Hardacre's Luck (The Hardacre Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  ‘Ja,’ he replied, and Jane inwardly froze.

  The young man shook his head as if annoyed with himself, and said again in accented, but correct English, ‘Yes, please. Forgive me, I forget sometimes I am in England.’

  ‘You’re not,’ Jane said, surprised by the coldness of her own voice. ‘You’re in Scotland. But we speak English too, if that’s what you mean.’ The coldness, which she found surprisingly difficult to control, was apparent to the blond young man, as well as to herself.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I meant no offence.’

  Jane forced a smile. The war was over. But she could not totally fight down the surge of resentment that rose at the sound of a German voice, other than that of Heidi who for so many years she had regarded as one of her own. Besides, he would stand there so healthily sun-bronzed at Teutonic attention the while, wouldn’t he, reminding her of those blond young Nazis she saw in Munich with Peter, all those years ago. She always had wanted to kick one in the shins to see if they too would double up and hop about howling like ordinary mortals. She resisted a murderously strong desire to do just that to her young Aryan on the steps of the Strathmore Lodge.

  ‘Scots people don’t take kindly to being lumped in with the English,’ Jane replied with a small smile. ‘Offends their sense of nationalism. Something you Germans have always taken rather seriously, have you not?’ The young man’s eyes narrowed; and his face lost its essentially gentle cast, and Jane felt guilty. He was a potential guest after all, and she was being particularly unfair about his not uncommon mistake. Friends of her own in Yorkshire were quite accustomed to referring to everything beyond the border as ‘North Britain’, after all. She smiled a bit more naturally and said genuinely, ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘If you would be so kind,’ he returned, retreating in a European way into correct manners, ‘I wish to meet with Frau Muller. She is at this address?’

  ‘Mrs Muller is occupied just now,’ Jane said, ‘but no doubt if you are wishing a room, I can organize that for you. Shall I ask the driver to bring your bags?’

  ‘No,’ he said, still speaking with careful politeness. ‘That will not be necessary. I wish Frau Muller. That is all.’

  Jane felt suddenly chilled, as if something from Heidi’s frightening past had emerged to threaten her here, even, in the shape of a latter-day Nazi.

  She straightened, looking severely down at the young man as if to impart to him, without words, her absolute solidarity with Heidi Muller, and her readiness to defend her friend against whatever unimaginable threat he might conceal.

  ‘I will speak with her,’ she said, and turned her back and walked into the inn, closing the door beside her. Once inside, she felt foolish. After all, what threat might this blond young German possibly offer in the middle of a gentle Highland spring morning? She walked through the long wood-floored corridor of the old building, back to the big kitchen with its ancient flagstone floors. At times like this she realized how deeply the war had affected them all, and why at times the young, blessedly free of its influence, did not understand them.

  ‘Heidi,’ she said, and Heidi looked up from her latest batch of scones, fresh from the oven, her face mirroring Jane’s own concern.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said at once.

  Jane sat down at the kitchen table and smiled wryly. ‘I don’t suppose anything is, actually,’ she said. ‘I think I’m being a bit of a fool.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About nothing probably. Heidi,’ she said again, slowly, ‘there’s a young man at the door, wanting to see you.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Heidi said, dusting flour from her hands. ‘I meant to come right away, but I smelt these burning when I came in and quite forgot. We were so long over our coffee. I’m sorry, Jane, I’ll go at once. I’ll put him in number twelve, I think, it has such a nice view.’

  ‘No, wait,’ Jane said, and Heidi again looked startled.

  ‘But why? He’ll be wanting his room.’

  ‘I don’t think he wants a room,’ Jane said. ‘And,’ she paused, ‘there’s more than that. He’s German, Heidi.’

  ‘German?’ she looked surprised. Their visitors were almost always English, occasionally French or American.

  ‘How unusual,’ she said.

  Jane was taken aback. ‘Don’t you mind?’ she blurted out, and then softened it, saying, ‘I thought perhaps …’

  ‘That I wouldn’t give a room to a German?’ Heidi’s worn, wise face twisted into a faint sardonic smile. ‘So, if I start like that, one rule for one kind of people, one for another, where will I end up? Hmm? Will you tell me that?’

  ‘You’re very forgiving,’ Jane said simply.

  Heidi slowly lowered herself to a kitchen chair beside her friend. She laid her hands, small, neat, still dusted with flour, on the smooth wooden surface. ‘Forgiving?’ she said. ‘Jane, what was done goes so far beyond forgiveness that it is a mockery, a travesty to try to seek even a grain of retribution. What can all my petty little human vengeance do to balance that? No. I will leave that to God. Besides, Jane, my husband was a German, people I loved were German. I was a German once, or so I thought. Come, I will see your young man.’

  She got up briskly, dusting her hands again, and Jane followed her brave little straight back through the doorway into the hall. She was sorry now she had shut the door in the face of her young visitor, leaving him alone in the spring sunshine. She hastened ahead to open it and found to her intensely renewed annoyance that he had done so himself and was standing hesitantly beyond the glazed inner door, in the tiled porch itself. She glimpsed him through the half-frosted figured glass, his hand hesitantly extended to that inner door as well, as if in some ill-conceived impatience he was already about to enter.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she called, quite harshly, ‘I’m coming.’

  But he flung open the door and stood, tall and menacing, blotting out the bright snowy light. Behind her, she heard Heidi scream.

  Jane leapt to protect her friend but Heidi, her hands clutched across her face burying the scream, was stumbling forward towards the man who ran to her, his arms outreaching. They met and folded into a fused awkward huddle in which each seemed to be supporting the other from falling. The young man was so tall that he was bent almost double over Heidi’s tiny frame and yet she, of the two, seemed the stronger. He raised his head, his eyes looking straight at Jane but unseeing through tears. He kept shaking his head and saying, ‘You know me. I did not think … you know me.’ Heidi drew back, releasing him only as much as she must so that she might look up to his face. She smiled her little wry crooked smile that Jane knew so well.

  ‘I should forget a son?’ she said. She kept shaking her head as he had done, bewildered, and turned to Jane, seeking in convention an avenue for unmanageable emotion, ‘Jane, this is my son. My son Ian. You know, I have talked of him.’ She nodded again, smiling, as if his appearance were the most ordinary thing in the world. Jane stood dumbfounded, and then utterly unable to find any appropriate words, she merely extended her hand.

  ‘How do you do?’ she said.

  For days, Heidi and Jan Muller were utterly inseparable. From morning until night they spent every possible moment in each other’s company, and Heidi went about the work of running the inn in a happily casual daze, totally uncharacteristic of her usual careful efficiency. The talk was endless, and each leapt over the other’s words the more quickly to gain knowledge of the dark gap of years between them. Each statement, each name, each place mentioned, brought from the other a torrent of questions, and each hardly waited for answers in eagerness to question again.

  When Jan learned of the role played by Lady Macgregor in his mother’s rescue, he at once awarded Jane the same total devotion he accorded Heidi, so that she became almost a second mother. She, seeing in him the shadow of his father who had so many years before befriended her husband, was deeply touched, and felt that she too, in some small way, had regained a son.
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  Jane’s only regret was that the reunion, joyful as it was, was inevitably tinged with the sorrow of uncertainty. Ian Muller, or Jan, as he over the years had become accustomed to being called, was an Israeli and Israel was a tremendous distance both in miles and ideas from the far North of Scotland that had become Heidi’s home. Jane, in each of her visits from her home near Castle Conon, watched and wondered, afraid to ask. Would Heidi leave her adopted home after so many years and take up a new life in a new, raw, nation? Jane felt she would miss her friend desperately if she so chose, but her concerns were not those of self-interest. The more Jan spoke of the life he knew, a life of pioneering and no little danger, of complex mixtures of cultures and ideas, the less she could imagine gentle, European Heidi, so at home in the wet, cold northern hills, being at peace in that place of sun, idealism and strife.

  It was Jan himself, in the end, who brought her concerns into the open. She had dined with them both, one quiet night at the inn, late, after the paying guests had been fed, watered and safely tucked up in the bar. Heidi left them to prepare coffee and Jan leaned towards her with that anxious wrinkling of his smooth, sun-tanned brow that she had come to associate with a troubled mind. It was the expression he wore whenever he spoke, and he spoke but little, of the war.

  ‘What am I to do, Lady Macgregor?’ he asked. ‘I cannot leave her alone, and yet how can I take her away from here?’

  ‘I have been thinking much the same, Jan,’ she said. And added, ‘Why don’t you ask your mother?’

  He shook his head at once, firmly. ‘Oh no, it would only confuse her. It is my problem, for me to decide. I must wait until I have a good plan, and tell her then.’

  Jane leaned back in her chair, her long bony hand held up to her chin, stroking thoughtfully down the side of her angular face. ‘And yet, you spoke to me,’ she said.

  ‘But of course, Lady Macgregor. You are so … how do you say … so assured, so confident. You are a woman of position. But my mother, she is a simple person, only a housewife always … she cannot be expected …’

  ‘She cannot be expected to know her own mind?’ Jane said drily. ‘Young man, you are falling into a fearful trap of the young, regarding their parents.’

  ‘How so?’ he said, surprised.

  She replied, ‘That happy conviction that your gaining of wisdom has occurred by some odd chemical process at the expense of theirs. Just because you are a man, and she your mother, does not guarantee your superior intelligence, your better judgement. Heidi has, all alone, supported herself and built a life for herself in a foreign country. She has a fine command of the English language, and has become a competent businesswoman. I suggest you do her the respectful service of according her at least a small say in whatever plans you have made for your futures. To your surprise, no doubt, she may have plans of her own.’

  ‘Oh my, Lady Macgregor,’ Jan said, leaning back as if in fear of physical attack, shielding his tanned face with his hands. ‘You are formidable. Come, I have at last an idea. You will come to Israel with us, we all will be happy, and oh, such a kibbutz mama you will make.’ He was laughing, but she could see he had listened to what she had said and later, when Heidi was once more with them, pouring coffee into demi-tasses, he at last broached the subject of their future.

  She looked up, surprised. ‘But there is no question,’ she said. ‘Your home is there, mine is here.’ She smiled, with only a trace of regret. ‘Perhaps in a different world it would have been different, but we cannot undo the years. My door is open always, to yourself and your,’ she paused, blushed, ‘your Hannah, should you ever wish to come.’ She added, ‘But I know the young must go their own way. My wise friend Jane has shown me that.’ She stopped, studying the face of her son. ‘You are not hurt?’ she said. ‘You did not suppose otherwise? You surely did not think that now we have found each other, we must turn love into a bond?’

  Jan nodded gratefully towards Jane whose small quick up-turn of her chin reminded him that she had told him so. He said, ‘Always I supposed if I ever found you, I would find you lost, desolate, with no one, like Isaac. I never thought you would have a life, friends, a place of your own.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘No, I could not dream to take you from this. You are more at home here than I ever have been anywhere.’ He looked away sadly, remembering all the places he had known and left, in his restless, moving life. He saw in his mother’s contentment in the cold Scottish landscape the same contentment that glowed in Hannah’s eyes when they surveyed the growing fields of Kibbutz Aaron. Perhaps there was never to be such a contentment for him.

  Jane Macgregor had offered to drive Jan Muller as far as York on his return journey to Dover. She was planning a trip south, anyway, being accustomed to spending the early spring months in and about London, visiting friends. First, however, she would have a long weekend at Hardacres, and pay a fleeting, morale-boosting visit to Emily Barton at that renowned hostelry of the Yorkshire countryside, The Rose, at Kilham. ‘I’ll drop you at York. You can spend the night at the Station Hotel and take the first train south. No slight intended to the Highland Line, but I’m sure I can make your journey more interesting,’ she said, with a wink to Heidi.

  ‘Interesting!’ Heidi exclaimed. ‘It will raise the hair from your head, with Jane and that race car she has bought. Besides, there is no Highland Line, Jane,’ she corrected. ‘We have only the British Rail now.’

  ‘So we have,’ Jane agreed, mildly. ‘Every time I turn around they’ve nationalized something else. You can’t expect me to remember them all. I promise you,’ she added, ‘a most sedate and refined journey, and I swear to leave you safe and sound in York with all hair still in place.’

  The motor car in question was a silver-grey Jaguar XK 120 that Jane, who for years had driven herself about in an ageing Morris, had taken a shine to one day in London and had bought outright on the spot. From having always treated her motor vehicle as a simple necessity, she was overnight transformed into a devotee, who was not above having a sporty suit tailored in a grey tweed to match her new purchase. She, who had more often than not relied on the now nationalized North British and Highland Lines for her journeys between her two homes, now drove everywhere her petrol ration would allow, visiting friends she hadn’t seen in years, just for the opportunity of a new, virgin road.

  On the morning of Jan’s departure she arrived in front of the Strathmore Lodge, the Jaguar’s hood lowered, and herself wrapped snugly in a silver fox jacket. Her iron-grey hair was drawn back into a tight bun and covered with a silk scarf in silver and green. Jan emerged from the front door of the hotel, his arm about his mother, grinning.

  ‘Ah, Lady Macgregor, it is magnificent. And you, too, are magnificent.’

  Jane laughed. ‘My dear, I am but basking in reflected glory, but at my age the setting of the stage is everything. If I’m to turn male heads now, it must be with such devices.’ She smiled with satisfaction, patting the wood-rimmed steering-wheel.

  ‘Why, Jane, that is not like you,’ Heidi said, clearly shocked. ‘Ian, she is a most proper lady, I assure you.’

  Jan grinned again, loading his small hand-case in behind the seat. ‘She is magnificent,’ he said again. He turned then to his mother and Jane looked away, for they had suddenly arrived at the moment she was dreading and no manner of banter could make that moment go away. Jan stood with his hands at his sides like a small boy, his big tough body seeming to shrink into childish helplessness.

  ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘To say?’ she said, her dark brown eyes warmly moist. ‘So what is there to say? What families always say when they part … that you will write, and you will, but not very often, like all the young. That you will think of me. Of course you will think of me. That you will come back, with who knows, one day even a wife. Grandchildren. I know all these things, Ian. When you come, you will come. I will be here.’ She laughed gently as he suddenly leapt forward and hugged her boyishly, all his grace reduc
ed to bumbling by his own emotions. ‘Ian, Ian, we have loved each other into a void for all these years. Surely you must know, if anyone, that it is not necessary to be together to love?’

  Jane drove away fast, her eyes on the road, as Jan leaned over the soft top and waved with great broad strokes as if he could clasp from the air a symbol of his love. When the first bend in the road hid Heidi and the inn from their view, Jane kept her eyes firmly to the front, while Jan lowered his head on to his folded arms and wept.

  Eventually he raised his head, shaking it at his own foolishness, letting the wind dry his face.

  He grinned sheepishly and said, ‘I am sorry, Lady Macgregor, I must embarrass you with my nonsense.’ She shook her head, smiling, still looking forward at the winding road. ‘Do you know,’ Jan continued, ‘for years I felt I had no emotion in me, after the war, some of the things that happened.’ His voice dropped and levelled to a soft monotone. ‘I used to think I would never feel anything again. Can you imagine?’

  Jane nodded. ‘After my husband was killed, I felt that way for over a year. And again, after Peter …’

  ‘Oh Lady Macgregor, forgive me, I bring things back to you that should not be spoken of.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Jane said brusquely. ‘There is nothing that should not be spoken of. And if you bring things back, then that is good, too.’ She slowed the car, turned to look at him, briefly. ‘Do you know, you are very like your father.’

  He looked delighted, and said, ‘Can you recall him? Really, can you? It is so long ago. But you know, I would like to be like him, I would like that very much.’

  ‘You are. Quite identical. I look at you and I could be back all those years, before two wars, with my Ian still alive, and your father and I, the three of us, together in Hong Kong. Funny to imagine, isn’t it?’

  ‘What a strange world, Lady Macgregor, that I should at last meet someone who recalls my father, here, not in Germany, not in Israel, but in Scotland, a place I never thought to see.’ He waved one hand with a bemused smile towards the barren hills still covered in snow.