The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

Robin looked at the pot of jam. ‘Strawberries. I remember the smell of growing strawberries, Dad, and the warmth of the sun through my shirt as I picked them.’

  ‘That’ll be in the jam, laddie.’

  Robin smiled. ‘You’re as much of a poet as Ian. This is Mairi’s way of writing poetry. She and Ian are so alike; I never realised it before.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘I wish I could see her smile.’

  ‘She’ll come to see you, Robin, if she thinks she’s welcome. She would not want to intrude.’

  Mairi intrude? Robin saw her small sturdy figure as it followed him and his friend all over the farm. She had intruded on him all her life. He tried to laugh and, although it sounded more like a snort, his father took hope from it and courage.

  ‘It’s nice out here in the garden, lad. I could bring her some Sunday and you could walk around the garden. She always liked flowers.’

  ‘I could show her the flowers I’m helping to grow. I’ve tried to remember. Is it the spring flowers she likes, or is it the roses?’

  ‘There were some white briars in a jam jar on the kitchen table.’

  Robin smiled. ‘White briar roses,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Ian arrived in England on 4 October 1919 and went first to Godalming in the pretty county of Surrey. When he had completed his business there he took the train to Scotland.

  He walked from Arbroath and the weather matched his mood. It was a perfect autumn day. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and the wind, a southwest wind, was not too strong but just strong enough to tumble the leaves that had already fallen along the grass verges. He whistled and he kicked them with the polished toe of his new shoes.

  New shoes. Leather. For nearly two years he had worn strips of dirty cloth wrapped around his feet in a vain attempt to keep them warm. Arabella had wanted him to have shoes especially made by a London shoemaker but he had refused. What he could afford, he would have. He had allowed her to buy him one pair of cashmere socks, but only this once, Bella, and just, if you must, as a welcome home gift.

  He thought of Bella now . . . no, when was she ever absent from his thoughts? He had been afraid that the girl of his dreams, the girl of the letters, would not be the girl who met him at Guildford. But she was and although they had met before only a few times, they knew as they walked towards one another down that station platform that they had been heading towards one another all their lives and that once they met and Ian held out his strong arms and enfolded the delicate girl to his heart, they would never again be apart. She was with him now, although she was still in her beautiful Surrey home. An elderly, and very disapproving, aunt had chaperoned the young couple because Lady Grey-Watson refused to have anything to do with either of them.

  ‘I can’t expect you to go through this for me, Bella,’ he had cried, his lips against her golden hair.

  And she had laughed and raised her face so that her lips met his. ‘It’s nothing to what you have gone through for me. And they’ll come round because they love me and if they don’t, I’ll manage if you love me half as much as I love you.’

  And he laughed now as, swinging his bag, he walked jauntily along, remembering the precious minutes they had spent trying to decide who loved the other more.

  ‘Are you the daftie?’ A broad Scottish voice broke through his romantic glow.

  Ian looked down at the boy and an anger so fierce swept through him, that he, who had never raised his hand in anger during five years of Hell, felt that he might strike the child.

  ‘The daftie?’ he asked, although he already knew the answer.

  ‘Aye, the daftie. The Dominie’s son that was that clever, went to Oxford. Daft as a brush but he’s coming home. You don’t look daft. My mam says we’ll not sleep safe in our beds with a daftie runnin’ loose.’

  Ian looked in horror at the child for whom he and Robin had fought and nearly died.

  What had Shakespeare said?

  I hate ingratitude more in a man

  Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness,

  Or any taint of vice . . .

  ‘Ask your mammie to pray that you’ll ever be half the man he is,’ he said and, cursing himself for letting himself get angry, his mood soured, he walked the rest of the way home in silence.

  He saw another boy, slightly older than the first ragamuffin, as he turned off the main road onto the one leading to the farm, and, at sight of him, the boy took to his heels and ran.

  Ian laughed. ‘That must be Mrs Baxter’s Bert, the terror of the entire county, off to tell Mairi.’

  Sure enough, when he breasted the brow of the hill and looked down towards the sea to where the farmhouse nestled comfortably among its fields, he saw his sister it had to be his sister although this running creature was a woman, a woman with Mairi’s wild red-gold hair. He too began to run and he caught her up in his arms and swung her around as he had done so often when they were children, before setting her on her feet. She looked up at him, her eyes shining with tears and her hair glinting gold where the sun hit it and, to his surprise, she burst into tears, and he held her like a baby and let her cry.

  He was amazed. Mairi had never been the kind of little girl who took refuge in tears. She had been much tougher than he was and here she was, soaking his new department shop shirt.

  ‘It’s all better now, Mairi,’ he said softly. ‘The war’s over and I’m home and Robin will get better, I know he will . . .’

  She sniffed loudly, made a tremendous effort and looked up at him through her tears. His appearance shocked her. He was so thin that he looked even taller than his six foot. He was a living walking scarecrow. Bella’s hairdresser had tried to do something with the hair that had been kept tidy with the use of a kitchen knife but it would be some months before it grew properly and – it was not gold but silver. A boy had gone to war and an old man had come back. What had happened to his young, strong manhood? She would not let him sense her horror. ‘You know about Robin?’

  As she spoke to her brother she thought of that first day when she had gone to the hospital in Edinburgh. She had been so nervous that she had been sick twice on the train. She had pictured the asylum, a huge grey sprawling building with iron bars on the windows. She had heard the screams of insane patients and she had smelled the nauseating carbolic smells of cleanliness and lack of hope. How could someone as fastidious and sensitive as the Dominie spend every free moment there? So simple, so simple. He loved his son.

  And then she had arrived and she had walked up a tree-lined lane to a large sandstone building which stood benignly among its paved walks and abundant flower beds. A nurse in a starched white uniform had opened the door to her and she had smelled lavender and had seen the sun shining on old polished furniture and books. She had breathed a deep sigh of relief.

  The nurse had obviously seen the reaction before. ‘This is the twentieth century, my dear. There is illness here, and sadness, but there is hope and joy. Captain Morrison is in the garden with his father.’

  Mairi looked up now at the gaunt face of her brother.

  ‘He wrote to me,’ he said simply and then he looked over her head towards the farmhouse. ‘But Dad?’ he asked. ‘I thought he’d come out to welcome the prodigal . . .’ He felt her tense in his arms and draw away from him. ‘Mairi?’

  There was no way to soften the blow, nothing that could be said that would make the pain go away. ‘He’s dead, Ian. He was killed almost a year ago, just a few hours before the Armistice.’

  The pain hit him like a knife between the ribs: his father, the provider, the arbiter, the meter out of justice, the solid bulk of security, the teacher, and later the friend, dead. How had he not known that the world no longer contained Colin McGloughlin? He looked at the fields his father had loved, the dry-stone dykes he had helped him build or at least repair, the trees where they had sheltered with their pieces. They were the same. They had no right to be untouched.

  ‘He was awarded the Vi
ctoria Cross, Ian. I wish you’d been there to receive it.’

  He pushed down his pain to deal with later. Another blow that Mairi had coped with on her own. He looked down at her, saw that the round softness of the girl’s face had been replaced by more mature womanly, but not matronly, lines. It was a too-thin face, but beautiful. Whoever would have thought Mairi McGloughlin would grow up beautiful?

  ‘So much you’ve had to deal with on your own, wee Mairi,’ he said and wondered how he could do what he wanted if it meant leaving her alone again. Nothing was easy. She must go with him. Bella would insist.

  She dimpled. ‘Not on my own,’ she said. ‘I’ve had Milly and Angus who are wonderful and Jean who’s a smaller Milly . . .’

  ‘And don’t forget Bert,’ he said. ‘It was Bert who told you.’

  She laughed and they turned towards their home and began to walk to it.

  ‘ “There’s a golden giant walking along the school road.” That’s how he announced you. “Has to be your brother and he’s no getting my bed.” ’

  He laughed. ‘I’ll sleep in the kitchen if it makes him feel better. It won’t be for long.’

  She took a quick look at his face but saw that he was not ready to talk. ‘You’ll be hungry,’ she said.

  ‘What would you do with yourself if you didn’t have men to feed, Mairi? A good meal cures all the ills of a troubled world.’ But he said that bitterly.

  ‘It goes a good way,’ she said simply. ‘Bert and Angus will sleep at the schoolhouse for a while. Mr Morrison is trying to cram Angus for his highers.’

  ‘How is he?’ And he knew that she knew he meant Mr Morrison and not Angus.

  ‘Better now that Robin is improving. It was slow, slow progress, but definitely progress and then, after your letter came, he seemed to accelerate. I visit him once a fortnight and now his father leaves us alone for a while. I think he expects, well, I’m not sure what he expects, but Robin is the same whether he’s there or not.’ She sighed and he looked down at her sadly.

  ‘But he’s not afraid to be alone with you?’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘No. We walk in the gardens. Growing flowers is part of his therapy. He loves it and he’s good at it. I don’t know what we’ll do in the winter. He seems nervous if I’m too close to him but at least we talk now, about books and music, the newspapers. We used to walk and stop to look at a flower and sometimes he’d pull one and thrust it at me. Now he tells me about them. Of course, it’s Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums now.’ She sighed and then looked up at Ian and smiled. ‘He’ll be glad that you’re home.’

  They were at the house and the next few minutes were taken up with introductions. Ian met Milly and recognised her, as he would have recognised her had he met her first in the street, from the descriptions in Mairi’s letters, and then Angus, a quiet muscular boy who looked so much like an amalgam of the boys Robin and Ian that the adult Ian almost wept. Next he met Jean who was so tongue-tied that she could say not a word but constituted herself his slave and set herself to wait upon him, hand and foot, until he feared that he might step on her, and Bert, the pirate, whose wicked black eyes told him he would have to fight for his right to sleep in his own bed if he had not already abdicated that right.

  ‘My father is dead and yours is too and I hope there was nothing left unsaid between you two,’ he said, speaking to the boy who surprised his mother by dropping his pugnacious appearance and hanging on the back of Ian’s chair in case he missed a word that the returning hero had to say.

  He was disappointed. Ian had never been a loquacious man and, especially when there was so much to be said, he found the process very difficult, if not impossible.

  He answered the children’s questions as truthfully as he could and Angus soon learned when he would not be drawn but young Bert worried at him like a dog at a bone until his mother, seeing Ian’s exhaustion, sent him off, with his brother, to the schoolhouse.

  ‘I’m no sleepin’ there. Bad enough Mairi made us eat with the Dominie.’

  Milly insisted and, after seeing Jean into bed, went off with her sons to ensure that Bert did not turn round and run back to the farm.

  Mairi and Ian were alone.

  ‘Funny not to see him sitting there with his paper and the dogs. He went to make up for me, didn’t he?’

  He was looking straight at her with those eyes that had always seen so much and she could not lie. ‘Not exactly, Ian. He wanted it to be over and he was tired of boys being killed; he was always such a good shot. I think he thought if experienced men went it would help the laddies. He did help the laddies, Ian. Dad threw himself in the way of a grenade to save the life of a boy from Arbroath. He knew what he was doing. Such incredible bravery makes it bearable, I think.’

  ‘Not for me. I never, all my life, did anything properly that he wanted me to do, and now, to know that he felt that he had to go and possibly die in my place . . .’

  She threw herself down on the rag rug at his feet and held on to his hands as if he or she or both were drowning. ‘It wasn’t like that, Ian. It wasn’t.’

  ‘Oh, please, Mairi, spare me that. I have so much I need to talk over with you; plans that need to be made. First I have to know if you and Robin have come to some kind of arrangement.’

  ‘It’s not possible to “come to an arrangement”, as you put it, with someone who is like a piece of glass, like the wee piece he brought me from Venice, so fragile that the least puff of wind will blow it over and smash it.’

  He put his hand on her hair. ‘You said he was improving.’

  ‘He is. He is, but he’s holding himself away from me. He’s so polite to me. We were always so at ease with one another; he was just like you. I could scold him and argue with him and fight him. Now I’m on my best behaviour. I don’t want to scare him into thinking he has to marry me because he kissed me once or twice and said there’d be roses.’ She shook her head and looked up at him and in the mischief in her eyes he saw his wee sister. ‘Now, you, Ian McGloughlin, have you no news for me?’

  He laughed. ‘I’ve met a rare wee bully too. Just like you, doing what’s good for me whether I like it or not.’

  ‘And don’t you like it?’

  ‘I love it.’

  They sat quietly for a moment, listening to the logs complaining in the flames.

  ‘So all is well, Ian?’

  ‘I sometimes can’t believe it, Mairi, but Arabella Huntingdon loves your brother, and I love her. She wrote hundreds of letters to me. Sometimes I got none for weeks and then I’d get twenty on the one day and she’d numbered them so I know that some never turned up. She could have been dining and dancing with all her posh friends but she stayed at home writing to me.’

  He went quiet and from the smile hovering around his lips Mairi knew that he was recalling some of Arabella’s letters.

  ‘And when are you going to see her? You are going to see her?’

  He looked guilty and the first pangs of jealousy hit her and she tried to push them away. A sister was not nearly so important as a lover.

  ‘I went there first, Mairi. I had to know . . . if she was real, the girl who wrote the letters. We met in Edinburgh once, when I left the work camp, and she was so shy and so sweet and called me Mr McGloughlin and asked if she might write still when I was in France. I loved her then, I think. I hadn’t before. What is love, Mairi, that chooses one against another and says, this is she? I’d been a wee bit embarrassed, you know, at the shooting, the laird’s niece, and then she smiled at me and gave me her scarf and I knew it was more than the scarf she was giving, but I was afraid that I didn’t want her gift, that I couldn’t appreciate it.’ He looked up from the fire. ‘You think I should have come to you first?’

  She noticed that he did not say, I should have come home first, and so she lied. ‘No, Ian, it was right for you to go there first.’

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. Her aunt and uncle are furious. Her parents a
re dead, poor wee lamb. Sitting here in the kitchen, I think I’m crazy to think I can marry her.’

  ‘The tenancy, Ian?’

  ‘I doubt they’d give it to me anyway and they won’t give it to a woman, lass. If I leave here, you’re homeless and, if I stay, who knows? Maybe Sir Humphrey will hound us out.’

  ‘The agent says the lease is yours.’

  ‘That’s before Arabella told them. She kept it secret, Mairi, dated men in her own set, as they say.’

  Devious wee madam, thought Mairi, and wondered when, if ever, he would realise that she had written her letters while working day and night to keep his home together, and apart from her one and only night at the opera with Jack, had dated no one in her own set.

  ‘She won’t want to live here.’

  ‘Can you see her as a farmer’s wife?’ asked Ian and he laughed tenderly. ‘But, Mairi, I have to tell you, I don’t want to farm. I want to write. Thanks to Bella, I wrote all during the war, and . . .’ He looked away from her as if embarrassed. ‘I’ve sent some stuff to a journal. I won’t let Bella help. I want to stay here and I’ll work the farm, Mairi. I’ll do the best job I can and when and if I start to make some money then I’ll leave and marry Bella. She’s rich, you see, in her own right, but I couldn’t live on a woman.’

  She had forgotten that Bella had known about his poetry. Bella had told her, her face alight with enthusiasm, that Ian was a genius, that he had memorised the poetry he was writing in his head because, in prison, he had had no paper.

  She stood up. ‘I’m tired, Ian, and I have to be up early.’

  He stood up too and walked with her to the stair and at the bottom step she stopped and looked up at him. ‘Please, Ian, you mustn’t worry about me. I couldn’t bear that. You stay here only as long as it takes to get yourself established. Bella thinks you’re a genius.’ She grinned up at him, the old, teasing Mairi. ‘Mind you, women in love have no judgement, or so I’m told, but I’d like to see your poems too, maybe, if you’d like me to see them.’

  ‘I’d be honoured to have you read them, Miss McGloughlin. There’s even one called “Mairi”. It’s about this horrible wee girl who plagued the life out of her long-suffering brother.’ He stopped laughing and was suddenly serious. ‘And there’s one called “Friend”. We’ll take it with us when we go to see him.’