Rich Girl, Poor Girl

by Eileen Ramsay

‘Poor Rose,’ said Lucy. ‘Poor Kier,’ she whispered. ‘We were never lovers, Rose. I loved Kier and once, a long long time ago, I thought I was in love with him too, but I wasn’t, Rose, and he was never in love with me. He loved you, or he would have if you had let him.’

  ‘Oh, excuse me. Now you’re the great psychiatrist too. Well, I did let him love me,’ said Rose, deliberately misunderstanding the sense of what Lucy was saying, ‘so much so that I’m going to have his child.’

  There, she had said it. The words hung in the air between them as they stared at one another. Lucy recovered first.

  ‘Oh, Rose, that’s wonderful; that’s the best of all good news.’ She started up from her chair, her hands outstretched.

  Rose ignored the gesture and leafed through her file. ‘Is it?’ She had not meant to be so blunt, so unnecessarily cruel. What devil got into her sometimes? ‘I’m glad you’re pleased, Lucy. I hope Kier’s mother will be . . .’

  Lucy stared at her incredulously. ‘You haven’t told her . . . but this will . . .’

  ‘Make her accept me . . .’

  ‘Make it easier to bear, Rose.’

  ‘I have ambivalent feelings, Lucy. I almost aborted, you know. A baby, the result of . . . Then, I thought, it might help . . . but that’s hardly fair to the baby. Let’s just say that I left it too long and now it’s too late. A child has no real place in my life, my career. How can I go on with my work with a child? Every day I see or hear of more people who need us. I shall have this child . . . but as soon as I am physically able, I shall be back at work.’

  She left the room and went to her own office, calling to their receptionist on the way.

  As usual the morning passed so quickly that she had no time to think of anything but the needs of others. At lunchtime she found herself walking smartly along the High Street to Draffens where she bought a coat. It was a lovely coat, soft blue wool beautifully cut into a body-skimming line; it was not a widow’s coat.

  ‘Would madam like to try it?’ asked the puzzled assistant.

  ‘No, thank you. Wrap it, please. I’ll take it with me.’

  Outside in the street she waited patiently in the line for the tram and, carrying her parcel, made her way to the Hilltown.

  She stood in the street outside the closie where Ma and Frazer and Lindsay and Murray and the others had all lived. People looked at her strangely – she was so very well dressed – but passed on. She held on to the coat, Ma’s coat, a much better one than the coat Frazer had bought . . . oh, so many years ago. But Ma was dead, dead from too much work and too little food and from damp and, oh yes, from her way of life, but most especially from despair.

  A woman approached her. ‘Can I help ye, missus?’ The voice was quiet and solicitous; obviously the speaker wanted only to help.

  Even in the depths of despair Rose recognized the qualities in the voice. ‘Typical Dundee,’ she thought. ‘Why have I abandoned my own people for so long?’ She looked at the stranger with a doctor’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, you can help me, you can accept this coat.’ The woman looked at her warily. ‘I bought it for someone who lived up that closie – Elsie Nesbitt, but she’s been dead for years.’

  ‘Elsie?’ The woman’s face was an artist’s study of joy, but still she did not hold out her hands to receive the parcel. ‘Hell, I kent Elsie fine. Grand woman. One o’ her bairns took to the doctoring, would you believe? There was a big joke wi’ Elsie. All her bairns was cried efter the faither, Frazer, Lindsay . . . except for that wan. She was Rose. Never kent why. Maybe Elsie liked roses.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Rose. ‘Will you take this?’

  The woman took the parcel. It would probably never be worn by her; it might change hands in a pub up the Hilltown or be sold in a pawnshop – there were plenty of them on the very street where they stood – but that didn’t matter. Somehow a little of the debt was paid, but there was still so much to pay and the safe birth of this baby was the first step.

  ‘You had better be a boy,’ said Rose as she hailed a cab.

  *

  Frazer Lucille Anderson-Howard was born in her godmother’s private room at the Dundee Royal Infirmary.

  ‘It’s a beautiful name for a beautiful baby,’ sighed Lucy as she gazed in rapture at the perfection of the tiny hands. ‘Frazer?’ She dared not ask, but allowed her voice to rise a little.

  Rose lay back against the white pillows. She had been surprised at the powerful feelings that had surged through her when the tiny scrap was put into her arms. Never demonstrative, she had felt an almost uncontrollable desire to cover the tiny face with kisses; almost, but not quite.

  ‘Kier would have wanted a boy,’ she said.

  Lucy wanted to protest, to say that Kier would have been delighted with his daughter, but she said nothing.

  ‘Not Frazer,’ said Rose.

  ‘Not Lucille, but something nice, a good name to grow up with.’

  ‘Frazer Lucille, on papers, but I’m going to call her . . . Robin.’

  Lucy looked down at her face. ‘Welcome, Robin,’ she said and she held out her hand and touched the tiny infant. To her delight, Miss Anderson-Howard gripped the finger held out to her and, though she did not know it, in that spontaneous action she had forged a bond with Lucy that nothing would ever break.

  Rose laughed. ‘You look positively maternal, Lucy. You should have had her, not me.’

  Lucy’s thoughts went back to the awful panic of the days following her Italian holiday. A baby. Max’s baby. Kier’s baby.

  ‘I would have liked to have had a child,’ she admitted. ‘I can only hope you will let me share your daughter a little.’

  ‘You may share with pleasure, Godmama, you and her besotted grandmother.’ She hesitated, just a fraction. ‘I have already engaged a competent nursemaid . . . They’ll stay in the flat at Laverock Rising. Kier’s mother will be there constantly and we . . . well, there are weekends.’

  ‘Oh, Rose,’ Lucy began to protest and then thought better of it. She had no right to tell Rose how to bring up her own child. ‘You won’t be able to give her up to a nanny, Rose.’

  But Rose was able. Within the month she was back in her consulting rooms and her daughter was safely ensconced in the light, airy nursery where her father had spent his infancy and where the young Kier and the young Lucy had forged their friendship. Lucy asked as often as she dared about the baby’s progress.

  ‘You must visit her for yourself, Lucy. She is, after all, your goddaughter.’

  And so began the Sunday afternoons, the times that were to become for Lucy the highlight of her busy week. She took the train from Dundee to Leuchars where Rose’s smart new car met her to take her to the house. She lunched with Rose in the dining room where she had so often sat with Kier and his parents and then Miss Robin was brought down, starched and laced, to see her adoring public. It did not seem to Lucy that Rose adored the baby – she rather laughed at Lucy’s infatuation – but Lucy was content to admire the child and to talk to her and even sometimes in fine weather to take her out in the gardens.

  Kier’s mother was almost always there. She seemed to have called a truce with her daughter-in-law, for nothing would keep her from her granddaughter.

  ‘Stupid name, Frazer,’ she told Lucy. ‘Why Frazer? If she had to give the child a man’s name . . .’

  ‘It’s a family name, I think, and really it’s not important, darling.’

  ‘Why not Kier?’

  They were silent, and Lucy looked at Kier’s mother and saw that the baby’s coming had not worked the miracle for which she had hoped. She was trying hard and she adored the baby, but her heart was broken.

  ‘I’m beginning to see him everywhere, Lucy, especially here. I turn round and he’s teasing me from behind a hedge, or I hear him calling from the stables. Why did he go? He was too old. Different if he’d stayed in, but suddenly to enlist like that and then . . . the Somme, . . . so
many, Lucy, so many. You’ll see that things are done . . . our way, Kier’s way, won’t you?’

  Lucy was embarrassed. ‘Her mother knows what Kier would have wanted, and you’ll be here . . .’

  ‘I won’t. God knows I want to watch this baby, but I’ll never see 1918.’

  She caught a cold in October 1917. She had been playing with her granddaughter in the garden, which was so lovely in its autumn colours, so lovely but so cold. The cold developed into pneumonia.

  ‘She didn’t even try to fight,’ wept old Baxter. ‘I never knew an Anderson-Howard that wouldn’t fight.’

  21

  France, 1918

  ROSE THOUGHT IT might have been easier to bear if Robin had not looked quite so much like Kier. The little girl became more and more like her father as she changed from mewling infant to rounded baby. By the time she was eight months old she was crawling around the floor, lifting a gummy grin to her mother on Rose’s infrequent visits, and by her first birthday she was hauling herself upright by whatever means she could and taking brave steps into the unknown. She attempted to use her first Christmas tree, ablaze with flickering candles and bedecked with gaily wrapped parcels, as an aid to walking, but luckily the faithful Sarah was there to rescue and to scold her and to tell Dr Nesbitt, Mrs Anderson-Howard, that they could not possibly have a lit Christmas tree this year, not with Miss Robin trying to walk.

  Rose, who had never experienced Christmas until she married Kier, had shocked Sarah by ordering the Christmas tree to be set up instead in her private sitting room where no one and certainly not – and this according to Mrs Anderson-Howard’s strict orders – Miss Robin was ever allowed.

  Sarah, of course, turned a blind eye to the number of times Dr Nesbitt lifted the sleeping child from her crib in the beautifully appointed nursery and carried her off. It was hardly a nurserymaid’s place to reprove her mistress for waking her own child from her sleep. And so Robin’s first real Christmas found her sitting, as midnight and Father Christmas approached, on her mother’s exquisitely tailored tweed lap in Mummy’s sitting room, watching the candlelight dancing on the tree.

  ‘Your father was such an idiot about Christmas,’ Rose whispered into the child’s black curls. ‘He told me he believed in Santa Claus and he said that if I was a good girl I should have everything I asked Santa to bring. I asked for diamond bracelets and they were there, every Christmas, and Daddy asked for a fat little baby with black curls and Santa Claus never brought him his present. But now you’re here, Miss Anderson-Howard, and Daddy is singing carols lustily with all the other angels. Can you hear him? He sings so dreadfully, but he played the piano beautifully. Perhaps a nice old angel has taught him to play Christmas carols on a celestial harp. I doubt that even an angel could teach him to sing.’

  Robin nuzzled against her mother’s blouse and, half asleep and half awake, listened to the soft Scottish voice.

  ‘I was not a good wife to your daddy, little lambie. He really loved Aunt Lucy’ – Robin smiled at the only word she recognized – ‘but he was so gallant, he thought I was a poor little frail creature to be cherished and he mistook that for love . . . And I? Oh, Robin, did I lose the ability to love in the closies up the Hilltown? No, I loved him. How could I not love someone so good and kind? Your Uncle Frazer was just such a man; he sacrificed everything for me. And then there was this old classics teacher. I called him Wishy. He taught me Latin and Greek and never asked a thing in return, and that’s why we’re having this wee chat, lambie. I need to pay a debt, Robin, to Daddy and Uncle Frazer and Aunt Lucy – poor Aunt Lucy. She never married, Robin, because I stole her love. He should have married Aunt Lucy years ago, and they should have had half a dozen bairns to fill this house.’

  The baby yawned and then slept and Rose looked down at the little face with the dark curling lashes. ‘If I’d known what joy a bairn could bring, I’d have had you long ago, but you did get in the way, Robin. You see, I’m a doctor. I take care of the sick; that’s all I ever wanted to do. It was like the visions the knights in armour are supposed to have had, me – wee Rosie Nesbitt from a closie up the Hilltown – caring for the sick. And I did it. I’ve made a difference. If I died today I could say, “My life made a difference.” I’m going away, Robin. There’s a horrid war going on. It killed your daddy and it’s killing other people every day and every night. There’s a lovely old convent in France. Daddy and I went there on our honeymoon. What’s left of it is a hospital, and I am going there to work until the war is over. You will stay with Sarah, and Aunt Lucy will come to see you often. Won’t that be nice?’

  Aunt Lucy did not think so. She was aghast at the thought of a young mother going off to work at the Front.

  ‘How can you leave her, Rose? It’s totally unsuitable. A baby needs her mother.’

  ‘Robin needs Sarah, who feeds her and keeps her clean.’

  ‘And loves her? Who could love her like a mother?’

  ‘You, Lucy. And Sarah.’

  ‘Oh, Rose, it’s not the same thing.’ For the first time she broke her self-imposed rule. ‘Kier would never have approved.’

  Rose laughed. ‘You must feel really strongly. I have to do it, Lucy, and it’s done: I leave for France on Friday. And I’m not an angel of mercy; it’s miles from any battlefield, but it’s just more immediate help than I’m giving here, more . . .’ She wanted to say reparation, but she couldn’t say that to Lucy, to anyone but her small daughter who could not understand.

  ‘I signed over the estate to Kier’s daughter as soon as she was born,’ she went on, ‘and so, should anything happen, there will be no problems.’ She got up abruptly and began to pace the room. The first flush of enthusiasm was over and the reality of what she had decided to do was making itself felt. She was going into a war zone, she could be killed. ‘I want you to take care of Robin if anything goes wrong. Make the decisions for her future that Kier would have made.’ She stopped as Lucy made a gesture towards her and she turned away from the desk. ‘I see dirt and disease every day. This should not be very much different.’

  *

  But it was. Rose had seen mangled bodies before, but usually one at a time. And it had not been huge pieces of flying metal that ripped flesh from bone or limb from body. She had listened before to the groans or screams of injured men, women in advanced stages of difficult delivery, abused children – but this noise, this constant screaming of men, of shells, the staccato drumbeat of death dealing bullets . . .

  ‘I can’t think in this noise,’ she said to a French nun, Mère Dolle.

  ‘The silence is more frightening. In the convent silence was welcome, a chance to offer up the whole mind and heart. Here, if there is silence, I see evil as a huge bat gathering itself up to throw more death at these poor boys. And they are only boys, Madame Médecin. Look at this pauvre bébé here.’

  The soldier was almost no more than a child. Had a beard ever grown on that almost grey skin?

  ‘Why, he’s German,’ exclaimed Rose.

  ‘Le bon Dieu looks only at the soul, madame,’ chided the old nun gently.

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ began Rose and stopped as she looked into Mère Dolle’s eyes. Around her was war and hatred and fear, and in those eyes was unquestioning love and acceptance. Oh, for such serenity, thought Rose and bent over the German youth.

  The boy opened his eyes and, seeing Rose, began to cry and plead in German.

  ‘What is he saying?’ she asked the nun who was soothing the boy in his own tongue. Not for the first time, she wished she had had more classes in French and German.

  ‘He is afraid you will cut off his arm.’

  Rose almost fainted at the smell from the wound as she uncovered it, and she had to turn away for a moment to discipline her heaving stomach.

  ‘I may have to,’ she said when she could speak. ‘There’s little left to save.’

  The boy soldier had lost consciousness and they worked over him in the poor light.r />
  ‘I need another nurse, sister. Is there anyone else?’ She looked at the nun, who was now almost as grey as the boy. ‘Don’t faint on me,’ she pleaded silently and, as if she could hear, the nun smiled. ‘I am well, doctor, only tired.’

  They were all tired, hideously tired. How old was Mère Dolle? Better not to ask. She was not young; the few wisps of hair that stole out from under the wimple were quite white. The capable hands were marked with age spots and yet she stood hour after hour, day after day, and often long into the night, and did everything that had to be done. Rose had never seen her eat or drink. Once she had been given a mug of hot soup and had turned modestly away to drink it.

  Strange creatures, nuns, thought Rose, who had never met one before. The older ones were unfailingly cheerful; only the very young occasionally broke down under strain and then, when they had recovered, worked twice as hard as if to expiate the sin of being merely mortal.

  ‘Have you had much medical training, Mère Dolle?’ she asked as they finally sat down to rest. A young nun brought them soup. Oh, the power of a bowl of delicious soup! Mère Dolle again turned away so that Rose could not see her but, back to back on the old bench, they chatted.

  ‘None at all, Madame Médecin. I spent my days until the war teaching fat little girls to sing, and playing the chapel organ like that boy there, the German. He is a student of music. That is why he fears the loss of his arm. There is little piano music for a one-handed pianist.’

  ‘Oh, God, war is hell,’ said Rose.

  ‘D’accord,’ said the nun as countless others had agreed before her.

  Rose sat drinking her soup and looking at the slim black shape before her: a musician with no medical training, a life of prayer and penitence devoted to the service of God, and yet she did the most intimate and, to some eyes, demeaning things for these men without a murmur or whimper of complaint. Why? How? Too difficult to tell if she had been pretty when she was young. Had she ever had a lover? Had she ever wanted one? She herself would have been content without a lover, except that there was now Robin. Robin . . .