IT WAS JUNE. JUNE FLOWED into July. Wild roses bloomed along the dykes and hedgerows at Aberannoch. Brambles grew strong among them and the delicate white blossom gave promise of the berries to come. The barley turned to beaten gold in the fields and the sun recast the still waters of the Firth into fields of silver to march beside the gold.
Kirsty sat in the garden, Hugh Granville-Baker’s child at her breast, and Jamie watched. Oh, the look in her eyes, as if she was looking upon the face of God himself.
‘All new mothers are like that,’ he told himself. ‘She’s besotted with her bairn, not his father . . . or his foster-father either, I’m thinking.’ He worked longer hours, and managed to put some money into the small savings account at the bank.
‘Could I get a tenancy one day? There’s no son at Pitmirmir.’
There was no change at the estate either. The Colonel and Lady Sybill Granville-Baker had no stomach for dealing with Aberannoch.
‘Sell it,’ Lady Sybill had said one day in the darkest hours of grief when she finally accepted that her bright boy was gone.
‘The lad was happy there,’ said his father, and the estate was no longer discussed.
*
Jamie-John was a good baby but when he cried, no one could quiet him like Jamie. He would lift the crying bundle in his strong arms and almost at once the furious yelling would die down to a sob and then the child would lie peacefully looking up at Jamie out of his beautiful blue eyes, eyes that had not changed in his two months of life.
‘That’s a good laddie,’ Jamie crooned. ‘Be a good laddie for Jamie.’
Kirsty smiled at the picture they presented. ‘No, Jamie,’ she said. ‘He’s not to call you by your first name. Haven’t you earned the right to be called “Father”? If you’d like to, that is?’
‘Like?’ said Jamie. ‘Like? Am I to be your daddy, my wee man?’ And he danced the baby around the garden.
‘He’ll lose his dinner,’ Kirsty warned, but it was too late.
‘I’ll clean him up,’ said a chastened Jamie.
‘And yourself as well.’
Jamie put the baby on the table in the front room and washed and changed him, and all the time he talked to him and Jamie-John followed the sound of his voice with his big blue eyes.
‘We’ll go fishing, Jamie-John, and I’ll teach you to guddle salmon. It won’t really be stealing because they belong to your grandfather. I’ll show you the best places to watch the daft wee birds. Will you like that, wee mannie?’
Jamie-John burped and smiled at his surrogate father. Jamie looked into the eyes smiling into his own and his heart turned over in his breast.
‘I’ll not show you the best place. Your mammy will show you the Dell.’ Again he saw Kirsty smiling, not at her baby but at the man she had loved. ‘Ach, wee lamb, who could hold anything against you? One day, maybe your mammy will love me a little and what a happy family we’ll be. I’ll work all the hours God gives, laddie, for my two treasures.’
Life was almost perfect, but the war would not stay out of the little heaven Jamie had tried to create in the cottage at Aberannoch. There were rumours of great battles, battles won by feats of engineering. Whole German towns or trenches encircled by miners working like silent moles – and then the mines blown like volcanic eruptions. A new weapon, a bullet-proof machine that could crawl across any terrain like a caterpillar, was whispered about and then developed. They would be over thirty feet long and weigh nearly thirty tons, and they would end the war. They didn’t . . .
And Jamie looked at Jamie-John at Kirsty’s breast and almost died of pleasure when she smiled at him over the baby’s downy head. Yes, his decision had been right. He kissed the baby, and very daringly and gently kissed the mother’s cheek, and then walked to Arbroath, took a train to Dundee and enlisted.
‘You’ll be all right while I’m away, lass. My wages will be sent to you. It’s for Jamie-John and you. I love you, Kirsty, with all my heart and I always will, but working the land isn’t enough any longer. I don’t believe in fighting and killing but if I can help, if my going shortens this war in any way so that this wee laddie can grow up free . . . And not just Jamie-John. Sometimes in my mind I see countless wee bairns: German ones, and Belgian, and Italian, and Russians and others forbye. War’s an evil thing, Kirsty lass. Man’s arrogance, that he thinks he’s better nor another just because of the colour of his skin or his eyes or the way he eats or worships his God, makes me weep with shame. The war will end, no’ by who is right and who is wrong but by who is stronger and richer, and that’s the Western powers.’
He stopped talking, the longest speech he had ever made in his life, and blushed furiously, and Kirsty looked at him and wondered. What depths were there to this farm laddie who had had so little schooling but who was so wise and so kind?
‘You’re a good man, Jamie Cameron,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever realized just how good.’
He came closer. ‘Ach, Kirsty, I’m not good. If you know the thoughts that sometimes come to me: thoughts about you . . . about you and me thegither.’
She looked down at the baby sleeping soundly at her breast, his little mouth still firmly attached. Asleep, he looked just like any baby. It was when he looked at her with his father’s eyes, the eyes that everyone avoided talking about, that Hugh was closest to her.
‘We could try, Jamie, to make a life, I mean,’ and this time it was her turn to blush.
He knelt down beside her chair and put his arms around her and the baby together and laid his head on Kirsty’s breast.
‘This moment I’ll cherish, lass. It’s this I’ll think on, and when I come back, I’ll do my courting. I want you, dear God in Heaven, I ache for the warmth of you, but I’ll not take you till all the ghosts rest in peace.’ He stood up and looked down at her bowed head.
‘I’ll away to my bed. I’m up tae catch a train for Edinburgh the morn. Me in Edinburgh! I’ll send you a picture postcard, and one for you to read to the bairn.’
Kirsty looked after him and, unchecked, the tears rolled down her cheeks. She admitted to herself that she had wanted nothing more than to lie in Jamie’s arms as she had once lain in Hugh’s.
‘Am I fickle? I loved Hugh desperately. I thought I could never ever love anyone else.’ But her body tingled with unfulfilled desire and she admitted to herself that she had wanted Jamie to kiss and to love her the way Hugh had loved her. She knew that had Jamie made one move she would have willingly gone into the little room with him. She sat down again by the fireside and imagined herself putting the baby in his crib and walking to Jamie’s door. Jamie had done so much for her and here he was going off to war. He could be killed, hideously wounded.
‘I’ll go to him.’ But still she sat while the room grew colder around her, and in his narrow little bed Jamie tossed and turned, and pondered that nobility could sometimes be a highly overrated virtue.