AN ARTIST WAS BUSY OUTSIDE her bedroom window. The huge beech trees were just struggling into their green spring coats – how many tints and shades there were. Mother Nature never ceased to astound her. Soft green shoots were bravely pushing up their heads, like so many watchful sentinels, out of the ground, away from the weakening grip of winter and towards the young sun. She could see two – no, three – of Jock’s beloved Clydesdales in the far field, their heads bent as they grazed. Suddenly one, his particular favourite, The Cutty Sark, threw up her tail and her heels and went skittering away across the field. Catriona peered to see what had excited the horse.
It was Jock, his hands full of carrots, his pockets full of apples. He looked up, but his face disappeared and in its place Catriona saw . . . horror! She woke up with a start, and at her anguished cry the rat that had been chewing the wainscotting in the corner whisked out of sight behind the wardrobe.
Victoria, beside her mother in the big bed, moaned softly in her sleep. Catriona leaned over, as she had done so many times over the years, to soothe her child.
Victoria fell quiet and Catriona lay back again and tried, as she had always done before rising, to make a list of all the tasks she hoped to accomplish during the day. First thing was to light a fire. At least Victoria would be warm. She slipped out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown and crept quietly down to the kitchen.
The table was a seething mass of mice. They were everywhere. Already they had eaten their way into the bags of flour and sugar, the packages of good farm butter, the loaves of yesterday’s bread. Some of them jumped from the table at Catriona’s arrival, but the bigger and bolder ones looked at her with their malevolent, beady eyes and went on chewing.
It was too much . . . to be brought to this. All her life, every day, every moment, Catriona had worked and cleaned, and tried to keep up the standards instilled in her by her mother. Now . . . to come to this.
I always meant to put it in the lassie’s name.
Dear God, would the words always be there to haunt her, to poison her love for the old man, to tarnish his memory? She could bear no more. For the first time since Jock’s sudden death, Catriona began to cry. Great choking sobs were wrenched from her and scalding tears chased one another down her cheeks.
‘Oh, why, Father, why? I cannot bear this; I cannot deal with such dirt and damp, and neglect.’
A mouse, startled by her cry, ran across her foot on its way to its hole and the delicate touch was the final straw. Catriona screamed and screamed and screamed. The vermin ran to their holes and Victoria, terrified out of her sleep by her mother’s distress; jumped from the big double bed and, without waiting to put on dressing gown or slippers, rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen.
She was nearly fifteen years old and suddenly she grew up. She threw her arms around the wailing woman and Catriona felt their strength.
‘It’s all right, Mother,’ soothed the girl. Never before, no matter what had happened, even on that dreadful night when Grampa had died at her very feet, had Victoria seen her mother unable to cope. She held her mother and was no longer a child; she would never again be a child. At the sight of her mother’s distress Victoria had stopped thinking only of herself. She had grown up. She felt a million years old. ‘We’ll cope. We will. We’ll make it work, together. I’ll help. Don’t cry, don’t cry.’
She pushed her mother down into the chair beside the range and, putting her arms around Catriona’s waist, laid her head in her mother’s lap, but still she was the comforter, not the comforted.
‘We’ll cope, Mother. A cup of tea. I’ll make you a nice hot cup of tea and then we’ll start.’ She looked around and repressed a shudder. ‘It’s only dirt. Dirt has no respect for anyone, rich or poor, but boiling water and good carbolic soap’ll sort it. You’ll see. You won’t recognize this place when we’re finished with it.’
She looked fearfully at the wainscotting and observed the tell-tale holes. She had seen the mice rushing away from her mother’s screams. No mouse or rat had dared to disturb the peace of Priory Farm. Had they done so, they would have met a timely end. Victoria took a deep breath.
‘We need a good mouser and we’ll get one, but first we need tea. That was what Grampa used to say, Mother, do you remember? ‘I can handle anything, if I get a decent cup of tea. None of your holy water here.’ Do you remember, Mother, how he loved his tea?’
She got up and Catriona, calmed by her daughter’s strength, watched her at work. The set of the head on the thin, young shoulders was John’s; the flashing grey-blue eyes that had vowed to do battle with dirt and poverty were John’s; but, oh dear God, thank you, the courage and character were Jock’s. That they were also hers did not occur to Catriona Cameron.
‘Tam will tell us how to deal with vermin, Mother,’ said Victoria later, as she held the teacup so that her shaking mother could drink the reviving brew. Oh, so nearly had she said, ‘Grampa will tell us.’ Sometimes her grandfather seemed still to be alive. She could almost hear his voice, almost smell his pipe. But here she could smell only damp and a strange, rotting smell that had to be the mice. Tam would know how to deal with mice. And might there be rats too? Victoria shuddered and tried to smile at her mother. Had Grampa still been alive, of course, there would have been no need to learn how to cope with such horrors.
‘Now, Mother,’ said Victoria as Catriona made no move, ‘have some more tea and I will find something for us to eat.’
Catriona retched. ‘No, child, there were mice in everything. Everything’s contaminated. We can’t eat.’ Her voice rose hysterically and Victoria heard the warning signs of distress and tried to deal with them.
‘We must eat, Mother. We have a great deal of work to do. See, the eggs are untouched. Wasn’t that nice? The mice left the eggs to have as their second course and now they’ve lost them. I’ll make something nourishing. You go upstairs and wash and dress. Here, there is water in the kettle. We’ll get this range cleaned and then it will stay lit twenty-four hours a day and there will be water, lovely hot water. And in two shakes of a lamb’s tail there won’t be a germ anywhere.’
To Victoria’s delight, her mother tried to smile.
‘I’m fine now, lass. It was just—’
‘I know, but we’ll survive, Mamma, and we’ll do more than that. Just think. It’s the two of us against the world. Does the world have a chance? No.’
Victoria found a bag of flour that the mice – she refused to think any more about the possibility of rats – had left inviolate and soon there were scones browning on the griddle iron.
‘I’m making up the whole bag,’ she said as Catriona, washed and dressed, re-entered the kitchen. ‘I hope I remembered your recipe properly. I should, since I’ve watched you bake often enough. We’ll have scrambled eggs and scones for breakfast, and boiled eggs and scones for dinner. We have plenty of vegetables for soup, and you can make that, Mother, while I start cleaning. Unfortunately, we’ve no bone for stock.’
‘There’s a wee grocer’s just round the corner.’
‘No.’ Victoria was in control. ‘We’ll be pioneers today and use only what we have. There isn’t time to go to the shops, and by the look of this place we’ll be too dirty to go anywhere. Here, Mother, doesn’t a scrambled egg scone taste wonderful?’ Catriona had to agree that it did.
After breakfast Victoria went to dress while Catriona washed their few dishes, and then they started to clean. Everything the vermin had contaminated was taken out into the back garden and burned. The dirty paper that had lined all the shelves in the kitchen followed the foodstuffs onto the fire. The floors were swept and scrubbed, and after the floors came the walls and the shelves, even the doors. Soon the smell of dirt and decay was replaced by the healthy and not too unpleasant smell of carbolic.
‘Once we start polishing there’ll be a fresh smell of lemon in here and then we’ll get some apple logs for the fire. Won’t that be nice?’
‘I’ll do the privy,’ offered Catriona, anxious to make up for her weakness of the morning, ‘and you can get started on the front room.’
Victoria dropped into a chair by the fire. ‘The front room? Mercy, Mother. Would you look at the time. It’s nearly four and we’ve been at it since before nine this morning. If I don’t eat I . . . I . . . don’t know what I’ll do.’
‘You’re right, lass. Look, I’ll start making the soup and it can be simmering while we finish. I’m glad we brought these oil lamps from the farm. They’re homely, aren’t they?’
Victoria turned away. She was not ready for talk of the farm, and certainly not ready for odious comparison. ‘I’ll boil these last two eggs, Mother, to go with our soup. Or will it just be mixed vegetables, since there’s no stock for flavour? Doesn’t matter. Tomorrow we’ll investigate the wee shop.’
*
Did Arbuthnott Boatman deliberately choose an extremely wet day on which to take the new owner of Priory Farm around his property?
John Cameron had spent the night very comfortably at the nearby Birkhill Inn. His handsome face and figure and the cut of his London clothes had endeared him to the barmaid, and his generous tip had won the heart of the groom who was to convey Mr Cameron the two miles to the farm. Sammy Taylor was not the brightest employee of the inn, but he knew horses and he knew farms. He looked at the hand-made leather shoes, at the polish and the fine tooling with something approaching anguish.
‘Ye’ll no hae a pair o’ galoshes, maister?’
John shuddered at the thought of squeezing his beautiful shoes into a pair of ugly, but no doubt practical, galoshes. ‘Wore my last pair some years ago.’
‘There’ll be a puckle mud at the fairm.’
‘Which I shall be more than happy to wipe from my feet, laddie,’ said John grandly.
He would go, as his father’s lawyer wished, to the farm and he would see the inventory, and then he would take the wind from Arbuthnott Boatman’s sails by telling him to sell up. He could hardly wait to change that pained, prune-faced look to one of surprise.
Arbuthnott Boatman, in a sensible hooded driving cape and with his best-quality rubber galoshes pulled carefully over his second-best pair of shoes, waited at the once sparkling mullioned windows of the front room of Priory Farm. Catriona had been gone only a few days but already the house seemed to sag into itself, as if ashamed that it was not as immaculate as it had always been. Boatman saw, with some pleasure, the look of irritation on his new client’s face as he stepped from his cab into a puddle, which immediately oozed over the top of his shoes and ran down inside his silk-socked ankles. He hid his smile and walked out briskly, an expression of welcome painted on his face.
‘Mr Cameron, I’d have known you anywhere. You have the look of your father about you.’
John avoided the outstretched hand. There was no need for pretence with this man. They did not like one another, but what did that matter? He, John Cameron, owned every mucky inch of this place, every wisp of hay, every hen – even, he supposed, every mouse that lurked in the warm barns. His father could hardly have shot them all, he decided with a quick flash of irritation. The other man was his employee. It was a good feeling.
‘It was always dinned into me that I resembled my mother,’ John said coldly. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, can we sign whatever we have to sign? I’m thinking of heading for Mexico. This damned war has ruined France, but with the proceeds from the sale of this little lot I should be able to live like a king in Baja California. And there’s America just over the border, if I feel the need for what passes there as civilization. Ever been to France, Boatman?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘France is the country, Boatman. Such wine, such women, such food. I’ll miss French wines, but Mexican señoritas and excellent cigars should compensate. And they say there’s the odd vineyard, and lobsters, of course, jumping straight out of the sea into the pot.’
‘Sounds delightful,’ said Boatman drily. ‘But what of the farm? And, by the way, Cameron,’ he added, knowing full well that it was not only unprofessional, but none of his business, ‘you haven’t forgotten that you still have a daughter?’
Did John flinch for a second at the word ‘daughter’? Had he missed holding his own child? Did he regret not hearing her first, lisping words?
‘Neither means a damn thing. The farm never has: sometimes I even wondered if I was my father’s son. As for the girl, I came back from business – important business – in Paris at considerable discomfort to be there within hours of her birth and they turfed me out. Never even saw her. I owe the girl nothing.’
‘I take it you want me to find a suitable tenant?’ The lawyer’s mind was working furiously. Could Catriona lease the farm? With Tam to help, really to run the place . . .
John looked at him, his face a caricature of incredulity. ‘A tenant? You must be out of your mind, man. When I shed the mud from these shoes, I want to do it in every way possible. There’s a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t intend to stay guarding the ancestral acres while waiting to be conscripted. Mind you, if all else failed, I’d be a farmer before I’d be gun-fodder, and I suppose if I made a show of farming, they’d give me a dispensation.’ He thought for a minute, obviously weighing up the advantages of a safe haven for the rest of the damned war against the lure of exotic places. Mexico. What did he know of it? He looked over at the barn and saw the short, broad shape of Bessie Menmuir carrying peelings to the chickens. He could find nothing alluring in the sight. But Spanish señoritas. Sunshine . . . ‘Show me where to sign. Sell, and sell now.’ He looked around him at the carefully tended farmsteading. ‘It should make a nice tidy sum.’
The two men looked at one another and, for once, the lawyer’s guard dropped and his dislike of his client showed in his eyes. John Cameron blushed with embarrassment. Well, let them all hate me. What do I care? I am going to sell.
‘Shall I quote you the full legal terms of your father’s will, which is essentially the same as his father’s, or do you want it in plain English?’ Boatman waited, childishly and unprofessionally relishing the other man’s discomfort. How had a son of the soil like Jock Cameron ever fathered a wastrel like this?
‘Get on with it, man. Spit out your legal jargon.’
The farm can’t be sold, Mr Cameron. It’s yours for your lifetime, Cameron, and then it goes to Victoria.’
‘Victoria?’
‘Your daughter.’
‘My daughter? You mean he left the farm to the girl? A girl I’ve never laid eyes on.’
‘She is your child.’
John laughed. ‘Either that or an immaculate conception, man. You wouldn’t catch Catriona in the barn with the ploughman. More’s the pity,’ he added under his breath. ‘She might have been more fun.’
Boatman looked at him dispassionately.
‘Your late father made his will when you married in 1899. He left everything to you for your lifetime. Anything except the house and the land can be disposed of as you see fit, but it wouldn’t be wise to dispose of animals or machinery; you’ll get little rent for a farm without them. The farmhouse and the land become the property of your surviving legitimate children on your death. Victoria’s.’
‘What’s she like, the girl?’
Arbuthnott Boatman considered both the question and his answer. Had John asked because he had a man’s normal interest in a child he had fathered? Perhaps there was a nice John Cameron under all the antagonism. ‘She’s a pretty wee thing. Very like you,’ he added honestly.
John tried to picture a girl with his hair and eyes, his features, but all he could conjure up was a picture of himself just after his mother had died. He saw a pale, drawn face, shadowed blue-grey eyes that were used to smiling and were now wet with tears that he would not shed. He supposed the girl must be pretty.
‘Well, she’ll catch herself a man in no time, if she plays her cards right. Let’s hope she can keep him. Depends what her mother has taught her. There’s more to marriage than well-cooked meals, Boatman.’
‘Indeed, and as the Merry Monarch, Charles the Second, told us, there’s more to marriage than four legs in a bed.’
John turned away in anger. What was the dratted lawyer trying to say, with his Charles II nonsense? All John knew was that, even in death, his father had thwarted him. He had tied him to this damned place. Well, he would not be tied.
I’m off to Mexico, he thought. They can send me the money there. ‘Get the best rent you can for the place, Boatman. Shouldn’t be difficult in wartime, with people anxious for security and the government keen to make the country as self-sufficient as possible. I’m sure there’s an account at the bank that I’ll be able to draw on from overseas. Your firm must be big enough to have overseas clients. My grandfather dealt with your grandfather, or so my father was always fond of telling me. Old, established firm. Anyway, he had some way of making sure that I was always able to get funds in France.’
‘Of course.’ Boatman would not say ‘Mr Cameron’. ‘We have several agreements with the Bank of Scotland and I’m sure we can have the necessary paperwork drawn up before you leave. Have you a sailing date?’
‘Need to get myself a tenant first. How long should all this take?’
‘Who knows? I’ll advertise locally and nationally. Or maybe one of your father’s men would like the opportunity? They’re good workers and they know the land, the animals and the people. Perhaps Mrs Cameron . . .’ he began tentatively.
John did not even have to think before rejecting that hare-brained idea. Catriona, his former wife, living in his home. ‘Don’t talk rubbish, man. What would a woman know about running a farm? She’d ruin it, and me, within a year. Besides, it’s poetic justice, isn’t it? She threw me out. Now the boot is on the other foot.’
John looked down at his hand-made shoes and did not see the look of dislike thrown at him by Boatman. His anger still simmering, he ignored his ruined shoes and walked boldly through the mud away from the lawyer. ‘Do what you can, as quickly as you can,’ he shouted. ‘There’s more than the mud of Angus that I want to brush from my shoes.’
‘Good day to you,’ said Arbuthnott Boatman, but the words went unheard – or ignored.