‘We have to take something,’ I said again. ‘Soup? Might there be a pie? Or a bottle of cordial? Flowers certainly.’
‘We’ll ask Mrs Murdoch on the way out,’ said Buttercup. ‘What a pity she’s only just arrived, though. A pie is a possibility, but as for a cordial or anything in a bottle I should think the chances are slim. What about cherry brandy? We have gallons of that somehow and it’s absolutely filthy.’
‘So generous,’ I said, as I set the bottle green hat on my head. It did indeed cover everything, and although one would think that a bottle green and all-enveloping hat would make someone of my sallow complexion look like one of the swamp creatures for which Queensferry was renowned, it suited me rather well. Grant is an angel in serge.
Mrs Murdoch, an angel in a linen pinny, was ready for us when we reached the ground floor and clearly the household tom-toms had related our mission to her for she had put together a basket with not only a pie, a bunch of lilies and a bottle of the cherry brandy, but also a fruitcake in wax paper and a bottle of tonic (her own recipe) which, she said, helped her own dear mother no end when her own dear father was taken.
I drove us, directed by Buttercup, threading through the estate on grassy tracks and glimpsing Cassilis House as we passed. (A boring Georgian box, Buttercup had called it, and it was short on the architectural furbelows and tassels which adorn many houses in the Scotch baronial style, but since her precious castle was three medieval cubes one on top of another, I could not quite see her objection.) Within minutes we had arrived at a pair of cottages sitting in some woodland about a mile away. Buttercup hesitated at the gate, clearly unsure which cottage was the one we were after, but a glance at the washing lines criss-crossing the gardens showed one teeming with little shirts and pinafores neatly arranged in order of size while the other line held only three men’s vests and a tablecloth. Furthermore, a row of bright red heads – the owners of all the shirts and pinnies – popped up at a window in the left-hand cottage to watch us and so, hazarding a guess, we negotiated the path to the one on the right. Buttercup squared her shoulders, heaved the basket high up in front of her like a breast shield and knocked on the door.
It was answered by a sturdy woman in her forties, with sleeves rolled past the elbow and a cloth tucked into her skirt waist as a makeshift apron. Her ruddy, mottled face was fierce and grimly set at the jaw. She glared at us and shook her head even as she stood back to let us enter.
‘Chrissie’s in there,’ she growled and jabbed a finger at an open doorway. I was at a loss to explain our transgression, but when we entered the kitchen-livingroom of the cottage she gave just the same look to Mrs Dudgeon and then to the crockery she was busy drying and I realized that her outrage encompassed us all. It was not too hard to understand – grief and shock settle quite readily into indignation in those whose personality is predisposed that way – but one can imagine that it does not make for the most suitable atmosphere in a house of mourning. Mrs Dudgeon, sitting upright and pale with misery in a hard chair, one hand clenched around a crumpled handkerchief, looked uncomprehendingly into the fierce face then lowered her eyes.
Buttercup, predictably, boggled and shifted her feet and so it fell to me to sit down beside the woman and lay my hand over hers. The handkerchief was quite dry but as soon as I spoke – no more than saying her name – quantities of tears began at once to course down her cheeks and splash into her lap.
‘There, there,’ I said, thinking what an ineffectual little phrase that was, as Mrs Dudgeon spread out her handkerchief, pressed her face into it and wept with abandon.
‘Where might I put these things?’ said Buttercup in a panicked voice.
‘Aye, come away through the scullery,’ said the fierce companion. She put down the cooking pot she was drying, slammed it down actually, amongst the others still draining by the sink and led Buttercup out of the room. Mrs Dudgeon continued to sob and I continued to pat her shoulder and shush-shush uselessly.
I looked around the room as I did so, as though not to gawp at her shaking shoulders would afford her some dignity. It was a typical cottage kitchen-livingroom, more prosperous than some I had seen with its thick rug and good mahogany sideboard, but quite typical nonetheless. The range in the hearth was gleaming as was the kettle atop it, and on either side of it sat two comfortable chairs of the Windsor type, their seats adorned with cushions in knitted covers. Between them was one of the tiny wooden stools they call creepies in Perthshire, which I have always liked and long wished I could insinuate into my own sitting room somewhere. Another knitted cushion sat on this and, imagining the many evenings Mr and Mrs Dudgeon must have spent in these two chairs sharing the creepie stool between their four tired feet, I could quite see why she was perched comfortless at the table now. It would have been as unthinkable to sit in her chair and look at the emptiness opposite as it would be to sit in his chair where, if cottagers were like the rest of us, she would never have rested for a minute in her life. I withdrew my eyes from the morose tableau the armchairs made but, looking up at the mantelpiece, found no respite from the sorrow. I had forgotten what Mr Dudgeon had said last night, but there was the photograph of the young man, stiff although beaming, in a uniform so new that the sleeves and breeches’ legs stuck out like the paper clothes one cuts for dolls. Beside the picture was a spray of rosebuds tied with a ribbon of Black Watch tartan and below it little flat case, resting open, which I was sure would hold his medal. I looked away as a hard lump, impossible to swallow like one’s twentieth walnut, formed in my throat.
At last, Mrs Dudgeon’s sobs turned hoarse and dry and eventually stopped with a gulp. She raised her head and tried a small smile with trembling lips. It was not successful.
‘What must you think of me?’ she said, blowing her noise tremendously on the sodden handkerchief. I offered my own and she took it and wiped her eyes, which were spongy with weeping. I smiled at her.
‘I think what a man your husband must have been and how you must have loved him,’ I said.
I realized as soon as I had made it that this remark, honest as it might be, was hardly more helpful than grumpy housework in terms of comfort. It sent Mrs Dudgeon off into such a storm of weeping that I feared the dish-drying woman might come back and box my ears. What were she and Buttercup up to anyway? And yet, I do not know, for when Mrs Dudgeon finally raised her head from my shoulder again she did at least look cried out. She glanced at me and then looked beyond me to the window and out into the woods.
I heard movement from beyond the scullery door; Buttercup and the woman were returning.
‘Is there anyone we could fetch?’ I asked Mrs Dudgeon quickly, before I could be overheard. I only just managed not to say ‘anyone else’.
‘No, no,’ she said, still looking out into the fading light. ‘My sisters -' she began, then broke off as the door opened.
‘Very well, then,’ I said with one last pat on her hand, before settling back in my seat to a more normal social distance. Her sisters must be on their way, I thought. Much the best thing. They would soon see off the stop-gap.
Buttercup seemed mysteriously emboldened when she reappeared and started by assuring Mrs Dudgeon that the next day’s Ferry Fair was to be cancelled. The widow would not hear of this.
‘It’s not fair on the bairns,’ she said. ‘And Robert would never have wanted it.’
Perhaps encouraged by such doughtiness Buttercup then launched into relaying Inspector Cruickshank’s message, but at the news of the post-mortem and even more so at the news that her husband’s body was to be kept from her, Mrs Dudgeon’s store of courage ran out.