Isobel sat down on her bed and took hold of Nanna’s little hand. ‘I wish you’d have the doctor, Nanna.’
She gave a sweet little smile. ‘Doctor can’t do anything. It’s me heart, lass. It’s tired out.’
Isobel had suspected for days that Nanna was nearing her end. Mam would not face it. Mam said that Nanna had a touch of summer cold and would soon be right. But Nanna wanted to go. She had been talking a lot, these last days, about Grandpa and Magnus and how it would be when she met them again.
‘Stay with me,’ she said, and she was gasping for breath. ‘Keep me comp’ny. Let me go easy.’
‘I will.’
‘Have you had another letter from Ian?’ she said, knowing that Isobel wanted her to ask.
‘He’s in the Atlantic fleet. I’m not allowed to say which ship.’
‘I shan’t tell anyone, lass. Not this side.’
‘He wants to marry me when the war’s over,’ Isobel said, and she felt the blood rush to her cheeks, remembering the words in his last letter: You always have been the only girl for me. I have been serious and reserved in the past and I have never been able to express myself on paper. I want to tell you that I was afraid of my powerful feelings for you that first time we kissed. I was afraid of being too eager, too fast. I was a fool, Isobel, not to tell you how much I need you. I want to lay my head on your breast and tell you of the great unbounded love I have for you. Will you marry me?
Isobel said to Nanna, ‘I wrote to him and said yes.’
Nanna said, ‘I’ll be watching you, Lil. I’ll be with you in spirit.’
Isobel bit her lip. The letter was three months old. They all lived on a knife edge. Nobody could guess what the next day would bring.
‘When’s Sylvia’s baby … ?’ Nanna breathed.
‘July,’ she said. Ray, a senior aircraftsman, was based in Kent and came home regularly on leave. Sylvia was expecting a child in July.
Nanna whispered, ‘You are going to be happy when it’s over. You’ve had your troubles. You’ve fettled ’em, our Lil!’ Isobel tried to hush her but she wanted to say more. ‘You’ll have your man and your house in the hills.’
‘Archerfield will go to Bobby, Nanna. He will have everything that was Magnus’s.’ The mill would be Bobby’s when he was twenty-one.
Isobel was salaried, a voting, working director of Hammond’s. Magnus’s father was going to work on, he said. He’d be like his own father before him and all the old millowners in Macclesfield. He’d die in harness.
Nanna lifted a pale little hand and patted the bed. ‘Lie down here, lass. Like when you were little–’
Isobel slipped off her slacks and climbed into bed beside Nanna. ‘I used to sigh, “A-ah! A-ah!”’ she said as she lay down.
‘And I’d say, “Is that you, our Lil?”’ Nanna gave a deep sigh.
‘And I’d get in and cuddle up to you, like this–’ Isobel said, and she slipped her arm around Nanna, moved closer and said, ‘I loved being with you, Nanna.’
But Nanna had gone.
One Sunday lunchtime, a month after Nanna died, Isobel cooked the Sunday dinner as she always did. They had roast pork, boiled potatoes and roast potatoes. They had tinned peas, there being no greens ready in June in Grandma’s garden – for Mrs Hammond – Grandma – had taken to the soil. Isobel had made apple pie and custard and all this because her in-laws had always eaten a roast on Sundays and always would.
After it was over and Mam returned to Lindow, they were all tired. Pop went for a lie-down in his room, Sylvia took Bobby up to bed with her for an afternoon rest and Grandma and Isobel collapsed into the wicker armchairs of the conservatory.
All the windows were crisscrossed with sticky tape in case of bomb blasts. It was cold, damp and stuffy. ‘Shall I open the door so we can breathe?’ Isobel asked.
Grandma said, ‘Yes,’ and when Isobel had done it, offered her a sherry and said, ‘Your mother does very well. All that work. And a husband in the asyl – Sorry, the mental hospital.’
There seemed no need to reply to this and Isobel took another sip of sherry as Grandma continued, ‘War brings the best out in people.’
What did she mean? ‘Why do you say that?’ Isobel said. ‘War has done nothing for me.’
‘Class divisions go in wartime,’ Grandma said. ‘Snobbery has gone.’
‘You never were a snob,’ Isobel said, at last daring to talk to her mother-in-law as an equal. ‘You used to terrify me. You said what you meant but you never put on airs about your connections and social ambitions.’
She laughed. ‘That’s because I’m Scottish. We don’t make the same distinctions in Scotland. We look up to people who work hard and achieve standing. We don’t admire people simply for being high-born.’
‘I think you’re right.’ Isobel was glad that at last they were becoming companionable and settled with one another. ‘I remember thinking when I was in Scotland that for the first time in my life nobody probed my background – nobody asked who my father was.’ She stopped abruptly. She had said too much. Grandma could have come back with, ‘And who was your father?’
But Grandma laughed. ‘There’s an old saying in Scotland we use if someone is getting too big for his boots.’
‘A man’s a man, for a’that?’ Isobel suggested.
‘No. We say, “Aye! I kent his faither!”’ She looked at Isobel‘s puzzled face and translated, ‘I knew his father.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, “I know who you are. You will never be other than your father’s child.”’
It was perhaps an innocent observation. It may have been tactless. But the relaxed feeling that had come to Isobel seconds ago was gone. Her nerves were on a knife’s edge. She jumped to her feet, threw the glass of sherry through the open door on to the grass and turned an angry face on her mother-in-law. ‘And what about me? What about Bobby? I never knew my father. Bobby will never know his. Where does that put us on your scale of values? Are we nobodies – because we don’t have fathers?’
The telephone started to ring, but before Grandma could go to pick it up or answer, Isobel stormed out, through the garden, down the path, hurrying to get away from her and all of the self-satisfied people at Archerfield. She ran as fast as she could, heading for the hills and a breath of clean, fresh air.
She was wearing only sandals and a print frock, but she would not go back to change. The heather would scratch her bare legs and she had no cardigan in case it went chilly, but on and on she went until, out of breath, out of practice and out of temper she reached the top of Kerridge Hill.
Below, all of Bollington lay dreaming in the heat. There were no signs of war from here. Few people walked in the hills these days, with the men gone and the constant need to be near to shelter.
She calmed down. She wished she hadn’t made an outburst. Grandma hadn’t meant to be hurtful. She was tactless and domineering but she had no ill-will towards Isobel. They all lived on their nerves, waiting for the next disaster to strike, waiting to hear what had happened to the men.
There had been no bombing raids for a week and everyone wondered if it could possibly be true that the tide of war was about to turn. A few days ago news had come through that Hitler had broken his pact with Stalin. He had turned on Russia. A hundred German divisions had smashed through the eighteen-hundred-mile border from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea.
Ray was safe. He had telephoned Sylvia only last night. But Isobel had not heard from Ian, and since Nanna died she had not been to church. But she prayed, on that warm hilltop, ‘Please God. Keep Ian safe. Please God. Keep Ian safe. Please God. Keep Ian safe …’ over and over. She didn’t need to embellish it or promise anything in return. Ian’s ship – a county cruiser whose name she dared not mention had been sent from the North Atlantic, with about a hundred others, to hunt and sink the Bismarck.
Now, the Bismarck – the unsinkable – was lying at the bottom of the Atlantic and they had heard no news of home
losses. There was no news of which ships were damaged and returning home, how many men were dead.
It was one o’clock. Isobel had time to walk over the hills towards the pine woods and Rainow. There was a taxicab climbing the hill below her, clanking its gears, disturbing the quiet. She got to her feet and started to walk over the Saddle on her favourite route.
She had been walking for half an hour and was nearing the pine woods when she stopped to take the Kirby grips out of her hair. She was warm. It would cool her to let her hair out of the confines of the roll she wore. She had shaken her dark hair out and put the precious Kirby grips into her pocket when she heard, ‘Isobel … ! Isobel … !’
For a terrible moment she thought she was having hallucinations – hearing voices from above. She was rooted to the spot. She dared not turn. Then it came, louder and clearer, ‘Isobel! Wait for me, Isobel!’
She wheeled round and saw him, running towards her, his naval uniform jacket flying open, his white cap in his hand. ‘Isobel … !’
Then they were in each other’s arms. Ian had his arms tight about her and their mouths were locked together in the kisses that made her faint with relief and love and the sweetness of his need of her.
He stopped for breath, laughed and took her by the hand. ‘Marry me?’ was all he said as they ran towards the pine woods.
‘Yes, oh yes,’ she said. And they were running deeper into the woods, into a little sheltered hollow where their canopy was a leafy green tracery against the blue of the sky and the ground below, the flattened brown bracken, dappled in sun and shade.
They dropped to their knees and held one another close out of sight of the world. Unseen but seeing he said again, ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Oh, yes. I wrote to you and–‘
Isobel got no further for his mouth was on hers again and he was struggling out of his jacket and putting it aside.
Then he stopped kissing her and held her a little way from himself and feasted his eyes before he put his hands on her breasts and pushed her away a little way.
Smiling at her he said, ‘Do you want me to … ?’
‘Yes.’ Isobel laughed a little before she kissed him on the mouth, the eyes, the neck.
‘Tomorrow …’ he said when she stopped for breath.
‘What? What tomorrow?’
‘I bought a special licence. We’re catching the early train to Edinburgh tomorrow.’
Isobel pressed her mouth over his again and he was laughing when she came up for air. He said, ‘We’re getting married at four o’clock on Tuesday. Rowena and her fiancée will be there. That’s all.’
Chapter Twenty-six
Macclesfield Arms Hotel, 1948
Last night I dreamed that Ian made love to me. It is a recurrent dream and the act of love is incomplete, as I am without him. The dream began with his calling to me from a far, far distance. ‘Isobel … Isobel … Isobel Leigh!’ He came striding across the saddle of Kerridge Hill, wearing the cord trousers and Fair Isle pullover he wore when he first kissed me.
I ran to him and we clung together for a moment before we sank to our knees on the grass in a passionate embrace, with his declaration of love whispering in the soft, heather-scented wind that played across our swaying bodies. ‘I love you. I love you, Isobel.’
I knew from the start that I was dreaming. I always know. I tell myself with my conscious mind when I am in the half-asleep state that is the dream’s precursor, ‘Stop this dream. There is no need to dream. Ian is your husband. Your past is done.’
But the subconscious always triumphs and I am back in my dream to the time when I was our Lil, the girl who had only a mam, trying to re-create myself as one of that breed of strong, unassailable north-country women who would never be bested or demeaned. But I needed a father for that creation. I had always needed a father to complete my dream. And I believed that I had never known my father. Such were my waking thoughts as I lay, half dreaming, in my bed at the Macclesfield Arms Hotel at the posh end of Jordangate, watching the breakfast maid pulling back the curtains.
‘Mornin’ Mrs Mackenzie,’ she said as she crossed the room to place the breakfast trolley at my bedside. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ and quickly she followed the observation with another, with true Macclesfield directness.
‘How long are you stopping?’
‘Another day, at least.’
When she left I got out of bed and went to the window to look at the hills beyond the District Bank and, craning my neck, at our old shop. And a little voice inside my head repeated, ‘You belong here. Macclesfield is where your heart lives. Don’t be influenced by a chance glimpse of Doreen yesterday. If you return, Doreen will have no part to play in your life.’
I had a good life; the life of a doctor’s wife in Edinburgh. The voice in my head said, ‘All that can change. The choice is yours.’
I sat at the breakfast trolley and poured a cup of tea. Tomorrow Ian and Bobby would arrive at the station. Mam, who lived with us in Edinburgh, had refused to come with them, saying she was afraid to return. She said, ‘I can’t go back to visit. Too much of my life has been spent there. I miss it. I’m homesick. I want my old life back.’ Her lovely face had been clouded.
I replied, ‘I wouldn’t stop you, Mam. But what is in Macclesfield for you now? My stepfather is dead. Nanna is dead. There’s nobody left.’
Mam had put an arm about Bobby and my son pressed himself against his beloved grandmother’s skirt. Bobby was as devoted to Mam as I had been to my Nanna. Mam said, ‘I can’t leave you. But I feel as if there’s a part of me that’s been torn out.’
I laughed and said, ‘Your heart?’, then wished I hadn’t, because I saw the yearning for something or someone in Mam’s eyes. So I said with brisk practicality, ‘I haven’t ruled it out. But you can always change your mind.’
‘I can’t,’ she said, as if a decision she once made had come home to haunt her.
‘Mam!’ I said, ‘You have nobody left in Macclesfield. Your family is here. And we want you to stay with us.’ But Mam had the haunted look when she waved me off.
The Macclesfield Arms faces the District Bank, and I could see two clerks arriving for work. Magnus’s father would be passing under my window soon, if he still worked at the bank on Fridays.
I buttered a piece of toast and went back to the window. On Monday Ian would have his interview at the new hospital that once was the Institute of Guardians; the workhouse. The National Health Service was crying out for doctors all over the country. Ian was certain to be offered a post and I had until Monday or Tuesday to decide whether our home was to be Edinburgh or Macclesfield.
Four days. And the decision was mine.
When I had eaten breakfast I had a bath, brushed my curly hair as Nanna used to do until it waved and loosened so I could fasten it in a chignon at the back of my head. Then I dressed, as yesterday, in the Parisian tangerine suit. I put on sheer nylon stockings that had a thin black seam and slipped on the black patent high-heeled shoes and finally pinned a black pill-box hat on top of my head, high and tall.
I liked what I saw in the long mirror when I was ready. I looked a picture of confidence and competence so why did I have this feeling that I was still the little girl everyone in Macclesfield knew as our Lil, the girl with no name, no father and no place in this ancient order?
I picked up my handbag and at ten-thirty left the hotel and crossed the road to the District Bank. The banking hall was busy with company clerks withdrawing cash for wages, as I used to do when I worked at Hammond’s Silks. I had not made an appointment, so I waited until the chief cashier looked up and recognised me, left his place and went through the door marked ‘Mr John Hammond’.
The door opened and Pop came out, his eyes alight with welcome, his beautiful voice soothing. He took my arm and led me into the office. ‘I had no idea. When did you arrive?’
‘Yesterday. I have some things to attend to in Macclesfield. Ian and Bobby are not coming until tomorrow so we
’ll come up to Archerfield and stay with you and Grandma. How is she?’
His lovely face broke into a smile though he said, ‘We’ve missed you. We miss Bobby dreadfully. Grandma hasn’t been the same since he went.’
‘Pop!’ I said quickly. ‘I went to the Town Hall yesterday. They want to pull down the Bollinbrook Road house. They are going to build an estate of new houses there. We’ve agreed a price, though we have no choice, really. They offered five hundred. So we will sell.’
‘You want the deeds?’
‘Yes. I want to take everything out of my safe deposit box. The deeds to Lindow as well. There’s a lot to do. The tenant isn’t satisfactory–’ He looked sad as I added, ‘We may sell Lindow.’
‘Your mother? Doesn’t she want to come back to us?’
‘Not unless I come home.’
I had said it. Home. It was not what I meant. I must keep my head, not be swayed by sentiment.
‘How’s Bobby?’ Pop said.
Trying to be calm and practical and do what was right for us all I smiled and said, ‘Splendid. He misses you. He’s been very excited knowing he’ll be seeing Pop and Grandma – and his cousin Judy. How’s Sylvia?’
Sylvia had given birth in 1941, to a healthy daughter. I said, ‘And how’s the mill?’
‘Sylvia is well. The mill isn’t working to capacity. Nowhere near. It would be sensible to join forces with Chancellor’s. Ray could take over Hammond’s Silks – if you were agreeable,’ he said. I still had a casting vote in the future of Hammond’s Silks, because it would one day be Bobby’s. He said, ‘We will have to have a family conference. You will represent Bobby‘s interests, of course.’
‘What are the options?’
‘We have two choices. British Nylon Spinners want to buy us out. Or we join forces with Chancellor’s Printworks.’
‘Oh.’ My mouth went tight at the corners. An obstinate frown crossed my brow. ‘Magnus wouldn’t have wanted that.’
‘He might have changed his mind, Isobel, if he’d seen how hard Ray works. He’s made a great success of Chancellor’s.’
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