After the Armistice Ball (15 page)

‘Stupid woman, stupid woman, stupid woman,’ I chanted, in time with my steps. I should be reliving that visit, that wasted chance, in my sleep.

‘That makes two of us then,’ said a voice, sounding only feet away from me. I jumped and wheeled around looking for the source. An ancient, crooked but sturdy old woman slowly unbent herself from where she had been stooping behind the wall which edged the lane to my left. She put her hands into the small of her back and stretched herself with a groan, before coming back to rest, not upright but gently curved forward like a feather. ‘Aye, the Dear knows why I’m crippling myself with this caper,’ she said, pointing to the ground at her feet with a knobbled and earthy finger. I peered over the wall at a vegetable patch, laid out between brick paths, in which stretched long rows of tiny green plants, looking like stitches in a brown blanket. ‘I’ve near kilt myself planting out they cabbages and now I’ll be out here every night with my candle trying to keep the snails off them, and then when I’ve been out in the snow to cut one and washed it and cooked it and laid it down, they’ll all turn their noses up anyway.’ She spoke with great weariness but her eyes were twinkly and she looked back at her poker-straight rows with pride. ‘And what have you done?’ she said. ‘Here, I hope you’ve not stepped in muck in they boots.’ She bent again and delving her hand into a bucket she began to sprinkle something around the neck of a tiny cabbage plant.

‘Oh goodness me, no,’ I said, thinking that I had no idea and deciding not to check, ‘I’ve upset and offended one of your neighbours, I’m afraid.’

The old woman’s head bobbed up instantly at this and I saw the twinkle in her eye intensify as though someone had turned the gas up to full. She stood straight again and wiped her hands, beaming.

‘Well now, Mrs Gilver madam, how did you manage to do that?’

She knew my name; this was more like it.

‘I say, I don’t suppose you’d like a hand with that?’ I said, stepping along to the gate and coming into the garden. ‘I could do with something to work off my bad temper and you look as though you need a rest.’

She held the bucket out towards me wordlessly, and eased herself back against the wall with her feet splayed. Crushed eggshells was what the bucket contained, and I took off my glove before grabbing a handful and crouching down amongst the cabbage seedlings to set about my inexplicable task.

‘I was charged with giving a little something to Mrs Marshall to say thanks for her trouble. From the Duffys, you know. And it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world to have a little chat about this and that, but the lady seems to think I was prying and – oh bother!’ A clump of eggshell, still with some of its contents clinging about it, dropped on to a seedling and bent it down. I flicked it away.

‘Och, you shouldn’t worry yourself about her, madam. She’s far too big for her boots. It’s no as if she was slaving for them. In and out in the morning as fast as you could blink she was, but even that was too much trouble.’

‘Well, it beats me why she should take the job if she had no taste for it,’ I said, glad to have someone with whom I could share my many thoughts on Mrs Marshall. The old woman rocked with laughter.

‘Aye well, her man, Sandy, he was in about the wee hoose painting and papering for them and when madam said did he know of any “domestic help” he just said his Aggie would do it and glad, never thinking a woman would grudge to work with the two good hands God gave her.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I imagine that
would
cause a little coolness.’

‘Well, Sandy was none too cool, I can tell you. Fit to be tied more like it. He’s near had enough of her airs and graces, for it’s not what he’s been used to.’ I wondered how she knew all this. Did the hot-tempered Sandy and the frosty Agnes have screaming matches in the garden? Did the sound carry this far?

‘No,’ she said again, ‘Sandy has never been used with seeing a woman too proud to turn her hand. Why, his mother still grows all her own vegetables, madam, and she’s over eighty, God love her old bones.’ She brought this out with great enjoyment and watched me closely to see if I was catching up with her.

‘I see,’ I said, with an inward whoop of delight that my gamble had paid off so lavishly and I was not grovelling around in the dirt for nothing. There is no greater source of scurrilous gossip than a mother-in-law with a grudge in her heart and if ‘Sandy’ had worked for the Duffys he might have well have told his mother something I would like to know. ‘Well, Mrs Marshall,’ I said, playing her at her own game, ‘if she felt that way, I suppose my dropping in with a tip was just about the last straw.’

‘I wish I’d been there to see it,’ she said. ‘Oh, but madam, to think here we are laughing and there that poor lassie is. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust is what we’re promised, but please God there’s not many of us bound for that kind of end.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘Naw, not me. I didn’t know the family at all. They don’t belong here. They just bought that wee hoose to play in, I think. No that any folk round here would want they wooden hooses. Built as hidey-holes for Edinburgh and Glasgow folk and that’s all they’ve ever been. Mind you, they had theirs lovely. Sandy showed me what they were putting up and it must have been a palace. Shame to think all that new paint and paper and all they curtains gone just like that.’

I privately agreed with her, but thankfully said nothing because she clapped a hand to her mouth in horror.

‘Devil take my tongue,’ she said. ‘Listen to me going on about paint and paper when they’ve lost their bonny lassie. Oh dear God, it’s true what they say. It’s as well we don’t know what’s coming, or we’d none of us get out of our beds in the morning.’

‘Were you at the inquiry?’ I asked, knowing the answer, but making the most of Mrs Marshall, to whom I felt sure one could say anything.

‘I was not,’ she pronounced. ‘Although I heard you were, madam, and if you don’t mind an old woman speaking her mind, you should have known better. My own man, God rest his soul, was taken home ten years since and I would no more have gone to his funeral than I don’t know what. A graveside’s no place for a woman, and as for a courtroom! Aye, I know there’s plenty of those clackety pieces from Gatehouse went and now we’ll not say a word to them for all they’ll say is that Mrs Gilver was there so there can’t be harm in it. I don’t know!’

‘But you’ll have heard all about it,’ I said, rightly surmising that none of what had preceded required a response. ‘Does your Sandy have any idea what caused it? He must know the place well.’

She shook her head.

‘He’s near gone daft with thinking about it, madam. Here, just mind out and not put too much down at once! That bucket’s to do the whole row and you’d not want to be scratching it back up again if you’re short at the end. It gets terrible under your nails.’

I was warming to Mrs Marshall as much and as quickly as I had cooled to her daughter-in-law.

‘He cannot think how it happened,’ she went on. ‘Mind you, once it was going he’s not surprised it went like it did. They kept the place that hot! Sandy was fair sweating when he was working there, if you’ll pardon me. And he tellt them and tellt them they could not have it so warm with new paper or it would be hanging off again. But soft-born, soft-bide, eh?’ She gazed innocently at me, crouched in the earth, scrabbling in the bucket of eggshells, and I smiled in spite of myself.

‘Mind you, it’s all just habit, this lighting fires in God’s good spring, for I know they found it close. I walked past this one day and every door and window in the place was wide open. New curtains all blowing out and getting clarty, so I think madam was just digging in her heels and refusing to do what she was told solely because she was told it. A stubborn old woman is a terrible thing, is that not right?’ She chuckled and smoothed her apron.

When I had worked my way up the row to the top of the vegetable patch and almost to the cottage door, Mrs Marshall stumped inside and came back with a glass of water for me and one for herself, and we sat companion-ably on the bench against the house wall looking down the row of cabbages with, I daresay, equal pride. Mrs Marshall sighed heavily.

‘Poor soul,’ she said. ‘Her mother will be lost without her, and maybe that sister of hers will be sorry now she wasn’t more like what a sister should be. I cannot stop thinking about it. Daft like, for I didn’t know the lassie. I’m not even sure now which one of they girls it was that died. The younger one, they said. But there wasn’t a spit between them. So was it the bonny, cheery one or the other one with the – I shouldna say this, but – with the face that would turn the milk?’

‘I’m afraid,’ I said, having no trouble applying these descriptions to Clemence and Cara, ‘that it was the pretty little thing who died, and her elegant sister who is still with us.’

‘Aye well,’ said Mrs Marshall, ‘God gathers his own.’ She seemed to recollect herself and shrug off some unwelcome thought. ‘It’s not like I ever heard any harm of Teenie-bash.’ I took this to be a reference to Clemence. ‘It just beats me how two lassies fae the same mould can be so different in theirselves. Mind you, two girls together can just as easy be at daggers drawn every day of their lives as they can be chums.’ She gave a shout of laughter. ‘I had nine, madam, and there’s ways that’s easier – although the work would kill a mule – for they all jist have to shake down and get on with it.’ I nodded solemnly and I did agree with her, as a matter of fact. I had often thought that had my boys been girls I should have been quite happy to add to their number until they were well diluted by siblings. Of course, had my boys been girls, I should have been obliged to keep on in pursuit of an heir for Hugh, even as far as matching Mrs Marshall’s nine, and I quite saw that if it might kill a mule it should certainly have done for me.

‘I was sure there was three,’ Mrs Marshall was saying when I turned my attention back to her. ‘But Aggie said definitely jist the two lassies. And that’s right enough, is it, madam? So I turned to Aggie and I said, “Well, who was the wee bit thing I saw riding a bicycle up fae the wooden hooses on the Tuesday night?” As if the devil was after her, mind. “I’m sure I don’t know,” says Aggie. “Your eyes are not what they were.” Cheeky besom. “Och well,” says I, “it was probably one of the other maids.” That shut her up. The
other
maids. She didn’t like that, I can tell you.’ Mrs Marshall wheezed with laughter again, and did not seem to notice me staring, open-mouthed. This must indeed have been ‘one of the other maids’. The poor creature, having begged or borrowed a bicycle from who knows where, racing up to Gatehouse to . . .? To send a desperate letter to one of her friends? Or to try to procure a way out of her troubles? But in Gatehouse? Was that possible? Or perhaps the furious pedalling itself was the idea.

‘Madam?’ said Mrs Marshall bringing me back from my wool-gathering. I drained my glass of water and stood up, forced to screw my hands into my back just as the old lady herself had done. She beamed at me, hugely entertained by having got a soft-born besom to do an a honest job of work. I held out my hand to her.

‘Thank you for a most pleasant morning, Mrs Marshall.’

‘Well, you know where I am, madam. Don’t go past the door.’

Returning to Gatehouse on the midday bus, I was met at the door of the inn by Mrs McCall, who happened to be passing along the corridor and who clutched my arms in her big hands and asked me in a shocked voice what in the Lord’s name had happened? What has she heard, I thought? And was about to ask her the same thing, when I caught sight of myself in the fish-eye glass above the fireplace. This glass never throws back a flattering rendition of one’s face, tending to give more bulbous prominence to the nose than is usual and making one look, overall, as though one’s features have been painted on to a child’s balloon blown up a bit too far. Now, though, I looked really quite savage. My hat was askew, my hair was sticking straight out to the sides (I assumed from having been squashed into my collar as I crouched) and there was a smear of dirt across one cheek. Looking down I saw that the hem of my coat was earthy and my stockings, frankly, a disgrace. Fearing that if I told her I had been planting cabbages I might lose any little scraps of dignity I had left, however, I made no explanation but ordered a bath and luncheon in my room and swept upstairs.

In the afternoon, refreshed, although still rather in need of a manicure, I sailed forth to deal with the girl in the post office. I had had a tremendous idea in my bath and was eager to set it in motion.

The post office was quiet, as I had expected, the people of Gatehouse being the sort to deal with all High Street business such as letters and parcels nice and early in the morning and not dash in and out in the careless way that city dwellers do. I have never quite been able to understand the exact nature of the moral rectitude that springs from doing things in the morning rather than the afternoon, but since it served my current purpose I had no quarrel with it. The postmistress herself, Miss Millar, was just visible up a ladder in the back-shop with a list in her hand and a pencil behind her ear. I leaned companionably against the counter at the telegraph desk and smiled at the girl.

‘I wonder, my dear, if you will be able to help me with a little matter,’ I began. The young person glanced very briefly to the side as though to check that her boss was well out of the way and then leaned towards me eagerly.

‘I find that I need to send a telegram to a friend of mine. She is also a friend of poor Mr and Mrs Duffy,’ I added hastily, seeing her face fall, disappointed at this prosaic beginning. ‘But the difficulty is this. I know that poor Mr and Mrs Duffy have gone off for a few days before they go home to begin to make the funeral arrangements. So I cannot be sure whether they have told this particular friend yet, about the terrible thing that happened. Do you see my problem?’ The girl shook her head slowly, and I saw that I should have to be rather more frank than felt comfortable. ‘You see, my dear, if I send a telegram to my dear friend and make no mention of it, she will, if she has heard the news, think me terribly callous. If, however, she has not heard and I
do
mention it, then not only will I give her the most frightful shock, but I might offend the Duffys. After all, it is their decision how and when people are to be told.’