The Tender Glory Read online

  THE TENDER GLORY

  by

  JEAN S. MACLEOD

  It seemed a great sacrifice when Alison gave up her hopes of a career as concert pianist to nurse her mother back at her Scottish home, Craigie Hill Farm - especially as her brother Robin refused to come back from Canada and face his

  responsibilities.

  But in the end she found a happiness beyond her dreams.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “YOU’LL go back,” Belle Christie said. “You wouldn’t dream of doing anything else in the circumstances. I know she hasn’t asked you to go. She wouldn’t demand such a sacrifice, but you won’t look at it like that, Alison. You’ll go because you want to go, because you know in your heart that you wouldn’t be happy otherwise.”

  The deeply resonant voice sank into lengthening silence, with only the ticking of the clock and the girl’s swift breathing audible in the gathering dusk. It was no awkward silence. They knew each other too well for that. They had lived together long enough and amicably enough to be able to dispense with words until there was need for them.

  Outside, in the quiet London square, the leaves fell noiselessly from the plane trees in the enclosed gardens, with no breath of wind to scatter them along the pavement or pile them against the railings like a russet tide. The sky was grey, for the light had faded early, and already the street lamps were flickering into life, but in the room where aunt and niece sat walled in by their separate thoughts there was only the glow from the electric fire to reveal the expressions on the two faces which were so much alike.

  They could have been mother and daughter, Belle mused. She had never married and Alison had filled a gap in her life which she had recognised more and more as the years went by. She was a woman who should have borne children—a natural mother—yet fate had decreed otherwise. The Second World War had torn her life asunder, leaving her, at twenty-six, without the man she loved. He had died gallantly in North

  Africa and she could never forget him.

  We’re made like that, she mused in the silence while she waited for Alison to speak. We Christies are all alike. It’s once and for ever when our hearts are given. Maybe it’s a wasteful way to live one’s life, but it can’t be helped. I couldn’t have married after Will. I know that, and now it’s Alison’s turn to make what might be the biggest decision of a lifetime.

  Not about love, that was true, but about her career, which had meant everything to her up till now. Dedicated to her music, she had been determined to succeed, if only to prove to her parents that their sacrifices on her behalf had not been in vain, and now, with her final examinations less than a year ahead, she was faced with a choice that must be tearing her apart.

  Belle watched her cross the room to the window, her steps lagging a little, her expressive grey-green eyes fixed on the darkening square, although in thought she must have been miles away.

  “It isn’t the decision that’s difficult,” Alison said, at last. “It’s trying to crush down the disappointment and the bitterness. I shouldn’t feel it, Aunt Belle, but I do. If Robin hadn’t gone off to New York Mother wouldn’t have needed me so desperately. I could have gone home for a spell to see her through this illness and come back eventually to finish my scholarship.” She turned back into the room, her face distressed, her hands tightly clenched by her sides. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she apologised. “I didn’t really mean it. It’s so long since Robin went to America that it seems to be part of another lifetime, but he did desert Craigie Hill, even though it was before my father died.”

  Belle rose to her feet, aware of the tension in the slight figure facing her across the room.

  “One tends to blame Robin,” she agreed, “but he must have had some reason—some rather desperate reason—for going so far and so suddenly.”

  Alison’s brows drew together.

  “It was sudden,” she allowed. “He quarrelled with my father, but not seriously, and that couldn’t have been his reason for going. There must have been something else. He was so fond of Craigie Hill, and there was never any question of him leaving Scotland. His roots were there and he loved the farm work. Something must have happened, Aunt Belle; something drastic which took him all that way away without even saying goodbye.”

  Her brother’s departure had hurt her more than she would admit, even to Belle, who had always shared her confidences, and the letter he had written to her afterwards had told her nothing. He had said, briefly, that he had wanted a new life, that Craigie Hill held nothing for him, just as it held nothing for her now that music occupied all her time.

  That wasn’t strictly true. She still loved Craigie Hill. She would always love her childhood home, but its isolation on that bleak headland above the wild North Sea had made it impossible for her to stay there if she was to fulfil herself and make the most of a considerable talent. Three years ago the opportunity had come her way. She had won her first scholarship and her parents had helped her proudly on her way. Belle Christie had taken her to live with her when she had come to London, glad of her company in the Kensington flat and equally proud of her success. It had been an ideal situation, pleasing to them both and immensely reassuring to her mother back at Craigie Hill.

  When her father had died six months ago Alison had offered to go home, but Helen Christie had urged her to stay where she was. ‘I can manage fine.’ Helen had written in her inimitable way. ‘I’m used to Craigie and there’s only myself to keep. Besides, I’ve got Kirsty and Neil Kinloch. They’ll stay, since there’s nowhere else they could go, anyway, at their age.’

  It had been reassuring at the time because she had wanted to be reassured, but now her mother was ill. Any day now she was due to go to Wick for an operation, perhaps even to Inverness if it had been too dangerously long delayed.

  “I wish I had known right from the beginning.” Alison sat down on the stool beside the fire. “She should have told us. She shouldn’t have left it till the last minute like this. If anything happens to her I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll blame myself for not going home after Dad died.”

  “That’s just nonsense,” Belle said rather sharply. “Nothing’s going to happen, anyway. My guess is that she’s worked herself to a standstill these past few months, coping with the farm and your father’s illness. A good long rest may be all she needs after the operation is over.”

  Alison looked at her anxiously.

  “I wish you could come, too,” she said. “You’re so capable.”

  “There’s no need for both of us,” Belle assured her. “But if it came to a pinch and you felt you couldn’t manage by yourself I’d come north immediately. Not that I’d be much use at Craigie Hill,” she added, looking down at her immaculately manicured hands. “It’s a far cry from running a boutique to managing a farm.”

  Almost as far removed as being a concert pianist, Alison thought, her mind scarcely equal to absorbing the devastating truth. It was all over, the eagerness and the striving and the ambition. Fulfilment had been snatched from her almost at the moment of achievement. She would give up her place at the Conservatoire of Music and go home and her chance of the career she had longed for would be gone.

  “It won’t be for ever,” Belle said to console her. “It might only be for a month or two.”

  But these were precious months, Alison realised. Without them she had no real chance of climbing to the heights.

  “I’ve never been quite sure what I wanted to do,” she admitted. “I’ve lived in a sort of rosy glow of music these past three years, with no very definite goal in sight, but I’ve been told I could make the concert platform if I stuck it.” She sprang to her feet. “Why am I going over and over all this?” she demanded angrily. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m goin
g home. It’s weak-willed and treacherous of me to moan about the might-have-beens. I won’t come back,” she added slowly.

  “Somehow, I know that. It’s Craigie Hill for me for the rest of my life.”

  Belle found nothing to say to her. The decision she had made had been a foregone conclusion in her own mind, but she was still able to recognise the agony of renunciation in the young voice and the bitterness of defeat.

  “You won’t regret it,” she said after a moment. “And don’t think it might be for always, Alison. You can come back to London when your mother’s well again.”

  Alison shook her head.

  “There won’t be any grant after next spring,” she pointed out.

  “Don’t worry about the grant,” Belle said quickly. “You can come back to me. What’s the good of me having a nest-egg if I never use it?”

  “I couldn’t.” The tears were nearer the surface now. “It’s kind of you, Aunt Belle, but I couldn’t use your money. You might need it yourself one day.”

  Belle picked up the tea tray to carry it through to the tiny kitchen.

  “We’ll go into that when the time comes,” she said firmly. “Do you really want me to come north with you?”

  Alison shook her head.

  “I don’t think it would do any good, and I know how busy you are just before Christmas,” she said. “Mother will want to see you—afterwards, I think.”

  They washed and dried the dishes between them, something they always did. They had done so much together, and now that too was over. The walks through the Park on a crisp April morning when the leaves were new on the trees; the visits to Kew and the trips along the river; the summer days at Worthing or high on Beachy Head, and the long rambles across the Downs were the things she would remember, together with the winter evenings at Covent Garden and the long stands at the Proms. The little, tender things that had meant so much to them both. Soon they would be no more than a memory, a dream fading into the

  harsh reality of Craigie Hill.

  She didn’t want to go to Craigie Hill full of regret. She loved her home, but this was different. This had been all she had ever wanted from life.

  “How will you go?” Belle asked.

  She had not said: ‘When will you go?’ She knew it would be soon.

  “I’ll tell them tomorrow.” Alison averted her eyes from the piano standing in its small alcove beside the window. “I don’t suppose they’ll ask me to go on working even till the end of the week. I’d be wasting their time. I’ll fly up,” she added, answering Belle’s direct question. “It will be quicker.

  I can hire a taxi from Wick.”

  She thought of the sheer cliffs beneath Craigie Hill and the bitter cold of an easterly gale sweeping in from the grey North Sea, and her life looked like that for a moment. Then, with firmed lips and a desperate sort of resolution in her eyes, she turned towards her bedroom.

  “I’ll start packing some of my things. I won’t be able to take them all by air.” She paused at the open door. “Would you let me leave my music here?”

  Belle answered without looking at her.

  “This is almost as much your home as Craigie Hill, and if you did want your music up there I could bring it with me when I come.”

  I’ll never want it, Alison thought forlornly. Never again. It’s always best to make a clean break. That way your heart doesn’t get torn apart by the hundred and one little reminders of the past. Yet how she was to sustain her loss during the next few weeks she didn’t know. A sick feeling clutched at her throat and she felt suddenly empty. The effort she had made had been no small thing, but all she could do was to look ahead. She was needed at Craigie Hill.

  That was the most important thing. The years in London had to be forgotten, thrust behind her as if they had never been. That was what she had to do because Robin had failed them all, and she ought to be able to do it without bitterness.

  I wish I could, she thought. I wish I could go back home without feeling that Robin is to blame for everything.

  Two days later she was on her way to Scotland. Air travel had effectively bridged the gap between her isolated home and the south, but it had scarcely changed her parents’ way of life. Wick had remained the ‘great city’ of their few sojourns abroad, and Helmsdale and Lybster had supplied them with their everyday needs. They had always lived frugally, earning what was no more than a meagre living from the soil, but eager to give their children a better chance in life than they had enjoyed themselves. Craigie Hill was small compared with its wealthier neighbours inland. It was perched on a cliff, with no great depth of soil beneath it, a house on a rock in simple fact. There was little arable land, but her father and his father before him had bred sturdy black-faced sheep on the moor behind it and her great-grandfather, a victim of the vicious Highland Clearances, had built Craigie Hill with his own hands while his wife and family had huddled together in the shelter of a broken-down byre.

  That was why it seemed so unnatural to Alison that her brother should have thrown it all away. It might have been a meagre heritage, but at least it was his own.

  They had grown apart a little after her departure for London, but she had always thought of Robin as belonging there, the last link in the chain that bound them to Craigie Hill.

  The first stop on her journey was Aberdeen. The plane touched down at Dyce in a thin haar creeping in from the sea. They had flown above it, watching it drifting like a delicate chiffon scarf between them and the land, and the pilot had to wait for a radio signal from Wick before they could go on.

  “We can just about make it,” the air hostess announced, coming back from the terminal buildings, “but anyone going on to Kirkwall may have to spend the night in Wick. There’s poor visibility all the way north from Duncansby Head.”

  The two passengers for the Orkney Islands shrugged resignedly. After all, it was October and they had travelled by air often enough at this time of year to expect delay. They settled down behind their respective newspapers as the plane taxied along the runway, lifted and flew north-westwards over the Moray Firth.

  Alison drew a swift breath of relief. At least, she was going to reach Wick without delay and after that her journey south along the coast would be easy enough. She would hire a taxi in Wick to take her to Craigie Hill.

  Coming nearer, with the mist lifting a little to show her Sarclet Head, her heart began to pound with a remembered excitement. Coming home had always felt like this. She had made the journey so often that every step of the way was dearly familiar, and some of her disappointment and hurt fell away as she watched the high plateau of Caithness forming beneath her. The haar still hugged the coastline, but behind it the spreading moorland lay under the autumnal sun, gilded like burnished gold until it rose to the terrible mountains of the west. The great peaks of Sutherland, seered by their isolated straths, looked back at her without kindness, girded by a chain of lochs, and far to the north the Pentland Firth heaved in sullen fury against Duncansby and Dunnet Head.

  Deliberately she brought her gaze back to the nearer hills, to green Morven and the Maiden Pap and Scaraben, which they had climbed as children. In the fitful gleam of sunlight they seemed to welcome her. Dunrobin Castle appeared, standing out on its rocky promontory half obscured by mist, the fairy stronghold of her earliest imaginings, the rose-pink castle of romance and mystery. In no time, it seemed, they were over the South Head and slipping down to the airport.

  Crossing the windswept runway, she hired the necessary taxi, aware of the driver studying her as he collected her hand-luggage and stowed it in the boot. His face, vaguely familiar, would not supply her with a name and she waited for him to speak first. She had already told him where she wished to go.

  “You’re Alison Christie,” he commented without preliminary as he got in behind the wheel. “We were at school together, but maybe you don’t remember,” he added dryly.

  She struggled to bridge the gap of years.

  “Jim Orbister!” she
remembered. “But you were really in Robin’s year. Older than me.”

  He smiled, guiding the car away from the airport into the town.

  “Four years. You’ve changed a lot.”

  “Which means?”

  “You’re different. More sophisticated, maybe. But then, you’ve been to London.”

  The remark had been tossed at her almost aggressively, yet in the next instant he seemed amused.

  “What’s brought you back to Caithness?” he asked. “Surely you don’t intend to farm Craigie Hill?”

  She flushed. He was far from being the uncouth country bumpkin with his fair, Viking good looks and his penetrating blue eyes which he kept fixed on her face as he asked his questions. She remembered him well enough now, thinking that he had grown into a handsome man.

  “I’ve no idea what I’m going to do,” she was forced to confess. “That will depend on my mother. She’s been ill for some time.”

  His face sobered.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologised. “You must be very anxious about her.”

  “I am.” She paused as he negotiated a busy crossroads. “That’s why I’ve come home.”

  “For good?” he asked, letting in his clutch as the lights turned to amber. “You’ve got a lot of luggage with you,” he observed when she made no immediate reply.

  “It may be for good,” she said a little breathlessly.

  “And you consider it a great waste,” he suggested. “I remember the furore when you went off with your scholarship to conquer the musical world or die in the attempt.”

  “I don’t think that’s very funny.” Her cheeks were scarlet. “I did my best.”

  “I’m sure you did.” He sounded contrite. “But don’t tell me you aren’t disappointed and blaming Robin like mad.”

  She turned in her seat to look at him.

  “You were his friend,” she said. “Have you heard from him?” He shook his head.

  “No. It was a sort of final step when he went to America. He got sort of secretive towards the end, not confiding in anyone. When I came up here to Wick to start this hire-car business we more or less drifted apart. Sometimes he’d come up at week-ends, sometimes not. I got the idea that he was settling in at Craigie Hill.”