They went at one another with strength but without skill. The other boys formed a circle around them and the girls stood squacking outside that.
Robin jumped down from the platform where he had begun to ask Edith for a dance and pushed his way through the excited young people.
‘Stop it,’ he yelled but neither of the opponents heard him.
‘Come on, Ian, it’s the kirk hall.’
It’s doubtful that they would have paid attention had he told them they were in the kirk itself. Robin grabbed Jack and pulled him back just as Ian swung a blow at Jack’s jaw. It connected, of course, with Robin and sent him to the floor in a crowd of multicoloured stars.
The shrieking stopped, the shouts of enthusiastic encouragement died away as the young people looked down at Robin.
‘Now look at what you made me do.’ Poor Robin heard Ian’s voice yelling at Mairi and he smiled as he pulled himself to his feet. Edith was there to help him stand up.
‘Oh, Robin, you poor lamb. I’ll make you a nice cup of tea. And you’d best away home, our Jack, afore I tell Father.’
‘You too, Mairi,’ Robin heard Ian say and he looked back to see Mairi, her face white with fear and embarrassment, burst into tears and run from the room followed by her brother. He would have gone after them but it was remarkably comfortable being propped up by Edith. Was she aware of how close her well-formed bosom was to his swollen jaw? He hoped not for he would have hated for her to move away.
She did though while she made him tea, having first given him a wet cloth to hold to his face.
‘You’re going to have a magnificent black eye,’ she said. ‘You were so brave, Robin, to get between Ian and Jack like that.’
‘Stupid, more like,’ groaned Robin who was beginning to wonder how he would explain his bruises to his parents.
He was not, of course, the only young man with explanations to manufacture. Colin McGloughlin was not at all pleased to have his daughter return home in tears and when he heard the story, told reluctantly by his son and somewhat hysterically by his daughter, was unsure as to which of his offspring he should berate first. As usual he chose Ian, only to have Mairi – as usual – jump to her brother’s defence.
‘Don’t yell at Ian. It was my fault. I did promise Sinclair but I had forgotten until Violet reminded me.’
Colin looked at his dishevelled offspring. ‘Oh, go to bed, the pair of you,’ he said and went back to his account books.
*
It was several days before Robin showed his face outside the schoolhouse. He had been concussed when his head hit the floor – not, he assured his father, when Ian’s fist hit his jaw – and he suffered from headaches for a few days. When his rather splendid black and purple bruising had changed to an unfortunate bilious yellow he made his way to the farmhouse with the pot in which Mairi had carried the soup. Ian and Colin were not yet home from the fields and Mairi was in the kitchen preparing their evening meal. She flushed when she saw Robin standing there.
He had known that she would be alone and he had known that she would be embarrassed and possibly annoyed to see him and yet he had been unable to prevent himself from coming. Why did she dislike him? What had he ever done to deserve her animosity? The questions rankled.
‘Ian’s still in the fields,’ she said angrily. ‘A farmer uses all the hours God gives him in the summer. Even a brilliant Greek and Latin scholar should know that.’
‘Take your pot, Mairi McGloughlin, before I put your head in it.’ Robin was well and truly fed up. He had had a painful and ignominious few days; his mother had been distressed and all for the sake of this madam. He thrust the pot at her. ‘It’s a pity your father never gave you a few of the skelps he was so keen to give Ian; it would have been the making of you.’
For the second time in less than a week Robin found himself on the receiving end of a McGloughlin fist but this time he saw it coming. He grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, fully intending to slap her with his other hand and found to his surprise that he had pulled her into his arms. Her beautiful green eyes sparkled up at him like those of a furious wildcat and he bent his head and kissed her full on her soft, yielding lips. Stunned, she stayed quiet for a second and then Robin felt her respond.
He was eighteen years old and had never kissed anyone except his mother and he had not done that for several years. This was very different. It was wonderful until Mairi came to her senses. She kicked him hard in the shins and when he released her with a yelp of pain she pushed him as hard as she could. He stumbled backwards and fell over the pump that stood just outside the scullery door.
It was painful and it was humiliating. He looked up at her. One minute she had been kissing him so that every nerve-ending in his body tingled with the hints of unknown delights and the next she was kicking and slapping him.
‘That’s it,’ he yelled. ‘Edith’s right, Mairi McGloughlin. You’ll end up an old maid and serve you right.’
She stood above him, her face red with fury, her eyes full of unshed tears, and then as suddenly as she had become a fury she deflated.
‘I hate you, Robin Morrison, and I’d choose to be an old maid rather than have anything to do with the likes of a mammy’s boy like you.’
Then she burst into tears and fled back into the farmhouse, slamming the door so hard behind her that the old stone house seemed to rock on its foundations.
CHAPTER FOUR
Robin Morrison, after promising faithfully to write to Edith Black, returned to the University of Edinburgh and decided to get a very good degree.
‘And that’ll show her,’ he announced to his suitcase as he tightened the extra leather strap he had fastened around it, the catch not being reliable. He had little desire to ‘show’ Edith anything. Edith was a clinger and there were times when a chap wanted to cling and times when he wanted to be clung to, but pleasant as a little dalliance was, there were other things in life.
After his first year, Robin did not usually return home for the university holidays since jobs were more readily available in the city, but he did return in the summer of 1910. Robin Morrison was going abroad, to Florence, to study for a year in the places he had read and dreamed about since he first learned to read.
Ian had the news first.
He was sitting at the fireside waiting for Mairi to bring the soup to the table. He and his father and their hired men had been ploughing all day and they were dirty and exhausted. Ian had been slumped in his chair almost too tired to eat and forgetting completely that it was four weeks since he had heard from Robin who was normally a faithful correspondent. Mairi had put the letter up on the fireplace propped against the Wallie dug, that bone china ornament no self-respecting Edwardian household would have been without and, softened by her brother’s obvious exhaustion, she brought it to him.
‘This came today, Ian; it’s from Robin.’
Immediately Ian brightened. These letters were his passport to a world in which he should belong but from which he was barred by poverty. Robin told him everything: classes, professors, university social events, opinions, political, religious, whatever . . . Robin shared with his friend. Ian never once complained about how much he missed their meetings and had taken to going to the schoolhouse once a week, where he discussed the world past, present and future with the Dominie, and which he used as a library.
Now he carefully opened the letter and read the closely written thin sheets again and again and just this once allowed his heart to fill with grief that he too should not see Rome and Florence or one day, maybe next summer, Greece.
‘Dad, Mairi,’ he called. ‘Come and hear this. Is it not wonderful? Robin’s won a scholarship to the University of Florence. A whole year, Mairi! He’s going to Italy for a whole year. He’s studying his daft old Romans, of course, but he plans to go on walking tours, to Venice, Mairi, and to Rome and, would you believe, Dad, Greece. He hopes, if he can save enough on his food, to get to Greece before he comes home for his last ye
ar in Edinburgh. What I would do to go with him!’
He handed Mairi the letter to read and sat back down in his seat. ‘He’ll send me postcards and he’ll sketch.’
Colin looked at his son and not for the first time wondered if he had done the wrong thing by forcing the boy on to the land. No, no, no. The land was constant. People needed food. Therefore, although he would have to work all the hours God gave him, Ian had a job, a life. How many young people in this glorious new century could say the same with any security? Weren’t machines taking jobs every day, even on farms? Hadn’t he seen a bit in the paper about a machine called a tractor? Couldn’t it plough an entire farm in a minute with just the one driver?
‘All well and good, lad,’ said Colin as he moved to his place at the head of the scrubbed table, ‘and I’ll like fine to see his postcards, but what kind of a job is he going to have at the end of all this?’
‘Teaching, Dad, but that’s not important. He’ll have seen things, maybe even put his hand on stones touched by Cicero and Plato and . . .’
‘If you want ancient stones, laddie, there’s plenty here on the farm. The Picts is as ancient as your Romans and Greeks and they even spoke decent Scots.’
Ian stood up angrily. ‘We don’t know what they spoke, because we’re none of us clever enough to read their stones.’
‘Soup,’ Mairi almost yelled. Ian must be distressed. He rarely argued with his father and certainly not over education and learning. She pushed him gently towards his seat. ‘I’m glad Robin’s coming home afore he goes gallivanting. I doubt his mother’ll live through many more winters in that draughty old house. The doctor’s bike’s fair worn a new path to the Schoolhouse.’
‘Aye, I think from the tone of Robin’s letters that his father isn’t telling him the whole truth; he knows his mother’s poorly but I doubt he knows how often she’s really ill.’
‘Why has he not been home lately, lad?’
‘Work, Dad. He’s worked as a postie and he’s worked . . . he’s worked in a bar. Not everyone who goes in a bar gets drunk, you know,’ he added defensively, ‘and he needs money since his father makes next to nothing as a Dominie.’
‘Then why in the name of heaven is the laddie set to be a teacher? Surely there’s only about two bairns at the most that wants to learn Latin and Greek.’
‘Robin sees teaching as a calling, like to the Church. Teachers want to make the world a better place.’
‘So do farmers, but we want a decent wage for it.’
‘You’ll be glad to see Robin, Ian,’ broke in Mairi. ‘Goodness, have you spoken to him since that awful dance?’
‘The dance wasn’t awful, Mairi McGloughlin, you were,’ said Ian with his rare smile.
‘Stop it, you two. Sometimes I think you’re getting younger instead of older. This is grand soup, lass. I’ll have another bowl.’
Mairi picked up her father’s plate and went through to the scullery. Rome, Florence, maybe even Athens. Robin would see all of them and she would stay at home content to see Dundee. No, she would not. She could live nowhere else but, oh, to see somewhere else, Edinburgh even, or London. It would be grand to look at famous buildings that sometimes seemed to exist only in books. Robin would see the wonders of the ancient world; he would speak in a language that she could not understand.
‘What are you thinking about, Mairi? Here’s Father wondering if you’ve burned the soup.’
Ian was behind her, his bowl in his hand, Oliver Twist begging.
‘Aren’t you jealous, Ian? Robin away to Italy and you, that’s just as clever, stuck behind a plough.’
‘Jealous, no. Unhappy, yes. But I’ll go abroad one day, Mairi, and I’ll relish every minute the more for having been denied. And in the meantime Robin will share.’
‘Oh, aye, Lord Bountiful. He’ll send you a postcard and not feel guilty.’
‘Good Heavens, lassie, why should Robin feel guilty? It’s not his fault I could not stay on at the school, that I wasn’t born rich. One day people will want to read the words I write and they’ll pay to read them and I’ll go to France and see castles and vineyards. Will I take you with me, my wee sister?’
Mairi did not doubt him. ‘Will you come back? I’ll go with you but I’d need to come back.’
‘Of course I’ll come back, especially if I’m not forced to stay, but first we’d better get the dinner on the table or neither one of us will be going anywhere.’
*
Robin came home but he was rarely at the farm. Ian was too busy and, besides, Robin wanted to spend time with his parents.
‘Robin’ll be away abroad afore I’ve had a chance to talk to him,’ Ian complained to his sister when he finally came in, exhausted. It was very late but still daylight and Mairi had been ironing while she waited for her menfolk to come home from harvesting.
‘You’ll be through by Sunday if this fine spell holds,’ Mairi heard herself saying. ‘Invite them back after church for their dinner.’
Ian hugged her in one of his rare gestures of affection. ‘You’re sweet, Mairi McGloughlin, and I’ll run away down to the schoolhouse afore I eat and ask them.’
Then he spoiled it. ‘You’ll be nice, won’t you, to Robin?’
Mairi stamped the hot iron down on his shirt as if she wished her brother were still inside it. ‘I hope I know how to behave in my father’s house, polite and . . . and ladylike.’
‘Och, Mairi, can you no just be yourself?’ He stared at her aghast, but she smiled.
‘Away afore you hang yourself,’ she said and, with a sigh of relief, Ian stuck his cap on his head and went back out.
It was nearly an hour later when he returned and his father had already eaten.
‘I’m sorry I took so long,’ Ian apologised. ‘Robin and I got talking about the Romantics and the Realists. I fair enjoy a chat like that, Mairi, and Mrs Morrison offered to make me a piece . . .’ He looked up at his frowning sister. ‘But, of course, I couldn’t stay and miss this.’
Mairi still held on to the plate of delicious-smelling rabbit pie. Harvest was a good time to make easy catches. She struggled with inclination and desire and then capitulated and sat down, after giving her starving brother his plate.
‘Come on, tell me, what’s Romantics and Realists?’
Ian’s eyes twinkled at her over the top of a full fork and, when he had finished chewing and savouring, he told her.
‘Realists is people like Hardy and Wells, and a French fellow, Emile Zola, and they write about life as it really is. You know, you see the dirt swept under the carpet, and then the Romantics are writers like Lord Tennyson and Rudyard Kipling, softer stuff, poems and such like, “Come into the garden, Maud.” ’
‘Surely poets are Realists?’
‘Yes and no. They paint the world as they see it and that might not be the way you see it. And it’s the subject as well. You wouldn’t write a poem about anything nasty, like wringing a hen’s neck, or a scuffle in Arbroath on a Saturday night.’
‘Your friend Tennyson wrote about war. I cannae think of a less romantic subject.’
‘That was then. We’re civilised. War’s a thing of the past.’
‘If women were running the world it would be,’ snapped Mairi and went off to put the oats on to soak for the morning.
*
Robin Morrison went to Italy and Mairi found herself, like Ian, looking for his letters. Not that she cared a fig for Robin but a first-hand account of foreign travel was interesting and educational. But there was more to life than watching for the postman’s bike. The farming year turned unrelentingly on its axis from one harvest and immediate ploughing and planting to the next. By October the harvest was over and the fields were being readied for the next year’s crops. Turnips were piled for winter feed and the constant repairing of binders and tack and the thousand other things that were indispensable occupied Colin and Ian indoors during the long winter nights.
They had a break at New Year
and Colin kept an open door for any of the neighbours who wanted to come in for a dram and a bit of Mairi’s Black Bun or the more delicate shortbread she baked. It was the only day of the year that the McGloughlins saw their father the worse for wear. He drank dram for dram with his neighbours and grew maudlin and sentimental until he fell asleep in his chair by the fire and was carried up to bed by his son, no longer Colin’s laddie but a man, suddenly grown bigger and stronger than his father. In the morning Colin was up as usual and, if his mouth was dry and his skull a throbbing mass, he said nothing and no one, not even Mairi, dared ask him how he fared.
Soon after ne’erday came the seedtime, the sowing of oats and spring barley. Then, without drawing a breath, it was time to prepare the ground for the root crops, especially the potatoes. The farmers painted a living picture on the soil with little awareness of the beauty they were creating but still with an appreciation of the world around them and even big men like Colin McGloughlin would stop and admire the delicacy of the primroses that peeped out from every turn. He would tell his horses to stop while he pulled a bunch, roots and all, for his daughter’s garden.
Then the weather turned warm enough for Colin to roll up his sleeves and unbutton his shirt, not to the waist, merely a decorous button or two – had his daughter not been nearby he would have liked fine often to remove shirt and singlet both – and get on with thinning out the turnips. And always, always the farmer watched the progress of the grain. The seeds were sown and the fields were watched for the magical overnight when thousands of little green soldiers suddenly appeared above the ground. They did not spring into action like those of the Greek hero . . . but bided their time growing taller until the summer sun turned their heads gold. Then Colin and other farmers like him all over Angus and further afield would lean over a fence and look and swither about whether or not to cut now – could they not hear the grains rustling and whispering in their silken beds, and surely this fine spell could not last? – or should they pray for good weather and wait another five or maybe six days?
The Crofter's Daughter Page 4
