That autumn I grew listless, wept easily, slept fitfully. Lily even went so far as to take me to Dr. Pyper, who spoke of growing pains and prescribed a syrupy tonic which did little besides make me cough. What finally brought me back to myself was not medicine but theatre. The Saint Cuthbert’s Dramatic Society was putting on Saint Joan, and David was playing an elderly soldier. By this time he was in his early sixties and Lily must have been over fifty, but like Barbara in her photographs they seemed ageless. I was the only one caught in the grip of time.
For two months David went to rehearsals every Friday, and on Saturday afternoons, as we walked to the churchyard, he recited his lines with gusto. On the night of the play, for once I was grateful for Lily’s punctuality, which secured us seats in the front row. I read my
book while she talked to the Waughs and the rest of the audience arrived. At last the lights went out and the curtains rose.
“There’s George,” whispered Lily. “Doesn’t he look grand?”
I sat motionless. George was no longer the helpful stationmaster who gave us a hand with our shopping after a day in Glasgow. He was Robert, the squire, who adamantly refuses to receive Joan and ends by doing everything she wants. Joan herself was played by Maisie Proudfoot, daughter of the golf club secretary. A few weeks before, I had run into her on the number four fairway. While we chatted, a small clear drip wavered on the end of her nose. Now, dressed in armour, she swore to regular conversations with Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret; I leaned forward in my seat willing the wind to do her bidding. At the end of the play, Lily had to nudge me to applaud.
I was still in a daze when David emerged, carrying his tunic and spear, and the three of us started for home. Then, as we were passing the Bell and Bush, a remark of Lily’s roused me. “Do you think,” she said, “Joan really did hear voices?”
“I have no idea,” said David. “She did manage to convince the most unlikely people to do what she wanted. I mean, suppose you’d gone to General Haig in 1916 and told him how to fight the war.”
Lily laughed. “‘Miss McEwen, would you kindly lead Britain to victory?’”
I trailed after them, gazing at the gaslights, each with its misty halo. Of course we read stories in Sunday school about people who saw visions, but they were bearded men in remote places. Here was a girl, my age, who had lived not far away, in nearby France, and who had left her father’s farm and everything she knew to lead an
army into battle, all because of her voices. The companions did not tell me to take Edinburgh or save the king, but as I followed Lily and David up the lane, I was thrilled by the notion that I too might have some purpose.
On Saturday at the circulating library, I asked if there were more books like Saint Joan. “Do you mean other plays by Shaw or books about Saint Joan?” Miss Clapham demanded, pencil poised.
“Books about people like Joan.”
“Ah, saints.” She lowered her pencil, clearly disappointed that my request was so obvious, and directed me to Religion.
I examined a life of Joan’s friend, Saint Catherine. The frontispiece showed Catherine about to be saved from the wheel. Later, despite being beheaded, she still retained her beatific smile. I moved on to Saint Margaret of Scotland, who initially seemed more promising, but after several paragraphs describing the hair shirt she always wore beneath her regal gowns, I let the book fall shut. I was due to meet Lily at the Co-op in a few minutes. Quickly I went to Literature and chose King Solomon’s Mines.
Now I wonder why I looked in books rather than at the people around me. We had our share of strange folk in Troon. Mrs. Ord, who lived at the back of the grammar school, was believed to have the evil eye. And there was a story about a dairymaid, Agnes, who had drowned in the river going to meet her sweetheart. People said she walked at harvest time, the anniversary of her death. One afternoon on our way fishing, David showed me the spot where Barbara claimed to have met her. “Just here.” He tapped the mossy parapet
of the bridge. “She was wearing a mauve frock, very fetching, but all wrong for fording a river. That was what killed her, the weight of the water in the fabric.”
He himself had never seen Agnes. Nor did I, though sometimes in August I remembered the story and looked for her. That Barbara’s experience was similar to my own did not strike me until much later. But I did begin to hope that I was being prepared for some important task. Perhaps Mr. Wright’s barn would catch fire and I would lead the animals to safety, or I would be warned that the roof of Saint Cuthbert’s was about to collapse. For a month, in the hope of discerning some hidden agenda, I wrote down the details of every encounter with the companions in a diary which I hid on top of my wardrobe. The girl met me twice on the way home from school. And one afternoon, when Lily was at a church meeting, I found her in the kitchen holding a blue jug Barbara had bought. “We’re not allowed to touch that!” I exclaimed.
She smiled, not pleasantly, and for a moment I was afraid she might dash the jug against the hearth. Then she put it back on the mantelpiece.
The woman came once when I was rearranging my room. I was moving the bed over to the window, and she asked if that wouldn’t be rather draughty. Her words themselves were like a draught, and a leg of the bed promptly caught on a floorboard. As she headed for the door, she frowned in the direction of the wardrobe. I was so discouraged that I dragged the bed back to the corner.
That night, writing in my diary—4:30 P.M. The woman visited. Came in without knocking. Queried my moving the bed. Grumpy—it occurred to me that the companions were aware of my observations. What else could explain the look the woman had given the wardrobe?
I glanced around. As if in answer, the rug rippled towards the door and a chair toppled to the ground. See? they seemed to say. You are never alone.
Quickly I sprang from the bed and returned the diary to its hiding place. At once the room grew still. As I took in the motionless rug, the fallen chair, I understood that my note-taking was a form of treachery.
The Saturday before Easter, Lily dispatched me to the garden to give the windows their annual spring cleaning. It was a bright, chilly day, and I found myself remembering the afternoon in Catherine’s garden. Why had the girl, who seldom appeared in public, done so on that occasion? Suddenly I knew it was because I had been about to confide in Catherine. Whatever mission the companions had in mind for me, secrecy was imperative, not just from Lily and David but from everyone.
“Come on, slow coach,” Lily mouthed through the window. I crumpled a wad of newspaper and began to rub the glass. Soon I could see my own reflection and behind me the apple tree trembling in the wind. And wasn’t there a figure beneath the tree? Two figures? Wasn’t the girl wearing her pinafore and the woman her raincoat? But when I turned around, the budding branches were empty.
I gave up on my investigation of saints and indeed forgot all about it until I met Father Wishart at the infirmary. I was on my second stint of night duty, and he had two parishioners on the ward: a pensioner with a broken hip and another I have forgotten. If the stern staff nurse was not around, Father Wishart often stopped for a cup of tea at the nurses’ station. One evening he showed up even later than
usual, his face pale and drawn, and told me he’d been keeping vigil at a deathbed. “May we all go like Nelly. A week ago she was playing bingo. Then a wee cold, and that was that.” He smiled. “She was sure she saw Peter waiting for her at the pearly gates.”
Everything conspired to make the occasion intimate: the small glow of the night lamp, the men sleeping around us. I offered more tea and asked if he had ever had a vision.
“I’m afraid I haven’t been so blessed. Though I did once see the infirmary ghost, or at least I thought I did. He has the same name as you.”
“Spelled differently,” I said, and coaxed him into repeating the story. Sir William MacEwan had been a famous brain surgeon at the infirmary. A few years earlier a young man, a concert pianist, had come to consult him about the severe headaches which were threatening to ruin his career. After a brief examination, Sir William dismissed him as a hypochondriac. The young man left the surgery in tears and, on his way out of the building, tumbled down a flight of stairs to his death. Many called it suicide. At the funeral Sir William was seen to weep, and a couple of months later he died in his sleep. Since then several people had met him, pacing the corridor outside the operating theatre.
“He’s meant to wring his hands in remorse,” said Father Wishart, “but when I saw him he was walking along like anyone else, an elderly chap in a white coat. I only knew it was him because I glanced away, and when I looked back the corridor was empty.” He gave a faint smile. “Och, I’m blethering, nurse. Probably I just need my eyes checked.”
He drank some tea. A man groaned in his sleep. “Do you think,” I said hesitantly, “Sir William is typical? I mean, do you think ghosts are always unhappy?”
“Goodness.” Father Wishart stroked his chin. “I’ve never thought about it, but yes, I suppose so. The reasons the dead are restless, what drives them back to walk among the living, are usually sorrow and pain. If there are happy ghosts, they must be few and far between.”
Before he could say more, the staff nurse’s footsteps sounded in the hall. “Here she comes,” whispered Father Wishart. “Thanks for the cuppa.”
That morning when I went off duty, I walked over to the theatre. The corridor was busy with white-coated figures, preparing for the first operation of the day. They all seemed full of purpose. No one was wringing his hands.
I stopped writing in my diary and waited. Almost five weeks passed before I came upon the companions, leaning on the gate of a field, talking animatedly. As I approached, they fell silent and regarded me with the same expression of pointed enquiry that the older girls turned upon me when I interrupted them in the school cloakroom. I stopped a few yards away, blushing.
“I know I mustn’t tell anyone about you.”
“As if you could,” the girl scoffed.
The woman, however, nodded nicely. She looked down at her hands and twisted the ring she wore back and forth. The next Sunday at church I noticed that the minister’s wife wore a similar ring. Did the woman have a husband? Did the girl have parents? Even in the midst of my investigations, I never asked what happened to them when they left me. Twice at the infirmary I broke a thermometer, and I recall how the globules of mercury fled and scattered
at my touch. That was what it felt like, to think of posing certain questions to the companions.
Presently the woman raised her head. “Why don’t you join the hockey team?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t blink, I didn’t turn away, but the gate was empty. I ran my palm along the top bar. The splintery wood was still warm.
At my first hockey practise a wiry girl with slightly protuberant brown eyes came over. “When the whistle blows,” she said, “run forward and I’ll pass you the ball. Then you pass it back to me.” By some miracle I managed to do this, and though I missed every other shot in the game, Isobel Henderson befriended me. A few weeks later she invited me to the athletics club.
“I’m hopeless at games.”
“Nonsense.” Isobel grinned. “There are boys.”
A chill wind blew across the sports field that Thursday, and while Isobel practised hurdling, I hopped from foot to foot. On the far side of the field were the promised boys. I spotted Ian Hunter among them; in the last year he had shot up. He caught me looking, and waved.
I raised my hand in reply; then, thinking better of the gesture, I pretended to straighten my pinafore. But Mr. Gillespie, the games master, had seen me. In his booming voice, he summoned me to the high jump. “We’re starting at two foot six. Anyone can do that.”
Reluctantly I joined five other girls. The only one I knew was Winifred, who had sung “Silent Night” at the Christmas carol service in a way that made Lily get out her handkerchief and reminisce about concerts in Glasgow. Now she soared over the bar with the
same effortless grace. When my turn came, I jumped as if I were skipping a rope and almost proved Mr. Gillespie wrong.
The narrow escape roused my concentration. The bar was raised to two foot nine. This time I imitated the other girls, turning my body sideways and scissoring my legs.
At three foot six, two girls dropped out. It was my turn. I jumped and heard the clatter of the bar. “Try again,” said Mr. Gillespie. “That was just your foot.”
I ran towards the bar, and as I leapt, invisible hands lofted me into the air. I felt their touch, cold and firm, and briefly I forgot everything except that feeling. Then I was landing in the rough grass.
Surely people must have noticed? But Mr. Gillespie boomed, “Well done,” and a couple of girls smiled.
There were only the two of us left: Winifred and I. The bar was raised. After two failures I was sure, on the third attempt, I cleared it, but again it clattered to the ground. Perhaps the spirits were safeguarding me from the ill effects of sudden success. Winifred also failed the jump, and Mr. Gillespie announced that was enough for this week.
I was tying my shoelaces when Isobel ran over. “What did I tell you? With some practise you could be okay. Do you want to come to my house for tea?”
“That would be grand.” As I tightened my laces, I whispered my thanks into the wind.