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“I think every soldier writes to home about those things. The food and the weather.”
Lorna noticed then that when Paul smiled, and the raw skin was pulled even tighter across the cheekbone, it lost its pink color, becoming almost as white as the skin on his other cheek. It made the darker pink of his full, undamaged lips even more noticeable.
Lorna suddenly realized she was staring, at his burns and at his lips, instead of listening to what Paul had been saying.
“Sorry?” she stammered.
“I ask you about your other brother? Is it Sandy?”
“That’s right. Alexander really. Mrs. Mack says he would have been called Alex, but he was Sandy soon as they saw that his hair was red like our mum’s. He got Mum’s blue eyes and freckles too.”
“Freckles?” Paul asked.
“Oh, em, the brown dots, across your nose and face.” Lorna prodded her face in explanation. “You know, freckles.”
Paul nodded in understanding.
“Freckles,” he repeated.
“Yes, Mum had freckles and blue eyes. And red hair. I don’t really remember her because I was only three when she died, from the influenza. We have photographs of her, but you can’t see that her hair was red.”
Strangely, Lorna found it easy to talk about her mother, like this, in the abstraction of someone else’s memory.
“But no red hair or freckles for you?” Paul asked.
“No, not for me, or for John Jo either. We are both true Andersons, like my dad—dark eyes, dark hair and dark souls, that’s what my grandpa used to say.”
“Dark souls?” Paul said, shaking his head doubtfully. “I do not think—”
“It’s true,” Lorna said, “Sandy’s quite the opposite of John Jo and me. He’s incredibly clever, and also kind and sweet. We’re just selfish and bad-tempered. You just wait till you meet my brothers, then you’ll see I’m right.”
Something in Paul’s expression made Lorna think about the words she’d just uttered. Wait until you meet them … Why would Paul ever meet them? John Jo and Sandy might not be back until the war was over, by which time the prisoners would be gone from Gosford. And then it struck her, how would either of her brothers feel if they found her cozily chatting with an enemy soldier like this? She knew exactly how they’d feel, and she knew what they’d do about it too.
Lorna suddenly felt panicked, as if there were army boots outside the door, and jumped to her feet. What had she been thinking, trusting this stranger, this enemy, with her precious memories?
“Sorry, I need to get back to the house,” she said, grabbing Paul’s dishes and dashing for the door.
Just as she pulled the door closed behind her, she heard Paul sigh and she hesitated. It was such a sad sound, from a boy far from home. They’d only been talking, but she’d been rude to him yet again. He didn’t deserve that, but how could she make it right now?
“Good night,” she said, trying to make her voice sound more friendly.
Just before she clicked the door into place, he replied.
“Gute Nacht, Fräulein. Schlafen Sie gut!”
Seven (#ulink_9135e9b1-aa57-56b9-8464-e307bd90db14)
Lorna stood at the scullery sink on Wednesday morning, washing the breakfast dishes and stacking them to drain in the wooden rack. As she worked, she gazed out the window. One of the cats sat on the wall, haughtily overseeing the activity of some sparrows pecking around nearby. Lorna was not on the lookout for the truck arriving, now that Paul was sleeping in the barn, but she was looking out all the same. Only to check that Paul was all right, of course, and that he didn’t need any more blankets.
She was almost finished with her dishes when the side door of the barn opened. Paul came out looking tired and rumpled, yawning and stretching out his arms and his back, as if he had only just woken up. Perhaps he had. He’d been up most of every other night this week with the ewes, so he’d probably had very little sleep.
Lorna watched as he walked to the water pump over the horse trough and stripped his shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. He hung it on a lantern bracket on the wall, then lifted off his undershirt and hung that up too. Bending over, he pumped the handle up and down, muscles straining.
As the water flowed from the wide spout, Paul thrust his head and shoulders under the stream. Lorna knew for certain that the water must be icy, for the temperature outside was barely above freezing. Sure enough, as Paul stood upright again, his skin glistening in the soft morning light, a shiver ran through him.
Physically Paul had changed so much since he’d arrived a month ago, so skinny and gray-faced. Now his face had lost its skeletal look, the sharp edge of his jawline had softened, and his cheeks, even under the tight scarring, had become plump and full. His chest and shoulder muscles had filled out and were now rounded and smooth. His stomach was flat and strong, no longer concave with hunger.
Lorna had only seen a man with muscles as well defined as that once before, on a school trip to the National Gallery in Edinburgh, but it had been on the carved body of a marble statue, a Greek god with curly hair, playing a lute and wearing nothing but a large and serendipitously placed leaf. She and Iris had giggled for hours about his bare bottom and strapping thighs.
They had been much younger then, and Lorna was certainly not giggling now. She was barely even breathing.
Even his skin looked healthy and pink, almost rosy in reaction to the icy water. What might he look like once the summer sun had tanned his skin?
Summer.
Would this Greek god still be here by summer, washing at the pump in the warm sun? Or would the war be over by then and her brothers home?
Paul shook his head back and forth, sending water drops flying. His hair was growing out and was now sticking up in wet spikes.
He looked like Caddy when she’d been swimming in the Peffer Burn.
Almost as if Lorna had called her name, Caddy appeared at a run around the corner of the barn, her claws skidding on the wet cobbles. She bounded up to Paul and jumped to put her front paws onto the side of the water trough, attempting to get closer to him. Paul pulled on the handle again and a stream of water belched from the pump onto the dog’s head. Caddy jumped back and then shook herself, just as Paul had done, sending water all over Paul. He laughed, and Caddy yelped in excitement, jumping up at him, and he rubbed vigorously at the wet patches in her fur.
Paul picked up a stick from under the trough. As he threw it, Lorna noticed there was another scar, this one under his left arm and around the side of his rib cage. Like the scars on his face, it was an angry pink against the white of his skin, but it didn’t look like a burn. This one was a sharp gash, perhaps two inches wide, a deep groove, as if the flat of a knife had been dragged across a pat of butter.
Lorna was awoken from her daydream of Paul as a Greek god by the reality of his desperate scars. What pain must this boy have endured?
Just then, Nellie clumped down the stairs and into the kitchen. Lorna grabbed an already-clean plate from the draining rack and plunged it into the warm soapy water again.
“What you doing that for?” Nellie asked, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Isn’t that Mrs. Mack’s job?”
Nellie pulled heavy socks over her petite feet and up to her knees, first one pair and then another on top. She tied them with a cord over the hem of her breeches and folded them down again into a cuff.
“Just helping out,” Lorna choked, glad that her back was to Nellie. “Heading off to school right now.”
Lorna lifted her coat from the hook just as Mrs. Mack came bustling into the house. Before she closed the door, she glanced back out into the yard again.
“That young lad needs to put some more clothes on,” Mrs. Mack said as she removed the first of the many layers of scarves, coats, and cardigans in which she had wrapped herself for the walk from the village. “I just told him he’ll catch pneumonia bathing in that icy water. I feel like I’m catching a chill just looking at him!”
She looked up at Lorna. “Won’t you be late, dear?”
“Going now,” said Lorna, trying not to blush as she grabbed her bag and gave Mrs. Mack a quick hug. Her father banged his boots against the wall outside to loosen the mud and came through the door as Lorna made to leave.
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he said, unbuckling the leather strap of his old watch and laying it across his palm.
He studied the watch for a moment, shook it, and held it to his ear.
“What’s wrong with Grandpa’s watch?” Lorna asked. Even though her father had worn the watch ever since his father had died, she still thought of it as her grandpa’s.
“After forty-odd years or more of keeping this farm on time, the damn thing has finally given up.”
Dad carefully hung the gold buckle on a cup hook hammered into the wood of the kitchen dresser, leaving it dangling.
“I’ll have to send it up to Christie’s in Edinburgh to see if they can get it going again. In the meantime, I’ll make do with my farmer’s instinct, and my grumbling belly, to know when it’s dinnertime.”
He winked at Lorna.
“You mean the same farmer’s instinct that can hear the sound of the pub opening at two o’clock every Saturday afternoon?” teased Lorna. “You and John Jo can hear the Gowff doors being unlocked all the way up here, can’t you, Dad?”
Lorna’s father laughed too, but then looked at the circlet of white skin contrasting with the deep tan of his wrist as if his watch was still there.
“And it’s the father’s instinct that knows that someone is going to be late for school again if she doesn’t get a move on.”
“I’m going, I’m going!”
After kissing her dad on the cheek, Lorna left the house, clicking the door shut behind her.
Across the yard, Paul was fully dressed now, but was still rubbing his hair with the towel as he walked back toward the barn. Suddenly, he changed course and walked over toward the drystane dyke that ran up to the gate, where he picked up two or three small items from the scrubby grass. He squinted at them and then, instead of tossing them down again, he put them into the pocket of his pants and headed into the barn.
Lorna was puzzled. What could he have found over there? Not nuts or berries at this time of year, and too small for sticks. Small stones, perhaps?
She imagined herself asking him about it. She found herself wanting to know more about him. And it was strange, the more they’d talked the evening before—and his English had improved in the month since he’d arrived—the less German he became. Or not less German, exactly, but more like any of the normal boys, the Scottish boys, she knew at school. Lorna didn’t know what to make of that. He was not like she had expected the enemy to be at all. In fact, she was beginning to realize that he might not be so very different from her.
Eight (#ulink_02f2bc72-94c8-5a88-b184-c2d015f45f38)
“Lorna, you are so unreliable,” preached Mrs. Urquhart, the minister’s wife, as she tied the ribbons of her starched white apron and proudly brushed some imagined fluff from the Red Cross insignia on the front.
Lorna could feel the other girls and the older village women watching her as they paused in their work filling the care packages in the church hall. It was Wednesday afternoon, and all the women in the village were at the weekly Red Cross meeting.
“I can’t believe you left your scarves at home. And now there’s no time to run back and get them,” Mrs. Urquhart said. “So how many of our fine boys at the front will be left freezing cold because their care parcels are short of knitwear, I wonder?”
Lorna assumed the question was rhetorical, simply part of the telling off, so she didn’t reply.
“Answer my question, please. How many scarves did you leave at home, Lorna?” Apparently not rhetorical. “You certainly were given enough wool last week for three or four.”
“Em … just the one this week,” replied Lorna.
“One?” Mrs. Urquhart sounded scandalized.
“Well, with the lambing, and school …”
Lorna wished she could stand up straight under the older woman’s scrutiny, but really she wanted the ground to swallow her up. Why did Mrs. Urquhart have to do this in front of everyone?
“Please don’t worry, Mrs. Urquhart,” Iris interrupted, stepping forward with a pile of scarves. “I knitted six this week, so Lorna can share mine.”
Lorna knew Iris was trying to help, in her own way, but did she not understand that by showing off for Mrs. Urquhart, she was just making things worse?
Mrs. Urquhart gave another dramatic sigh and laid a bony hand on Iris’s arm.
“At least you won’t be letting down those poor frozen soldiers, Iris dear.”
Mrs. Urquhart seemed cheered enough to stop lecturing Lorna as she began inspecting Iris’s scarves appreciatively. They were lovely, each one intricately patterned and tassled, as beautiful as every piece of knitting or sewing Iris produced.
“Oh, how clever you are,” Mrs. Urquhart gushed, “and how thoughtful and caring. Thank you. You’ll make someone a lovely wife one of these days.”
Mrs. Urquhart gave a tight nasal laugh, and to Lorna’s annoyance, Iris joined in.
“Now, everyone”—Mrs. Urquhart clapped her hands as she addressed the whole group—“Mr. John will be here any moment in his van, so can we get these boxes packed up and sealed? Immediately, please, so we still have time to practice our elbow bandages and slings.”
“I hate that woman so much,” whispered Lorna. “You’d think she was the bloody Queen of Aberlady, not just the minister’s wife.”
“I think you are being rather unfair,” said Iris, without bothering to whisper.
“Shhhhh!” hissed Lorna. “She’ll hear you.”
Iris laid down the scarves and faced Lorna.
“Mrs. Urquhart has a lot of responsibility in the village as the wife of the minister, what with the church flowers, the Sunday school, and leading the Red Cross and the Girl Guides. She needs our support, Lorna, not your sniping.”
Lorna rolled her eyes but said nothing more.
Iris put one scarf into each cardboard box on their table, tucking it carefully on top of the paperback novel, the packets of tea, the soap, and the Capstan cigarettes they had already packed inside.
“Anyway,” Iris said after a moment, “you knew we were packing parcels today, so why didn’t you bring your scarf? Did you even finish it?”
“Yes, I did finish it actually.” Lorna was indignant. “But I was in a rush to get out the door this morning and left it in my knitting bag, that was all.”
“Why were you late, anyway? You looked like you’d run all the way to school.”
“Oh, you know, just chores and whatnot.”
Lorna hoped Iris was busy enough not to notice the flush starting up her neck, because she could not possibly explain that morning’s distraction of watching Paul from the kitchen window.
To move Iris’s mind away from any further questions, Lorna asked one of her own.
“So do you and Prince Charming have more plans to go dancing with the delightful double act of Esther Bell and Craig Buchanan?” Lorna sniggered. “After all, the last outing was such a success.”
Iris had moaned for days about how awful the evening in Tranent had been, with Esther being bitchy about everyone at school, including Lorna, and expecting Iris to join in, and Craig being … well, being Craig, so full of himself, he was chatting up other girls, even though he was there with Esther. Lorna was still so relieved she hadn’t buckled under Iris’s pressure to go with them.
“Stop it, Lorna.” But Iris was giggling too. “You know I’d rather run through Aberlady naked on Easter Sunday than repeat that foursome. And it’s all I can do to stop William suggesting we do it again this weekend. He didn’t even notice there was anything wrong.”
Lorna tucked her hands together in front of her chest and did her best impression of their teacher, Mrs. Murray.
“And what can one learn from this experience, young Iris?” Lorna paused as if considering. “Perhaps that Craig Buchanan is an unbearable cad, Esther Bell is a complete cow, and William Urquhart really isn’t worthy of your attention?”
Iris laughed as she slapped at Lorna’s arm.
“I told you to stop it! Seriously, you can say all you like about Esther and Craig, but you know you must be nice about my William.”
