‘Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say it right there.’
‘If that’s what you want.’ The girl returned the frosty glare. ‘Do you know where my mother is?’
‘She’s walked out on you, has she? That doesn’t surprise me – she always took her own way without a thought to anybody else. I’ve no idea where she is, and what’s more, I don’t care.’
The girl’s hopes had plunged as soon as she saw the unpleasant face, but, thinking that Harry Bain couldn’t be as bad as his wife – nobody could – she made one last attempt. ‘Is your husband at home, please?’
‘My husband died two years ago.’ The steely eyes narrowed in self-pity. ‘I’ve had to do everything for myself ever since, and me so ill some days, I was hardly able to lift a finger.’
‘I’m sure it didn’t do you any harm.’ Laura couldn’t resist the jibe, and when the door slammed in her face, she stuck out her tongue. ‘Twisted old bitch!’
Too early for her bus, she sat for a good half hour in the Union Terrace Gardens, seething with anger at the reception she had received, and despondent because she was no nearer tracing her mother. But she still had to contact the solicitor in Auchlonie. He must know some-thing – he was her only hope.
Chapter Thirty-two
Before she received Fridjof’s letter, Laura had fluctuated between imagining that something terrible had happened to him, and doubting if he had actually proposed at all.
‘Maybe he’s got a wife and kids in Norway,’ she had said to Betty Fry one day when she was feeling particularly low.
Betty, who had been thinking along the same lines, had nevertheless hastened to console her. ‘I’m sure he’d have told you if he had. Have patience.’
Laura tore open the envelope anxiously when it came. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, in great relief. ‘He’s still speaking about marriage, though he didn’t write himself. But this puts my mind at ease, because his captain would know if there was any reason why Fridjof and I shouldn’t be married.’
‘If any person present knows of any just cause,’ Betty intoned, ‘let him speak now or forever hold his ...’
‘When’s the wedding to be, Laura?’ Louise interrupted.
‘His ship’s coming to Aberdeen for a few days in January, and we can fix it up, then. Oh, God, that’s months yet.’
Betty looked sympathetic. ‘It’ll soon pass.’
Laura was looking longingly at the signature, the only thing her lover had written – a large scrawled ‘Fridjof’. Oh my darling, I love you, she thought, or as he himself would say it, Min kjaereste, jeg elsker. ‘This bloody war!’ she burst out, suddenly. ‘Keeping people apart like this.’
‘If it hadn’t been for the bloody war, you wouldn’t have met him in the first place,’ Betty reminded her, ‘but it’s bound to be over soon. I’d say the Germans are coming to the end of their tether.’
Cheering a little, Laura said, ‘Maybe it’ll be finished by the time we’re married.’
‘It’s going to be funny being back in civvy street,’ Betty remarked. ‘I’ll be five years older than I was when I joined up, and it won’t be the same. No excitement, no nothing except trying to find a decent job, or preferably a decent husband, to keep me in the luxury to which I have never been accustomed ... ho, ho! But you won’t have to worry about that, Laura, you lucky thing.’
‘Neither will I,’ remarked Louise. ‘Ernie proposed last night, and I accepted.’
‘Lep Wilson! Why didn’t you tell us when you came back?’ Betty couldn’t understand how any girl could have kept such exciting information to herself until the next morning.
‘I wanted to get used to the idea first.’ Louise smiled shyly. ‘Could we arrange a double wedding, Laura? That’s why I wanted to know if your Norwegian had set the date.’
‘What?’ Betty pretended to be horrified. ‘And do me out of a second chance to shine as bridesmaid?’
‘I’d quite like a double wedding, Lep,’ Laura said, ‘but I don’t know when or where ours will be. When depends on us both being available at the same time, and where depends on where Fridjof’s boat happens to dock.’
‘Oh, well, I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.’ Louise seemed rather disappointed.
Laura, who had been looking forward to penning her first love letter, felt depressed at being denied that pleasure, and it would be a long time before she saw Fridjof again. Could she survive months of worrying about him? And she still had to find her mother – that was a big enough worry in itself.
As soon as she was given the date of her forty-eight-hour pass, Laura wrote to David. ‘I’m off Saturday and Sunday, but I’ll go to Auchlonie before I come home, to save time. If I find out anything from the solicitor, I’ll go to wherever Mum is, but I’ll definitely be home that night, whatever happens, though it might be fairly late – or fairly early, if I’ve no luck. So keep your fingers crossed that Mum’ll be with me.’
On the Friday, she asked several RAF drivers if they were going anywhere near Auchlonie the following morning, but the nearest she could get was a lift from one who had to collect a senior officer from Keith railway station. It wasn’t ideal, but at least she could get a train there to take her the rest of the way, otherwise she would have to travel to Aberdeen and back, which would take much longer.
When she arrived in Auchlonie on Saturday, she approached the stationmaster first. ‘Excuse me, I’m trying to find a solicitor here, but I don’t know his name.’
The man looked surprised, but answered readily. ‘It’s Mr Reid you’ll be wanting. Turn left when you go out, carry on to the High Street and turn right. He’s a few doors along.’
‘Thank you very much.’
Walking purposefully to the exit, Laura’s mind was in a whirl. Was it left then right, or the other way round? No, it was the first way – left, right, like marching. She found the office with no difficulty, and asked the young girl at the desk if she could see Mr Reid.
‘Have you an appointment, Miss ...?’
‘Fullerton,’ Laura supplied. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t have an appointment, but it’s very important.’ She tried to remain calm – or to give the appearance of being calm – but it was very difficult.
‘I’ll find out if he can see you.’ The girl disappeared through a door marked ‘Private’ and came back in a few seconds. ‘Go straight in, Miss Fullerton.’
‘Thank you.’ Laura’s legs were shaking as she walked into the solicitor’s private office, but she was immediately struck by the drabness of the room. Everything in it was some shade of brown, except the filing cabinet which was dark grey. The walls were wood-panelled halfway up and had been painted a fawny colour above that, but time and smoke had left their mark; the linoleum was brown, with several bare patches from the traffic of many feet; the huge desk was made of oak; the chairs were upholstered in dark brown leather. The only relief was provided by Mr Reid himself, a stout little figure with a bush of pure white hair. Above rosy cheeks, his bright blue eyes gave the same welcome as his smile. ‘You wish to consult me, Miss Fullerton?’
‘Yes ... no ... well ... not exactly consult,’ Laura stammered, not sure of what to say now that she was face to face with him at last. He was regarding her with some curiosity, so she tried to explain. ‘You see ...’
‘Are you Elspeth Gray’s daughter?’ he asked suddenly, and when she nodded in astonishment, he added, ‘You’re very like her. The spit and image of her when she was younger.’
‘It was my mother I wanted to ask about. Did she, by any chance, come to see you about three years ago?’
‘She did, and it was your name being Fullerton that first put me on to you, then the resemblance ... but that’s not what you wanted to know. She came to ask about the money that had been held in trust for her since her mother died.’
‘So I was led to believe. Was there enough to ...?’
‘There was over two thousand pounds, but she just took one hundred with her.’
At a normal time, Laura would have been more impressed by the total amount, but she was intent on her quest. ‘Do you know where she was going when she left here?’
‘I didn’t know at the time, but I received a letter from her a few weeks later asking me to transfer the balance to a bank in Edinburgh.’
‘Have you still got that letter, please? I need to know her address – it’s a matter of ... life and death.’
The old man heaved himself up and walked round his desk, cluttered with overflowing wire trays, and crossed to the tall metal filing cabinet. Sliding out the second drawer, he fingered through it then extracted one folder and leafed over the papers inside. In a minute, he looked up in triumph. ‘Yes, here it is. I’m afraid it’s the address of the shop she was in the process of buying at the time, at twenty-nine Leston Road, but no doubt that will suffice.’
Laura’s brain could scarcely digest this latest piece of information. The money must have gone to her mother’s head. What could have possessed her to buy a shop, and what kind of shop could she possibly run?
Mr Reid handed her the letter. ‘There’s a pad and pencil beside the phone there, if you want to make a note of it.’
‘Yes ... thank you.’ Hastily scribbling down the address, she tore off the sheet of paper and placed it in her pocket. ‘Can you tell me when I’ll get a train to Aberdeen?’ Her spirits were so high that, if she’d had wings, she would have flown all the way to Edinburgh.
Miraculously producing a dog-eared timetable from the confusion of other items on his desk, the solicitor pored over it for a moment, then grunted and glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘You’d come on the ten eight, and there’s not another one until after two, but I know there’s a bus at five past eleven, and you’ll catch that easily. The stop’s along the High Street, to the right as you go out.’
Laura jumped to her feet. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Reid.’
He smiled indulgently. ‘I hope you find your mother.’
‘So do I.’
As she walked along the uneven pavement, Laura’s thoughts jumped ahead to Edinburgh, where she had gone through such a harrowing experience and had imagined her life to be finished. What a coincidence that she was returning to it, full of hope, to find her mother. Coming to a side road, she looked up idly at the signpost. ‘BLAIRTON 2, MOSSMOUNT 5’, it said. Blairton? That name rang a bell ... yes, of course. It was the name of the farm her mother had said belonged to her lover’s parents.
Laura had almost forgotten that this was the village in which her mother had grown up, and took more interest in it now. The street had a charming higgledy-piggledy appeal to it, a mixture of low cottages and larger houses, some having gardens and some where the pavement went right up to the windows, which were discreetly screened by snow-white lace.
She looked inside as she passed a grocer’s shop, and saw an elderly man, the proprietor presumably, in shirt sleeves and a long white apron, cheerfully serving his customers. Farther along, an empty shop had a placard in the window, ‘CLEARANCE SALE. OWNER RETIRING.’ Wondering idly what kind of business had been carried on there, she glanced up at the sign above the door. ‘G. Fraser. Dressmaker.’ So this was where her mother had once worked. How long had it been closed? Seeing a yellowing card lying on the inside window sill, Laura twisted her head to read it. ‘Final Day of Sale Saturday 2 1st’. Very informative, she thought, in some amusement. Twenty-first of which month? Which year?
When she reached the bus stop, she consulted her watch, found that she had ten minutes to wait and a little jingle came into her head. ‘Ten minutes to wait, so mine’s a Minor’, the slogan used on the posters advertising De Reske Minors, which showed a healthy, smiling girl holding a cigarette with the smoke spiralling up. Well, smoking was one vice she didn’t have. She did enjoy a little drink occasionally, but never more than that.
It wouldn’t bother her if all the pubs and hotels were to close their doors tomorrow. Ah, but wait! Hotels were used for other purposes besides drinking. She had hit on her one vice – sex. She could easily become addicted to sex – quite easily. Oh, Fridjof, min kjaereste.
‘It’s a fine day now.’
Not having realized that anyone was near, she looked up in surprise at two young mothers who were passing with their prams. ‘Yes, it is,’ she replied, noticing for the first time that the clouds had disappeared and that the sun was shining. Taking a glance inside the prams, she wondered what her babies would look like when they made their appearance. With her auburn colouring and Fridjof’s blondeness, they certainly wouldn’t be dark, but blonde or auburn, she wouldn’t give a damn as long as they were healthy.
‘The bus shouldna be long.’ A man was standing beside her.
‘Good.’ Laura hoped that she wouldn’t have to wait long for a train when she reached Aberdeen. All this waiting about was putting years on her.
After hurrying all the way from the bus terminus to the Joint Station, she asked a porter when the next London train would be leaving, and had to sprint to catch it, the guard holding a door open for her.
‘That was close.’ The soldier who had risen to help her in made sure that the carriage door was closed properly before he sat down himself.
‘I’ll say,’ she puffed. ‘Too close for comfort.’
She sank back and took a few deep breaths, then shut her eyes. Was this to be the last lap of her search, or would it bring disillusionment and despair? No, no. If her mother had bought a shop, she must have intended to stay in Edinburgh for some time, so she was bound to be there still.
Laura’s body grew stiff with sitting in the same position pretending to be asleep so that no one would talk to her, and her one-track brain was repeating over and over to the train’s rhythm, ‘twenty-nine-Leston-Road, twenty-nine-Leston-Road, twenty-nine-Leston Road’. The journey seemed never-ending.
When, at long last, she reached her destination, she went to the newspaper stall to ask how to get to Leston Road and as she walked along Princes Street, she remembered once thinking that the towering Castle to her left, on a pedestal of volcanic rock, made a magnificent backdrop to the lovely gardens running alongside the railway line at a lower level than the street, in the same mould as the Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen, but much larger and more impressive. Passing the Scott Monument, she recalled climbing all two hundred and eighty-seven steps to the top with some other WAAFs, and how tired they had been when they reached the ground again. But finding her mother, her reason for being here now, was far more important than the Castle, the Gardens, the Scott Monument and even the large shops to her right, which she had browsed through when she was stationed at Turnhouse.
At the end of the famous street she turned left, coming eventually to Leston Road and finding that number twenty-nine wasn’t far up, but her hopes faded when she saw the closed shutters. A sign above the window, ‘E. Fullerton, Dressmaker’, showed that it was definitely her mother’s. Of course, what else would it be but a dressmaker’s shop? A card on the door announced, ‘Hours 9 to 6. Saturdays 9 to 1’, and although she knew that it was long past one, Laura looked at her watch – five to four. Her frustration almost made her weep – to be so close, yet no nearer her goal. She would have to make the journey again another day. Turning to walk back down the hill, she kicked viciously at a small stone, her eyes following it until it ricocheted against a wall.
Noticing a chip shop, she was assailed by a sudden pang of hunger and made to go in, but this door was also locked. She had taken a few more steps before it struck her that the owner, or one of the assistants, might know where her mother lived. She turned back to see if the opening hours were displayed, and her heart lifted when she saw the scribbled chalking on the window, ‘Frying tonight – 4.30 to 11’. Only just over half an hour to go, less probably, because the fish and chips would have to be cooked before they opened for business. It had been like a slap in the face when she found her mother’s shop closed, and she hadn’t been able to think, but somebody here would be able to
tell her what she was so desperate to know.
All the travelling she had done, and the see-sawing her spirits had suffered, caught up on Laura then, and she leaned wearily against the door to wait. There was no one in sight except two small girls sitting on a doorstep on the opposite pavement swapping paper scraps, and a scruffy mongrel sniffing in the gutter. After a moment, the dog went over to the girls, obviously hoping for a tidbit, but given nothing he moved to a drainpipe and lifted his leg. The children sniggered and Laura gave a little smile as she shifted her feet to ease them.
At that moment, a very fat old lady waddled out of a door farther up, so Laura hurried to meet her. ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where Mrs Fullerton, the dressmaker, lives? I have to find her and her shop’s shut.’
The woman studied her doubtfully, then, probably deciding that Laura was not a German spy in disguise, she said, ‘Just a few doors up. I’m no’ sure of the number, I think it’s maybe fifty-nine, but it’s the only one with a green door.’
‘Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.’
Walking quickly towards number fifty-nine, or the green door whichever number it was, Laura passed more shops, all open. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Still, it didn’t matter now. Here was the green door – it was number fifty-nine – but her mother’s name did not appear on any of the nameplates. By good luck, as she stood wondering what to do, the door opened and a young woman came out holding a small boy by the hand. ‘Excuse me,’ Laura said hopefully, ‘does a Mrs Fullerton live here?’
‘Second floor, right.’
Her blood coursing wildly through her veins, her weariness evaporating like a puff of smoke, Laura raced up the stairs, praying that her mother would be at home.
Chapter Thirty-three
When Meg went out, Elspeth cleared up the dinner things then settled down in her armchair, glad of some peace and quiet. She’d had a very busy morning – her feet were hot, her head ached, her body felt as if it didn’t belong to her. She sympathized with her customers that they couldn’t buy new clothes with coupons so limited, but some of them expected miracles of her. It was impossible to let a bust thirty-six out to fit a forty, even a thirty-eight, or to add four inches round the hips, no matter how she tried.
Time Shall Reap Page 34