And then she asked me what the blazes I thought I was doing, helping myself to the King’s own medical equipment, and how dare I? I told her the King didn’t own the city supply of drinking water, which I am not sure is technically true, but it is the principle of the thing – you can’t expect public infirmary patients not to drink. She accused me of cheek and of putting on airs again. Then she directed her venomous gaze on my visitors.
Euan, still holding the drinking glass, turned magenta and shrank into his brown garments in fear and embarrassment under her blazing ire; Ellen blanched and stood fast with her arms crossed over her chest, gripping her sleeves.
‘And what do you mean by bringing these creatures into the women’s ward?’ the nurse bellowed at me. ‘How dare you keep your meetings here, you dirty fast wee midden!’
With that, she seized the glass from the quivering hand of Euan McEwen and dashed the last unconsumed stolen King’s water straight into his blushing face. For a moment, he knelt by my bedside absolutely and damply astonished.
‘Get out!’ the nurse raged at him. She swung round to face Ellen, who was holding herself so tightly she’d torn a hole in the thin fabric of one sleeve. I thought Ellen was going to explode with rage.
But she didn’t. She stepped past the nurse without a word, and wiped Euan’s face with the back of one hand. He stood up. Together they walked with dignity back the way they’d come in, with every patient watching the show. Euan held the door for his sister.
She hesitated. Then she turned around and called to me defiantly, ‘We’re away to Blairgowrie for the berry picking. We’ll be back at the Strathfearn Estate for the flax at Bridge Farm. Get well and come to see us at Inchfort Field!’
‘I will!’ I vowed to her from across the ward.
My mother arrived eventually, but I was asleep again by then and she did not want to waken me. She arranged for my discharge the following morning, and I was assigned a different nurse for the duration of my stay. The ward sister in charge was extremely grovelly and apologetic for her subordinate’s behaviour, concerned when I couldn’t bear to finish my breakfast porridge, and called me ‘Lady Julia’. I used my new-found power to demand coffee, but couldn’t finish that, either.
I left St John’s on a spring tide of obsequious kowtowing. The noted surgeon who had last year coaxed an extra five months of life out of my dying and bedridden grandfather came out to the car to see me off.
(It was my mother’s little two-seater Magnette which she drives herself – Grandad’s landaulet had already been sold and the driver dismissed. Mother’s car is a cracking red sporty thing with glittering chrome knobs all over and it is utterly impractical, apart from her occasionally giving me a driving lesson in it when she is in one of her more Bolshevik moods. Driving like a man is one of her few foibles.)
The surgeon held the door while Mother tucked me in with pillows and a blanket, as the car has no top. ‘Lady Craigie, I do apologise your daughter wasn’t given a private room.’
‘Of course you couldn’t have known who she was!’ Mother said. ‘How lucky we are that the Travellers were so kind to her. That was Jean McEwen and her folk, wasn’t it? To think Jean and I used to play together along the Fearn! It’s my own fault she’s never met my daughter and couldn’t recognise her!’
She didn’t say, You can’t be blamed for the occasional small-minded pig-headed idiot turning up on your nursing staff – it is hard to cure people of ingrained cultural platitudes. But I knew that, like me, she was thinking it hard.
And like her, I didn’t say anything. I was sheerly grateful that the headache had subsided, and that I was out of the newspaper nightgown. Mother had brought me sensible clothes of her own (my trunk still had not arrived). I dared to ask, ‘Can I drive?’
‘Do not be ridiculous, Julia.’ But she laughed.
As we headed out of Perth on the Edinburgh Road I shook off the blanket and managed to kneel backward on the seat, sticking half my body out of the car like a dog, enjoying the fingers of wind rumpling the tufts of leftover hair.
‘Darling, I cannot bear to watch,’ Mother shouted.
‘Slow down, then, Mummy! You’re supposed to be watching the road, not me.’
The concentration it took to hold myself up made me seasick again, however, so I was forced to behave myself and sit properly.
3
LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES
My grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Strathfearn, whom my brothers and I call by the French pet name Mémère, had been reduced to three rooms in her late husband’s ancestral mansion – four if you counted the bathroom. (Not the nursery bathroom – it gave everyone vapours to think I was lounging blissfully unclothed in that enormous bathtub, which was also used by the workmen in the east wing.) Four little iron beds had been brought down to Mémère’s big bedroom from the abandoned staff rooms in the attic; two of these beds had been installed side by side in Mémère’s dressing room for Mother and Solange, with just enough room to walk between them, and another was lined up at the foot of Mémère’s four-poster for her lady’s companion Colette. Mine was shoved against Mémère’s tall French windows. This was really the nicest place to be because I got to decide for myself whether the windows were open or shut. Also we still had the little morning room downstairs to ourselves, with big notices saying NO ENTRY posted on the terrace and in the corridor to keep the workmen out. We had use of the kitchen, but so did everybody else.
For my first two days out of hospital, I couldn’t go downstairs to the morning room anyway. Standing at the top of the stairs was like being on the edge of a sea cliff, only worse – the vertigo actually made me want to be sick. I had to sit down on the top stair with my head between my knees before I managed to creep back to bed. The days that followed were interminable. I couldn’t do anything – I couldn’t focus my mind sharply enough to do a crossword or read or even be read to, though Mother and Solange and Mary Kinnaird all did try.
Solange also fussed with my hair and filled my surroundings with roses, and brought me tall drinks full of mint leaves and lemon peel. Eventually I wanted to strangle her. I’d never known her to be so nervous.
‘Please go away, Nanny. I don’t want to be read to,’ I told her petulantly, a small child all over again with my grown-up self-sufficiency completely destroyed, and felt instantly, hideously guilty as she tiptoed out of the room to continue her never-ending quest for something to distract me with.