JAMIE WAS GONE, AND TRUE to his promise a card arrived from Edinburgh. It was for Jamie-John and read:
What a bonny place. I’ll take you one day.
Love from Daddy. x for Mammy.
Kirsty could almost feel the pride – and the great daring – with which her husband had written the card. She pressed her lips to the X, to the kiss for Mammy. Had Jamie kissed the card too before he put it in the post box? Not for the first time did she wish she had overcome her inhibitions and gone to Jamie in his room.
‘I loved Hugh and I always will love him, but I have to make a life with Jamie. I owe him that much.’
She did not believe that she could ever recapture the melting tenderness or consuming passion that she had experienced with Jamie-John’s father, but she liked Jamie, had always liked him, and surely a deeper affection could grow? She remembered teaching the Merit Class about the system of arranged marriages in Japan. She had not thought much about the feelings of the young people involved in such marriages, but a child in the class had worried.
‘Is all the fowk in Japan miserable then, Miss?’
And Kirsty had decided that no doubt many of them managed to get along together quite happily.
‘Love grows,’ she had added quite grandly without having any real knowledge of this fact.
‘And it must,’ she added to herself softly now, ‘because I wanted to be with Jamie and I couldn’t be like that with just anyone. Feelings grow: mine have changed for Jamie.’
There was not the breathless tingling that had been conjured up by even the very thought of Hugh, but still her feelings were not those of the young child, the Dominie’s lassie, who had made a friend of the farmworker’s laddie.
*
Jamie had joined the Royal Artillery and was now Bombardier Cameron.
‘I had the chance of the Black Watch,’ he had told Kirsty in his first letter, ‘but I’ve never been keen on the kilt.’
Jamie was a Scot who found no thrill at the skirl of the pipes or the whirl of the kilt. He thought the pipes shrill, preferring the fiddle. And as for the kilt? He could not, of course, tell Kirsty, but felt strongly that if he was to fall in the mud, he would much prefer that his limbs be decently covered.
Can you believe that I am across the Firth in Fife at a grand place, Mugdrum House, me, Jamie Cameron, that slept in a barn till an angel married him. I’m learning to ride a motor cycle, and what a brave man I am roaring up the driveways like the laird himself. I have to admit to enjoying the power of machines, but have a feeling I’ll spend most of my time on somebody’s old bike. Seemingly they telephone messages from one part of the battlefield to another and, the telephone being a distinctly unreliable instrument, they have to depend on pedal power.
Will they give me a medal to make my bonny laddie proud? Will I make his mammy proud? Is that not what I want more than anything? Oh, Kirsty lass, do I not know that it will be hard for you? I thought it out carefully. There should be enough for you to pay the rent and feed the three of you, if you’re careful, and was I not the cleverest man in Angus to choose Jessie Robertson for my mother-in-law?
I have to face the fact, and so do you, my love, my heart, my soul – oh, Kirsty, could I speak to you the way I can write – but I may be killed, and God knows I would prefer to die than to be left hideously deformed, but should I die, Kirsty, will you please write to the Colonel? He has the right to know about the bairn and he was aye a good man.
Kirsty read the letter a hundred times and could not doubt that her husband loved her as a woman wants to be loved by a man. She was a churchgoer because her parents had taken her to the Kirk regularly, but now she went to church and prayed for Jamie and for the repose of the soul of Hugh Granville-Baker, who had died without knowing that he had fathered a son. She would not think of the possibility of Jamie dying, and therefore she did not consider informing the Colonel of the facts of Jamie-John’s parentage.
Jamie’s next letter came from the Front and said little other than that he missed her. He did not tell her what life was like on the 133rd day of the battle of the Somme, when the British called off their action. On the first day of that 133 days, Britain alone had lost 57,470 men. Jamie, who had never seen a hundred people together in his entire life, could hardly conceive of such numbers. He did not tell her of the horror of living, no, of existing, covered in slime, amid the stench of rotting corpses, desperately firing shells – one-third of which failed even to explode – at an enemy as exhausted and demoralized as himself. As Kirsty prepared happily for her child’s first Christmas, Jamie did not tell her of huddling in a trench during one of the worst recorded winters ever experienced in Europe.
*
Kirsty bought a paper streamer and draped it around the front room to welcome 1917. Jamie woke from a doze to the sound of guns, the guns that were never silent. The thunder of one battle died down and the roar of another began. He could not conjure up the sound of bird calls in Aberannoch. He tried to hear Kirsty’s voice, little Jamie-John’s cry, but they refused to come. Only the boom of guns and the screams of dying men came. He tried to make part of his mind work with the lovely words the Dominie had taught him. Other men were writing poetry – could he? The words, like the birds’ songs, eluded him.
When Jamie-John was a year old Kirsty decided to try to get a job. The baby was already walking and needed shoes so that he could play safely in the garden.
‘Imagine having to think about the price of a pair of shoes,’ said Jessie. ‘We’ll take it out of the bank.’
‘The bank’s for emergencies, Mother. I’ll manage out of housekeeping. I wish I could teach. It’s so stupid. Here’s me, a qualified teacher, and the village school making do with an old man well past retirement.’
‘He’s a man, Kirsty.’
Kirsty looked at her mother in astonishment. Obviously Jessie still believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Had the war changed nothing for her? Was her mind still firmly anchored in the last great days of Victoria?
‘Mother, can you possibly still believe that it’s right to throw away education, talent, just because a woman gets married – and oh, please don’t tell me that motherhood is a woman’s crowning achievement.’
Jamie-John, who was playing with building blocks on the rug at their feet, looked up at the sound of the almost angry voices and smiled his devastating smile. Kirsty caught him up in her arms and covered his plump little face with kisses.
‘It is, it is,’ she said, setting him down again, ‘but why can’t we have both – motherhood and jobs – especially when we need the money? I’ll sign on at the estate as a land girl.’
It was the very opening Jessie had wanted. For months she had been thinking about the every-day-more-obvious fact of the baby’s parentage, and now she could quite naturally speak of it. ‘The estate your son’s grandfather owns, Kirsty. I’ve never ever said a word about it, but shouldn’t you consider showing the baby to Lady Sybill?’
‘The baby is Jamie’s.’
‘Kirsty . . .’
‘Mother, please. Had Hugh lived it would have been different, but he’s dead. I want nothing from his parents. That’s not why I loved Hugh. I loved him, not the son of a great estate. Can’t you understand that?’
‘Very noble,’ said Jessie drily. ‘Oh, Kirsty, the bairn has the right to grow up the way his father grew up.’
‘Morally, yes. Legally, no. I’ll give Jamie-John what I can, Mother.’
‘So you’ll go and work all hours of daylight as a land girl and come home to him at night too exhausted to play.’
‘Jamie will be a tenant one day. He’ll work for Jamie-John and we’ll give him a good home and love. That’s all he needs.’
‘Perhaps.’ Jessie was still heavily involved in the village war effort: sewing circles, sphagnum moss collections for wounds, fresh eggs for wounded soldiers in the nearby hospitals, and so she saw and heard a great deal of what went on in the area. Now she said casually, ‘I did tell you the castle is open again? The Colonel is here for a day or two. The poor man was wounded in the spring and has come back to recuperate for a wee while. There’s a big house at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh being used as a hospital for wounded officers, gas cases and suchlike. He was there and took the opportunity to come north to decide about the estate.’
Jessie could see no change in Kirsty’s expression.
‘That’s a splendid hospital,’ she said. ‘I did read that the poet, Siegfried Sassoon, was there. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he is well enough to write some poetry?’
Jessie rose angrily and put her constant sewing – this time a blouse for Jamie-John – on the table. ‘Kirsty, consider your child. If the Colonel sells up, he’ll never return and Jamie-John will have lost his grandfather. Here are we worrying about the price of a pair of shoes, and a few miles away sits a rich man . . . Och, lassie, I know there was no thought of worldly gain in you when you . . . fell in love with Hugh, but he could do so much for the bairn – schools, clothes, the university even.’
Neither of them considered the baby’s legal grand-father – Jamie’s father – who lived less than a mile away but whom they seldom saw.
‘Had Jamie not married me, I might, just might have gone to the Colonel. I thought it all out, Mother. Perhaps he would have believed me – he’d have to believe me now . . .’ added Kirsty, looking down at the child with his blue-black hair and Hugh Granville-Baker’s eyes. ‘But what if he’d said he would support the baby if I gave him up? Could you give him up, Mother?’ Kirsty did not wait for an answer. ‘I couldn’t.’
Jessie looked at the firm line of her daughter’s jaw and saw that there was no more to be said.
*
In the panelled library of Aberannoch Castle, Hugo Granville-Baker looked into the fire which he needed even in the summer and saw his son’s face. The boy seemed more alive to him in Scotland than anywhere else. Sometimes it seemed to him that his son was more alive than his own marriage, which had deteriorated even further since Hugh’s death. It was now strictly pretence: neither wanted the shame of a divorce, and neither admitted to having found someone else to love.
‘Sybill can enjoy her discreet flings without sullying her family name, and me . . .?’
The Colonel thought of his constant companions for the last few years: fear, pain, cold, hunger, worry and, the hardest of all to bear, grief. A spark shot out of the fire and went black on the hearth. So bright and short had been his son’s life. He looked at the portrait hanging above the carved fireplace. Hugh’s merry blue eyes smiled back at him and he could not bear the pain. He rang the bell furiously and soon heard the limping steps of his batman.
‘Pack us up, Frazer. I’ll find out about trains.’
*
Kirsty Cameron had made up her mind: she would become a land girl for the rest of the war. When Jamie returned, everything would be different. He might even get a tenancy – if not at first, then in a year or two. Meantime she had a duty to do her bit. It was a lovely day and she would take Jamie-John with her, especially since she would soon be leaving him for hours at a time.
‘Walk, Jamie-John. We’ll go for a long walk today. All the way into the village, and then Mother has to see a nice man and you’ll be a good boy and read your book.’
At fourteen months, Jamie-John was walking quite well, and he tried to help his mother get him ready for his outing. He submitted to having his face washed and his curls combed. He was not so happy about having to wait while his clothes were changed, but at last he sat in the second-hand baby carriage that Kirsty had found in Arbroath and rode like a king towards the village. In each fat little hand he held a chop-bone, for he was teething and Jessie firmly believed that the bone of a lamb chop was much better for him than any of the patent devices on the market.
‘As well as easing his poor wee gums, he gets some nourishment from them,’ she had said and Jamie-John, when he was given a bone, carried it everywhere with him.
It was a lovely day for a walk and it was almost two years since Kirsty had walked that way with Hugh, and his image came to her stronger and more strongly still as they approached the village. Tears, unbidden, flooded her brown eyes.
‘Oh, Hugh, will I ever be free of you?’ her mind whispered. ‘This morning I wrote words of love to one man, and here is my whole body trembling at the thought of another?’ But it was not a trembling with passion but the pain of loss.
‘Oh, blast.’
Kirsty had not kept to the road but had wandered onto the grass verge and a wheel had come off the old baby carriage. Jamie-John was tipped sideways and expressed his displeasure in no uncertain terms.
‘Hush, lambie. You’re not hurt. Mother will lift you out and then I’ll try to fix this stupid wheel.’
‘Weel,’ said Jamie-John, and was rewarded with a hug for being such a very clever boy.
*
Colonel Granville-Baker saw the girl in some difficulty as his car swept down the driveway.
‘Stop, Frazer, and I’ll give her a hand. No, not you, you old goat. My legs are better than yours.’
‘Car,’ said Jamie-John, and Kirsty looked up to see her nightmare realized. Her baby’s grandfather was about to see him. She picked up the baby and pressed him close against her shoulder.
‘It’s all right, sir, I’ll manage,’ she said breathlessly.
‘Glad to be of assistance,’ said the Colonel and lifted the carriage out of the verge.
Jamie-John heard the deep voice. He pulled his head away from his mother’s shoulder and turned to the sound.
‘Bome,’ he said, and with a devastating smile offered Colonel Hugo Granville-Baker a damp and well-chewed lamb bone.