When the Lights Come on Again (17 page)

‘I should think so too,’ he murmured. ‘Insulting a chap’s mother like that. Not quite the thing, you know, dear gel.’

He was putting it on. He had to be. Quite that posh he wasn’t. But she had been terribly rude. She apologized again. He waved a languid hand.

‘Think nothing of it. I have to admit that my mother in full flow is quite a prospect. It’s a bit like a natural phenomenon - a river bursting its banks or those pictures of streams of molten lava in Iceland that you see on the newsreels. Personally, I think that if the Germans knew we had her on our side, they’d sue for peace straightaway. The people of Czechoslovakia could sleep safe in their beds at night.’

He was doing it again - talking nonsense until she had recovered. Helen was right. Adam Buchanan was a very nice man - even if he did talk posh.

‘Can I call you Elizabeth?’

‘I only get Elizabeth from my father - usually when I’ve done something wrong,’ she responded, giving him a smile in return for his own. ‘You said that your friends call you Adam. Mine call me Liz.’

He extended his hand across the narrow café table. ‘Hello, Liz.’

‘Hello, Adam.’

His grip was firm, and this time the touch of his warm hand didn’t make her feel at all uncomfortable.

‘So, Elizabeth called Liz, have you always wanted to be a nurse?’

‘Since I was wee,’ she confided. ‘I used to bandage my dolls and pretend to take their temperature - my brother too when he’d let me. I would tuck them up in bed and pretend to nurse them. And I took the pillowcase off my bed and fastened it around my head with pins so that I looked the part.’ She made a face, laughing at herself. ‘Daft, eh?’

‘Not daft at all,’ he assured her.

He was real easy to talk to. Liz found herself telling him things she hadn’t even told Helen, like about the time she had spent at Blawarthill as a child, how lost and alone she had felt until the nurse there had been kind to her.

‘That must have been tough.’

‘No doubt it was very character-building.’

‘I’m sure,’ he said politely. ‘Probably what made you want to be a nurse, as you say. Would you like another coffee?’

She shook her head. ‘No thanks. I’d better be getting home. My mother’ll be up on the ceiling if I’m not back soon.’

‘I’ll take you,’ he said immediately. He lifted a hand to forestall the protest Liz had started to make. ‘It’s no trouble. No trouble at all.’ He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘In fact, my dear girl, it’s essential to my cunning plan.’ He sat back in his seat, tapping the side of his nose in a significant manner and putting on a look which reminded her of Helen’s mysterious voice and face.

‘Which is?’

‘To ask your mama if it would be convenient for my mama to call on her and your father to persuade him that it’s his patriotic duty to let you join the Voluntary Aid Detachment.’

‘What?’ Liz’s face broke into a joyful smile. ‘Would she really do that?’

‘Of course she would. She’s a good sport.’

‘But why should she go to all that bother for me?’

Adam smiled. ‘Because you’d make a great nurse and you’d be an asset to the Red Cross - which needs as many volunteers as it can get at the moment. And that would also be the Red Cross to which my mother is devoted.’

‘Because she was a VAD in the Great War?’

‘That,’ he said, ‘and because it was what kept her going after my father died. There was some bad timing there,’ he said ruefully. ‘I’d just started at the Uni, you see, and I was all caught up in that.’

‘You don’t have any brothers and sisters?’

‘No. After she had me she had a post-partum haemorrhage and as a result she had to have a hysterectomy.’

Liz tried to show nothing more than polite interest. She knew what a hysterectomy was, of course, but she’d never actually heard the word said out loud. Even in all-female company it tended to be spoken in a whisper. The young man sitting opposite her seemed belatedly to realize that.

‘Oh, I say, I do beg your pardon. I don’t suppose this is really a very suitable subject for mixed company - certainly not for a well-brought-up young lady like yourself.’

Liz, who’d decided to take it as a compliment that he thought he could discuss such subjects with her, made a face.

‘And do you know how fed up well-brought-up young ladies get with that sort of censorship? Especially when the topic of conversation is our own bodies, and our own health?’

He grinned. ‘Yes. Cordelia tells me quite frequently.’

That was the second time in this conversation that he had mentioned the Honourable Miss Maclntyre.

‘You were saying,’ Liz prompted, ‘about when your father died?’

‘Yes - well, we lost a lot of money in the Crash, and basically he worked himself to death during the last few years of his life trying to leave Mother and me with something. We moved to a smaller house in Milngavie - it’s a very nice house, but we used to have a much bigger one. Out Strathblane way. Bit of land, a couple of ponies, that sort of thing, you know.’

She didn’t, but she sensed he wasn’t trying to show off in any way. She supposed he couldn’t help talking posh either.

‘Cordelia and her family were our nearest neighbours. They’ve still got their place out there.’

Childhood sweethearts, then. That must be it.

‘Would you know me again?’

‘Sorry, was I staring at you?’ asked Liz. ‘I was wondering if it’s going to work. Your mother trying to persuade my father, that is.’

‘O ye of little faith. Of course it will. Her powers of persuasion are legendary in Milngavie and Bearsden.’

‘But will they work in Clydebank?’

‘Of course they will. Liz?’ he asked, smiling diffidently at his still novel use of her first name. ‘Is becoming a VAD the only thing that’s worrying you?’

‘How do you mean?’

Adam Buchanan fixed her with a very level look. He might be extremely adept at talking nonsense, but there was a keen intelligence at work behind the quiet good looks.

‘There isn’t anything wrong at Murray’s, is there? I mean, are you having a problem with anything - or anybody - there? I could always speak to my uncle about it if you were.’

He looked so sympathetic, sitting there across the table from her. She was sorely tempted to tell him the whole story. She thought better of it. As Helen had said, they always tended to lay the blame at the lassie’s feet. She didn’t want Adam Buchanan to think badly of her.

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No, it’s just the nursing thing.’ Out of sight underneath the table she crossed her fingers so that the lie wouldn’t count.

‘You’re sure?’ He seemed disinclined to let the subject go, one arm along the back of the bench, his fair brows knitted in concentration.

Anxious to change the subject, she allowed her mind to leap ahead to something else which genuinely troubled her.

‘The only thing is ... my chances of becoming a nurse are all tied up with there being a war.’ She lifted her eyes to Adam Buchanan. ‘Do you think there’s going to be a war?’

‘Do you know,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘I’m awfully afraid that there is.’

And for a moment, in a douce Glasgow café, two young people sat silent, gazing into the abyss which had opened up at the feet of their generation. The experience of the war to end all wars was something which belonged to their parents, not to them, a prospect they had never dreamed they would have to face. Yet every day the dreadful possibility seemed to be edging closer.

As Liz and Adam sat there in sombre contemplation, the door of the café opened. There was a sudden influx of cold, damp air, the noise of traffic from the road outside - and a young man who stood there with a student’s briefcase over his dark head, laughingly protecting himself from the downpour. By the way he was being greeted - and by the strong physical resemblance - he had to be the son of the café owner. He was also, Elizabeth MacMillan decided, the most handsome man she had ever seen in her entire life.

Fourteen

‘And?’ demanded Helen, busily engaged in bandaging the arm of a volunteer casualty.

‘And what?’

‘In the name of the wee man!’ Helen dropped the end of the roll of bandages she was holding and put her hands on her hips. ‘And what happened then? You can’t stop there.’

‘No, ye cannae,’ said the volunteer, who happened to be Helen’s young brother Dominic. The other three lads were there too, Finn as well. As a joke, Liz had bandaged one of his paws, unaware that Mrs Galbraith was standing behind her, tapping her foot and doing her best to look disapproving.

Liz shouldn’t have done it, of course, but she was in the oddest of moods today. Her whole future hung in the balance this weekend, dependent on the outcome of Mrs Buchanan’s visit to her parents the following day. Yet she was curiously light-hearted, ready to laugh at anything and everything.

She was probably hysterical. She had looked it up in her nurses’ dictionary before she came out this morning.
Hysteria: Nervous disorder characterized by violent mood-swings. More common in women than men. A firm hand and sharp words, rather than sympathy, usually produce good results.
Yep, that sounded about right. She should ask Helen to slap her face.

Her mother hadn’t made it to the exercise, nor had Mrs Crawford. Good-hearted soul that she was, she had volunteered to help a panic-stricken Sadie get organized to receive Amelia Buchanan for tea on Sunday afternoon. Liz coming home late - by car - had been the first surprise. Seeing the lace curtains twitching in several of the neighbouring houses, Liz had thought ruefully that her method of arriving home on this particular Friday evening was going to be the talk of Queen Victoria Row for some time to come.

Her escort being a well-spoken young gentleman unknown to her parents had been another shock, but when he casually mentioned that he was the nephew of Liz’s boss, the stern look on her father’s face disappeared as though someone had wiped it off with a cloth.

He offered young Mr Buchanan a small refreshment. A wee dram of his best whisky, perhaps? That was when Liz knew that Adam had really made an impression. Her father’s best whisky, kept tucked away in the sideboard in the front room, was his only whisky. Apart from at Hogmanay, William MacMillan never drank at home. Like most Scottish families, however - even some of the teetotal ones - there was always a bottle of whisky in the house for special guests and hot toddies to cure colds.

Adam had gracefully declined. Turning to Sadie, he had asked if his mother might have the pleasure of calling on her and her husband on Sunday afternoon. Sadie had more or less gone into a tail-spin, or, as Liz had put it to Helen, ‘I thought she was going to have kittens.’

She and Mrs Crawford were spending most of today baking and getting ready for tomorrow’s visit. That solved one problem. Her mother wasn’t going to find out Helen’s second name. Not yet anyway. That was just as well. Liz was in enough trouble as it was.

Adam had barely driven away in Morag when her father had barked out an order. ‘The front room, Elizabeth. Now. You’ve got some explaining to do, young lady.’

It had all come out. William MacMillan had listened to most of it in ominous silence. He had one question for his wife. Had she known that their daughter was attending Red Cross classes? On the point of rushing in to deny that on her mother’s behalf, Liz had been astonished when Sadie had answered for herself, admitting that she’d known all along about Liz’s Tuesday night activities.

The expression on her father’s face had been almost comical. He’d been so taken aback, especially when Sadie, screwing up her courage, had gone on to say that most people would think it was commendable that Lizzie wanted to do something to help other people.