Chance Developments (6 page)

“You have made that girl pregnant,” said his father. “You…yes, you have done that.”

He closed his eyes. It had simply not occurred to him, possibly because he had blocked it out. The guilt—and there had been guilt—had obscured the more practical issue.

He spoke automatically. “I didn't.”

His father stood up, towering above him. His face bore an expression he had not seen before—one of pure anger. “Don't deny it, Harry. Don't add lies to your mountain of misdeeds.”

The housemaster raised a hand. “Mr. MacGregor, perhaps…”

“I'm sorry,” said his father. “I shall try to control myself.”

“Your feelings are completely understandable,” said the housemaster quietly.

They both looked at Harry.

“We have made every effort to contain the situation,” said his father. “I have spoken at length to her father, who has been extremely understanding—more so, in fact, than one could reasonably hope for in normal circumstances. That, at least, has made our position less awkward.”

The housemaster nodded. “That's fortunate,” he said.

“Jenny has been sent down south. There's a place where girls who…girls who get themselves into trouble are able to go and have the baby. They arrange adoption.”

The baby. He caught his breath. This was about a
baby
. This was not about something that happened on that picnic, with the waterfall behind them and the sun. The full enormity of what he had done came home to him. He started to cry.

“I'm going to kill myself,” he said.

The words came unbidden, and their effect was immediate. His father gasped, and exchanged a quick glance with the housemaster.

“Don't say things like that,” said the housemaster. “You don't mean that, Harry.”

“I do.” He felt his body shaking with his sobs. He wanted to die.

His father moved over towards him. He put his arm around his shoulder. “Listen, Harry, this is not a tragedy. This is a mistake that…well, that happens. We had to talk to you about it. We had to make sure that you understood.”

The housemaster rose from his desk and crossed the room. A boy had committed suicide the previous year—a boy under his care. That had been something to do with sex as well. You had to be so careful with these young people. They were impetuous.

“We think that perhaps it would be best if you went home, Harry,” said the housemaster. “I think what you've just said is not something you really mean. Go home with your father.”

He struggled with his tears. “I'm to take all my things?”

The housemaster inclined his head. “Yes. I'm sorry about this, but we cannot countenance such things.”

“You're not being expelled,” said his father. “Mr. Sanderson—and the headmaster—have been very understanding. You're not even being asked to leave. You're going of your own accord.”

“Yes,” said the housemaster. “I don't for one moment approve of what you have done, and you will have time to reflect on that, I imagine. But I don't want to ruin your prospects. You're planning to go to art college, aren't you? I'm sure there'll be no difficulty with that. And I'm sure, too, that you will not repeat what you've done, will you?”

His father answered for him. “He will not. He won't be seeing the girl again. You can rest assured of that.”

“Good,” said the housemaster.

He offered Harry his hand to shake.

He took readily to the regime at the art college. They started early, even in the winter term, when the light that flooded through the windows of the great studios was a cold northern one, struggling to make an impression on the half-darkness in which winter clothed Scotland. There was little time for individual flourish—just the constant discipline of drawing under the critical eye of the tutors; they were artists themselves, some rumoured to lead a bohemian existence, but not here, not in the college with its formalities and proprieties.

He discovered the work of James Cowie, and made the trip to Hospitalfield to visit him. The quiet painter spoke to him about preparatory studies. “Do everything three, four times. And then do it again.” He looked at the work that Harry had brought to show him, paging through the sketchbooks. “On the right lines,” he said.

In 1939, shortly after his nineteenth birthday, he went to Glasgow to visit Fergusson, who had returned to Scotland from France. “Painting under a cloud is going to be difficult,” Fergusson said to him. “The light will be blocked out, you know. That's what's happening now in Europe—the light is being blocked out.”

On the train back to Edinburgh, he sat in his compartment with a kilted soldier, a corporal. The man said nothing, but as the train drew into the station, he lowered the window, opened the door, and leapt out onto the platform. Harry struggled with the swinging door but managed to close it before the train came to a halt. He sketched the incident in his sketchbook—the man's back, the pleats of the kilt caught in the wind, the Edinburgh skyline in the distance.

Later, sitting at the table in his lodgings with the young man with whom he shared a room, a medical student, he described what happened. “Despair,” said the medical student. “We see it in the infirmary every day—or almost every day. Despair. Guilt.”

He asked him about guilt. “Why do we feel guilty?”

The medical student laughed. “Because there are plenty of people who are only too ready to peddle guilt. The Wee Free Church does it. They're always at each others' throats, but they're made of the same hodden, you know. And they find fertile ground for their efforts, believe me.” He paused, looking at his watch. Their landlady was slow; even the cooking of a haddock seemed to take her for ever. “Your problem, Harry, is that you will never have done anything that makes you feel that way.”

He looked at him. “How can you tell?”

The medical student laughed. “Because if you had, I could see it in your eyes.”

Harry held his gaze.

“I believe I might see something,” said the medical student. “What is it, old fellow? Something to confess?”

“No.”

“That tells me everything. People who say they have nothing to confess have everything to confess.”

In a dream that night he saw his baby. It came to him and stretched out a hand. It was wearing white, a
mort claith
, he thought, the Scots term for a shroud. It tried to say something to him, but was taken away by a woman in a blue tunic. And suddenly the child was no longer there, but had been replaced by a man in a grey suit who said, “Draw everything twice, Mr. MacGregor.”

In 1940, at the age of twenty, he left the art college and enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. “You're doing the right thing,” said the college principal. “Your place will be open when hostilities are over.” It was shortly after Dunkirk, and he had none of the illusions of the previous year.

“You'll be an officer, I take it,” said the principal.

He shrugged.

“But of course you will be. Were you in the Corps at school? Yes? Because that's what they look at.”

“I'm not sure that I'm cut out for that.”

“For leadership? But of course you are. Listen, one of the things we do here is instil self-discipline. Drawing class at eight thirty in the morning is exactly the sort of thing that develops that…that ability to cope with the world. The average young man won't have that, you know.”

“Miners start early…”

“That's not the point. Miners are not officer material.”

The principal was right. He was sent off on a week's selection course and emerged an officer cadet. Four months later he was commissioned, and found himself in charge of a platoon of men recruited from rural Argyll. Some of them seemed to be no more than boys—sixteen-year-olds taken from the farms where they were starting their lives as stockmen, shepherds, gamekeepers. They looked at him as if he came from another world, accepting an authority that for his part he felt he had no right to exercise.

He was sent to North Africa. In 1942, he was at El Alamein. He had been seconded to a camouflage unit, and his skill at creating the illusion of tanks and fuel dumps out of netting and wood had been noticed by his superiors. He was promoted to captain and mentioned in despatches. He saw Monty himself, who inspected one of his bogus tanks and pronounced it good. “I'm not fooled, of course,” he said. “But let's hope that General Rommel is.”

A few days after the victory, he was in Cairo. In Shepheard's Hotel a man in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys came up and introduced himself. The lieutenant offered to buy him a drink. “I feel I almost know you,” he said. “But not quite. My cousin, you see, is Jenny Currie—you two were quite friendly, I believe.”

When the other man returned from the bar, Harry's hand trembled as he took the drink. They exchanged toasts.

“Somebody said that you were up at El Alamein,” said the lieutenant. “Well done. I hear you were one of the camouflage chaps. Magicians, people said. You made things disappear.”

“They remained exactly where they were,” he said. “We just made it look as if they were something they weren't. The human eye will believe what it wants to see.”

“Oh, I know that,” said the lieutenant. “Try looking out of a tank in the desert.”

They had lapsed into silence before he summoned up his courage. “What news of Jenny, then?”

The cousin visibly relaxed. “I thought you were never going to ask.” He paused. “You see, I do know about…” He left the sentence unfinished.

Harry felt himself blushing, and the younger man noticed it.

“I'm sorry. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it.”

He reached out and laid a hand on the other man's forearm. The cousin looked down with surprise at the hand on his arm. Harry withdrew it.

“No, I'm glad you did. I'm very ashamed, you see…” He broke off.

The cousin lowered his voice. “Don't be embarrassed,” he said. “Look, both of us have seen enough in the last two months to teach us not to be awkward about things. Enough death, I mean. I've had my men roasted before my eyes, their tanks an oven. My God, if you've seen that, then you're not going to worry about something like this. A small thing. A very small thing.”

He felt his eyes begin to fill with tears.
I can't cry. Not here, in Shepheard's Hotel. I can't cry.

The cousin saw what was happening. “Look, she's fine. She's absolutely fine. She had the baby…”

“What was it?”

The cousin smiled. “It was a girl.”

He almost asked about the adoption, but thought there was no point. “And Jenny herself?”

“You didn't hear about her marriage?”

He felt himself reeling. “I was forbidden to try to contact her. Her father and mine agreed. I was not to see her.”

The cousin managed a weak smile. “I think she knew that. I don't think she thought you were deliberately cold-shouldering her. She was told the same thing, I understand. Her mother came down on her like a ton of bricks. You were to be off-limits.”

He wanted to know about the marriage.

“A fellow from Glasgow,” said the cousin. “They're a shipbuilding family. He's a naval architect and so they've left him where he is. They've recently built a corvette. I saw pictures of the launch. They're doing well, of course, with the need for shipping.”

He nodded.

The cousin continued. “He's a perfectly decent type. He's a bit older than she is—thirty-five, thirty-six.”

“And children? Do they have children?”

“None since…” He tailed off.

Harry looked down at his drink. “Are you in touch with her?”

“Yes, of course. I haven't seen her for a long time, of course, but I had a letter the other day. We occasionally write to one another. In fact, she was the one who told me that I might bump into you. I don't know where she'd heard you were here, but she seemed to know.”

Harry hesitated. “Will you pass on a message from me?”

A shadow passed over the cousin's face. “She's happily married, you know…”

“Of course, of course.”

“So I'm not sure that you should write to her.”

“Which is precisely why I'm asking you to pass on a message.”

“Yes, all right.”

But now he was unsure what to say. He heard the words of the song, the words that everyone knew.
Will you please say hello to the folks that I know…They'll be happy to know that as you saw me go, I was singing this song…

People took comfort in that; in the folksy optimism of it. But he did not want to pass on a cliché. So he said, “Tell her that I'm terribly sorry.”

The cousin inclined his head. “I'll write to her,” he said. “I'll say that.” He paused. “We all have something to be sorry about. Every one of us. And we often don't have the chance to say anything about it because we're…because we're ashamed. Then it's too late. Your tank gets it. You tread on a mine. A sniper lines you up in his sights, and it's too late.”

“Oh well…”

The cousin seemed to want to continue. There were many conversations like this in wartime, thought Harry. Things that had not been said, were said; people felt liberated, released from their normal inhibitions, by the possibility of imminent death.

“It's not a girl with me,” said the cousin. “It's a boy.”

Harry said nothing.

“And now it's too late.”

“The War?”

“Yes.”

Harry met his eyes. “I'm very sorry.”

“Thank you. Nobody knows.”

“I can understand that,” said Harry. “But you don't have to worry about telling me.”

“You're an artist…”

“Exactly. And anyway, I've felt the same thing myself, on occasion. So you're not alone. You may think you are, but that's just because others are afraid of honesty.”

“But…”

“But there are all sorts of possibilities. Love can occur in so many different ways, if we let it. Nothing is as clear-cut as people would like to think it is.”