Beneath the Abbey Wall (28 page)

T
he phone in his office started to ring when he was halfway up the stairs. He ran the last steps and regretted it. “McAllister,” he answered, his breathing heavy and hoarse.

“Brodie, QC, here.” The breathing from the other end of the phone reminded the advocate of a racehorse that had just won an eight-furlough steeplechase. “I have just come from the gaol. I'd like to ask your opinion on a number of points before I go back to Edinburgh. I will be here for . . . ” McAllister could almost see the dapper wee gentleman consulting a pocket watch, but dismissed the notion as fanciful. “My train leaves in fifty-five minutes.”

“I'll be right over.” McAllister put down the phone and made for the stairs.

“McAllister,” Joanne called out, “I need you to approve this . . . ” She was waving some sheets of copy paper.

“Later,” McAllister called from halfway down the stairs.

Beech appeared around the corner of the half-spiral stairs. “Can I help?”

“I need someone to sign off on these articles. The father of the chapel has already threatened me with a blank page if I don't get it down to the stone in the next two minutes.”

Beech went into the reporters' room, unscrewed his pen, and signed the pages. “There. Done.”

“Don't you want to read them?” she asked.

“And spoil the surprise when I read the
Gazette
over breakfast?”

“Will the printers accept your signature?” This question came from Neil, who knew how strictly the printer's union enforced their rules.

“Oh, I think so.” Beech smiled. “Don McLeod is highly regarded. I think they will bend the rules until he is back.” Beech sat at a typewriter, looked around. “Anything else?” Neil handed him some copy. “Ah, my favorite subject—council rates.” He started to type, and the room came alive with morning-of-deadline vim.

Just before the seven-o'clock deadline, Rob announced, “That's all, folks. McAllister is checking the final proofs but, all being well, another edition of the
Highland Gazette
will roll off the presses on time.”

“Well done, everyone.” Beech clapped. Neil joined in.

Joanne blew an offending wisp of hair out of her eyes and leaned back in her chair, rolling her shoulders. “That was insane.”

“But fun.” Neil smiled.

Joanne had to look away. Thrilled that she had this secret, she was also terrified that everyone in the room could sense the current between them. Especially Rob.

“So, who's up for a drink? Beech? Neil? Joanne?” Rob asked.

“An early night for me, my boy.” Beech was already up and putting on his coat.

“Not sure,” Neil said. “Joanne?” He looked at her.

She looked away.

Rob saw the small smile—
She thinks it's a secret,
he thought, and he grinned. “Okay, I get it. Maybe McAllister will join me.” He doubted it. McAllister had not returned until midafternoon—on deadline day and with two key staff missing. And even if he did fancy a drink, Rob wasn't sure he wanted his company—
more cheer at a funeral
. So he went home. He didn't mind; an evening transfixed by Radio Luxembourg, rock 'n'
roll crackling over the airwaves, fading in and out as though it was coming from another planet, not a radio mast in not-too-distant-as-the-crow-flies Europe, was Rob's idea of heaven.

*  *  *  

Joanne and Neil walked through town, Joanne pushing her bicycle. In the basket were cooking apples for a pie and eggs for custard.

I'll make you an apple pie,
she had told Neil, not wanting to say,
I'm desperate for your company.

“You must get on well with your in-laws,” Neil said as they walked across the bridge.

“Granddad Ross is a lovely man,” Joanne replied. “I'm not sure Granny Ross approves of me—but she loves the girls.”

“And your husband? Is he still in the picture?”

“No, thank heavens.”

“If life here is anything like a small town in Canada, it must be hard for you. My mother certainly found it so.”

“Your mother was a widow. She didn't desert her husband.”

“She was a widow for respectability. Her husband left her a few months after they arrived in Canada, so I was told.”
Even that was a lie,
he remembered but did not share.

It was dark and the night was cloudy and the streetlights far apart, and the trees, especially those in front of the bowling greens, were big and bare, the many-fingered limbs creating a bower over them as they passed at a very slow pace, the weight of the story slowing Neil down.

He had never told anyone about that day.

“I was eleven, starting high school, when some busybody in the office saw my birth certificate and made sure everyone knew I had no father.”

She could hear it in his voice. The pain and anger still fresh.

“At midafternoon break, John Rasmussen, the bully in the
form above me, whose father worked in the lumber mill and was also a bully, started the chant.” What Neil remembered most clearly was that John Rasmussen, although from a Swedish family, was chanting in a strange mixture of Canadian, Scottish Canadian, and Gaelic accents.

They were almost at Joanne's prefab and, not wanting to break the spell, her bicycle against her right hip, she stopped, and Neil was talking, and she was listening, and the sound of the silent trees was the music the dirge the pibroch to the tale.

“He was saying,
Bastard. You're a bastard,
his voice low so the teachers wouldn't hear, and after saying it about half a dozen times, his sidekick, a daft fat boy called Eric, joined in.” The sound of John Rasmussen's voice had stayed with him and would stay forever. He had heard it during the mortar fire at Monte Casino and it had made him stronger. He had heard it on the day he first walked into the university, an ex-soldier student on a scholarship. When he heard it, it made him stronger,
Bassstrd,
it sounded like,
basstrd, basstrd, you've got no da, basstrd, basstrd.

“I was big for my age, and strong, and I hit him, so the headmaster gave me and John Rasmussen six of the best and we became good friends.” Neil kicked a tree root that had pierced the tarmac of the pavement. “He died right at the end—when most of Italy had been liberated and we were about to go home, he was shot by a sniper.”

John Rasmussen was the only person he had ever talked to; about the resentment, the pain, the shock—not of having no father—but of being lied to. And on every birthday, in spite of his reading, in libraries and archives, in parish registers, how impossible it was for unmarried women to keep their babies—he could not forgive that. He told himself he did not hate her, his birth mother, the one who rejected him, gave him away, but no, there was no forgiveness.

“My mother, my real mother, who brought me up, who worked gutting fish until her hands were crippled with arthritis, who fed me, who told me stories in the long winter nights, who gave up her beloved glens for me, that woman was truly good. Whoever gave birth to me is not my mother.”

He said it with a finality that made Joanne wonder whom he was trying to convince, himself or her.

“My parents threw me out when I became pregnant on the first and only time I'd drunk spirits, gin of all things, and . . . ” She quickly came out with her story, to show him that she too had suffered. “My father is a minister. He could not bear the shame.” She laughed, and it was her turn to hide the bitterness that had diminished over time but never completely vanished. “So much for Christian forgiveness.”

They were speaking conversationally, trying to tell their stories lightly. But neither was fooled.

“I love your little house,” Neil said as he held open the gate for her. “And your garden.”

For once Joanne was glad she hadn't the time to trim the hedge, glad the lilac was overbearing, blocking the front door from the lane. She went round the back and put her bike away, opened the kitchen door, and was suddenly aware that the girls were away, that she and Neil were alone.

“Would you put the kettle on?” she asked, her hands covered in flour and butter for the pastry. Ten minutes later, the apple pie in the oven, she went to close the curtains in the sitting room. The thought of her husband made her nervous.
Never mind he's with Betsy,
she thought,
he'd still give me a good hiding if he found me with a man.
The double standard she did not think about, it was just the way it was.

She switched on the radio. Brahms swelled out into the room. She took off her shoes. She ran her fingers through her
hair and wished she had time for a bath. She went to the bedroom to check the sheets were clean.

“Milk? Sugar?” Neil called out. He had the tea made and the mugs out on a tray.

“No sugar, thanks.”

“Not very Scottish.” The sight of the tray, the way he had put out the sugar bowl and milk jug, made her tingle.
What man does that,
she thought, and she knew for certain she loved him.

“And you're very well trained, milk in the milk jug indeed.”

“My mother was once in service. She insisted everything was done properly.
No matter how poor we are,
she would say,
good manners and good habits cost nothing.”
He smiled. “I still have her most precious possession, her tea set. There are only three cups and saucers left, but I treasure it.” He did not tell her that no matter how many times he asked, his mother never revealed how she came by the tea service. “Coming here, I feel I am paying homage to her. She was once a beautiful young woman, barely eighteen when she went to Canada, where she had a tough life, and I wanted to say thank you to the mountains and glens that she came from.”

There was something artificial in the way he said this, but Joanne put it down to his being a scholar, a man whose words were better on paper.
Not that he's not silver-tongued, he could charm the birds from the trees
.

Joanne rose. “I'll make custard.”

He reached out, put his hand on her wrist. “No regrets?”

“You asked me that before and the answer is the same—no, no regrets.” But she wished that she did not feel so guilty.
Adultery, adulterer, fallen woman,
those were the words that would haunt her as surely as
basstrd
haunted him.

He pulled her onto his lap. She felt she had never been kissed
properly until she met Neil. She felt she had never known what love was, until she had met Neil. And the guilt—she pushed it down deep into a well where her conscience could not penetrate. For now.

“Better switch off the oven,” he murmured as he led her by the hand to her own bedroom, her narrow bed, her sanctuary that she had vowed no man would breach—until she met Neil Stewart.

It was late when they eventually had the apple pie and tea. Without custard. He ate half, and with every slice he told her again how good it was.

“So you can cook too,” he teased. He loved the way she blushed so easily.

“And sew and knit and all the usual housewifely things.”

“Your husband was mad to leave you.”

“It was the other way round, I threw him out.” This was important to her; Joanne was proud of remaking her life. No matter how many disapproved, this was a better life for her and her children. “And, although he doesn't know it, I am going to divorce him.”
There, I've said it
. She prayed Neil would see what a divorce meant.

Neil looked at her, but with his mouth full of apple pie, he could only nod.

“Bill is living with Betsy Buchanan. And Betsy wants him to marry her.” She hesitated. “Betsy is pregnant.”

Betsy had been in tears when she made Joanne promise to tell no one. “Cross your heart you'll never tell,” Betsy had said, and Joanne had to look away, scared she would laugh as Betsy invoked the
cross your heart and hope to die
promise she had last heard in the school playground. But Neil would never repeat the information.

“Wow,” was all he said.

His reaction, or rather nonreaction, was not what she expected.
Can't he see what this means?

“Betsy's not sure what Bill will do.” She knew she was blethering but it was important he understand. “Betsy is helping me get evidence of Bill's infidelity. Then I'll apply for a divorce. We need a witness to stand up in court and testify, or at least have some photographs of them in a compromising situation . . . what? Why are you laughing?”

“It's all so ridiculous. Not you. The law. It's the same in Canada. You have to have proof of infidelity. I've even covered a case where dirty sheets were shown in court.”

“That's horrible.” Joanne found this distasteful and vowed to change her sheets as soon as Neil left.

He helped himself to another cup of tea. “I admire you, Joanne. You have made a new life for yourself, a new career. It will be hard living here as a divorced woman, but you are prepared to do it.” He reached across for her hand. “And I know you can.”

A numb sensation gripped her whole body, a deep-down chill, colder than any Scottish winter, gripped her toes—even in sheepskin slippers. She wrapped both hands around the mug of tea—but still the ice penetrated. Her shoulders in the cozy moss-green twin set, bought to bring out the color of her eyes, felt bare. She was as exposed as an unwanted daughter left out in the snow, and she knew it.

“You'll have no trouble getting back into the boardinghouse? I thought your landlady was an ogre.” She needed him gone.

“I have a key.” He was surprised but did not want to show it. “Maybe another time we can find somewhere to be together for longer? It was perfect in Ullapool.”

“Maybe.” She could hear his voice change, trying to reassure her. It didn't work. Fatigue hit her, and she wanted to cry.
Though why, she had no idea. Often, after a conversation was over, after the person had gone, when it was too late, it would come to her—the hidden heart of the matter.