Searching for Shona (12 page)

“There’s no telling about that,” Miss Morag said. “It could go on for years.”

Years, thought Marjorie. Years before she could tell Shona about Jane Carruthers and Clairmont House. Years before she could find Marjorie Malcolm-Scott.

Chapter 12

Dr. Knight Gives Advice

Although Marjorie didn’t realize it at the time, the morning in March when she took the Qualifying Exam was to change her life almost as much as changing places with Shona in Waverley Station the September before.

She passed the exam with flying colors and was admitted to Nettleton Academy, twelve miles from Canonbie. For the next five years she caught the bus every school morning at eight o’clock and returned home at five in the evening. Isobel McKay had passed the exam, too, so the girls traveled together and continued to be friends.

During her first year at the academy, Marjorie was no longer able to shut out news of the war. The evacuation of Dunkirk in June was followed by frightened talk of invasion. There were terrible tales of the blitz in the south. Long convoys of lorries passed the house on their way to the army camp outside Canonbie, and occasionally tanks rumbled down the road, rattling the dishes on the sideboard. The Miss Campbells worked long hours at the Canteen, serving mugs of tea and thick sandwiches to tired soldiers on the troop trains. And Marjorie and Anna continued to knit khaki scarves and squares.

There were times during the next year when Marjorie envied Shona and wished that
she
had gone to Canada, which sounded a safer, happier place to be. But gradually the far-off days “before the war” became unreal, and for long stretches of time she never thought about Mrs. Kilpatrick or Uncle Fergus or even the real Shona. “After the war” was the time people talked about, but no longer believed in. Marjorie began to live completely in the present, worrying only about such things as homework and school friends and sweetie coupons and pocket money. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to live with the Miss Campbells and Anna. They had become a family.

Marjorie worked hard at school and always brought home good report cards. The Miss Campbells were very proud when they read the glowing remarks her teachers wrote.

“Perhaps some day you’ll go to the University in Edinburgh,” Miss Morag told her. “Quite a step up from going back to the orphanage!”

Because food was scarce, the Miss Campbells dug up their neat front lawn and planted potatoes, and when the egg ration fell to one egg a week, they decided to keep hens. Anna was delighted at this and went with Miss Morag over to see Mrs. Appleby at Escrigg Farm. They bought a broody hen (whom Anna called Jenny) and twelve eggs for Jenny to sit on. Jenny had such a voracious appetite that the Miss Campbells wondered if they would ever come out ahead, but when the chickens finally hatched Anna was so excited that they decided it was all worthwhile.

One year the summer holidays were shortened to three weeks, and then school closed again in late September and early October so that school children could help with the potato harvest. The farm workers were all off fighting or working in munitions factories. At first Anna and Marjorie enjoyed it, but it turned out to be such hard work that they were glad when school started again.

Anna continued to go to school in Canonbie and had made her own friends there, but her happiest hours were spent helping the Miss Campbells in the shop. The Miss Campbells often said they didn’t know how they had ever managed without her, although there was not much business now that clothes were rationed. However, people did eventually have to replace out-grown or out-worn garments and often bought ribbons or fancy buttons to give a new look to clothes they’d grown tired of.

When Anna was fourteen, she left school and went to work in the shop full time. By then Marjorie was sixteen and had decided she wanted to be a doctor. Although she could never have explained it to anyone, the decision was somehow tied in with Anna. There were ways in which Anna was really smart, but most people overlooked them, and Anna hadn’t learned a thing in all those years in school. If Marjorie had told people about wanting to help kids like Anna, they’d have said she should become a teacher, but that wasn’t Marjorie’s answer. She wanted to understand Anna’s problems, to know what made her different. At sixteen, however, you can’t tell people all your ambitions. Becoming a doctor was just the first step.

When the Miss Campbells learned of her plans, they were delighted. “But the question is, how am I going to pay for it?” Marjorie asked in a worried voice.

“You’ll get a government grant,” Miss Morag assured her. “Being an orphan, you’re entitled to the maximum. And you know that Agnes and I will be glad to give you money for extras.”

“So proud of you, we’ll be!” said Miss Agnes, looking up at Marjorie fondly. Marjorie was tall now and not as slim as she’d like to be. Six years of starchy food and living with Miss Morag who could not abide a picky eater had done that. Her hair was light brown and she wore it curled under in a pageboy. She didn’t look in the least like the dirty, woebegone child with the extraordinary haircut who had been assigned to Miss Agnes in the church hall long ago.

In March of 1945, Marjorie took her Higher Leaving Certificate exams and applied to Edinburgh University to study medicine.

And in May of 1945 the war ended. There were victory parades, street dances, and bonfires on every hilltop in Britain, and Marjorie thought she must be the only person in the whole country who was not completely happy.

In actual fact, there were thousands of people who shared Marjorie’s uncertainty about the future. Soldiers had to find civilian jobs, women lost their work in factories and offices, children had to learn to get along with fathers they hardly knew, and evacuees returned to homes they scarcely remembered.

The Miss Campbells had no trouble getting permission to become guardians of Marjorie and Anna. Marjorie had turned seventeen, so there was no question of her going back to the orphanage. But she did worry about what would happen to her plans for the future when Shona came home. She had sat all those exams using someone else’s name. Worse still, she had applied for a grant, claiming that she was a penniless orphan when she had a rich uncle to support her and probably quite a lot of money of her own.

All that summer the question of her true identity weighed heavily on her mind. She hated to hear the Miss Campbells bragging about her, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell them what was worrying her. She felt she’d been cheating them for six years.

She wondered, too, what she would tell Shona when they met. She hadn’t thought about how they had found Clairmont House or about Jane Carruthers for ages and wondered if it had all been their romantic imaginations. How old had she been then? Eleven?

One afternoon, she went up to her bedroom, reached under the bed, and dragged out the picture of Clairmont House. For a long time, she gazed at it, thinking more about Shona, who had treasured the painting, than about the picture itself. How had she got along with Uncle Fergus’s cousin and her family? It must have been a terrible strain for Shona, who had grown up in an orphanage, to suddenly find herself surrounded by relatives she didn’t know, who wanted to hear all about relatives she was supposed to know!

Marjorie wished Shona could have been there when they discovered the turret room. Then she remembered the diary. If only she’d taken it so that she had something to give Shona when they met. Perhaps it was still there, lying unnoticed in the toy cupboard. She would go and find out.

Marjorie pushed the painting back under the bed and ran downstairs and outside. She hadn’t been past Clairmont House for a long time, but she knew that the soldiers had moved out so the house was unoccupied. She wasn’t sure, however, that she would have the nerve to go inside. She walked down the road telling herself that she would, at least, look at it one more time.

When she got there, she paused at the gate and then stared in astonishment. She was looking at the Clairmont House of the picture. The gates hung open, bent and rusted, and the huge stone gateposts leaned at drunken angles. They must have been hit many times by carelessly driven army lorries. The stone ball from the top of one pillar lay on the grass. It was just a stone ball, not a skull, but she thought that perhaps if the shadows were different, the chips might look like eye sockets. The grass was long, the flower borders overgrown with rank weeds, and the shrubbery an impenetrable jungle of branches and nettles. The house looked empty and forbidding. One upstairs window was broken and in another the glass had been replaced with raw boards.

How could Robert McInnes have known when he painted the picture that it would one day look like this? It was as if he had been able to see the future, as if he had stepped outside time….

The thought overwhelmed her, and she decided she wasn’t going to go inside the house after all. She would go home. As she turned to go, Dr. Knight’s car drew up beside her.

“The Miss Campbells tell me you want to be a doctor, Shona,” he said, his friendly eyes twinkling behind his thick-lensed glasses. He was a bewhiskered old man now, and Marjorie was fond of him.

“I leave for Edinburgh next week,” she said.

“A first rate place to study,” he told her. “I went there myself. But what are you doing here?”

“I was just out for a walk. Anna and I used to play here.”

“A friend of mine is thinking of buying this house for an old peoples’ home and he wanted me to look it over,” Dr. Knight said. “I’m sure it’s hopeless—all these drafty rooms and stairs—but would you like to come inside with me and have a look around?”

“Oh, yes!” Marjorie said eagerly.

Dr. Knight had a key so, for the first time, Marjorie entered by the front door. They went through the house, and Dr. Knight sighed and shook his head as he went into each room. The floors were scarred from hobnailed boots, the woodwork burned with discarded cigarettes, and the whole place was in a sad state of dirt and confusion.

“We may as well go, Shona. This place will never be suitable. Goodness knows what will become of it.”

“There’s one more room we haven’t seen,”Marjorie said shyly. “The little playroom in the turret.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Anna and I went in there a couple of times—before the soldiers took over.”

As they walked through the hall and up the stairs, she told him about Anna’s running away and about the day the soldiers nearly caught them.

“You two young girls must have led the Miss Campbells quite a dance,” Dr. Knight said, his eyes twinkling again.

“I’m afraid we did,” Marjorie said.

They had reached the turret room, and Marjorie pushed the door open eagerly only to find that the room was practically bare. She gazed around, overcome with anger and disappointment. The empty cupboard, the carpet, and the curtains were still there, but the little desk and chair, the couch, the toys and books were all gone. And there was no sign of the diary.

“You should have seen it. It was such a perfect little room,” Marjorie said, her eyes brimming with tears.

“The war destroyed a lot of things, Shona,” Dr. Knight said soberly. “But sometimes I think some good things came out of the war, too. Look how much you and Anna have done for Agnes and Morag Campbell.”

“What do you mean?” Marjorie asked. “The Miss Campbells have done everything for us, not the other way around.”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Knight. “You girls brought a whole new interest into their lives. Before you came they were two fussy, self-centered, middle-aged ladies. They were always coming to see me with odd ailments—most of them imaginary. After you two came I’ve scarcely seen them. More girls like you scattered around and my practice wouldn’t be worth a darn!”

“You wouldn’t say things like that—not if you really knew me!” Marjorie burst out. “You see I’m not Shona McInnes. I’ve been cheating everyone all these years.”

Dr. Knight looked surprised but said nothing as Marjorie launched into the long story of her deception. When she finished, Dr. Knight crossed the room to the window seat and sat down, patting the seat beside hem. “Sit down here, my dear,” he said. “We’ll take all that over again—slowly”

Dr. Knight listened to the story once again, shaking his head from time to time.

“And you’ve never heard a word from this Marjorie whoever?” he asked. “Not even now with the war over?”

“I don’t see how she’d know where to write,” Marjorie answered.

“I expect she could find you through the orphanage records if she wanted to. But why should she want to?”

“So she could be herself again, I suppose,” Marjorie said slowly. “I was the one who suggested it, you know. And what will happen to me when they discover I took all the exams under the wrong name when I really do have money?”

“It seems that the other girl has the money,” Dr. Knight said. “What I want to know is, do
you
want to change back? Do you want to find your Uncle Fergus again?”

Marjorie shook her head. “I think of the Miss Campbells and Anna as my family now. And I really
do
want to be a doctor, and that’s not the sort of thing Uncle Fergus would want for his niece. His friend’s daughters went to boarding schools and finishing schools, though I suppose the war has ended some of that. I
do
want to be something useful, Dr. Knight, and I’m so worried about what will happen when people find out.”

“You leave it to me,” Dr. Knight answered. “I’ll vouch for your character. But, you know, I think that when you go to Edinburgh you’ve got to try and find this Marjorie person. For your own sake and for hers. You should both face up to what you did, though as I see it, that’s for the two of you to work out. Now, let’s get along home. It’s almost time for evening surgery.”

Chapter 13

Willowbrae Road