Capital Union, A (16 page)

Next day, I watered the tomatoes without even seeing them, pouring can after can over the plants in a transparent hail of water. I thought of the drops clinging to the budding, green fruit as my tears. I would never see Douglas again. I thought of Jeff, his dust buried in a small pot, and the bairn in my womb growing, ripening towards the day it would be born. Strangers would see me as a tragic widow, a woman alone in the world, hand in hand with a child robbed of its father. They would assume he had died a soldier’s death, a hero’s death, and I would be left to live the lie. I didn’t know who I could tell that I was expecting a bairn, so I told no one. The dungarees hid the curve of my belly so well, and I was still very small, although Mrs Ogilvie exchanged looks with Jim at breakfast, as I sat
picking
at my food. I supposed they had heard me crying in the night and assumed I was disappointed in my trip to Ardhall; disappointed in love. They waited for me to mention it, but I never did. On the fourth day, Mrs Ogilvie announced that she had arranged tickets for a dance at the Miners’ Institute and told me that if I moped about for one more minute she would ask the Ministry of Agriculture to repatriate me to the city, as it was unlikely that any tomato could ripen under my baleful stare. I couldn’t think of any excuse not to go, so I put on the pink crêpe de Chine dress she lent me. ‘Pre-utility, thank God,’
she said. It was gathered under the bust, and with a cardigan over the top, my bump wasn’t visible. I didn’t think she had guessed.

The hall at the Institute was decorated with bunting and a GI swing band had set up with microphones at the far end. The men in their pale-green uniforms softened my memory of Douglas on the same platform. It was a different movie
playing
in the same cinema. I wondered if Bella had been in that audience at that rally, even as I was longing for him. I had betrayed Jeff with an empty dream, thought to drink from a cup that had already been drained. A spotlight shone on the brass instruments and the trumpeter jumped to his feet to encourage the folk who were filling the room. ‘Let’s get this room jumping,’ he shouted, and the drummer hit his cymbal, which shimmered.

‘They’re American, dear,’ said Mrs Ogilvie. ‘Very boisterous.’

‘But utterly adorable,’ said a voice behind me. I turned to see the blackest man I had ever seen. He bowed and held out his hand. ‘Would you do me the honour? Captain Arnold at your service, ma’am.’

‘Agnes Thorne,’ said Mrs Ogilvie, putting my hand in his. ‘She would be delighted, although you might need to remind her how to dance. It has been a quite a while.’

His face lit up. He pulled me into a dance hold and we swung off in a polka. It was like dancing the middle part of a Canadian Barn Dance at a ceilidh. He galloped me round the room, only just avoiding other couples. I was so dizzy I began to laugh, but tears were close behind. He led me off the floor for some lemonade as the music ended.

‘So what do you do, Agnes?’ he asked, passing me a glass.

‘I’m persuading tomatoes to grow at Laurelhill Nursery.’

‘Somehow I don’t think that is going to stop the Germans,’ he replied.

‘The wee, green ones are hard enough to stop a man in his tracks,’ I said, ‘and I have a pretty good aim.’

‘David and Goliath?’

‘Who are you calling David?’

He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Agnes, and your war.’

‘Slainte mhath…’ I said, uncertain of his first name.

‘Raphael,’ he said, filling the pause.

A waltz struck up and he led me back onto the floor. It was good to be held kindly by a man. His chest was warm, and I liked the feeling of his hand on the small of my back. Mrs Ogilvie winked as she span past with Jim, who had gelled down his hair and put on an old dinner jacket from the 1920s. ‘You are seeing me at my most debonair,’ he had said as we left the farm. ‘This tux is my dark secret: there’s a trail of
broken-hearted
lassies from here to Timbuktu.’

I looked up at Raphael. ‘You sure look cute,’ he smiled.

My face was beginning to relax and my cheeks felt less tense as I sighed, drawing air into my lungs. I had been
holding
my breath for a long time.

‘You okay?’ he asked. ‘You got a problem with me being negro?’

I shook my head. ‘Why would I?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he replied. ‘I must be the blackest man since Fred Douglass to pitch up in this godforsaken Arctic wilderness you call home. Although I believe he brought more than a little heat to the cheeks of Edinburgh’s abolitionist ladies in the nineteenth century.’

‘I’m not from Stirling,’ I said.

‘Oh, how many minutes down the road is the place you’re from?’

I punched him on the shoulder. ‘Where are your manners?’

‘I’m sorry, but Pennsylvania could swallow this whole country in two bites, fence it in and call it a farm.’

‘It might be a prickly mouthful.’

‘I believe it might, but I am willing to try,’ he replied, and pulled me closer. My belly pressed against his flat
stomach
and he pulled back. ‘I’m sorry, Agnes. I didn’t realise.’ He looked round the room as if he expected to see an angry man approaching.

‘It’s all right, I’m a widow.’

He looked down at me. ‘That is not all right. That is a tough call, and I am sorry for your loss.’ He led me back to Mrs Ogilvie and Jim.

‘You’d better look after this little lady,’ he said, and bowed before walking up to the bar and slapping one of the soldiers standing there on the back.

‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ asked Jim.

Mrs Ogilvie took a long sip of her lemonade, drawing it up through the straw. I knew that when she raised her eyes to me from behind the smokescreen of her blue, powdered lids, that I would see she had guessed, perhaps had always known. But instead she nudged Jim and squeezed past to go to the powder room. It was an invitation to follow her, though I wasn’t ready. I told Jim I was going to get some air and walked out into the night. I didn’t know how I felt about the child. I had always imagined knitting for my firstborn in a cosy nursery with a loving husband at my side. Not this world, at war.

The night air was unseasonably cold and my breath hung in front of my mouth like a veil. The Ochils were dark,
glittering
in the frost under a waning moon, which had just tipped past full the night before. The music grew fainter behind me as I walked, my trench coat buttoned up to my chin. I flexed my hands, but the cold was already in my fingers, licking the bones. The Forth slid, inky black, under old Stirling Bridge and my feet echoed on its cobbles. There was no one about. They were all at the dance, or dreaming of husbands, sons and brothers far away. It was a land of women now. The blackout blinds were pulled down on all the big houses, bleak like the empty mansion behind the flat, a pattern of abandoned lives, endlessly repeating. I needed to get off the street, to feel the earth under my feet. Sticks cracked as I began to climb up the path to the Wallace Monument. I wanted to raise myself up above everything; to look out over the small world that was my life in Stirling. An owl called as I reached the foot of the tower, which seemed to grow straight out of the rough rocks.
The jaggy crown on its head loomed above me, as if it might slide down its misshapen body and crash round its feet,
crushing
me. I tried the handle. The door was unlocked. It creaked as I opened it and the smell of damp stone seeped into my clothes. The stairs spiralled round, past arrow slits. I thought I could hear the faintest sound of the trumpet over the water, carrying on the still air. The stairs grew narrower and the roof got lower, squashing me in and I walked in an ever-decreasing spiral, my hand trailing on the stone spine of the tower, as if I was winding the thread of my life onto a bobbin.

I tried to picture William Wallace, who had stood on this spot before the tower was ever built, looking out at the English camp lying in the Forth’s silver loops, and his ghost’s cold hands reached round my back and squeezed my belly. I couldn’t breathe. My legs were heavy as I reached the top, and pushed open the door onto the narrow walkway outside. The sky flew up above me, filled with stars. Ice cracked under my feet and I held onto the parapet in case I skited on the slippy surface and fell over. I was alone; alone with the bairn swimming in my womb; a featherlight touch as a foot moved, stretching, preparing for life. I looked over the edge. It was a long way down and seemed further with the cliff below. The trees clung to the rock and reached up to me, as if they would catch me if I fell. I imagined dropping into their arms;
wondered
if they would smile and stroke my hair, coorie me in, sing to me in their twig voices. I held onto the parapet, scared by my thoughts, and with my nail I scratched my name into the frost on the stone wall. ‘I can hold on,’ I said. ‘I am alive.’ The letters melted into the sparkling diamond sheet, black furrows on the late winter page, and then I heard the sound of the door at the bottom of the tower click open and feet tapping on the steps. They grew louder and faster as they took the measure of the tower. I looked round for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere, so I pressed myself against the far wall, out of sight of the door. The hinge creaked as it swung open and a man coughed. ‘Agnes? Are you there?’

There was a smell of cigarette smoke. I crept round the corner. Raphael was leaning on the parapet, looking out over the river at the castle. His face was in profile, his shoulders hunched like a great gargoyle.

‘Raphael?’ I said, wondering if I could squeeze past him, not sure if it was safe to be there with him.

‘I don’t normally follow ladies home,’ he said, ‘but since you are obviously a damsel who lives in a tower, I don’t think the normal rules apply.’ He laughed.

‘I wanted to be alone,’ I said.

‘I don’t think you do,’ he answered, stubbing out his
cigarette
, adding a full stop to my name. ‘I think you need a friend.’

‘I have friends.’

‘So why aren’t you with them?’ He pulled a hip flask from his pocket. ‘Lemonade never did it for me.’ He passed it to me. I took a sip.

‘Bunnahabhain?’ I said. ‘The river mouth – safe harbour.’

‘I’m impressed.’

I stood beside him. He traced the letters of my name with his finger. ‘Last will and testament?’ he asked.

‘No. I don’t know.’

‘How old are you, Agnes?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Eighteen and standing on the edge of a precipice, alone at the top of a tower in a goddamn horror of a fairy tale. Wouldn’t you rather come home and get warm?’

‘I don’t have a home.’

‘And why would that be?’

‘Jeff is dead.’

‘But you aren’t. Wake up, Agnes. This war won’t last forever. I don’t know what happened to your husband, but he wouldn’t want you to end your life with his, would he?’

‘He didn’t love me, and in the end, I didn’t love him. Does that fit with your picture-book story?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I thought it did.’

‘God has a plan for you, Agnes, and I don’t think it ends with freezing to death on an ice tower on a frosty night.’ He put his jacket round my shoulders. ‘Now let’s go. The people you came with will be missing you.’

‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘Let’s just say that the benefit of having smokes outside is that you get a chance to observe the world and all its passing strangeness. My curiosity was piqued as to why a pregnant lady would toddle off into the middle of nowhere on her own.’

‘It is not the middle of nowhere.’

‘Well, where is it, then? You tell me.’

I didn’t answer him. The stars were tiny pinpricks of blue light behind the mist of his breath.

He held out his arm to lead me down the stairs.

‘Thank you, Raphael,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t going to jump, if that’s what you were thinking.’

‘Do any of us know what we are going to do before we do it?’ he asked.

Mrs Ogilvie burst into tears of relief when Raphael dropped me at the farm. He refused a plate of her Eggs Benedict, just said he had to get the boys back to the servicemen’s club in Edinburgh. He tooted the jeep’s horn and drove off at speed. We sat by the fire, talking until the clock on the mantelpiece struck two, and decided that I should send a telegram to my mother, and go home at the beginning of the week. Mrs Ogilvie had guessed I was expecting, but hadn’t wanted to say anything with Jeff so recently dead. ‘A bairn isn’t the end of the world, Agnes,’ she said. ‘They bring their own love, and you don’t need to worry about the delivery. Mrs Winning at the surgery is a dab hand at hoiking them out, if you want to have it here.’ But I wanted my mother.

Jim stopped work on his agricultural census and walked me to the station so I could get the train to Glasgow and on to Ayr. A newspaper seller was shouting, ‘Saving stamps for bombs,’ and waving a picture of Lord Alness sticking stamps on a bomb, and Jim said the Americans had beaten the Germans
in Tunisia. I wasn’t sure where that was, but I hoped it was a sign that the war might end soon.

Ayr seemed to be quiet like Stirling and I was glad to arrive. I was looking forward to a warm meal, but Duncan met me at the station grim-faced. I thought he was going to say something about Jeff’s death, but he didn’t.

‘Why so sour, puss?’ I said, as he took my suitcase.

‘You know,’ he said, putting it in the back of the cart, and lifting me up onto the seat. He flicked the reins and Polly
trotted
on.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘The whole Hannes thing is praying on my mind.’

‘Why should it? He’s gone now.’

He straightened his cap. ‘Someone might have seen us.’

‘There was no one around.’

‘What if someone did? I haven’t been able to look the neighbours in the eye since it happened. Whenever anyone mentions the war effort, I feel like I betrayed them. What if he is back on the battlefield now, shooting people we know? What does that make me? I might as well have lifted the gun and shot them myself.’

‘Duncan, you’re being daft. Believe he was a farmer, like us.’