He was behind her. She had heard him scrape the chair back from the table, listened to the uneven footsteps as he dragged his bad leg across the floor. He put his hands on her bowed shoulders and turned her round to face him. How easily she fitted into the circle of his arms.
‘What people think doesn’t matter, Mairi. It’s what we know that matters.’
‘Fine words, Robin.’ She could not meet his eyes.
He lifted her chin with his right hand and bent slowly until his lips touched hers, gently, sweetly, the kiss of a child and then his arms went around her and he pulled her to him as if he could not get her close enough and his kiss became powerful, demanding, the kiss of a man. She could not move even had she wanted to move and she did not; she wanted to stay there for ever, with Robin’s body blocking out the light, the pain, the worry.
He let her go. ‘You’ll notice I was careful to hold your hands down, Miss McGloughlin. My jaw has a long memory and I’m a wee bit frail at the moment.’
‘I didn’t hit you that hard,’ she said and they were bickering again and then Robin stopped it by kissing her again and this time her hands were, of their own accord, around his neck and she was kissing him back as heartily as he was kissing her.
‘And I look such a fright,’ she said breathlessly as he released her rather abruptly.
He limped back to the table. ‘I didn’t notice,’ he said and she wanted to hit him but she couldn’t. She knew that she would never hit him again; she doubted that she would ever want to squabble with him again either. She wanted him to kiss her again. That had been very satisfactory. She had forgotten her old trousers, her broken fingernails, her untidy hair. She went to the table and sat down beside him and they looked at one another.
‘What a lot of time I wasted thinking you were a wee nuisance.’
‘I was.’
‘I would like to kiss you again.’
‘Me too.’
‘I can’t. You are having the most extraordinary effect on me.’
‘I know. I used to have that effect on Jack too, but I liked it with you.’
He smiled. ‘It won’t be long now, Mairi. I think Russia and perhaps some of the smaller Eastern countries, places like Romania, will sue for peace soon. Everybody has had enough. Almost a whole generation has gone. Not just us but the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Russians. So much waste. You should have seen Italy before the war. Unbelievable beauty and history and art and music all tumbled together, and the smell of Italy, like nowhere else; lemons and garlic and olive oil and heat. Heat smells, Mairi, and it carries the smell of ripening fruit. I’m afraid to go again. La Belle France? Very little belle about it now.’ He stood up. ‘I have to go. When do you expect your father? I would like to have waited to see him but . . . oh Hell, Mairi, kiss me again and tell me that wasn’t a dream.’
She was only too happy to comply and the next few minutes were among the loveliest the young couple had ever lived through. ‘I must go,’ he whispered against her mouth as he kissed her.
‘I know,’ she whispered back but she made no attempt to loosen herself from his strong arms. ‘We have wasted so much time, Robin.’
‘You never wrote to me once, not even when I was wounded.’
‘I thought Edith . . .’
‘Who’s Edith?’
‘Jack’s sister.’
‘Who’s Jack?’
‘I don’t remember.’
This time Mairi broke free first. She had to while she could still think. ‘He’ll be in any minute, my father.’
‘I won’t wait,’ said Robin from the door. ‘My father will think I’m in a ditch somewhere.’
‘Wait, wait, the oatmeal puddings.’
‘Tomorrow, bring them tomorrow, in daylight when the whole village can see you walking into our bachelor paradise and my father in school with his snotty-nosed bairns.’
Snotty-nosed. Billy Soutar. ‘Oh, Robin, he’s dead, Billy Soutar.’
‘I know, but we’re alive, Mairi, and from now on it’s roses all the way.’
*
There were few roses growing for them. Robin went to see the medical board and was declared fit to return to his unit and soon she heard that he was somewhere in France and, as she read the papers, she prayed that he was nowhere near a place called Passchendaele or somewhere named Cambrai. She wrote to him every day and she wrote to Ian at his oddly named ‘Home Office Work Centre’ where he was building a road with several other ill-assorted prisoners.
Thank God they have sent a few skilled Irish navvies to show us what to do with the dynamite or we’d blow the whole place up and ourselves with it.
Ian did not mention Arabella and so Mairi felt that she could not mention the young aristocrat either. At least there seemed to be no ill treatment of prisoners in this work camp. Ian had been beaten up several times in his first prison and had spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement. Unlike too many others, he had not gone insane, possibly because he had continued to write his poetry in his head. Colin had been furiously angry when Ian had admitted to being bullied but the father’s anger was directed, not against the bullies, but against his son.
‘Why doesn’t he lay a few of them out, Mairi? He’s strong as an ox and a bully needs to be put in his place.’
‘It’s because he’s stronger that he doesn’t fight, Dad, and maybe there’s one holding him while another one thumps him,’ Mairi had said and had gone off to make Robin smile when he read her next letter by telling him all about the hopelessly inept Ian being let loose with dynamite.
It had been a great relief when Ian had been transferred to the work camp where some of the guards were soldiers too badly wounded to return to their units. If the powers that be had thought these men would make life miserable for the pacifists, they had miscalculated hopelessly. The war had taught the soldiers cruel lessons. They rejected the idea of war as wholeheartedly as did their prisoners.
Now Mairi sat at the table in the front room and watched rain streaming down the windows as she waited for Colin. She had not started their supper, for a tinker family camping in the nearby woods had brought her a trout and it would not be cooked until Colin was already seated at the table.
He was late. He had walked into Arbroath to pay some bills and to talk to the bank manager, but he should have been back by now. No doubt he had met another farmer at the bank and they were deep in the accounts of the prices of winter feed.
Mairi went back to her letter to Robin. She had just written: and Jessie came over and I showed her how to make the puddings, when the door opened and she looked up to see her father standing there staring at her. Something had happened; she just knew it but she would stay very calm.
‘Ach, Dad, you’re soaked. I’ll fetch the bath and you can have a nice wash here in front of the fire while I cook the fish.’ She was prattling. She did not want him to tell her.
He could feel her fear. He had to get it over with. ‘I’ve joined up, lass,’ he said wearily and stopped dejectedly in front of her, water soaking into the rag rug on which he stood.
They looked at one another steadily, giving and receiving messages in some wordless communication.
‘Then you’ll need your tea,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll fill the bath and let you steep for a while.’
He waited until she had gone into the kitchen and then he sat down on a wooden chair – he would not soak her cushions – and began to struggle with the knots on his boots. Mairi came in but she did not look at him as she put the tin bath in front of the hearth and began to fill it from the kettle bubbling away at the back of the fire. She took the empty kettle with her and he heard her going out to the yard to the pump. He’d better lag it well in the morning. God knows when it would get done again.
She came back with some clean underclothes, his other shirt and trousers, a pail of hot water from her range and the cold water from the pump; this she put on the large hook that hung from the chimney. The hot water she emp
tied into the bath.
‘I’ve another pail,’ she said, ‘and that should give you a nice hot bath. Don’t take too long. Fish cooks before you have time to turn your back on it.’
‘Mairi, please, lassie, I have to explain.’
‘That you’re so ashamed of your son that you’ll go in his stead? Ian’s not a coward, Dad; he’s a braver man than you’ll ever understand.’
‘Ach, don’t hate me, Mairi. It’s just something I feel I have to do.’
‘For the neighbours? And what about the farm, Dad?’
He looked stunned. ‘I didn’t even think on it,’ he said after a pause. ‘You’ll manage, lassie. You’ve always been a better farmer than Ian.’
She did not smile. ‘You’d best get your bath before the water gets cold.’
When he was undressed he lowered himself gingerly into the hot water, lay back enjoying the euphoric feeling that unaccustomed hot water always gave him, and then splashed loudly for fear that Mairi should come in and see him in his nakedness.
When he was finished he stepped out cautiously and pulled himself, half wet, into the dry clothes. Then he took the bath outside and emptied the dirty water into the drain. Mairi had his fish on the table when he returned.
‘Sit down with me, lass. I’m leaving in the morning and there’s a lot we have to talk about.’
She perched on the edge of her chair. She was not comfortable. She did not want to stay. He knew that if he said the wrong thing she would explode from the chair like a pheasant scared up by a dog.
‘Can you understand that I’m scared and excited at the same time? I’m no an old man, Mairi, though I’ve behaved like one often enough since I lost your mam. My youth went with her and is buried in the kirk yard but I’ve got a second chance now. This war is wrong but Ian sees the wrong wrongs. There are wrongs that decent men have to make better and the world is full of them the now. Evil and wickedness is marching all over Europe and it has to be stopped and I think I can help. I’m not an old man, Mairi,’ he said again, ‘and too many laddies that don’t know what they’re doing are being killed. Maybe if same more older ones that know the front end of a gun from the back end were to join me, we could lick the Hun in a month or two and be back to help with the spring sowing and my boy would be out of that damned work camp and home where he should be.’ He stopped talking and looked at her steadily. ‘Will you care for our land here for me while I care for it over there?’
She nodded wordlessly.
‘The Blacks’ll help – if you need any help,’ he added quickly, ‘and just maybe they’ll let Ian out to work the farm. I’ve heard of that being done. Even some fighting men have been released for a while to help with the harvest.’
She looked up at him fearfully.
‘No that that’s why I did it but, you never know, lass, it might help my laddie, his old man marching to the front. I’m getting a kilt the morn. Your dad’s in the Black Watch, Mairi McGloughlin, the finest regiment in the world, bar none.’ He stood up. ‘Private Colin McGloughlin of the Fifth Battalion at your service, madame.’
For the first time in over twenty years he enfolded his daughter in his arms and let her cry till she was exhausted. His face too was wet.
Mairi went with him to the station the next morning. ‘If you see Robin . . .?’
‘I’ll not kiss him for you, lassie.’ Colin hugged her. ‘Now that I’m in, it’s just a matter of time, lass, and then I’ll be back and I’ll bring your Robin with me and we’ll have a wedding Angus will talk about for years. You’ll write to me? Is there enough paper in Angus for all the letters you write?’
‘More than enough,’ Mairi said. She felt old this morning, old, old, old. Much older than her father who was babbling like a nervous schoolboy. ‘I’ll write as often as I can. The farm’s lost its best worker . . .’
‘Talk to Jack. He’s got broad shoulders. The neighbours will help if they can and maybe you’ll get some of these land girls that wifie Macgregor is teaching. I have to say the ones I’ve heard about are doing a grand job. Watch out for the tinkers when they find out I’m not in the house. You’ll need to lock the door at night now and keep at least one dog in with you. Bloody hell, the things I didn’t think on when I was feeling that patriotic.’
‘I’ll be fine, Dad. I’ll maybe get some woman in to live while you’re away. I’ll be fine.’
With that Colin had to be content and he stood at the window and watched his daughter until the train rounded a corner and she was gone.
*
Mairi squared her shoulders and went back to the farm. This was what she had always wanted, wasn’t it, to run a farm? She would never ask Jack or his father for help and so she looked for help for herself and found it in the strangest place. There was a news item about a soldier’s wife who was going to be put out of her council home because, out of the twenty-three shillings a week she had to live on, she could not afford rent. The woman had three children, two boys and a little girl. Mairi wrote to the paper offering them a home with part-time work for the mother and the two boys.
She wrote to her father.
The boys are a bit rough but the Dominie will soon straighten them out and they are both fascinated by the farm and are pleased to be away from the town. The wee girl’s nice and I’ve given her all my old frocks. Do we ever throw anything away? Mrs Baxter, Milly, is clean and capable and she is going to take over the house while I work full time on the farm. She wants to try with the hens too and now that Angus and Bert have stopped chasing them, I’m sure everything will be fine. Can you imagine the bairns were scared witless by the dogs? The only ones they’d ever seen were fierce brutes. Imagine how awful to live all your life up a stair in a big tenement. They find it too quiet here but once they learn to listen they’ll hear the night noises.
Milly and wee Jean are in your room and Milly is so grateful to have a home that I’m sure everything will work out well.
She did not tell him that Bert, the younger of the boys, had drawn pictures all over Ian’s precious books, and she certainly did not tell either her father or her brother about the subject of his precocious artistic endeavours.
She told Colin instead how pretty the winter skyline was and he stood in a trench ankle-deep in water and tried desperately to picture his fields.
Later she told him that bread had gone up to an impossible 8½d for a small loaf and admitted that she had been allowed to send some to Ian in his prison camp where the food was barely enough for survival. Colin saw boys his son’s age and younger die horribly every day, with nothing gained, and he began to think with his reason and not with his heart and he wondered how his boy was coping in a prison camp, he who had been happiest sitting under a tree. And he worried about the responsibility he had thrust on his daughter who had now accepted even more. How could she cope with the farm, and the house, and now a complete stranger and three children?
‘It’s 1917. It’s got to end this year and I’ll go home to my fields and Ian will come home, and Robin. He and Mairi will marry and this soldier will return and he’ll take his wife and bairns back to their closie, and everything will be the way it was before this madness came over us all.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cleaning out the cattle shed was one of Mairi’s least favourite jobs but it was one that had to be done. Colin had prided himself on the fact that his inbye cattle were always kept as fresh as possible and so Mairi was standing up to her knees in urine-soaked straw shovelling it into a pile as quickly as possible. Her back hurt and her arms hurt but at least she could no longer smell the warm, sickly smell of the soiled straw. The human body, she often felt, was incredibly able to adapt itself. After a while the nose became so used to stink that it no longer noticed it.
She noticed the smell of the clean straw though. That first forkful conjured up visions of summer fields full of waving, dancing cereal crops and the feel of the warm sun as it turned the fields golden.
‘Mairi, there�
��s a man wants to see you.’ Jean Baxter, in one of Mairi’s own outgrown frocks, was standing in the doorway. Jean should have been at school but, as a result of the recent bad weather, she had had a bad cold and her mother had kept her at home for a few days. Mairi had enjoyed helping the child with the work the Dominie had sent home but the experience had reminded her of how long it had been since she had picked up a book other than her father’s account books. Now she smiled at Jean. Who could it be disturbing her in the middle of a busy day? Someone from the estate office? No, the lease was in order. ‘Who is it, Jean? If it’s a travelling salesman, tell him to talk to your mum.’
‘It’s your man on the horse. Will you ask him to let me up while you two are talking?’
Jack? In the middle of a working day? Who was cleaning out his byres? She threw down her fork, pushed her hair back from her face with rather dirty hands and stomped in her wellington boots out into the steading. Jack was standing seemingly deep in contemplation of a large puddle which a kitten was patting tentatively. He smiled when he saw her.
‘I know you said you didn’t fancy this, Mairi, but it’s never been sung in Arbroath afore and they say it’s got some nice tunes in it.’ He handed her an advertisment cut from the local paper and while she read it, he lifted Jean onto the old horse’s back. ‘Don’t fret. He’ll not move unless I tell him.’
Mari looked up from her reading. ‘Friedrich Von Flotow? What kind of name is that? It’s not Italian.’
‘Well, the name of the man that wrote it isn’t important. “Martha” is a good lassie’s name and so it should be something to take our minds off the war for an hour or two. I cannae say I really fancy it myself, no having heard opera afore, but the main singer’s Welsh, Mr Ewen Jones. The paper calls him the brilliant Welsh tenor. If you don’t fancy that, they’re doing one called “Rigoletto” but that’s bound to be Italians.’
Mairi looked at him. She did not want to get involved again but it would be nice to put on a dress and stockings and go out, leaving the house and the farm and all the problems that the last few years had brought, just for a few hours. ‘Jack, you know I’m writing to Robin Morrison.’
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