The Girl with the Creel (57 page)

Jenny smiled now. ‘That's what you told me to do, but he doesn't need me so much now. He's got his old job back.'

Robbie had been grinning, but his features sobered abruptly. ‘Shall I tell you why I gave up my house in London and disposed of my furniture et cetera, my dear? When I told my sister about you, she could see that I thought a lot of you …' He broke off for a moment then said, ‘This is very difficult, and I hope you won't think I am out of order by what I am about to suggest.'

‘No, I'm sure I won't.' In spite of her denial, Jenny felt uneasy … surely he wasn't going to ask her to marry him?

‘I had no children, and at the time this came into my head, you had no one to turn to when you needed help …' He stopped and drew a long deep breath. ‘I had hoped you would allow me to adopt you and your family, so that I could be a father to you and grandfather to your children, but now you have Peter. He might not like me interfering.'

‘Peter's got no claim on us,' Jenny said, a little shakily because of the relief she felt. ‘He's only a lodger, and no doubt he'll get married again some day … I hope he does. Yes, Robbie, I'd love you to be part of my family. My bairns never knew any of their grandfathers.'

He rubbed his hands gleefully. ‘Pearl will be delighted about this. It was her idea that I should come home, but I'd never have had the nerve to ask you that if she hadn't pushed me into it.'

‘How would she like to be their grandmother?' Jenny surprised herself as much as Robbie with her unexpected offer.

He caught her hand and brought it up to his lips. ‘My dear, she'll be beside herself with joy. You will have made two old fogeys very happy.'

Blushing, Jenny laughed. ‘You're not old, Robbie, and certainly not a fogey, and you'll have to bring your sister here as soon as you can.'

Just then, Babsie Berry, who took Georgie and little Lizann for a walk most afternoons, brought them back. Seeing the man, she asked, ‘Will I keep them for a while yet?'

‘No, no,' Jenny smiled. ‘This is Robbie Chapman, an old friend of my father's, and he'd like to get to know my bairns.'

‘Well, I'll away then.' She nodded to Robbie. ‘Nice to meet you.'

Noticing Georgie eyeing the stranger doubtfully, Jenny knelt down and put her arms round both her children. ‘This is Robbie. He'd like to be your granda, if that's all right with you two?'

The little girl took only a second to make up her mind, running over and climbing up on his knee to kiss him. ‘Will you be a real granda and take us out walks sometimes, like Josie May Yule's granda?'

‘I'll take you wherever you want to go,' he grinned.

Jenny, however, could hear the trembly catch in his voice and gave her son a wee push. ‘Are you not going to say anything to him?'

He looked round at her, his face a study in perplexity. ‘He can't be our granda. A granda is either your mother's father or your father's father and he isn't …'

‘He'll be a pretend granda,' Jenny explained, hoping the boy wasn't going to be difficult. ‘He didn't have any children of his own, so he hasn't any real grandchildren, and …'

‘But if he's only a pretend granda, he might want to stop pretending after a while. He might want to get new grandchildren.'

Quickly handing wee Lizann to her mother, Robbie held his hand out to Georgie. ‘Come here, son.' When the boy moved closer, he went on, ‘If a man pretends something hard enough, he begins to believe it's true, and that's what's going to happen with us. That is … if you want it to.'

Flattered at being classed as a man, Georgie held out his hand with a shy smile. ‘Maybe it'll be all right.'

‘You bet your boots it will,' Robbie laughed, ‘and you're going to have a grandma, too. Would you like that?'

Both children assuring him that they would, he gave them his full attention for the next hour, but at quarter past five he stood up. ‘I'd best be off before Peter …'

‘I want you to meet him, and you can't go away without some supper.'

Peter had been prepared to dislike Robbie Chapman, a feeling that deepened when he was told what had happened, but he found that there was something about the man that he couldn't help but respond to. Soon he was talking easily to him, and while Jenny was engaged in getting her children to bed, he told Robbie more about the night the corvette was torpedoed and his spells in hospitals than he had ever told her.

Later, when she came in from seeing her caller out, she said, ‘I want you to understand why I agreed with what Robbie wanted.'

‘You don't have to explain anything to me,' Peter said quickly.

‘Just listen,' she smiled. ‘The first time he was here I could tell he was a lonely man and I wanted to do something for him. And he's so nice, I knew my bairns would like him. I really want him and his sister to be part of my family, even if you think I'm stupid.'

‘I don't think that. I think he's a genuine man, but … you'll have to watch he doesn't take you over altogether. He looks as though he wasn't short of a few bob, and he'll likely want to throw his money around to impress your kids …'

Jenny frowned. ‘No, I won't let him do that. I'll let him give them birthday and Christmas presents, but nothing big.'

*   *   *

After telling Pearl the good news and having a short discussion on what it would mean to them, Robbie went to bed. Steeped once again in the atmosphere of the Yardie, he turned his mind to the night Willie Alec had told him to stop visiting. He had come home, asked for a loan of his mother's writing pad, and come up to this same room. He had written from the heart, his torment almost unbearable, and could still remember every word of the letter which had gone unanswered.

He had mentioned no names, not even his own, and thinking about it now, coming up for seventy, what he had written seemed melodramatic and childish. He had always believed that her husband had kept the letter from her, but now he wasn't so sure. Jenny had said that Hannah never got over Willie Alec's death, so she must have loved him very much, and she had wanted to forget the impudent young artist.

But he had made a start at reparation now, Robbie mused. He had offered himself, and been accepted, as a substitute grandfather to a young boy and girl who were in fact Hannah's grandchildren. He wished he could take her real daughter under his wing, too, the older Lizann who had vanished in such peculiar circumstances, but that seemed to be an impossible dream – she wouldn't turn up again after being away for so long. All he could do was to make life easy for Jenny, who was, after all, the widow of his dear Hannah's son.

Chapter Thirty-two

Aberdeen had suffered many air-raids since the war started, mostly what became known as tip-and-run. It was in fact the most frequently bombed city in Scotland, but not the most severely – that dubious honour went to the Clydebank area of Glasgow – and Aberdonians had begun to think that the Luftwaffe had no intention of unleashing a large attack on them. On the night of 21 April 1943, however, their complacency was rudely shaken. Twenty-five Dorniers came sweeping in from the north just after nine o'clock, as dusk was falling, and wreaked mayhem on the city.

When the first explosion came, Mrs Melville and Lizann were sitting in their nightdresses having a last cup of tea before going to bed. ‘Oh, my goodness!' the older woman exclaimed in dismay. ‘That sounded awful like a bomb, but I never heard the siren, did you?'

‘No, I'm sure it didn't go.'

The vacillating wailing of the alert sounded a few minutes too late, accompanied by a series of crr … rumps from, it seemed, all around them. ‘Will we go down to the lobby?' Mrs Melville asked, nervously. ‘We'd be safer there.'

‘We can't go down like this,' Lizann pointed out.

‘We could put our coats on.'

‘It'll likely all be over before we get down the stairs.'

‘Aye, it sometimes doesn't last very long.'

But they were both wrong. The bombs kept falling, and when Lizann rose and edged open the curtains, the sky was blood-red with reflections from dozens of burning buildings. ‘Come away from that window,' her landlady burst out, ‘it's not safe standing there. And put out the light, just in case.'

They pulled their chairs together and held hands as the house shook. Neither of them dared to say anything now, each believing that her last moment would come at any time. In spite of, or perhaps because of, her fear, Lizann found herself thinking of her mother and brother, of her Auntie Lou and Uncle Jockie, of Jenny Cowie, of Peter Tait. If she was killed, none of them would know. They didn't know she was in Aberdeen. Nobody knew … except Dan Fordyce. But she didn't want to think about him and concentrated on George. Was he looking down from above and waiting for her to join him? This should have been a comforting thought, but it was anything but.

An extra-loud blast made the two women grip hands more tightly – they could not see each other's faces in the darkness – and when the fearsome reverberation died down, Mrs Melville whispered, ‘That was a close one.'

Lizann's agreement was drowned by another exceptional bang. It was quite some time before the terrifying sounds faded and eventually died away, and some time after that before the sirens gave the sustained tone of the all-clear. The fear-bred silence of the people in the tenement between the apparent end of the raid and the official signal that it was over was broken now, as feet tramped up the stairs and voices chattered in a somewhat hysterical manner.

‘They've all been down in the lobby,' Mrs Melville whispered. ‘I told you we should have gone down as well.'

Lizann rose to switch on the light. ‘Yes, I suppose we should, but we were lucky.'

‘We mightn't be so lucky another time, though.'

Aware of this, yet thinking that the short passageway from the outside door wouldn't be much safer, Lizann just said, ‘I feel like another cup of tea. How about you?'

The only topic of conversation in Aberdeen the following morning was of course the air-raid, and Lizann was horrified to learn that there was hardly a part of the city that hadn't been affected, some areas very badly. Two schools had been set alight and one got a direct hit. Vast damage was done to the Gordon Highlanders barracks, the Royal Mental Hospital and its nurses' home. Rows of houses were flattened, and both a Presbyterian and an Episcopal church were bombed – the Luftwaffe could not be accused of religious discrimination. The final tally showed a hundred fatalities, nearly a hundred seriously injured and 141 minor injuries. It was the worst night the city had suffered.

Details of the raid reached Easter Duncairn in bits and pieces, the van drivers who called relating what they had heard, people who had gone to Aberdeen to see for themselves coming back with horrific stories, and Dan Fordyce soon realized that these were not idle rumours. Never free of fear for Lizann's safety, he was now frantic with anxiety. He had no idea where she lived, but it seemed that all the city had got it, and he couldn't bear to think that she had been killed or maimed in any way. On Saturday morning he decided to go to his sister.

He wished now that he hadn't been so taken up with his studies when he was at university. He had never explored the city and, being concerned solely with agricultural matters, he had not gone near the harbour area nor across the river to Torry. But Ella would tell him where to find the fish houses and curing yards and he would go round every last one of them. He had to find Lizann and persuade her to leave Aberdeen, even if she refused to return to the farm with him. Then he remembered that all these workplaces would be closed from Saturday lunchtime, and he spent a miserable weekend champing at the bit.

Only taking time on Monday to give instructions to his grieve as to the work to be done, he set off in his lorry, filling the tank at the nearest garage with the pink petrol issued to commerical vehicles.

Ella was astonished when he told her what he meant to do. ‘We'll make a list from the Post Office Directory, and I'll put them in order for you, but we'd better have lunch first.'

Dan was annoyed that the journey – over fifty miles in an antiquated vehicle – had taken so long, for it was almost three in the afternoon before Ella leaned back. ‘That's it, but there's an awful lot of them.'

‘I could be lucky at the first place I try,' Dan said, hopefully.

‘I doubt it. Take the map with you, so you can find all the different streets. The lorry would just be a hindrance, so leave it here and get the tram to Market Street. You'll have to walk the rest.'

Dan studied the map on his way to the centre of the city, and when he came off the tram, he hurried down Market Street and along South Market Street until he came to Palmerston Road, the first on his list, where he had to pass several warehouses before finding any fish houses.

At each place he tried – going on to Poynernook Road, Raik Road and Stell Road – and only after having to wait to see this one or that one, he was told that they had never heard of Lizann Buchan, and it seemed no time at all until his watch told him that he need go no farther – work would have stopped for the day.

‘No luck?' Ella asked sympathetically when he went back. ‘Never mind, there's always tomorrow.'