Capital Union, A (12 page)

The traffic increased as we neared the station; carts and trams rumbling across Haymarket junction. I took Hannes’ arm and he leant on me, playing along and keeping his eyes lowered. There were so many men here in suits and uniforms that I was worried in case someone Jeff knew might recognise me before I spotted them, but no one did. There were four
platforms
, and the ticket inspector pointed to the most distant one over the bridge. ‘Safe journey, folks,’ he said. ‘Plenty of time before the train, so don’t rush.’

We stood at the far end of the platform and Hannes kept his head down, staring at the tracks. If anyone guessed his true identity, there was no escape from this station for him. We were below the level of the street and he would never be able to climb the high walls on either side, or escape into the yards, which were bustling with railway men. After ten minutes, the train roared out of the tunnel from Waverley in a cloud of black smoke, and pulled up at the platform. We sat in an empty compartment, but were joined by a real old windbag who seemed determined to have our story even if it meant she had to stop knitting. ‘Going far?’ she asked, as she swapped needles. Her tweed coat was folded on the seat beside her. She had eyes like river-wet pebbles. One was cloudy.

‘Ayr,’ I said, and then realised I should just have said Glasgow. It was more anonymous. She might have kennt people in Ayr.

‘Don’t know it at all,’ she said. ‘I’m a Balloch woman, myself. It is better up the coast and away from all this trouble. Of course, it is not the same with all the men away. Difficult to keep things on track. What happened to you, dear?’ She leant forward to speak to Hannes as if he were a child. He rolled his eyes towards me.

‘He can’t speak,’ I said.

‘Bless him, the poor soul,’ she replied, leaning back. ‘His sacrifice won’t have been in vain. We’ll beat those Jerries. I said, we’ll beat the Boche, dear,’ she shouted at Hannes. He closed his eyes.

‘Tired?’ she asked me, nodding at him.

‘He’s only just getting better now.’

‘The sea air will do him good. It’s a great tonic. I swear by it.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said.

‘My arthritis is always worse in the city. Damp, you see. I don’t like to complain now there are so many people worse off than myself.’

But she spoke about her aches and pains all the way to Linlithgow without dropping a stitch. ‘Excuse me while I turn this heel,’ she said, unravelling more wool from her ball.

I looked out at the ruined palace as we pulled into the
station
. The four towers crumbled behind the gate. Jeff had taken me there, once. High above us, traces of fireplaces hung on the wall like picture frames, with no floor beneath them. We had walked up and down the towers, edging along what was left of the corridors, while Jeff sang bright airs he claimed were from Queen Mary’s court. They had echoed down into the dark hall beneath, which had grass for a carpet.

Hannes touched my sleeve and nodded towards the
corridor
. ‘I expect he needs to stretch his legs, dear,’ said the woman. ‘Far too long in a hospital bed, no doubt. My mother had a sore so septic it had to be packed every day by the district nurse. You know what suffering is when you have seen that.’

I nodded and followed Hannes out. We opened the
window
to feel the air rushing past. The conductor came along the corridor, moving in and out of the compartments, having a bit of banter with the people inside, and getting closer and closer to us. I got the tickets out of my bag, and passed them to him before he could speak to Hannes. His hands were balled into fists in his pockets and pressed against his thighs to stop them trembling. The inspector glanced at our identity cards without opening them, clipped the tickets and said, ‘Thanks, hen. Thirty minutes to Glasgow. Your connection will leave at quarter past the hour from Central.’

‘Thank you, Sir,’ I said, as he squeezed past. Inside, I felt I was betraying the trust of my countrymen. I tried to imagine Hannes in uniform, like the men on the news in the cinema, but I couldn’t. I wondered where his uniform was. Perhaps it was hidden out on the Pentlands, pushed into a rabbit hole. He looked ordinary. Strained. I had never deceived anyone in my life and the burden of it slowed me down. I became conscious of every movement of my face as if I was acting in a movie, but I had forgotten the next line, and was making it up. Everything I said sounded false. I was playing a role and I had a sudden memory of Jeff pulling clothes from his mother’s wardrobe for me to wear, as if all I had been doing all those days was
pretending
. Hannes noticed the sadness in my face, and touched my cheek.
‘Es tut mir leid, Agnes,’
he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

I pushed his hand away, and looked out the other
window
. In my mind’s eye, Jeff was sniffing under the arms of his mother’s white ball gown after the university reception and complaining that he wouldn’t be able to get it dry-cleaned because of the war. He said he should never have let me wear it, as if it had been a crime to sweat, as if his mother had never been damp like a real woman, but a saint carried in the parade of his memory for everyone to worship. I stopped
feeling
the swaying of the train carrying me along the tracks to Glasgow. I was sliding on a moving platform into a strange world, indebted to a man who might already have killed my
countrymen. I leant my head on the cool glass, and then went back into the compartment without him. The old dear was asleep, the needles still clamped under her arms, and I shut my eyes.

There were no lights on at Queen Street Station when we got off. The glass ceiling soared above us, and people with suitcases and gas masks slung over their shoulders moved around us without speaking. They seemed anxious. An ARP warden stood by a bucket of sand, as if he could extinguish the fire of an incendiary bomb on his own, while the crowds fled. We walked without speaking down Buchanan Street to Central Station, under the bridge they called the Hielanman’s Umbrella, and caught the train, which rolled out over the Clyde into the light. The sleepers on the bridge rattled. Some of the buildings I remembered had gone. Hannes was staring at the empty spaces. It was another hour to go.

I had forgotten how big the sky was over Ayr, how salty the breeze. The green fields rolled inland from the sea in soft peaks and troughs, crowned with our neighbours’ farms, each white house standing at right angles to its byres. The verges of the road were full of brambles and wild flowers, and small birds darted over the hedges between the fields. The black and white cows smelt sweet as we passed, blowing through their noses and watching us as they chewed, grinding the grass, moving their jaws from side to side. Their calves were big now, grazing near their mothers. The bull lay dozing in the last sunny corner of the field, a favourite cow at his side. I breathed in deeply and relaxed. I could see it was the same for Hannes. He walked more lightly here, held his head up higher. ‘
Unsere Kühe sind braun
,’ he said, pointing at them, and I understood. His language didn’t seem so foreign, seemed closer to the Scots. We turned onto the farm track at the burn to see my brother Duncan running down the hill towards us, his dogs at his heels. He was tall, deep-chested, with rosy cheeks, and shouting, ‘Aggie, Aggie’, making the dogs dance and bark with excitement. He birled me round
when he reached me. As he put me back on my feet to shake what he thought was Jeff’s hand, he stopped smiling. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

‘A friend of Jeff’s,’ I said. ‘He wants to go back to his family in Ireland.’

It was the first lie I had ever told my brother. ‘He can’t speak. A bump on the head. He wants to go home to Cork.’ A second lie.

I thought Cork might be far enough from Auntie Ina’s to stop any questions about shared family and acquaintances. The dogs sniffed round Hannes’ feet. He reached down to pat them.

‘Well, it’s lucky you’re such a chatterbox,’ said Duncan. ‘You can speak for two and no mistake. Come up to the house…’ he paused, and looked at me for an introduction, tucking in his chin and raising his eyebrows.

‘Hamish,’ I said. ‘Hamish, this is my brother, Duncan.’

The two men shook hands. Hannes bowed from his
shoulders
, but Duncan had already turned away, calling the dogs, and didn’t notice.

Everyone at dinner was sorry to hear about Jeff, but didn’t ask for details, so I knew they thought he had what he deserved for being too feart to fight. Mother had decided puir Hamish should take his dinner in bed and set a fire in the back
bedroom
for him. ‘Well, it may be September,’ she said, ‘but it can be gey chilly if you are feeling poorly. Why is he wearing Jeff’s coat?’ she asked when she came back downstairs to hang it up.

‘Jeff said he could borrow it,’ I replied, as it hung with empty sleeves on the coat stand. It was the third lie I had told my family. Lies standing on end, one in front of the other, and I knew there would have to be more, a long line of dominoes, each ready to bring down its neighbour, and I worried that I might not be able to remember them all, and keep the story standing.

Even so, it was good to be home, but everything was not as it was before. Mother only had one bag of flour in the pantry,
although there were still rows and rows of her homemade jam on the shelves, with the empty berry pan shining on the floor below. She had been saving her sugar ration. At tea, Duncan was worried about the price of beasts going South for
slaughter
. ‘They’re lighter by the time they arrive, and so is my wallet,’ he said, ‘At least I am doing better than the slaughtermen here. They have no work now. What was wrong with killing them locally?’ He looked round, but no one had an answer.

‘Let’s eat.’ Mother folded her hands and said grace, while Dad scratched and filled his pipe. He knew better than to light it. On the table, there was fresh fish from the boat and Mother had killed a chicken that had stopped laying. After dinner, we played cards and Duncan tickled me for refusing to call him the champ when he won. ‘That was the deal,’ he shouted, as I begged him to stop. ‘If I win, you call me the champ. It was not the best of three.’

As the light faded on the long, late summer evening, the men went out for a smoke and I helped Mother clear the dishes to the kitchen. I saw Hannes had fallen asleep when I collected his plates. He looked like a bairn, undefended, as he had when I first saw him in the flat. I wondered how his family were doing without him. They had waited a long time for news.

‘Have you been to see Jeff yet?’ Mother asked as we washed up.

‘No.’ The saucer I was drying clattered as I laid it in the pile.

She looked up as she put another plate in the wooden rack.

‘I need to apply for a pass each time I want to go,’ I said, ‘although they booked me in for next week on a first visit. I had a bad cold last time and couldn’t go.’

‘He’ll be missing you,’ said Mother.

I didn’t reply.

‘Are you all right?’ She dried her hands and put her arms round me. ‘You can’t help it that he’s a conchy,’ she said. ‘No one will think any the less of you.’

‘Mr Black hates me,’ I said. ‘So does his wife.’

‘Who’s Mr Black?’

‘The butcher.’

She laughed. ‘Well, tell him to go hang himself. You come from a good family and are not to blame for a daft husband with fancy ideas. Jeff will come to his senses soon enough, especially without your good cooking and his home comforts.’ She emptied the basin. ‘And when he is released, it won’t kill him to lift a pen and help out in some office or other.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Dad doesn’t want you to mention this
business
, if you can avoid it. You understand. We have to keep the neighbours’ goodwill.’ She held me at arm’s length.

I nodded. I wanted to tell her what had happened on the night before Jeff went to prison; that I never knew a husband could take what he wanted from a wife without asking, but I would have had to tell her about Hannes. I wanted to keep his secret, to repay him for saving me. My throat felt tight.

‘That’s my girl. You are growing up,’ she said, and she pulled me close. She smelt of rose water. ‘There’s a lot we women have to thole.’ She patted my back, and turned away to put the
kettle
on.

I told her I wanted an early night after the journey, and went upstairs. I was anxious to avoid the kind of fireside chat where they would ask for Hannes’ story. I didn’t feel like I could invent a whole life for the mythical Hamish, complete with military record. I couldn’t remember much from the newsreels, just the flattened city I couldn’t name, and the marching feet, moving closer; cobble by cobble, heel by heel, and toe by toe.

At the end of the landing, I pushed open my door. My room was exactly the same as before I was married. Time was frozen here. My teddy was still on the pillow and my annuals were in a row on the shelf above the bed. There were rosebuds on the wallpaper, with shiny lines running through the
background
, like marks on the sand after the tide. My brothers had shared the two rooms next door, but, apart from Duncan, they were married now and living out. They still took the boat out together when the farm could spare them.

I lay under my covers with a hot water pig at my feet as the bed was damp. I could hear Mother and Dad talking
downstairs and laughing. Plates and cutlery clattered as she laid the table for breakfast so the men could get something to eat before starting work. I knew she would smoor the fire in the range to keep it going, and tell Dad not to be too long over his last pipe. Then her footsteps would creak on the stairs, she would put on her Pond’s face cream in the bathroom, and fall asleep over the first page of her book. Hidden upstairs, I
realised
that Hannes must have learnt everything about me and Jeff in the silence of holding his breath.

I turned over twice but it was impossible to drop off, and I walked up and down by my bedroom window. The stars danced over the hill and I watched the waning half-moon float up from the ridge to join them. It was like an orange segment, undigested on the black belly of the sky. An owl called.