Capital Union, A

by Hendry, Victoria

  There was a smell of cigarette smoke. I crept round the corner. Raphael was leaning on the parapet, looking out over the river at the castle. His face was in profile, his shoulders hunched like a great gargoyle.

  ‘Raphael?’ I said, wondering if I could squeeze past him, not sure if it was safe to be there with him.

  ‘I don’t normally follow ladies home,’ he said, ‘but since you are obviously a damsel who lives in a tower, I don’t think the normal rules apply.’ He laughed.

  ‘I wanted to be alone,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think you do,’ he answered, stubbing out his cigarette, adding a full stop to my name. ‘I think you need a friend.’

  ‘I have friends.’

  ‘So why aren’t you with them?’ He pulled a hip flask from his pocket. ‘Lemonade never did it for me.’ He passed it to me. I took a sip.

  ‘Bunnahabhain?’ I said. ‘The river mouth – safe harbour.’

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  I stood beside him. He traced the letters of my name with his finger. ‘Last will and testament?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  ‘How old are you, Agnes?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Eighteen and standing on the edge of a precipice, alone at the top of a tower in a goddamn horror of a fairy tale. Wouldn’t you rather come home and get warm?’

  ‘I don’t have a home.’

  ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘Jeff is dead.’

  ‘But you aren’t. Wake up, Agnes. This war won’t last forever. I don’t know what happened to your husband, but he wouldn’t want you to end your life with his, would he?’

  ‘He didn’t love me, and in the end, I didn’t love him. Does that fit with your picture-book story?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I thought it did.’

  ‘God has a plan for you, Agnes, and I don’t think it ends with freezing to death on an ice tower on a frosty night.’ He put his jacket round my shoulders. ‘Now let’s go. The people you came with will be missing you.’

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Let’s just say that the benefit of having smokes outside is that you get a chance to observe the world and all its passing strangeness. My curiosity was piqued as to why a pregnant lady would toddle off into the middle of nowhere on her own.’

  ‘It is not the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Well, where is it, then? You tell me.’

  I didn’t answer him. The stars were tiny pinpricks of blue light behind the mist of his breath.

  He held out his arm to lead me down the stairs.

  ‘Thank you, Raphael,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t going to jump, if that’s what you were thinking.’

  ‘Do any of us know what we are going to do before we do it?’ he asked.

  Mrs Ogilvie burst into tears of relief when Raphael dropped me at the farm. He refused a plate of her Eggs Benedict, just said he had to get the boys back to the servicemen’s club in Edinburgh. He tooted the jeep’s horn and drove off at speed. We sat by the fire, talking until the clock on the mantelpiece struck two, and decided that I should send a telegram to my mother, and go home at the beginning of the week. Mrs Ogilvie had guessed I was expecting, but hadn’t wanted to say anything with Jeff so recently dead. ‘A bairn isn’t the end of the world, Agnes,’ she said. ‘They bring their own love, and you don’t need to worry about the delivery. Mrs Winning at the surgery is a dab hand at hoiking them out, if you want to have it here.’ But I wanted my mother.

  Jim stopped work on his agricultural census and walked me to the station so I could get the train to Glasgow and on to Ayr. A newspaper seller was shouting, ‘Saving stamps for bombs,’ and waving a picture of Lord Alness sticking stamps on a bomb, and Jim said the Americans had beaten the Germans in Tunisia. I wasn’t sure where that was, but I hoped it was a sign that the war might end soon.

  Ayr seemed to be quiet like Stirling and I was glad to arrive. I was looking forward to a warm meal, but Duncan met me at the station grim-faced. I thought he was going to say something about Jeff’s death, but he didn’t.

  ‘Why so sour, puss?’ I said, as he took my suitcase.

  ‘You know,’ he said, putting it in the back of the cart, and lifting me up onto the seat. He flicked the reins and Polly trotted on.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘The whole Hannes thing is praying on my mind.’

  ‘Why should it? He’s gone now.’

  He straightened his cap. ‘Someone might have seen us.’

  ‘There was no one around.’

  ‘What if someone did? I haven’t been able to look the neighbours in the eye since it happened. Whenever anyone mentions the war effort, I feel like I betrayed them. What if he is back on the battlefield now, shooting people we know? What does that make me? I might as well have lifted the gun and shot them myself.’

  ‘Duncan, you’re being daft. Believe he was a farmer, like us.’

  But as we drove past the ploughed fields, I could hardly remember what had made me take Hannes into my life. He was the figure born from the trees in the rainstorm: Mrs MacDougall’s bogeyman, my childish secret against Jeff. He was my humanity and my betrayal. Now I had made my brother unhappy. The child kicked in my womb, and I put my hand over it. Duncan flicked me a look out of the corner of his eye and stared back at the road.

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’ he said, snapping the reins so the horse trotted on faster.

  ‘Maybe later. Does Mother feel the same as you now?’

  ‘I don’t know. She never mentions him. Dad still thinks he was a friend of Jeff’s. I don’t like lies, Aggie.’

  ‘I am sorry, Duncan,’ I said, and touched his sleeve, but he didn’t put an arm around my shoulder as he usually did and I knew I wasn’t forgiven.

  ‘I feel wrong inside,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to be with my friends when they are home on leave. Can you imagine how that sits with me? I buy them a drink and I feel like there is so much space between us that I am reaching the glass across the Irish Channel to them, the channel I took a killer across; a man who is fighting for our destruction.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate. You didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t ask to go to war. You were helping me.’

  ‘Aye, but the price is too high. I might as well have signed up as a National Socialist.’

  ‘He was a farmer, Duncan.’

  ‘He is a Nazi.’

  ‘Duncan, please.’

  He looked at me. ‘It is worse than you think, Ag. The Ghillie told me he had an odd story to tell, the story of a hybrid animal he saw early one morning. It had a thick, brown coat, a white head and a strange, guttural cry, and the most curious thing about it was: it was walking along the forest path with a native species, so friendly that they had touched their wee noses together. And later he had seen this animal caught in a net at the harbour, and although it was dangerous, it hadn’t been killed. On the contrary, it had been set free. How could I explain a story like that, he asked, because it had left him scratching his head for many a day.’

  I remembered the figure with the gun, slipping into the trees.

  ‘You are not safe here, Ag. It was a warning.’

  ‘He wouldn’t say anything against you,’ I said.

  ‘He’s not letting it drop. I buy him a drink when I see him at the bar to keep him sweet, and he raises his glass each time and says, “To the Divine Mystery of God’s wonderful creation”. He’s a big drinker and his tongue gets looser as the evening goes on.’

  ‘Everyone kens he’s got mair wind than sense.’

  ‘You shouldn’t underestimate him. Don’t you remember you turned him down the summer you met Jeff? You are free now. If you refused him again, he might try to hurt you.’

  ‘Duncan, he is twenty years aulder than me. He got the message the first time.’

  ‘All men think they are God’s gift to women, Aggie. The face they see in the mir
ror is not the face you see.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘I am not entirely unkissed. Elaine is keen to get mairrit.’

  ‘I meant, are you safe?’

  ‘Likely no’, although he has no grudge against me. It wasn’t me he proposed to, but, like I said, he talks when he drinks and he drinks when he’s upset. I don’t want you here, Aggie.’

  ‘But I want to see Mother.’

  ‘Are you sure she wants to see you?’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘The truth.’

  I didn’t know which truth he meant. He stopped the cart. ‘Choose, Aggie. You can stay and remind us of your lie every day or you can go back and work in the nursery. Stop the talk before it gets going.’

  ‘Redeem myself?’

  ‘Aye, if you like.’

  ‘A Land Girl growing tomatoes out of season. Do you think that is enough?’

  ‘It will have to be.’

  I took the reins from him and turned the cart. I felt like the road no longer connected me to home, but only to Duncan’s anger, which smouldered in him, fed by the Ghillie’s suspicions, the wireless barking on about the war, his friends’ tragedies, the telegrams brought to his neighbours through silent streets. He didn’t want me to stay. There was no future here. The past was getting in the way. ‘Tell Mother, and Dad, I was asking for them.’

  He nodded, but I knew he would just say I hadn’t come after all, to spare Dad.

  The road back to the station was dreich. Duncan’s face was unrelenting. He never looked at me or spoke again. I think he was crying. He kept turning his face away and swallowing hard. He bought me a ticket and left me beside my bag in the waiting room. As I sat there I hated Scotland, the Scotland that had killed Jeff, imprisoned Douglas and left me alone. I’d tried to help someone from another place and she, Scotland, had stolen my family. She seemed less like a great beauty, silver rivers of hair trailing over her misty gown, and more like a hag of petrified rock. I thought of the women they had burned as witches on the dead volcano in Edinburgh, or drowned in the loch at its feet; sacrificing them on the castle rock as if their red blood could run down the cliff face into the heart of the earth and bring it back to life. I thought of the bloody quarters of Wallace’s body enshrined in memory at the foot of his tower; the monument hoisting his dream up into the sky, only to smother it in cloud, or throw it up bright against the light as another folly, far above the people who still struggled below. Scotland ate her own children on winter nights as they dreamed, but each new generation still loved her. She was an unkind parent, a deceiver, a monster; she was a lover, an enchantress, a dream.

  28

  May and my delivery came too soon. The early summer had passed in a slow harvest of picking tomatoes. Jim only allowed me to fill small trugs as I got bigger, and finally he let me sit by the kettle with my feet up. He claimed it was only my tea that kept them all going, and the Ministry inspectors happy on their lengthy visits. I rarely put the wireless on. Hitler was fighting in Russia, and the long reports of Allied troop movements in Africa reminded me of Douglas’ injured poet friend who loved the Cuillins. There were pictures in Jim’s paper of Douglas, too: in a kilt, haranguing voters on Kirkcaldy High Street. He wanted to give Scotland dominion status like Canada. I folded the page over and didn’t read on. I sang to the baby inside me to drown out the sound of the world, but he must have guessed it was not a good place because in the end he joined us only slowly, and it was a long, walking labour.

  That first day of my pains, I wandered about the kitchen and sitting room, unable to sit down or get comfortable. It was worse overnight and I lay propped up on pillows, trying to get some sleep, but the contractions came on as a deep ache and kept waking me up. I knelt on my hands and knees, but that didn’t help. Mrs Ogilvie came in and rubbed my back with camphorated oil, and Jim came in to say a Gaelic blessing. She bundled him out the door. It was midday before she sent him for Mrs Winning. The contractions were closer together now and the pain had increased. I began to cry and I wished my mother was there. By teatime, they let me hang onto the stone lintel of the mantelpiece to push down, and placed folded towels at my feet. I felt the baby’s head turn a corner deep in my belly and then slide downwards. He was born at 6pm and they laid me in bed with him on my chest. He had fuzzy, blond hair and smacked his tiny lips together, casting round for my breast. I could have run up Dumyat and held him up to the stars. Mrs Winning looked at him, swaddled in his shawl, and said, ‘What a wee dote. He’s been here before.’

  Mother never replied to my telegram telling her of little Dougie’s birth. If she had winkled the whole story out of Duncan, perhaps she was afraid the Ghillie would use what he knew to press his suit, if I did go home. I no longer had the protection of my marriage. And if I refused him, he might destroy them, too, so I stayed on at Laurelhill through the long years of the war. I was the sick sheep she had isolated to protect the flock, and it made me anxious. Dougie slept in my bed, or in the bottom drawer from my dresser. I tried not to think of it as a tiny coffin when its brass handles rattled as he cried. I would snatch him up to my breast and hold him close, kissing his hair while he fed. We were alone on the raft of my bed in the chaos that tried to pull itself up the country on steel fingers. Death flew in the air and swam in the sea, and I cried for a world Dougie knew only as an illusion; the peace that stretched just as far as the fringes of his shawl, but he brought me joy as he grew.

  He took his first steps on the tenth of April, 1944, holding onto my fingers. Jim put him in the wheelbarrow to celebrate and ran round the yard with Mrs O shouting, ‘Slow down, before you do yourselves a mischief.’ When I rescued him, he kicked his wee legs against me and shouted, ‘Again, again,’ and I wished there was more for him, that the laughter could be shared with my own family, too. Each inch he grew carried us further from them. We were becoming strangers to each other with every month that passed, and it made me sad, as if we could never go back to what we had. Once, I thought I saw Duncan at the end of the road to the nursery, but I couldn’t be sure. He was wearing a coat I didn’t recognise, and didn’t turn round when I called his name. I arrived back at the farm in tears and, as he did every time I wilted, Jim announced it was time to rally the troops and took us to tea in his favourite café on the High Street, or down the Forth in his boat to Fallin. He always packed a picnic on those summer trips, and we ate fruit from the greenhouses and drank flasks of tea until we were full. We would lie in a solemn row on a blanket, like sardines in a can, and snooze until it was time to go home. ‘Always row back with the tide,’ Jim would say with a wink, starting the motor on the boat.

  As a special treat in May, Jim gave me and Mrs Ogilvie a lift to Perth. He was off to see his supplier about onion sets and a new tomato called Jubilee that had come out the year before. He dropped us by the Tay, which flows through the centre of the town, and we walked along the river’s edge to the South Inch park. The wide, green space felt fresh and welcoming with broad paths lined with benches. Mrs O spread out a rug, laid out our spice cake and sponge fingers on a tea towel, and lay back in the weak sun with a sigh. ‘You would never guess there was a war on up here,’ she said. ‘It’s like visiting the past. A summer Saturday afternoon like all the others we ever knew, and all the ones we thought we’d see, at least before that madman Hitler and his henchmen started clumping all over the place with their bloody flags.’

  I looked at the solid, stone buildings surrounding our little square of blanket, our temporary heaven, and I treasured our friendship. Dougie’s wee fist held onto the edge of my blouse. He made little cooing noises, like a dove, as he drank milky tea from his bottle, and his eyes followed a dog chasing a bald tennis ball.

  ‘How are we ever to keep that darling boy safe in this madness?’ asked Mrs O, turning on her side to gaze at him. Dougie tried to sit up in the basket of my crossed legs. ‘Let me burp him, Agnes,’ she said. ‘It’s the closest I am going to get to having children.
’

  The beautiful mask of her face smiled, but a traitor tear slid to the corner of her eye. She settled Dougie on the edge of her lap and leant him forward to rub his back in gentle circles. He closed his eyes and burped. ‘Better?’ she asked him, smiling down into his face and handing him a rusk.

  ‘Mind your dress,’ I said, passing her a napkin. ‘There could still be handsome men in Perth, roving forestry workers in search of a wife. Sponge finger?’

  She shook her head. ‘Even if they form an orderly queue, once was enough for me. I have got used to being Stirling’s only divorcee and anyway, after the war, if it ever ends, I can reinvent myself as a glamorous war widow. No shame in that.’ She wiped Dougie’s mouth. ‘On the other hand, why bother hiding the truth? Everything is changing.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s for the better,’ I said, lifting Dougie from her and tucking him into his pram. ‘Shall we get you that cloth you fancied?’