The Shadow of the Sycamores (47 page)

The tears spilled over. ‘My father threw me out … because of the baby.’

Billy raised his eyebrows hopefully and Henry nodded his agreement. ‘You’d best come home wi’ us, then.’

‘But … what about … your wife? What’ll she say?’

‘Fay’ll not mind,’ Billy said unexpectedly.

Henry didn’t contradict him. A baby to look after might be what his wife needed to get her back on track again. ‘Everything’s going to be fine, lass,’ he assured the girl.

Everything
was
fine. There was one more to feed but two more hands to the plough, as the farmers would say. Fay was delighted to have an infant to attend to and young Maggie was only needed to feed him. Pressed to give him a name, she plumped for Henry, who said, ‘No, we don’t want two Henrys in the house.’

After some thought, Maggie remembered how she had admired the hero in
Little Women
and called her son Laurie.

‘But his real name was Laurence,’ Mara pointed out.

‘I know but I like Laurie better.’

They all did, although little Laurie would have kept on
smiling and gurgling with laughter no matter what he was called.

It was Henry who approached the rather delicate subject of registering his birth. ‘It’s the law,’ he explained, ‘and I’ll come wi’ you if you want. You can wait till he’s older before you have him baptised.’

A Registry Office for Births, Marriages and Deaths had been introduced to the town many years before so it was not the church’s Session Clerk they had to approach. When the Registrar – George Mavor, grandson of Willie Rae’s old drinking crony – asked Maggie for the father’s name, she turned to Henry in some confusion. ‘I don’t want to land him in trouble.’

‘Just put in your own name, then,’ Henry suggested, and, although Mavor frowned when he learned that she was not quite sixteen, the infant was registered as Laurie Fiddes.

Most of the concerts and parties put on as celebrations for the coronation held no appeal for any of the Rae household but, when Henry said there was to be a dance the next Saturday night, Billy said shyly, ‘Would you let me take Maggie? She needs some enjoyment.’

Getting unanimous approval, he put the question to the girl herself and was disappointed that she didn’t seem too keen. ‘It’ll be good fun,’ he coaxed her.

‘I can’t dance,’ she whispered tearfully.

‘That doesn’t matter; we can watch everybody else. Anyway, the last dance I went to, half the people couldn’t dance but they soon picked it up.’

Mara altered one of her old summer dresses for the girl, a pale blue shirtwaister, and, to brighten it a bit, she embroidered a few lazy-daisies, white with yellow French knots in the centre, on the left shoulder. On the actual day, she washed Maggie’s long hair and brushed it into ringlets, with the result that the girl drew loud gasps of admiration when she came into the kitchen, ready to go.

She looked the picture of health now. Instead of the poor little waif she had been when Billy found her, her face and figure
had rounded out, her chestnut hair shone like well-buffed bronze. Her blue eyes had lost their look of fear and worry and she even whistled gaily as she went about her chores, despite Fay’s caution that it wasn’t ladylike. The blue dress finished the transformation from pretty girl to lovely young woman.

This was the first of many outings she had with Billy, whose well-scrubbed face was now sporting a light coating of fair down on chin and upper lip.

‘Shouldn’t I be shaving?’ he asked Henry one day, as they set off on their daily rounds, his much larger than the older man’s now.

‘Time enough, yet.’ Henry ran his hand proudly over his neatly trimmed beard and thick moustache, both an impressive silver-white. Then, seeing how disappointed the young man was, he corrected himself. ‘Aye, I suppose you should be shaving. I’ll give you a shot o’ my old cut-throat but you’ll need to take care. One slip and you could lose your nose.’

They both smiled at that and the three females had great amusement as they watched Billy giving himself his first shave, very carefully. Fay, however, reprimanded her husband later for giving him such a dangerous implement. ‘What if he cuts himself?’

‘I used to nick myself every day,’ Henry grinned, ‘and I’m still here to tell the tale. Tell me this, my Fairy. Do you like my whiskers? You’ve never said one way or the other.’

‘Well, I didn’t like them at first,’ she admitted. ‘They tickled when you kissed me goodnight but they made you look real smart in your dress uniform.’

‘Aye,’ he said, regretfully. He probably would never have a chance to wear it again. ‘D’you mind that picture Jack Rennie took to put in the
Advertiser
at the time of George V’s coronation? Even if I say it myself, I was a fine figure of a man then.’

‘Indeed you were.’

‘Not now, though. My back’s getting bowed, I’m tottery on my legs when I’m tired and my brow’s got that many wrinkles it’s like a sheet o’ corrugated iron.’

His wife held out her arm and patted his hand. ‘No, no, my Tchouki. You’ll always be the handsome young man who came into the druggist shop to get his thumb bandaged. I remember it as if it were yesterday.’

‘And I can remember how bonnie you were … no, my Fairy Fay, you’re still bonnie. Bonnier than any other woman I’ve ever known.’ He pulled her face nearer so that he could kiss her.

Coming in from hanging out the nappies she had washed, Mara said, ‘Ho ho! What’s this? You should leave the kissing to youngsters like Maggie and Billy.’

‘You don’t think they’re …?’ Fay murmured in surprise. ‘They’re far too young to be kissing.’

Henry gave a loud guffaw. ‘No younger than we were, my Fairy, and I’ve never regretted a minute of our married life.’

‘Neither have I,’ she assured him but her face showed that she was a little perturbed about their young lodgers.

She was also very much afraid that young Billy would give himself a nasty cut with the open blade when he was shaving and made Mara buy a safety razor for him.

Only about three weeks later, Henry had a nasty shock. He hadn’t felt like going to kirk with the young folk and had spent the forenoon pottering about the little garden at the rear of the house. Fay had been the gardener at one time and then Billy had stepped in when she took on looking after little Laurie. But he felt he really should do it himself as master of the house. He was leaning on the hoe catching his breath when Jim Barron looked over the wall.

‘I thought I might find you here, Henry.’

‘You thought right, then, Provost.’ Henry was not too taken with the current holder of the position, who had taken over from Leslie Main about a month before. There was something about him – he was younger, of course, though that didn’t necessarily count against him.

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. At the council meeting last night, the motion was made that … we should … ask you to retire.’

‘And it was carried unanimously?’ Henry smiled.

Barron shifted uneasily. ‘Not exactly unanimously.’

‘No matter, I’ve been expecting it. Will young Billy be getting the job?’

The Provost’s face, already pink with embarrassment, turned a deep crimson. ‘Um … not exactly. The feeling was that we need more than one street sweeper to clean the town properly and we will be appointing an overseer and three men, Billy being one.’

Henry gave a relieved sigh. ‘As long as he still has a job.’

‘Oh, yes, he will still have a job but there is one more thing, Henry. This house was … um … it came with the job if you can remember that far back?’

‘I’m surprised you can remember, Provost.’ His sarcasm was lost.

‘I don’t remember, of course, but it’s on record. It was part of your salary and, now that you will no longer be working for the council …’

His heart heavy, Henry said, with forced brightness, ‘You want me to move out? Is that it?’

‘We would like you to vacate the premises as soon as possible.’

‘There’s more than Fay and me in the house now.’ Henry realised that it was probably useless but it was worth a try.

‘So I believe and … um … that is another thing, isn’t it? The house was provided for you and your immediate family – not for the waifs and strays you seem to have a habit of picking up.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean, Provost, and I assure you that we will leave the house as we found it – in a better state than we found it – but that’s neither here nor there. If you give me a date, I’ll make sure it is kept.’

The florid-faced man seemed even more uneasy. ‘Your retiral date is one week from yesterday and it was agreed that we should give you another week to vacate the house. That lets our overseer take over his post on the first of May.’

Henry held his head erect, despite feeling that his whole
body was caving in, but not one glimmer of a clue to his despair would he give this upstart. ‘Very well, Provost. It will be as you say. I will stop working as from next Saturday and leave the house free for the Saturday after that. Good day to you.’

He felt sick when he went inside, his whole body trembling with anger, with fear for the future. ‘I’ve to retire next Saturday,’ he told Fay who looked at him speculatively.

‘You’ve been expecting it, though?’

‘Aye but I wasn’t expecting the rest. We’ve to give up the house in another two weeks.’ Then his voice broke and he sat down with his head between his hands.

‘But that’s ridiculous!’

‘That’s what the Provost told me just now. Be out two weeks from yesterday. I should have minded the house went wi’ the job.’

‘But think of the length of service you’ve given them. They should have presented you with the deeds – that would have been little enough thanks.’

‘Well, well, it hasn’t happened like that. We’ll just have to shift – lock, stock and barrel – and there’s plenty of us to leave the place spotless.’

‘I would rather leave it like a pigsty,’ Fay declared uncharacteristically.

‘No, I don’t want to give Jim Barron anything to complain about.’

‘Is Billy to get your job? If he is, couldn’t we still …?’

She was angrier than ever when he told her what was to happen. ‘What about a bell-ringer and court usher? Have they engaged somebody for that?’

‘He never said but my guess is they’ll do away with that side of the job. Times have changed, you know.’

Neither of them slept a wink that night, agonising over where they could go, but, in the morning, Fay said, ‘We had better tell the others. Five heads will be better than two. The trouble is we’ll need a house big enough for us all. It would be awful if we had to split up.’

‘It’ll not come to that, my Fairy,’ Henry assured her, although
he couldn’t think how to prevent it. They could never afford to buy a house and the ordinary council houses were far too small for them. Even if they did offer him one, which didn’t appear to be on their agenda, they certainly wouldn’t offer him two.

Despite Henry telling Mara that she shouldn’t spend so much of her inheritance, she had bought back Oak Cottage. Willie Rae had left it to his daughter Kitty but circumstances had forced her to sell it a few years later.

When Jeffrey Kelly, Mara’s ex-boss’s son, told her that the present owners of Oak Cottage had put it up for sale, she knew that this was the answer to her family’s problem. Filled with excited anticipation, she had written to her aunt in London – without telling her parents – to ask what she thought of the idea.

Kitty, of course, wrote back to Mara by return, saying that she was really pleased that Oak Cottage would belong to the Raes once again and Mara presented the letter to her parents with a proud flourish. It took a tremendous effort – with young Billy’s help – to make them see that it was the best thing for all of them but, succeeding at last, she put the matter in Jeffrey Kelly’s hands, stressing the urgency of the matter.

The entry date had been quite acceptable to the Macleans, the fourth occupiers since it was sold, who had been finding it too big. They had been thinking of moving to Aberdeen but hadn’t quite made up their minds so the offer of a quick sale with entry within a week made the decision for them.

The house in Mid Street had been cleaned from top to bottom, five pairs of hands making light work of it even in the short time available, and Henry had told Mrs Maclean, ‘Leave the house the way it is and don’t worry. There’s plenty of us to see to things after we’re in.’

So the move had been made on the requested date, furniture and all, because the Provost had graciously told Henry to empty
the house of all the previous Town Officer’s furniture as well as their own possessions. It hadn’t taken them long to get everything organised in Oak Cottage to their satisfaction and there was much more room for them all.

Life had been sailing more or less on an even keel since they took up residence. Billy was now courting Maggie quite openly but his dissatisfaction with his job – which had been building up for some time – came to a head in June of 1939. ‘I’m tired of being at everybody’s beck and call,’ he said while they were having supper one night. He looked round the other four but his eyes came to rest on his sweetheart. ‘I’m going to join the army,’ he said quietly. ‘They’ll be needing every man they can get if it comes to war.’

‘Oh no, Billy,’ Maggie exclaimed, her face blanching. ‘I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to leave me.’

‘I’d have liked to marry you first but I’ve nothing to offer you.’

‘I don’t need you to offer me anything. I’ll marry you as soon as you want.’

He turned to Fay now. ‘I’m sorry I brought it up when we’re eating. I’ll take Maggie for a walk and we’ll have a proper talk about it.’

The talk of war had made Fay’s stomach judder. She had lost her younger son to a war, her son-in-law as a result of war and she couldn’t bear the thought of this young man, as dear to her as Jerry and Leo had been, putting himself in danger but she could say nothing.

The rest of the meal was taken in silence but, when the boy and girl went out, Henry rose to put his arm round his wife’s shoulders. ‘I can tell what you’re thinking, my Fairy Fay, but he’ll have to make up his own mind. And Maggie and all – she’ll have to think of wee Laurie before she decides anything.’