by Maggie Craig
They’d both been appalled by the way the police had treated the girl, as though she were the guilty party rather than the victim. And it had occurred to Liz that she might find herself reporting the assault to the sergeant who’d arrested Mario... the one who thought she was a loose woman.
‘Please, Adam,’ she pleaded. ‘I’d rather do nothing about it.’
He spluttered. ‘Liz, he can’t be allowed to get away with it! Let me at least go and see my Uncle Alasdair. Does Mitchell still work at Murray’s?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘I’m not in touch with anybody there.’
‘I’ll find out tomorrow,’ he said determinedly. ‘In the meantime, d’you still fancy that drink and a spot of supper?’
He reported back to her the next afternoon. Eric Mitchell had left Murray’s exactly one week before, having joined up. According to Lucy Gilchrist, he’d shown his mettle by signing up voluntarily. Alasdair Murray had a different interpretation of events.
Mitchell had been trying unsuccessfully to get his job as a shipping clerk categorized as a reserved occupation. He’d been in dispute with the authorities for some time over it. His time had run out a couple of weeks before.
Lucy Gilchrist knew he’d been due to leave Glasgow on the overnight train to London the day before. His contretemps with Liz and Adam had taken place in the early evening. He’d probably caught that train.
‘We could try to find out from his wife where he is,’ said Adam, frowning at Liz. ‘Otherwise, it’s a case of tracing him through the Army, and that could take time. And if you’re reluctant to press charges...’
‘I’m a lot happier knowing he’s away from Glasgow,’ said Liz, thinking about it. ‘Let it go. For the duration, at least. Maybe we can do something about it after that.’
Adam gave her a look. ‘Why do I get the feeling that you’re trying to pacify me, MacMillan?’
Reaction set in the next day. The catalyst was tripping over the threshold of one of the ward kitchens and dropping a tray full of dirty cups and saucers. Cordelia, standing at the draining board drying dishes which another student nurse was washing, turned with a smile.
‘Would you like a hammer, Liz?’ She crouched down to assess the damage, plucking the cups and saucers which had survived out of the mess of broken crockery.
‘Hey,’ she said, glancing up and seeing Liz’s stricken face. ‘Come on, now. It was an accident. Even the old battleaxe will understand that.’
‘To whom might you be referring, Maclntyre?’
Cordelia glanced up guiltily as Sister MacLean swept into the kitchen. Then her expression changed. ‘I don’t think MacMillan’s very well, Sister.’
Sister MacLean took one look, pulled Liz over to a chair and fired out an instruction to the anxiously hovering probationer.
‘Is Dr Buchanan in the hospital?’
‘I think so, Sister.’
‘Well, go and fetch him. Now!’
He came striding into the room, the pupil nurse having to run to keep up with him.
‘Liz?’ he asked gently, crouching down in front of her. ‘Liz, sweetie, what’s the matter?’
His voice penetrated her distress. She lifted her head, clutching the sleeves of his white coat. ‘Oh, Adam! It’s all just hit me.’
‘What’s just hit her?’ demanded Sister MacLean. Cordelia explained.
‘Delayed shock then,’ said Sister briskly. ‘Some form of sedation, Doctor?’
‘No,’ said Adam decisively. ‘She needs her bed.’
He rose to his feet, scooped Liz up in his arms and headed for the door, turning pointedly when he got there and waiting for one of them to open it for him.
‘You’re not taking her there yourself!’
His lips twitched. ‘I know there hasn’t been a man in the nurses’ home since Florence Nightingale was a girl, but this is an emergency, Sister.’
‘And anyway,’ put in the student nurse, doing her best to be helpful, ‘it’s not really a man - it’s only Dr Buchanan.’
Adam lifted his fair brows. ‘I’m not quite sure how to take that. But will somebody please open this bloody door!’
Sister MacLean could do the eyebrow-raising trick too. ‘There’s no need to swear, Dr Buchanan,’ she said primly. She opened the door and walked beside him as he carried Liz along the corridor. He gave her a formal little nod.
‘I apologize for my language, Sister. Now, can we have some of that brandy you keep for emergencies?’
‘By all means,’ said Sister MacLean with dignity, apparently not at all fazed by the fact that he knew about her secret drinks supply. ‘How much?’
‘Well,’ he said, waiting again whilst she opened the door which led into the nurses’ dining room, on the other side of which lay the home. ‘Why don’t we all have a glass?’
‘Certainly, Doctor.’
He was there when she went to sleep and he was there when she opened her eyes again the next morning.
His long length was propped uncomfortably in a chintz-covered armchair which had always seemed a reasonable size but which looked far too small with him sitting in it. He was ruffled and unshaven, but when she opened her eyes and wished him good morning he shot up out of the chair to feel her pulse and lay his hand against her forehead.
‘Hmm,’ he said, after a minute. ‘That all seems normal enough. How are we feeling, sleeping beauty?’
‘Well, I don’t know how you’re feeling,’ she said, half closing one eye and regarding him through the other, ‘but I’m starving. I’m that hungry I could eat a scabby dog.’
He laughed. ‘Och, MacMillan, see you and your way with words? Scrambled eggs on toast?’
Liz shuddered. ‘Yellow liver? No thanks.’ She was one of the many who found the slab-like concoction made from dried egg powder completely unpalatable. ‘You know what I’d really like? A bacon roll.’
‘Then a bacon roll you shall have. Even if I have to go out and wrestle wild pigs the length of Byres Road to get it. Back in two shakes. I’ll get Cordelia to come and sit with you.’
In the event, he didn’t have to go that far. He managed to sweet-talk one of the hospital cooks into parting with two thin slices of precious bacon and putting them into two rolls for him. He carried them back triumphantly to Liz’s room, Cordelia tactfully disappearing when he got there.
Liz told him to eat one of the rolls himself, and they sat chatting quietly over their impromptu breakfast.
‘What about Sister MacLean? Does she want me to report what happened?’
‘Apparently not,’ he said, between mouthfuls of roll. ‘Cordelia told her what you’d said and she can understand your point of view.’ He looked contemplative. ‘She’s not a bad old stick sometimes.’
Liz smiled. ‘I suppose not, though I’ll deny ever having said that.’
‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘You’re still looking a bit pale.’
She obeyed the instruction but then, distracted by the cooing of a pigeon which was sitting on the window ledge outside, turned and looked in the direction of the sound. She studied the bird for a long time. When she eventually spoke, her eyes were still fixed on it.
‘I wonder where Mario is right now,’ she said. Her voice was full of wistfulness.
Adam laid his half-eaten bacon roll back down on the plate, a dull ache in his jaw. The punch which Eric Mitchell had thrown at him two days before had just begun to throb.
Thirty-nine
‘Join the Army!’
‘Well, the medical corps,’ he said. ‘The RAMC.’
‘But why, Adam? Why now?’
He shrugged. ‘Because I reckon it’s time I did my bit, I suppose.’ He turned to look out of the window of the ward kitchen.
Liz came round in front of him, peering up into his face.
‘But you’re doing your bit here. None better. You’ve worked like a dog since the war started. Right from the Athenia, through the Blitz, all of that.’
He shrugged again. ‘Mayb
e I fancy myself in a uniform.’
She recognized the flippant answer for what it was. She was looking at a man who’d set his mind to a course of action and who wasn’t going to be dissuaded from it: for some reason which he wasn’t prepared to share with her.
‘I’ll miss you,’ she said at last.
‘Will you?’ He hadn’t moved from the window, standing there staring out, his arms folded across his broad chest.
‘Of course I will. How am I going to cope without you?’
‘You’ll survive.’ He turned at last from his contemplation of the rooftops of Partick.
‘Look, Liz, I’ve got to get on. I’ll see you later.’
The door swung closed behind him. Liz stared at it in dismay. She’d become so used to his company, so accustomed to taking her troubles to him and having him make them better. Had she put too much pressure on him when he already had so many stresses in his work? Was it her fault that he was going away?
She tried discussing it with Cordelia, but she seemed unable to shed much light on Adam’s decision.
‘Perhaps it’s the soldiering bit,’ she suggested eventually. ‘Sooner or later it gets to most of them. They feel they should be out there - doing their bit for king and country, defending their womenfolk against the vile Hun, that kind of thing.’ She grimaced.
Liz looked at her doubtfully. ‘But he’s doing his bit here. You know how hard he works.’
Cordelia, uncharacteristically unhelpful, shrugged.
‘I wondered if it had anything to do with me, Cordelia.’
‘Eh... how exactly do you mean, Liz?’
‘He’s helped me so much,’ she replied, ‘always been there ready to help me, given me a shoulder to cry on. Maybe I’ve asked too much of him.’
‘In which case,’ Cordelia pointed out, ‘I’m as much to blame.’
‘So you don’t think that’s what’s making him want to go away?’
‘No, Liz, I don’t think that’s what it is.’ She squinted down at the watch pinned on the bib of her apron. ‘Good grief! Is that the time? I really must be getting on.’
Central Station was thronged as usual when Liz saw Adam off. At her insistence, he found himself a seat, deposited his things on top of it to book it and then jumped back out on to the platform. He’d said his farewells to his mother earlier that morning in Milngavie. Liz was surprised that Amelia wasn’t here now - nor Cordelia either - but Adam told her how upset his mother had been, although doing her best not to show it.
‘Maybe I should have taken French leave,’ he said, ‘like they did the night before the Battle of Waterloo.’
Liz struck a dramatic pose. ‘Well, we could go for the scene in the romantic film where you say—’
‘It’s not goodbye, darling, it’s only au revoir? he supplied. ‘Or maybe we’ll all be saying auf Wiedersehen if things don’t look up.’
She punched him lightly in the chest. ‘Nonsense. Now the Army’s got you on its side, we’ll have the war finished in a fortnight. Winston doesn’t know it yet, but he’s got a new secret weapon.’
‘I’m touched that you have such faith in me,’ he murmured. There was a pause. ‘Liz...’ he began, but she had started speaking at the same time as him.
‘You look very dashing,’ she said, taking in the picture he presented in cap and uniform, his tall frame surmounted by a casually unbuttoned greatcoat.
‘I don’t feel very dashing,’ he confessed. ‘Why don’t you and I go down the coast together instead? A walk on the beach and lunch in a pub with a roaring fire?’
‘Sounds lovely, but it’ll have to wait till you come back. What were you going to say just now? I think I interrupted you.’
‘Oh... nothing really. Mind your back.’ He pulled her out of the way of a raucous group of sailors who were heading up the platform complete with attendant girlfriends.
‘You will write, won’t you?’ Liz asked, once the noisy crowd had passed. ‘Keep me posted. It’s bad enough having to worry about Dominic Gallagher.’ For Dominic, appropriately enough for a Flash Gordon fan, was now a trainee pilot in the RAF.
‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ said Adam lightly. ‘I’m a medic, remember? I’m the one who’ll be patching up the other chaps.’
‘So you won’t go and fling yourself in front of any bullets?’
‘Would you care?’
‘I would care,’ she assured him, uncomfortably aware of the tiny pause before she had answered him. She glanced away. To their left one of the sailors and his girlfriend were locked in a passionate embrace. Adam followed Liz’s gaze.
‘Looks like he’s trying to perform a tonsillectomy,’ he muttered. ‘By suction.’
‘Maybe I should give you a kiss. For luck.’
Adam turned his attention away from the couple and looked down very intently at Liz. And there was another of the pauses which seemed to be characterizing this conversation.
‘Kissing in public is vulgar, MacMillan,’ Adam drawled, the blandest of expressions on his face. ‘Don’t you know that?’
‘Kiss my hand, then,’ she suggested, extending it to him with a gaiety she was very far from feeling. ‘Like the gentleman you are.’
Mario had kissed her hand in all manner of extravagant ways. From Adam Liz expected the swift equivalent of a peck on the cheek, perhaps a joking comment to go with it. Instead, he took her hand, lifted it to his mouth and pressed a long kiss against the softness of her palm. He had his eyes closed, his eyelashes, much darker than his hair, thick and feathery against the smooth skin underneath them. She was reminded suddenly of a wet night in Buchanan Street.
She stood and watched his train pull out, waiting till it went out of sight. Then she wished she hadn’t. It gave her a real empty feeling. She would miss him, of course she would. He was a good friend. She just hadn’t been prepared to miss him quite so much.
Adam wrapped his greatcoat more tightly about himself and settled into a corner of the compartment. The train was bloody freezing. The junior Army officer sitting opposite him was telling another - in great detail - what he’d got up to with a girl he’d picked up during his leave.
The young lady had clearly been very accommodating, but Adam didn’t think any woman deserved to be talked about like that. He loathed men who boasted of their conquests. The naval officer sitting beside him was, however, listening in with interest. It looked as if he’d be pitching in with his own story soon.
Great, he thought glumly, exactly what I need - God knows how many hours locked up in a train full of sexually frustrated and overtalkative servicemen.
Honesty compelled him to admit that he himself might not be much better. When it came to sexual frustration he was something of an expert. He could write the bloody book.
He had promised Mario he would look after her. He had kept his promise well. Whenever he had seen that she was tired or fed up or depressed, he had offered a drink, or a trip to the cinema. Nobody, not even Cordelia, had ever known what it had cost him to spend so much time in her company and be forced to treat her like a sister.
And now he had left her: because he couldn’t stand it any longer. He knew she would be all right now. There was a core of steel in Elizabeth MacMillan.
He suspected he had started falling in love with her the very first time he had met her - that soaking wet night in Buchanan Street. She’d been all shining hair and passion.
But he had seen how shy she was, suspecting there was something more to it than mere reserve. He’d been willing to wait. And while he’d been standing back, behaving like a bloody gentleman as usual, Mario had got there before him.
It made no difference to him that she had allowed Mario to make love to her. He shifted uncomfortably on the cushioned seat. Who was he trying to kid? Certainly not himself. When he had found out about that he had been overwhelmed by his feelings. A tidal wave of pure sexual jealousy, he supposed, which had left him empty and despairing.
It hadn’t stopped him lov
ing her. He wished it had been him, that was all. How many times had he sat next to her in the cinema, hoping her hand would accidentally brush against his? Hoping her hand would deliberately brush against his...
How often had he longed to slip his arm around her shoulders, put his fingers under her chin and lift her face towards him for a kiss?
‘You all right, old man?’
‘What?’
‘You groaned,’ said the naval officer. ‘Thought you were in pain or something.’
‘N-no,’ stuttered Adam. ‘I’m fine.’
I must have invented some new meaning of fine, he thought bitterly. And yes, he was in pain, but not the sort he could cure with his own medical skills.
She didn’t love him, of course. Oh, she liked him as a friend, an amiable twit, someone who made her laugh. That was all. It was Mario she loved. Even in his misery, Adam found something to admire in that. Her constancy to her lost lover shone like a diamond.
He stared out of the window and saw nothing of the countryside flashing by. All he could see was her lovely face, smiling as she wished him farewell, sending him off to war with a cheerful word and the offer of a kiss.
He nearly groaned again. What sort of an idiot was he anyway? She had made the offer and he had turned her down.
As the train picked up speed after Motherwell, all he could think of was that squandered opportunity. She might have put her arms around him. He could have felt her body against his, experienced the softness of her breasts against his chest—
He pulled himself up. What was the use?
He had held her in his arms, of course, when she had been distressed and in need of comfort. She had permitted him to do that. But it was Mario she loved. Not him. It would never be him.