North Sea Requiem

by A. D. Scott

  Mae Bell being there meant Joanne could stay the night when the girls were at their father’s or grandparents’. Not with McAllister. But in the single bed in one of the three guest rooms—the one originally meant for the maid, on the attic floor. From up there, on clear mornings, she could look northwards to the ridge above town, the dark pine woods on either side framing the dairy farms that supplied much of the town with milk so rich that she kept the four inches of cream at the top of the bottles for her apple pies. McAllister once remarked that her apple pie was so delicious he would have to marry her, until he saw his mistake and again backed off.

  • • •

  Mae Bell was finding living in McAllister’s house peaceful. There was enough music to keep her entertained, books by the hundreds—although she was not a reader and would have preferred magazines—but most of all she found the British wireless programs fascinating.

  When McAllister was at work she kept the wireless on for company, tuned in to the Home Service.

  “Really? You have a show called the Home Service?” she asked when Joanne recommended the channel.

  She discovered Woman’s Hour, a program that relaxed her with the comfortable stories of everyday life. She loved the chapter a day of a novel reading. She found something called Mrs Dale’s Diary, a short daily show based on the life of a doctor’s wife. And the news, and the news analysis and the quizzes, the dialect of Wilfred Pickles with his quiz show, Have a Go, and the comedies—though what The Goon Show was about she had no idea. Most of all, the reassuring voices of the announcers, the slow, solemn news readers, the posh tones of the British Broadcasting Corporation were a world far removed from hers. The news from Britain and America and Europe about the atomic bomb and the arms race she ignored, not needing any more bad news, and she switched the wireless off every time it was mentioned.

  This is another country, another planet, from my life, she thought. The Highlands were very far from the clubs, the crowding, the harsh life of an orphaned jazz singer. Yes, her father was alive, or so she believed, but she was an orphan. Her life choices had made her so, and she did not regret it for a moment.

  Still, she missed her Robert. Still, she talked to him.

  “You’d really like this guy McAllister,” she told Robert. “Clever, but not arrogant. He knows his music. He’s known hard times. He’s funny. You don’t need to worry, hon; he’s not my type. Besides, he has the love of his life beside him—only she can’t see that they are made for each other. Yep, I know, not like us. We knew.”

  She’d voice these thoughts as she wandered from sitting room to kitchen, a cup of tea in her hand. Hey, Robert, would you believe I’m addicted to tea? Sure, I can find coffee, there’s this little Italian place—you’d love it.

  So the conversations with herself went, all the while the wireless playing, all the while her hurting, thinking, wondering if she had the strength—and the money—to continue her search.

  She had planned the confrontation for this week. She thought she now knew enough, and needed her theories confirmed. She was still unsure it was wise. It might even be dangerous. She kept thinking of skin-melting acid. Dying did not scare her; she believed she would join Robert in some great smoky place with good music. Abandoning her mission was not possible, not now that she had read Robert’s last letters to her.

  “You’re quite a guy, aren’t you?” she whispered one particularly dark and wet and windy and cold day. “But Robert, you need to help me. I’m really close, but I don’t know what to do next.” She lit a cigarette. If only he’d posted those letters, she was thinking, she’d have started her search long ago. She let herself cry. Then she turned up the volume and danced a completely inappropriate sexy twisting jiving boogie to Jimmy Shand and his Band playing an eightsome reel.

  That’s better, she thought as she collapsed on the armchair trying to catch her breath. Now it’s time to move. But this time, no disguise, no hideous school sports shoes.

  She didn’t hear McAllister come in. She didn’t see him standing in the doorway. She felt his presence, was grateful he didn’t interrupt her reverie, only walked to the kitchen, where, she was certain, he would put on the kettle and make a cup of tea.

  • • •

  McAllister and Joanne didn’t take their trip to Elgin that week. A notice in the newspaper was the first distraction from their plans.

  Don blamed himself for not spotting it. Fiona was distressed because she was the one to set the classified advertisements, the notices, and the court reports. This week, she hadn’t run a final check, too distracted by events and by Hector’s grin.

  “Who let this through?” Joanne’s voice was at shriek pitch, and McAllister almost ran from his office to the reporters’ room.

  “Who authorized this?” She was pointing at the newspaper.

  Don bent over the page at the court proceedings notices and saw what she was pointing at. “I’ll find out.” From the speed of Don’s departure, Joanne was glad it was not her in his sights.

  “I’m sorry,” was all McAllister could say.

  “The divorce decree published for all to read! My mother-in-law will be mortified.” She blew her hair out of her eyes in frustration. Then another shriek—this time like a puppy someone tripped over. “The girls! Someone’s sure to tell them.”

  “I’m sorry, I . . .” McAllister saw the notice further down the page in the Lost and Found section. He grabbed the paper again. “What the hell is this?”

  Seeking friends and colleagues of the late Robert John Bell USAF, based at RAF Kinloss 1951 to 1952.

  “Why the hell did Mae put this in again . . . we agreed to keep quiet, to not stir up the letter writer.” He grabbed the phone. Dialed an outside line. Dialed his house. Talked to Mae. Put the phone down. He looked as though he would throttle someone.

  “Mae didn’t place that advert. Someone else did.”

  “Mal Forbes.” Don came in with the pages from the compositors. “He’s the one to make up the dummy with the classifieds. I never checked. I seldom do.”

  “Why would he put these in?” Joanne was pink. She was hot. She was ready to slap the man. But the morning after press was a half day off for him.

  “It’s probably a simple case of having a space at the bottom of a column,” Don said. “I’ve done it myself. You reach for the nearest bit o’ copy, or rerun an ad at no cost to the customer, or make up a house ad, anything to fill the gap.” Don knew they needed to be able to work together. And Don was sure there was no malice in the insertion of the notices. “McAllister?”

  “Oh really? He put in those particular notices without checking?” Joanne was furious, her face pink; she was standing, then sitting, trying hard not to run down the stairs and confront the man.

  “It was last minute. Mal filled up the space at the request of the typesetters.” Don was trying to assuage her. Not succeeding.

  “I agree. It was a mistake. I’ll talk to Mal Forbes.” McAllister neither raised his voice nor showed any shade of anger. Yes, he could see how upsetting it was for Joanne but her marital affairs were no secret. It was unfortunate the notices had been published, but Mal was only doing his job.

  Joanne was even more furious than before, this time a steel cold anger. She looked at the editor. She looked at Don, who had the grace to shrug. She reached for her coat. “I’m off. Don’t expect me back anytime soon.”

  McAllister sighed. Problems in the newspaper, he knew how to deal with them; with Joanne he was lost.

  Joanne did not stay out for long. She came back within the hour and went straight to his office, where McAllister was sitting talking with Don.

  “I’m sorry,” McAllister said to Joanne.

  “No, I’m sorry. If you say it was a mistake, then it was a mistake.” But I’d still like to slap Mal Forbes, she didn’t say.

  “Sit down.” Don pushed the other chair towards her. She sat close to him. A dear, dear man was what she called him.

  “We need your .
. . intuition, it’s about . . .” McAllister started.

  “You were going to say women’s intuition.” She smiled.

  “I’m trying to treat you as an equal.” He smiled back.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, you two.” Don lit up again.

  There was a knock on the half-open door. McAllister thought it might be Mae Bell. Don thought it might be Mal Forbes. All three were surprised to see the Reverend Duncan Macdonald, Joanne’s brother-in-law.

  “Joanne . . .”

  “Is it the girls?”

  “They’re fine. It’s . . .”

  McAllister stood. Don too. “We’ll leave you alone.”

  “No.” Joanne suddenly needed them there.

  When he spoke in his clear calm sympathetic voice, all were reminded why the minister was a loved man and a respected preacher. “Joanne, your father suffered a heart attack. He did not survive. I’m sorry.”

  She would never forget how hard she had to bite back the instinct to say, I’m not. What did come out was trite, all she could think of. “Thank you for telling me. I’ll call round later. You can tell me more then.”

  There was an immense stillness within her. A void. She was waiting, waiting for feelings to emerge but there was only emptiness. She knew herself well enough to know reactions would set in later but for the moment all she could think was, I feel free. First Bill is out of my life, now my father. I’m free.

  Different reactions to death were part of a minister’s lot. He knew not to say more. And as Joanne’s brother-in-law, Reverend MacDonald knew it took her awhile to absorb information—good and bad.

  “I’ll collect you and the girls when they are home from school. We’ll have supper together.”

  “Yes.”

  He left. Don went with him, leaving them alone, and he would guard the stairs and make certain they were left alone.

  McAllister was unsure what to do, so he offered her a whisky.

  “It’s eleven thirty in the morning, McAllister.” She started laughing. She couldn’t stop. He came over to her, pulled her to her feet. Held her.

  “I’m rid of my husband. Now my father. All in one week.” It was a strange laugh, a choking sound more than real laughter, a sound forced up from within, a sound from on the precipice of panic.

  McAllister held her, saying nothing.

  He knew she didn’t mean to be callous. He knew she was only saying the truth. The two men who had tried in vain to mold her to their idea of a daughter, a wife, were gone.

  Joanne might not yet know how she feels, he was thinking, but me, I’m relieved they’re gone.

  FIFTEEN

  Two days later, McAllister drove her south to Stirlingshire for the funeral.

  They set out at dawn. They did not talk much on the seven-hour journey. Joanne had been quiet since hearing the news, waiting for a reaction to set in. The emptiness she was feeling she mistook for not feeling, not knowing this void was too an emotion.

  When they were close to her childhood village, she made him wait until five minutes before the funeral was due to start. Then she directed him to the church.

  As she walked up the steps and through the stone archway into the churchyard, she felt the familiar dread; she was about to attend another service in her father’s church, certain his voice, his eyes, his gestures, would be as censorious as ever. Except he was dead.

  McAllister kept a respectable distance. Half a step behind, he walked with her on the winding path between tombstones that had fallen, or were laid flat, or, with the more recent, standing erect and lichen free. He noticed the grass, brighter than grass on lawns or bowling greens or golf tees, and not for the first time pondered on the source of the fecund lushness.

  Pausing on the church steps, he felt rather than saw her disquiet. She was not looking at anything or anyone, but the rise of her head, the slow, deep in-breath, the slow out-breath, the stiff set of her shoulders as she gathered her courage in a protective cloak around her, reassured him.

  He longed to reach out and touch her, support her, but knew every eye was turned from the gloom of the interior to her silhouette framed in a beam of spring sunshine that penetrated like a spotlight through high arched windows towards the coffin lying horizontally across the nave, only just falling short of the coffin of the Reverend John Innes, her late father, minister of the church, shepherd to his flock, bar one black sheep, his daughter Joanne.

  The pews were full, mostly with parishioners and villagers there out of duty, and perhaps relief. They were gathered together to bury a disciple of John Knox, a man whose attitudes were firmly set in the seventeenth century—proven by his casting out of his child and his steadfast refusal to forgive her.

  Joanne had accepted McAllister’s offer to accompany her, to be at her side in front of family, parishioners, and the plain curious. He welcomed the comments and gossip his presence would bring. He welcomed the unsaid announcement that he, her boss, was now more than that.

  The service was conducted by the Reverend Duncan Macdonald, son-in-law, brother-in-law, minister of the loving and forgiving Jesus of Nazareth, carpenter and fisher of men, branch of Presbyterianism.

  The hymns, the sermon, the lifting of the coffin on the shoulders of six men of the parish, out to the open grave, all went by in a blur for Joanne. But the sound of earth on the coffin lid brought reality back with a clatter. She glanced across at their mother and, for the first time in over eleven years, looked her in the eye. What she saw surprised her—a nod, a brief pursing of the lips. Joanne knew this was all the acknowledgment she would get, an acceptance that she and McAllister had a right to be there.

  Joanne kept telling herself, It’s over, he’s gone. The constant repetition was to reassure her, that he, her father, would never again make her feel unwanted. Unloved.

  She did not acknowledge that it was she herself who allowed her father—and her former husband—to doubt the one good man who valued her for who she was.

  They took the Loch Lomond road home. It was the one McAllister knew best and loved: the narrow twists followed the shoreline of the loch, Ben Lomond to the left. The wait for the Balachulish ferry; the drive up to Glencoe; the lone piper at the head of the glen where many a car would stop to cool the engine, hear a tune, or drop a sixpence into the tinker man’s hat and look down to the desolation of a never-forgotten massacre, before climbing back in and taking the turn for the east coast and more rivers and burns and glens and slivers of silvered loch and lochans glinting in the breaks between gatherings of clouds—all familiar, all magic, all ignored by Joanne.

  Again, as often over the years, she rehashed that scene with her father, the one where he cast her out because she was pregnant and not yet married. In these versions she came out triumphant. She mentally wrote and rewrote her words, hearing herself respond with dignity and strength as opposed to the weeping sniffing trembling wreck she had been when he had made her stand in front of his desk, beating her with his words, the Old Testament unloving unyielding words—his weapons.

  She had been in the kitchen when he summonsed her to the study. She had looked at her mother, but her mother had gone to the kitchen sink to polish already dry dishes before putting them back in the dresser, not once turning around, only showing her younger daughter her stiff stern back in the habitual grey cardigan, hand-knitted in itchy Shetland wool.

  She had followed him into the cold study—his version of a hair shirt, cold in temperature and in atmosphere, a room that as a child she thought he kept deliberately chilly so as to imbue his bleak Sunday sermons with dread. Starring a bleak God, a God who was yet to become a father of a loving son, a God who belonged in high echoing enclosed spaces built in unforgiving stone and worshipped by unforgiving people, mainly men, he preached the gospel according to John Knox.

  “Your mother tells me you are pregnant.” Straight to the heart of the matter, she remembered.

  “I want to marry Bill Ross,” she said.

  “And you always do wha
t you want.”

  This was the injustice that had blighted her life, not what followed; not his disgust, his shame, his cold rage, not his forbidding any contact with her mother—not relenting even when the girls were born. It was this accusation, implanted in her from before she could remember, one she did not doubt, that she, his daughter, did exactly what she wanted to do, with no thought of others, that she was considering in the silence of McAllister’s car on the long drive back to the Highlands.

  It was on the final descent into town with the familiar swelling of Ben Wyvis on the evening horizon that she asked, “Do you think I’m selfish?”

  Her voice was so earnest he had to stop himself from smiling. “Who says you’re selfish?”

  “My father said I always do exactly what I want to do.” Implying no thought for others, she didn’t say.

  He wanted to slam on the brakes, take her head in his hands, kiss her eyes and lips, and tell her not to be foolish, but another man telling her what not to do wasn’t what she needed. He shifted down a gear for the steepness of the hill into town.

  “Joanne, I have never met a less selfish person than you.” He was unconsciously shaking his head at her father’s accusation, angry that this false thought had been planted in her and encouraged to grow—that she was selfish—willful even. He now knew that the accusations had continued—seamlessly—from father to husband. But no more, McAllister vowed.

  “Joanne,” he started again, “you are never a person who does whatever you want; you think of others . . .” He did not know how to tell her, or whether to tell her, that her habit of putting others first, of holding back her ideas, her opinions, her needs, how she looked to others—himself, Mae Bell, even Rob—to seek approval, to validate herself, drove him crazy.

  He knew that what he said now, in the cocoon of the car on the last miles through the dark tunnel of trees, around the bends and turns down to the firth shore and the railway tracks and the beginning of town, would stay with them.