Call of Glengarron

Even the back of young Jamie’s head reproached me. He was kneeling on the floor, resentfully thrusting his toys into a canvas bag.

I felt frustrated tears pricking at the back of my eyes. How could you expect a child not yet five years old to understand the cruel realities of life? How could you explain that a father he couldn’t remember, a man to whom he owed nothing but his name, had the right to demand his return?

I said briskly, “Hurry up with your packing, darling. The taxi will be here in a few minutes.”

He swung around to look up at me, still clutching a grubby panda. His eyes were huge, sad and accusing.

“I don’t want to go to my daddy. I don’t like him....”

That called for a gentle reproof. “Jamie. How can you say that? You don’t
know
him.” Trying to keep the doubt from my voice, I added, “He’s a nice man, and you’re going to be very happy with him. Just you wait and see.”

“I don’t like my daddy,” Jamie repeated stubbornly. “Why can’t I go on living here with you, Lucy?”

Why not indeed? Nothing would have given me more joy than having the care of my poor dead cousin’s child—if only I were allowed to.

“It will be such fun for you,” I persisted. “Living in a great big castle in Scotland. You’ll love it.”

I stooped down and picked up a one-armed plastic spaceman, pushing it into the bag. “There, that’s it. Now we’re all ready.”

“I don’t want to go,” he said again, miserably. I could tell that tears were very near the surface with him, too, ready to spill out if I gave him half a chance.

My heart turned over in pity. He was such a very little boy to have to suffer an upheaval like this. It was barely more than a week since he had lost his mother, and now Jamie’s father was peremptorily demanding his return.

I felt a new burst of anger against Craig McKinross for his callousness. I could not forgive such an utter lack of sensitivity.

After all, it was Craig himself who had really been responsible for Margo’s death. Craig, who by his outrageous demands had made life impossible for his wife and driven her away from him.

These past few months I’d come to believe that she had succeeded in putting the unhappy past behind her. But I was wrong, too tragically wrong. If only I could have done more to help.

After the breakup of the marriage, Margo had returned to London and resumed her modeling career, fighting to carve a place for herself all over again in that fast-moving and highly competitive world. And this time she’d had a small son to consider, too. It hadn’t been easy for her.

Luckily, I was able to take Jamie off her hands quite often. He and I got along famously and sometimes, when Margo had a late evening engagement, Jamie would even spend the night with me. Then she would either collect him first thing next morning, or I’d take him home on my way to the office. Her smart Soho apartment wasn’t too far from the Regent Street headquarters of the public relations firm where I worked.

My cousin was always touchingly grateful. “Honestly, I don’t know how I’d manage without you, Lucy. You are an angel.”

“Don’t be silly. You know I always love having Jamie.”

“Poor little beggar. It’s just not fair.... A boy needs a father....” Margo cupped her chin with long expressive fingers and regarded me thoughtfully. “Make darned sure, Lucy, that you don’t ever get caught the way I did.”

“Well ...” I laughed awkwardly. “I hope I’ll be getting married one of these days.”

“As long as you avoid my ghastly mistake. For God’s sake don’t choose a man just because he’s a handsome brute.”

Craig McKinross had certainly been good-looking. I thought back to the day of their wedding six years ago. I remembered him holding me by the shoulders and lightly kissing my forehead. “What a very lovely bridesmaid you make, Lucy.” His quick smile, friendly and warm, had snatched my eighteen -year-old heart from its precarious moorings. Craig had instantly become my standard of male perfection— darkly handsome, tall and muscularly lithe. His marriage to my beautiful and wildly sophisticated cousin became my classic image of romance.

Their separation three years later had finally shattered my dreams. For such a blissfully promising start to end like that. It had seemed beyond understanding.

“The wretched man is utterly impossible.” Margo had exploded. “There’s absolutely no pleasing him.”

“Yet he seemed so nice.” I felt numbed, weakly helpless. “I thought you were going to be so happy together.”

“So did I. But I discovered that the creature’s nothing but a selfish boor. Every single thing has to be
exactly
the way he wants it.”

“What are you going to do now?” I’d asked her.

She shook her head sadly, biting back the tears. “I don’t know, Lucy. I just don’t know. But I’m darned if I’m going to let that man ruin my life—and Jamie’s too. I’ll just have to struggle along on my own as best I can.”

Bravely, Margo had set about starting afresh, making a new life for herself and her son. But she’d never been able to forgive Craig McKinross. She had never been able to forget his brutally selfish behavior.

In a way, poor little Jamie, though she loved him dearly, was a perpetual reminder of her husband. The boy was so like his father. That same wiry black hair, the wide mouth and eyes that were a dark smoke blue....

And now the veneer of gaiety Margo had pasted over her unhappiness was savagely exposed as a sham. While Jamie was away staying the night with me, Margo had turned the gas heater full on, unlit. And in the morning, when neighbors found her, it was too late.

There could be no doubt that it was suicide. Any chance of accidental death was ruled out by the police owing to the care with which her sitting room had been sealed before the gas was turned on. Even the whisky she had been drinking, didn’t that help prove suicide? Margo had never possessed a lot of physical courage. I don’t think she could have carried through such a plan without the help of alcohol.

But the polite official evasions, made me angry. Was it fair of the police to hint at insanity? Could a woman driven to despair by an unfeeling man reasonably be described as mad?

Quite aside from my grief, Margo’s death had been a great shock to me. The possibility that she would ever take such a final, desperate step had not so much as entered my mind. I hadn’t believed that her life was so utterly devoid of hope. Not to this extent—that she would deliberately put an end to it.

For a brief, abyss-opening second, another possibility jumped into my mind. But I thrust it away instantly. Margo had no enemies. Of course in her sort of career there were professional jealousies, rivalries among the cliques. That was inevitable. But this was something different. No—she couldn’t have had any real enemies.

Little Jamie was still kneeling on the floor, hugging his bag of toys as if they were his one contact with reality. Usually he chattered endlessly, but now he was silent, brooding. I searched in my mind for some way of cheering him up.

“There’ll be so many new things for you to do up in Glengarron,” I said. “Perhaps you’ll be able to go on the loch in a boat. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

He looked up at me wistfully, still holding tight to his bag.

“I’d much rather stay here and live with you,” he said in a small voice. “Why can’t I, Lucy?”

“Oh, darling, I wish you could. But ... but I’ve only got this little flat, and ... well—I have to go out to work every day....”

“But I’d be a good boy, Lucy—really I would.” He paused, then added anxiously, “And I wouldn’t eat very much.”

I swung away quickly, pretending to search in my handbag. It needed a terrible effort to keep my voice steady.

“You see, Jamie, now Mummy isn’t here any more ... well, it’s only right you should go to your daddy. He loves you and wants you with him....”

Abruptly, cutting through my platitudes, Jamie asked: “Why did Mummy hate my daddy?”

“Of course Mummy didn’t hate your daddy,” I lied quickly. “Of course she didn’t.” If only Margo hadn’t spoken so freely about her bitterness toward Craig. A small child could absorb so much of the conversation going on over his head.

Jamie’s logic was impeccable. “If Mummy didn’t hate my daddy, then why didn’t we live all together like other families?”

“They had a sort of quarrel, you see,” I said carefully. “Just like you and your little friends have sometimes. Only with grown-ups the quarrels last a bit longer, and it’s best for two people not to live together until they feel friendly again.”

He shook his head firmly. “Mummy wouldn’t have made it up.”

“Oh, I expect she would have in a little while. It was just that ... that she was cross with your daddy. But she loved him really....”

“Do you love my daddy, Lucy?”

“No,
of course not.”
My reaction was immediate, unthinking. For me “love” had all the connotations of adulthood. Too late it hit me that Jamie was using the word with the simple innocence of a child.

“I don’t love my daddy either,” he said with grim satisfaction. “I think he’s a nasty man.”

“But I didn’t mean ...” I floundered helplessly. What could I say? If I contradicted my words, if I stated that I did after all love Craig McKinross, I ran the risk of being quoted by Jamie when we reached his father’s home in Scotland. And how would I ever explain that away? “Your daddy is a very nice man,” I finished lamely, asking heaven to forgive me.

I glanced at my watch. Five past eight. Another ten minutes before the taxi was due. I did a quick tour of the flat, making sure everything was properly turned off.

It made me feel like a traitor to be handing Jamie over to his father. I was about to deliver the little boy to a gaunt Scottish castle in the remote highlands of Wester Ross. To give him into the care of Craig’s aunt and her husband—a couple Margo had once graphically described as dried-up desiccated old sticks. What sort of background was that for a child accustomed to love and warmth?

But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do to prevent Jamie going there. Even if I hadn’t been a single girl with a living to earn, I still couldn’t have kept him. I had no claim. The fact that I knew the little boy better than any other living person meant nothing beside the legal rights of his father. The man who had treated his wife so abominably, who until now had shown no interest at all in his son, could demand the instant return of his child.

As if it wasn’t bad enough to have just lost his mother, Jamie was being wrenched away from everything else that gave his life some shape, some meaning. The nursery school, his little playmates—and me. He was to be dragged away at the merest whim of a man who couldn’t possibly feel any love for him.

The one person who might have staked some sort of counter-claim—Margo’s father—was unwilling to put himself out. “Of course the child must go to the surviving parent,” he had told me curtly. “It’s only right and proper.”

“But, Uncle Arthur, he doesn’t even know his father’s people. He’ll feel so lost and unhappy. Isn’t there some other way?”

“He’ll soon adjust to his new life. Children do. Lots of boys at my school are homesick at the beginning of the term. You catch them grizzling in the dormitories sometimes. But they get over it in a day or two.”

It was no good trying to argue with Uncle Arthur. Teaching at a private boarding school, he considered he knew all there was to be known about boys. Yet for a long time I’d had a sneaking suspicion that he didn’t really like children. His interest in them was academic.  He was concerned only with how much history he could pump into them to pass their examinations. Children were, so to speak, empty vessels to be filled, corked and dispatched. His not quite five-year-old grandson meant little to him. Jamie was a problem to be sorted out—and like all problems, the sooner a neat solution was found, the better.

Uncle Arthur was a man with curiously little emotion. When my aunt died years ago, he had disposed of their home and taken a residential post at St. Meredith’s just outside London. It had seemed to suit him very well. He continued to see Margo fairly regularly, and I believe he quite enjoyed her company. Perhaps in his own oddly withdrawn way he took pride in possessing such a beautiful daughter, especially when she began to achieve some success as a model.

But I also believe that he was quite unmoved by the news of Margo’s death, treating it rather as a tiresome interruption to his orderly existence. He had attended to all the details of the funeral as though he wanted the whole business over and done with as quickly as possible. His daughter’s child he had been very glad to leave in my care. And when he heard that Jamie’s father wanted to have the boy back, Uncle Arthur grunted with satisfaction that the last remaining headache was solved. Already, though Jamie was still in London with me, Uncle Arthur had returned to his school and immersed himself in routine again, the ripples caused by Margo’s death fading back to smooth tranquility.

He had left to me the tricky job of explaining things to the poor little boy.