Capital Union, A (6 page)

‘Well, why don’t you do yours?’ I shouted, although I didn’t mean to.

I wished I could call the words back but I couldn’t. Then I heard Mrs MacDougall’s light switch go on, although it was late, and I bet she had her glass to the wall.

‘You only ever give me half the story,’ I said. He brought through the letter with the black crown on it. He was to go to the Conscientious Objectors’ Tribunal in Glasgow next week.

‘They can’t make me fight,’ he said, ‘as long as I can prove that the Act of Union didn’t give English jurisdiction
precedence
in Scottish courts. I have been looking into it for Douglas’ appeal.’

‘Not that again. I am tired of that man and the way you follow him like a dog. Why can’t you think for yourself?’

He swallowed and said he was sorry I felt like that, pulled up his pillows and the quilt and went to sleep on the divan in his study. The bed felt cold without him and I wondered if this was how it would be if he went to prison. I looked at the stars of the Plough through the window and heard Mother’s voice telling me that the last one always pointed north to the Pole Star, the only fixed point in the sky.

By morning my head ached, but I decided to go to the early Mass anyway. I knew Jeff was a half-baked Piskie when I
married
him, so I just let that flee stick to the wa’ and went alone as usual without waking him.

The church was full of flowers and candles and it made me feel as if there wasn’t a war on after all, as if I could come out the door afterwards and find my house was clean and
sparkling
and Jeff still had a kiss for me on his bonny lips. I prayed for the war to be over during the intercessions. So many of my neighbours’ menfolk were mentioned, and some were even named in the list of those whose anniversaries we keep. As I stood in the queue to receive communion, two little boys started fighting in the line next to me. One raised his wee hands, clasped in prayer, and used them to hit his brother, and the younger one swung his praying hands back in his brother’s belly like a club. They laughed and their mother stared straight ahead at Jesus hanging on his cross, and bit her lip.

‘Body of Christ,’ said Father Michael, holding the wafer up in front of me. I put it on my tongue and crossed myself. I prayed for Jeff and Douglas as I knelt in the pew. On the way out, I put my last sixpence in the box to buy a candle for Mrs Black’s son at the Shrine of the Venerable Margaret Sinclair. The light looked very small on the sanctuary. I thought of the
nun sleeping with folded hands under the stone, and the
people
she nursed while she lived, even though she was poorly. I prayed she might send us a miracle.

A blue wind from the south was shaking the trees as I walked home across the Meadows. My mother said each wind had a different colour, as any fisherman could tell you. I envied her not needing to lose any of the men on the farm to war, and she always prayed to Mary, Star of the Sea, when the boys took the boat out. I wished the farm had a phone so I could have heard her voice. No one around me was making any sense, but Father Michael had said The Lord is my shepherd in his homily and I felt less lost. I was humming the psalm to cheer myself up when I reached the flat and had just got my key out when Mrs Black came up to me. ‘Mrs McCaffrey,’ she said, ‘I have something for your husband.’

I thought she meant something nice, but she snapped open her bag and took out a white feather. I put my hands behind my back so she couldn’t give it to me, but she pushed it towards me, right in my face. It looked like a feather from an angel’s wing, curling over at the edges and fluffy at the quill. I couldn’t think where she had got it, which birds were white in the
garden
, and then I realised that she must have pulled it from her pillow in the night, or plucked it from a chicken at the shop. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

‘I am not taking that,’ I said, and pushed past her. She said we all had to face up to things, that Jeff was a coward and the worst kind, hiding behind his politics, as if Herr Hitler would give two figs for nationalism when he was sitting at Holyrood with a whisky in his hand. I took the feather from her and tried to throw it on the ground, but it was so light that it floated down between us, and blew in to the stair as I opened the door.

‘Your husband is a skiving coward, scrievin’ nonsense while laddies get blown to pieces.’ She looked like she was going to swing her bag at me.

I ran upstairs and banged the door, but Jeff shouted, ‘Don’t bang the door, Agnes.’

I thought my head would explode, pop like a puffball, and all the dust inside would float away on the breeze, growing fainter and fainter until it disappeared.

‘Don’t you shout at me when Mrs Black is out there saying you are too feart to fight.’

Jeff went quiet. ‘I’ll go down and have a word.’

‘You’re too late. She has gone to bend the ears of her friends about you. I will never be able to go to the butcher’s again.’

The feather was still at the foot of the stair the next day, although I tried not to look at it lying in the corner, and then two days later it was gone. I don’t know who picked it up or brushed it away. Maybe the wind took it.

The week passed slowly and on the first dry day after a spell of rain I got up early and walked out onto the Blackford Hill. There were only a few days left until the tribunal and the words buzzed in my mind as I walked; ‘C’ for conscientious, ‘O’ for Objector. It was as if the pages of a dictionary were flashing before me and Jeff was pressed like a trapped insect as the book snapped shut. There was no Scots word for such a thing. He was in a foreign land. As I climbed the hill above the battleships shoaling on the Forth, I saw that the world was pressing into Edinburgh, making the familiar view unfamiliar. My legs ached as I walked along the ridge to my snare. I
suppose
it was lack of food. A neighbour next door had said there was fruit at McColl’s, but last time I queued for oranges there was only one left by the time I got served. Mr McColl had thought he might have some more by the end of the week, but I didn’t go back. There were wild strawberries and rhubarb growing over the wall.

My snare was empty, although there was a little dried blood on it. I moved it further into the gorse bushes just in case someone had discovered it and was helping themselves. It was peaceful on the hill. I could just make out the Forth Bridge although it was always blacked out of the photos in
Jeff’s paper, and I wondered what the exiled King of Norway thought of the view of its red legs from his new home in South Queensferry. I supposed a Viking chief like him would like a fiord, even a Scottish one.

The smell of the grass warming in the sun made me feel sleepy, and the bees were humming in the yellow gorse,
living
their little bee lives, never knowing that the Germans were coming. I lay back on a flat patch of grass, just off the path, beside my silver snare, which arched against the Forth. I could have picked the ships out of my net like minnows. It might have been an hour later when I woke up. My cheek was hot from the sun, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon, or even who I was, or where. Then I remembered Mr Ford, and Jeff most likely facing prison because the dunderheid agreed with Douglas. I wished that we had never met the bear and that there was no war and that we were still happy.

From the height of the sun, I guessed it was almost midday and I hurried home past the duck pond, which was covered in scum. Some trees had tipped over in the gale but there was no one to clear them away. All the good, green places were going to sleep as if they were enchanted, and the hard streets and barracks and docks were sucking all the men away, so that soon there would be nothing left but old people and women and bairns. By the time I reached Falkland Terrace, I had decided to tell Jeff that I would volunteer to become a Land Girl. There were farms in the Pentlands I could cycle to, and then, if Jeff was taken to prison, I could bury my hands in the good earth and not be lonely.

I heard the noise of the saws at the top of the street before I saw the sparks flying from the railings as they were cut down. Mrs MacDougall was out shouting at the workmen that they had better agree to pay for new ones after the war, and one of them paused with three on his shoulder, spiky like spears, and said, ‘Aye, Mrs, if you’d like to pay for the ships during it.’

‘A war is no excuse to ration your manners,’ she said, but he laughed and clattered the railings into the back of his truck. She sat down on the wall at the end of a row of metal dots as she spotted me. ‘Agnes,’ she said, ‘get Jeff down here to have a word with these vandals.’

‘Jeff is a wee bit busy at the moment,’ I said.

‘What on earth could he be busy with at a time like this?’

I didn’t want to tell her in front of all these men that he might be going to prison. One of them winked at me. ‘Look boys, it’s Rita Hayworth,’ he said.

Mrs MacDougall sighed and stood up. ‘I want your
husband
out here to deal with this. My Struan would have
protected
his property and not let these ruffians take good
railings
to make bad boats. These hooligans are just stacking them at Leith docks. Mr McColl saw them rusting down there when he went for fruit.’ She dabbed her eyes with a corner of her pinny while peeping at the men. ‘Struan would never have left me to deal with all this and only a slip of a girl for support.’

I don’t know why she thought I supported her. I didn’t like her or the railings.

‘I’m going in now, Mrs MacDougall,’ I said, but I had to pull the bell as I had forgotten to take my key. There was no answer from Jeff so I tried again. Mrs MacDougall said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’ll get it,’ but as she stepped forward, she clutched her chest. She shrugged off my arm when I asked her if she was all right.

‘Don’t make a fuss. It’s all this commotion. If you could just get out my way so I can get in, I’ll be fine. This carry-on is more than I can bear, what with the police running up and down the stair yesterday as well.’ She looked at me as if I was to blame for the whole stramash.

I was happy to let her past, then. I followed the nippy sweetie up the stairs, but she took them one at a time,
clutching
onto the banister and always putting the same foot up first.

Jeff was towelling his hair dry at the door. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I’ll be in in a minute,’ I said, and he walked back into the hall. I could hear the wireless playing.

Mrs MacDougall had dropped her key. I opened the door for her and took her arm. ‘The blind leading the blind,’ she said, and tried to smile. Her flat was the mirror image of ours. I steered her into the front room and sat her down in a
wing-back
chair.

‘I don’t really use the drawing room,’ she said, ‘it’s for visitors.’

She remained seated, although she didn’t lean her head back against the starched antimacassar. I made a pot of tea and put mats out to stop the cups marking her wooden coffee table. She mouthed a thank you and her cup rattled as she put it back on her saucer. ‘Not enough milk,’ she whispered.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked, kneeling beside her.

She squeezed my hand. ‘Not really. The police gave me a bit of a fright the other day.’

‘Me, too,’ I said.

‘That sort of thing doesn’t generally happen in Morningside.’

‘I suppose it doesn’t,’ I replied.

‘I am not saying you are a bad influence, dear.’

I let go of her hand and sat back in my own seat as she continued. ‘But all those officious men walking round the
garden
as if they owned it, and piling out the door with boxes of I don’t know what. Jeff’s mother would have taken a turn, but, of course, she would never have let them get away with it. She was a great guide to Jeff after his father died.’ She mopped her brow with her handkerchief. ‘You are very young. One must make allowances. Not an established woman.’

I stood up to leave, but she reached out for my arm.

‘Don’t leave yet,’ she whispered.

‘I need to sort things out at home,’ I said. ‘Chap on the door if you don’t feel any better. Jeff could telephone the
doctor
for you.’

‘I don’t want to be alone,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m scared.’

‘But your colour is better now. Let’s get you tucked up in bed and I am sure you will be as right as rain.’

‘It’s not that. The police might come back.’

‘Well, they won’t bother you. They said they would return Jeff’s things in a few days. He hasn’t done anything wrong.’

‘If he is one of those objector chaps like Grant, he’ll bring them back at the drop of a hat, running all over the place, willy-nilly, scaring decent folk.’

‘You’ve nothing to worry about, Mrs MacDougall.’

‘But you see, dear, I do.’

‘Don’t tell me you are a Party member, too?’ I was trying to cheer her up, bring back her fighting spirit.

‘Most certainly not. My Struan fought for the British Empire in the last war. I still have his medals. He was proud of the Union. Look what it was like before: Highlanders
jumping
about the heather, bashing men in red coats. Uncouth and unshaven, the lot of them, and the women left to feed hungry bairns on thin air.’

She looked a bit stronger and waved at Mr MacDougall’s framed medals on the mantelpiece. The clock beside them chimed and to my surprise a cuckoo popped out. ‘A gift from Schramml, that old fool. That is exactly the problem. The very nub of the matter.’

‘What is the problem?’ I asked.

‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. You would be the first to admit that we haven’t exactly seen eye-to-eye, although one has a duty to maintain friendly relations with one’s neighbours, while being careful not to live out of each other’s pockets. Especially,’ she added, ‘in times like these.’

‘With the Germans coming?’ I asked.

She paused and looked towards the door. ‘What if they’re already here?’

‘I don’t think you need to worry about that. The Home Guard would be firing real bullets from their pill boxes, not crawling round the streets making eyes at housewives.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, I need your help, Agnes. I have most unexpectedly got myself into a spot of bother, and it’s a cross I can’t bear alone.’ She blew her nose. ‘I want you to promise me that you won’t betray my trust, even if you don’t agree with what I am about to show you.’

I was so curious that I promised. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I said.

‘It’s not a game,’ she said. ‘Swear on the Bible,’ and she made me take it down from her mantelpiece and place my hand on it. Small pieces of paper were sticking out from
various
pages. ‘Swear,’ she said. ‘May you be struck dumb if you ever betray the trust I am about to place in you.’

‘I swear.’

I thought perhaps Mrs MacDougall was losing her
marbles
, but her eyes were very earnest. She looked afraid, like the sheep at market. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense any longer, Mrs MacDougall. I’m on tenterhooks.’

She took my arm and we went upstairs to Professor Schramml’s flat, pausing to listen for anyone approaching before opening the door. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ she said.

There was a sweet, sickly smell in the hall, which was in darkness. All the doors were closed. A little light from the stained glass above the front door fell in fragments of colour on the polished lino. She put her fingers to her lips and picked up a broom, which was propped against the wall. ‘Take your shoes off,’ she whispered. ‘Jeff might hear us.’

‘Why would that matter?’ I asked, but she pressed her
fingers
to her lips. ‘Don’t talk.’

She opened the door slowly, holding the broom like a weapon and keeked in. Then she opened the door fully and beckoned me to follow her. The smell was stronger here, a smell of unwashed bodies and illness. There was a man with a bandaged head lying in the large double bed. The curtains were drawn. A vase of dried hydrangeas stood on the
dressing
table. ‘I’m having problems keeping him clean,’ said Mrs MacDougall. Dirty sheets were piled in a corner.

I walked forward. ‘Don’t go too close, dear. He might be a bit unpredictable.’

The man’s eyes were glazed and his face was flushed with a fever. He was young, helpless in a nightshirt two sizes too small for him. He tried to sit up as I approached, but slumped forward at an angle and I guided him back onto the pillow. ‘
Wer sind Sie
?’ he whispered. His eyes rolled towards the
window
where the sound of the men cutting down the railings had grown fainter as they moved down the street.

‘You see the difficulty,’ said Mrs MacDougall, beckoning me. ‘Come through to the kitchen.’

I followed her through the hall past photos of Professor Schramml’s family on the beach or posed for weddings and christenings, all smiling, never knowing they were now in limbo in Edinburgh in a war, with no loving eyes to look at them. A few frames were missing, just lighter patches on the wallpaper to show where they had been.

‘He’s German, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Evidently. But remember you promised to keep my secret.’

‘Mrs MacDougall, it’s not about secrets now. He looks like he needs a hospital. He might be dangerous when he gets better.’

‘Nonsense, he couldn’t hurt a fly, the state he is in. He has had a wee bump to the head. Anyway, I have my broom. I’ll just give him a good whack if I have to.’

‘You’re not making any sense. He needs help. He could be that airman who came down, or a POW.’

‘This isn’t about him now. It is about me. If the police are prepared to lock up your Jeff for holding daft views, what might they do to me when they find I have a pet German? I was only doing my Christian duty. I thought he was ill, or maybe drunk, when I found him outside. He was on his knees in the rain. He held the cross round his neck out to me and I saw an opportunity to be a Good Samaritan. A call to serve. I thought he was one of ours.’

‘He speaks German.’

‘Well, he knew enough to keep schtum when I found him. I thought he might be from the hospital, wandered off. I used to be a nurse, you know. I haven’t always been the old body on the stair. I was going to take him back in the morning when the rain stopped, and then I thought maybe I could do a good job for him here, save the hospital some money, put a little back in the war purse. But then the police came thundering up the stairs.’

‘It’s not too late. I could walk round to the hospital. See what they say. It might not be so bad.’

‘The authorities might not be very sympathetic towards me. Question my motives like they are doing with Jeff. And what would Mr and Mrs Black say if it gets out, and their poor laddie with his leg blown off.’

‘Well, I don’t think Mr Black would take his cleaver to you. You’re one of his best customers.’

She frowned. ‘I’ll attribute your insouciance to youth. I could never show my face on Morningside Road again. I would be cast out into the wilderness. Our Lord has left me in the storm without guidance. I am like Job in torment.’

‘Don’t upset yourself. You have lived here a long time. No one will blame you.’

‘But they will, don’t you see? They will doubt me and I will lose my good name forever.’