Granny always said, ‘You dinna need a job – there’s plenty to get on wi’ here.’ When Caroline protested that other people were paid for their summer jobs, it was all a joke and ‘we’ll see’. She must get hold of her father or Diana and make them understand she had to be independent.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Daniel said. ‘They give us plenty – we’re lucky really.’
He didn’t mind the work, but they had him out in the fields with the men. ‘I could drive a tractor,’ she had said to Grandpa when she was fourteen. ‘Let me do that too.’ He had lifted her up with his hard rough hands and she found herself in the tractor seat, high, looking over the newly ploughed fields. He showed her what to do and she drove the tractor up the lane to the yard with him standing behind her; it throbbed and roared beneath her like a beast. Proud and terrified, she remembered how to bring it to a halt, but got down shaking when Grandpa reached over and cut the engine.
Somehow, though, that was the end of it, and she had always had to work in the garden or the kitchen. The nearest she got to the labour in the fields was taking the men’s piece boxes and flasks out to them at twelve o’clock.
Soon she would be a student. Already school seemed a foreign land she had once visited. The dormitories and corridors and classrooms, the absurd rules, the teachers who had been so important only a few weeks ago: they had all vanished from her life. I’ll never go back there, she thought, leaving for the last time, getting on the bus that was to take the girls who were not being collected to the station. She was met in Aberdeen by her Uncle Harry and the little girls. Daniel’s term had not yet ended: he would be home in a few days, so she stayed on in Aberdeen with her cousins until he too was met at the station and he too had finished with school for ever.
Until just last year, when Aunt Janet or anyone else asked her about university and what she might do afterwards, she could not think so far ahead. All she was sure of was that she had a lovely time of being a student in front of her, a life so remote from future plans, or having a real job, she could not begin to see beyond it.
‘What about teaching?’ Janet used to ask, but that was because she was a thwarted teacher herself, Caroline thought, and had never had the chance to go to university. It was Gordon who had gone on to Higher Education while Janet learned shorthand and typing, since in her parents’ view she was unlikely to need a career.
Caroline had never had any intention of teaching. Going back to school would seem unnatural; it was a world gladly left behind. All that was over. Yet it went on haunting her in dreams, through the summer. Nightly she would wake sweating, worrying about being late for class, or sitting an exam for which she had done no work. Perhaps it was just the results she was worried about and when they arrived, securing her place at University, the dreams would stop.
This last year she had at least had an answer for everyone when they asked: ‘I’ve applied for medicine, like Daniel.’ Then, in another couple of weeks the letter would come and they’d know if they had the places that were provisional on their predicted results. Soon, soon, they would both be sure.
His family had been amused by Daniel’s certainty from early childhood that he was going to be a doctor, indulging him with a toy stethoscope and a white coat made to fit a seven-year-old. Later, as he passed exams and still planned to be a doctor, they were proud of him. You could see them all thinking about the day when they could say, my nephew, my grandson, my son, my stepson – the doctor. It was galling that the reaction to her decision had been so different. ‘Are you sure, Caroline? It’s a very lengthy degree,’ Harry had said, and her father added, ‘It’s not easy for women, you know.’ Worst of all, Janet said, ‘You don’t have to follow Daniel.’
She vented her fury on a cushion, that first time, throwing it at the wall when they had gone. Daniel laughed at her. ‘Ignore them,’ he said. ‘It’s up to you.’
He never asked her what had made her choose medicine and did not challenge her claim that it was a rational decision based on the subjects she excelled in, and advice from the one teacher in school she respected. ‘You could study medicine with these grades, if you get what we’re predicting, Caroline,’ Miss Matthews had said.
‘My brother’s going to do medicine.’
‘Is that any reason you shouldn’t?’
No, no it wasn’t. Suddenly she was set free; it was her decision, nothing to do with Daniel. Miss Matthews saw that.
Caroline closed the henhouse door on the soft crooning of the birds and trailed back to the house with two new eggs in a basket. The broody hen was nowhere to be seen. She felt like a broody hen herself, out of sorts, not wanting to be with the others. In the kitchen, Margaret was being put into dry pants and a pair of shorts that had been Louise’s last summer, fastened tight with a safety pin. Esther was laying cutlery on the big table, concentrating hard on getting the spaces between just right. Louise was nowhere to be seen, but even at six she was better than Caroline had ever been at avoiding the duller duties.
Daniel was in the basket chair by the stove, a cat on his lap, his nose, as his grandmother said, in a book. He was in stocking feet, his boots lined up in the porch with his grandfather’s and Eddie’s.
‘Just the twa?’ Granny said, looking in the basket.
‘It’s all I could see, anyway.’ She made for the stairs before she could be asked about the broody hen.
Upstairs the house was warm with a day’s sunshine, and silent. She climbed to her attic room slowly, weary with boredom. Sunlight lay across the landing but the top flight of stairs, uncarpeted, was in shadow, and almost cold without a window. Her own room felt stuffy, so she opened the window the full height of the bottom sash and knelt with her elbows on the sill, leaning out to the cooling air. A stirring of wind caught her hair and lifted her fringe. She was at the back of the house; below her was the slope of garden where they had been sitting and the burn and woods beyond. In the wood were the graves of sheepdogs that had belonged to the family years ago, when her grandfather was young: Mac and Bella and Jock. Caroline imagined herself walking in the wood, going deeper and deeper, till in her mind it became a magic forest where you could walk for days and, coming to the end at last, find yourself in another country. It wasn’t really like that; you would probably reach the other side in twenty minutes of steady walking. Still, she liked to think of it, of being deep among trees, deep in the silence of the wood that was not a real silence, but a faint hiss of leaf upon leaf and a rustle of tiny creatures among twigs and dry debris.
Caroline! Come to your tea!
With a sigh, she heaved herself upright and pushed the sash down till only a couple of inches of evening air could come in.
I could go to Aberdeen, she thought suddenly, I could stay with Aunt Janet. There’s more happening in a city, I wouldn’t be so bored. And they wouldn’t make me do all this stuff I can’t be bothered with. I need a rest anyway, I need to have a break before I start all the hard work next term. It would be a fair swop: Granny gets the little girls and Daniel; Aunt Janet gets Caroline and doesn’t have to look after children.
Just as suddenly, she changed her mind. She would be in Aberdeen soon enough, when term started and she didn’t anyway want to go without Daniel. There must be somewhere else they could go together, if her grandfather would spare him – even for a few days. Why shouldn’t they have a holiday?
Daniel had been working out of doors with the men all day and deserved a rest, Granny said. The meal had been eaten and washed up and the children were in bed.
‘You go up and read the wee ones their story,’ she said. With a sigh, Caroline went up to the spare bedroom where all three girls were in the big bed waiting for her. Esther patted her side of the bed. ‘Sit here,’ she said.
‘Look.’ Margaret pushed the blankets off and tugged up her pyjama leg to show her bruised knee.
‘Was that your tumble in the burn?’
‘Big bump,’ Margaret said with satisfaction.
‘Co
me on.’ Louise held out her book. ‘She’s being a baby now. Read mine first.’
Caroline read. Margaret tucked her thumb in her mouth and leaned on Esther, and Esther leaned on Caroline. Louise lay on the far side, listening and thinking, not leaning on anyone. Margaret’s book was very short, mainly pictures, then they came to Alice again, and she read some more of that, for the other two.
‘I can read it myself, you know,’ Esther said.
‘Of course you can.’
‘I like the way you do the voices.’
Caroline did the voices of the playing card gardeners and the terrifying Queen – Off with their heads! – and the Cheshire cat. Then she shut the book at the end of the chapter and said, ‘Time to go to sleep.’
‘It’s the Mock Turtle next,’ Esther sighed, lying down.
‘She reads it when you’ve gone downstairs,’ Louise said.
Esther went red. ‘Shut up.’
Caroline had begun to draw the curtains; she turned back to the bed. ‘Shall I leave them open for a while?’
‘Close them!’ Louise yelled, flinging herself back on the pillow. ‘Or I can’t get to sleep!’ Caroline could feel the heat of Esther’s glare as far as the window.
‘I’ll leave them a little bit open,’ she said, compromising.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Esther said. ‘It’s lovely when you come back from school. Will you tell us about your school again tomorrow?’
Esther longed to go to boarding school. When there had been a discussion about who would look after Margaret when Gordon and Diana went abroad, and someone had suggested she could at least go away to school when she was older, Esther had offered to go instead. Margaret could stay at home with Louise, and then her parents wouldn’t have to have an extra child most of the time. She had been much younger then, but she had never given up the idea: one day, she might go to boarding school too. When she wasn’t reading Alice she was reading Enid Blyton. She had reached In the Fifth at Malory Towers again, and it was one of the little pile of books lying by her side of the bed.
‘I don’t know why you think it’s so interesting. I was very glad to leave.’
‘Oh well,’ Esther said drowsily, ‘you’re nearly grown up now.’
Caroline kissed them all, Margaret already sleeping, and went downstairs. That’s right, she thought, I am, and if I want to go away for a while, they can hardly stop me. Still, she would approach it carefully, since you never knew with Granny and Grandpa. They had not approved of boarding school; they did not believe people should leave home and never understood why anyone went ‘gallivanting’.
It was when Gordon had remarried and planned to take his new wife to Ghana where the next contract was, that he decided to send his children to boarding school. It was a narrow little world at the farm, secure and healthy when they were young, but not demanding enough for their secondary education.
‘It’s better if they’re at school during the term and come to you in the holidays, except when we’re home on leave of course,’ he told his parents. ‘We’re going to keep a base in London.’
He felt better when he had made this decision and secured school places in Perthshire and Edinburgh. Doing this went at least some way to lessening the guilt he still felt about landing the children on his parents when they were babies. And yet, as Diana kept telling him, what else could he have done?
A year later, Diana was pregnant. She came home for the birth, which as it turned out was just as well: Margaret was premature and sickly for weeks. As soon as they could take her home from hospital, they brought her to Braeside, where Caroline and Daniel had been born, fourteen years ago. They let out their London house so that when they came home on leave, it was the farm they stayed at, until eventually, after she had whooping cough, Margaret stayed on in Aberdeen with Janet and Harry. To Caroline and Daniel, it was obvious their father no longer believed it was possible for him to bring up his own children. Nobody even mentioned it now; the arrangements were taken for granted. Gordon was looking for work somewhere in the UK, he said, but he often said so, and nothing had come of it so far.
In the kitchen a smell of warm laundry greeted Caroline; her grandmother was ironing.
‘It’s a’ fine and dry the day,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the lot ironed before Percy Thrower comes on the television.’
‘Can I help?’ Caroline said, knowing she was safe since only one person can iron at a time. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat at the table that was scrubbed and clean, ready for the next meal.
Her grandmother glanced at the clock. ‘Well, you can finish off for me if I dinna get done by half past eight.’
Caroline, thinking tactically for once, said, ‘I’ll do all of it, if you want to put your feet up.’
‘Och, I’ll put my feet up soon enough. You’re nae great shakes at ironing, eh?’
‘They show you at school, but nobody bothers much.’
‘Well, you’re done wi the school now.’
Here was her opening: what should she say?
‘I was wondering if . . .’
Granny looked up from the iron, but her hand kept up its thump and glide across the board, smoothing the pillow cases.
‘Oh aye?’
ii
A compromise had been reached. Caroline and Daniel won a week’s grace in early September, before term began. They were going to Harry’s partner’s cottage in the Highlands, since he was climbing in the Alps this summer and it was empty. They travelled into Aberdeen on the bus, to catch a train for Inverness. Their grandfather could not be spared to drive all that way.
It was hot on the bus with the sun shining directly onto their faces, but outside a colder wind blew, flattening the barley in the fields as they passed.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to come.’
‘So you said.’ Daniel closed his eyes, leaning back. ‘But maybe I fancied a change too.’
‘Maybe you did.’
He opened his eyes and looked at her. Caroline sometimes thought, and thought it again now, I would look like that if I’d been born a boy. Daniel was beautiful, with his fine features and dark hair and eyes; she was less beautiful, though they were so alike. Janet said, when she moaned about it, ‘You’ll grow into your looks, Caroline, wait and see. You’ll be bonnier at thirty than eighteen – not many women can say that.’
Janet was the source; Janet knew everything. Caroline sighed and leaned her head on Daniel’s shoulder, and dozed.
Peter Macdonald was to meet them at Inverness Station and drive them west to the cottage near Ullapool. He was the crofter whose land was adjacent to George’s place. But how would they know him?
He knew them, or at any rate knew they were the only youngsters, dark and thin and eighteen years old, getting off the train together. He came up to them as they walked off the platform to the station entrance, a little wizened man in a waxed jacket and flat cap.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘you’re for George’s place, then?’
‘Are you Mr Macdonald?’ Caroline asked. ‘Hello.’ She held out her hand and he took it in his hard grip. ‘This is Daniel.’
‘Aye,’ said Mr Macdonald. ‘How are ye the day?’
‘Fine,’ said Daniel, ‘but starving – can we get something to eat soon?’
A grin split Peter Macdonald’s face; his teeth, Caroline observed, had not seen a dentist for some time. ‘Nae bother.’
He led them to a Land Rover smelling of animal feed and cigarette smoke, with a collie pacing about in the back. They squashed their cases in with Caroline on the back seat, while Daniel sat up at the front with Peter Macdonald. The collie thrust its nose close to the grid between the back seats and the boot, and breathed on Caroline, its pink tongue hanging out.
‘Down, you!’ Peter shouted and the dog lay down, ears flat.
Once clear of Inverness, they were drawn on winding roads further and further from civilisation. Caroline leaned back and closed her eyes, sick of countryside, however maje
stic, not wanting to look at the hills. We should have gone to London, stayed in a Youth Hostel or something there. Or with Diana’s friends, Diana has friends in London. We should have gone to a city.
Her thoughts drifting, she was aware of Daniel and Peter Macdonald talking, mostly Daniel, Peter confining himself to speeches of half a dozen words at a time. He smoked thin cigarettes he had rolled up ahead of the journey and kept in a little heap by the gear lever with his matches. Daniel was fascinated by his one-handed ignition of both match and cigarette. In concession to his passengers, he had rolled down a window, but all this meant for Caroline was that the smoke drifted behind him along with waves of cold air. I’ll die of smoke inhalation, she thought, or maybe freeze.
By the time they reached Ullapool, Daniel was asleep and Caroline felt sick. She was thankful to stand outside in fresh air while Peter called at the Post Office before heading up the final stretch of road to the cottage.
She and Daniel walked along Quay Street, lined on one side by shops, on the other by the wall dividing town from water, and watched the ferry for the Western Isles departing.
‘Why on earth did we come?’ She stuck her hands in her anorak pockets and tucked her head down against the wind. It was colder here.
Daniel put an arm round her shoulders and hugged her. ‘Just wait – we’ll have a wee house all to ourselves and we can cook and eat anything we fancy. ’
‘Nobody to tell us what to do. Or not do.’
‘How far is this place from Ullapool do you think – can we walk there?’
When Peter came out of the Post Office and beckoned them back to the vehicle, they asked him. The dog rose, briefly excited, then subsided at Peter’s Get down!
‘It’s a couple of miles – but you could bike it.’
The Treacle Well Page 3
