Contrary to whatever those stupid small-minded women in the hospital thought, the McEwens and their folk are all incredibly modest. Skirts down, legs together, blouses done up properly. The older women were watching me closely, I noticed. I was worried the eccentric clothes I had been turning up in all summer might have caused them to peg me as dangerously wanton.
In a moment when we’d stopped for a swallow of lemonade and to catch our breath, I said again to Ellen, ‘I really am going to miss you. It will be very dull when you are gone.’
She sang to me teasingly from Robert Burns’s ‘A Red, Red Rose’:
‘And fare thee well, my only love!
And fare thee well awhile!
And I will come again, my love,
tho’ it were ten thousand mile!’
We had a good big fire going by the time it got dark, past ten o’clock still despite the cloud. The music just didn’t stop, and we kept on dancing till we were falling over each other (and the excited Pinkie, who thought she knew how to dance), because we really couldn’t see any more.
Someone took me by the arm and bent to murmur in my ear. It was Sandy.
‘I’m going back to the Big House,’ he said. ‘I’ll stop at the library and let Mary know there’s no harm doing here. She doesn’t like a ceilidh much, and it’s half past eleven. Jamie said he’d like to stay a while later. But if you want to go now –’
‘I don’t want to go ever.’
Afterwards I asked Jamie if he noticed anything between Mary and Sandy, and he told me not to be ridiculous.
‘What’s ridiculous about it?’
‘Sandy doesn’t notice women.’
I felt my eyebrows leap up into what was left of my hair.
Jamie laughed. ‘I mean, he doesn’t notice anybody. He’s thirty years old and I don’t believe he’s cast a glance of appreciation at anything under five hundred years of age since he left school. He’s celibate as a monk. Probably more so.’
It was true; Sandy hadn’t even seen me when I picked him up at the station.
And yet … part of me thinks maybe that is why he hadn’t noticed what Mary looks like, and why they can get along so well – the way he gets along with the McEwens and their folk – because he just doesn’t see people.
In the end, Jamie and I didn’t go back to the Big House at all that night.
We stretched the cover over the car in case it rained, and then Jamie and Euan and Ellen and I all sallied back up the lane through the dark and the haar to the post office telephone box. The silly thing was, it was nearly as far as it would have been to walk back to Strathfearn House – but this way we didn’t have to negotiate the river path, or worse, the swinging iron footbridge in the dark. You know what I mostly didn’t want to have to do – pass close by those flipping standing stones! I seemed to be more afraid of ghosts during the last summer at Strathfearn than I usually was.
Mother was remarkably level-headed on the ’phone.
‘Jamie and I are going to stop at Inchfort overnight,’ I told her.
‘Thank you for ringing, Julia. Your grandmother was worried about you driving all that way around so late at night.’
‘Oh dear, she’s not still awake?’
‘Very much so, but she has used it as an excuse to listen to the whole of Lucia di Lammermoor on the wireless and it’s not yet finished. Sandy warned us you might stay. Try to be polite – it’s most kind of Jean McEwen.’
‘Och, nae bother,’ said Mrs McEwen, sounding like Euan, when I passed on Mother’s gratitude. ‘Your mammy Esmé was always in about the camps here when she was a girl. Just like her dad.’
You see … you do lose track of people. Because the McEwens were here every summer since our mothers were children, and so were we, but our mothers played together and we did not. Somehow Jean and Esmé went their separate ways and their paths swung so far apart that their grown children only just learned each other’s names. How long does it take? How do you ever hold on to anybody?
‘Where’s your gran going to live when you’ve packed up at the Big House?’ Ellen asked me as we made up the extra beds.
‘Well, with us, of course. She’s coming to Craig Castle. I won’t be there though; I have to go back to school.’
‘Will you go back there when you finish school?’
‘I think I’ll go to Oxford It’ll be like an extension of school. I like it.’
‘I thought only men went to university.’
‘Lots of women go. Mary went! You could go!’
‘Why would I want to?’
‘You could study archaeology.’
‘Huh.’ She sounded sceptical. ‘Would your folk let you do that?’
‘I keep telling them I’m going to university. Two of my brothers have already gone and no one ever objects when I say I’m going too. Sometimes you just have to do what you want, even if they say no.’
She laughed. ‘There you go again, taking the reins of the world.’
‘Isn’t it just taking the reins of myself?’
The bow tent was set up so that there was a bit of living space in the middle and a sleeping space at either end. Ellen and I and some of the younger cousins were at one end and the older McEwens were in the other end with the baby. The lads went out to a different tent. There wasn’t quite enough bedding with me and Jamie unexpectedly there as well; I had to share with Ellen, and Jamie had to make do with a ground sheet.
Auntie Bessie and the woman with the accordion were still cracking away by the fire out front as I crawled into the cosiest, most wonderful camp nest I’d ever imagined, on a mattress stuffed with straw and heather and well protected from the wet ground by troughs dug round the edges of the canvas for drainage.
I really was tired, but my mind wouldn’t turn off. I was so delighted by the snugness of the camp.
‘Is this where I stayed when you brought me here after I got that dunt on the head?’ I asked, staring up into the dark, aware of Ellen warm and wide awake on one side of me, and her three little cousins already snoring gently on the mattress made up next to us.
‘Well, a bit. We’ve been and gone to Blairgowrie since then, so the camp’s come down and been put back up on other greens since. And we were further across the field before, but it’s muddy there now.’
After another time of quiet, listening to the little girls’ trio of purring snores and sleeping sighs, I decided I was the only one still awake in our end of the tent, so I jumped when Ellen whispered suddenly at my ear, ‘I like your brother.’
‘Which one?’ I whispered back – to provoke her, as I knew perfectly well which one she meant.
She gave her characteristic snort. ‘The one who’s not old enough to be me dad! Young Jamie. He talks to me like … like I’m one of his mates. I never met a lad who does that.’
‘They all do that. All my brothers do, I mean. I’m the only girl they’ve ever had to talk to, and the youngest, so they just treat me like another one of them.’
‘You’re lucky.’
I considered.
‘I suppose I am. But it’s like being raised by wolves – you don’t realise you’re not one yourself until someone points it out to you. Sometimes it makes me so mad that not everyone treats me just like another wolf.’