Authors: The Handkerchief Tree
‘No. But we’ve parted.’
‘Parted? Shona, you’re no’ serious?’
‘I am, then.’ Shona’s look was indeed serious, and made Cassie seem almost afraid.
‘You going to tell me about it?’ she whispered.
‘If you will promise me you’ll never repeat what I tell you to anyone else. Promise me, Cassie.’
‘I promise!’
‘All right, then. The thing is, Brett’s gone to London. He went on Saturday.’
‘He’s no’ got a sore throat?’
‘That was an excuse. He’s going to make arrangements in London to sail to Australia; he won’t be coming back here.’
The colour drained from Cassie’s face and her gaze fell. ‘Why?’ she asked at last. ‘Why’s he doing it?’
Shona looked away. ‘This is the part I don’t want to tell you, but there’s no way you’ll understand if I don’t. He’s running away, Cassie. He’s running away because Mr MacNay’s coming back and he’s going to find out that Brett’s been fiddling the books. He could be prosecuted, you see, so he’s gone.’
Cassie was stricken, unable to find words, until at last she cried out, ‘I don’t believe it, Shona! There must be some mistake. Brett wouldn’t – he wouldn’t do a thing like that!’
‘He’s done it before. In Toronto. They let him off then, but who knows what Mr Kyle would do? Brett couldn’t risk staying.’
‘This is terrible,’ Cassie was moaning. ‘Terrible, like a nightmare. And for you, Shona. You must be in a state, eh? I mean, he’s left you behind. And he never asked you to marry him? Never asked you to go with him?’
Shona bit her lip, her eyes filling with tears. ‘He did ask me to marry him,’ she said, her voice so low Cassie had to strain her ears to hear it. ‘He did want me to go with him. But I said I couldn’t do it.’
‘Couldn’t do it? What are you saying? You turned Brett down? How could you? I thought you loved him?’
‘I do love him! I do, Cassie. But he’s no’ the Brett I thought I knew. They say if you love somebody it shouldn’t matter what they do, but I couldn’t live his life, you see. I couldn’t be living on the edge, worrying all the time if somebody was coming after us.’ Shona was shaking her head. ‘And the worst thing of all is that Brett doesn’t really understand that everything we had would be built on shifting sands. I could tell he didn’t really believe what he’d done was wrong. He thinks it’s owed to him, to have what he wants, so he might do the same thing all over again. How could I live like that?’
Shona was suddenly sobbing in earnest as Cassie sat staring, her face set, her eyes cold. ‘If you truly loved him, you could. But you didn’t give him a chance, did you? Supposing he’d said he’d never make that mistake again, couldn’t you have believed him? Folk change, you know.’
Change? Hadn’t Brett himself said once, ‘don’t expect me to change’? And ‘A leopard doesn’t change his spots’? That was about something else, of course, and maybe where more important things were concerned he might have different views. Shouldn’t she have given him a chance, then, as Cassie had said? No, Shona decided, no! For he had never said he would change, never tried to persuade her that way. Maybe he knew himself too well.
‘No,’ she said aloud. ‘No, Cassie, Brett’s life isn’t for me. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Is it?’ Cassie rose and stood looking down at Shona. ‘He asked you to marry him, he asked you to go with him, and you said no. If he’d asked me I wouldn’t have cared what he’d done, I’d have said yes. That’s the difference between us, eh?’
Shona slowly stood up and turned to go back. ‘Well, there’s no difference between what we want for him, anyway. I can’t go along with what you say, but we both want him to get away and no’ face arrest. So I know you’ll keep your promise.’
‘I shan’t even reply to that. Let’s just go home, it’s getting cold.’
‘You could come in for a cup of tea at Mrs Gow’s if you liked?’
‘No, thanks.’ Cassie was walking fast, keeping her gaze straight ahead. ‘No’ today.’
On Monday, October 21, Stuart MacNay returned to work at Maybel’s in George Street. Everyone was, of course, delighted to see him, and looking so well, too – no longer pale and gaunt, enduring pain, but quite filled out, with tanned cheeks and an air of confidence.
‘I’m so glad to be back,’ he told Fraser. ‘Work beats rest any time – but where’s Brett, then?’
‘Hasn’t phoned in,’ Fraser answered, frowning. ‘May still have the sore throat. I’ll speak to Shona.’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t see Brett yesterday,’ Shona answered truthfully, but Fraser was looking at her with eyebrows raised.
‘Are you feeling all right, yourself, Shona? You look a bit under the weather.’
‘I’m all right, thanks, Mr Kyle.’
‘Well, I don’t mind telling you I’m a wee bit concerned about this. I don’t like an accountant of mine not keeping in touch. I know the firm he’s letting his flat from – I think I might give them a ring, see if they know anything.’
With a beating heart, Shona watched him walk away to make the call. This was it, then. Fraser was going to find out that Brett had gone and there was nothing she could do.
It didn’t take long for the balloon to go up, as Fraser put it himself. As soon as he was told that Brett had cancelled his lease and left the flat, he came back at once to the workroom to find Shona.
‘In my office, please, Shona. Now.’ In his office, he pointed to a chair. ‘Sit down, please, and tell me what’s going on.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Where is Brett?’
‘I don’t know, Fraser.’
His green eyes centred on her face. She had never seen them look so cold. ‘If I were to fetch a Bible, would you still tell me that you don’t know where he is?’
She flushed, her lip trembling. ‘I can’t – I can’t say any more. Please, don’t try to make me.’
‘He’s gone, hasn’t he? Absconded? And what would be the reason for that, I wonder?’
She was silent, her hands twisting on her lap.
‘And you haven’t gone with him? Another mystery.’ Fraser suddenly moved to the door. ‘All right, Shona, I’ll let you off the hook for now. I’ve got work to do, and so has Mr MacNay. Surprising, isn’t it, that Brett only decides to go missing when his boss comes back to work?’
News of Brett’s flight spread fast around the shop, with all eyes on Shona, though no one asked her outright where Brett could be. In fact, apart from Cassie, there was sympathy for her but little for Brett, for it seemed obvious enough why he had gone.
‘I always did feel a bit uneasy about him,’ Willa remarked. ‘So handsome – quite the film star – but too good to be true. Sorry, Shona, I don’t mean to upset you. I know he’s your cousin.’
Shona said nothing. She didn’t feel like talking.
‘Wonder what’ll happen now?’ Isla asked excitedly. ‘What will Mr MacNay find?’
‘Who says he’ll find anything?’ asked Cassie, but no one troubled to reply.
For three days, there was no information on the senior accountant’s search. While Fraser fumed about and Brigid came over from Morningside specially to get news, it began to look as though Brett had been particularly clever and that nothing would come to light. But Mr MacNay was not one to be beaten, and on the morning of Thursday, October 24, he was able to tell Mr Kyle that his assistant had indeed been falsifying the accounts. Not by great sums, and not enough to make Fraser suspicious, just the sort of amounts he could use to spend on himself and maybe hope to put back at some future date.
‘What will do you now, Mr Kyle?’ Stuart asked him. ‘Inform the police?’
Fraser ran a hand over his brow and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. What’s the point? We don’t know where he is. Probably back in Canada by now, unless he’s in trouble there as well. I didn’t check his references, did I? What sort of a damned fool does that make me?’
‘He seemed such a nice young man,’ Stuart said sadly. ‘And so incredibly good looking.’
‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ Fraser stood up. ‘Come on, it’s lunchtime – I’ll buy you a pint, Stuart. You deserve it.’
‘No pints,’ Stuart said firmly. ‘I’m afraid it’ll have to be a glass of milk.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Fraser. ‘But come on, anyway.’
Late afternoon, Fraser sought out Shona. ‘It’s all right,’ he told her heavily. ‘No need to look so scared. We’ve decided to write the whole thing off to experience. I won’t interrogate you any more.’
She gave a long sigh. ‘Fraser, thank you. I appreciate that. But I do want to say I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything. I’d promised.’
‘I understand.’ His look was sympathetic. ‘This has been hard for you, Shona, very hard, and it’ll take some getting over. But you will, you know, you will get over it.’ He paused for a moment, then asked softly, ‘Did he want you to go with him?’
She nodded.
‘But you didn’t. I’m not going to ask why, but I can guess, and I believe you’ve done the right thing. There’s no point in going over what was wrong with Brett, but it’s something to remember – if you can’t trust a man with money, you can’t trust him at all. What you have to do now is let time do its work. Take it day by day and one day, I promise, it’ll be over. You’ll see.’
‘Fraser—’
‘No more, no more. As a matter of fact, we’ve other things to think about. Have you heard the news?’
‘What news?’
‘It was on the wireless in the pub at lunchtime. The American stock market has crashed.’
‘Oh. That sounds bad.’
‘If you’re thinking, but that’s America, nothing to do with us, I’m not so sure. It might have ramifications for us all.’
‘But it’s so far away!’
‘Not these days.’ He laughed shortly. ‘And what America does the rest of the world often follows. But, you know what this day’s going to be called? Black Thursday. For you and me, too.’
Time, Fraser had said she would need, just as Mark had once said, too, and time Shona endured, hiding her loss as much as she was able, keeping going, working hard, hoping to get better. Brett never wrote, which was just as well. Somehow she’d known he wouldn’t; he was sensitive enough to know that she’d meant what she said and was now making a new life for himself in which she would have no part. No doubt time was working for him, too, as for her, but oh so slowly!
Meanwhile, as she faced her own personal tragedy, a greater tragedy was beginning to play out on the world stage. Fraser had been right – the Wall Street crash in America had had far-reaching ramifications. Maybe only making worse problems that were already there, but as the 1930s began, it soon became apparent that the outlook for the future was bleak beyond belief.
American credit vanished. World trade crumbled. Everywhere there were cuts in expenditure and more and more people began to lose their jobs. Over the industrial and shipbuilding areas, particularly in Scotland, a terrible fog seemed to have descended, and though there was talk of weathering the slump and the hope that the national government might do something to help, no one really believed it.
‘Because we’re all in the same boat,’ Fraser cried. ‘Who can bail us out? However many cuts we make, when we reach the bone, that’ll be it. No more to be done.’
Not that he was saying Maybel’s had reached that level yet, but already there were bad omens, the first casualty being his plans to open a new shop in Glasgow, followed by his idea of starting to open a café at the market garden. Both of these projects being close to his heart, Fraser was deeply affected, though trying to put a good face on things. ‘No, haven’t reached the bone yet,’ he told Shona. ‘And if we can still keep the two Edinburgh shops going, we’ll manage until the slump is over.’
‘Surely folk will always want to buy flowers, Fraser? There are still people with money in this city.’
‘Depends if there are enough to keep us going, though. We might have the rich ordering flowers for weddings and dinners and corporate events, but we need a lot of them, and ordinary folk, too, coming in to buy their daffodils and such. If you lose your job are you wanting to buy daffodils, or struggling to buy food?’
Shona had turned away from that conversation with a stronger feeling of dread even than she’d been feeling since the Wall Street crash. She thought of Brigid and her staff, of Isla, Cassie, Willa and Dan, the delivery man – were all their jobs at risk? Was hers? Not yet, not yet. To cheer herself she suddenly decided to go back to Edina Lodge. See her Handkerchief Tree. It was May, it should be looking beautiful. And it had never failed to cheer her yet.
Some days later, on her next afternoon off, having been admitted through the gates to the Lodge, she made her way to the gardens, feeling sudden anxiety that her tree might no longer be there. It was some time since she’d visited the orphanage – maybe it had died, or for some reason been chopped down?
But it was there. Her tree. Covered in its exquisite load of flowers, or leaves, whichever term you cared to use, for there was the tree’s strange charm – that you couldn’t tell which of the two – flowers or leaves – it bore. How the sight of it took her back to that first sad day at the Lodge! Mark Lindsay had taken her then to see the tree and told her it would make her feel better, which it had. He’d been so astute, hadn’t he? For there was no magic about the Handkerchief Tree, only a strangeness that had so intrigued her she’d forgotten her homesickness for a little while. And he’d known that would happen, clever Mark – it was not surprising he’d made such a good doctor.
Hearing a footfall behind her, she turned, half expecting to see him, but was surprised, instead, to meet the interested blue gaze of Miss Bryce.
‘Shona, how nice to see you! Haven’t seen you back here for some time.’
‘No, it’s true, I haven’t visited for a while. But it’s so nice to see you again, Miss Bryce.’
And she hadn’t changed at all, except for one or two grey hairs at her temples and small creases at her eyes. Telling her she was looking well, Shona hoped Miss Bryce would see no great change in herself. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but sometimes when she looked in the mirror she thought she did look much older and sadder.
‘What a piece of nonsense!’ Willa had declared when she’d remarked on it. ‘You look exactly the same. Just a very pretty girl.’