The River Flows On (53 page)

‘Oh, so that means that this end o’ Yoker’s really well lit up for them, then?’

Davie, full of his mission to explain, didn’t catch the sarcasm.

‘Aye, whatever that is burning out there, it’s going to be a great marker for them.’

‘Davie, lad,’ came Neil’s voice.

‘Aye, Da?’

‘Shut up, son, would you? Now, who knows some songs?’

They had survived. Kate thought that was all that mattered until, after the All Clear was sounded early the following morning, they staggered out of the close into the spring morning and saw the devastation the bombers had wrought. She and her father and Davie walked along Dumbarton Road - or what was left of it. A smoky haze hung in the air, and a very distinctive smell.

‘My God!’ said Neil. ‘They hit Yoker distillery. All that good whisky gone up in smoke!’

The look of horror on his face was the only thing that made Kate laugh that morning. Nothing else did, especially not the knowledge that the bombers would be back tonight. Everybody knew that. It had been their pattern in raids on other cities. That’s when the discussions started. Were they going or were they staying?

‘I’m no’ leaving my own house for that lot,’ Agnes had said, folding her arms across her chest and gesturing towards the sky. ‘I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction!’

They’d got word that buses were to be laid on for those wanting to leave Clydebank but, despite the devastation, some folk still felt safer staying in their own homes. Lily, Kate could see, was terrified of going and terrified of staying. Neil Cameron slipped an arm about his wife’s trembling shoulders.

‘We’ll stay too, lass. Take our chances together, eh?’

Lily, her eyes brimming with tears, had looked up at him and nodded. That’s when Davie had said, ‘Oh, Da . . .’ and the argument had started up again.

Kate slipped out. She was undecided herself as to what to do, but she did know that she had to get in touch with Jessie and Grace. Raids weren’t always reported straight away - news like this was bad for morale - but she couldn’t take the risk. They’d both be worried sick if they’d heard anything about it on the wireless.

From the looks of it there weren’t going to be any phone boxes working in Clydebank so she walked back along to Scotstoun. Her luck was in: the damage wasn’t nearly so bad in that direction and Miss Noble and Esmé MacGregor, hugely relieved to see Kate safe and sound, were still at home, with a working telephone, although like everyone else they were considering whether or not to move out.

‘Come to Pitlochry,’ Jessie urged Kate, her voice crackling over the phone line. ‘Mrs Robertson says she can squeeze everybody in. Grace is up to high doh about you - and everyone else.’

Which might, thought Kate as she walked back to Yoker, be the only thing that would influence Grace’s grandparents to make a move. She walked up the stairs and pushed open the door. It was on the latch.

‘Daddy...’ she began, walking into the kitchen. Then she stopped dead. Peter Watt was sitting in her father’s chair staring into space. He was filthy, his face covered in dirt and smears of blood. Neil took her to one side.

‘The Holy City’s flattened, lass. Nothing but a pile of rubble.’

Kate searched her father’s face. ‘Mary and Adam?’

His face etched with lines of sadness, Neil nodded and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Kathleen. Seemingly they brought their bodies out about an hour ago.’ He gestured towards the young man sitting so silently in his own chair. ‘They asked him if there was anyone he could go to and all he could say was “Kate Baxter at Yoker.” So they brought him here.’

Kate went to stand by him. ‘Peter,’ she said softly.

His eyes filled with tears when he saw her. ‘Kate,’ he said, through cracked lips. ‘Och, Kate ...’

‘Hush, now,’ she said, putting her arms around him.

He looked up at her, his dirty face streaked with tears. ‘I wasn’t with them, Kate. That’s what I can’t bear. They must have been so scared.’

She lifted one of his hands. It was bleeding, his skin shredded and his fingernails jagged. Oh God, he must have tried to dig them out with his bare hands ...

‘What am I going to do, Kate?’

Her arms tightening around him, she pulled him into the warmth of her body. ‘What we’re all going to do, Peter. Keep going. That’s all. Just keep going. That’s all any of us can do.’

Chapter 36

Two years after the war ended Kate visited the islands. The Orcadians welcomed her with open hearts and quiet sympathy. She saw the sights Robbie must have seen: the burial chamber of Maes Howe with its runic inscriptions; the Stone Age village of Skara Brae; St Magnus’s Cathedral. She saw Scapa Flow, still full of British warships but with a hole at its heart, a marker buoy indicating where the
Royal Oak
lay under the water.

She took a bus down over the Churchill barriers, the defences built in response to that tragedy by Italian prisoners of war. She visited the Italian chapel, made by those prisoners out of a Nissen hut. With only scrap materials to work with, they had created an exquisite little place of worship in the style of the churches of their homeland. Kate found it in her heart to admire the men who had conquered their homesickness by making something beautiful out of nothing.

Tm glad you’re going,’ Peter had said when he’d seen her off. ‘You see, I know that Mary and Adam are dead, because I saw them. But I don’t think you know that Robbie is. Not really. In here, maybe.’ He tapped her forehead. ‘But not in your heart. You’re still hoping he’ll walk through the door one day.’

‘Och, Peter,’ Kate said gently. ‘You’re not going to ask me again, are you?’

She had hoped at first that their increasing closeness over the war years had been because of their tragic bond, strengthening their friendship because they had both known the pain of losing partners. On VE Day, however, as the whole country had celebrated, Peter had turned to Kate and asked her to marry him. They were not old, and he was sure that neither Mary nor Robbie would have begrudged them some happiness. Kate thought that was true. It made no difference.

She valued Peter as a friend, and she told him so. Robbie had been her husband - her soulmate, her lover, her best friend. There couldn’t be another relationship like that. Not for her.

Peter, however, hadn’t been prepared to take no for an answer and brought the subject up at frequent intervals. Not, apparently, on this occasion.

‘Credit me with some sensitivity, Kate. I’d hardly ask you when you were about to go off to the Orkneys, would I now? Mind and take travel sickness pills wi’ you. I hear the Pentland Firth’s gey rough.’

She left the Ring of Brodgar till the day before she left the islands, going there in the early morning, a lift having been arranged for her with one of the local posties in his van. It was a remarkable place. She counted the stones - thirty-six of them - all much, much taller than herself and arranged in a huge circle - more than 300 hundred feet in diameter, the postman had told her. She walked round it, on the inside of the stones, and then obeyed a childish impulse to do it twice more. Three times for luck.

She stood then with her back against one of the stones and looked about her: heather-clad hills in the distance, two sparkling blue lochans in the hollow between the stones and the hills. The countryside was quite different, but it reminded her of how she had felt the day she had looked out over the Tummel at Pitlochry. It had been a turning point, the day she had decided to start living again. After a fashion. But she was tired now. It had been a long war.

Abruptly, she slid down the stone to sit on the grass, closing her eyes and letting the wind caress her face.

Her mind was full of images of him: helping her save Mr Asquith from a watery grave; offering her first bite of a shiny red apple; his eyes softening as he leaned forward to kiss her; his face alight with love and wonder when he had seen Grace for the first time...

With a sob, she drew her knees up and let her head fall forward.
I need you to be strong
. She had. been strong. For Robbie, for Grace, for herself, for Peter, for everybody. She was tired of being strong. It had been easier while the war was on. Then there had seemed to be some purpose to her life. Now there didn’t: Was there any point in living on without him? Grace was almost a woman now, about to start at the Art School. Soon she wouldn’t need her mother.

The breeze danced on the nape of her neck. It was the lightest of touches, like a couple of fingertips delicately brushing her hair to one side. It happened again. Slowly Kate raised her tear-stained face and looked into the middle of the great circle of stones. With an exclamation, she dashed away the moisture from her eyes. It was making her see things.

Two figures stood there, some distance away from her. Then, without any apparent movement, they were right in front of her. She was dreaming. She must be. His smile, however, was just as she remembered it - wide and slow, lighting up his grey eyes as he looked at her.

You daft bisom, you’ve still got work to do, but I’ll be waiting for you once you’re done.

She heard the words in her head. Her eyes went to the other figure. A handsome young man, tall and straight, with a smile just like his father’s.

The voice in her head came once more.
Neil James, of course. Who else did you think it would be?
She could hear the rumble of amusement.
He’s a fine lad, this son of ours.

Her heart full, she stretched out a hand. Could this really be happening? She had felt that feather-light touch - she knew she had. The figures were fading.

We’ll be waiting for you...

She was alone again. The stone circle was empty. There was only the wind and the sun on her face and the plaintive cry of a bird, hidden somewhere in the heather.

‘Thank you,’ said Kate softly, the words directed to whoever was listening. ‘Thank you.’

Kate took a step back and looked critically at the arrangement of her plates and bowls on the felt-covered table. She’d sold quite a lot today, and got an order for wall plaques from a city-centre shop - but it meant there were a few gaps now in her display. Never mind. Jessie, off school for the Christmas holidays, was going to help her bring some more stuff in tomorrow.

Thinking of her sister, Kate sighed. Some things just didn’t work out. Andrew Baxter hadn’t got himself killed in his second war against fascism either, but he’d come home from it with a wife - a cheerful girl from York called Gwen. Like generations of her family before and since, Jessie Cameron had risen to the occasion, congratulating the newly-weds and shaking them both warmly by the hand.

‘It would be easier,’ she had confessed to Kate afterwards, ‘if I could hate her, but she’s a really nice girl.’ Only then, in privacy, had she burst into tears and cried it all out on Kate’s shoulder.

That’s what shoulders are for
. Kate moved a small bowl from the side of the table to the middle and smiled. He was never very far from her thoughts. You’ve got work to do. Well, she was doing it now. She hoped he would be proud of her if he could see her. She smiled again. Maybe he could.

Even with her paintings beginning to fetch good prices, it had been a financial struggle to set herself up in business: buying the kiln and the other equipment, renting a small workshop, paying out for the clay. She was getting there though, pleased as punch to have been invited to exhibit her pottery at this pre-Christmas arts and crafts fair in Glasgow. Still working part-time at Brown’s - she couldn’t afford to give her notice in quite yet - life was hard going but satisfying. And she had good friends.

‘Friends,’ Peter had said in a flat voice, when she had come back from the Orkneys and told him that no meant no. ‘You want us to stay friends.’ Then he had relented and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I suppose so. If I’m allowed to do that occasionally, and to walk arm in arm with you now and again.’

Kate had wanted to cry.