‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It must be rather nice to have a tantrum met with ice cloths and kisses.’
‘Yes, and end up with half your officers in retreat and facing the firing squad,’ said Hugh, which put paid to the conversation at a stroke.
Now, in Mrs Hemingborough’s kitchen, this jumble of memories only served to spur me on and quite wiped out the quelling effect of her scorn.
‘I intend to,’ I said. ‘Play bonny, that is. I intend to get to the bottom of this nonsense before anyone else – anyone perhaps more sensitive – is hurt.’
‘Aye well,’ said Mrs Hemingborough, ‘you’re harming no one. Do what you will.’
‘Indeed,’ I agreed, still rather nonplussed at her equanimity. ‘I’m harming no one at all. I certainly feel quite unencumbered by the demands of compassion with respect to you, Mrs Hemingborough, since you seem so utterly and bewilderingly unaffected by your ordeal.’
‘I am that,’ she told me. ‘What’s for you won’t go by you. Not,’ she added, ‘that anything happened.’
‘What’s for you won’t go by you?’ I echoed as I let myself out and climbed back into my motor car. ‘What’s for you won’t go by you?’ What in heaven’s name did she mean by that?
5
Lorna and I walked to Luckenlaw House in the end. I had reported back to Mr Tait upon my return to the manse, and he seemed no more able than I was to account for Mrs Hemingborough’s peculiar reaction, confirming that she had no male relations and so no one obvious to protect in the face of his having leapt over a wall in the dead of night and made mischief with her.
‘If it weren’t for the feathers,’ I concluded, ‘I should say that young Jessie was mistaken. If it weren’t for the feathers.’
‘And she said “What’s for you won’t go by you”?’ said Mr Tait.
‘Which is most odd, I think you’ll agree,’ I answered. Mr Tait said nothing. ‘Don’t you think?’ I prompted.
‘Oh yes, yes, indeed. Very strange,’ said Mr Tait.
So, feeling I needed fresh air and thinking time, I agreed readily to Lorna’s suggestion that we leave the motor car and walk around the law to visit the Howies.
‘It’s a bit further if we go down past the school instead of cutting around the farm lanes,’ she said, ‘but much drier underfoot and there are lovely views.’ I assured her that a long walk on ash was far preferable to a short slither through the mud and worse of a couple of farms, and we set off, practically arm-in-arm, for there was something about Lorna which took one straight back to one’s schooldays. I half expected her to produce a liquorice stick from a knicker pocket, bite it in two and offer half to me.
It was morning playtime at the school and Miss Lindsay was standing in the doorway, wrapped up in a thick coat and sipping a cup of tea as she watched her young charges.
‘Such a conscientious schoolmistress,’ said Lorna, waving at her.
In the playground, blithely ignoring the several balls which the little boys were scuffling around, a coterie of girls were once again busy with their skipping rope.
‘Spring a lock o’ bonny maidie,’ they sang, weaving in and out of the swooping rope.
‘Summer lock o’ wedded lady.
Harvest lock o’ baby’s mammy.
Who will be my true love?
Three times twist me,
All that I wish me.
First time he kissed me
He will be my true love.’
And then once again with the same air of knuckling down to it, they began to chant the alphabet, looping in and out and round behind the girls swinging the rope. As the chant wore on, one became aware that some of the boys were paying a measure of sideways attention to the game, and when one of the girls stumbled and got her feet caught in the ropes on the letter ‘P’ a volley of laughter and whistles went up all around.
‘Ella loves Peter,’ the children chanted, in that familiar infuriating sing-song. ‘Ella luh-huves Pee-heeter.’
Ella, looking thunderous, shouted, ‘Forfeit, forfeit!’ and the girls swinging the rope were joined by another two, the four together beginning to whip it round faster and faster until it was almost a blur, whereupon Ella capered fearlessly into its path on the upswing and began to skip while the rest of the girls clapped and whether the clapping grew faster and the rope matched it or vice versa, certainly before long the rope was flashing round, zinging off the ground with sharp cracks, and the claps were thrumming. Then the singing began.
‘My mother is a queen and my father is a king.
I’m a little princess and you’re a dirty thing.
Not because you’re clarty and not because you’re clean,
But ’cos you’ve got the chicken pox and measles in between.’
Poor Ella was purple in the face and blowing hard when it was over but looked satisfied to have paid the price and detached her name from Peter’s. Peter himself – whichever one of the small boys he was – kept his own counsel.
It was all new to me. I had only sons and even the farms and cottages on the estate had been going through a very boyish era in recent years, with blue ribbons threaded through all the christening robes and dollies packed away in paper against the day when the tide would turn. Here in Luckenlaw, I noticed, doing a quick tally of the playground, the balance was currently on the other side.
‘What a lot of girls there are,’ I said to Lorna. ‘I was just thinking how in my village we run to boys these days and I couldn’t help but notice.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lorna. ‘Luckenlaw is famed for it. We say there must be something in the water, you know.’ We had moved on from watching the children and were now descending the lane towards a small burn with a ford and footbridge.
‘Have you ever heard the theory – goodness knows where I came across it – that in times of war women begin to have more boy babies? I always thought it quite horrid if it’s true. Much too obliging of the mothers docilely to provide cannon fodder. I’m with Luckenlaw on that score.’ I glanced at Lorna as I spoke and noticed that her face had turned quite solemn. Of course! How tactless of me to witter on about cannon fodder and even about there not being enough boys to go around if what I had surmised about her on the strength of the rosebud and velvet ribbon were true. ‘Much better have girls and keep them safe and sound,’ I went on, willing myself to shut up. I managed it at last. Briefly. ‘I think I must have said something to upset you, Lorna dear,’ was how I filled the silence. ‘I do apologise.’
‘Not at all, don’t be silly,’ said Lorna, the beaming smile in place as ever but her eyes shining rather than twinkling for a change. ‘I’m far too sensitive, I know. Morag – Miss Lindsay – is never done telling me I need to toughen up, and I’m sure she’s right.’
‘Oh well, as to that,’ I said vaguely, thinking of the Italian bambina and Hugh’s instant diagnosis of military downfall, ‘who wants to be tough, really, when you get right down to it? Talk to me, if you like, dear. I shan’t tell you to toughen up, I assure you.’
Odd, the way one twitters oneself into a hole single-handed. Somehow Mrs Hemingborough’s coarse unconcern over her assault and my automatic impulse to take the other side to Hugh on any point of debate had ended up with me begging this rather droopy girl to share her tale of woe and promising to be all sympathy while she did so, when in fact nothing in the world could be more designed to embarrass and bore me. Unfortunately, Lorna did not need to be told twice.
‘There’s nothing much to say,’ she began, which is never, I have found, an indication that there will not be a great deal to hear. ‘I was engaged to be married,’ she went on haltingly. ‘His name was Walter. He went to war and didn’t come back. Like so many others. And the worst thing is that in his heart, he was a conscientious objector. Only he dared not take a stand. He simply dared not. And I didn’t stand behind him. I was afraid of what everyone would think. So he signed up when his papers came. He only lasted a month, then he died of dysentery. He always had a
very delicate constitution.’
One hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. Lorna herself was hardly swashbuckling, but to think of her pining and berating herself for a decade over a conshie without the nerve even to be a conshie was, in my present mood, simply tiresome and it was hard to resist the thought that this Walter had died of his tummy upset just to show the rough boys what a sensitive soul he was. (I can surprise myself with my own unpleasantness sometimes.)
‘Do I detect a trace of guilt in your voice, Lorna?’ I said. ‘I promised not to tell you to toughen up, and I shan’t, but you must at least stop that. You’re a lovely young woman’ – I stopped on the footbridge and faced her to hammer my point home – ‘with a whole life ahead of you.’
‘I know,’ sighed Lorna, and I was sure that she had been told just this many times before. She gazed over my shoulder. ‘We were going to live there,’ she said. I turned around and followed her gaze towards a cottage on the far side of the burn. It was a long, low and rather mossy-looking affair, apparently empty as far as I could tell from its dusty windows, and standing hardly higher than the burn which chuckled along in front, darkened by the overhanging trees of the lane.
‘Oh my dear,’ I said, kicking myself for choosing just this spot as a setting for my pep-talk, although surely she could not really regret the cottage; it was bound to be damp. ‘What did your Walter do?’ I asked, doubting that a country solicitor, the local doctor or a businessman from town would ever be drawn to settle in such a place, and unable to think of a single other suitor for the minister’s daughter who would. I rather suspected a curate, if truth be told.
‘He was a poet,’ said Lorna.
Ah, I thought, but I said nothing and with a last sighing glance at the cottage, she turned and walked away.
‘Good girl,’ I said firmly, myself turning away from the blank windows and tussocky garden and following her. ‘You really should put the past behind you, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Lorna again. ‘And at least I have the past. No one can take it away.’ Whereas, I thought, there might be no future of which to speak. There was no guarantee, at any rate, that anyone would roll up to bring her one. That much was inarguable, and in the end Lorna’s mood prevailed: we plodded on in gloomy silence, and since it was far too cold for plodding – only a day for a walk if that walk were a brisk stride out with the head up and the shoulders back – by the time we arrived at Luckenlaw House we were both chilled to the bone.
The Howies, it immediately became clear, were taking the other route from the Gilvers through their even more desperate financial straits. Hugh and I had hung on to the old routine through the lean years, me in my sitting room and he in his library, with smaller fires and thicker jerseys. Here at Luckenlaw House, we were shown into a long room which might once have been a dining hall. It was wonderfully warm and cosy with two fires burning and a paraffin heater belching away besides, but the entire household seemed to be corralled there, two men sprawled in armchairs with newspapers and the women sharing a sofa, smoking, chatting, and stroking what I first took to be an elderly muff but which soon showed itself to be, in fact, an elderly cat. What is more, a dining table set up by a sideboard near the windows suggested that the Howies took their meals in this room, and a card table by one of the fires, set around with four chairs and having a trolley of decanters drawn up handily beside it, was a sign that they spent their evenings here too.
‘Lorna, my pet,’ cried Vashti as we were shown in by a girl. I hesitate to call her a maid, for she was wearing a brown woollen skirt and a yellow jersey and she did no more than fling the door open for us before turning on her heel and disappearing back from whence she came. Vashti sat up and stubbed out her cigarette in a rather full ashtray balanced on top of a pile of magazines on the sofa beside her. The cat rose and yawned luxuriously, showing us a pink tongue and rather few, randomly scattered, yellow teeth.
‘And Dandy dear,’ said Nicolette. ‘Johnny, this is Dandy Gilver. From Perthshire. I told you last night.’ Johnny, who had not been prompted to rise by Lorna’s and my entrance, stirred himself at the sound of his wife’s voice and came to shake hands.
‘Delighted to make your acquaintance,’ he mumbled. With this, social obligations evidently discharged, he returned to his armchair and fell into it with a sound somewhere between a groan and a sigh, like a slumbering dog. From the other – unmistakably his brother with the same high, bony nose and crinkled hair – there was not even as much as that. He only folded his newspaper across one middle finger and waved it at us. Vashti looked over at him, rolled her eyes, and looked away.
‘Ignore my lump of a husband, won’t you,’ she said.
‘Your husband?’ I said, glancing around the four of them, trying to sort out the family tree. ‘I thought . . .’
Nicolette giggled and explained.
‘They are brothers and we are sisters,’ she said.
‘How . . . neat,’ I replied. Really, I was wondering which match was made first and whether the one who threw her sister in the way of the spare brother was now suffering pangs of remorse, for neither of the Howie men looked like much of a catch and there was nothing I could see in this grim, dank house which might serve as a sugar-coating for being landed with him.
Coffee was ordered, the girl who had answered the door just pert enough to heave a sigh at the extra work we had brought her but not pert enough actually to demur, and we four ladies settled ourselves to wait for it. The Mrs Howies were no less startlingly dressed this morning; indeed their costumes were rather more disconcerting in the light of day, Vashti’s particularly. Her floating panels of the evening before had been replaced by a swathe of fine but mud-coloured wool, ornamented with scarves in vivid orange and scarlet, which pooled around her feet as she sprawled on the sofa and billowed out like flags in a breeze as she rose and strode to the fire to heap it with more coals. Had it not been for these scarves and a long chain of beads I might have taken her still to be in her dressing gown for it was hard to cast her garment as any kind of day-dress. It was positively medieval, as though Vashti were dressed up for a play. Next to her, Nicolette appeared almost unexceptional although, in another short, tight suit – of bright tweed this time – and another pair of very narrow shoes with high heels and pointed toes, she too was rather out of place in the setting. Once again, she clanked with bracelets and bangles and once again her fingers were rendered all but useless with rings (I should have given a sovereign to see her try to play a piano). What entertaining creatures they were, but what decidedly odd chums for Lorna. I wondered again who, out of the three of them, had first promoted their obvious intimacy, and why.
‘Have you always lived here?’ I asked, thinking that perhaps they and Lorna had been girls together. It was difficult to hazard a guess at their ages – Vashti had that rather thick, grubby-looking skin which ages hardly at all (and I have always thought it a rare case of fairness on the part of Mother Nature that it should be so. Why should not the Vashtis of this world, sallow and plain in their youth, suddenly find themselves looking rather better as the bloom faded from the milkmaid cheeks of their rivals?). Nicolette was a more ordinary English rose, but so lathered in make-up that she could have been anywhere between twenty and forty, at least when seen against the light.
‘Long enough shading into too long,’ drawled Vashti unhelpfully. ‘Five years, Nic?’
‘Is it really only five?’ said Nicolette and sighed. Lorna smiled mildly, as though she was used to hearing the like.
‘Five years since we abandoned all hope and entered,’ said Vashti in an archly sorrowful voice. This time Lorna giggled, and I bit my lip, while shooting a look at the two brothers, faintly concerned on their behalf to hear their wives give way to such open regret at the lives they had chosen. For while a man railing at his fate might be thinking of a dozen different aspects of it, a woman at the same game must always be understood, essentially, to be despising her husband. In this case, though, I was wrong.
‘Johnny and Irvine are from Ross-shire, of course,’ said Nicolette and waited. ‘They’re really Rosses on their mother’s side,’ she added and waited again.
‘Ah,’ I said, catching up at last. ‘The Invergordon Rosses?’
‘Exactly,’ said Vashti. ‘We had hoped we could all settle at Balnagowan, but the cousin who got her paws on it sold up and we were banished to walk the byways like a band of gypsies looking for a hedge to huddle under.’
‘There was never the faintest hope of keeping the old pile,’ said Johnny Howie suddenly, making the rest of us jump. ‘I said that all along.’
‘ . . . as well have saved your breath,’ said Irvine, saving as much of his as he could while still getting the words out at all. ‘Women . . .’ He did not trouble to finish the thought.
‘We met our dear husbands while on a tour – a pilgrimage, almost – in the Highlands,’ said Nicolette. ‘Vash and I have always been simply fascinated by . . . history, I suppose you would call it.’
I nodded my understanding. In other words, they met their mates while on a shameless husband-hunt in a part of the world known for its old families and enormous castles. For ‘history’, I surmised, one could read ‘pedigree’ and it must have been a shock to the sisters to realise that they had attached themselves to a side-shoot of the illustrious Ross clan and one which could so easily be snapped off and sent packing.
‘So we ended up here,’ said Vashti flatly. ‘We persuaded Irvine and Johnny to buy the place and we moved lock, stock and barrel.’
‘Turfed out the dozier tenants and got the place shipshape again,’ said Johnny. ‘Do you know there was no one at all managing the home farm? The neighbours had simply helped themselves to our fields and had their hay stacked up in our barns.’
‘ . . . nerve of them,’ mumbled Irvine.
‘Then we offloaded the creaking servants and sat back to enjoy the rest of our lives,’ said Vashti. ‘We must have been mad.’
Bury Her Deep Page 7
