The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

  Sir Humphrey stood up and went to the door and Ian had no choice but to follow him.

  ‘Marriage between equals is difficult enough. You are just released from the prison camp, Ian. Is it love or pity? Give her a chance to really get to know you. Until October you’d met fewer than five times. Give yourself time.’

  ‘I won’t hurt her, Sir Humphrey. Try to convince her that she’s making a mistake if you like. She must be sure in her own mind and heart.’

  The sound Sir Humphrey made was almost a snort. ‘Basic psychology. I tell her no. She’ll dig her heels in. Damn it, I wash my hands of the pair of you. Invite her to your cottage. Let the difference in your lifestyles speak for me. And you’d best emulate Kipling and win the Nobel prize with your writing. Even that might not be enough. I won’t wish you the joys of the season. Good day to you.’

  Ian walked out, head high, and managed to get to a bend in the driveway before being violently sick in the shrubbery. When he had recovered he turned and looked back at the great house. Was Sir Humphrey right? Was there too great a difference between them? Maybe Bella was living a fairy tale but this frog would never turn into a prince.

  And then he saw her, running towards him down the driveway, and he forgot all his good intentions and ran to meet her.

  ‘My darling, my darling, we’ll make it work. Ask Mairi if I may dine with you tomorrow?’

  He kissed her cold little nose and then her cheeks and then her mouth.

  ‘I don’t know about dining, Arabella Huntingdon, but you’re welcome to take your dinner with us.’

  And, in full view of the disapproving windows, he kissed her again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The estate was being sold. Mairi could not believe it. It had been in the hands of the Grey and then the Grey-Watson families for nearly three hundred years. It was rumoured that an insurance company was prepared to make a sizeable offer as was one of the ammunitions barons who had found himself, on the cessation of hostilities, with both a fortune and a title.

  ‘Well, let’s hope we don’t have to work for him,’ was Ian’s comment when he read this item in the local news.

  ‘Didn’t Bella say anything?’ Bella’s letters, since she had returned to London in late January, were if anything more frequent than before.

  ‘She hasn’t seen too much of her family, Mairi. It only leads to argument and distress for everyone.’

  Mairi sighed but said nothing. Ian had returned from the Big House on Christmas Eve, a little shaken, but he had said nothing except that Bella would be coming for Christmas dinner. That news, as he had expected, had thrown both Mairi and Milly into a panic and they had swept and dusted the already swept and dusted house and threatened the children with all manner of horrible penalties, should they drop a crumb anywhere. Ian wisely stayed away until Mairi herself decided that ‘Bella can lump it or like it.’ Still, when the children were in bed, she returned to the scullery to make one more baking of shortbread to add to the already heavily overburdened table.

  Bella arrived wearing her silver fur coat. She had not considered not wearing it. If Mairi was to be her sister-in-law she would have to take her as she was, fur coat and all. And if Ian was to be her husband, and she was determined that he was, then it would, in all probability, be her last fur coat.

  She ate a hearty dinner, insisted on helping Mairi clear the table and so Ian felt that he too had to offer to help. In the end everyone helped and each got in the other’s way and they had a delightful time.

  Then, delicately, Arabella asked about hygiene arrangements and so Mairi took her to the outside privy which she had made as comfortable as she could, although nothing could prevent it from being cold. Bella judged it ‘lovely fun’ whilst silently vowing never again to enter the door, no matter how desperate she found herself.

  She helped Jean and Milly dry the dishes and only dropped one cup. Bert and Angus fell madly in love with her and fought desperately to sit close to her by the fire. She foiled them by sitting the wool-clad Jean on her satin lap and Mairi watched and tried not to feel jealous of the beautiful girl’s ability to win over everyone. But at last Christmas Day was over and Sir Humphrey’s motor arrived to convey the silver princess back to her palace. Ian went with her and returned two hours later to tell the waiting Mairi that Rupert Grey-Watson had asked him in to take a glass of brandy with him.

  ‘He was as nice as ninepence, Mairi, and very civil, but he thinks it won’t work.’

  ‘Perhaps he wants Bella for himself?’

  ‘I must admit I thought that might be it. The Grey-Watsons lost money during the war while Bella’s fortune seemed to multiply, but to Rupert she is merely a young cousin. He’s fond of her, as you are of wee Jean, no more.’

  For several days Bella seemed to be in the farmhouse more often than she was at her uncle’s home and, on one auspicious day, Ian went into Dundee to hire an evening suit, shirt, tie and shoes. He had been bidden to dinner.

  Mairi thought he looked magnificent. So too did Milly.

  They watched him enter the Grey-Watson motor which had been sent for him and then drive off to the manor house.

  ‘He’ll easy be the best-looking laddie there,’ said Milly proudly. ‘That Rupert seems like a nice enough young man but he’s not a patch on our Ian. Well, I mean to say, he’s called Rupert.’

  ‘I think Rupert is very handsome,’ teased Mairi as she shepherded Milly back indoors for their very last evening together, ‘and I think Rupert is a lovely name.’

  ‘Ach, you’re Ian’s sister right enough when you say daft things like that. Men should be called Jim, or Angus, or Bert. You know where you are with a Jim.’

  ‘Steak,’ said Mairi softly.

  ‘Aye, lassie, steak. Now come on and help me with my case. Now that the Dominie’s away to see off Robin, I’ll need to get in there and take care of the dirt. I’ll have it readied up for him when he gets back.’

  Mairi helped Milly with the family’s accumulated belongings and tried to keep her mind off Ian’s visit to the Big House and Robin’s retreat to Italy. She would not allow herself to think about Robin, she would not. She would not remember that night before he went back, for the last time, to a war zone. She would not permit herself to think of the sweetness of being held against him while she listened to his heart.

  Our hearts are beating together, Mairi. Can you hear them? Lub dub, lub dub. What can lub dub, lub dub mean?

  But she had not been able to answer or to hear him tell her because the Dominie had come out and although he had pretended not to see and had hurried back into the schoolhouse, the spell of the moment had been broken. They had laughed, a little shamefacedly, a little resentfully – they had had so little time together – and they had gone back into the house so that Robin could share his last moments of leave with his father.

  His last moments of leave. Were they, had they been, his last moments of sanity? But he was well, well enough to be released from the asylum. And instead of coming to her, he was running to Italy, the country where some of his best and his worst memories were buried. No, she would not think of it. She would think only of folding Jean’s little nightdresses, her Sunday smock.

  ‘Goodness, would you look at the size my laddies have grown here in the country, Mairi. If their daddy could just see them. Good country air, good country food.’

  Mairi put the jumper Milly handed her into the box labelled ‘Salvation Army’. ‘The country is no paradise, Milly. There’s some here as stunted as bairns in the towns. Look at that wee lassie Jean plays with.’

  And they chattered on because neither could bear to talk about the future or the past. At last the cases were packed and they had no excuses left.

  ‘How did I manage to gather all these things, Mairi, and still fill a box for the Sally Army? How can I ever thank you?’

  ‘Please, Milly. If you talk like that it will feel as if you are going away for ever instead of just down the road.’

  ‘Ay
e, and we’ve you to thank for that and all. The Dominie says my Angus has a brain.’

  Mairi blew out the lamp and led the way downstairs to the kitchen. ‘Your troubles will really start when he tells you Jean has a brain.’

  Milly snorted with laughter. ‘A lassie that’s in love with Jack Black’s old horse, a brain?’

  They laughed together as they made a last pot of tea.

  ‘Och, I’ll miss having you to laugh with, Mairi. You’ve kept me sane these last few years.’ Milly stopped, aware of what she had just said. ‘Och, lassie. He’ll come home to you, safe and well.’

  Mairi stood up. ‘We’d best go to bed, Milly. I don’t want Ian to think we’re waiting up for him as if he was a bairn.’

  Milly moved as if to touch her and she shied away from the gesture. ‘Don’t say any more, Milly dear; we’ve been good for one another. I shall miss you so much but you’ll only be in the village. Heavens, you could be going sixteen miles away to Dundee. Then I really would have something to be miserable about. Come on, off to bed, and we won’t say goodbye the morn’s morn, just cheerio.’

  Milly said goodnight and went quietly off upstairs and Mairi fussed with the fire and the fire guard for a few minutes.

  ‘Robin gone, now Milly and the children, and, if this dinner party has gone well, and how could it not, when they see Ian properly, Ian will be going soon too. If I have the farm I’ll manage. Let them leave me the farm.’

  She put out the light and followed Milly upstairs but she did not sleep. She lay wide awake, long after she heard Ian come back and climb the wooden stairs. She could tell nothing from his step. It sounded just as it always did.

  *

  She was, as usual, the first one up in the morning, and only someone who looked very closely at her face could tell that she had not slept at all.

  Jean was excited about going to a new home but she was unhappy too and only the promise that Ian was going to walk with them to the schoolhouse carrying their cases calmed her down.

  ‘And you can come back as often as you like, wee Jean,’ he said. ‘Especially since Mairi only makes crumble when you’re there to eat it.’

  ‘And why not, since Jean’s always willing to go out and pull rhubarb, unlike some I could mention.’

  That remark, of course, set Milly off. ‘Mairi McGloughlin, you cannot expect a man that’s working all the hours God gives him to come home and dig up his dinner afore he eats it.’

  ‘And why not? There’s maybe cause for saying a man should learn to cook. Mind you,’ she added, as she noted joyfully the appalled expression on Milly’s honest face, ‘if anybody at the schoolhouse had learned to boil an egg, there’s you would be out of a job.’

  Milly looked at her. ‘Well, I’m off then. I have every afternoon off. Give me a few days to clean the place properly and I’ll come back to see you.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Mairi lightly. She did not want Milly and the children to go. They had known each other such a short time, but so much grief and happiness had been woven into their time together, it was as if they had always been friends. She hugged Jean and went back into the farmhouse as if this morning was just one of many mornings and she did not watch them walk off over the hill and down the school road.

  Another step. Another stage. When Ian returned perhaps he would share his memories of the evening with her. Right now she had work to do. She would take the bedding from the big bed and soak it; too cold today for washing it and hanging it out to dry. She would have to wait for a dry day with a bit of wind.

  Ian came back when she was turning the big mattress. ‘Here, I’ll give you a hand,’ he laughed. ‘And then I’ll tell you about my grand dinner afore you burst.’

  ‘Milly and I didn’t give you a thought, Ian McGloughlin. We had far too many other things to discuss last night.’

  ‘That’s better, more your feisty wee self. Come on. The world won’t end if you sit down before the sun sets. Now, what do you want to know? Not the ladies’ frocks, I hope, because apart from Arabella who was wearing a sort of blue thing, I haven’t the smallest notion. I near died of fright when I went into the dining room. First I had to take in, that’s what they say, take in some old auntie who put her hand on my arm so gingerly for fear she would catch something, and I was seated miles away from Bella. The table would have filled the big barn and come out the other end and never in my life have I imagined so many dishes and glasses and bits of silver. Bella had shown me place settings – that’s what it’s called, a place setting, the right number of spoons and forks and knives for this, that and the next and a glass for this wine and another for that wine and a special one for water – but everything she had told me went right out of my head and up the chimney.

  ‘ “Not to your taste, young man?” asked this old lady on my right but she was smiling and holding her fork almost in front of my nose so I smiled back at her and picked up my matching fork and then ate what she ate and used the same fork or spoon she was using. And don’t ask me about the food although there was chicken, I think, but I couldn’t see it for sauce, and there was fish before the chicken, and they take a kind of frozen ice cream between courses and different wine with fish and even a wine with the pudding, but not a dish a patch on your game pie . . .’

  ‘And I suppose you told them so,’ said Mairi, since he appeared to have run out of breath.

  ‘I was too scared, Mairi,’ he confessed. ‘There were so many people and it was so hot and then the wine . . . I’m not used to drink. Sir Humphrey kept introducing me as “Bella’s protégé, you know: damn good young war poet”. But I let him talk. It was his house, after all, and I listened and tried to answer questions. At these affairs, it’s like people are on strings. You talk to the person on one side and then everybody’s string gets tweaked and you turn and talk to the person on the other. I got to talk to Bella after dinner in this huge room with two fireplaces and more wood burning than we’ve used all winter and she said it was going well.’

  ‘And what did you think, Ian?’

  He got up and put another log defiantly on the fire. ‘I don’t know. Rupert’s a decent bloke and he thinks it would be wrong for me to marry Bella.’ Ian laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. ‘It’s me he’s thinking of; he thinks Bella will make me miserable, even if I let her keep me, which I will not do. His mother is a different story. No matter how much she smiles and seems polite, I can tell that Lady Grey-Watson can’t stomach the thought of me at her table. One or two of the other elderly ones seemed all right, interested in the war and in my poetry, but at least one of the old ladies thought I was a shirker and therefore ought to have been shot. They let Bella come back with me in the motor. She wanted to come in with me, force them, if you know what I mean, and it nearly killed me to send her away but everything has got to be right, above board, honourable, if you want to use such a word. She leaves today and I must get this book out and it has to do well, give me some kind of reputation.’ He fell silent and they sat for several minutes looking into the fire.

  ‘Will she come to say goodbye?’ asked Mairi after a while.

  ‘No. I don’t think I could let her go again, Mairi. It’s easy to be noble when she’s not in my arms. Ach, damn it.’ He jumped up. ‘I shouldn’t be talking like this to you.’

  ‘I understand, Ian, of course I do. Goodness, war has an awful lot to answer for, doesn’t it, or at least the people that cause the wars. Can you remember when we were wee, running to the school, scared to be late? If anyone had asked we would have said that by this time we’d be married with families of our own, and here’s Dad dead and not even enough bits of him to bury, you, with your experiences, and Robin, my gentle Robin with his silly old Romans, marked so badly and cruelly that no one can even see the marks. Write your poems, Ian, and maybe even a book about the nature of pacificism, and write them so well that people will read and understand and vow that nothing like this will ever happen again.’ She stopped, embarrassed, and, as usual, to
ok refuge in mock anger. ‘Now, will you get your great feet out of my kitchen and let me get on with my work. There’s a farm to run, in case you had forgotten, and only you to run it.’

  He went to the door, put on his coat and cap, and went out without a word, but she knew he was not hurt or angry. He would do his work and when he came in, his dinner, piping hot, nourishing and recognisable, would be on the table, and things would be back to how they were before the war, except for the empty seat by the fire and the empty spaces in their hearts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The postman, Davie Wishart, who had had a fairly good break from cycling all the way to Windydykes farm, was back on his rounds by February.

  ‘Could you not consider gettin’ one of those fancy telephone machines in, Ian, to save my old legs?’

  Ian brought him in to the warmth of the fire. ‘I would but we won’t be here that long. I doubt the next farmer of Windydykes will have use for a telephone.’

  ‘Unless I’m the next farmer,’ said Mairi lightly as she handed the postman a steaming mug of strong sweet tea. ‘I’ve decided to apply, Ian. They can only say no.’

  Ian looked at her in astonishment but he would say nothing in front of old Davie.

  He was eloquent enough when the man had gone, free-wheeling down the hill and then struggling up the other side.

  ‘Talk to me, Mairi.’

  ‘What would you like to talk about?’

  Ian looked at her bowed head in exasperation. ‘Mairi, was that a joke, a female emancipation thing, now that you’re nearly eligible to vote?’

  All men over twenty-one and all women over thirty had become eligible to vote in 1918. Ian had happily availed himself of the opportunity to participate in the government of his country but Mairi, of course, had still over a year to wait.

  She looked up from her mending. ‘Possibly, but I hadn’t meant to say it until it popped out.’

  ‘You are going to apply for the tenancy?’