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Authors: Catriona McPherson

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BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

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From the first-floor balcony below looking up, there was no more to be seen. No ledge, no opening with black curtains, just blank wall painted in the same cream colour and dappled by the sun through the stained-glass window. An assistant, one I did not recognise, saw me standing there staring, and frowned at me. I flushed, dropped my head and left Aitkens’ – Fair Ladies, as it was now – knowing I would never return.

It took quite some time on the rattling little motorbus out from Waverley station into the rolling hills of East Lothian. I had never been here before, except for whisking past on a London-bound train, but at first glance it appealed to me. The sky was larger than in Perthshire, making me think of Suffolk and those roiling clouds which take up half Constable’s canvas sometimes. This spring day the sky was a gentle blue, almost white at the horizon but pale even high above my head, and the drive, long and straight, passed between two rows of birches, just putting on their fresh green coats for the year.

The main house stood foursquare at the top of the drive but behind and around it I could see numerous little white bungalows with red roofs and blue paint. There were white fences around tiny gardens and only the slopes instead of steps at every door hinted that this village was unusual in any way.

The big front door stood open and I stepped in, quite diffidently but not wanting to take someone from a more important task to come and welcome me. A corridor led away towards sunlight at the back of the house and I ventured along it, coming out eventually into a kind of solarium or orangery. It was very warm, but still most of the ladies were tucked up under knee-blankets and with shawls around their shoulders. I looked around them, nodding in answer to their smiles and waves, for they were all pleased to see a visitor, even a strange one, and then at last I heard a cry of greeting.

Mary Aitken, sitting upright and smiling in her bath-chair, beckoned to me.

‘Mrs Gilver,’ she said, and my heart leapt with pleasure. It was not distinct. ‘Mezzz Gilluh’ would be the best approximation, but she was speaking and my greeting to her was not diplomacy.

‘Mrs Aitken. My, you look
well
!’ I bent and kissed her cheek. ‘I didn’t expect to see you looking so well. How are you?’

‘Peace,’ she said and she breathed out, long and slow, smiling even wider. She had cut her hair, I saw, a remarkable development for any woman her age and especially so for the Mrs Aitken I remembered. It fell around her face in soft white waves and, as though it had been that scraped bun keeping all the tension there, her face seemed to have softened too. Of course on one side the muscles were almost dead, but that is not what one noticed about her. Rather one saw the clear eyes, and pink glow to her skin, and then noted too the way she sat with her hands folded calmly. I gathered that Mrs Ninian of Aitkens’ was pretty much gone.

‘Peace,’ I repeated, thinking that she had been due some, always worrying and scrabbling and fearful that the price she had paid was too high for whatever she had won.

‘Poor Bella,’ murmured Mary. ‘Prison.’ She looked around herself at the sunny room and the view of the gardens with the little white cottages dotted all around. Then she sat forward and gave me a closer look, a faint echo of Mrs Ninian from the old days. ‘Jack?’ I wondered what she knew and wondered even more what to tell her. As if reading my thoughts, she thumped herself on the chest. ‘Strong,’ she said. ‘Brave. Now.’

‘You always were brave,’ I answered. ‘And strong. Very well. Jack is living with Hilda Haddo at Abbey Park. And Fiona too. They seem to be running Aitkens’ together. Lots of changes.’

‘Pretty,’ said Mrs Aitken, and it was halfway to a question.

I nodded. ‘Pretty as a sugarplum,’ I said. ‘Does it upset you?’

‘A shop,’ she said. ‘Building. Money. Pff!’ She batted it away from herself with a backwards flap of her hand. Then she looked beyond me and her smile widened again. I turned. Abigail Aitken was there, dressed in starched blue cotton with her heavy hair plaited and pinned to her head.

‘Mrs—’ I bit my tongue. ‘Abby,’ I said and stood to embrace her. Then I held her at arm’s length. ‘You look like a nurse.’

‘I am a nurse,’ she said, laughing a little. ‘Well, a nurse’s help, anyway. I’ll never forget how hopeless I was that day when Mother was first ill and how splendid you were. I was determined to make improvements!’ She beamed at me. ‘Besides, it’s the only way we can afford to stay here.’

‘I don’t blame you for wanting to,’ I said, looking around again. ‘It’s lovely.’

‘The sisters,’ said Abigail and the seal flipped inside me again, but I had misunderstood her. ‘The sisters are very devout but really quite jolly. Most of them are a lot jollier than me!’

‘Get there,’ said Mary, and Abigail patted her shoulder and bestowed a smile on her that had as much devout devotion as filial devotion in it. I could see Abigail Aitken going from nurse’s help to nun, if Mary lived long enough to give her the chance of it.

‘So, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, ‘shall we go over now and then come back and have luncheon with Mother?’ I nodded and, although I had thought my steeling myself was subtly done, Mary leaned over and took my hand again.

‘All right,’ she told me and squeezed hard.

We made for a cottage quite a way from the main house beyond a stand of spreading oaks, in a little green dip of land with a view of a pond. Abigail opened the gate in the white fence and ushered me ahead of her.

‘Just go in,’ she said. ‘They’re expecting you.’

My heart was hammering as I lifted the latch and opened the front door into a tiny hallway.

‘In here, Mrs Gilver,’ a voice called. I turned to the left and entered the sitting room.

‘Oh my!’ I said and before I could stop them my eyes filled with tears and spilled over.

They must have been in their fifties by now, but their faces were unlined by any worries and unmarked by troubles overcome, so that they looked like children still. Soft brown hair growing in feathery wisps and bright eyes in their three little heart-shaped faces, soft, slight little figures in their cotton dresses.

‘This is Dora, my eldest,’ Dulcie said, resting a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. ‘And Lucy. And this is Winifred. Smile for Mrs Gilver, girls.’ All three of them gave me wide smiles of utter innocence and the vision flashed before my eyes of that photograph of Mirren at the party in her lacy dress with orchids in her hair. Then one of them – Lucy – put up her arms to me and I stepped forward to hug her.

‘They don’t speak, Mrs Gilver,’ said Dulcie. ‘Ruth was the only one of my girls who ever spoke. Mama, she would say.’ Dulcie pointed to the chimneypiece where a photograph of another of these girls sat in a wooden frame.

‘She had a heart attack,’ Dulcie said. Absent-mindedly she lifted the little frame and polished it on her sleeve as I had seen her do with the arm of her chair at Roseville that day. ‘And please don’t look sideways at the frame. I would have solid gold and rubies, but someone’ – she turned back to the room and put her hands on her hips – ‘likes shiny things a little too much. Doesn’t she, Winifred Hepburn, eh?’ Winifred giggled but I rather thought she was responding to the smile and the sound of her name than the joke. She slipped down a bit in her chair with the laughing and Abigail hurried over to lift her up and pack her cushions around tightly again. Winifred, guilty as charged, it seemed, reached out and grasped the gold cross which swung free from Abby’s neck as she bent forward. With infinite patience, Abigail tickled the girl’s wrist until she let go again and then tucked the cross back inside her collar.

‘Abigail is a born nurse,’ said Dulcie, still smiling.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Abby. ‘I like taking care of my sisters,’ she said this a little shyly, ‘but as for some of the ladies who come to recuperate for a month! I smile and do as I’m bidden but I say plenty under my breath in the sluice room, I can tell you.’

‘I was a nurse in the war,’ I said. It seemed to be what was expected, to sit and talk as though in any sitting room, in any company, while the three Hepburn sisters looked around and smiled and slowly lost interest in the new arrivals and returned to their inner calm. ‘Soldiers. It was pretty horrid, sometimes.’

‘Yes,’ said Dulcie. ‘We do very well here without men.’

‘My sisters have hardly ever seen a man,’ Abigail said. She used the word more boldly this time. ‘I don’t pity them.’

‘They seem to be doing very nicely on it,’ I agreed. ‘And do you live here in the cottage as well, Mrs Hepburn?’

Dulcie nodded. ‘Every third night one of the sisters comes instead and I go and sleep in the main house. Night-times can be difficult, you see. I used to have my own room, for when I visited, but now I share with my . . .’ She stopped and both she and Abigail gave uneasy little laughs. ‘We’ve been trying to decide,’ she said. ‘Something to say to stop questions from new staff, you know. God-daughter, I think we settled on, didn’t we, Abby?’

I nodded, but inside I was beginning to shudder. Anything less godly than the relation between these two women was hard to imagine, one the by-blow of the other’s husband and her son’s mistress too. Thankfully I managed to think my thoughts while showing none of them. At least, perhaps Fiona Haddo would have said, ‘Oh, I know,’ and raised that arched eyebrow, but Dulcie and Abigail had half their attention on the three girls.

I left them soon afterwards, making my way alone back to Mary in the sunroom. Which path would I have taken if life had worked that way? If one could choose one’s fate from a display on a shop floor and had it made up to fit one? Would I be Hilda Haddo playing at shops again in another store with another man in charge of me, or would I be Abigail Aitken, back in her mother’s heart and with Dulcie as a second mother should Mary’s frail health fail, here playing at houses in that little white cottage with three rosy-cheeked dolls?

Neither, I decided, and I would not be Jack nor Robin nor Fiona nor Bob nor, God knows, Bella. I rummaged in my pocket. Miss Armstrong had been keeping these tucked away on her private shelf in the staff cloakroom all through the closing, refitting and reopening of the Emporium. I rubbed my thumb over the black letters, feeling the good deep engraving and reading the words again with a swell of pride.
Gilver and Osborne. Servants of Truth
.

I would not even swap places with Alec. I was very glad indeed that, out of everyone around, I was me.

Postscript

15th May 1927

Darling,

I wish you would tell me what is wrong. I cannot imagine what it is I have done to make you angry with me or what someone might have said to turn you against me so. If you refuse to meet me or speak to me when I ring you up how can I make it right again? I know that you love me as I love you and I am going to trust that whatever has happened to upset you it will pass and you will be my same old darling again soon.

Your Dearest xxx

17th May 1927

Dearest,

We have had more happy times this spring than some people get in their lifetimes and must count ourselves fortunate for them. I will treasure the memory of your love as long as I live. I am not what you thought I was and not what I myself thought I was either. I cannot explain and I must not see you again but you surely know that my heart is yours for ever.

Your Darling xxx

Facts and Fictions

Abbey Park at 15 Abbey Park Place is a real house in Dunfermline. Once a bank, later the headquarters of the Carnegie Trust, in 1927 it was owned by an American by the name of Bishop. I have evicted Dr Bishop and moved the Aitkens in.

Aitkens’ Emporium and the House of Hepburn are imaginary. Hepburns’ is imagined to be diagonally oppposite the tolbooth and Aitkens’ is next door to the Guildhall.

Bank House and Roseville are based on two real houses in Dumfries and Galloway which I have hauled north and plopped down in Dunfermline where I needed them, opposite the Guildhall and in place of Broomfield Drive respectively.

Needless to say, none of the Aitkens or Hepburns (or others in the book) are based on real people, except for Lynne McWilliam of the Gowns Department at Aitkens’, who got her name courtesy of Mrs Lynne McWilliam of New Abbey, the winner of a character name competition. My good luck with suitable winning names continues.

Also by the same author

After the Armistice Ball

The Burry Man’s Day

Bury Her Deep

The Winter Ground

Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

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