‘She’s no’ at her school the day, then?’ Uncle Hugh spoke for the first time.
‘You can see that she’s no’,’ Liza answered shortly.
‘She’ll never be a scholar.’ Grandfather’s paper rustled in sharp agreement with Uncle Hugh. But Grandmother had returned, filling the kitchen with her tall self, and darkening the sun each time she passed the window.
‘Come in about to the table now.’ And soon Grandmother was throwing all Liza’s careful forewarnings to the wind: ‘Sup up now, Janie. Just you blow on your broth if it’s a bit on the hot side. There’s plenty more where that came from. Sup up, now. Never mind your Mother nudging you under the table there. Your belly maun be gey teem after your travel.’ Grandmother’s voice rose roughly and comfortably. Soon Grandfather and the uncles would go out to Laveroch Wood with their horses, leaving a legacy of freedom behind them. Freedom to explore the milk house, dark and cool, with its great stone slabs, its bowls of yellow cream, basins of brown hens’ eggs and green ducks’ eggs, its pale, shining rhubarb laid out on green leaves; its smell of an imprisoned summer, grass and clover and cold well water.
Freedom to peep into the ‘best’ room, curtained against the light of day, its willow-pattern plates behind doors of glass, its chairs standing as if they had stood so for a hundred years. The piano that set up a quivering wail of protest when you ever so quietly pressed one of its yellow keys, and all the whiskered men and ringleted ladies on the photographs above stared down in silent reproach. ‘When Grandmother first got the piano,’ Liza once told Janie, ‘she was so excited about it till Grandfather and the men came home at night to carry it into the house. She sat and played it under the trees; all the woodworkers got great fun out of that, but Grandmother didn’t care, and she sat and played all afternoon. We children thought the world had come to an end, it was such an odd thing for Grandmother to do. She was always so tall and strict and busy.’
Janie loved this picture of her Grandmother. Her piano had known the wood once and had made music for it. Now the wood was shut out with great, green curtains, and the piano had grown grumbling and old.
The uncles looked as if they would sit forever, till Grandmother got her broom and furiously swept amongst their feet. Her busyness shamed the long men into going. Their going stirred up the quick smell of fir resin and loam. For a moment the kitchen might have been Laveroch Wood itself.
‘I’m away to throw the hens some corn,’ Grandmother said casually. ‘I’ll maybe have a look in-bye the black pig too. Anybody like to come?’
Janie jumped at the invitation. Inside the house Grandmother was old and very wise, knowing the best cure for this ailment, and the worst weather for that ailment. Knowing what Paul had said to the Corinthians. And what someone ought to say very soon to that Geordie Scobie for underpaying country folk and overcharging town folk for their eggs. Outside the house was a different matter altogether. No ailments existed round the garden, out by the steading or in the wood. No one cared what Paul had said to the Corinthians. According to Grandmother when she got outside, Paul had once said something quite different:
Paul said and Peter said
And all the saints alive and dead
Swore she had the sweetest head,
Bonnie, bonnie Bride of the yellow, yellow hair.
Grandmother knew that the secret of her other self was safe in the keeping of the black pig and Janie. Neither of them thought it in any way odd for Grandmother to kilt up her apron and trip sedately round the sty to her own singing:
And she slept for a hundred years,
Years, years.
And she slept for a hundred years,
A hundred years.
Till Prince Charming came and kissed her
Long ago.
They stepped easily into this other world, the child and the Grandmother. Pondering over a new word for meadow. Muskoday. Musk in the garden now. And small, yellow musk roses waiting to come in summer. High afternoon, the stable doors open, the stables empty. No great, black wood horses there now, to flick their tails, and stamp their feet, and roll their wild and searching eyes round a visitor. The whitewashed byre, dark stone drinking troughs. An intruding hen whirred out of her nest in the manger, cackling her resentment, and rousing the sleeping afternoon. ‘We’ll go in-bye now,’ Grandmother said, ‘I’ll make a baking of scones for our tea. You can have a hot one with milk. Hot scones are ill for the belly they say, but I never died of eating one yet. And, for an ill thing, a hot scone’s got an unco fine taste.’
The bellows roared the fire into redness. Grandmother, huge and hurried in her white baking apron, had become old and wise again. Aunt Morag, still and quiet by the window, shaded her face with her thin hands and lifted her damp hair from her forehead. Only her eyes had life in them. Blue. Like the sharp blue flames that shot up through the fire, when Grandmother threw salt in it to guard against ill luck. The firelight glimmered along the brass work on Aunt Morag’s treasure chest.
‘Can I see all your treasures again, Aunt Morag?’ Grandmother coughed harshly through Janie’s sudden request. Liza creaked in her chair, and mentioned some flower that Janie had yet to see. ‘Please, Aunt Morag, just one more look.’
Aunt Morag smiled her first, small smile. Her eyes became more brightly blue, her great box creaked open, lovingly and separately she took out its contents, holding them up against the light of the sun. Beads that flashed. Scent bottles blue and green and yellow, their scent remaining forever secret. Books with vivid jackets, pencils, and the blue bird brooch with pearls flashing on its wings. Soon the table was as crowded and coloured as the stalls in the Green. ‘I only want the blue bird brooch,’ Janie thought, staring at them all. ‘Just the blue bird brooch, but if I don’t get that, I’d like anything else at all.’
‘Get that litter off the table, Morag,’ Grandmother commanded, roughly and fiercely. ‘I want to get the tea set up.’ Janie watched Aunt Morag return each treasure to its own corner of the box, her face pink, her eyes triumphant. The lid clanged down with ominous finality. And Janie’s hopes clanged with it. Aunt Morag looked white once more, her hair damper than ever, and her eyes sought and held the window again.
Grandmother’s voice sounded fiercer than ever: ‘Heaven only knows why you keep tormenting yourself with that box, bairn. You know fine there’s nothing in it to spare for you. Or for anyone else. Come on and see if Grandmother’s got something for you. And it’s high time you were getting out of the sun for a while, Morag, you’re taking up all the light.’
Grandmother wheeled Aunt Morag into a corner, the geraniums stood revealed now, on the white window-sill, the light caught and danced across the row of Aunt Morag’s medicine bottles. Janie turned and followed Grandmother, not even worried about the sharp, sly kick Liza gave her in passing. Aunt Morag was in disgrace. And Janie was glad.
‘Haste ye back now, soon,’ Grandmother’s voice came to them all the way past Butcher’s Broom. Liza lit up her pipe with a great sigh of relief. It was good to be going back to the Lane again. Grandmother’s country was frightening in the dusk. Wheeling curlews cried out in their loneliness. Wood cushats grumbled in their sleep, flapping crows screamed in last angers. Janie ran on in front to have a Think, and having thought, relayed it all to Liza:
‘Mam, I wish the man that owns Woolworth’s would give me the biggest sack in the world, and let me choose all the things I wanted off his counters. I’d fill the sack as full as anything. With beads and books and scent and things. I’d show every one of them to Aunt Morag. Then I’d put them all back in my sack again and not give her one thing. That’s an awful good Think, isn’t it?’
Liza took the pipe from her mouth and stared at Janie. ‘That’s just about the wickedest Think I’ve ever heard tell of,’ she said. ‘Just the wickedest. If Grandmother knew you’d think like that, she’d never give you eggs and butter and jam to take home with you again.’
‘But that’s what Aunt Morag does to me,’ Janie
insisted.
‘Nothing of the kind, Janie,’ Liza said with finality. ‘Your Aunt Morag’s a chronic invalid. Don’t you forget that.’ Liza put her pipe in her mouth again, the smell of it rose homely and comfortingly in the air. The lights of Kinloch Station twinkled in the distance. Janie was glad there was enough money to take the train home.
six
THE morning after the visit to Grandmother possessed no time in its own right. It became this time yesterday on the road to Grandmother’s house, or this time tomorrow when I’m back at school, and my name’s on the register again. It became any time at all, except its immediate, worrying self.
‘Janie had a bad cold and couldn’t come to school,’ Liza scribbled hurriedly. That this was a lie didn’t worry Janie. That Teacher would know it was a lie worried her exceedingly.
‘Hurry up, Janie. You’ll be late today, as well as absent yesterday.’ Liza, too, had morning-after regrets. ‘Take this rhubarb in-bye to Betsy in your passing. We haven’t got the right pot for it. Get a move on. It’s nearly ten to nine. And don’t be standing there sniffing at the rhubarb. It hasn’t got any smell.’
But it had. A smell of yesterday. Of Grandmother’s milk house. A small, intangible smell of far-off safety.
The line to Teacher lay on a corner of her table. Janie kept her eyes fixed on High Summer, the huge painting on the opposite wall. Staring at it with the desperate single-mindedness of shutting out all other sights. Especially the line to Teacher on the corner of the table. Any moment now, Miss Sim would say:
‘Janie MacVean, take this line to the Headmaster.’
High Summer, blazing down from the wall, withheld the moment in a great maze of greenery.
A voice more ominous than the voice of Miss Sim broke through High Summer. Janie saw the startling figure of Nurse Conduit in the doorway, her list of Names To Be Examined in her hand.
Janie’s first impulse was to shoot her hand up in the air: ‘Please, Miss Sim, may I leave the room?’ And rush through the door and away out of the school-gates altogether. But that means of escape from Nurse would have been too obvious. It wouldn’t have worked.
Other means of escape crowded swiftly in on Janie. It wasn’t Nurse Conduit who stood in the doorway at all. It was Mr. Thompson, the Headmaster, smiling and hurried. ‘Excuse me, Miss Sim,’ he said, ‘but I would like to speak to my daughter for a moment, if you don’t mind.’
‘Certainly, Mr. Thompson,’ Miss Sim replied, all pink and puzzled. ‘Children, the Headmaster would like to speak to his daughter. Where is she?’
Everybody got a great surprise to discover that Janie was really the Headmaster’s daughter all the time. Especially Gertie. She just stared with her mouth open when Mr. Thompson put his arm round Janie’s shoulder and led her away, saying very loudly: ‘Janie, my dear.’
Now it was Grandmother, dressed in her Sunday clothes, who strode through the doorway, tut, tut, tutting Nurse and Miss Sim out of the way and making straight for Janie’s desk, singing as she had sometimes sung in the black pigsty:
Off we’ll go to London Town,
Yo Ho, my lads. Yo Ho, my lads.
We’ll see the King wi’ the golden crown,
Yo Ho, my lads. Yo Ho, my lads.
Not knowing that this was just Grandmother’s way, everybody in the class would think that Grandmother was really going to see the King and taking Janie with her. In her Sunday clothes Grandmother looked as if she could go anywhere at all.
‘Janie MacVean.’ It was Nurse Conduit’s voice that dispelled all images of escape. At least, thought Janie, as she walked forward to join the group of children on the floor, my frock’s still clean from yesterday. So is my bodice. And I haven’t got knickers to worry about. But I’ve still got nits in my hair. Nurse Conduit will be sure to find them. She always bone-combs my hair so well. She just flicks her fingers through other folks’ heads. Lucky other folk, Janie thought, as she watched Connie Morne and Isla Skea and Shona Coolin, whispering and laughing easily together, enjoying Nurse’s visit as a break in lessons. Shona Coolin, that’s a lovely name for such a horror to have. She never once lends me her rubber. My name’s Shona too. My real name. Only it’s Grandmother’s name as well. But Grandfather will never let us use it. So I’ve got to be called Janie instead. It’s the English name for mine. Janie. A terrible name.
‘Gertie Latham.’ Nurse Conduit’s voice brought a gleam of comfort. Janie wouldn’t, now, be de-loused alone. More, they both had the secret of ‘nits’ to keep together from the rest of the children.
‘It isn’t fair,’ Janie confided to Gertie later, ‘everybody in the class must know that we’ve got nits. That stuff Nurse put on our heads smells terrible. It makes my head itch all over. And I think I’ll kill that Connie Morne if she goes on sniffing the smell out loud and laughing and whispering about us.’
It was a mystifying day. Nurse hadn’t given Janie a note to take home to her Mother. ‘And that’s a funny thing, Gertie. Because you’ve got one. And I always get one too.’
Nor was any word spoken about the line for being absent. Not even by the Headmaster when he came into the classroom. He seemed quite unaware of the existence of his ‘daughter’. The news he brought was momentous.
‘You all belong to a city with the oldest and loveliest Cathedral in Scotland. I’d like to discover just how much you all know about the subject. To the pupil who writes the best essay on the Cathedral, I’m going to award a prize of one shilling. Find out all you can about it. Better still, go down to see it, and tomorrow you’ll write your essays.’
‘That bob’s mine for certain,’ Janie informed Gertie, without conceit. ‘My Mam knows everything about history, if I can just catch her in the mood for telling.’
Liza was in the mood for telling. ‘We’re off to see some old friends of ours. Quiet folk down-bye,’ she said cryptically to Poll, as herself and Janie walked through the causeway. ‘You see, the dead that lie in the Cathedral are awful quiet folk, Janie,’ she explained, twinkling, when they were out of Poll’s hearing. ‘But of course we don’t tell Poll that, we just leave her guessing.’
Janie had often seen the Cathedral looming darkly through the trees. It stood close by the Green. In summer charabancs drew up in front of it. Flower-frocked women stared at it from beneath large hats, clicked their cameras, and made their way to the fair on the Green. Old women of the city drowsed beneath the Cathedral’s trees. They knew every inch of the Green and every aspect of the Cathedral, and the time for staring at both was over. Old men pottered and bent amongst the Cathedral’s tombstones, then they too sheltered and slept beneath its trees. In Janie’s mind the Cathedral was a resting place for the old, and a thing of curiosity for the stranger. Until now. Until Liza gave it a vivid, personal life of its own, and Janie began to see it through her Mother’s most curious eyes.
‘The Wolf of Badenoch, swooping down from the high hills behind Forres. The clang of his horses’ hoofs ringing on the cobbles, wakening the sleeping townsfolk and sending them scurrying out into the streets, curious and frightened. Their curiosity diminished but their fear heightened when they saw the flames rise red and high from the airt of the Cathedral. The whole town was aglow, Janie. Everybody in the world must have known where our town lay, with the red sky of fire that was above it. Quiet monks in brown cassocks chanting their queer, Latin words on this very spot, maybe. Hearing the nearing noise of the Wolf and his men. But like as not the monks had gone on singing till they came to the end of their song. The burning torches, the flash of skean dhus, the cries of the wounded, an old monk hiding beneath a tree, watching the Cathedral blacken and crumble and fall all round him, knowing that it would be built again, but he would be too old to have part in it again. And unco sad in heart at the knowing. The plunder over, the destruction done, the Wolf of Badenoch clattering out of the town again. His loot lighting up the darkness; golden chalices and silver crucifixes. Townsfolk lurking in the shadows, crossing themselves at the
devilish departure of holy things. And, mind you, Janie, I’ve not got muckle meed for Popish things. But it was the first, old faith of our land. Though your Grandfather will never allow mention of that. His religion lay in a chield by name of John Knox. Him that put the clampers down on Mary Queen of Scots. She was Queen of Bonnie France. But that’s a story for some other time. And, Papes or no Papes, the monks were fine craftsmen. You’ve only got to look at this Cathedral to see the truth of that. They gave our Lane its name too. Our Lady’s Lane. They must have walked through it often, and been byordinar fond of it, to give it a name like that. You wouldn’t think it to see the Lane now. But maybe it was all different four hundred years ago.’
‘It’s different sometimes now,’ Janie remembered. ‘But you’ve got to see it early in the morning, when it’s all misty, to catch the difference.’
‘Just one last thing,’ Liza said, as they made their way out of the Cathedral, through the tombstones. ‘It’s hard to tell whether the Bishops and Archbishops all lying here were good men or bad, because all that’s told about them is written in Latin. But here’s a stone that I like. Everybody can understand it. Listen to it, Janie:
Here lies Martin Elginbrod,
Have mercy on my soul, Lord God,
As I would have, were I Lord God,
And You but Martin Elginbrod.
The White Bird Passes Page 6
