Mairi smiled. ‘Why don’t you tell him yourself, Miss Huntingdon?’
Arabella seemed to be considering many questions. ‘Yes,’ she said after a while. ‘We must all help our brave . . . men. It would be a kindness to send a letter, a simple message of encouragement, wouldn’t it?’
‘I have the address in the house.’ Again Mairi compared her plain homespun dress with the tailored clothes of the other girl. She might as well see everything, she thought.
‘Would you like to step inside out of the wind, Miss Huntingdon, and I’ll write the address for you.’
Arabella followed her into the house, stepping straight from the farm yard into the front room. Mairi looked at her home for a moment through the other girl’s eyes and she was ashamed and then she was even more ashamed when Arabella said delightedly, ‘Why, how comfortable this room is, and how your furniture shines.’
‘I use vinegar and water; my mother put store by the old ways.’
‘And no wonder.’ Arabella looked up at the ceiling which was astonishingly close even to her own head. ‘Mr McGloughlin must find some difficulty in standing erect.’
‘No, oh, you mean Ian. Yes, he stoops. I don’t suppose he even thinks of it any more.’
‘And how useful to be able to change a gas mantle without standing on a stool as the people at home do,’ said Arabella and blushed furiously. ‘If I may trouble you . . .’
Mairi hurried to the desk where Colin kept his accounts and copied the address that Ian had given them on to a piece of notepaper. Arabella took it, folded it neatly and tucked it into a pocket of her dashing little jacket. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And do forgive me for disturbing you.’
She hurried over to her groom who was waiting by the horses, stepped into his hands and was pushed up into her saddle. She did not look round as they trotted away.
Mairi went back to her mangle and finished wringing out the blankets which she then pegged out on the drying green. She stood watching the wind whipping them up into a wild dance but she was seeing the delicate and lovely figure of Arabella Huntingdon standing in the front room of the house.
‘She’s seen where you live, Ian, and she’s seen how we live. Maybe she’ll be too fine a lady to write to one of her uncle’s tenants. And if she is, Ian, then she’s not worth your interest in her.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It wasn’t mud; it was slurpy, sucking clay. It reminded him of the sound the pigs made as they sucked up their scraps: slurp, slurp, slurp.
He stood in it, some places three to five feet deep, and listened to the high explosives dropping all around him.
There were about twenty of them in the dug-out, packed tight like fish in a tin. The water came up to his knees. He looked at it lapping there like the sea on the beach at Carnoustie. Oh, just to slip down under the water. There would be cold, wet sand and shells; there would be shells and it would be salty and the seaweed would drift in front of his tired eyes until he closed them and then he would sleep, sleep, sleep, away from this madness.
His ambulance was a pile of charred metal somewhere near a place called Arras. The wounded who had been in it were charred embers too. He had to get back to them, he had to. Maybe someone had survived. Please, even just one. The soldier who had pulled him out of the blazing van, and had held him in an iron grip while the ambulance became a funeral pyre, had insisted that no one could possibly have survived the direct hit, let alone the fire. But he had to see for himself. He would wait for nightfall and then he would climb out and go back. He was an ambulance driver. He had to stay with his ambulance.
No one saw him go. He crept out of the dug-out like some primeval creature emerging out of the mud and onto dry land and he slithered back in the direction from which he thought the men had brought him. Eventually, when he was too tired to crawl any farther and too distraught to care whether or not he would be shot, he stood up and began haltingly to limp along the road.
By morning he was miles from the battlefield and he lay down in the shelter of a hedge and fell asleep.
He woke, cold, stiff, and hungry, but he was used to these sensations. He could hardly remember when he had not been cold or stiff or hungry. He stood up, slapped his arms, jumped feebly up and down and began to walk.
The joy to be away from the mud! But these were fields where men like his father had toiled for hundreds of years, coaxing a living from the reluctant soil. Now there was nothing. Not a blade of grass, not an insect. He walked on. Once or twice that first day a shadow passed overhead. It was a hawk floating, floating on the wind as he hunted carrion. There were bodies. Dear God: he would not let those birds have the bodies, dead boys who sat there for days, for weeks, with their dead eyes staring out to see if someone would come to bury them, to give them some dignity. He straightened the bodies as best he could, so that there was only the obscenity of death, no lewd gestures, no naked limbs grotesquely offered.
The sun came out and the smell rising from the fields made him sick. He fell asleep in his own vomit, not a decent healthy sleep but the exhausted state of a mind and body that is at the end of its tether. When he started awake he heard himself mumbling, ‘As before,’ and knew that was his prayer for the dead, and for the living dead in this war, for he had no words of prayer left. Now he expected God, if there was still a God, to know that he meant those same prayers that he had said a lifetime ago when he was young and sensitive, when he had been able to think and to feel.
He had absolutely no idea where he was but he did know that he was dying of hunger. When had he last eaten? Yesterday or was it the day before that? He passed a burned-out farmhouse and searched desperately for something, anything, that he could eat, but there was nothing.
He was unconscious when the patrol found him and he did not wake when they laid him in the back of a wagon and carried him back to their post.
He was aware of sounds, of voices that he could not understand. The smell of mown hay drifted in through the open windows on the wings of heat. Hay? Heat? How could it be? It was April, no, it was May or perhaps June. Yes, he must have been in France a month or two. He had had a letter, two letters from Mairi and . . . he groped wildly at his chest . . . one from Bella.
‘Bella!’ he cried and woke up.
‘Bien,’ said a voice and then he felt a cool cloth on his forehead and strong arms lifting him up. A cup of water was held to his mouth and he gulped it feverishly.
‘Thank you,’ he said and he looked around.
He was in a hospital ward and a nurse was standing beside him. He heard her speak to someone he could not see and then she lowered him against the pillows.
The doctor came then and examined him and he spoke but Ian did not understand.
‘British?’ asked the doctor when he had finished poking and prying and Ian gasped, ‘Yes.’
‘Bien,’ said the doctor and left him.
Later a man came who told him that to be a deserter was ‘ver’ bad theeng, not nice’, and Ian wondered what on earth he was talking about.
But he forgot it when an orderly brought him a meal, soup, hot and thick, not like the watery rubbish he had been eating with his unit. He did not recognise the flavour but he believed that it was the most wonderful taste he had ever experienced.
The man who spoke some English came back and asked him questions but his English was so poor and Ian was so weak that he did not think he was making a good job of his answers. The man seemed to think he was a deserter.
‘I was looking for my ambulance,’ he said over and over again.
‘Regiment?’ the man asked.
‘Non-combatant corps,’ Ian said but the face peering into his looked blank.
‘Conscientious objector,’ he tried. ‘Pacifist.’
That was understood. The man stood up abruptly. ‘We shoot canaille in France,’ he said and stalked away.
Ian never saw him again but two days later the first nurse helped him to dress in trousers and a shirt th
at did not belong to him and, leaning on her arm, he went out and was assisted into a car. There were three French soldiers in the car and they said nothing to Ian, possibly because they spoke no English and he spoke no French, and he was driven off.
They drove for hours and, to Ian’s surprise, it was autumn. They had passed one or two fields where crops had been allowed to grow or, more likely, had narrowly missed being laid waste, as had much of France. He put his hand in his pocket and the nervous soldier beside him pushed a rifle butt into his stomach. Ian removed his hand and with it the personal effects the nurse had given him, the letters from Mairi and Arabella.
‘Ah,’ laughed the soldier, ‘votr’ amante,’ and he laughed knowingly and Ian, who had no idea what he had said, smiled since that seemed the best thing to do in the circumstances.
At last they came to a small town that showed few signs of having been devastated by approaching or retreating armies. They stopped at a large building in the centre and Ian was hustled inside. He was, once more, in prison.
Again he found himself in a narrow cell with a board to lie on, a piece of wood that was supposed to act as a pillow and a thin blanket which he did not think he would need, the day had been so hot and dry.
It was two days before he was allowed out of the cell and that was the day he was brought before an officer who spoke good English.
He answered the questions which were hurled at his head by a dry voice.
‘Ian McGloughlin, Non-Combatant Corps, ambulance driver.’
‘You were without uniform, identification, had been wounded, and were certainly without ambulance.’
He did wait while Ian tried to explain.
‘I am an ambulance driver. My vehicle was hit by enemy fire. I was pulled out by some men of the Gordon Highlanders. The vehicle was burned with my patients inside. The Highlanders took me with them, patched me up, but I worried about my ambulance. Maybe it didn’t burn completely; I had to get back to see. I just left the unit and started walking back, I think in the right direction. The last name I remember is Ypres.’
The officer looked at him from under thick black eyebrows. His eyes too were dark in his suntanned face. ‘You walked a long way, mon brave, and you say to find a burned-out ambulance?’
‘I had to see for myself. I was responsible for those men. They were all hit, every one.’
‘You know what happens to deserters?’
‘I did not desert.’
The officer shrugged. ‘You have heard that conscientious objectors have been executed here in France? British C.O.s. You are, how they say, in between the Devil and a very hard rock. The world wishes to shoot you.’
Ian said nothing.
‘I believe your crazy story, Monsieur Ambulance Driver. We will keep you here, maybe a little more comfortable, until we can get some of your own people to take you off my hand. There are enough already here to feed.’
He stood up and walked out and Ian was left standing by the table. He remained there for some time and, after a while, was conscious that his legs were having some difficulty in supporting him. Should he sit in the officer’s chair or wait to fall down? He compromised by leaning against the wooden table. And that was where he was when the orderly came back to take him to his cell.
The next few days were not too unpleasant. At six in the morning he was roused and given coffee. He had never had coffee before and he thought he would be unlikely to want to drink it again but at least it was hot and wet. From seven until nine thirty he went into the yard to exercise with the other prisoners and at ten he was given some soup. Champignon, the mushroom, became his first French word. He smiled to think how surprised Mairi would be to hear that the most delicious and nourishing soup could be made from something that grew wild all over the farm. From ten thirty to almost four o’clock he was back in the yard and once one of the guards allowed the prisoners to play football. Language barriers dissolved as they ran madly about the dusty square. Ian limped or hobbled as best he could up and down; sometime in the past few months, possibly when the ambulance was hit, he had injured his leg but he was unable to remember much about the time he had been in France. Some memories were very clear and other things were a haze.
Still, he would remember these dusty, sunny days, especially the football day when everyone seemed to forget that they were prisoners, and gave themselves up to keeping a deflated ball from anyone else.
The game ended, and the exercise period, and they went in, as usual, for more soup, this time thicker and with more vegetables, mainly potatoes. After this meal they went out into the yard again and this time Ian was able to read as he walked up and down or sat in the shade. There were few books in the prison and only one in English, a tattered copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, and since no one else wanted it, he was able to have it every day. At seven o’clock he was locked once more in his cell where there was nothing to do but stare at the walls until the light went out at nine. He would spend the time reading and re-reading Arabella’s stilted, formal little note that wished him well and he would compose answers in his head. He refined them and refined them and laughed to realise that, even without paper or pencil, he was once more writing poetry.
‘Well, it’s certain nobody’ll ever see these poems, since they can’t get written.’
His French hiatus came to a rude end one morning when he was taken out of his cell, not to the exercise yard, but to the interrogating office and saw, to his horror, that the British officer they had found to interview him was his old adversary, Captain McNeil.
‘Should I save the Government the cost of a court martial and shoot you here and now, McGloughlin, you lily-livered bag of scum?’ he said, pointing a service revolver at Ian’s chest.
‘I have done nothing wrong, sir,’ said Ian stoically, although his heart was beating uncomfortably hard in his chest.
‘First you’re too scared to fight, to do your duty to your king and country, and then you desert your post. You’ll be shot, McGloughlin, and I hope I’m there to see justice carried out.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They had lived through this scenario before. Jack was on his horse beside the pump in the yard and she was on the barrel, but it was a different horse and she was not looking for a kitten, she was cleaning out a drainpipe. She had to work all day, every day, anything to keep her mind from worrying, worrying.
‘You shouldn’t be doing jobs like that, Mairi. What’s your dad thinking on?’
‘He’s thinking on the fact that his son is missing in action, if you must know, Jack, and he has no idea that I am cleaning the drainpipes.’
Jack dismounted and held up his hands to her. ‘Come down, Mairi, and let me do that for you; it’s not a lassie’s job.’
Mairi looked down at him and saw how he had changed in the past two years. The eyes no longer danced with devilment. Jack Black had grown up. She allowed him to help her down from the barrel.
‘Any job that needs doing is a lassie’s job these days, Jack. There’s a war on, in case you haven’t noticed.’
He turned white beneath his ruddy complexion and she could have bitten her tongue. She had meant to be flippant, not to hurt.
‘I went up against the Board, Mairi. All legal. I’m needed on the farm.’
‘Oh, Jack, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I wouldn’t wish going to war on my worst enemy and you were never that.’
To her surprise he seized her hands. ‘Then you’ll start walking out with me again, Mairi?’
She pulled her hands away and started to walk towards the house. ‘We’ve been through this . . .’
He interrupted her. ‘Who are you waiting for, lass? Some daft prince to come riding by on a white stallion? Could you no accept a man on an old bay?’
Who was she waiting for? A picture of Robin Morrison came, unbidden, into her head. He must get leave soon. He had returned once to Britain but only to a hospital in England to recover from dysentery. His father had said that Robin was ashamed t
hat, while his friends were dying around him, he had succumbed to a disease of the bowels. He had left the hospital as soon as he was able to stand upright and was once more ‘somewhere over there’. Robin, Robin’s father, Ian, so many people to worry about and now Jack standing here gripping her hands again and looking at her with sad cowlike eyes. It was easier to give in than to fight.
‘We can go to the pictures now and again if you like, Jack, but only as friends.’
‘Och, Mairi, that’ll be great. In the paper it says that we get plays and even opera in the town these days. Whatever you’d like. I’ll get the best tickets.’
‘Opera? Italians screaming at one another in Italian? I wouldn’t understand a word of anything like that, Jack. A good murder story or a tragedy – no, maybe not. There’s enough tragedy to go around just now, isn’t there?’
Immediately he was calm, concerned. ‘No further word then?’
‘He’s disappeared into thin air. His ambulance was hit and all the wounded in it were burned to death. They say he was pulled out, but by whom?’
‘Maybe the Gerries got him and he’s in a camp somewhere.’
She looked at him and he saw brave far-seeing eyes. ‘He’s not dead, Jack. I would know. He’s been the closest person to me in the world since I was six years old. I would know,’ she stated again.
‘It’s a mess over there,’ he said. ‘Letters take months to get out and he was maybe hurt a wee bit when his ambulance got hit.’ He thought of his old school mate actually driving an ambulance. ‘I wish I could drive a car. A doctor in Dundee’s got one. Everybody’ll have one in a year or two.’
Mairi dismissed such nonsense. ‘Aye, and in two shakes of a ram’s tail, we’ll all be using these tractors they had at the Highland Show. Farming without horses, I ask you.’
‘I’m surprised at you, Mairi. If there was ever a woman that was running helter skelter into the twentieth century it was you. I thought you’d welcome change.’
Mairi sat down on the old iron set at the farmhouse door and Jack sat beside her, his bonnet in his hands.
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