September (1990) (10 page)

She always asked this, despite the fact that she saw him every lunch-time, because she was the school dinner-lady and served out the midday meal. It was handy having Edie doing this because it meant that she stinted on helpings of things he hated, like curried mince and stodgy custard, and was lavish with the mashed potatoes and chocolate shape.

"Yes, it was all right." He went into her sitting-room, dumped his anorak and his school-bag on the couch. "We had drawing. We had to draw something."

"What did you have to draw?"

"We had to draw a song." He began to undo the buckles of his satchel. He had a problem and thought that probably Edie could help to solve it for him. "We sang 'Speed Bonnie Boat Like a Bird on the Wing over the Sea to Skye,' and we had to draw a picture of it. And everybody else drew rowing boats and islands, and I drew this." He produced it, slightly crumpled from contact with his gym shoes and his pencil box. "And Mr. McLintock laughed, and I don't know why."

"He laughed?" She took it from him, went to find her spectacles, and put them on. "And did he not tell you why he laughed?"

"No. The bell rang and it was the end of class."

Edie sat on the couch and he sat beside her. Together they gazed in silence at his work. He thought it was one of his best pictures. A beautiful speedboat slicing through blue waters, with white water pouring up at its bow and a snowy wake at the stern. There were seagulls in the sky and, on the front of the boat, a baby wrapped in a shawl. The baby had been difficult to draw, because babies have such funny faces. No noses or chins. Also, this baby looked a bit precarious and as though at any moment it might slip off the boat and into the sea. But still, it was there.

Edie did not say anything. Henry explained to her. "It's a speedboat. And that's the lad that's been born."

"Yes, I can see that."

"But why did Mr. McLintock laugh? It's not funny."

"No, it's not funny. It's a lovely picture. It's just that . . . well . . . speed doesn't mean a speedboat in the song. It means that the boat's going very fast over the water, but it's not a speedboat. And the lad that was born to be king was Bonnie Prince Charlie, and he was grown up by then."

All was now explained. "Oh," said Henry, "I see."

She gave him back the drawing. "But it's still a good picture, and I think it was very rude of Mr. McLintock to laugh. Put it in your bag and take it home for you
r m
other to see, and Edie will go and start getting your tea."

While he did this, she heaved herself to her feet, put her spectacles back on the mantelpiece, and went out of the room through a door at the back that led to her kitchen and bathroom. These were modern additions, for when Edie was a little girl, the cottage had consisted solely of two rooms. A but and ben it was called. The living room, which was the kitchen as well, and the bedroom. No running water, and a wooden lavatory at the end of the garden/What was more astonishing was that Edie had been one of five children, and so seven people had once lived in these rooms. Her parents had slept in a box-bed in the kitchen, with a shelf over their heads for the baby, and the rest of the children had been crowded into the other room. For water, Mrs. Findhorn had made the long walk each day to the village pump, and baths were a weekly affair, taken in a tin tub in front of the kitchen fire.

"But however did five of you get into the bedroom, Edie?" Henry would ask, fascinated by the logistics of sheer space. Even with just Edie's bed and her wardrobe, it still seemed dreadfully small.

"Oh, mind, we weren't all in there at the same time. By the time the youngest was born, my eldest brother was out working on the land, and living in a bothy with the other farm-hands. And then, when the girls were old enough, they went into service in some big house or other. It was a sore wrench when we had to leave, tears all over the place, but there was no space for us all here, and too many mouths to feed, and my mother needed the extra money."

She told him other things, too. How, on winter evenings, they would bank up the fire with potato peelings and sit around it, listening to their father reading aloud the stories of Rudyard Kipling, or Pilgrim's Progress. The little girls would work at their knitting, making socks for the menfolk. And when it came to turning th
e h
eels, the sock was given to an older sister or their mother because that bit of the knitting was too complicated for them to do.

It all sounded very poor, but somehow quite cosy too. Looking about him, Henry found it hard to imagine Edie's cottage the way it had been in olden days. For now it was as bright and cheerful as it could be, the box-bed gone and lovely swirly carpets on the floor. The old kitchen fire had gone too, and a beautiful green tile fireplace stood in its place, and there were flowery curtains and a television set and lots of nice china ornaments.

With his drawing safely stowed, he buckled up his satchel once more. Speed Bonnie Boat. He had got it wrong. He often got things wrong. There was another song they had learned at school. "Ho Ro My Nut Brown Maiden." Henry, singing lustily with the rest of the class, could just imagine the maiden. A little Pakistani, like Kedejah Ishak, with her dark skin and her shining pigtail, rowing like mad across a windy loch.

His mother had had to explain that one to him;

As well, ordinary words could be confusing. People said things to him, and he heard them, but heard them just the way they sounded. And the word, or the image conjured up by the word, stuck in his mind. Grown-ups went on holiday to "My Yorker" or "Portjiggal." Or "Grease." Grease sounded a horrid place. Edie once told him about a lady who was very cut up because her daughter had married some fly-by-night who was not good enough for her. The poor lady, all cut up, had haunted his nightmares for weeks.

But the worst was the misunderstanding that had happened with his grandmother, and which might have come between them for ever and. caused a lasting rift, had not Henry's mother finally found out what was bothering him and put it right.

He had gone to Pennyburn one day after school to have tea with his grandmother, Vi. A gale was blowing and the wind howled around the little house. Sitting by the fire, Vi had suddenly made an exclamation of annoyance, got to her feet and fetched from somewhere a folding screen, which she set up in front of the glass door that led out into the garden. Henry asked her why she was doing this, and when she told him he was so horrified that he scarcely spoke for the rest of the afternoon. When his mother came to fetch him, he had never been so glad to see her and could not wait to scramble into his anorak and be out of the house, almost forgetting to thank Vi for his tea.

It was horrible. He felt that he never wanted to go back to Pennyburn, and yet knew that he ought to, if only to protect Vi. Every time his mother suggested another visit, he made some excuse or said he would rather go to Edie's. Finally, one night while he was having his bath, she came and sat on the lavatory and talked to him . . . she brought the conversation gently around to the touchy subject and at last asked him straight if there was any reason why he no longer wanted to go to Vi's.

"You always used to love it so. Did something happen?"

It was a relief at last to talk about it.

"It's frightening."

"Darling, what's frightening?"

"It comes in, out of the garden, and it comes into the sitting-room. Vi put a screen up but it could easily knock the screen over. It might hurt her. I don't think she should live there any more."

"For heaven's sake! What comes in?"

He could see it. With great tall spotted legs, and a long thin spotted neck, and great big yellow teeth with its lips curled back, ready to pounce, or bite.

"A horrible giraffe."

His mother was confounded. "Henry, have you gone out of your mind? Giraffes live in Africa, or zoos. There aren't any giraffes in Strathcroy."

"There are!" He shouted at her stupidity. "She said so. She said there was a horrible giraffe that came out of the garden, and through the door and into her sitting-room. She told me so."

There was a long silence. He stared at his mother and she stared back at him with her bright blue eyes, but she never smiled.

At last she said, "She wasn't telling you that there was a giraffe, Henry. She was telling you that there was a draught. You know, a horrid, shivery draught."

A draught. Not a giraffe but a draught. All that fuss about a stupid draught. He had made a fool of himself, but was so relieved that his grandmother was safe from monsters that it didn't matter.

"Don't tell anybody," he pleaded.

"I'll have to explain to Vi. But she won't say a word."

"All right. You can tell Vi. But not anybody else."

And his mother had promised, and he had jumped out of the bath, all dripping wet, and been gathered up into a great fluffy towel and his mother's arms, and she had hugged him and told him that she was going to eat him alive and she loved him so, and they had sung "Camptown Races," and there was macaroni and cheese for supper.

Edie had cooked sausages for his tea and made potato scones, and opened a can of baked beans. While he ploughed his way through this, sitting at her kitchen table, Edie sat opposite him, drinking a cup of tea. Her own meal she would eat later.

Munching, he realized that she was quieter than usual. Normally on such occasions they never stopped talking, and he was the willing recipient of all the gossip in the glen. Who had died and how much they had left; who had abandoned his father on the farm and hightailed it off to Relkirk to work in a garage; who had started a baby and was no better than she should be. But today no such snippets of information came hi
s w
ay. Instead Edie sat with her dimpled elbows on the table and gazed out of the window at her long, thin back garden.

He said, "Penny for your thoughts, Edie," which was what she always said to him when he had something on his mind.

She sighed deeply. "Oh, Henry, I don't know, and that's for certain."

Which told him nothing. However, when pressed, she explained her predicament. She had a cousin who had lived in Tullochard. She was called Lottie Carstairs and had never been bright. Never married. Gone into domestic service, but had proved useless even at that. She had lived with her mother and father until the old folks had died, and then turned very strange and had had to go to hospital. Edie said it was a nervous breakdown. But she was recovering. One day she would come out of hospital, and she was coming to stay with Edie because there was no other place for the poor soul to go.

Henry thought this a rotten idea. He liked having Edie to himself. "But you haven't got a spare room."

"She'll have to have my bedroom."

He was indignant. "But where will you sleep?"

"On the Put-U-Up in the sitting-room."

She was far too fat for the Put-U-Up. "Why can't Dotty sleep there?"

"Because she will be the guest, and her name's Lottie."

"Will she stay for long?"

"We'll have to see."

Henry thought about this. "Will you go on being dinner-lady, and helping Mummy, and helping Vi at Pennyburn?"

"For heaven's sake, Henry, Lottie's not bedridden."

"Will I like her?" This was important.

Edie found herself at a loss for words. "Oh, Henry, I don't know. She's a sad creature. Nineteen shillings in the pound, my father always called her. Screamed like a wet hen if a man showed his face around the door, and clumsy! Years ago, she worked for a wee while for old Lady Balmerino at Croy, but she smashed so much china that they had to give her the sack. She never worked again after that."

Henry was horrified. "You mustn't let her do the washing-up or she'll break all your pretty things."

"It's not just my china she'll be breaking . . ." Edie prophesied gloomily, but before Henry could follow up this interesting line of conversation she took a hold of herself, put a more cheerful expression on her face, and pointedly changed the subject. "Do you want another potato scone, or are you ready for your Choc Bar?"

Chapter
4

Emerging with Archie and Virginia from the front door of Balnaid, and descending the steps to the gravel sweep, Violet saw that the rain had stopped. It was still damp but now much warmer, and lifting her head she felt the breeze on her cheek, blowing freshly from the west. Low clouds were slowly being rolled aside, revealing here and there a patch of blue sky and a piercing, biblical, ray of sunshine. It would turn into a beautiful summer evening-too late to be of much use to anybody.

Archie's old Land Rover stood waiting for them. They said goodbye to Virginia, Violet with a peck on her daughter-in-law's cheek.

"Love to Edmund."

"I'll tell him."

They clambered up into the Land Rover, both with some effort, Violet because she was elderly, and Archie because of his tin leg. Doors were slammed shut, Archie started up the engine, and they were off. Down the curving driveway to the gate, out onto the narrow lane that led past the Presbyterian church, and so across the bridge. At the main road, Archie paused, but there was no traffic, and he swung out and into the street which ran through Strathcroy from end to end.

The little Episcopal church squatted humbly. Mr. Gloxby was out in front of it, cutting the grass.