The Farm Girl's Dream Read online

  *

  In the autumn of 1916 two advertisements appeared on the same day in the Dundee Courier and Advertiser. One was for a ‘Deplenish Sale of House Goods from the Home of a Lady’ and the other stated ‘Parlour and Bedroom wanted by Professional Lady’. Catriona went to the first and answered the second, and the result was that in October of that year Miss ‘Doctor’ Currie moved into the newly decorated front parlour and best bedroom of the scoured, mended and repainted house on Blackness Road. She had liked the comfortable settee in the parlour and the highly polished oak table, which was just the right height for her work. If she had known they had come from the home of a ‘lady’ and been purchased at a bargain price through Catriona’s haggling, she would have said, ‘Well done.’ She had frightened the life out of Catriona by arriving in a very noisy and unbelievably fast little car, driven by herself. Never in her life had Catriona been so close to someone so elegant and, as soon as the doctor spoke, Catriona realized that Dr Currie was not only a woman but was herself a ‘lady’.

  What was someone who had so obviously been born with all the advantages of life doing working for a living and in such a profession? Grampa might have thought doctoring suitable for his beloved grandchild, but he had known nothing at all about the daily grind of a doctor’s life and had in his mind an idealized picture of an immaculately dressed, starched Florence Nightingale. What would he have made of Dr Currie, who was even now stubbing out a cigarette in the ashtray of her motor car?

  Dr Currie had correctly interpreted Catriona’s look of shock. Had she not seen it a thousand times before? ‘I’m Gynae, Mrs Cameron,’ she had explained, ‘and you can’t tell an unborn baby to wait for the number twenty-seven bus. Now, I like the rooms and – not that it’s important – I like you. I’ll arrange to have a telephone put in, but don’t worry, I’ll pay for everything myself. You’ll find it a boon, believe me. What a great time the twentieth century is.’

  Although Dr Currie was supposed to look after herself, Catriona soon found herself setting an extra place at the table for her and, although the doctor paid extra for her meals, it would have been worthwhile just to have her there to help Victoria. She brought a gale of educated fact and opinion into the house, and her very presence seemed to have medicinal value. She also gave some interesting unmedical advice.

  ‘Buy a bottle of Abdine, Mrs Cameron, and give Victoria a restoring glass every morning. Good for the stomach and very good for the complexion. At least, she’ll think it’s good for her – the advertisements tell her so – and therefore it will be.’

  To Dr Currie, who occasionally gave her a lift into Dundee, Victoria revealed all about Robert and her hopes for further education.

  ‘I thought I could go to night school after the mill, doctor, but I’m too tired. My friend Nellie had a baby . . . without being married,’ she added delicately, ‘and she laughed and said it was the easiest way out of the mill, and she’s only sixteen. Her . . . friend, the baby’s father, left to join the army. He gets lots more money and he sends her some regularly. She has a room up the Hilltown.’

  Dr Currie sighed. ‘She’s changed one life of drudgery for another, Victoria, but at least she’ll have a little love.’

  Love. Victoria was rather shocked at the easy way in which the doctor spoke of something that normal people never mentioned in the course of conversation. She was heady with excitement, with the car, the conversation, this amazing woman in a man’s world.

  ‘May I ask what brought you to Dundee, Dr Currie?’

  Flora Currie inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke out into the confined space, but Victoria was used to filling her lungs with jute. The tobacco smoke she found more pleasant.

  ‘The war,’ said Dr Currie. ‘Surgeons and doctors are being begged to enlist. That left jobs for second-class citizens. Women, my dear,’ she explained. ‘I had to work in Africa for two years and I got home as fast as I could when the war started.’

  Victoria gasped in awe. ‘You’ve been to Africa?’ She wanted this journey and this conversation to go on and on. Unfortunately they had reached the turn-off to the infirmary and Victoria had to get out and walk the last part – her mind, for once, full of adventure: Africa . . . King Solomon’s mines . . . diamonds and lions . . . the Victoria Falls.

  I know very little about Africa, Victoria castigated herself. Mary Slessor, David Livingstone, I presume. I’ll get books from the library and I’ll try to talk to Dr Currie.

  She walked happily to the mill, her footsteps light.

  *

  At home, Catriona was awaiting a second lodger. A Mr Dundas was to call and Catriona had spring-cleaned the already spruce best back bedroom and had opened the windows to let the cold, fresh air sweep any stale air away. It would be nice to have a man about, for safety’s sake. Flash was grand, and Dr Currie added even more security, but there was a war on and there were, according to Tam Menmuir, unsavoury characters in plenty who would be only too willing to take advantage of lone women.

  She put a shepherd’s pie, top-heavy with potatoes, into the oven for Victoria’s supper and went to answer the demanding doorbell.

  She looked up and her welcoming smile froze. Her heart plummeted into the pit of her stomach and for a second she felt faint. Then she stiffened her backbone.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Her visitor swept the hat from his still-black locks and bowed to her mockingly. ‘I find myself in need of temporary accommodation, and I must confess that after all these years I was curious. May I come in?’

  ‘There’s no welcome for you here.’ Catriona tried to close the door, but he had already stepped part-way into the hall.

  He smiled, the smile that had so easily charmed the heart from her body. Was it working now, still?

  ‘My God, but you’re a handsome woman, Catriona, and by the smell of supper, as good a cook as ever you were.’ He pushed her easily aside and closed the door, thereby confining them together in the tiny hallway. ‘A man could do a lot worse. Come on, lass, let’s give one another mutual aid. And then, of course, there’s my daughter . . .’

  She slapped him as hard as she could across the face and he shouted with anger and grabbed her arms. He did not hit her but just held her, unable to move, to breathe, in his arms. Then he bent his head and kissed her. She stood unmoving and, slightly embarrassed, he let her go.

  ‘You threw me out, Catriona, you and my sanctimonious, self-righteous father, so don’t accuse me of having no interest in the girl.’

  ‘You managed to pull yourself out of some French . . .’ She could not bring herself to say the word which sat on the edge of her tongue. Aware of her difficulty, he laughed again.

  ‘Trollop’s bed, were you going to say, Mistress Cameron?’

  ‘You knew our baby was coming – our baby, John Cameron – and you left me for her. I near died giving birth to my daughter and then, bold as brass, you turn up. I needed you, John. I cried for you, and who was there? Your father. He walked the floor, not you. He held my hand, not you. He heard Victoria’s first cry, not you. And did you once write to ask forgiveness? Did you once try to make amends? No. You waited like a vulture till he was dead, and now you come back for what you can get.’

  ‘It’s mine. He left it to me.’

  ‘He meant to leave it to Victoria,’ she said vindictively. Oh, she wanted to hurt him, as he had hurt her. To let him know that his father had intended to change the will, but just had not found the time or energy to do so. ‘Those were his last words, John. I always meant to put it in the lassie’s name. So enjoy your inheritance, but you won’t enjoy it here. Anyway, why should you want to? The farm is yours.’

  ‘Like Hell it is. It’s tied up and pays me almost nothing. At the moment I find I’m a little short of cash: just until the next quarter-day. Come on, Catriona. Let me stay. I’ll pay my way, and maybe I can get to know the girl and you again, and we can make our peace. At least give me a chance. You we
re always fair, lass.’

  ‘Aye, and where did my fairness get me?’

  At that very moment they heard someone at the front gate and Victoria, still keyed-up and excited by her talk that morning with Dr Currie, hurried up the pathway and opened the door. She stopped short, aware of the tension, of unease. Her mother and Mr Dundas, she assumed, were standing so close, so very close together.

  ‘Mother? Hello, Mr Dundas. Do you like the room?’ She looked at him with interest. He reminded her of someone. Who? She smiled at him. ‘Next to Miss Dr Currie’s, it’s the best in the house.’

  He smiled at her, sensing easy prey. ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll love it, my dear. Why don’t you show it to me? Your mother was just about to do so.’

  He looked at Catriona. His eyes, so like her daughter’s, gazed so charmingly, so straightly into hers. She had fought so hard to get him out of her heart. Had it all been for nothing? I will not be soft-talked again, she thought. I must remember, I must remember that this man is a swine.

  ‘Victoria, this is not Mr Dundas, and he is not—’

  ‘Catriona, my dear, let me introduce myself to this beautiful young woman.’

  John turned away from Catriona and smiled his melting smile at Victoria, who, immediately captivated by his charm and his strange familiarity, smiled back. ‘Let me take your coat, my dear, and hang it up for you. There must be a lobby-press. Your mother was always proud of her lobby-press. Every boot and shoe in its appointed place.’

  Victoria stared at him, mesmerized, and he smiled again. ‘My name is Cameron, Vicky, John Cameron, and I’m your long-lost father.’

  5

  IT WAS NOTHING LIKE HIS dreams of glory. It was dirt and squalor, and blood and fear – and more: it was smells, the sickly smell of earth soaked by rain and blood, the palpable smell of raw terror, but even worse, above everything else, it was noise. Shrieks, from men and machines, the booming or cracking of guns, whinnies or squeals from wounded horses, shouted orders, muttered prayers to God, to the generals, to mothers – and somewhere, at all times of the day or night, the sound of sobbing. Robert Fotheringham pulled one foot out of the clinging mud that invaded everything and then, with an almost unbearable effort, the other foot, and turned round so that he could lean his head against the wall of the trench. Tomorrow, just a few hours away, there was to be a big offensive, but first there was something he had to do. Yes, he wanted to write to Victoria. If he tried hard he could just remember what she looked like, and if he tried really hard he could smell her – clean, sweet, fresh – although that lovely scent made him hungry for something that he did not really understand and was becoming more and more elusive. It could not cope here: it was too lovely, too innocent, too pure to exist in this charnel-house. He looked out across the no-man’s-land where death and destruction waited in hungry anticipation and he saw not miles of smoke-blackened French farmland that had once been fertile, but his home, his beloved Inchmarnock, and red rowan berries blazing on the trees and great copper beeches raising their mighty arms to the skies above the Kingdom of Fife, and below them drifts of purple autumn crocuses and among them Victoria, her empty sketchbook in her hand. She raised it to him and she laughed.

  ‘I was trying to sketch it,’ she said, and the autumn sun shone on her dark hair and Robert reached out to touch her, to put her between him and the insanity to which he had willingly, happily, proudly bondaged himself – but she was not there.

  He felt in the pocket of his battle-dress and pulled out the little gold pencil that Pa had given him for his fourteenth birthday. Paper? What could he write on? Pa’s letter was there, with its message of fondest love from Ma. Ma? He saw her too easily. He sighed. He would write on the back of Pa’s letter.

  My dearest Victoria,

  Tomorrow we’re going over the top. Isn’t that a silly expression for a major offensive? But a humble private, even one with an honourable stuck in front of his name, doesn’t tell the High Command what he thinks. He just does.

  It’s not as I saw it . . .

  No, he could not tell her what it was really like. He could not say, ‘It’s so awful that grown men are blubbing like babies and I am so scared, not that I will die, but that I will be hurt so badly that I will cry too, and I just couldn’t bear to lose face like that.’ He could not say, ‘I have never been hurt before,’ because only the people one loves are capable of inflicting real pain.

  It’s different, it’s real. I find that if I remember the woods and you, and the way the sun makes your hair shine, and how stern you were when I picked Pa’s primroses, then somehow I remember why I am here, why I must stay and do the right thing, why we must never, ever allow this monstrous insanity to happen again . . .

  ‘Fotheringham, stop mooning there, laddie. Did ye no hear the pipes?’

  The pipes. Pipes, bugles, shouted orders. Fall in, fall out, fall in, fall out. How in the name of God were they expected to fall in when this ghastly mud gripped the boots so that merely to lift them was an effort? He folded up the letter, scribbled Victoria’s name and address on the grimy envelope and stuffed it back into his pocket. His rifle – oh, dear Lord, where was his rifle? The sergeant would kill him if he’d let it slip into the mud. Kill him, that was funny. Robert Fotheringham was laughing as he followed his platoon over the top. But he was not laughing while utter chaos and bedlam broke out all around him, when he could see nothing but smoke and occasional flashes of fire. Where was the sergeant? Where was the enemy? They were everywhere and they were nowhere. He could see and hear nothing that made any sense, so he was certainly not laughing when the shell exploded and sent his cloth bonnet flying into the air like a partridge; sent him, bleeding, back down into the welcoming embrace of the mud.

  *

  ‘France, the only civilized country in the world, Victoria. I loved it there.’ John Cameron stopped walking and turned to look at his daughter. She was his flesh and blood, good lines there – peasant stock no doubt, the aristos would say, but good stock for all that. ‘We should go there, together. A decent dress, your hair . . . Wait till you see the restaurants, the little sidewalk cafés. Every woman looks like one of those mannequins in the tea-room at Draffen’s: such elegance. And the countryside.’ He kissed his fingers with a very Gallic moue and Victoria laughed up at him.

  ‘You are funny, Father,’ she said and she smiled, because really, did any girl in Dundee have a more handsome, elegant and cosmopolitan father than hers? He even spoke some French, learned, he explained, on business trips.

  ‘Like the one I was on when you were expected, lass. I rushed from Paris – rushed, Victoria – to get home and what happened? They turfed me out. My own wife in league with my father against me, as if I were responsible for the vagaries of French timetables, for the appalling weather in the English Channel.’

  ‘It was May,’ said Victoria shortly. How often had she heard that soft May discussed and described: never better blossoms on the flowering cherries, never a finer crop of spring flowers.

  ‘Aha. There speaks the non-sailor. The English Channel, my dear, is like a woman and has a mind of its own, which it’s constantly changing, and always without warning.’

  She smiled. She wanted to believe him. It would just be so wonderful if he and Catriona could make up, but even though Victoria had persuaded her mother to give ‘Mr Dundas’ a temporary welcome, she saw no thinning of her mother’s antagonism, even though Victoria had explained that the ‘Mr Dundas’ charade was so clever really, if only one was prepared to listen. ‘He wanted to see you, Mother, and me. Isn’t that romantic?’

  Now Victoria said, ‘It’s a shame Mother couldn’t rent the Priory, Father. I wish you would live in it. I’m so glad you didn’t sell.’

  ‘Sell? Victoria! Would I sell my only child’s birthright?’ His eyes were wide-open and honest.

  ‘Mother would have made a good farmer.’

  ‘Your mother is a grand housekeeper, lass, always was, but the truth is she couldn
’t run a business. The men would have taken advantage of her.’ He stopped, sensing that Victoria felt allegiance to the farm folk and he didn’t want to alienate her, not when the next rent from the farm was six months away. Besides, Catriona was a good cook, almost as good as some French women he’d known. And she was attractive. If Menmuir wasn’t so old and doddery, John might have thought there was something besides fellowship in his constant ‘dropping in wi some tatties’. My tatties, thought John, although he could hardly complain, since they were being given to his wife – ex-wife – and his daughter, and he himself ate one or two. That potato soufflé she’d made last night, for example . . .

  ‘When this blasted war is over, Victoria, I’ll take you to France. We’ll go and see some of those marvellous châteaux, and Paris. The sights, the sounds, the smells . . .’

  ‘But I like all the sounds and sights and smells here, Father,’ said Victoria, sweeping out her arm to encompass the view, which stretched across acres of fertile farmland to the banks of the great River Tay. ‘Grampa and I used to explore every nook and cranny of the farm and then, when I was bigger, we would go out into the countryside. We’d take scones wrapped up in cloths to eat, and a jug of sweet milk to drink, and he’d tell me about all the people who had lived here, and why our farm is called the Priory. It’s built from stones from an old abbey. Did you know that?’

  John forgot that when he was a child his father had been a working farmer with no time for stories. ‘No, he was always on at me about lessons and chores. No wonder I hated farming – muck and glaur from morning to night. Do you know what glaur is, Victoria? It’s mud that seeps everywhere and won’t let you get yourself clean.’