ON THE SUNDAY AFTER HER wedding Kirsty Cameron walked to the church where she had been married with her new husband and her mother. Apart from the minister and two elders, Jamie was the only man there. Balcundrum and his wife congratulated them.
‘You’re no’ joining up, Jamie, lad?’ asked the farmer. ‘I hear the estate might change hands, and should ye find yourself out of a job there’s aye one at Balcundrum, and a bigger hoos to go with it.’
‘Thanks, Mr Lovett, but as yet I’ve no plans to leave the Colonel.’
‘We’d never have thought you and Jamie, lass,’ said Mrs Lovett, ‘Not that you’ve not got yourself a good man – there’s little of his father in Jamie Cameron, besides a strong back.’
She looked measuringly at Kirsty’s figure, but as yet there was nothing to see.
‘You were a naughty girl’ – was there a slight hesitation? – ‘not to tell anyone. Do we no’ all need an excuse for a celebration? Hogmanay passing, and not one community party. I don’t remember a Ne’erday like that in all my life. You won’t have heard the auld meenister lost two of his boys at the close of the year? Aye, and the laddie wants to join up and him only sixteen years old.’
‘Poor, poor man,’ said Jessie.
The community had grown to like old Mr Close since he had come out of retirement to replace their own young minister, who was one of the first clergymen to join the army as a hospital chaplain. Now, almost two years later, everyone knew that Mr Close had married late to a wife almost too old for childbearing who had surprised herself and her husband by presenting him with three sons, one after the other in quick succession. She had died ten years before when her fourth totally unexpected son had been six years old. His father called the boy his ‘ewe lamb’, which was poetic if not biologically accurate. And now the poor man had lost two of his older sons, one a soldier and one a sailor.
‘Oh, dear God,’ thought Kirsty as she sat beside her brand-new husband in the pew and watched the old man, suddenly grown even more frail and bowed, climb into the pulpit, ‘I’m almost glad there’s something more exciting to talk about in the village than my marriage. What a horrid person I am.’
The minister’s sermon was not, as she might have expected, on the futility of war, but on the theme, ‘Love thine enemies’.
‘He’s too good for this world,’ was the general assessment of the village. ‘Did you notice the laddie wasnae in the Kirk? Him that’s sat there every Sunday looking up at his faither as if at the Lord himself. It’s a sad hoos this day: twa laddies dead, and a third that angry he willnae enter the Kirk.’
‘Perhaps he’s overcome by grief,’ suggested Kirsty.
‘Aye, he is, lass,’ said the woman who had spoken. ‘But he’s angry with God for letting it happen and angry wi’ his faither fer no’ letting him at the Germans. And whit’s this aboot a surprise wedding on Hogmanay? There’ll be another wee surprise afore very long, I’m thinkin’.’
Kirsty blushed furiously and saw the knowing looks on the faces around her. She turned away to where Jessie already stood with her new son-in-law.
‘I’d never have expected it o’ the Dominie’s lassie,’ she heard the voice say. ‘Juist shows we’re a’ the same under wir skirts.’
‘Haud yer tongue.’ It was Balcundrum’s voice. ‘You’re in the Lord’s hoos.’
There were tears in Kirsty’s eyes; she could hardly see. This was what it was going to be like. Already there had been talk all over the village and the surrounding farms, and in such a closed community there was room for two stories at the same time.
‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it. I thought I was strong enough, but I’m not. I’ll never come to church again. They can talk about me but I won’t have to look at them.’
‘A good New Year to you, Mrs Cameron.’ It was the minister, not bowed with grief but standing smiling at the door of his church, greeting his parishioners, getting on with his job.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Kirsty stumbled over the words.
‘I have three angels in Heaven now, lass. A little more work and I’ll be free to join them.’
He shook her hand and turned to his next parishioner.
Kirsty walked to her husband and her mother. She took the hand that Jamie held out to her and felt his strength. How could she survive if he was not there by her side?
‘I should maybe think of a job at Balcundrum, Kirsty,’ he said as if he was unaware of all the undercurrents. ‘I never wanted to work with my father, but . . . What do you think, Mrs Robertson?’
‘You must do what you think is right, Jamie,’ said Jessie, who in the few days since the wedding had begun to treat Jamie with the same deference with which she had treated her husband.
‘You’d come with us if we moved, wouldn’t you?’
Kirsty looked anxiously at her mother. Moving? She and Jamie in one cottage, with the baby, of course. Jessie in another? How would they pay the rents? How could she live alone with her husband?
‘We’ll go on as we are while I’m useful, Jamie. But you won’t always want a mother-in-law with you.’
‘Mother, what are you saying? We agreed that Jamie should come and live with us.’
‘Things will change, Kirsty. You will need more room eventually.’
‘Not for a long time,’ said Kirsty desperately. ‘Will we, Jamie? We’ll manage.’
Jamie squeezed her hand. ‘I had no’ thought of changing anything, lass. Balcundrum took me by surprise, and I could see myself grieve there one day. Who knows, though? There might be a bigger house, a better job at the castle. We’ll wait to see how things go.’ It was Jamie’s turn to blush. ‘I mean as far as jobs are concerned. The way folk are joining up, I’ll be able to work anywhere.’
*
February 21st, 1916. Verdun. The Germans had decided to wear out the French army. They had to be ready to break, said the German generals at the end of 1915. France can stand no more; then we’ll wear out England.
‘There’s too much fuckin’ artillery in this bloody war.’
Only a Tommie could make a sardonic comment like that in a moment of extreme terror. But the terror wasn’t over in a moment. It became as much a part of a soldier as the nails on his fingers or the hairs on his head. Had he ever known a life without this fear?
Shells screamed, 105s, 150s, 210s, and men screamed as they began to recognize just what shell was coming to blow their heads off, even the heads in the new steel helmets.
The minister’s third and eldest surviving son, a boy who had wanted to be a concert violinist, died in the mud, his right arm blow to smithereens.
‘You’ll let me go now, Father,’ cried the boy, George. ‘They’ve killed Hamish. Hamish that couldn’t squash a bluebottle but had to catch it and let it out the door.’
‘Vengeance is mine,’ said the old man while the tears for lost dreams, lost promise, ran down his paper-thin cheeks. ‘The Lord will avenge him, lad.’
‘Let me go. I’m ashamed not to be in uniform. Every man who is able, who is not a coward, has joined up.’
‘No, lad. The good God has spared my ewe lamb to me.’
Old Jack Lovett, farmer at Balcundrum, found the boy’s body hanging in the barn at the church glebe.
‘He must have been unsound,’ wept Kirsty. ‘To kill himself because he wasn’t allowed to join the Army?’
‘His friends at the secondary school had all joined up,’ said Jessie sadly. ‘They called him a coward.’
‘A coward? Three brothers dead in the mud. His father nearly seventy years old. Oh, the poor man. What will become of him?’
There were even fewer men at the Kirk the following Sunday. The Reverend Mr Close looked older and frailer than ever but his voice was strong. He preached on the text, ‘The work Thou gavest me to do . . .’
After the service, after he had greeted the few parishioners who had turned up, he went back to the manse and sat down in his chair in his study while Balcundrum’s wife prepared his lunch. It was his special chair, the chair where his boys knew they could always find a hug or a cuddle, where they could curl up with their father and tell the tale of woe and know that their side would be listened to, believed.
‘There’s time for a game of cricket before dinner, Father.’
Hamish. His pride and joy; his arms held out in welcome – both his arms.
Mr Close smiled.
‘Two’s hardly enough for a decent game, lad. I’ll bowl for you.’
‘We’re all here, sir. You bowl, I’ll bat and the bairns will field. Come on, young John. Help Father. He’s not so young as he used to be.’
‘John, my dear lad.’
‘There’s music, Father. You should hear our Hamish play.’
‘My ewe lamb?’
‘I’m here, Father. He understands and He forgives. Come on.’
And then the sweetest voice of all: ‘I’ve missed you, dearest Andrew. Come on. It’s time, it’s time. We’re all here, all waiting for you.’
*
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Balcundrum’s wife told the story over and over again. ‘Died and gone to Heaven. How often have I said that? Looked as if he’d died and gone to Heaven. He looked thirty years old, not a day more. And the smile? Oh, please God, I’ll be let die with a smile like that for the welcome I receive.’
‘His text?’ Jessie was almost in tears.
‘The work Thou gavest me to do . . .’ whispered Kirsty.
‘A grand way to die, right enough, with a smile on your face,’ said Jamie bitterly. ‘He’s another death that won’t be counted. He died of grief, of a broken heart. Three men . . . three laddies blown to bits in action, and a fourth wee bairn by his own hand. He could thole no more, and dressing it up with Mrs Lovett’s stories of last texts and last smiles doesn’t change that. War kills mair than the soldiers in the field. Where will it say, “Killed in action, the Reverend Andrew Close. Killed in Action, wee George Close, aged just sixteen?” ’
Kirsty looked at her husband. He sounded so bitter, but it was not his usual anger against the war: it seemed more directed against himself.
‘Jamie, you don’t want to go, do you?’
‘Only madmen want to go to war.’
Jamie could not speak of the battles that raged not in Europe, but within himself. Living in the same house with Kirsty, seeing her body blooming with the fruit of another man, filled him with such longings.
‘It should be mine.’ He would clench his teeth together in the stillness of the night to save himself from crying out his plea. In the first few weeks of their marriage she had been up before him every morning to make his breakfast, determined to be the best wife she could be in their unusual circumstances.
‘If you didnae fill me full of food at five in the morning I could get back to my bed, Kirsty lass, and have another hour’s sleep. There’s little I can do in the dark.’
‘But I thought you always got up at five, Jamie, and you need to be fed.’
‘Like the cattle,’ he said bitterly. ‘Sometimes I’m up at three, lass, but I pull my clothes on, run to the byre, feed the animals and I’m back afore the bed gets cold. Stay in your bed, lass, till the sun comes up. It’s the sun directs a farmer’s day, not a clock.’
‘I only wanted to be a good wife,’ Kirsty had almost sobbed, and the urge to hold her in his arms and console her and tell her that she was the best, most beautiful wife in the world, made him rush out into the darkness with no words said at all.
Jamie had decided that he would make no claims of any kind on his wife. He had seen marriage only as a way to lessen the shame the village would heap on the girl he loved: an extension of the life he had lived above the cattle in the byre. He had slept there, visiting his parents’ cottage twice a day to eat. That is what he had thought marriage to Kirsty would be like, except that he would live in the house. He slept in the bed where Kirsty had slept, and the feelings and desires that swept over him as he tried to find some smell or trace of her on the sheets made him blush with shame. Several nights he ended up trying to sleep on the drugget rug that covered the wooden floor, so humiliated was he by the thoughts that came to him in the narrow bed.
Sometimes he would allow himself to dream of what life could be after the birth of the baby when Hugh Granville-Baker would be at least out of her body if not out of her mind. One day, one day, he prayed, Kirsty would turn to him. He did not expect her to love him the way she had loved the father of her child. Second-best would be enough.
‘She always liked me fine at the school. Surely friends can love as well as like? I’ll not rush her, frighten her, and she likes me a bit or she wouldn’t have married me. She’s afraid to be alone with me when her mother’s at the sewing. Does she think I’ll try to claim my rights?’
‘Kirsty, can’t you sit by the fire and read your book? You’re that restless.’
She sat down holding the book almost defensively.
‘It’s easier to read if it’s the right way up, lass. Would you be happier if I spent the evening in my room?’
She looked at him sadly. ‘You said you loved me, Jamie, but you never want to . . . well, to kiss me or anything.’
He looked at her. What answer did she want? Was her vanity hurt that he made no attempt to touch her? Was she saying she would welcome more intimacy than the holding of hands in the village to present a combined show to their neighbours? Would he ever understand her?
‘I love you, lass, but we made a bargain and I’ll stick to it . . . if that’s what you want.’ He allowed no hope into his voice.
‘Yes,’ she answered with her head bowed so that the curls fell down around her cheeks.
‘She’s a bairn herself for all she’s twenty-two,’ he thought.
‘Should you feel different after the bairn’s born . . . well, I’d like to . . . we could start with courting, as if we weren’t married at all.’
‘All right, Jamie.’ She raised her head and looked fully at him. ‘I still love Hugh, you see. I can’t get him out of my mind.’
‘Or heart,’ thought her husband sadly. ‘That’s fine, lass,’ he said. ‘You can’t turn love on and off like a spicket for the water. Now, relax and read your book. We’ll sit here like old married folk and be easy with one another.’
But keeping his feelings inside was not easy, and he found more and more to do around the farm, avoiding the Dell when he could for sometimes he thought he smelled honeysuckle there, or saw a shadowy figure. More than anyone he welcomed the longer days, days he could fill with work, so that he returned to the cottage too tired to do anything but eat and sleep.
And as the spring came, Kirsty answered the questions about the expected date of her delivery with as much equanimity as she could, and felt more and more gratitude to her husband, for at least she received no slurs for not having a ring on her finger.
There was talk of conscription, and a thing called British Summer Time which would change the very hours of the day and night.
‘More time for us to be in the fields,’ said Jamie. He had come to a decision, but he would wait for the birth in early May before he told his wife.
On the Western Front there was a continuing crisis at Verdun and General Joffre planned a joint offensive. A rebellion in Ireland at Easter caught the attention of the press for a while. James Joyce was preparing to publish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and John Buchan was writing his great war novel, Greenmantle. The composer Edward Elgar was writing ‘The Spirit of England’ and, jogged by the thousands of needless deaths on the battle-fields of Europe, scientists were experimenting with the refrigeration of blood for transfusions. Out of the darkness always comes the light.
Kirsty waited for the surge of energy that would tell her her baby was willing to be born, but it never came. She stayed quiet, almost lethargic, as fertile as the garden in which she sat dreamily watching the daffodils.
‘There will be roses soon in the Dell,’ she thought, and the pain struck her.
‘Mother!’ she cried in primeval fear, and Jessie was there beside her.
There was no time to send for Jamie from the fields, and no need. Kirsty’s son came into the world as if determined to prove that he had caused enough trouble and would cause no more.
Wrapped in an exquisite hand-knitted shawl, he lay in his mother’s arms and waited until his foster-father entered the room. Jamie tiptoed over to the bed.
‘We’re fine, Jamie,’ said Kirsty. ‘Don’t tiptoe. He’s had a good feed and now he’s asleep.’
She was different, older. She had been somewhere he could never go, achieved something he could never achieve. He felt humble, in the presence of something sacred, miraculous.
‘Oh, clever wee Kirsty,’ he smiled. ‘Isn’t it you that’s definitely top of the class!’
Had he heard the deep voice in his sleep? The baby stirred, yawned a delicate pink yawn and opened his eyes. Hugh Granville-Baker’s eyes looked directly at Jamie and smiled.
‘Goodness,’ cooed Jessie. ‘I know they say babies can’t smile, but he smiled at Jamie.’
‘Wind,’ said Jamie, who had had time to control himself. He had never expected it, thought the baby would look something like his mother’s last baby. All babies look the same . . . but not this one. Had Kirsty noticed?
‘He’s a grand lad, Kirsty. Have you a name for him yet?
‘John,’ said Kirsty definitely, ‘after my father.’ She smiled, a smile of such beauty, at her husband, ‘and James, after you. If you’d like me to, that is?’
‘I’d be honoured, lass. Welcome to the world, John Jamie Cameron.’
‘Jamie-John,’ said Kirsty. ‘It sounds better.’