by Helen Grant
I tried to concentrate instead on taking in the town. The street we had come down looked narrower and more closed-in than the towns and villages we had passed through the day we went to the coast. Some of the buildings were very plain and square; others had more elaborate – and I guessed older – architecture. It was fascinating to me to see the passing of time marked on the town: the garish-looking shop fronts grafted onto weathered-looking old buildings. There was a kind of memorial in the middle of the square, so I went up the steps to look and that and read the date: 1893. There was something reassuring in seeing that the past – a past that stretched back even further than 1945 – was still present here. Perhaps I was not so very far from home after all.
We walked about the town for a while. I found the shop windows fascinating, although I was not sorry that the shops themselves were closed. I imagined the town in the daytime being as busy as the city I had seen in the magazine Tom brought me. But the few people who passed us now took no particular notice of us.
Eventually, Tom dragged me away from the shops.
“We’ll get a fish supper,” he told me. “You can’t live in the twenty-first century without having one of those.”
I was bemused by the place he took me into, although the aroma of frying food was unbelievably good. We stood with our backs to the wall, waiting for our order.
“Where do we sit down?” I said to Tom in a low voice.
He glanced at me, amused. “We don’t.”
I was scandalised, but it wasn’t until we were outdoors again and out of the earshot of the staff that I said, “We can’t eat these in the street.”
“Yes, we can,” said Tom cheerfully. He held one of the paper-wrapped packages out to me. “We’ll sit on the wall over there.”
I followed him. The parcel was temptingly warm in my hands but I was still struggling with what he was suggesting.
“Tom,” I said as we sat down on the wall, “Eating in the street – it’s – it’s not–”
Tom looked at me. “Let me guess. Your grandmother said it was bad manners.”
“Yes.”
Tom pulled back a fold of paper, extracted a large chip and put it in his mouth. When he had swallowed it, he said, “I don’t know why she bothered, when she never took you out of Langlands anyway. What street did she think you were going to eat chips in?”
“She didn’t like me wandering around with food at all,” I said. “Not even in the garden.” It crossed my mind that this prohibition had never stopped me from eating berries in the kitchen garden nor pilfering apples to eat in my room while reading a book, and I had never considered myself morally compromised by either of these activities. Still I hesitated. The smell of freshly-fried food that seeped out of the warm parcel on my lap was maddening. I could feel my mouth watering. And after all, why should I care what Grandmother would have expected me to do? But the lessons she had taught me about how to behave had been very soundly drummed in. Just because something feels good doesn’t make it good – that was one of them, along with handsome is as handsome does. Just because the aroma of fish and chips was making me want to rip open the parcel and wolf the lot didn’t make it a proper thing to do.
The paper rustled under my fingers but I didn’t eat.
“Ghost,” said Tom, “Eat something.” He put his head on one side. “You’re not going to be arrested for crimes against good manners, you know.”
I stared into Tom’s eyes. He didn’t drop his gaze. He looked faintly amused, but he wasn’t backing down. He was waiting for me to eat. It occurred to me that refusing the food he had bought me might be ruder than being seen eating in the street.
I opened the parcel and began to eat. The food was delicious. Once I had started I couldn’t stop. I was ravenous, and anyway, I had done it now, so I might as well enjoy it. I ate all of it, and then I crumpled the paper into a ball and licked my fingers.
I felt better after eating, warm and cheerful. Who cared if it was unladylike behaviour? I doubted whether the handful of people who had passed by while we were eating had even noticed me.
Grandmother was wrong. That wasn’t just anger speaking to me anymore. Now I could see quite clearly that her way of doing things was irrelevant in Tom’s world. I wondered if there had been any sense to some of those stuffy rules even in 1945. Don’t eat in the street; don’t talk about money; tilt the soup bowl away from you; you must never be alone with a man.
Later that evening, when Tom had brought me back to Langlands and kissed me goodbye, lingeringly, he paused, with his arms around me and his forehead resting against mine so that we were too close even to look into each other’s eyes.
He said, “Ghost, you know...I’m not seeing anyone else. I mean, there isn’t any other girl.”
He was silent for a few moments after that, and so was I, but I could feel his fingers on the side of my neck, caressing my skin almost thoughtfully.
Then he said, “I don’t know how this would have worked in 1945.”
“How does it work in 2017?” I said softly.
Tom thought about it. “It goes as fast or as slowly as you want it to.”
His touch was warm; my skin seemed to glow with it. When we were as close as this, I became dizzy; I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t think what fast or slowly might be. All I could think about was Tom, the sound of him drawing breath, the way he was so close to me that when he blinked I felt his eyelashes graze my face.
At last Tom said, “It’s going to get dark. I should go before it gets too dark to see the track.”
“Yes,” I said.
He kissed me again then, but briskly, his lips touching my cheek and not my mouth. Then he was walking towards the motorcycle, the helmet swinging from his hand, and I was watching him go, my hands clasped tightly together as though compensating for the loss of his touch.
After he left, I went back into the house and climbed the stairs to my own room. I had not slept there since Grandmother died. It was not just the cold – I was used to that, after all – it was the strange loneliness of being at Langlands by myself. The kitchen, warm and homely as it was, felt comforting. Sleeping on the bench or on the floor was a small price to pay.
Now, however, I went into the bedroom I had slept in since I was tiny, with its iron bedstead and the washstand with the little mirror hanging over it and its little bookcase stuffed with volumes in worn bindings. The bedstead was a double; the room had not been furnished with a single child in mind, but more probably for long-ago guests.
I took off my boots and climbed onto the bed. I didn’t get under the covers; I simply lay on top of them, looking up at the ceiling with its ornate plasterwork, wreathed here and there with delicate cobwebs. After a while I turned my head on the pillow to look to my right, at the space beside me. I tried to imagine Tom lying there, next to me.
Rays of light from the dying sun slanted through the tall windows. The evening shadows were long now, and the light picked out everything with heightened contrast. It was too obvious that I was alone. I closed my eyes and tried again.
I could almost see him, his face turned towards me on the pillow. His blue-green eyes, his dark hair, the lines of his cheekbones. His mouth. I tried to make myself feel how it would be. Tom and I, lying here together. Tom rolling over to face me, touching my face, my shoulder.
I touched my fingers to my lips, feeling the soft pressure, imagining Tom’s mouth on mine. I traced the line of my collarbone, wondering how it would feel if it were Tom’s hand caressing me and not my own. Would it be beautiful, or would it feel horribly, guiltily wrong?
I looked into myself, and all I felt was confusion. I couldn’t tell where the sharp prickles of excitement ended and the searing stabs of guilt began.
Then a board creaked outside the bedroom door and I jumped as though a brand had touched my flesh. My eyes flew open. I was off the bed alm
ost before I knew what I was doing, and now my heart was thudding so hard that I felt dizzy. I crossed the floor in a few paces and thrust the door wide open.
Nothing. There was nobody there. I went right out onto the landing and looked both ways, but I was quite alone. Of course I was. The creak I had heard was a board I had trodden down on my way into the room springing back into place, the sound amplified by my own guilt.
I sagged against the doorframe and put my hands over my face.
What’s wrong with me? I thought. Why don’t I even know what I want?
I stood there for a long time, until the last of the light had died and I had to creep downstairs to the kitchen in darkness.
Spring comes late in Perthshire; the trees are not yet green in March. Often, I would get up in the morning and be shivering with the cold as I banked up the fire in the belly of the kitchen stove. Still, sometimes the water in the chickens’ enclosure was frozen solid when I went to feed them.
After the day Tom took me into the town on his motorcycle, he came again a number of times, sometimes on the motorcycle and sometimes in his mother’s car. Once, he brought me a photograph of us together, the one we had taken the day we had dressed up in the things from the attic. I took a print that hung in my bedroom out of its frame and put the photograph in its place: me and Tom, smiling forever behind the glass.
My education in the ways of 2017 went in fits and starts. There were great gaps in Tom’s knowledge of the history of the past seventy years. He did his best to fill the gaps by looking things up. He took to bringing a thing he called a tablet, that looked a little like the slate I had had when grandmother taught me my letters, only it had a kind of lighted rectangle on it instead of an area to write on. The tablet was unreliable for some reason related to the fact that Langlands House backed onto the side of a hill; when it worked, Tom could find out the answers to things from it, but often it was slow, and sometimes it didn’t work at all.
The other problem was that I found some things very hard to understand. History was less of a problem; once events were firmly in the past it was easier to trace the path of what had happened and what the outcome was. But I found it very difficult to make sense of some modern things. “Power” seemed to be a big problem because everything had to be run on gas or oil or electricity and there was never enough of any of these things, or else the wrong people had control of what there was, and when any of these fuels were used they did horrible things to the countryside.
“Why don’t people just use less power?” I suggested.
Tom shrugged. “They need it for their cars and for aeroplanes and...well, just about everything in the house. Dishwasher, washing machine, TV...”
“They could use horses,” I objected. “And they could do those jobs by hand – washing clothes and cleaning dishes – like I do here.”
Tom shook his head. “People don’t want to do that anymore. It takes up too much time. And anyway, if you have a couple, and they both go out to work, like Mum and Dad do, who’s going to have the time and energy for doing all those other jobs by hand?”
“Your mother goes out to work? All the time?”
“Of course she does.”
“But, Tom–!”
The discussion would go on from one incomprehensible circumstance to the next, as though we were passing through all the stages of an impossible quest without ever reaching the end.
In between trying to explain the main events of the last seventy years to me, Tom would take me out again – one evening we went for a walk on a path that ran alongside a river and twice passed under the remains of railway bridges, and one Saturday morning we went back into the town very early, before most of the shops were open. Sooner or later I should have to get used to busier places – I knew that – but not yet. The thought of so many people, of crowds of them, was dizzying. I had spent so long never seeing anyone but Grandmother, I could not imagine remembering dozens of faces – perhaps hundreds – of them, and recognising them when I saw them again. I would never forget Tom’s face, I knew that – it was the one solid thing in a chaotic world, it was the eye of the storm. But all those others? I saw myself wandering through an endless multitude of strangers, every single one of them an unfamiliar face, every single pair of eyes turned towards me. No; I was not ready for busy places yet. Besides, it was Tom I wanted to be with, not all those unknown people.
Sometimes when Tom was telling me about the history that spanned the gap between his time and mine, and showing me pieces of his world, his words would fade away into the background as I lost myself in the pleasure of studying him. I liked the way his hair fell untidily over his forehead, the way he pushed it back without thinking about it; I liked the way his brows drew together when he was concentrating on something, as though the problem annoyed him. I liked the blue-green colour of his eyes, although now I had seen the real ocean I knew that it was not that colour at all, at least, not in Scotland – it was grey, silvery where the light touched it. Tom’s eyes were the colour of the sea only in my imagination.
I liked to watch his hands, too, when he sketched shapes in the air with them, intent on describing things to me. The skin of his hands was roughened from working outdoors, but they were gentle when he touched my face or pulled me close to kiss me. I watched his hands moving and imagined their touch; sometimes I closed my eyes or looked away.
The hardest thing was that so much of my time was without Tom: the long hours, days at a time sometimes, when I was utterly alone. I couldn’t stop myself indulging in daydreams of Tom being there all the time. Without him, Langlands felt like a dead place, and I was the phantom who roamed through it.
I had to do something to stop the loneliness from becoming overwhelming, so when the day’s chores were done, I spent my time trying to find out what I could about my situation. Tom had said he would ask around about Dr. Robertson, but surely there must be something to be learnt from the documents in the house?
Three times I took everything out of the safe in the library and sorted through it, document by document; I even riffled through the wads of banknotes, in case anything should be caught between them. I found nothing at all about Dr. Robertson. The second time I pulled the papers from the safe, out fell the gold-coloured key again. I picked it up and turned it over in my fingers but in the end, there was nothing to do with it but put it back into the safe.
I picked out the photographs again too, and stared at them as though if I looked for long enough they would come to life and tell me what I needed to know. The ones of my mother as a child I studied with yearning interest; I looked at the ones of Grandmother with mixed feelings. Liar, I said with silent bitterness. But the pictures of her at my age, and as a young bride, were taken long before I was born, long before she had started to tell me all those falsehoods about the War. Before it all went rotten. I put the photographs back amongst the other papers.
Then I tried the other places where I thought Grandmother might have stored papers. I went back into her room, where all the drawers were still pulled out from the last time I had been in there, looking for the combination to the safe. Well, why wouldn’t they be? There was no-one to tidy the room if I didn’t do it myself. All the same, it was strange seeing it like that, when she had always been so very neat in her ways. It gave me a pang of regret, which I squashed firmly.
At any rate, there was nothing about Dr. Robertson there, either.
I looked into drawers and bureaux and presses all over the house, but nothing came to light, and the search only served to show me that if there was anything, and Grandmother had really wanted to hide it from me, I would never find it. Langlands was simply too big, and there were too many places she could have hidden things. I couldn’t take up every loose floorboard in every room or search inside every book in the library. I found nothing; it was Tom who made the breakthrough.
He came on a Tuesday afternoon, in the middl
e of a rainstorm. He brought the car, which was sensible, because even in the short distance from where he parked it to the door of the house he got a soaking. I hadn’t heard the car coming for the drumming of the rain on the roof and windows, but I heard him knocking. When I opened the door he grinned at me, his eyes merry through the wet strands of hair that fell across them, and said, “Spring weather.”
“Is it spring?”
“First day,” he said, stepping inside and shaking his head to get rid of the water that dripped from his hair.
It was March 21st. In a little over three weeks I would be eighteen. I did not get far with that train of thought. Tom tried to kiss me and when I yelped at the water dripping off him, he laughed. He was so wet that I could feel the dampness seeping into my clothes from his jacket. When I stepped back, the fabric of my blouse had turned sheer with the damp and was sticking to my skin. I might as well have left the blouse off altogether.
I saw Tom looking and felt my face flame with a blush. I pulled the edges of my cardigan together over the damp fabric. For several moments silence stretched out between us.
In the end, it was Tom who spoke first. He cleared his throat, and then he said, “I’ve got some news. I’ve found something out.”
I stared at him, uncomprehendingly.
“About Dr. Robertson. We may have found him.”
It’s strange how you can get used to not knowing something. When Tom told me he might have found Dr. Robertson, it was almost a shock. I didn’t jump up and down with excitement; I just said, automatically, “How?”