by A. D. Scott
“Who said what?” Rob asked.
Don could see Rob’s hands clench into fists and took over. “Take her home,” he told Rob and Hector.
Rob stepped forwards. Don grabbed his sleeve. “Home. Now.”
When he saw Rob and Hec walk off, Morag between them, he looked over at the bunch of supporters milling around the edge of the stadium. Then he was in among them, his anger propelling him across the pitch with surprising speed.
“Which fine laddie has upset a wee girl that’s just lost her mother?” he yelled out in Gaelic to a group of Lochaber supporters.
“Which brave man, or wifie, has made Nurse Urquhart’s lass cry?” This time in English to the town supporters. “Can you no see this family has had enough?” to both groups.
He stood his ground, arms out from his sides, a small, round, tight-as-a-bow-ready-to-shoot old Highlander, glaring, shouting, “Which one o’ you upset the lassie? Which one?”
No answer. Only a shuffling, a murmuring, most looking away or gathering their coats tight around them, ready to leave.
“I’m no’ having it. If you’ve anything to say, say it at me.” Don was poking his chest with his forefinger, hurting himself.
There were mutters. Some in the back started to walk away. Some of the women, more than the usual one or two, who had come today to support Nurse Urquhart’s team, looked at Don McLeod, nodding thanks as they passed. Within a few minutes there were hardly any spectators left on the field and the Lochaber team had retreated to their bus.
When Don looked back, Hector and Rob had disappeared with Morag. Probably taken her back to Granny Bain’s.
He buttoned up his coat, pulled his cap low. Might as well join them. He trudged over to the far-northeast corner of the field, walked through the prewar housing scheme in the shadow of Tomnahurich Cemetery, and went around the back of the house, knowing front doors were only for policemen, ministers, bad news, and strangers.
The back door was open onto a wee porch. He knocked.
Hector’s sister Marie answered. “We’re in the front room, Mr. McLeod,” she said. “Can I take your coat and fetch you some tea?” She showed him into the sitting room.
“Thank you.” As he came into the room, a fire blazing even though it wasn’t that cold, he nodded at Morag and said to Granny Bain, sitting on the couch with her, “A fine-mannered lass you have there, Maraidh.”
The old woman didn’t look up. “Sit yerself down, Donal.”
Rob was gone. Hector was there but excused himself saying he had film to develop. Eleven-year-old Maraidh served the tea. After Granny Bain had added a drop of whisky to their cups and after she suggested Morag go with Maraidh up to the bedroom for “a wee lie-down,” she and Don talked. In Gaelic.
In English or in Gaelic, the sentiment was the same. “What is the world coming to?” Granny Bain sighed. “Some troublemaker in the crowd was saying Frankie Urquhart put Alan Fordyce in the hospital to get back at him for killing his mother. But that can’t be.”
Don told her it was a possibility. He told her about the acid bottle, everyone on the Gazette being questioned by the police. He said fingerprints were found on broken bits of glass, and that one of them belonged to the father of the chapel.
“Thon too-big-for-his-boots wee manny?” she said. “His wife is more likely to have a go at someone . . . but acid? I can’t see her throwing acid—even though she’s a right meddlesome piece o’ work.”
They chased and teased the story round and around until Maraidh came down and said Morag was sleeping.
“Run round to Mr. Urquhart’s, tell him his Morag is here . . . and ask him if he wants his supper wi’ us.” She rose from her chair. Don could see it took her an effort. Her back, is it?
“You’ll be staying for supper,” she said. It was a statement, not a question, and he was glad of it. It had been a long time since he’d eaten a home-cooked meal.
“Here, make yourself useful.” She handed him a pencil and the forms. “Check my footba’ pools.” She switched on the wireless in time for the six-o’clock news and left to cook or brew potions or charm a frog.
Neither Frank nor Frankie Urquhart accepted the invitation to supper; in spite of the temptation of a home-cooked meal, company was not what they wanted.
Don stayed until late, reminiscing with his old friend until he saw her eyes closing and the trace of a smile linger at the corners of her mouth, even in sleep. It was an intimate picture, a reminder that she was his first love, his possible wife—until WWI, an almost fatal injury, and the appearance of Joyce Mackenzie, his late wife, intervened.
Morag Urquhart slept the night in the Bain household, sharing the bed with Maraidh. She stayed with them all day Sunday. There was nothing at home for her, only a father and a brother who, in their grief, were as lost to her as her mother.
ELEVEN
When another anonymous letter arrived at the Gazette, Fiona knew immediately what it was. She shivered when she picked it out of the other correspondence with her thumb and forefinger, laid it aside, and called upstairs to the reporters’ room. As usual, Joanne answered.
“You’d better give it to McAllister,” she told Fiona.
“It’s addressed to you.”
Joanne was down the stairs in a lightning strike. She looked at Fiona. She looked at the letter. She too shivered. This one was from no copycat. “Do you know where McAllister is?” she asked.
“I think he went out for cigarettes.”
Joanne waited. She couldn’t touch the letter.
“Mrs. Ross . . .” Fiona hesitated, “do you know Morag Urquhart?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “We were in the same shorthand and typing class at school; she’s worried about her brother . . .”
McAllister came in, removed his hat. “Ladies.” He smiled. Joanne didn’t notice. Fiona did.
“McAllister”—Joanne pointed to the letter—“another one.”
He picked up the envelope, told Fiona to call DI Dunne, took Joanne’s arm, and steered her up the stairs to his office. He felt her tremble before he saw her face. “Don’t worry,” he started.
“What a useless piece of advice! Don’t worry. When anyone says that, you know to worry.” She slumped onto her chair. “Sorry. It’s just the thought of acid . . . poor Nurse Urquhart. Sorry.” She was staring at the envelope with her name on it, sitting on the table like unexploded ordinance.
“We should wait for the inspector before opening it.” McAllister was trying to shield her.
“Open it.”
He did. He read it twice. Then read it aloud.
I SAW YOU WITH THE AMERICAN WOMAN
KEEP AWAY FROM HER OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.
“That makes it clear the anonymous letter writer is the person who attacked Nurse Urquhart,” Joanne said.
There was a knock on the open door. DI Dunne stood, hands clasped as though he was about to deliver a eulogy.
“There’s no evidence to link the writer to the attack on Nurse Urquhart.” He had overheard Joanne’s remark.
“And nothing to connect Nurse Urquhart with Mrs. Mae Bell?” Joanne asked, as she had been desperately trying to find a link other than the letters.
“Not that we can find.”
McAllister stood. “Inspector, have a seat.” He pushed the letter across the desk.
“You opened it.”
The reprimand was slight, but Joanne rushed in. “It was addressed to me, I asked McAllister . . . sorry.” Once again a shudder made her shoulders clench. Acid. It burned a woman’s throat beyond repair. “Sorry.”
“My fault.” McAllister was watching her, longing to reach over and take her hand. He didn’t. He smiled instead. She looked away. Wrong move, he told himself.
The inspector finished reading the letter. He put it back in the envelope. Told them not to open any further communications from the writer. Stood. Looked at Joanne, said, “We will investigate this—and please, don’t worry,” and then left.
�
�If one more person tells me not to worry, I’ll scream.”
“As the letter mentions her, I think you should tell Mae Bell. Invite her to the house if you want,” McAllister said.
She noticed he didn’t say my house. She would have liked him to say our house. She knew she was being silly, especially as she was far from certain what she really wanted. She did not see that all he wanted was to gather her and her children up, and hide them, protect them, in his house, in their house.
“I’ll leave a note at her hotel.” Joanne stood. “Thanks, McAllister.” She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. When he came towards her, she put a hand on his arm in an I’ll-be-fine gesture. “Don’t worry,” she said, and they both smiled. “We’ll talk later.” She sighed knowing she must get back to the reporters’ desk, to the fascinating task of collating the monthly Women’s Institute reports.
• • •
Once more Joanne and Mae Bell were sitting in the window of Gino’s café and ice cream shop overlooking the river.
As soon as they were seated, Joanne rose again. “Sorry,” she said to the waitress, this time an elderly woman who was slow but, Chiara told her, a relative of some distant cousin who had begged her father for a job. “We’ll take a table at the back.”
Mae Bell raised an eyebrow, but followed. “You sound serious,” she said when they had resettled themselves and ordered.
“I had an anonymous letter warning me to keep away from you.”
“It’s not the first time that threat has been made.” Mae laughed. “The last time it was someone’s father.”
“This is serious, Mae. What if the writer is the same person who threw the acid at Nurse Urquhart?”
“I know it’s serious—but never let bullies know they upset you.” She winked. She knew, much more than Joanne would ever realize, how serious this was. Her life with Robert was one long escape from prejudice. Even though they met when they were part of a big band entertaining the troops in postwar Germany, there was nowhere in her own country that she could avoid the disdain, the stares, the outright hostility that her love of Robert brought.
Except in Paris, she was thinking. Even there, they were accepted only in a particularly small milieu of left-wing thinkers and jazz lovers on the Left Bank. Never in the countryside—she remembered a trip to a small town on the Riviera. The hotel refused us a room together even after we showed them our marriage certificate.
She had given up family, friends, reputation for love.
Mae Bell didn’t want to remember past troubles. And most of all she did not want anyone to discover why she was here in the Highlands. Being with Joanne and McAllister she could find out much. But she hadn’t allowed for a real affection to develop with these once strangers, now friends.
She veered the conversation slightly off target. “I heard one of your printers attacked the nurse.”
“Who told you that?” Joanne sat back, her neck stretched in righteous indignation.
“It’s all the talk amongst the staff at the hotel.”
“Oh, Mae, I’ve no idea what’s going on, but an acid attack, that vicious . . .”
“Cowardly . . .”
“Horrible . . .”
“But we must never live in fear.” Mae lit a cigarette, blew out a long stream of smoke, and said so softly that Joanne had to lean forwards to catch her words, “If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you must never give way to fear or they win.” She didn’t explain exactly who “they” were. But Joanne took her meaning.
Around them the café was quiet except for a crashing of cutlery and dishes and Gino shouting in Italian what Joanne took to be “careful,” or maybe stronger. The St. Valerie Avenue double-decker bus stopped outside, and the top-deck passengers peered down into the café. Joanne was nervous for herself, and for Mae, hoping the steamed-up windows would hide them.
“Don’t go anywhere on your own at night, will you?” she asked Mae.
“Here? In this town? Is there anywhere to go at night? Do tell!” The way she said it, her hands and her eyebrows acting out her remarks, made Joanne laugh.
“Honey, I’m all grown up, I can take care of myself. And changing the subject, have you gotten rid of your rat of a husband yet? Are you and McAllister now ready for a bit of loving—real loving? Do you have anyone else dangling around? Tell me all—I love a steamy story.”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
Joanne’s laughter made Mae smile and say, “Steamy stories, no, but I will tell you about my true love.”
It only took about twenty minutes. Joanne had never heard anyone talk so truthfully, so tenderly about love and loss and the deep, raw pain of grief. Later she would remember not the words but the sensation of being touched, a sensation almost physical, as Mae Bell recounted the day she met Robert Bell, the day she received the telegram, the days and weeks of waiting for confirmation, each hour the hope draining away, and the day Mae knew, a sensation like ice water running down the spine, she said, that Robert, her love, was never coming back.
“We first met in Germany. Nineteen forty-seven. His brother was a good friend of mine; he played piano in a big band. I was the singer—we were entertaining the troops. Robert and I caught up again in Paris two years later.”
“That was when McAllister heard you sing.”
“Must have been. I was with that band for five years. Robert played saxophone and sat in with us a few times, but flying was his love. Until he met me, he always said, it was his way to touch the sky, he said, same as you reach heaven when you sing. And love, I told him. You touch heaven when you love,” Mae Bell said.
Joanne felt a stab of envy. She once, maybe twice, thought she was in love. But she had mistaken destructive attraction for real deep-down unconditional love—of the lasting kind. Now she was not sure she knew what real love was.
“He never had enough schooling to be a pilot,” she continued, “but he was clever, good at math and at reading maps, and had this amazing homing instinct. Towards the end of the war, his captain recommended him to stay on and retrain. His lucky charm, he called Robert. So Bobby signed up and went from rear gunner to navigator.”
“Bobby?”
“Everyone called him Bobby except me.”
“Bobby Bell.” Joanne said it slowly, making Mae smile.
“He called me Mae Bell, always. He told me how proud he was that I was his wife, so it was always Mae Bell, never plain Mae.” Again that laugh, the sound a song of a laugh, a song that made Joanne glad.
“We had a joke between us.” The way Mae Bell said it, Joanne knew it was no joke. “He said if he was ever in trouble, he would send out a Maeday. You know, Mayday, the distress call?”
Joanne nodded.
“Only he said it would be M-A-E day, Maeday, because if anyone could rescue him, it was me. In the end, of course . . .”
That he had left a message with a waiter at the club two days before the fatal flight, she never told anyone, not even his brother. That one call, barely understood by the Frenchman, but written down at Robert’s insistence on a scrap of paper . . . and even after Robert spelled it out, it didn’t make sense to anyone except to Mae. The written message read: Maeday.
Repeating Robert’s words, the waiter said “Maeday” clearly, plainly, no interpretation necessary. Mae tried to contact Robert. Telephoned every number she could find. She’d spent a small fortune talking to operators in local Scottish exchanges who all said the same thing; they could only connect to the base switchboard number.
Mae spoke to commanders who knew nothing except Robert had been on a training mission. Trying to contact his closest friends, who were on the same exercise, she spent days of tears and frustration. There was nothing, no contact, no news—until an officer from the U.S. embassy tracked her down at the club. The moment she saw his uniform she knew.
Now she had the unposted letters. Two of them. Found in that box of his effects, kept by the police and forgotten about, with very litt
le there except a lighter, a notebook, a music score for Porgy and Bess, and a dictionary—she smiled when she held it, remembering his aim to learn five new words a day.
“So that’s why I’m here, why I visited Elgin and Kinloss and Findhorn. I wanted to meet some of the local guys he worked with, to talk, to remember him, maybe find some kinda . . . when someone goes missing, no wreckage found, no funeral, you keep hoping . . .” She sighed, smiled, chuckled. “We sure did have a huge wake in that club in Paris though. Robert’s brother Charlie composed a piece for him, North Sea Requiem—a hymn to his brother, a hymn of joy as well as pain.” And the smile and the laugh were through eyes that still shed tears, though not as frequently as before, for her lost husband.
“I don’t know that area,” Joanne said, just for something to say.
“Beautiful in a bleak kinda way.” Mae reached for another cigarette. “I’d love to see it in summer.”
“Wouldn’t make much difference.” Joanne smiled, wanting to lighten the conversation. “Scottish winters, Scottish summers, all beautiful—in a bleak kinda way.” They laughed at Joanne’s attempt at an American accent.
“That’s what a lady in the hotel there told me.”
The woman in the hotel had also told Mae Bell of the great times the local lassies had with the American air force men. Great fun they were. And the dancing, we loved that. Mind you, there was many a person who disapproved. But no, we had fun.
Mae Bell did not doubt it for a second. The end of a war, a distant location, the long winter nights, a recipe for fun, she thought.
“So”—she winked at Joanne—“on a more cheerful note, how’s the divorce coming along?”
“Cheerful? Mae Bell!”
“Honey, from what you haven’t told me, this is your liberation.”
Joanne thought of divorce as a defeat. This was the first time she had heard her well-suppressed dreams said out loud. Free. Freedom. Liberation. It was true. Mostly she dwelt on the consequences of being a divorced mother in a small town in the Scottish Highlands. Dwelt on the scandal, the gossip, the consequences for her and her children. But liberation? This was a notion not new, but longed for.