It was morning playtime at the school and Miss Lindsay was standing in the doorway, wrapped up in a thick coat and sipping a cup of tea as she watched her young charges.
‘Such a conscientious schoolmistress,’ said Lorna, waving at her.
In the playground, blithely ignoring the several balls which the little boys were scuffling around, a coterie of girls were once again busy with their skipping rope.
‘Spring a lock o’ bonny maidie,’ they sang, weaving in and out of the swooping rope.
‘Summer lock o’ wedded lady.
Harvest lock o’ baby’s mammy.
Who will be my true love?
Three times twist me,
All that I wish me.
First time he kissed me
He will be my true love.’
And then once again with the same air of knuckling down to it, they began to chant the alphabet, looping in and out and round behind the girls swinging the rope. As the chant wore on, one became aware that some of the boys were paying a measure of sideways attention to the game, and when one of the girls stumbled and got her feet caught in the ropes on the letter ‘P’ a volley of laughter and whistles went up all around.
‘Ella loves Peter,’ the children chanted, in that familiar infuriating sing-song. ‘Ella luh-huves Pee-heeter.’
Ella, looking thunderous, shouted, ‘Forfeit, forfeit!’ and the girls swinging the rope were joined by another two, the four together beginning to whip it round faster and faster until it was almost a blur, whereupon Ella capered fearlessly into its path on the upswing and began to skip while the rest of the girls clapped and whether the clapping grew faster and the rope matched it or vice versa, certainly before long the rope was flashing round, zinging off the ground with sharp cracks, and the claps were thrumming. Then the singing began.
‘My mother is a queen and my father is a king.
I’m a little princess and you’re a dirty thing.
Not because you’re clarty and not because you’re clean,
But ’cos you’ve got the chicken pox and measles in between.’
Poor Ella was purple in the face and blowing hard when it was over but looked satisfied to have paid the price and detached her name from Peter’s. Peter himself – whichever one of the small boys he was – kept his own counsel.
It was all new to me. I had only sons and even the farms and cottages on the estate had been going through a very boyish era in recent years, with blue ribbons threaded through all the christening robes and dollies packed away in paper against the day when the tide would turn. Here in Luckenlaw, I noticed, doing a quick tally of the playground, the balance was currently on the other side.
‘What a lot of girls there are,’ I said to Lorna. ‘I was just thinking how in my village we run to boys these days and I couldn’t help but notice.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lorna. ‘Luckenlaw is famed for it. We say there must be something in the water, you know.’ We had moved on from watching the children and were now descending the lane towards a small burn with a ford and footbridge.
‘Have you ever heard the theory – goodness knows where I came across it – that in times of war women begin to have more boy babies? I always thought it quite horrid if it’s true. Much too obliging of the mothers docilely to provide cannon fodder. I’m with Luckenlaw on that score.’ I glanced at Lorna as I spoke and noticed that her face had turned quite solemn. Of course! How tactless of me to witter on about cannon fodder and even about there not being enough boys to go around if what I had surmised about her on the strength of the rosebud and velvet ribbon were true. ‘Much better have girls and keep them safe and sound,’ I went on, willing myself to shut up. I managed it at last. Briefly. ‘I think I must have said something to upset you, Lorna dear,’ was how I filled the silence. ‘I do apologise.’
‘Not at all, don’t be silly,’ said Lorna, the beaming smile in place as ever but her eyes shining rather than twinkling for a change. ‘I’m far too sensitive, I know. Morag – Miss Lindsay – is never done telling me I need to toughen up, and I’m sure she’s right.’
‘Oh well, as to that,’ I said vaguely, thinking of the Italian bambina and Hugh’s instant diagnosis of military downfall, ‘who wants to be tough, really, when you get right down to it? Talk to me, if you like, dear. I shan’t tell you to toughen up, I assure you.’
Odd, the way one twitters oneself into a hole single-handed. Somehow Mrs Hemingborough’s coarse unconcern over her assault and my automatic impulse to take the other side to Hugh on any point of debate had ended up with me begging this rather droopy girl to share her tale of woe and promising to be all sympathy while she did so, when in fact nothing in the world could be more designed to embarrass and bore me. Unfortunately, Lorna did not need to be told twice.
‘There’s nothing much to say,’ she began, which is never, I have found, an indication that there will not be a great deal to hear. ‘I was engaged to be married,’ she went on haltingly. ‘His name was Walter. He went to war and didn’t come back. Like so many others. And the worst thing is that in his heart, he was a conscientious objector. Only he dared not take a stand. He simply dared not. And I didn’t stand behind him. I was afraid of what everyone would think. So he signed up when his papers came. He only lasted a month, then he died of dysentery. He always had a very delicate constitution.’
One hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. Lorna herself was hardly swashbuckling, but to think of her pining and berating herself for a decade over a conshie without the nerve even to be a conshie was, in my present mood, simply tiresome and it was hard to resist the thought that this Walter had died of his tummy upset just to show the rough boys what a sensitive soul he was. (I can surprise myself with my own unpleasantness sometimes.)
‘Do I detect a trace of guilt in your voice, Lorna?’ I said. ‘I promised not to tell you to toughen up, and I shan’t, but you must at least stop that. You’re a lovely young woman’ – I stopped on the footbridge and faced her to hammer my point home – ‘with a whole life ahead of you.’
‘I know,’ sighed Lorna, and I was sure that she had been told just this many times before. She gazed over my shoulder. ‘We were going to live there,’ she said. I turned around and followed her gaze towards a cottage on the far side of the burn. It was a long, low and rather mossy-looking affair, apparently empty as far as I could tell from its dusty windows, and standing hardly higher than the burn which chuckled along in front, darkened by the overhanging trees of the lane.
‘Oh my dear,’ I said, kicking myself for choosing just this spot as a setting for my pep-talk, although surely she could not really regret the cottage; it was bound to be damp. ‘What did your Walter do?’ I asked, doubting that a country solicitor, the local doctor or a businessman from town would ever be drawn to settle in such a place, and unable to think of a single other suitor for the minister’s daughter who would. I rather suspected a curate, if truth be told.
‘He was a poet,’ said Lorna.
Ah, I thought, but I said nothing and with a last sighing glance at the cottage, she turned and walked away.
‘Good girl,’ I said firmly, myself turning away from the blank windows and tussocky garden and following her. ‘You really should put the past behind you, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Lorna again. ‘And at least I have the past. No one can take it away.’ Whereas, I thought, there might be no future of which to speak. There was no guarantee, at any rate, that anyone would roll up to bring her one. That much was inarguable, and in the end Lorna’s mood prevailed: we plodded on in gloomy silence, and since it was far too cold for plodding – only a day for a walk if that walk were a brisk stride out with the head up and the shoulders back – by the time we arrived at Luckenlaw House we were both chilled to the bone.