Andrew treated the question as seriously as it was meant. ‘Yes, I have. I loved a girl very much. I lost her early in the war. All my searches came to nothing …’
He reflected, as they sipped their beer companionably, how he’d asked Brodie to check the records of exclusion zone entries. Then, on his week’s holiday, while Brodie was retracing Andrew’s own earlier steps, he had gone to Dr Guthrie’s to check their old registers. He wanted to be sure that he and Brodie were following up the same Flora Macdonald.
It had been his first breakthrough, for from that simple search had come the startling fact that there was only one Flora Macdonald, not two as he’d believed. His own Flora had lied to him about her age. It made him want to laugh and cry and at the same time it infuriated him that he had not thought of it earlier. The combined movements of what he’d once thought were two girls started to make sense.
He’d discovered years ago during the war that a Flora Macdonald had sailed the Atlantic to Canada on the White Empress when he was on convoy duty, but he could not discover how these passages were allocated. The addresses of applicants had been lost and the girl who sailed to Canada could have come from anywhere in Scotland. His Flora would never have fled. She had no relatives or connections in Canada.
Then, Brodie had found the lists of evacuees to East Lothian, and to his astonishment Andrew discovered that Miss Flora Macdonald’s name appeared on a list of names taken at North Berwick station on the very day she had disappeared from Portobello. And again he drew a blank, for her name did not appear on the list of evacuees for whom Lady Campbell’s billeting committee had responsibility.
Now, to answer Robert, he went on. ‘But I know she isn’t dead. And I believe that one day I’ll find her.’ He waved his arm towards the open sea and said, ‘Somewhere out there.’
‘Have you ever looked at your family and known, just known that you don’t belong to them – that you have nothing of them in you?’
‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘I have not.’ And again he was troubled because this sounded like disloyalty. Andrew saw himself in this boy and was growing fond of him – loving him like the son he might never have.
‘I have more in common with you than I ever had with my family.’ Robert smiled shyly at Andrew. ‘I look at my mother and I don’t need to be told that she hates me. She adores my brother Edward. I suppose it’s because they are so alike. Both of them like fast horses and danger. Father and I don’t come up to standard but at the same time she does not like to see us together. I want Father to be proud of me but I don’t think I’m doing very well.’
‘You’re doing very well, Robert,’ Andrew said. ‘Your father is proud of you. He has told me so.’ He decided to end the conversation there by suggesting that they went into Dunbar to find a fish and chip shop before they sailed back. He did not want Robert to say anything he might later regret; did not want to encourage introspective ramblings that the boy might later be embarrassed about. After that, he drew back a little yet couldn’t help but think he had failed the boy in some way.
Robert duly took his Highers, but then, when everyone thought he was ready to go to university, he disappeared. This time, Sir Gordon reported his disappearance immediately to Andrew and told him that Hamilton’s daughter Phoebe had also gone from the estate. It was not suggested that they had run away together. Phoebe was found a couple of miles away, at her grandfather’s farm. It looked more like a lovers’ tiff, which had seriously upset the Hamiltons.
Three days later a dirty, dishevelled Robert was brought to the police station by the Leith harbourmaster. He had tried to stowaway on a ship sailing from Leith Docks to San Francisco. He was alone and was plainly surprised to hear that Phoebe, too, had been missing.
Andrew questioned him. Robert’s only explanation, given reluctantly, was a tight-lipped remark about learning something that had made his position intolerable.
It was a minor offence, and after questioning him, relieved that he was safe, Andrew took him home, expecting a welcome for both Robert and himself at Ingersley. But he was again shocked by Lady Campbell’s fury. In the backlash of her temper, far from being relieved at her son’s reappearance, she turned on Robert. ‘I wash my hands of you!’ she said. ‘I never want to speak to you again.’ There was no forgiveness in her.
Andrew felt a surge of protective emotion for Robert, who had simply to stand there, head bowed, and take it all. He wanted to speak out in Robert’s defence but it was not his place to do so.
Sir Gordon asked Andrew to come into the study while he dealt with Robert. Andrew felt his own anger rising. Why were his parents not questioning the boy? Why weren’t they asking what it was that made his position intolerable? Or what Phoebe Hamilton had to do with it? As far as stowing away went, Robert had committed no real crime. The boat had not sailed and that side of it could have been resolved quietly. But again, Andrew could not interfere between father and son and must stand by, impotent with rage at the injustice being done to Robert.
Sir Gordon said, ‘I am angry and disappointed. You have disgraced me, Robert. You would not join the Royal Navy–’
‘No, sir.’
‘Yet you try to run away to sea. Have you anything to say?’
‘No, sir. I want to get away.’
Sir Gordon Campbell was clearly at a loss, but he pulled himself together as if reminding himself that he was once in authority over hundreds of men and why shouldn’t he be able to deal with his own much-loved son? He said, ‘I don’t want to see you unhappy but you can’t go on like this. You have to make some decisions about your future. You have three choices – university, National Service or the Merchant Navy.’
‘I’ll take the latter.’
Sir Gordon winced, then said, ‘Very well. I will take you to Leith to see someone I know. Initially you will be a lowly deck hand but you will be independent and it will make a man of you.’ Then he added, and there was a terrible air of sad resignation about him as he spoke, ‘I’m glad Nanny is not here to see this sorry day. Thank goodness she is having a happy time in Canada at that family wedding.’
Robert lifted his eyes to his father and in a choking voice said, ‘I take it you will give me until tomorrow to pack my things?’
Chapter Thirteen
When he reached his own room Robert closed the door and threw himself on to the bed, there to lie, miserable and lost and on the brink of tears. He couldn’t have told them anything. How could he have said a word in his own defence?
Last Friday, Phoebe Hamilton had invited him over and, ever sensitive to change, Robert wondered why invite him especially? He still worked on the farm at weekends and holidays; his pay was three shillings an hour plus lunch and supper, which he took with the family on Saturdays and Sundays. But he saw Phoebe most days and Lucy Hamilton always asked him to eat with them. Robert loved the informality of eating in the kitchen with Lucy and Phoebe.
Nourished by Lucy’s motherly interest in him, he thrived on the welcome smiles that always greeted his arrival, but it had seemed to him lately that the Hamiltons thought that he and Phoebe were being ‘thrown together’, as they called it. They seemed afraid of a romantic attachment developing. Their worries were unnecessary. Once he was at university, he’d be gone from the estate during term-time. Both he and Phoebe were too young to be serious, or hope for marriage. Father would fund his lodgings in Edinburgh but Robert must earn his spending money, and this was all going to plan on Robert’s side. Not so Phoebe’s.
The Hamiltons wanted their daughter to go to college to train to be a teacher, but Phoebe wanted to stay at home with her mother. She wished for nothing but to marry and live an identical life to Lucy’s, preferably near at hand. Now Robert asked himself whether Phoebe had alarmed her parents by sharing with her mother the secret of their stolen kisses. When nobody was in the room with them it would not be long before Phoebe, like a kitten testing her claws, would preen and tease to tempt him until he couldn’t help but succumb and kiss her.<
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Last week he’d even found her waiting outside the picture house in North Berwick when he’d arrived, alone, to see Around the World in Eighty Days. She’d said, ‘I didn’t know you’d be here,’ but she did. He’d told her so the day before.
‘Can we sit together? I’ve bought my ticket,’ she said. He’d laughed and they’d held hands and he’d slipped an arm around her until the lights went up. She had made a point of leaving first, because her father was meeting her and she did not want him to see them together.
So it looked to Robert as if he and Phoebe were going to be lectured after supper tonight about being too young to make any promises.
He arrived at half past six to find Lucy Hamilton in the kitchen, stout, comfortable and energetic – the perfect mother figure. Two cleaning ladies came every Monday and Friday morning but the rest – the cooking, shopping and laundry – was done by Lucy, even though she could afford all the servants she wanted. This evening, however, she did not smile or greet him.
‘Where’s Phoebe?’ he asked.
‘In the drawing room. Go and talk to her,’ she said.
He went into the warm, cosy and comfortable drawing room where cretonne-covered chairs were set by the fire and plush chaise-longues and tub chairs were placed in the window bays. On the low pedestal tables, bowls of flowers and silver-framed photographs fought for space, whilst the walls were all but invisible under the dozens of watercolour landscapes and old family oil portraits. It was June, very light, and Phoebe was sitting in the window that overlooked the rose garden.
‘You all right?’ he asked. She did not turn her head, so he went to the window and put his hands on her shoulders, expecting her to smile at him with those starry blue eyes that were so full of fun.
Her dark hair had been cut in what she declared was the gamine look – a soft-fringed, urchin style – and when she didn’t respond to his hands on her shoulders, he ran his fingers through the wispy ends at the back of her neck. She turned. ‘Stop it!’ she said in a closed-in, hurt voice she had never used before.
He squeezed his lanky frame into the small tub chair facing her. ‘What’s wrong?’
She looked as if she were about to cry as she drummed her fingers on the chintz-covered arm of the chair. ‘I don’t know how to tell you.’
‘What?’
‘We can’t see one another anymore.’ Her eyes were brimming with tears, and though he wanted to hold and comfort her, he felt protest rising in him just as it did when he saw someone being picked upon for no reason.
‘It’s your father, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Who does he think he is? He can’t tell me what to do–’
‘Yes he can!’ Her blue eyes flashed behind the tears. ‘He has every right.’
‘How come?’
‘Because … because …’ She hesitated, then blurted out, ‘He’s not only my father! He’s your father too, Robert Campbell!’
He wanted to laugh but Phoebe looked so serious and upset that what he said was, ‘You been drinking or something?’
She got to her feet and flounced, as he thought it, to the middle of the room. Then she folded her arms and with tears streaming down her face stared back at him. ‘If you don’t believe me, ask Mummy. She’ll tell you the truth.’
‘Ask what?’
‘Ask is it true that my father and your mother are lovers. Ask is it true that you, Robert Campbell, are my father’s child.’
He was incredulous. ‘Are you trying to say I’m not my own father’s son? How can you believe such nonsense?’
‘I am saying that,’ she said, ‘so even if you asked me, I couldn’t marry my own brother.’ She began to weep noisily. ‘I’m going away. I can’t live here anymore. I can’t bear it.’ With that she fled from the room. He heard her running up the stairs, heard the bedroom door slam.
He had gone cold, for all it was a warm June night, and beyond the garden, he could see men, Mike Hamilton among them, stripped to the waist hauling bales of hay into stacks in the meadow so they could be loaded on to the trailer. They would be working until nearly midnight. He would go and ask Lucy if she knew what had got into Phoebe.
Lucy was washing dishes at the big white sink. She looked round when he came into the room. Her face was pale. ‘Has she told you?’
‘It isn’t true. It can’t be …’ he said. ‘You don’t believe it, do you?’
Lucy Hamilton, normally so calm, pulled her hands out of the water, wiped them hastily on a towel and said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s true.’ Then she too burst into tears. ‘I’ll go to Phoebe. Wait.’ She fled from him.
It was half an hour before she came back, and the longer he waited and thought about it, the more the accusations seemed both ridiculous and spiteful. Robert had seen Mother and Hamilton together, many times, almost daily, but Mother’s attitude was always condescending and Hamilton’s the very opposite of loving.
Lately it had become an embarrassment. Robert could feel the hostile tension between them when Mother demanded that Hamilton help with her horse, Mother’s wishes always taking precedence over the work on the land and Hamilton muttering that she must surely be going out of her mind.
No, Phoebe had some bee in her bonnet, but even as he thought this way, cold warning waves ran down his spine when he realised that Lucy Hamilton would never have said such a thing unless … He went to the door that opened on to the hallway and heard Phoebe upstairs, crying hysterically.
He shuddered and went into the sitting room, leaving the door ajar so Lucy would see him when she came downstairs, as she did five minutes later when Phoebe’s cries had settled down to a low, sobbing sound.
Lucy closed the door and came to stand beside him. ‘She won’t come down. She won’t listen to me.’
Robert’s eyes were clouded. ‘Just tell me.’
‘What did she say to you?’ She indicated to him to be seated.
Robert clenched his left hand into a fist and said, ‘Phoebe told me that her father and mine are one and the same.’
There was a long silence. He looked up. Lucy had a handkerchief to her face. She blew her nose, pressed her lips together, then spoke. ‘I wish Phoebe had not told you. It can’t do any good. Do you want me to say it isn’t true? Are you and Phoebe becoming fond of one another?’
‘Tell me everything. Please,’ he said.
‘All right.’ Then, softly, so that Robert knew he must not interrupt her, she began to speak. ‘I’m a little older than Mike, but since I was a girl I have been attracted to him. I was thirty. I’d had one or two proposals but had not found anyone else. Sir Gordon Campbell and your mother had just caused a sensation on the estate by marrying and it was not until then that Mike started calling at our farm, night after night. It was as if marriage were catching. War was coming and lots of couples were all at once desperate to get married. I knew that Mike wanted marriage too and I was so happy that at last he had chosen me.’
Robert nodded and said nothing as she continued. ‘So you can imagine how shocked I was when he came to me … it would be about this time of the year, haymaking … and told me that he and Ruth had been lovers until she married, when their affair ceased. Then he said, “It had ceased. Until tonight”.’
Lucy looked at him, to see how he was taking the news. Robert’s face was stony, but he nodded his head for her to continue.
‘That very night. The night he proposed to me, only an hour before he asked me to marry him, he had been with her. He wanted to confess. He wanted to get it off his chest and start marriage to me with a clean slate.’
She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief, pulled herself together and continued. ‘I had my pride. I refused him. He cried and pleaded and said he wished he had not told me for if I had not known I’d have said yes. I felt sorry for him. I said I wanted to think it over as I could not marry a man who was in love with somebody else. However, he cried again and said he did not love Ruth. It was a kind of animal instinct that had led him on, but now the affair was over
and he would never mention her again. I wavered. He pleaded, begged me to marry him. This was in the July before the war started in September.’
‘Well, there you are,’ Robert cut in. ‘Perhaps it was just one of those things – a little pre-marital experience.’
She put a finger to her lips to stop him. ‘He promised it would never happen again. I forgave him and we married the day before war was declared. We were happy. I think … I have always believed that he truly loved me. Then, in the April, nine months after he and Ruth–’
‘I know. I was born.’
‘On the day you were born Mike was in a dreadful state. He dashed up to Ingersley to see you when you were hours old. Ruth would not admit that you were his child but Mike was convinced.’
‘And you chose to believe Mike?’ He could still not believe it.
She took a deep breath to control herself. ‘I was seven months gone with Phoebe. How do you think I felt, seeing my husband crying over another woman’s child? Don’t you think I wanted to believe Ruth? Wanted to believe that you were not Mike’s?’
Andrew wanted to tell her to stop but he dared not. It was his life they were talking about as well as hers. He said, ‘But Mother was married to Father. So what’s to say …?’
Lucy’s teeth sank into her bottom lip. ‘The Commander was at sea when you were conceived.’
‘Only if I was born on time. I’ve always been told I arrived early and surprised everyone.’
‘Mike was told that, by Ruth, but he said, “You don’t breed a black colt from two palominos. Especially with the palomino stallion a thousand miles away”.’
‘I must be Father’s son.’ Father would have suspected, Robert thought.
‘Sir Gordon was at sea, at war, when you were born. He’d have been told that you were premature.’ She stood up and patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry you had to find out like this.’
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