Flora leaned forward eagerly. ‘Is there anyone special you can remember?’
He looked thoughtful. ‘There were one or two. What was his name again? The lad you’re looking for?’
‘Dougal. Dougal McCrae.’
He shook his head. ‘Can’t say as I recall anyone of that name. There was a Davy—that wouldn’t be him, would it?’
‘I don’t think so. He was tall with fair hair.’
‘No. This was a little chap, played the mouth organ. Every chance he got he’d play his mouth organ. It drove us wild. Always the same tunes over and over again.’
Flora shook her head. ‘It doesn’t sound like him.’
The old man went on. ‘And a girl in every port, or so he said. A proper sailor.’ He chuckled and then began to cough.
‘What happened to him?’ asked Will, seeing that Flora was silent.
‘Now there you’re asking…’ The old man wiped his eyes and looked into the distance as if he was trying to recall events a long time ago.
‘This was a handsome lad, I’ll give you that.’ The old man chuckled. ‘He had a head of red hair, flaming red it was. You could see it from miles away—‘Red’ we called him, because of his hair.’
‘Red hair?’ Flora found her tongue.
‘The reddest you’ve ever seen. I’m not likely to forget that - even if I can’t recall much else.’
‘I don’t suppose,’ said Flora, ‘that he ever mentioned a special girl.’
The old man shook his head. ‘Can’t recall as he did.’
‘Do you know where he came from? Scotland maybe?’ Will prompted.
‘Not him. He was a Cockney, born and bred.’
Will and Flora rose to go and Will pressed a packet of tobacco into the old man’s hand. ‘Thank you for speaking to us.’
Outside the home, Flora leant against the wall. Will put his arm around her. ‘You realise,’ Flora looked up at him, ‘that we’ve been on a wild goose chase, and there is no sign whatsoever of Dougal.’
‘I’m afraid so. What do we do now?’
‘I think we give up. Dougal has disappeared. He’s not on any of the ships’ records, and he doesn’t seem to be on any parish records. It’s a mystery. I don’t think we are going to get any further.’ She looked up at Will, ‘I wish for Chris’s sake we had been able to trace him, but it is a very long time ago. We tried anyway, and,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t have got this far without you. I’m so grateful.’
He put his arms around her. ’It was a pleasure.’ He kissed her gently. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for ages.’
Flora said, a little shakily, ‘I wanted you to—kiss me, I mean.’ Oh, dear, she thought, I don’t know how to talk to men. I haven’t any experience of flirting. But looking up at Will, she knew that she didn’t have to flirt with him. There was no need to pretend.
Chapter 24
‘So,’ Chris said, ‘have you found anything—about Dougal, I mean?’ She began to cough and Flora poured out a glass of water from the carafe that stood on a side table.
‘It’s very hard to try to trace someone all these years ago,’ Flora said, hesitating. How can I tell her? Flora gathered her thoughts. I can’t tell her that there isn’t a croft. That there’s no record in the parish registers. That there never was a farm in Aberdeenshire. That no one remembers Dougal McCrae; he didn’t marry, and there are no children, or any relatives. That he may have sailed as crew on a ship bound for Nova Scotia, but there are no traces of him in any of the ships’ lists. That even an old man who sailed to and fro across the Atlantic doesn’t remember—at least he remembers someone who was a red-haired Cockney, no resemblance at all to Dougal, with his fair hair and height.’
She said, ‘We think he may have sailed for Nova Scotia.’
‘Yes,’ said Chris, coughing again.
‘We won’t give up searching,’ Flora promised, but she thought despairingly, I have no idea where to look. I’ve come to the end of the road. Chris was sitting quietly, gazing into space. Flora looked at her elderly relative, her hands in her lap, her mind full of memories. ‘I wondered,’ she said, hesitating, ‘if you and Dougal… I mean…’
‘You mean,’ said Chris in her forthright way, ‘was I in love with Dougal?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Flora.
‘Goodness no,’ said Chris. She smiled at Flora. ‘In fact, I don’t suppose I ever quite trusted him right from the beginning. I feel I have been rather foolish clinging on to the past. But now I have you in the present day and young people around me. That’s the end of that story. I feel you have gone to a great deal of trouble for me—I am truly grateful. I would have liked to be able to trace him for my father’s sake. But there it is. You have done so much, you and Will.’
She put out her hand and clasped Flora’s wrist. ‘I have been living in the past, as old people do, but the present—and the future—are really much more interesting, even though I am getting on in years. I hope it will be a happy future for you—and for Will. And now my dear, would you ring for Nelly and ask her to bring in tea—though it is a little early. And we might as well use the best china - what is the use of keeping it?
*
Back in the seamen’s hostel, George Wishart puffed at his pipe, enjoying the aroma of a really good tobacco. A grand gift from the young man. A fine couple too. The lass, she was like the young woman he’d courted years ago. A long time since, and she’d made a grand wife.
She’d looked disappointed, he thought, when he’d told her about the red-haired Cockney. Plainly, he was nothing like the lad they were trying to trace. And now… well, memories of the past had gone. He could remember some of the shipmates, and now and then a name would come back to him.
Like that name, Dougal. But there had never been a Dougal. Pity - he wished he could have told that nice young woman something helpful. What were the other mates he could remember? He dredged up a few names. There was a Shorty, and Johnny, and Danny. Yes, now he could just about remember Danny. Or Dan as he insisted on being called. Not that he always answered to Dan—maybe it was because he’d changed his name. Odd sort of chap; sailing to Nova Scotia, he’d said. Going to buy a bit of land there. He’d seemed different somehow, from the rest of the crew, who were a pretty rough lot. Classier, he was, better spoken.
Now he could remember someone asking, ‘And what’ll you do for money, Dan?’ Dan had laughed at that. Oh, he was a sharp one. The old man remembered the night Dan had joined in a card game. And how he’d been caught cheating. There had been a fight he recalled, and Dan had come off best—near killed one of the young crew.
They were wary of him after that.
But now the memory was slipping again. What had happened to Dan? He was a wrong ‘un, George Wishart thought. You could always spot them. Chances were he’d have landed in prison, except that he caught typhoid and died, just before the ship docked. It was a killer then. So he never got to Nova Scotia. Anyway, Dan’s story would have been of no interest to the nice young woman.
His name wasn’t Dougal—was it?
Chapter 26
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Aunt Mina crossly. ‘Leaving that huge house to Flora. What will she do with it, I ask you?’ She picked up the letter again. ‘Just like Chris. She could have sold that house, got a good price for it. And now what - Flora says she’s going to keep it on as a boarding house, a home for the lodgers. A boarding house. I ask you!’ She sniffed. ‘None of our family has ever run a boarding house.’
She went on. ‘Well, I don’t need to have anything more to do with her. I wash my hands of the whole affair.’
Her daughter Nancy sighed. She had heard all this before.
‘And as for that husband…’
‘He sounds a very suitable young man,’ put in her daughter mildly.
‘That’s as may be. I don’t know. I wasn’t invited to the wedding,’ said Mina crossly. ‘Not that I would have gone,’ she admitted.
It had been a very quiet affair, Flora
had explained. Neither Aunt Mina nor Will’s aunt had been invited. After all, it was only a few months since Cousin Chris’s death, and she and Will had wanted a simple wedding, especially as war now seemed inevitable. In the city tearooms, businessmen shook their heads and wondered what the outcome might be. In comfortable drawing rooms, their wives began to talk of getting up work parties, making shirts and knitting socks for soldiers. Throughout the country, mothers looked at sons who worked in the shipyards or in the factories, and worried about the future.
But for all that, Flora and Will’s wedding was a happy occasion. Flora wore dark red silk—‘no mourning for me,’ Chris had insisted. ‘Don’t go into black, Flora.’
Some people disapproved: ‘her cousin gone just a few months ago and not even a black crepe armband.’ Some people had no sense of decorum.
But Flora didn’t care. She stood beside Will, holding her bouquet of white carnations and maidenhair fern and repeated the words after the minister, with a sense of wonder that all this should have happened in only a few short years.
Afterwards there was a wedding breakfast. Nelly had toiled for days to produce a spread to fit the occasion. Mr Turnbull proposed a toast ‘to the happy couple—and to the memory of Miss Dunbar.’
Looking round at them all, Mr Turnbull, Margery Craig, Arabella (who had insisted that she would sing), Nelly, Will’s friend Dave, and the neighbours who crowded in to wish the couple well, Flora felt a warm glow of affection surround her and Will.
Then it seemed only weeks later everything had changed. All through the summer, Flora felt unreasonably happy, and hardly noticed that Will looked serious and read the newspaper with more concentration than he had ever shown before.
‘It is war,’ he said that August evening.
‘But,’ Flora put her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘It will all be over by Christmas.’
Will shook his head. ‘That’s what they say...’
Flora felt afraid for him. She knew Will so well, and when he spoke of enlisting, she didn’t say a word, simply gave him a fierce hug. And watched him as he jumped down the front steps, leaping over the last two steps as he always did.
‘You do realise, don’t you,’ said Will gently later that day, ‘that I have to go. I enlisted today.’
Flora took a deep breath. ‘I know,’ she said softly.’ How long would the war last, Flora wondered. A year, two years? Even longer?
Upstairs, she could hear Arabella singing, her voice swooping up and down in a patriotic song. She had already told Flora, ‘I can do my bit to cheer the troops. People are getting up concerts, and I have offered to sing.’
Mr Turnbull, up in his attic, looked at the pages he had written. But the words meant nothing to him today. How long would the war last? he wondered. He had grasped Will by the arm when he heard that the young man had enlisted. ‘We’ll look after her while you’re away,’ he’d said gruffly.
Margery Craig, who might well become Mrs Turnbull before long, had said nothing, just a brief, ‘Good luck!’ to Will.
Flora shook herself. She would go down to the kitchen and see that Nelly had everything she needed to make Will’s favourite pudding, a dumpling boiled in a cloth. She must check that there were enough sultanas. In a day or two he would be gone. She must make sure he had cheerful memories to take away.
So she wiped her eyes, put on a smile and went downstairs to the kitchen.
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