Brow of the Gallowgate

by Doris Davidson

  ‘He’s failing, you know,’ Will said, sadly.

  ‘I know, but he’s not that old, and he’s still got plenty of spirit left in him . . . well, usually.’ Making a face, Ellie sat down beside Flo and poured herself a cup of tea. ‘It’s been good to see you two again. It’s just a pity that it took Father’s death to bring us all together.’

  ‘We couldn’t afford to come home before.’ Flo was on the defensive. ‘We weren’t at Mother’s funeral, and I felt I had to be at Father’s, so we used some of the money Mother left us to pay our air fares.’

  ‘I wasn’t criticizing you,’ Ellie said. ‘I know you’d have come before if you could.’

  Gracie turned to Will. ‘Tell your mother to keep writing. I don’t actually remember her, but I’ve got to know her, and like her, through her letters.’

  ‘She looks forward to yours, too.’

  ‘It’s funny how much the Ogilvies have been affected by the Wynesses . . .’ Ellie began, then turned red, remembering the terrible extent to which they had been affected. ‘I mean,’ she blustered, ‘Flo marrying Mary’s son, and Hetty . . .’ Her voice petered out at the thought of Martin’s mother.

  ‘We’ll all have to forget about that,’ Gracie declared. ‘I’m very grateful to Will for telling us the truth at last, because we should have known about it, but it happened so long ago, and Martin couldn’t help what his mother did any more than any of the rest of us.’

  She broke off and sighed. ‘Now it’s goodbye to the house, goodbye to the shop, goodbye to everything that could remind us of Mother and Father.’

  ‘We don’t need the house to help us to remember them,’ Ellie said quietly.

  They spent the next hour and a half reminiscing about their childhood, then Ellie stood up. ‘I’ll have to go and waken Gavin. It’ll take him a little while to come to himself, and we’ll have to leave shortly. Thank goodness it isn’t freezing, for I don’t like driving on icy roads, especially when it comes down dark.’ As she walked through to the bedroom, she felt a sense of foreboding, a tightness in her chest and lungs, and she wasn’t altogether surprised when Gavin failed to respond to her gentle prodding, nor to the vigorous shaking she gave him as panic struck her. There wasn’t the faintest movement of the blankets, so she sat down on the bedcover and took his hand. It wasn’t cold, but she was quite certain that he was dead.

  ‘Oh, Gavin,’ she whispered, ‘I know you loved me just as much as I loved you, but I’m glad you died here in this room, thinking of Mother. It just seems . . . right, somehow.’

  Gracie forced herself to decide what to do about all the things in the house. The furniture was fifty years old, some of it a lot older, and wasn’t worth moving to their new home, wherever it might be.

  The best of Grandmother Johnstone’s figurines had been taken by her brother and sisters. Ellie, strangely enough, had chosen the only item which had belonged to Grandma Ogilvie – the old chipped plaque.

  ‘This meant a lot to Mother,’ she had said when they all told her it was worthless. ‘And she once told me it had meant a lot to Grandma, as well.’

  The glazing on the gold-rimmed plate was cracked, and the gold paint itself was wearing off, but the words had still been quite readable.

  To forget and forgive is a maxim of old,

  Though I’ve learned but one half of it yet.

  The theft of my heart I can freely forgive,

  But the thief I can never forget.

  It must have meant a lot to Ellie, too, Gracie had thought at the time, and had wondered if it was because of Jack Lornie, who had been killed in the war. It came to her now that Ellie had taken it to remind Gavin of their mother. Gavin had died just after that, of course, and everything else had gone clean out of her head.

  Neither Flo nor Hetty had thought it strange that Ellie insisted on having Gavin buried in their parents’ grave; he was family, after all, but Gracie had been surprised. She hadn’t said anything while the others were there, but she’d tackled Ellie about it when they were alone.

  ‘Why didn’t you bury Gavin in Edinburgh?’

  Her sister’s white face had regarded her piteously. ‘It would have been better for me, I suppose, but it wouldn’t have been right for Gavin.’

  ‘I can’t see why not.’

  ‘Gracie, you don’t understand. He spent a big part of his life loving Mother, and . . . ’

  ‘That was long ago, Ellie, before he fell in love with you, you know that. He’d only been friends with Mother for years, there was nothing more than that, I’m positive. You’ve been torturing yourself over nothing.’

  The tears had come to Ellie’s eyes then, the first since her husband’s death. ‘I know he loved me, but he still felt something for Mother. He was speaking about how much he used to love her when he . . . fell asleep, and I know she always felt something for him. That’s why I had him buried here. Father’s closest to Mother, but Gavin comes next, and that’s how it should be. That’s how it always was.’

  Remembering, Gracie sighed. That’s how it always was, and that’s how it would always be now, till the end of time.

  Her heart ached for her sister . . . and for Gavin McKenzie.

  Epilogue

  Ironically, Albert’s property, like all its neighbours, remained standing – empty, neglected and crumbling – for many years after Gracie and her family moved out in the middle of July 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War having put an effective stop to the Council’s plans where all entreaties from the residents had failed.

  This part of the ancient thoroughfare was eventually demolished and rebuilt, however, and where there had once been dozens of shops and quaint old dwelling places, there now tower two rather unfriendly concrete masses – a Technical College and an eighteen-storey block of flats – externally and internally a thousand times more modern, but with nothing like the subtle appeal of the Ogilvies’ house, which had stood tall – but not quite so tall – on the brow of the Gallowgate before them.