Rose Cottage (2 page)

The room I shared with her was at the front of the cottage, over the kitchen, which was our main living room. I was wakened from sleep by raised voices. Gran’s, urgent with something that could have been despair or anger. My mother’s, unwontedly shrill and tearful. Aunt Betsy’s, high, hard, and assured. I slid down under the bedclothes and covered my ears.

A door slammed. I pushed the blankets back and sat up. Light footsteps on the bare wooden stairs. My
bedroom door opening softly. My mother at my bedside, arms tight round me. A hand coming gently to stifle my questions.

‘It’s all right, love. All right. Mummy’s going away for a bit, that’s all. Be a good girl now, won’t you?’

‘Where’re you going?’

‘Just away. Not far.’

‘Can’t I come too?’

‘No, baby, no. But I’ll come home soon, see if I don’t, and then old Sourpuss’ll get her cards, and we’ll all be happy again.’ A giggle, then a swift kiss, which let me know that there were tears on her cheeks. ‘I’ve got to go. Mind your books at school now, Kathy. You’re a bright girl, and you’ll go a long way. See it’s a better way than me. Go to sleep now, lovely, and don’t forget your mum.’ A quick hug and another kiss. ‘Good night, baby.’

I stood at the window and watched her go down the front path. The moonlight was strong enough for me to see that she had Granddad’s battered old Gladstone bag in one hand, and in the other a bulging bass carrier of the sort that the family used for game and salmon.

I never saw her again. She had gone with the gipsies, Gran said. Every year they came to the same lane near our house for a few nights, and they were there on the night she left. But by morning the camp had vanished without trace, and there had been no way of getting in touch with her. From time to time she wrote, usually with the cards she sent for Christmas and for Gran’s and my birthdays. Some two years later she sent news that she was going to be married (‘so tell the old cat’)
and was off to Ireland where ‘Jamie’ had been offered a job. She would write from there and tell us all about it. But she never did. She had been killed in a bus crash, she and her Jamie, somewhere in the west of Ireland. That was all Gran told me; it was Aunt Betsy, inevitably, who gave me the details. The couple had been the only passengers in the small country bus, when, in the dark, it ran into a stray bullock loose on the road, and plunged down a bank and burst into flames. The driver, ‘a good man, though no doubt he was a Catholic’, had been thrown clear, but had been badly burned himself in trying to free the two passengers. ‘And it was to be hoped’ (this was Aunt Betsy again) ‘that they were dead already.’

I do not know what Gran would have said if she had known about this, but, childlike, I said nothing, and took out my grief and horror in nightmares. But when, a little time later, Aunt Betsy was found to be working a text in cross-stitch which said THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH, my grandmother, normally the gentlest of women, tore it out of her sister’s hands and threw it into the fire.

And for once Aunt Betsy never said a word.

When I was sixteen the war broke out. I was at the local grammar school. The only other girl from the village who went was the vicar’s daughter, Prissy Lockwood. Our cottage lay almost two miles from the village, on the way to the station, and Prissy and I travelled together daily, two stops down the line. She was just about my only contact with the village in those days; there was very little to do in Todhall, and our relations with the Hall were hardly social. I worked there when I could – a shilling an hour – helping Gran in the kitchen. It paid my train fares, and helped a little here and there. At home I kept a good deal to my room, working most evenings at my school books, to keep out of Aunt Betsy’s way. My great-aunt was a good housekeeper, and I am sure that she was a help to Gran, who was working most days away at the Hall, but I knew that she still regarded me as the offspring – and probably the inheritor – of Sin, and things were never other than distant between us. I sometimes caught her watching
me with what looked like positive dislike, but it is impossible to be accurate about such things, and her normal expression was, to say the last, sour and forbidding. She died in 1945, of a cancer that we had never suspected, and which she bore with the same ferocious strength that she had brought to her fight against Sin. By that time I had been away from home for nearly five years.

In 1940 the Hall was taken over by the RAF, and the family went north and asked Gran to go with them. She went with few regrets, her only worry being my future. Aunt Betsy (who in fact had not been asked to go) declined to leave Todhall; Gran would be ‘living in’ at Strathbeg Lodge, and there were new tenants in the Campbell cottage there, so Rose Cottage must remain her home. Things looked bleak for me. But here the vicar and his wife intervened, having no doubt heard something of my situation from Prissy. For my final year at school I was to lodge at the vicarage, and Prissy and I would take our Highers together. Which is what happened. My results were rather better than Prissy’s, a fact which she accepted with cheerful indifference: she had never had any ambitions beyond marriage and a family, and in fact, after leaving school, she only put in a year with me at a teachers’ training college in Durham before marrying a young officer whom she met on holiday, and relinquishing her college place without regret. I finished my course and was then – to my grandmother’s delighted pride – appointed to an elementary school in a small Yorkshire town. I found lodgings near at hand, and, since I spent my holidays in
Scotland, where I was glad to earn a little extra by ‘helping out’ at the House, I saw nothing of Todhall for the next few years.

Of my marriage I will say little except that it was a typical war-time affair, too commonplace in those days to be seen as tragic. I met Jonathan Herrick at a concert given by Yehudi Menuhin. In those days the great artists travelled the country, taking music to out-of-the-way places, playing sometimes even in village halls. Jon and I had seats next to one another. We were both in uniform – he was a Flying Officer, and I did part-time war service in the Royal Observer Corps, and had just come off duty – and in the intervals we talked, and after the concert we went out together and sat for hours over ersatz coffee in some small bar-café. We met again, took a bus out into the country and walked and talked. I don’t remember what about; he told me little of himself or his family, and nothing of his work; I knew merely that he was flying bombing missions over Germany. I took to watching and listening for the Halifaxes on ‘bombers’ nights’, and, when I was on duty, painfully trying to track the numbers of aircraft going and returning, without ever knowing which missions he was on.

In a short time – time was precious in those days – and after a few more meetings, I found that I loved him. We married, a typically hasty war-time affair, at which not even Gran (who was temporarily back at Todhall nursing Aunt Betsy) could be present. Five weeks later, in the last months of the war, Jonathan was killed. I found, to my stupefaction, that he had been
wealthy, the only son of well-to-do parents who were both killed when a flying bomb got their Sussex home in a direct hit. That, with all it had held, was gone, but there was a London flat, and a great deal of money, all of it apparently mine. No angry relative turned up to contest it; there was no one, and Jon, his lawyers told me gently, had been careful to make a Will a few days before we were married. So there was I, Kate Herrick (Jon had hated the name Kathy and never called me by it), wealthy, widowed, and quite content to throw up her teaching job just as soon as the war ended, and move to the London flat. Eventually, because I found it hard to do nothing, but had no desire to go on teaching, I went to work in a big plant nursery at Richmond, which was run by the widow of one of Jon’s friends, whom I had met during the brief days of my marriage.

Then came Gran’s telephone call.

I was working in the potting rooms behind the shop. We had just had a delivery of pot plants, and I was unpacking them, when one of the young sales assistants came running in.

‘Phone for you, Kate. Long distance, so hurry.’

I set down the pots I was holding, and wiped my hands hurriedly on the tissue wrapping. ‘Who is it, do you know? The Dutchmen, I hope? Those bulbs should have been here a week ago.’

‘I don’t think so. Moddom says it’s private. It’s in her office, and so’s she.’ ‘Moddom’ was the junior help’s name for Angela Platt-Harman, the owner of Platt’s Plants, and my employer.

‘Oh dear,’ I said. We were not supposed to make or take private calls at work, but my apprehension was only a token, a kind of expression of solidarity with my co-employees. In the workplace Angie and I were always, carefully, employer and employed.

‘It’s all right, she didn’t look mad.’ She hesitated. ‘I was in the office when she answered it, and she sent me to find you. It’s Scotland. Doesn’t you family live there? I hope it’s not—’

I didn’t wait to hear what she hoped it wasn’t. I ran to the office.

Angie was speaking into the telephone. ‘No, it’s no trouble. Quite all right, really. Ah, here she is now. Just a moment.’ She covered the receiver with her hand. ‘Kate, it’s your grandmother, but don’t worry, she says there’s nothing wrong.’ She handed me the receiver and pointed me to the chair behind her desk. ‘Take your time. I’ll see to the shipment.’ She went out of the office.

I sat down. ‘Hullo, Gran? How lovely to hear you. How are you? When they said it was Scotland, I was afraid there might be something wrong. Are you all right?’

‘I’m well enough.’ It seemed to me, though, that there was a quaver in the old voice that told of some distress or urgency. ‘It’s all a lot of fuss, nothing but a touch of flu, and you know how it goes to my stomach, and the fool of a doctor says I’m not to go back to work for a bit yet, but I’m fine now, and come the month-end I’ll be back at the House. That Morag may fancy herself at the clootie dumplings and broth and such,
but she’s a lot to learn afore she can dress a fish properly, or put a dinner on when they’ve company.’

‘Don’t you worry about that, Gran. They’ll do all right at the House. Just get yourself better, that’s what matters. But hang on a minute, I didn’t know you’d been ill. What is it? You said stomach trouble? What does the doctor say?’

‘Never mind that now. This is dear, phoning. I know I didn’t ought to have called you at work, but I can’t get to a phone in the evenings, and you and I’ve got to have a real talk, and not on the phone. What I wanted to ask you – Kathy, hen, when do you get your holidays?’

‘When I ask for them. I’m due some time, anyway. Do you want me to come up now, Gran? Of course I will! I can look after you if you’re supposed to rest. In fact I’d love to come. London’s horrid in June. Can they have me? Will I be in my old room?’ My room had been a small attic at the House, with no mod cons, but with a breathtaking view over the whole length of the glen, right to the distant gleam of the sea loch.

‘No, didn’t I tell you? I’ve got my own place now. I’ve got Duncan Stewart’s house, down by the burn-side. You’ll mind the one, with the wee garden that used to be the kailyard.’

‘I remember it. How lovely! No, you didn’t tell me.’

‘Oh, well, you know I’m not much of a hand at writing, and it’s a long way to the post office for the telephone, and my legs aren’t so good these days.’

‘Are you phoning from there now?’

‘No, from the hospital. Now don’t fret yourself, I’m
going home tomorrow, and Kirsty Macdonald – you mind her, she has the house next door – says she can look after me fine. But there’s something I want to talk to you about, Kathy love, and something I want you to do for me. It’s important, and it won’t wait. No, not on the phone, hen, the girls at the desk hear everything. It’ll keep till you get here. It’s about Rose Cottage – you do remember Rose Cottage, don’t you? Well, then, can you really come?’

‘Of course I can. I’ll go and see the boss now, and I’ll be with you some time at the weekend. Take care, Gran, won’t you? ’Bye, then. Love.’

I cradled the receiver, then lifted it again and got the number of the Lodge. It rang for a long time before a woman’s breathless voice answered it.

‘Hullo? Strathbeg Lodge.’

‘Hullo. Is that Mrs Drew?’

‘Speaking. Sorry to keep you waiting. I was out in the garden with the children. Who is it, please?’

‘Oh, madam, it’s Kate Herrick. Kathy Welland. I’m sorry to trouble you, but I was worried about my grandmother. She’s just rung me up from the hospital, but she won’t tell me much about it. I gathered it was some sort of gastric flu, but I did wonder if she was all right? Do you know about it?’

‘Kathy, how nice to hear from you. Yes, your grandmother did have to go into the Cottage Hospital last week. She’s been off colour for some time now, but she wouldn’t admit to anything, so in the end Dr McLeod sent her in, really just for a rest, and he said while she was there they’d do some tests.’

‘Tests?’ Somehow the word held a world of fearful speculation.

‘Yes. These stomach upsets she’s been having lately. Didn’t she tell you? I think they were wondering about an ulcer. William, take that puppy out of here at once,
at once
– oh, hell, now see what’s happened! Go and get a cloth. I don’t know, ask Morag – no, do
not
ask Morag to do it, do it yourself. I’m so sorry, Kathy. I was saying. Your grandmother is coming home tomorrow, and I think we’ll hear in a week or so if there’s anything wrong. But really, she was just a bit tired and run down, with something like a mild flu, but Dr McLeod thought she should go in for examination. I don’t honestly know any more, but if you’d like me to keep you in touch – you’re coming up? Oh, great, that’ll do her more good than anything else. Dear God, there’s that puppy again. William!
William!
When will you get here, Kathy? Saturday night? I’ll ask Angus to meet the train, shall I?’