by Helen Grant
Tom shrugged. “Like I thought I would, from asking around. First, I went to the address in your grandmother’s will, but it’s gone. There used to be a big house there, but they knocked it down. Now it’s flats. I looked at the names on the doorbells but I couldn’t see any Robertson. I checked in the phone book too, and he wasn’t in that either, but maybe his number just isn’t listed.”
We began to walk down the passage to the kitchen.
Tom went on, “Then I went to the health centre, but they’d never heard of him. The woman on Reception said they couldn’t give out personal details anyway, but she didn’t know any Dr. George Robertson in the town.” He shook his head. “She started asking me why I wanted to know, and I said he was an old friend of my Gran’s. I don’t think she believed me. Then she asked who my Gran was, so I said it didn’t matter and left. I was thinking maybe he’d moved right away from the town.”
“What did you do then?” I asked, thinking that it sounded hopeless.
“I was walking out and there was this notice on the wall about when the centre was built, and I thought, that’s not all that long ago, maybe he moved on or retired before then. When I got home, I Googled doctors in the town–” Tom saw my expression and added, “It’s like looking them up.” Then he went on, “But the only thing that came up was the health centre. I thought, there must have been something before that was built, so I tried looking for old doctors’ surgery but there was nothing. Maybe if I’d had the name or address for it...but all I got was places in other towns.” He grimaced. “I thought, that’s it, I don’t know where to go from here.”
Tom paused as I pushed open the kitchen door and we went inside. Both of us gravitated towards the stove; the outdoor temperature was no longer freezing but with damp clothing it was still unpleasantly cold.
Tom said, “Anyway, I got back from work last night and Gran was there, talking to Mum. She’s eighty-six and she’s lived in the town her whole life. I thought, if anyone knows where Dr. Robertson is, it’s her. So I waited until Mum had gone off to make tea, and I asked her if she’d ever heard of a Dr. George Robertson.”
“What did she say?” I was fascinated by Tom’s narrative, and not simply because I wanted to know what his grandmother had told him. I couldn’t imagine belonging to a family that had so many different people in it – mother, father, grandmother, probably cousins and aunts and uncles too. Some people had sisters and brothers too, though Tom didn’t.
“She wanted to know right away why I was asking,” said Tom. “She doesn’t miss anything. After the woman in the health centre asked me that, I thought I’d better make up a story. I said someone Dad and I had done some work for had been asking, because they had something of his they wanted to return. Then she asked what.”
Tom was grinning, as though his grandmother’s persistence was funny. It made me unsettled; it seemed to me that sooner or later someone was going to persist until they found out why he was really asking. Would he break his promise if someone pushed him hard enough? But Tom was unconcerned.
“I said the first thing that came into my head, which was a spirit level. That was what I was looking for that day I saw you, when Dad and I had just finished working here.” He shook his head. “I don’t think she believed me. She said it was an odd thing for someone to borrow from a doctor. But she said she knew Dr. Robertson. She said he was retired, but we knew that anyway, and he lives in the town. I asked where, and she said she didn’t know, but probably one of the big houses on the north side of the High Street, because he’d always had money. And then,” Tom concluded, “I could hear that Mum was coming back with Gran’s tea, so I asked her about her indigestion, because she can go on for hours and hours about that.”
I laughed in spite of myself. But then I said, “So we don’t know exactly where he is?”
Tom shook his head. “But we know he’s still alive, and he’s living in the town.”
“I suppose so,” I said, but it was hard not to be disappointed. Nothing I had uncovered in the house had told me anything; I’d been relying on what Tom could find out.
“I’ll keep asking,” said Tom. “Someone will know. Someone always does.”
He fell silent, and both of us listened to the rain rattling at the kitchen window. Even the light coming through it seemed to have a dismal grey tinge.
“How do you live here?” said Tom. “Most of the rooms are freezing, and it’s so dark in here.” He glanced at me. “I’m not insulting your house. I’d just improve a few things.”
“Like what?”
“Electric lights, for starters. And central heating. Proper plumbing. And some of the windows round the back are boarded up. I saw that when we were here working. I’d get those replaced. I’d do that chimney properly, the one that fell through the roof. Yeah, I’d do the roof too. When we were up there you could see all the slates that were missing.” He thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t change the inside that much. I’d just restore things, like the broken bits of panelling. I’d get the ceilings and the wood repainted, and I’d get the whole place cleaned. Get all the cobwebs out.”
“That sounds like a lot of things,” I said. I should have liked listening to Tom talk as though he lived here, as though the house was his to work on as well as mine. But it made me uncomfortable, hearing him talk about the broken panels and the spiders’ webs. Those were things I hardly noticed myself; there was no use in noticing them, since I couldn’t do anything about them – I wasn’t a carpenter and I couldn’t reach the high ceilings to dust even if I wanted to. But Tom had noticed them.
Tom didn’t seem concerned. “Probably quicker to build a new house,” he said cheerfully. He looked up, away from me, gazing at something in his own mind that I couldn’t see. He said, “That’s what I want to do – build new things. I want to be an architect.”
“Are you learning from your father?” I asked.
Tom shook his head. “Dad just does small jobs. Repairs, roofing, stuff like that. I said I’d work for Dad for a while to save up some money before I go to university. I think he’s hoping I’ll like it so much I’ll take over the business in the end, but...” Tom shrugged. “I don’t want to be mending roofs and laying patios for old ladies all my life. I want to design buildings.” He grinned wryly. “Though it’ll probably be supermarkets and blocks of flats.”
“What if you could build anything?”
“Then I’d do something people would remember. Maybe a huge great tower in the middle of Glasgow. It would have an official name, but when people flew over the city they’d look out of the plane window and say, ‘That’s Tom McAllister’s Tower.’ ” He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know what’s funny about that. I’m dead serious, you know.”
“I’m sure that would be lovely,” I said primly, doing my best to keep a straight face.
“Liar. You’re laughing at me again.”
“I’m not.”
Tom folded his arms, but he was grinning. “Come on then, what would you do, if you could do anything?”
I opened my mouth to say something but no words came. What would I do? The world outside Langlands was too vast, too unfamiliar, too full of unknown possibilities. If I had walked down to the limits of the estate and stepped out into 1945, I would have known what to expect. But 2017 was an infinite realm of which only the tiniest part had been charted for me.
At last I said, “I’d find my mother. That’s what I’d do.” I looked at Tom. “I’d find out who I really am.”
Someone will know, I told her, and sure enough, someone does. CCTV would be wasted in this town; it wouldn’t tell you anything your neighbours couldn’t. This time it’s old Mrs. Campbell who knows.
Dad and I are putting down a new patio behind her bungalow. I don’t know why she wants one – I can’t see her spending the summer having barbecues. Most of the week it pisses with rain while we’re working
too. It reminds me why I don’t want to do this forever. Mrs. Campbell’s not bad though. She makes us cups of tea and piles the sugar in. I think she feels sorry for us, working away in her back garden with the rain dripping off our caps and running down the backs of our necks.
While I’m working my mind keeps drifting off to Langlands. I think how gloomy it’ll be in the house, with the rain making that drumming sound on the roof. I think of Ghost moving about in there in the dark, looking like a real ghost in those old-fashioned clothes. It makes me feel bad for her, and uneasy. Going to Langlands is more than stepping back in time, it’s like digging down into a grave.
We have to find the truth. Was there some good reason for hiding her away there? Because if not, I want to make her leave Langlands now, right away. I want her in my world, not that creepy old place. It’s on my mind all the time, what possible reason old Mrs. McAndrew could have had, but I can’t puzzle it out. Maybe she really was just crazy, but she didn’t strike me that way.
On the second day, Dad has go to the hardware shop to get something, so it’s just me and Mrs. Campbell for a bit. Two minutes after he’s gone, she’s at the back door with a mug of tea and a piece of cake on a plate.
“Come in for a minute,” she says. “You look frozen.”
I reckon she picked that moment because she saw Dad going off. He always wants to get on with the work, not stand around talking. I guess she’s lonely. There was probably a Mr. Campbell once but not anymore.
I look down at my boots but she tells me to come in anyway, and once I’m in, I’m grateful, because the kitchen is much warmer than the back garden. I sit at her kitchen table and eat the piece of cake, and she talks about the work and her daughter in Aberdeen and how the rain makes her joints ache. She’s in the middle of telling me what the doctor said about that, when I think of asking her about Dr. Robertson. She’s old enough to remember him for sure.
When I can get a word in, I say, “Mrs. Campbell, can you remember a doctor called George Robertson who used to work in the town?”
“Och yes,” she says, and unlike the woman at the health centre she doesn’t even ask why I want to know. She’s too busy telling me what a handsome young doctor he was and how nobody could work out why he didn’t marry – “broken heart, they said, only I don’t know who broke it” – and how amazed they all were when he eventually married a girl with a lot of money. “He needn’t have carried on doctoring at all, but he liked it that much – it’s a vocation, isn’t it?”
I keep an eye on the kitchen clock, wondering when Dad’s going to get back, while Mrs. Campbell gives me a rundown of all the major events in Dr. Robertson’s life: the time someone got run over right outside the surgery and he ran out and saved their life; the son who grew up and moved down to London; his wife dying at sixty-two.
“Does he still live in the town?” I ask, thinking she’s going to ask me for sure this time why I want to know all this. But she doesn’t.
“Yes, he still lives in that place off Ferntower Road,” she says. “The one with all the wood painted red. I can’t think how he manages in it at his age.”
She must be at least seventy herself, but I don’t point this out. I let her finish talking, and then I thank her for the tea and cake and stand up. I’m back outside in the rain about two minutes before Dad turns up again.
“You’ve not got much done while I was away,” he says.
I shrug. Nothing to say. I’ve already made my mind up. The first chance I get, maybe even tonight after work if it’ll stop pissing it down for half an hour, I’m going to go down Ferntower Road and look for a house with the woodwork painted red. I’m going to find Dr. Robertson.
The next time Tom came, he had something on his mind, something troubling him. I could see it in his expression; I was learning to read him the way I could read the changing weather in the skies over Langlands. This would have pleased me, except I could tell something was wrong.
He had brought me things: bread, milk, soap and some fruit I didn’t recognise, strange, green things like mossy eggs.
“Kiwi,” he said. “You don’t eat the skin, just the inside.”
I turned one of them over in my hands. “Are these a new thing?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t think so. I guess your gran just didn’t like them.”
After he had put everything on the kitchen table, he stood and looked at me, his expression grim.
“It’s bad news. I found Dr. Robertson. But he won’t talk to us.”
I stared at him. “Why not? And how did you find him?”
“Mrs. Campbell. She’s a woman Dad and I have been doing some work for. She’s really old, so I thought she might remember Dr. Robertson, and she did.” Tom scratched his head. “She loves talking. It’s picking out the stuff you wanted to know from the rest of it that’s difficult. I had Dr. Robertson’s whole life story. Anyway, she told me where he lives – some big house off Ferntower Road, with the wood painted red. It wasn’t difficult to find.”
“You went there?”
“Yeah.” Tom sighed. “Maybe that was a mistake. But I was there, outside the house, and I thought, why not? I thought I’d ask if he’d see you. Anyway, I wanted to make sure it was really him. Mrs. Campbell seemed sure about it, but she could have mixed him up with someone else. So I went and knocked.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t even open the door properly. He had a security chain on it. I said, ‘Dr. Robertson?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and then he said, ‘What do you want?’ I asked if I could talk to him for a few minutes. I said it was about someone he knew. He said, ‘Who?’ so I told him Rose McAndrew. He was quiet for a long time, and then he just shook his head and shut the door. I knocked again and he didn’t reply. I called out, ‘Can we just talk for a couple of minutes?’ but...nothing. I couldn’t think what else to do, so I kept knocking and then he opened the door a crack and said, ‘Be off with you.’ I could see he was going to shut it again so I said, ‘Look, I just want to talk, I don’t have to come in, and I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important.’ He stared at me for about two seconds and then he said, ‘Go away or I’ll call the police.’ I had to go. He was going to do it.”
I was silent when Tom finished explaining. I still had the funny green fruit in my hands; it felt rough, as though I were holding a fat little creature with a wiry pelt. I couldn’t think what to say.
“I’m sorry,” said Tom eventually. “I didn’t want to push it. If he really had called the police, I couldn’t have told them why I was there without mentioning you.”
He’d remembered his promise. “Thank you,” I said quietly.
Tom let out a long breath. “You know, maybe that’s the only way to get to the bottom of this. Talk to the authorities – the police, social services or whatever.” He must have seen the alarm on my face because he hastily added, “We could wait until you’re eighteen. It’s only a couple of weeks. But look, they might be able to make him tell us what he knows. He can refuse to talk to me, but I don’t think he can refuse to talk to them.”
When he said that, I sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and put my elbows on the table and my head in my hands. Why was it so impossible to work out the best thing to do? Perhaps Tom was right, and we couldn’t get to the truth on our own. It was true that I would be eighteen very soon. We could wait that little time and then ask for help. It wasn’t as though I could hide from the outside world for the rest of my life anyway. So why did I feel so unhappy about the idea?
After a moment, Tom slid into the seat next to me. I felt him touch my hair gently, pushing it back behind my ear so that he could see my face.
I didn’t look at him. Instead I looked down at my hands on the table top, turning them over so that I could study the palms, as if they were a map to somewhere I wanted to go. I struggled to find the right words to tell Tom how I f
elt.
“I wish–” I began, and hesitated. “I wish Dr. Robertson would have talked to you. Maybe we can’t find the truth on our own, but whatever there is to find out, I feel like I want to know first.” I shot Tom a glance. “Do you understand? I don’t want to find out at the same time as a lot of strangers. If it’s something bad, I don’t want them looking at me, seeing how I react. And if...” I thought about it. “...if it was Grandmother who did something bad, I’d want to know that first, too.”
I fell silent then. I couldn’t explain my feelings about Grandmother any further than that. Thinking about her was like a dull dragging ache under my ribs. I couldn’t imagine any reason big enough or urgent enough to justify what she had done. She had made me into an anachronism, a thing as out of place in the modern world as an Egyptian mummy or a knight in armour. In spite of that, I wanted time to think about what I would say to the world about her; how I should explain her to people who didn’t know her. She wasn’t just the person who had kept me away from the outside world, brought me up to a lifestyle that no longer existed, and lied to me for seventeen years. She was also the person who had taught me to read and write. She had braided my hair for me when I was too little to do it, and read me Puss in Boots and The Tinder-Box scores of times although she must have been horribly bored. She had made me cocoa when I had been out chopping firewood and my hands were frozen, and sometimes she had made me baked apples with cinnamon, which was one of my absolutely favourite things. I hated her for what she had done, and I missed her with all my heart, and I couldn’t face talking to strangers about her until I had sorted it all out in my own head.
I suppose Tom was thinking too, because for a long while he said nothing either. In spite of the thoughts that swarmed in my head like angry wasps, I couldn’t help but be aware of his nearness. No words passed between us, but I knew that his face was turned towards me. He sighed quietly, and I felt his breath on my skin.