DR CURRIE DROPPED VICTORIA AT the door of Smart’s office and drove on to the Blackness Road house. She had enjoyed her short break; if she was honest with herself, she would admit that it had been especially good to see Sandy Inchmarnock again. He was one of those men who look better as they age, unlike his son, who had been a particularly lovely boy. She refused to admit to any feelings at all, besides pity, for her old friend. It would be a long time, if ever, before the boy recovered and there was obviously no consolation to be found for either Lord or Lady Inchmarnock in their marriage. The thought: What if he had married me, as everyone expected him to do? popped briefly into her head and she snorted in a most unfeminine fashion. All those years ago, none of their set had been able to see anyone else when Julia was in the room. It had been a competition, and Sandy had won the prize. Dr Currie banished the images of privileged Victorian youth and turned her attention to her driving.
It was she who had suggested that Victoria go into the office to begin catching up with the work that would have accumulated during their two days in Edinburgh. The girl had been quiet on the train, withdrawn and worried. Now that she was away from the boy, she had time to realize what she had seen in the last few days, to wonder about what she was expected to do now and to pray that she could cope.
‘Go to the office for the afternoon, Victoria. Mr Smart isn’t expecting you until tomorrow but he’ll be delighted to have you.’ She did not add, ‘Hard work will take your mind off your young man and his troubles.’
She thought about Victoria and young Robert, and about the conversations she had had with Lord Inchmarnock and the doctors attending the boy, all the way home. Her mood was as melancholy as Victoria’s as she stepped out of her little car and into the lovely May sunshine. What a delightful month it was in Dundee, with some trees still in glorious blossom and others unfurling their fragile green leaves tentatively to the sun.
The curtains at the house on Blackness Road were still drawn. How unlike Catriona, the most fastidious and conscientious of housewives, not to have the blinds drawn up and the windows open to allow the wind to blow away the bad night air. The doctor trod firmly, but without undue speed, up the path and opened the unlocked front door. She heard Flash barking from Victoria’s room, where he and Priory had no doubt decided to sleep during their mistress’s absence. She called out reassuringly to him and the dog fell quiet. So too was the rest of the house – deathly quiet. Dr Currie began to feel the first twinge of unease. At this time of day Catriona should have been cooking or ironing, and she could smell neither activity.
She found Catriona huddled on the settee in the living room. Her hair had escaped from its neat pins and her dress was torn and disarranged. Her knees were drawn up, she had her arms wrapped round them, and she was rocking herself back and forward and moaning, moaning, moaning. Dr Currie, who had seen such sights too often before and who realized without asking the cause of Catriona’s distress, went over to her quickly.
‘It’s all right, Catriona. I’m here. Everything is going to be all right.’
‘Victoria?’ It was a tortured, pleading gasp.
‘I sent her to work.’
The mother relaxed and allowed the doctor to help her from the room and upstairs.
Quickly and methodically Dr Currie stripped and examined her landlady, now so horrifyingly her patient. There was little external damage. The scratches and slight bruising would heal quickly. The real wounds, which were internal, would take time to mend.
An unforgivable invasion of her self, thought the doctor angrily as she worked.
Later, her patient finally sleeping peacefully, Dr Currie went to release the animals. Flash had contained himself, but not Priory.
‘If life isn’t one mess, it’s another,’ said the doctor, disobeying Catriona’s strict instructions and lighting up a cigarette before beginning her second clean-up operation.
She opened Victoria’s window to allow the cigarette smoke and animal odours to drift away together, then she set the living room to rights. Only then did she make tea for herself and her patient. She forced Catriona to drink a cup of tea and to eat a little bread and butter, while she sat by the side of the bed and listened to the distressed woman going over the sordid little story again and again.
‘It was my fault, doctor, my fault. He always was a . . . loving . . . man, and I led him on. I—’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Dr Currie, when she had listened to the story for the umpteenth time. ‘When will you stop blaming yourself for John Cameron? He’s no good, Catriona – never was – and it has absolutely nothing to do with you.’
Catriona looked at her. She did not believe her. She did not really believe that an unmarried woman could possibly understand what had happened. But Catriona had been brought up to look upon doctors, ministers and teachers as almost God-like creatures, with whom one never argued. ‘I don’t want Victoria to know,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve sheltered her from everything sordid.’
‘Catriona, Victoria has just spent two days at the bedside of a gently reared young boy who, for reasons known only to the powers that be, has spent the last several months fighting for his life in a rat-infested hell-hole known as a trench. He has been hideously disfigured and is now fighting a second, even tougher, battle. Victoria was calm and supportive. She will not see what has happened to you as the end of the world.’
‘What are you talking about, Dr Currie? What has happened?’ Victoria was standing in the doorway, the hat and gloves that an office girl could wear with impunity grasped unceremoniously in her hands, her eyes anxious.
They had not heard her come in.
Ignoring Catriona’s protestations, Dr Currie told Victoria truthfully and simply what had happened.
Victoria went white and then red, first with shock and then with barely suppressed anger. Sex . . . Violation . . . She had never given either one much thought. Sex was something that married people did occasionally. It had to be done, of course, or there would be no children, but to think of it in terms of her mother and her new-found father. No, it could not be. There was some horrible mistake. She looked at her mother, grown old and frail again in the space of a night, and Victoria went to her and, as she had done on the very first morning in the house, took the older woman in her arms. ‘How could he, how could he?’ she seethed. ‘It’s my fault, Mamma. I forced you to take him in. I should have been here to protect you.’
‘Enough,’ said Dr Currie. ‘What a pair for overloading yourselves with guilt and responsibility. John Cameron is responsible for this, and no one else.’
‘Can we have him arrested for assault, doctor?’ Victoria could see only the need to punish someone for her mother’s pain. She was ready to rush to the nearest police station.
The two older women exchanged glances over her bowed head. A divorced woman who takes in her former husband as a lodger and then claims that she has been assaulted might not be dealt with too sympathetically.
Dr Currie, more sophisticated and worldly wise than Catriona, tried to answer as diplomatically as possible. ‘It would be too unpleasant for your mother, Victoria. He was her husband . . .’
‘They are divorced,’ Victoria reminded her, and felt her mother wince even at the sound of that shameful word.
‘He was living here, Victoria. Some people might find that fact . . . interesting.’
‘I could explain that it was for my sake, that I wanted to get to know him, that I hoped . . .’ Victoria’s voice trailed off. What had she hoped? Was she a child who believed in fairy stories?
All three women were silent while unpleasant thoughts chased around in their heads.
‘Where has he gone anyway?’ asked Victoria at last. ‘He needs money. He never paid for his lodgings and the next rent from the farm isn’t due until the September quarter-day. I’ll check his room.’ She jumped up and hurried out.
Dr Currie leaned over her patient and adjusted her coverings. ‘Excuse me for a moment too, Catriona. I’ll heat up that fish pie . . . No, I’m perfectly capable of seeing that it doesn’t burn.’
But the doctor did not go to the kitchen. With a heart beating faster than it had done for some time, and a feeling of disaster threatening to overcome her, she hurried downstairs to her own quarters. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it while she tried to calm her heart. He had, oh dear God, he had. Several times in the past few months she had felt that someone besides Catriona had been in her room. A ten-shilling note had been removed from her purse, but never all the money, so that a busy woman might think she had spent it; or a shilling had disappeared from the pile she kept on her dressing table for emergencies. She had decided to say nothing to Catriona, in the hope that she and Victoria would soon see the true worth of John Cameron. But now this.
Like an old woman, she stumbled to her bed and looked at the small space beside her pillow, where the exquisite gold half-hunter watch with the words Sandy loves Flora picked out in diamonds had kept her brave for twenty lonely years.
Oh, they could have a warrant made out for his arrest now. But would it bring back her watch, her carefree girlhood?
For the first time in those twenty years Flora Currie sat down on her bed and allowed the tears to roll down her cheeks. A few hours ago she had been remembering with pleasure the days of her girlhood, the days when young Sandy Fotheringham had spent every minute he could in her home; she had remembered fondly the excuses he had made to find himself beside her at a tennis party or a ball. Every day for twenty years she had seen the watch he had given her on her eighteenth birthday, just a few days before Julia swept through London society like a comet. And now it was gone. And to think that its sale would line the pockets of a wastrel like John Cameron. Feeling that she too had been violated, Dr Currie sniffed loudly, blew her nose soundly and, after washing her face, went back upstairs to comfort her patient.
And who is to comfort me? she thought. I cannot add to Catriona’s guilt, and if I tell her she will blame herself. There must be something I can do. Or must I let him get away with it?
*
Nellie Bains sometimes wondered if she had been right to exchange the drudgery of the jute mills for the somewhat dubious pleasures of motherhood. Wee Jimmy was quite a handful for a lassie not yet eighteen years of age, and now that Tam was away in Flanders with the Black Watch, the cramped room and kitchen up the stairs in the Hilltown was often a lonely place.
Perhaps she should have married Tam, then at least there would have been some money coming in. He had promised to arrange things and at first there had been a few shillings regularly every week, but since he had been away, she supposed that he had been too busy marching and saluting officers to worry about his family. That was all he had done, he said, during his three-week training period. He had learned to salute his superiors, and heaven knows but it seemed that everyone was more important than eighteen-year-old Tam Sinclair; and he had learned to slope arms, whatever that meant. He had not yet seen a machine-gun and he had never fired a rifle, but now he was off defending the Empire and Nellie was left behind to look after his son. She decided to take him for a walk in the lovely June weather. They would walk down the High Street and look in the windows of all the posh shops.
Victoria saw Nellie as she left the office for her lunch break and called out to her.
Nellie was surprised, but delighted to be hailed by her one-time schoolmate. She only wished that any one of her neighbours was there to see her well-dressed friend.
‘Well, Victoria, that costume definitely says: I work in a nice clean office.’
‘Oh, I know, Nellie. I’m so lucky. I love the work and I go to Bruce’s College one day a week for shorthand and typing. But what about you?’ Victoria looked down and was rather disconcerted to find herself being grinned at by a very gummy little face. ‘Is this your wee boy?’
‘He’s teething,’ explained Nellie, wiping the child’s cheeks with a far from clean handkerchief cut from an old sheet. Nellie looked at her son through the eyes of this well-fed, sophisticated friend from her childhood. ‘He’s a bit washed-out looking, isn’t he?’ she said critically but honestly. ‘I wish I could get him out to Birkie, Victoria. The air was different out there, wasn’t it?’
Victoria smiled. Even to think of the air of Birkhill cheered her. ‘Nothing like it anywhere, Nellie. A tonic for what ails you, my grandfather used to say.’ For a moment she thought of her mother, still unable to cope fully with what had happened to her barely a month ago. She smiled brightly at Nellie again. ‘Can’t you move in with your mother while your . . . man is at the war?’
‘Move in with my ma and seven other weans, and two of them with bairns, in one room and a kitchen? You must be kidding. I have a room just for the two of us . . . and Tam, when he’s home. I like my independence and my privacy.’
Victoria looked at Nellie. The snotty-nosed ragamuffin had grown into a handsome woman. Her clothes were well pressed and mended, and it was only the child’s face and the over-used hankie that were dirty.
She spoke spontaneously. ‘Let’s take the bairn to Lamb’s for coffee, Nellie. My treat.’
‘Goodness, are the waitresses there no as stuck up as the clientele, Victoria? They’ll no be happy to see me in there, especially wi wee Jimmy. I read in the paper once that Mrs Pankhurst – you know, the Mrs Pankhurst, the votes-for-women lady – she ate at Lamb’s. They’ll think they’ve come doon in the world serving me and wee Jimmy.’
‘You have as much right in there as anybody else. Besides, he looks like a well-behaved wee laddie.’
Nellie hoisted her son on to her hip, where he settled contentedly. ‘Oh, he’s grand, just greets a bit when the pain’s bad, but a wee nip of whisky soothes the gums.’
Victoria looked at Nellie in horror as she ushered her charges across the tramlines. ‘The bone of a lamb chop is better, Nellie, and has nourishment in it, too . . . So the doctor that lodges with my mother tells her patients.’
‘Aye, well whisky’s easier to get, Victoria. My, isn’t this a bonny place?’
They had arrived at Lamb’s and were shown to a table that Victoria could not help but notice was hardly the best seat in the restaurant. Should I make a fuss? Am I brave enough to ask for a better table? Nellie and the baby seemed perfectly happy, so Victoria sat down. Since she had no experience of small children, she was interested to see how the boy accepted being in a different environment. He accepted it as he accepted everything. He stared around at the green plants, the tables with their starched white cloths and the waitresses in their starched white aprons, and he grinned cheerfully at anyone who looked at him.
‘He’s a happy baby, Nellie,’ said Victoria with a tinge of jealousy in her voice.
‘Och aye, he’s a nice bairn, and my family is great with him. Granny, my ma, my sisters . . . everybody helps.’ Nellie deposited her son on the floor at her feet, helped herself to a cream-filled cake and leaned across conspiratorially.
‘You’ll never guess what I did the other day? The wean had a hen: you know, we were all told to have hens and eggs to help the war effort. Well, we got this tough old hen from the Priory – don’t ask how, Victoria – and we put it in a pen on the drying green. I gave it tattie peelings and scrapings from the porridge pot, and it laid three lovely brown eggs, no all on the same day, but then the thrawn old thing stopped laying and just ate me out of house and home. So, says I to myself: We’ll hae a good bowl of soup. I wrang its neck, but wee Jimmy saw it before I had the thing plucked, and you’ll never guess what I tellt him.’ She leaned across the table, her eyes sparkling with humour and pleasure at being in such a nice place with a friend.
Victoria humoured her. ‘I hardly dare think, Nellie Bains.’
‘I tellt him the Germans got it. We buried it on the drying green, with a cross and everything, and when I’d put him down for a sleep, I went to dig it up to cook it.’ She stopped talking and started laughing uproariously.
‘Nellie,’ said Victoria. ‘You didn’t eat the child’s pet, especially after you had buried it in the ground?’
Nellie wiped her eyes with the same cloth she had been using for Jimmy’s nose, and for his wet and now cream-covered cheeks, before answering. ‘I would have done, but old Maggie Thomson up our close had dug it up as soon as my back was turned. I made her give me the carcase for soup.’
Nellie held no grudge towards the neighbour who had stolen her dinner: she would probably have done just the same herself. Victoria thought again how well Nellie handled hardship. Sometimes, in the years since her grandfather’s death, she had felt that the Camerons had hit rock-bottom, but they had never yet had to dig up a dead hen. Nellie had nothing . . . except happiness.
‘And how are you all, Victoria? Yer mam?’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t recognize the house, Nellie.’ Victoria could not tell her the truth; she could not say that Catriona was a shadow who floated around the house or sat dully, staring into space, and who started at any sound, especially the noise of an opening door. ‘We have a lady doctor living with us, but you knew that. She’s wonderful. You wouldn’t believe the hours she works. She has a motor car and she smokes cigarettes but, it’s funny, Nellie, she’s still a lady.’
‘I’ve seen her. Don’t get in her road if she’s heading for the Dundee Royal,’ said Nellie feelingly. ‘Must be great to know a real live doctor, even if it’s a woman. Dae ye get free medical care?’
Victoria thought of the care and attention her mother was receiving. ‘Me, Nellie? I’m as healthy as one of Grampa’s Clydesdales.’
‘Oh, I loved to see him sitting up there on a Sunday in his tall hat and his frock-coat. Whae has the horses now?’
‘One or two were sold off when Grampa died, but Glentanar and the Cutty Sark still work the farm. Tam Menmuir loves them just as much as my grandfather did. It’s almost like seeing Grampa. He speaks to them in the same way. I’ll need to go, Nellie. You wouldn’t believe the demands for jute with this war going on and on. I’ll be lucky if I get all the letters and bills typed in time to catch my tram.’
Victoria paid the bill, said goodbye to Nellie and hurried back to the office. She loved being there. She loved the dark wallpaper, the heavy polished wood, the feeling of usefulness and especially of accomplishment at the end of the day. If only everything in life was as easy as neatly typing a column of figures.