Robert, and then threw the pen from him, so that several of the pictures were splattered with ink.

  *

  In the hall the tweenies wondered whether or not they should try to do the study. They had finished everything else, but Jarvis, the butler, had said as how Master Robert had gone into the room, and he did so hate for the maids to see him.

  ‘Poor lamb, he should get used to us being around,’ said Milly solicitously to her friend Bess. ‘Then he’d know we only see a hero what has suffered for our freedom.’

  ‘It’ll take—’ began Bess but she never finished, for just then the silence of the great house was shattered by the blast of a shotgun. It was only too obvious that the souldestroying sound had come from behind the closed door of Lord Inchmarnock’s study.

  *

  The butler had met Victoria in her flight and calmly, as if every day of the week a guest rushed headlong from the house, he arranged to find madame’s coat, madame’s car.

  ‘I prefer to take a bus,’ said Victoria. ‘Please, I would enjoy the walk down the driveway to the road.’

  ‘As you wish, madame, but his lordship . . .’

  ‘Can think what he likes,’ wept Victoria. ‘Please, I have to go, please.’

  He opened the great door and she hurried down the steps. A path wandered off and hid itself among the rhododendrons and Victoria took it. She did not want the watching house to witness her flight. She ran and soon found herself at a pond, where a weeping willow bent over to admire its own reflection.

  ‘Oh, dear God, this is the place. I’ve been here before.’

  She stopped and looked around. Yes, it was the same spot where the boy Robert had met the girl Victoria. The great trees stood even taller now and once more their branches were visions of red and gold, yellow and brown. Under the trees, purple autumn crocuses were spreading themselves.

  With eyes full of tears, she stood and looked at the archway created by the towering beeches. An autumn sun shone hazily through the leaves and she thought she saw a figure appear on the path – a boy, tall and slender. He shimmered and dissolved and she blinked against the tears and the sunlight, and there he was again. ‘They’ll forgive a knight going off to the Crusades,’ he said and he held out his hand. It was autumn, but in his hand he held a posy of small yellow flowers.

  ‘Robert, Robert, my dear, where did you get those primroses?’ And then suddenly birds rose up in alarm from every tree, and the sky was dark with their wings and the air was full of their cries, and the boy was gone.

  Her soul full of an unbearable knowledge, Victoria stood for a long time looking at the spot where the boy had stood, this moment and a lifetime ago. Then, chilled and unbearably anguished, she turned and, with head held high and tears streaming unchecked down her face, she walked down the path to the road.

  She did not
wait for a bus but walked along the river to the ferry. How calm, how peaceful, how beautiful it was. It was possible to believe that there was no evil in the world, no sadness, no madness, when one watched a great river. The sunlight rested on top of the still water and the underlying currents teased the rays and pulled them this way and that.

  Victoria bent down and picked up a stone. She hurled it into the water to break that deceptive air of calm. There was too much evil in the world hiding just under the surface. Get it out, get it out and deal with it. The Tay was beautiful, smiling in the sunlight, but it was a treacherous river.

  She felt slightly calmer after throwing the stone and continued to the ferry terminal, where she scrubbed her face dry with her handkerchief. She sat, until the ferry left, staring into space and, if she had but known it, her eyes were so full of unimaginable horror that two other passengers could not bear to sit near her.

  She did not wait for a tram at the other side, but walked up to the Perth Road and out, farther and farther, until she came to Blackness Road. When she saw the dim light shining from the window of the room where Catriona waited, Victoria cried again and, heedless of the shock to her neighbours’ sensibilities, ran until she was safe in her mother’s arms.

  Catriona rocked her and wisely asked nothing until Victoria was quiet.

  ‘He’s dead, Mother. I saw him in the wood, but he wasn’t there. He was himself again, the way I want to remember him. Oh, his poor parents, his father.’

  Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,

  Drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows . . .

  Sandy Fotheringham, Lord Inchmarnock, held the slim little book that the other young soldier had given him at the hospital and he read the words from the last poem his son ever heard. The poet, Siegfried Sassoon, had himself read it to Robert. Now his father read it over the boy’s open grave. The weather underscored his grief. It was a cold and raw day. The great trees in the churchyard held their bare arms up in supplication as he intoned his prayer. He had wept. Dear God, how he had wept. Not at first; not for some time after the remains of what had been the person he loved more than anything, or anyone, in the whole world had been tidied up and taken away. Only then had he raged like a wounded lion through the beautiful rooms of the house they had both loved, and which he never wanted to see again. Memories of Robert were everywhere in the great house, but too often the picture of what had been left of his son superimposed itself on the father’s precious pictures: Robert in his baby clothes smiling up at his father; Robert, a plump toddler in his embroidered nightshirt running, squealing, up and down the corridors, evading capture and the inevitable bedtime, Robert, Robert, Robert . . .

  Did anyone guess Sandy’s agony as they saw his erect and proud bearing, his aristocratic head bent over the little book of poems as, in his well-modulated voice, he read the words of the soldier-poet who, better than anyone, exposed the futility of war.

  . . . Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win

  Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives . . .

  Oh, sweet Lord, what was the flaming climax to my boy’s life?

  Julia Fotheringham too had read the sombre words. She would not talk of Sassoon when she returned to London’s drawing rooms: he was for ever bound up with the horror that was Robert’s final action.

  Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin

  They think of firelit homes . . .

  An elegant, even beautiful figure in her black highnecked gown, she sat in her firelit home, winding the jet mourning beads round and round in her beringed fingers.

  He’s dead. My baby, my child, my son. So beautiful, so loving and kind, and he’s dead. Dear God, what did I say to make him do this terrible thing? It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my fault. Oh, please, dear God in heaven, don’t let it have been my fault. I couldn’t bear that, and I have had so much to bear.

  She crushed the letter yet again between trembling fingers, the letter that started Dear Pa, as if his last thoughts were only for Sandy: Robert didn’t even want her to know what he was thinking. He had shut her out at the end. Why? Dear God in heaven, why? Didn’t he understand that I couldn’t bear for him to be unhappy, not like me . . . He didn’t know how empty our marriage has become. He was the priceless pearl, the only common unit that we loved, the precious chain that held us together – our son, our joy.

  I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

  And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

  The letter she had received from the boy-soldier slipped from Victoria’s trembling fingers. She sat on her bed, looking out at the garden but seeing, through eyes swimming with tears, other trees.

  What a waste! She wished from somewhere she could find stronger words, words that would express what Robert’s loss – his terrible, dreadful way of ending his life – really meant. He had been so beautiful and so good. If he had grown up, he would have become a truly fine man, a good man. And his was not the only tragedy. In homes all over Europe girls were sitting on beds weeping for lost loves; mothers and fathers were asking: Why? For what has our child paid the ultimate sacrifice? Although Robert Fotheringham had taken his own life, he was as much a war casualty as any boy lost in battle. Would he have been a poet, a painter. . .? In spite of her numbing grief, Victoria laughed, a painful, croaking laugh. No, not a painter. He could paint no better than she. A teacher, perhaps. A man of vision. How many men of vision had died, together with the dreams they had not begun to realize? How many pieces of soul-soothing music would never be written? How many cures for diseases of the mind and body had died unborn, with their discoverers, in the Flanders mud? Why did they die? For Truth, Freedom, Justice, Right?

  Oh, dear God, wept Victoria and she hugged herself for comfort against the almost unbearable pain. Don’t let those words become trite platitudes. Let there be an end to war. Is there no great writer out there somewhere, no great statesman who can make the oppressors realize that their way is wrong, that every man has rights, that every man has a place in the great scheme of things? When will there be peace, so that we can mourn for the unachieved flowering of a generation’s genius?

  Victoria bowed her head again over Robert’s last letter and sobbed. Could she have said something to change his mind from its dreadful course? Should she have visited him more often? Had he felt her first, involuntary withdrawal at the sight of his ravaged face? Oh, Robert, Robert, it did not matter, and I soon learned not to mind it. Did you hear me talk so cruelly to your mother? Did you misunderstand what I said? I did not say that I would not, could not marry you. I said I could not be bought.

  She got up suddenly from the bed and went over to her bookcase. Mansfield Park still stood in its accustomed place and it immediately yielded up its secret: the petals of a flower so silver and fragile with age that she was afraid to touch them, for fear that they would disintegrate at the slightest touch. She bent her head and tried to breathe in their fragrance, but she smelled only a book that had lain too long unread on its shelf.

  ‘I will keep them all my life, Robert, and I will remember you as you were. If I failed you, I am sorry. Rest in peace. Rest in peace.’

  . . . Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

  And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

  Bank holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

  And going to the office in the train.

  Lord Inchmarnock finished and stood, with head bowed, as he prayed for his son and for all the other sons. And then his silent prayer was joined by that most poignant of sounds – the lone pipes. Where in the world, thought Sandy, had that eerie, mournful pibroch not sounded? The lament faded away and Sandy stooped and gathered a handful of good Fife soil. With his other hand he reached into his pocket and took out the walnut shell that Victoria had sent him by Flora.

  ‘I’ll try to remember only the walnut shell days, Robert, my heart,’ he said as he threw, together into the open grave, the walnut
shell and the handful of Inchmarnock soil.

  He started to rub his hands together to wipe the clinging bits of dirt from them. Then he looked into the grave and saw the wooden box, and he stuffed his hands with their light traces of soil into his pockets. Would that I never had to wash them again, he thought. Would that I could keep this final, tentative connection with the boy-soldier who was the last in a proud line. He raised his head. He was almost alone. The many mourners were moving away towards their carriages and motor cars and, he was happy to note, their farm carts – his tenants, obviously.

  ‘They’re all to come to the house, Simon,’ he said to his grieve, who was standing respectfully a little way off. He watched the man hurry after the tenants and sighed. Thank God that is over, he thought. I lived for Robert. Perhaps Julia did too. Where will we find the strength to go on? Well, we’ll start with the mourners. One duty after another. Perhaps that’s all life is, a series of duties.

  11

  AS WINTER APPROACHED, CATRIONA PUT her mind to the household tasks. If her mind was busy with the house and its welfare, there was less time to think of herself and her problems. She worked so hard every day that when she finally fell on to her bed at night, she slept like one dead, one who no longer had to think. In this way life became bearable. Victoria and Dr Currie watched her cope and each, in her own way, tried to help. If she would only speak about it. But since that night when, in her own mind, she had given way to weakness and had cried in her daughter’s arms, she had shut herself away and brooked no argument.

  ‘You can help me best by allowing me to go on with life as best I can,’ she said.

  Davie Menmuir was always there to help, too. He rarely spoke, but for some reason Catriona tolerated his presence and seemed to draw some comfort from his being there.