no satisfaction from it since he didn’t notice. His arm swung up, pointing. “Look! This is where Patrick stood. You remember the photo – Patrick and the mule, halfway between the buttresses? Of course the water jets weren’t there then. Go and stand in front of them. I’ll take your picture.”
She did not want to stand where Patrick had; it did not matter that she would stand before a rebuilt magnificence of creamy stone and fluttering pennants; in her mind’s eye she saw smashed ruins and hillocks of broken stone, sullen grey fading to colourlessness, and Patrick grinning and holding a mule by a rope.
She blinked away the image and stood half-paralysed by the same creeping unease which had squirmed inside her since their arrival in Ieper. It was like nausea, only warmer. She had felt it on the Ramparts, at the Flanders Museum, and now at the Cloth Hall, and it made her want to run away, to run and run and run. She had told Gavin about the squirmy feeling but he said that at only two months gone, nothing could possibly be moving yet, that she mustn’t get broody. She mustn’t.
“Kate!” He flapped his hand at her.
She steeled herself and crossed to the rectangular pond sunk into the stone. Its honour guard of thin water jets arched high and crystal cold into brilliant blue sky; she stood in front of them, trying to smile, but she could
“What mist?” Gavin had said when she mentioned it. “The air is clear as a bell.”
Then she had known and understood; now she struggled to stand still for the photo. She wanted to run. She wanted to be sick.
“Say cheese, Kate! Smile a while!”
In a sudden light wind, the tall jets hunched over, shivered, and broke into icy rags and tatters. Bright water sprayed across her face, startling her into laughter. Gavin’s camera whirred happily.
“That’s more like it, Kate. You don’t laugh often enough. Not much at all these days.”
He slipped an arm round her as they walked away. “You have diamond droplets on your eyelashes.” He fished out a handkerchief and dabbed the spray from her eyes. “You’re the prettiest girl in town when you’re smiling and sparkly.” He drew her closer. She was embarrassed by a surge of relief at the return of tenderness. “By the end of next week it will all be over and everything back to normal.”
He was quietly insistent. All-be-over was scheduled for next Friday lunchtime, a quick and unremarkable medical procedure, but he did not trust her acquiescence. He did not want children; neither did she. But still he must constantly be reassured that she was going through with all-be-over; that they would continue with the life they had planned together, their cycle of travelling, meeting up with friends, lounging at their summer house in Eire, buying expensive items for their stately Victorian flat in Glasgow. The flat and its pale deep rugs and polished floors were his major arguments against children: imagine sticky fingers! Roller blades! The danger to the Rennie McIntosh glass! He laughed to prove the joke, but he meant it all, and watched her constantly, looking for changes in her, wordlessly demanding that she be as she had always been.
“You should have a special time next weekend,” he said, to reward her smiles. “What kind of pampering would you like?”
I would like, she thought, to be allowed to be a little affected by about-to-be-over, just a little; and I would like not to be affected by this place. But neither was likely and she could not share the unease with him.
They were still walking in the shadow of the hall, a shadow deep and dark, even on this bright day. The chill seeped up through the paving, wrapped round her and slid inside the collar of her jacket.
“You’ve gone quite pale,” he said.
“I’m cold.”
“There’s a cafe,” he said. “Let’s have a hot chocolate. Warm us up.”
She smelled the chocolate in the air, wafting round her face, warm and rich; she felt fingers of cold ruffle the hairs at the nape of her neck. She retched. Gavin let go of her suddenly.
“Morning sickness. You haven’t had that before,” he said accusingly.
“It’s the chocolate. The smell is over sweet.”
He swept her past the cafe. “I thought we’d agreed we’re not having any of that nonsense!”
But it wasn’t
Rowan lived in a white croft which dreamed by the side of the loch at Inverash. Kate visited her for a month every year in the summer holidays. There she could look up to the sky and study the frail white elegance of trailing clouds, and down at still water and see the pale shadows of sky; she could look into Rowan’s eyes and see traces of a blue clear as the summer loch, clouded now by great old age, and hear her say, “Patrick had the same blue eyes, like mine, like yours.”
As a child, Kate, standing on tiptoe, had puzzled over the old photographs ranged along the tall wooden mantelpiece, trying to see the blue. But the smiling boy in the stiff new uniform was a composition in shades of shadow; even the tartan trews and diced cap, which she knew to be bright coloured, were grey and greyish and darker grey. The eyes, though, had a curious lightness, and smiled mischief directly at her wherever she stood in the room. The other brothers, Alexander and Charlie, stared sightlessly into the distance, but Patrick sought her out. Even aged seven, she knew that Patrick knew her. And being only seven, she thought nothing of it; Rowan was comfortable with Patrick and Charlie and Alexander, and therefore so was she. She looked at their photos and their battered old school books. (“That’s a Latin grammar,” Rowan said of the one with the blue cloth cover and the gold stamp. “That was Patrick’s. He was clever. He was going to the University at Glasgow, but then the war came.”)
For years, Kate had thought the war ended in June 1917, because after that date, Rowan had nothing to say about it. But time was a confused concept at Inverash. Every Sunday afternoon, Rowan and she went to the rowan tree at the gate to polish the sixpenny pieces nailed to its bark. In June the blossom hung low in thick creamy clusters and, while Kate polished, Rowan used to pick some and thread it into Kate’s hair while she told the story of the sixpences as if for the first time.
“The boys carved their initials there before they went away. There, see? C. A. P., one on top of the other, 1914. And after Charlie and Alex were killed, and Patrick lost, all three in 1917, my father used to scrape the initials clean of lichen every now and then. Mother had a sixpence which Charlie had in his pocket when he was killed. It was new-minted, a 1917 coin, and somehow she could not bring herself to spend it. And whenever she got another 1917 sixpence, she could not spend that either, so she kept them in a jam-jar on the windowsill. And then one warm June night, two years after the war was over, she woke to find Father gone from the bed and heard banging and cursing. He was out at the gate in the moonlight with the jar of coins, a hammer, and long thin nails, and he was hammering sixpences into the initials to make them permanent. And with one bang he’d cry ‘My sons! My sons!’ and with the next a curse word, and the blossom, all ghostly white in the moonlight, showered from the tree and lay in his hair and round his feet. He hammered in a new date too: 1917. Mother was afraid that night, for he hammered like a devil in hell, he who had been a tower of strength, never shedding so much as a tear for his sons, but going about his business as usual, straight-backed and quiet-spoken. She brought him back to bed eventually and the floor and the quilt and the pillows were thick with the little flowers and their heady perfume. It was days
