their evenings to help Iain at Ardtuath and they’d come straight from school, their socks bunched around their ankles above scuffed shoes, knees as knobbly as pine knots. She smiled and waved, but then stopped in her tracks as she saw the look on their faces.
‘What is it?’ she asked, automatically reaching to smooth Stuart’s fringe out of his eyes.
‘We seen that postie. On his bike. He turned in at the gates to the big house.’ Stuart gasped for breath, panting out the words.
‘Who was it? Mr McTaggart?’
The boys nodded their heads in unison.
Flora blanched. A telegram then. Alec.
She hesitated, wanting to know but not able to march up the drive to Ardtuath House and face the Mackenzie-Grants. Sir Charles’s anger would be bad enough; Lady Helen’s grief might be even worse.
But the not knowing was unbearable. So she was about to steel herself to do it when she caught sight of another figure in a Wrens uniform hurrying along the road towards them from the base, arms outstretched, capless brown curls askew. And as Flora’s legs gave way beneath her, Bridie reached her and grabbed her just before she fell.
Lexie, 1978
Mairi’s voice is gentle as she recalls the facts of my father’s death. I’d heard them before, from Mum, of course. The Kite was accompanying that summer convoy through the Barents Sea when she was hit by a torpedo. She went down fast, taking with her the crew of 239 men. Only nine were saved, pulled from the waves by a rescue vessel, as the rest of the ships continued on their way to Archangel.
So my father lies, like so many other sailors, in a grave that I can never visit. His name on the family memorial of the Mackenzie-Grants in the graveyard doesn’t seem nearly enough, but I suppose it was all Mum had. Those wildflowers that we laid there every Sunday were all she could offer him. He left not knowing that she loved him still. She had to live with that for the rest of her life. And he never knew that she was carrying his child.
And then Bridie tells me how, after the memorial service in the kirk, Sir Charles accosted Ruaridh in front of everyone, his rage and grief spilling over, and told him he should be ashamed of himself, sitting safe in a shelter on the hill in a job that Alec had made sure of for him, while his son’s bones were lying under a hundred fathoms of icy sea. Ruaridh stood there and took it, saying nothing, but his jaw was clenched, his face as pale as a ghost with his own grief at the loss of his childhood friend.
Flora begged him not to go, but the very next day Ruaridh marched down to the base and asked for a transfer to the escort ships. And, because they needed a signalman, he was given a berth on the Cassandra, whose name indeed turned out to be a portent of doom. Ruaridh was lost as the last-but-one convoy was returning to Loch Ewe after a safe run through to Murmansk, the ship’s bows shot away by a German torpedo.
And so it was that the next time Mr McTaggart cycled along the road towards Ardtuath, he passed the gates of the estate and turned in at Keeper’s Cottage with the telegram that would break – again – the hearts of Iain and Flora, just three months after they’d learned the news of Alec.
‘So that was it, then,’ I say, once I’ve digested the story that my mother’s best friends have told me. The tragedy of it makes me want to weep.
No wonder Mum found it hard to talk about my father. She must have felt so guilty about writing that awful letter to him. About him sailing to his death not knowing how much he was loved.
Then the awful realisation hits me, too, that she might have felt responsible for her own brother’s death. Sir Charles’s fury at Alec’s love for Flora must have played a part in his grief-stricken rage, detonating his outburst at Ruaridh. Both my father and my uncle were war heroes, but now I understand how complex Mum’s feelings must have been about the part she imagined she’d played in their deaths.
And, in the end, what had it all been for? Could we ever really have belonged in the world of the Mackenzie-Grants? Mum’s last faint hope of that ever coming to pass died with Alec. She never met