‘Ta.’ Diana smiled at him, relaxing again. ‘You’re an angel.’
Gordon paused by the door. ‘We should be raising a glass to you, Harry,’ he said. ‘The partnership.’
‘Oh, that’s old news.’
‘Only a month,’ Janet said. ‘And it is wonderful – he’s the youngest partner they’ve ever appointed at Mackie’s.’
‘I think you did mention that,’ her brother teased. ‘Maybe once or twice.’ He winced. ‘Listen to that bairn – she’s not going to stop. I’d better go up.’
‘It’s a strange house and a strange bed, no wonder she hasn’t settled,’ Janet said as Gordon disappeared upstairs.
‘So we really should go out – celebrate the great achievement,’ Diana said.
Neither Janet nor Harry bothered to reply to this. Janet swallowed the last of her sherry, feeling the good effect of it wearing off already. Diana reached for her cigarettes, bored.
In a moment Gordon reappeared with Margaret, purple-faced but suddenly quiet in his arms. She gazed at the other adults, as if surprised to find herself among them, then, shy, buried her face in her father’s shoulder.
‘Oh Gordy, you shouldn’t have brought her down. I’ve never known a nanny yet who thought that was a good idea. They’re supposed to stay in bed when you put them there.’
Janet, who agreed with this in principle, said nothing.
‘Put the fag out, Di,’ Gordon said, ‘at least while she’s here. She was coughing.’
Obligingly, Margaret began to cough again, a harsh straining that went on and on, making her redder than ever.
‘She’s been coughing like that for ages – she’s had a cold,’ Diana said.
‘It sounds worse now.’
Janet put her cool hands on Margaret’s face, still turned away and wet with tears.
‘She’s awfully hot. I think she’s running a temperature.’
‘Should we check – have you a thermometer?’
‘In the bathroom, if I haven’t packed it away.’
She went to look. Gordon lowered himself onto the sofa with Margaret in his arms.
Diana sighed. ‘Just what we need. What about calling a doctor?’
‘It’s Friday night,’ Harry said. ‘If you wait till morning you can take her down to the surgery.’
Margaret had begun to cough again, drawing in long gasping breaths.
‘It sounds a real smoker’s cough you’ve got, my precious,’ Diana said, coughing a little herself and putting out her tongue to pick off a shred of tobacco. ‘Must give it up. Bad example.’
‘I don’t think she’s coughing because of the smoke,’ Gordon said.
Janet had found a thermometer. ‘Here we are – I’ll pop it under her arm.’
She knew before she did it that the baby was running a high temperature, and she also knew what was likely to be wrong, having worried all week one of her own girls might pick it up. It was going round the whole area. One child had had to go into hospital because she was asthmatic. Louise was asthmatic.
‘I think you should get her to a doctor in the morning, or call somebody out,’ she said, holding up the thermometer and trying to read the mercury in the fading light. She bit her lip. ‘I hope this is wrong – it’s awfully high – 103.’
Diana did look worried now. ‘What is it – do you know what’s wrong with her?’
‘I think it’s whooping cough.’
Janet did the nursing. There were three weeks before the end of term, so the worst would be over by the time Caroline and Daniel came back for the school holidays. The move to the new house was postponed. Harry had had whooping cough, so he went to work; so had Gordon, who said he would go to London on his own to deal with the extension to the project he was working on in Ghana.
They had discussed vaccination. Diana thought Margaret had been immunised against whooping cough – Gordon wasn’t sure – nobody knew. She had definitely had the vaccination for diphtheria and polio, they said. Janet sighed, and left them to argue, since it scarcely mattered now. Margaret was really ill, struggling to breathe. Diana began to panic. Her anxiety transferred itself to the child who cried even more when her mother held her, jigging her up and down in her arms, fruitlessly ‘shushing’. Diana was clearly relieved when Janet offered to nurse her instead, taking Margaret’s cot into her own bedroom. In the mornings, leaving her in bed to catch up on the sleep she had missed, Harry had breakfast along with his father-in-law and the men who had been up since milking and had already done a couple of hours’ work. He sat in his suit and tie with the farm workers in their shirt sleeves and braces and nicky tams, their boots at the back door, and felt awkward, a fool in the midst of their easy banter.
In the office he was himself again, the junior partner, useful and competent. On his way home, he called at the house in Harrowden Place, so that he could walk round the empty rooms on his own and imagine his family there. It was a big house, too big perhaps, but he thought their family might grow, and he needed something to reflect his new status, the life they were going to move into, once they were in the city.
In the kitchen, the range had been cleaned; the plumber said he saw no reason they shouldn’t go on using it, if they wanted to fire it up. Next to it sat a new gas cooker, since Janet had no intention of relying on a coal fired range for cooking – her idea was they’d get rid of it as soon as they could afford to refit the kitchen altogether. The longed-for washing machine sat in the scullery so that the rollers could be swung round over the deep sink to squeeze the clothes through. It was looking fine, the house, but they would still have a lot of work to do when they moved in, every room to decorate.
Upstairs was light and airy, the bedrooms square with sash windows. They all had fireplaces, but they could stuff paper up the chimneys to keep the draught out. The chimneys were all good and a bedroom fire would be needed now and then. It might be hard to heat the whole place in winter. He stood in the room that was to be decorated with flowered wallpaper for Esther and Louise, and found himself thinking it would hold three single beds if it had to, or the little box room next to it could become a nursery.
He saw it coming, that Margaret would stay with them, at least until Gordon managed to get a job back in this country. He also realised Janet was afraid to ask him directly, in case he turned the idea down flat. As if he would – there was nothing he would deny his wife. She wanted so little, content in their marriage, the children, her pride in his achievements. Gordon was well paid and generous; he would make sure it cost them nothing. There was a precedent; that was what made him sure he was right.
Caroline and Daniel had stayed with his parents-in-law since their mother’s death nearly fifteen years ago. When Bess died Gordon had turned to his mother to look after his nine-month-old twins. Now it seemed his second wife couldn’t look after her own child.
Harry glanced at his watch. The Inverurie bus was due in fifteen minutes on the Deeside road. He should leave now to catch it. Soon, when they had settled in after the move, he would decide whether they could afford a car.
He had stopped worrying about whooping cough. Under Janet’s care, Margaret was getting better, and there was no sign of their own two coming down with it. He locked the door of his new house carefully behind him and set off in the direction of the bus stop, swinging his briefcase. It was all about to begin: their family life, the good and solid future he had been planning and working for, perhaps since the day he had met Janet, during the war that already seemed to belong to another age.
ii
‘You’re doing a grand job, at any rate,’ Celia Livingstone said, watching her three youngest grandchildren as they trooped across the yard on their way to the garden, Esther and Louise holding Margaret’s hands. They were accompanied by the old dog that was past being much use to Andrew, but still looked for work. Today she was herding wee girls, Janet thought, amused at the way the collie circled, tail waving.
‘Margaret’s no bother.’ She glanced at h
er mother. ‘But – ’
They were sitting with cups of tea on the bench by the kitchen door. It was early October, still mild, though the breeze carried a breath of autumn. Janet leaned on the rough stone wall of the house and lifted her face to the afternoon sun, closing her eyes. She had taken the girls out on the bus to Braeside Farm and the effort of managing the three of them – Louise so lively and disobedient, Margaret so whiny and still, at eighteen months, babyish – had left her feeling resentful.
‘It’s a pity Harry couldna come with you,’ her mother said.
‘Oh, he’s busy, he goes to the office on Saturday mornings and he’s in the middle of painting our bedroom. I thought it might be a good idea to take the bairns out of his way.’
Something in her tone alerted Celia. ‘You’re managing fine, though?’
‘I suppose so.’ How much to say? She was not in the habit of confiding in her mother and did not have Gordon’s thick skin. ‘I still feel Gordon and Diana should be looking after their own daughter.’
‘No doubt,’ Celia said, ‘but until he’s back from that foreign place, I dinna see what’s to be done. I’m sure it’s nae suitable for bairns. They keep moving and it widna be guid for her, being shifted about – they need to be settled in one place at that age.’
Janet wanted to remark that there were people in Ghana bringing up children successfully, but there was no point. Her mother did not understand Gordon’s life or the place he lived in. The photographs he sent were impossibly exotic – the heat-baked landscape; the huts; the barely clothed native children crowding round Diana in her white dress; the women dignified but remote with their headdresses and robes – it was all too distant to be real.
‘It’s just – well, if I’ve got Margaret I can’t really think about having any more children myself. Three’s enough. And I don’t see why I should have to give that up.’
‘Were you wanting another bairn? What does Harry say?’
‘I’d like to be able to think about it.’
‘You’re young yet. But I dinna see what the problem is. Was Harry wanting a boy?’
‘Mother, you sound as if all that matters is what Harry wants! What about me?’
‘We canna be thinking about ourselves all the time. You’ve a fine life – a good husband and bonny bairns. And yon’s a grand house – I just hope you can afford it. Your father was worried about that, but as I said to him, I’m sure Harry kens what he’s doing.’ She patted her daughter’s knee with a hand hardened by years of farming and gardening, housework and husbandry. ‘Count your blessings, Janet, you’re fine as you are.’
Janet bit her lip. As usual, a mistake to try to talk to her mother. Worse, she always put her finger on a sore place, as if she knew – though she could not know, it wasn’t possible, those conversations in the dark in bed, the shadow that had fallen between Janet and Harry, the hurt in his voice when she said, I can’t think about another one. Not now, and he answered only, It’s up to you.
‘Remember,’ Celia added, ‘I had to take on two of them – just babies – and I was a lot older than you.’
‘Did you mind?’ Janet could not help asking. ‘Did you want Gordon to take them back when he married Diana?’
Celia sniffed. ‘What do you think? They were better with us. That lassie didna ken one end of a bairn from the other. I was fair amazed she was expecting at all.’
An accident, was Janet’s view of this. Diana had never shown any interest in having children. She had been the one to suggest boarding schools for Caroline and Daniel. Janet imagined Gordon saying in a few years’ time, when she was definitely past wanting another child of her own, ‘Right, we’d better get Margaret off to school now, like her brother and sister.’
No. She wasn’t having that. If I’m looking after Margaret, there’s no boarding school for her. Before she could ask her mother what she had felt about Caroline and Daniel going away to school, the dog barked in the distance.
‘I’d better go and see what the girls are up to,’ she said. ‘Jess is a good nanny but you can’t expect a dog to keep them out of mischief.’
Her mother chuckled: ‘Your father always says she’s the best working dog he’s ever had.’
They rose together and Celia took their cups inside. Janet brushed crumbs from her skirt and headed towards the garden, calling for her girls.
Once Upon A Time
1960
i
Caroline was reading Alice in Wonderland again. They had reached the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It was hot, so they were lying in the shade of the big apple tree, the tartan travelling rug spread out and a small table with a jug of Granny’s raspberry wine, some old cups with blue flowers round the rim, and a plate of ginger biscuits. Esther leaned on Caroline, making her even hotter. Louise stretched out on the grass nearby, linking a daisy chain.
Once upon a time there were three little girls, Caroline read.
‘That’s us,’ Louise interrupted, sitting up to look at Esther. ‘You’re Elsie, I’m Lacie, and she’s Tilly.’ She pointed at Margaret, asleep on Caroline’s lap.
‘E for Elsie and Esther . . . L for Lacie and Louise. Margaret can’t be Tilly, she’s an ‘m’,’ said Caroline.
‘Tilly is short for Matilda, I read it,’ said Louise.
‘Clever girl,’ said Caroline, bending her head over Margaret and stroking her fine hair.
Esther said, ‘I don’t like Elsie. It sounds common. Margaret calls me Essie, that’s better.’
‘It sounds like a mouse,’ said Louise. ‘Elsie the mouse.’ She tickled Margaret’s face with the feathery tip of a grass stalk, so that she sneezed and woke.
‘Well, the Dormouse is telling the story, isn’t it?’ Esther pointed out, ‘so maybe it was telling about mice.’
She started to giggle, setting Louise off too. In a moment they were holding their stomachs, laughing and laughing and rolling down the grassy slope to the burn, Margaret staggering to her feet and trotting after them, wanting to join in without knowing what it was she was to join. The book was left lying open at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, the pages fluttering in a tiny breeze. It didn’t matter, since they knew the story through and through, and would go back to it at bedtime when the grown-ups were all downstairs, and they were left to themselves in the shady summer evening bedroom.
Caroline sighed and raised her face to the sun, closing her eyes but opening her mouth a little, as if tasting its warmth. Then she put a leaf in ‘Alice’ to keep the place, and closed the book. She got up to look for the little girls. They were at the burn again, she could hear splashing, so she supposed she’d better keep an eye on them. I wonder how long they’ll be, she thought, shading her eyes and gazing down the slope. I wonder when I can stop being in charge. She had been quite keen in the morning, wanting to re-establish herself in some way. It was her home, after all, though the girls had often been here while she and Daniel were away at school. She sighed and rose to her feet, brushing leaves from her skirt. Then she set off down the garden to see where they had got to.
At the edge of the field, Esther was wading through the deep part of the burn, leading the way with Louise splashing behind but not holding her skirt high enough so that the hem was already soaked. La la la, I’m a Water Baby, la la lala Louise carolled. Behind her, Margaret struggled to keep her balance. I’m too wobbly for walking on stones, she thought, resenting Louise for being between her and Esther.
‘I’m not a sister,’ she said loudly, as the thought came to her. They couldn’t be three little sisters.
‘It’s all right,’ Louise said, turning back for a moment, balancing on one leg and waving the other through the clear water, ankle deep. ‘You’re as good as. Nearly a sister.’ She put the other foot down again and marched on after Esther who was a long way ahead, humming softly, as if she were on her own.
Margaret trusted Louise least of all when she was being kind. Nearly a sister, she thought. Is a cousin nearly a sister – or different fro
m that? I am a cousin. ‘Wait for me!’ she called, beginning to hurry despite her fears. She wanted to be a sister; she didn’t want to be left behind. A large pebble moved beneath her bare foot, she slid, faltered, and down she came, hard on her knees.
Caroline saw it happen but was too far off to scoop Margaret up in time; her yells pierced the air. She began to run down the slope, calling it’s all right, I’m coming! Then, from nowhere, Daniel appeared and was in the burn, his great strides bringing him to the shrieking Margaret in five seconds, less. He had her, he held her, they were both soaked, his shirt absorbing the water from her frock, but his arms warm and firm around her.
Margaret hiccupped and sighed and laid her head on his chest. This was best, almost worth the sore knees and the wet frock and knickers – to have Daniel rescue her. Now she was glad she had been left behind. It was better being a cousin after all since it meant she was Daniel’s sister. The others didn’t have that; they didn’t have a brother at all, even one so much older. Half-brother, Esther had corrected her last night, but who cared about that? Half was better than not brother, or cousin.
Caroline left them to it and went indoors. The sun was slipping from the garden now.
‘Don’t moon about,’ Granny said. ‘Go and shut up the hens for me. See if there’s any more eggs while you’re there and take a look for that broody one. I need to get her in a run by herself.’
Hens. This was not what she came home for. All through the summer term she had longed for this place, the big quiet house and her room at the top of it, the garden and the woods beyond, the silence. She forgot about the tractors at dawn, the cock crowing, the coming and going in the warm kitchen, the jobs they made you do, as if nobody could be left alone to just think. Look after the wee ones, feed the hens, take in the washing, spread the pillow slips on the grass to bleach in the sun.
She had wanted to get a job this year and make some money that would be her money, not from her father or grandfather. In a few months though, perhaps she and Daniel would get their mother’s money that was going to come to them when they were of age. Did that mean eighteen? She hoped so. She and Daniel could do what they liked then, live where they liked. They had talked and talked about it, dreaming their future.
The Treacle Well Page 2
