Dear Hugo

by Molly Clavering

  She raised her eyebrows—they are very delicately pencilled dark ones—and murmured: “Such as Miss Bonaly?”

  It was the first faint glimmer of humour I had ever noticed in her, and I was delighted to know of its existence.

  “You aren’t robust enough for Miss Bonaly yet,” I told her. “But you would like the Drysdales and the Curries, and there is Mrs. Keith—”

  She wouldn’t commit herself, and I was not going to press the matter in case it stopped her rare visits to me. There would be time enough when she felt a little more settled and less at a loose end, to bring it up again.

  “How wily of you, Sara!” was Elizabeth Drysdale’s comment when I told her. “I should never have suspected you of having the wisdom of the serpent.”

  She had given me a lift back from morning church, and asked for Pam, sympathising with him over being left alone at home. I explained that he was spending the morning with Mrs. Kilmartin, to their mutual benefit, for his gay society was just what she needed.

  I was not very sure that I liked being told I was “wily”, and said so. Elizabeth only laughed.

  “Bring Mrs. Kilmartin to tea one day when you think she feels like a little mild society,” she said. “But don’t rush her, Sara. You were right to go slow. The poor woman must have had a ghastly life with her husband, and the worst of it is she will miss him all the more for having had to take care of him like that.”

  “It’s just the first step that is so difficult,” I said. “Once she starts seeing people it will be all right, but how to get her started I just don’t know.”

  A male voice from the back of the car said mildly, “If you two would stop playing destiny and leave things to sort themselves out, it would be a good thing.”

  We were so startled, having completely forgotten Lewis’s presence as he sat silent behind us, that I gave a squeak and Elizabeth swerved the car almost into the dry-stone dyke edging the road.

  “Mind the car!” shouted Lewis, startled in his turn.

  “The car? What about us?” I demanded indignantly.

  “Plenty of women—and far too many of them driving cars,” was his callous retort.

  For the moment we had forgotten Mrs. Kilmartin, and Elizabeth stopped at my gate while we were still arguing about women drivers. We all got out, because Elizabeth said it was preferable to be driven by Lewis to driving him in his critical mood, and while we stood there in the sunshine, Pam appeared round the corner of the house, prancing heraldically and waving something white in his mouth. Faint cries could be heard, of “Pam! Bring it here, good boy!” to which he paid no attention as he did his bull-fighting act, bull and torero in one, tossing his head and rolling his eyes.

  Just as Mrs. Kilmartin came running into view, Lewis grabbed Pam, and Elizabeth took the white scrap from his jaws.

  “He hasn’t torn it,” she announced, looking at it carefully.

  “It’s a little slicked, of course, but quite clean. What beautiful work! Is it yours?” she added, smiling at Mrs. Kilmartin, who had come to a sudden halt on seeing us all at the gate. I defy anyone to resist Elizabeth when she smiles at them so radiantly and warmly. Mrs. Kilmartin advanced a timid step or two, and nodded.

  “Yes, I did it,” she said.

  “Richelieu work—and so exquisitely fine I wish I could do anything as good,” said Elizabeth with the honest admiration of one good needlewoman for another’s work.

  Mrs. Kilmartin smiled, and I quickly made introductions. Elizabeth was far too sensible to say more than, “I’d like to see some other pieces that you have done, Mrs. Kilmartin,” but as they got into the car to drive off, Elise Kilmartin murmured, “I should be very pleased—”

  As for me, I wanted to throw my hat in the air and shout Hurrah, except that it was my new little white one, bought in honour of our French trip, and for a wonder, becoming. Just as well, perhaps, or the demonstration might have alarmed Mrs. Kilmartin and driven her back into solitude.

  I am sure that she and Elizabeth will meet again soon, and discuss whatever this embroidery is, and from that they will progress to other meetings. To know a family like the Drysdales will do Elise Kilmartin far more good than hobnobbing with another solitary female, don’t you think?

  *

  Dear Hugo, I am so glad that you enjoyed the tale of our travels, for I was a little afraid it might bore you. France is indeed a lovely land, much more so than one expects, somehow, and Atty is already wondering if we can go there again next year. But he agrees with me that our own country, and especially our own little bit of it, is quite as beautiful in an entirely different way.

  I am thankful every day that I am able to live in such lovely surroundings, and each morning I go out into the garden and lift up mine eyes unto the hills: the nearer ones which hem in our valley green with new grass and young bracken, and the far away heights violet-blue in the distance, and over them all, far and near, the wonderful play of light and shadow. Housework is shockingly delayed while I walk up and down the stone-flagged paths inspecting the new growth in the borders, for everything seems to shoot up inches overnight—including weeds, unfortunately! Tulips and pheasant’s-eye narcissus are flowering now, and the little rock-plants I put in last “back-end”, as they call autumn in Ravenskirk, are a blaze of colour—red saxifrages, blue and mauve and pink aubretias, yellow rock cress and white arabis, with the splendid deep blue gentian acaulis to add a stronger note among the pale shades. But my greatest interest is in watching the peas and beans and scarlet runners appearing in the vegetable patch. I am inordinately proud of these minute objects, because though I have quite a green thumb for flowers, I have never dealt with vegetables before. Atty makes anxious enquiries about their progress in every letter, with a view to eating them in the summer holidays, so I hope that marauding sparrows won’t do too much damage among them while they are so young and tender.

  Aunt Nettie finds me a puzzle and, I’m afraid, a trial. She cannot understand why I don’t employ a man to do the garden, and spend my time “like the other Ravenskirk ladies” in sewing and bridge, baking and tea-parties.

  “You could manage the house yoursel’ if you didna have all that howking and pruning to do,” she told me. “You’d just need me once a week then.”

  “But it would cost me more to pay the man,” I pointed out. “And I don’t like housework, but I do like gardening.”

  “Well, if you’re set on it, there’s no more to be said. And from what Madge tells me Mrs. Drysdale, she’s another like you,” said Aunt Nettie sadly.

  “If it’s too much for you to come here three days a week, Miss Marchbanks, I daresay I could get someone else—”

  Aunt Nettie mumbled something about having got the furniture and the brass right polished now, and not wanting to leave it for some careless body to get smeary again. She added darkly that she hoped Mrs. Drysdale was getting her money’s worth out of Madge.

  It was such a heavenly morning that I did not want to stand in the middle of the drawing-room (which looked as if we were about to move house, all the furniture piled up, pictures and curtains down; Aunt Nettie’s preparations for giving it a weekly “thorough”) and listen to her grumbling. I was impatient to be out in the sun with Pam.

  But when I looked at her, I suddenly saw that her grumbles were caused by worry, so I firmly took a chair which was perched forlornly upside down on top of another, righted it, and sat down, “What’s wrong, Miss Marchbanks? No, the room can wait perfectly well for five minutes while you tell me,” I said.

  “It’s Madge. She’s that restless and kind o’ unsettled,” Aunt Nettie replied gloomily.

  “Oh dear!” I said, feeling dismayed. All winter and spring Madge had seemed quite content with her daily work at Carmichael and the W.R.I. meetings and competitions, for all of which she entered impartially, whether they entailed growing a bowl of hyacinths or making an apron to cost not more than half a crown. I ought to have remembered that the W.R.I. closes down during the summer m
onths, and that Madge would find herself without scope for her too abundant energies.

  “Oh dear, Miss Marchbanks! Is she going out to dances again all over the place?”

  “No. It’s not that. It’s just—I ken she’s got something on her mind, she’s that restless.”

  I suggested rather feebly that Aunt Nettie might ask Madge to take her problem, whatever it was, to Elizabeth.

  “Mrs. Drysdale is both kind and sensible. I’m sure she will give Madge good advice,” I ended.

  “It’s you Madge wants to speak to,” Aunt Nettie replied. “She tellt me to ask could she come and see you this evening.”

  I felt that Elizabeth would be much better at this kind of thing than I should; and it was not just cowardice that prompted the feeling: but if Madge wanted to talk to me I could not refuse to listen. I told Aunt Nettie that of course Madge could come and see me that evening.

  “I said it would be all right,” was Aunt Nettie’s calm answer. “Eight o’clock, I said. You’ll have had your supper by then.” And added disarmingly: “Madge says you’re the one she kens best. She likes Mrs. Drysdale very well, but it was you that took her on first, and got her the job at Carmichael.”

  After that there was nothing to do but bow to the inevitable, and hope that I should not find Madge and her troubles too complicated.

  A long walk in the afternoon to clear my mind seemed to be indicated, so Pam and I set off up the burn by the hill path.

  I like to think of the many times Ivo and you must have walked this path, Hugo, round by the south of Windy Gans and over the ridge and the wide moss beyond into the next valley. It is not very clearly to be seen nowadays, though it must have been a wide and well-trodden way when it was the Garth road used by people on their way to and from church at Ravenskirk. Only a few people use it: a shepherd or two, men out shooting, and Pam and myself. Larks rose all round us, singing into the far blue above until they were tiny dark specks against it, and a cuckoo was calling steadily from a distant plantation, where the brilliant spires of larches stood out among the sober spruce firs. Soon the path climbed up beyond the trees and the green levels beside the water, and I was all among the rolling hills, where curlew wheeled above the rough grass and springy heather, uttering their wild lonely cries. This is part of the way I like best for its peaceful solitude, and I was selfishly indignant when I saw two figures, a man and a woman, coming down towards me.

  It was not long before I recognised the woman for Madge Marchbanks, but I did not know her companion, and before they had come near, he turned back and left her to approach me alone.

  With a sinking heart I realised that this was almost certainly the cause of Madge’s restlessness, It was bound to be a man! And looking at her as she walked down the rough winding path with the sunlight on her rosy face and fair uncovered head. I could see how attractive she must be, big and strong, yet so light on her feet, and with kindliness beaming from her brown eyes, so like a cow’s. . . .

  Pam abandoned his search for rabbits among the tall shafts of young bracken, and flew to meet her barking joyously, and she stooped to pat him, straightening with deepened colour in her cheeks as I said, “Good afternoon, Madge. I didn’t know you came home this way from Carmichael.”

  There is no guile in Madge. She answered at once: “Yon fellow from the Forestry asked me to take a walk with him, and he’d see me some of the way home.”

  (The Forestry Commission has a big camp in the valley a few miles beyond Carmichael, where plantations of conifers are springing up all over the bare hillsides.)

  “Oh!” I said rather baldly. It was difficult to know what to say.

  “I’m real glad I’ve met you, Miss Monteith,”—and she sounded honestly glad, too—“I was wanting to see you. Did Aunt Nettie tell you?”

  “Miss Marchbanks said you were coming up to Piper’s Cottage this evening.”

  “This’ll do as well, or better. It’s easier speaking outside,” said Madge.

  I turned, and we started walking slowly back down the long slope.

  “Was it about—about your friend in the Forestry that you wanted to talk to me, Madge?” I asked.

  She nodded. Her face grew still pinker as she said:

  “He’s wanting me to marry him.”

  “Thank goodness for that!” I thought.

  Aloud I said, “I see. Does he know about Helen?”

  “Ay. He says he doesn’t care. I told him how it happened, and he says it was just the War. Folk went kind of mad then, he says.”

  “Well—are you going to marry him? Do you care for him?” I felt like an inquisitor, but Madge does need someone to ask her these questions.

  “I—I dinna ken!” Madge burst out, and I knew by her broadened speech that she was agitated. “That’s the gospel truth, I just dinna ken! He’s a decent lad, an’ it’d mean a lot to be married, but—”

  I did not know what to say. Madge is the sort of person who can attach herself as easily as a dog to someone who is kind to her. And as she said, it would mean a lot to her to be married, more than to most girls. It would slam the door finally on her past indiscretion, and Helen would soon be just the eldest of a brood of children; but it was fairly obvious that she felt no more than a mild liking at present for “the fellow in the Forestry.”

  “I wonder what your Aunt Nettie would think,” I said at last.

  “Aunt Nettie’d be thankful to see me married. She’s said that often enough,” Madge answered with a rueful laugh. “But it’s her I’m thinking of. She’s been that good to me, Miss Monteith, and he’ll not be long here now, they’re shifting him to the North. It would mean leaving her by Lea lane, for I’ll never go without wee Helen—”

  This was a complication with a vengeance. I did not know how Miss Marchbanks would exist without “wee Helen”, whom in her grim way she adored.

  “Madge, it’s very difficult for you,” I said. “But not so difficult as if you were really fond of this man. Because you aren’t, are you?”

  “I like him well enough—”

  “I don’t know that that is enough for marriage,” I said.

  With another of her outbursts of honesty, Madge said, “I’ve never liked any lad the way I did wee Helen’s father!”

  The cry came straight from her heart. “If that is how you feel, Madge, don’t marry this other man. Wait until you meet someone you can feel like that for,” I said.

  “I doubt I never will. I doubt I’ll just need to be an old maid,” said Madge sadly.

  “Old maid” hardly seemed the right term, but I did not raise the point. I only said, with a glance at her blooming looks, that I thought she had plenty of time.

  We were at the little back gate into my garden by that time, and we stood for a moment.

  “Thank you, Miss Monteith,” Madge said with earnest gratitude. “I’ll just do what you say. Good afternoon.”

  She went away down the road towards the village, leaving me a prey to all sorts of doubts. Should I have given Madge such definite advice? It is a risky matter to try to play providence, and good intentions are proverbially dangerous. I very nearly ran after her to tell her to do what she thought best, and pay no attention to me, but I didn’t. I would only have made her more muddled than ever. Poor Madge. I don’t believe anyone has ever given her credit for being genuinely and lastingly fond of her soldier lover who left her to bear his child and the disapproval of her neighbours alone. Not that he could have helped it, I suppose, if his regiment was moved; but he could have come back when the War ended, unless he was killed. What a muddled affair life can be!

  CHAPTER XIII

  JUNE, 1952

  Dear Sir, in answer to your kind enquiries—

  (a)—Mrs. Kilmartin has been to lunch at Carmichael (a family party) and to tea at Ladymount. I took her there, and she enjoyed it, and really appreciated Mrs. Keith.

  (b)—Madge appears to have dismissed her swain, who has gone to Inverness, and settled down again. She has tak
en up tatting in a big way, as a new outlet. I really mean tatting, and you have no idea, unless you saw it, what pretty and delicate edgings it makes for handkerchiefs and collars. I foresee that everything small enough in the Marchbanks’ cottage will be tatted to its last available inch.

  (c)—I have not seen Major Whitburn for several weeks, which accounts for my not having mentioned him in recent letters. I think he has been away.

  (d)—Atty is flourishing and playing cricket very seriously. He has developed into a slow left-hand bowler—or something equally cryptic and important. I am not well up in cricket, but will have to learn something about it before I go to Edinburgh to take him out. The duties of an aunt are many and varied, far more so than I had ever imagined. What with birds and cricket, the intricacies of Rugby football and the latest in jet planes, I am hard put to it not to disgrace myself, or worse still, Atty. I came out rather well over Latin, though. The modern young do not seem ever to have heard of those nonsense verses in Latin which delighted our simple childish minds. Do you remember the rolling periods of the one about “forty buses in a row”? I wrote it out for Atty, half-afraid that he might consider it beneath contempt, but no. He was just as pleased with it as I was in my day, and took it back to school “to get a rise out of some fellows who think they know everything,” as he observed darkly.

  “Sabile, sabile, eres ago

  Fortibus es in aro

  Nobile, nobile, themis trux

  Se vaticinem, pes an dux.”

  Your letter sounds a trifle plaintive where you say that I tell you hardly anything about myself, but I am sure the personal pronoun is constantly appearing. A long tale of nothing except Sara Monteith, beautiful and talented though she is, would make rather dull reading, and I come into my letters quite enough. Besides, you know, “the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.” Not that I consider my quiet life uneventful, for plenty of things happen in a small way, and if not actually to me, I have an excellent ringside seat, so to speak, and can see it all at close quarters.