Air Ambulance (13 page)

They walked along a narrow pathway skitting the bay and down on to the hard white sand. It was made up of a myriad of small, crushed shells and, like an eager child, she found herself exclaiming at their beauty.

“I thought it was all just white sand,” she told him. “But look at the colours! There are so many shells, too, that are quite perfect.” He picked up a handful at random and held them out to her.

“The effect of the Gulf Stream,” he told her. “It touches the south-westerly tip of Heimra Beag and filters in round the headland. There are shells here from all over the world.”

Eage
r
ly she selected a few from his extended palm.

“They are the loveliest things I’ve ever seen,” she declared. “If I collected a lot of these little round mother-of-pearl ones the children could string them together through the holes and make necklaces of
them
...
”

She paused, suddenly aware of his silence, and her eyes were drawn to meet his. His face was taut and expressionless, and he looked away before she had the chance to read what lay in his eyes.

“It might be an idea,” he conceded. “Certainly the children would appreciate it. The shells are only to be found here, at Monkdyke, and unfortunately Margot can’t bear the thought of intrusion. My small ‘colony’ distresses her. The sight of their crippled bodies reminds her too acutely of her own unfortunate state, I’m afraid.”

“And of Andrew,” Alison said with sympathy. “It’s all rather tragic, because, if she would only accept things as they are, she would soon be able to forget. The children don’t consider themselves odd, and they are very loveable;
s
ometimes more so than normal children, I think. They seem to possess such a fund of gentleness and affection.” She looked round at him half apologetically. “But you already know all this. It’s something
you
should be telling
me
!”

“I don’t think I need to explain to you about the children, Alison,” he said.

It was the first time he had used her Christian name, and it had sounded to her foolish heart like an endearment.

“I don’t think Mrs. Blair would object to my coming to the bay,” she said after a moment or two. “She expects to see me again.”

“I’m afraid Margot is often lonely,” he agreed. “She has very few interests.”

“What does she do all day?” she asked pityingly.

“Reads, mostly and sews. She has enough embroidery tucked away up there at Monkdyke to fill a cabin trunk.”

Or a bottom drawer? Hastily Alison turned from the thought. They had reached the end of the bay and were ready to climb up over the rocks on to the road that led to Garrisdale, and Fergus gave her his hand to help her up. The long, sensitive fingers fastened securely over hers in an intimacy that held friendship and understanding and something else that was vastly protective. Pity?

“Tomorrow,” he said, “is Sunday. I don’t know what you feel about a sea voyage to church, but we go over to Heimra Mhor whenever we can. I take some of the older children in the launch, and Andrew always comes, in spite of the fact that he isn’t a very good sailor.”

“I’d love to come,” she told him, her eyes instantly alight. “I had been wondering about Sunday on Heimra,” she confessed.

“Isobel Pollock holds a Sunday School for the smaller children,” he explained. “I would find the life pretty complicated without her help and cooperation,” he added.

The confession did not surprise Alison, but it caused her a small pang of envy. Not envy of Isobel in any paltry sense of the word, but because she would have given much at that moment for Isobel’s wonderful chance to serve him.

“I’m sure you would,” she answered. “Mrs. Pollock is the right sort of person for Garrisdale.”

He did not answer that, and she remembered that Margot had told her that so many nurses came and went on Heimra. It could not be entirely because of the loneliness. Was it, then, because of Margot herself?

Any girl who was young and gay and good looking would irk Margot beyond endurance because she would be jealous of her, and Fergus’ work would have to suffer to pander to a whim.

With Isobel it might be different, though. Her beauty was not the sort that immediately met the eye of the beholder, because it came from within, and, into the bargain, she was many years Margot’s senior. There would be no reason for the lovely invalid of Monkdyke to consider Isobel Pollock as a rival, yet Fergus had just been unstinting in his praise of his house-mother. This generous, plain woman who loved children was also his friend. Andrew came towards them as they reached the lodge.

“I know a poem about a bird!” he declared. “I’ve just learned it.” He had lost much of his former reticence in Alison’s presence, accepting her now as he did Fergus, as someone in whom he could trust and who would be unfailingly kind.

“Well,” Fergus encouraged, “let’s hear it. Learning is never wasted when it can bear repetition.”

“Here?” the child asked. “Out on the
machar
?”

“What better place could we find,” he uncle decided, “since you say it’s about a bird?”

Andrew continued to regard them solemnly for a split second before he put his small, thin hands behind his back and began:

‘
“
Come out and see my fly my kite,

Because I’ve stuck some breadcrumbs on it,

And when it’s nearly out of sight,

A bird will come and ride upon it
!”

It seemed as if the small slight body might burst with the effort he made, and suddenly Alison’s eyes were full of tears. She dared not look at Fergus as he took his nephew’s hand.

“That’s a new one,” he lied gallantly. “I’ve not heard it before. Who taught it to you? Mrs. Pollock?”

“Oh, no!” Andrew told him without hesitation. “Mrs. Pollock didn’t know it, either. It’s Captain Gowrie’s poem. His own special poem. He learned it when he was a boy like me.”

Alison could not hide her surprise, and when she looked round at Fergus she saw it reflected clearly on his smiling face.

“Well, now,” he said, “that’s something, isn’t it? Might I be allowed to ask how all this came about?”

The hot colour of painful embarrassment dyed Andrew’s puckered little face, but he admitted without hesitation.

“I went to visit him. Mrs. Pollock said I might, and I had a puddock to show him.”

“A puddock!” Fergus groaned. “Don’t tell me Mrs. Pollock
approves
of frogs in the best bedrooms!”

“She doesn’t mind,” Andrew assured him guilelessly. “So long as they don’t hop about too much and get lost under the furniture.”

“Or in the beds!” Fergus looked round to Alison. “I think you did mention that Isobel was the right sort of person for Garrisdale,” he said with a smile.

Their laughter rang out freely on the keen, salt air, and Andrew took Alison’s hand.

“Are you coming back to Garrisdale?” he asked eagerly.

“Not tonight, Andrew,” she said gently. “But tomorrow I shall be going with you to Heimra Mhor.”

She watched them walk away, a man and a small, handicapped boy between whom there existed the most complete understanding and all the time she was thinking of another man who had remembered from his own childhood a poem about a bird.

CHAPTER EIGHT

EARLY the following morning Andrew was knocking
urgently
on the door of the lodge.

“Mercy on us!” Mrs. Cameron exclaimed. “Who can that be at such an hour, and you not through your porridge yet!”

Alison smiled.

“I think I know the knock,” she said.

“Ay! And me, too,” Kirsty confessed, crossing hurriedly to the door but pretending complete surprise when she opened it to find Andrew’s small, anxious figure on the doorstep.

“I thought Alison mightn’t know about the tide,” he announced, waiting to be invited into the warm kitchen. “We’ve got to leave early.”

“She remembered all right, but she’s just having her breakfast,” Kirsty told him. “Are you going to come in and wait for her?”

Andrew doffed his bonnet and stepped shyly over the doorstep.

“Hullo!” said Alison. “I won’t be a minute. You’ve had your breakfast, I expect, Andrew?”

He nodded, his blue eyes shining.

“I’ve got on my new kilt,” Andrew announced, fit to burst with pride but a little disappointed, it would seem, that nobody had noticed the fact as soon as he came in.

“My, now!” exclaimed Kirsty, “I was wondering where the bonnie new kilt had come from.”

Andrew lifted his sporran to show more of the tartan.

“My Uncle Fergus bought it for me when he was in Glasgow that time I was having my tonsils out. He got it at Forsyth’s.”

At this point Dougal Cameron came in, and the new kilt had to be examined and praised all over again and a six pence slipped surreptitiously into the pocket on the back of the sporran.

“It’s my father’s sporran,” Andrew announced with pride. “I wasn’t big enough to have it before.”

Alison rose quickly from the table, her throat tight.

“I won’t keep you a minute, Andrew,” she promised, yet when she reached her own room she stood for a moment or two at the tiny dormer window gazing out over Heimra Beag and thinking about Gavin Blair, wondering what sort of father he would have made for Andrew, and thinking how different things might have been if he had lived.

When she took down her cloak from the hook behind the bedroom door her eyes were misty with unshed tears, but when she went out into the spring sunshine with Andrew by her side, she was smiling.

“Are we to go back to Garrisdale?” she asked him.

“Oh, no!” He was hobbling along by her side, the new kilt swinging above the pitifully thin little legs, the Balmoral bonnet with its red bobble and flying streamers framing the hauntingly pale little face like a jaunty halo. “We can go straight to the jetty. Sandy will be there with the launch.”

Sandy was there and waiting, his big shaggy head and red beard bristling as fiercely as ever in spite of all his efforts with a comb. As it was Sunday morning, he had dressed in his best suit, a clerical grey herringbone tweed, pressed and re-pressed over the years by Sandy himself, for he had never taken a wife.

“Women are all the same,” he had been heard to comment. “They do the things for you that you can well enough do for yourself, and you’ve to keep them for the rest of their lives and listen to them talking into the bargain!”

In spite of his occasional sourness, however, Andrew love
d h
im. The blue eyes lit up as soon as he saw the old Highlander, who had been sailor, fisherman, ghillie and boatman during his varied career, and he was on board the launch before Alison had reached the end of the jetty.

“Good morning, Sandy,” she greeted the old man. “Are we going to have a smooth crossing?”

“If we get the tide,” he answered, the sea-blue eyes going beyond her to search the path to
Garrisdale. “The others are late.”

“No! No, here comes Uncle Fergus!” Andrew shouted from the well of the launch. “We’ll be in time.”

Alison turned to see Fergus coming towards them, striding down across the young heather shoots with half a dozen of the older children in his wake. She held her breath thinking how magnificent he looked in his own kilt with his Balmoral at an angle almost as jaunty as Andrew’s, and the tall shepherd’s crook, with its curly ramshorn handle, in his hand. He was so right for Heimra, so much a part of his background that even a stranger would have recognized him as belonging.

“Have I kept you waiting?” he asked apologetically. “Andrew insisted on going to fetch you, even though I told him that you weren’t likely to let us down.”

He smiled down into her eyes, and she thought how lovely the sun was and how calm Coirestruan could be in spite of its ugly reputation.

When they reached the other side Sandy moored the launch and prepared to follow them at a respectful distance to the kirk.

The children walked on ahead, chattering among themselves, and suddenly Alison was thinking what a family party they made. It was thus that the laird and his wife and family must have walked to the old grey kirk above the shore for generations, and nothing had really changed on Heimra in all these years.

The Kirk was set on a hill a little way apart from the cluster of houses which outlined the miniature harbour. It was built of the rose-pink granite quarried out of Heimra’s cliffs, and it seemed to glow like a living thing where the sun caught it. Its solid, square tower, rising above the tops of the pines, stood out sharply against the turquoise sky, and the bell which summoned the islanders to worship began to ring.

The steady, repetitive, peaceful sound echoed far and wide, a sound that Alison would carry away in her heart forever. Whatever might happen to her in the future, the kirk bell on Heimra would be one of her lasting memories.

As they approached the doorway other people were nearing the church, and she recognized Mrs.
MacIver
from the hotel.