Authors: The Handkerchief Tree
Carrying a small bunch of asters, bought at cost from the shop, Shona, on the following Sunday, made her way through the ranks of graves lining mossy paths to her mother’s cross, marvelling as usual on how much some folk had been able to spend on their loved ones in this place.
See the great marble angels balancing over tombs and the sculpted figures looking down from tall columns, the marble books, the stone flowers, the gravelled stretches in front of graves, marked by railings and set with urns for flowers. Sadly, some of the older gravestones had lost a good part of their inscriptions, so that only odd letters still stuck out from crumbling masonry. At one time, all those names and dates would be read by grieving relatives; now there were no relatives left and no names to read.
Sadder still were the memorials to dead children, and Shona always hurried past those, not wishing to think about the young lives snatched away from what would have probably been comfortable homes and happy futures. Where were the memorials to those dead children who hadn’t come from comfortable homes, though? Only in the hearts of those they’d left, and maybe that was saddest of all.
Here, at last, at the end of the cemetery was the marker for the grave of Emily Edith Murray, Born 1888, Died 1919, where Shona halted for a long moment before hurrying to fill a jar at the cemetery tap.
‘No need to worry about height or shape with these, Ma,’ she whispered as she arranged her flowers in the jar. ‘But I’ll make ’em look nice, anyway. There, they look just right; should last till I come again.’
For some time she pulled out weeds from before the cross and tidied away leaves that were beginning to blow as a December breeze rattled through the graves. It was growing colder and she knew she would have to go soon, for the cemetery closed early in winter. There was just time to stand in silence, hoping that her mother might somehow know that all was going well for her.
No need to worry, Ma, she would have liked to say, I’m happy, I think it’ll work out all right. And if her mother couldn’t hear, well, Shona felt the better for telling her, anyway.
‘Gates closing!’ she heard a man’s voice calling and quickly scrambled up, dashing away a tear or two.
‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘I’m just coming.’
And Shona ran down the paths and out of the gate, back into the world.
Five years on, Shona, the day after Willa’s wedding, could still remember Brigid’s unusually serious words: ‘Things are always changing; nothing stays the same.’ And thought how right she had been.
Having arrived early at work on a beautiful June morning in 1928, Shona was alone in the staffroom, dwelling on the changes she herself had seen since she’d left Edina Lodge. Why, even the fact that she was here, drinking tea and not worrying, was a wee change in itself, brought about when she had persuaded Mrs May to allow her staff to have a tea before they started work. After all, it was true enough that they were often too rushed to have anything later, and Mrs May had agreed.
But then, she often did agree with Shona these days, and maybe that was a change, too, to be compared with Shona’s transformation from raw young junior to experienced and talented florist. Now twenty years old, confident and professional, she had become someone immensely valued by the Mays – even more than Brigid, who was still at the shop, and perhaps as much as Willa, who now, of course, was not.
Oh, Lord, how she was missed, even if her leaving would no longer be the blow it might once have been. Shona sighed a little, remembering how dependent she had been on Willa in the early days, and of how, as she began to equal her in experience, that dependency turned to pleasant friendship.
If only Willa hadn’t had to go and marry that admirer of hers, that fellow who had haunted the shop until she agreed to go out with him! Next thing they were engaged, and though Grant Henderson had a good job in a George Street bank, the engagement had been a long one. Though not long enough, for here they were, married, and after a lovely wedding at Colinton Kirk, held on the shop’s half day closing so that Shona and Brigid could be bridesmaids, and with flowers provided by the Mays as their personal present, they were away on honeymoon. Back at Maybel’s, the day after the wedding, it was all an anticlimax.
‘Hello, hello!’ cried Brigid, bursting in, with the new assistant, a pale young girl named Isla Wardie in tow. ‘Got the tea made, Shona?’
‘I’ll make some fresh,’ said Shona rising, but Brigid was turning Isla in the direction of the gas ring and kettle.
‘No, no, Isla can make it. You’d like to, wouldn’t you, Isla?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the sixteen-year-old answered hastily. She was a pretty girl with large, apprehensive blue eyes and dark bobbed hair, and as she filled the kettle and stood uncertainly holding it Shona, with a sympathetic smile, lit the gas for her and pointed out the tea caddy.
‘It’s only your second week, eh? And last week was a bit hectic, with the wedding and all, so you didn’t get to do much. It’ll be different now.’
‘Aye, more boring,’ said Brigid, looking in their biscuit tin and taking out a ginger nut. ‘Sorry, only joking. Don’t want to put you off, Isla, when you’ll be feeling pretty pleased with yourself, having got the job.’
‘Of course she’s pleased!’ Shona cried quickly.
She knew, as Brigid knew, that Isla’s mother was a friend of Mrs May’s, which perhaps accounted for Isla’s having been selected at interview. Maybe not, though, because Mrs May had said she was very ‘artistic’. Perhaps she was in any case the best candidate, but Brigid was being grumpy about it and Shona didn’t want trouble.
‘Isla, don’t take any notice of Brigid,’ she continued smoothly. ‘I expect she’s just feeling a wee bit down because the wedding’s over.’
‘And thinking Willa’s on honeymoon and I’m not!’ Brigid said snappishly. ‘You know, it’s made me look at my Robbie in a new light. Maybe I’ll be the next to go, eh? And then it’ll be you, Shona, and that sailor laddie of yours. Looks like it’ll be Isla running this place before she knows it! Here, is that kettle boiling yet? I’m desperate for my tea.’
As Isla, giving Brigid terrified glances, managed to make the tea, Shona said she’d open up and went out smiling. She knew that Brigid would never marry the young office worker she called ‘her Robbie’, as she had no intention, she often said, of ever becoming a housewife. And as for Shona’s marrying Archie Smith, that was a piece of nonsense only Brigid could dream up. It was true, when he was on leave, that he always came straight to the shop to see if Shona would go out with him, and she usually did, but then there were one or two other young men who asked her out and she went out with them too. Never would she be walking up the aisle with any one of them. Not when she was so happy in her job.
‘Nine o’clock, girls!’ she heard Mrs May calling at the door of the staffroom.
‘I’m opening up, Mrs May!’ she called back, flinging open the shop door to the June sunlight, and as the sense of anticlimax began to fade, she felt her usual rush of excitement for a new day and her wonder for what it might bring.
While Isla toured the plants with her watering can under Brigid’s watchful eye, Shona went into the workroom to start a dinner-party arrangement that was to be delivered that afternoon ready for the next day. As Mr May was to be doing flowers for the hall and drawing room at the same house in the New Town, Shona wanted to discuss her ideas with him and was surprised, therefore, to find him not already at work.
‘Hugh’s just coming,’ Mrs May told her, seeing her questioning look. She laughed shortly. ‘At least, I hope he is. I left him still having breakfast in his dressing gown.’
‘Oh, well, I expect he’ll be along soon,’ Shona said, still surprised. The Mays usually came down from their flat together and she knew Mr May would be keen to get on with his hall arrangement which was, he’d already told her with a grin, going to be very ‘dramatic’.
‘Tall flowers for me, Shona, and low flowers for you, eh?’
‘I know what you mean,’ she’d answered, laughing. ‘Guests want to see each other across the table. I’m using miniature roses, mainly, apricot coloured and cream, to match Mrs Lockyer’s dining room curtains.’
‘And I’m using dark red gladioli, to match the décor of the hall, with white lilies for the drawing room, exactly following Mrs L’s instruction. You know what she’s like – very sure of what she wants!’
Oh, yes, Shona knew. Mrs Lockyer had used Maybel’s Flowers before and was a valued client – better get things right, then.
’Just make a start,’ Mrs May advised. ‘I’m sure Hugh will be down in a moment.’
It wasn’t Hugh May who came into the workroom, however, but Miss Bonar, the Mays’ housekeeper, a tall, grey-haired woman in her fifties. Always rather pale, she appeared quite white as she approached her employer.
‘Why, Miss Bonar, what brings you down here?’ Mrs May asked in surprise. Miss Bonar was very rarely seen out of the upstairs flat.
‘Madam, I think you’d better come up to see Mr May – he’s not looking at all well.’
‘Not looking well?’ Mrs May appeared transfixed, her own colour draining from her face so that the patches of her rouge showed up like theatrical make-up. ‘What do you mean? He was all right when I left him.’
‘If you’d just come, though, Madam.’
Mrs May turned her dark eyes on Shona. ‘Come with me, Shona, will you?’
‘Of course, Mrs May.’
Moving fast, the three women made their way from the workroom to the upstairs flat, where Mrs May called desperately, ‘Hugh! Hugh! Where are you?’
‘He’s on your bed, Madam,’ Miss Bonar told her breathlessly. ‘He went there when he said he didn’t feel well – left his breakfast – never ate a thing—’
‘Oh, God!’ Running into her beautiful all-blue bedroom, Mrs May knelt by the double bed where Mr May lay back against pillows, his face without colour, his eyes closed, his breathing ragged and erratic. ‘Oh, God, Hugh, what’s wrong?’
For a long moment the watchers thought he would not open his eyes, but at last the eyelids fluttered up and he was able to fix his wife with a panic-stricken gaze.
‘I – don’t know, Phyl,’ he whispered. ‘I just – don’t feel so good.’
‘Is it your heart, darling? Let me feel it!’
‘No, no, I don’t know what it is . . . I just feel . . . not myself.’
‘Madam, shall I ring the doctor?’ asked Miss Bonar.
‘I’ll do that,’ said Shona. ‘It’s Doctor Dell, isn’t it? Where can I find the number?’
‘By the telephone in the living room,’ Mrs May gasped as she held on to her husband’s hand. ‘Tell the operator to put you through straight away – it’s urgent!’
‘The doctor’s ordering an ambulance,’ Shona reported, hurrying back from the telephone. ‘When I told him the symptoms, he said Mr May would need to go to hospital.’
‘But is the doctor coming?’ asked Mrs May. ‘Is he coming?’
‘Yes, right away. He’s only in Charlotte Square, eh? He won’t take long.’
‘And I want Hugh to go to a nursing home, not the hospital. We know a good one – he went there with his appendix.’
Might be worse than he was with his appendix, Shona thought uneasily. She had never seen anyone look as ill as Mr May since she’d said goodbye to her mother in 1919.
‘He’ll be all right, Mrs May,’ she murmured, suddenly daring to put an arm round her. ‘The doctor will know what to do and the ambulance is coming as well.’
‘That’s right, Madam,’ Miss Bonar put in. ‘Doctor Dell’s very good, he’ll soon have Mr May better.’
But as Hugh May lay with his eyes closed again, Mrs May began to sob.
After that things began to happen, with Dr Dell, small and quick, arriving first, to be followed soon by the ambulance men with a stretcher, while Shona and Miss Bonar kept out of the way, exchanging bleak glances.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Miss Bonar suddenly wailed, twisting her hands together. ‘Shona, I don’t know what to do.’
‘He’s in good hands,’ murmured Shona, trying to find words of comfort, but thinking how terrible it was that life could always catch you out, springing surprises you weren’t prepared to face just when you might be feeling that everything was fine. Take what had happened to her mother: struck down, out of the blue, not like her dad who was in the war, where the worst might have been expected, but without warning, just as Mr and Mrs May had had no warning. How could folk cope with no warning?
‘Maybe I should make some tea?’ asked Miss Bonar, but Shona shook her head.
‘I don’t think anybody will have time to drink it. My guess is they’ll be taking Mr May to the nursing home as soon as possible.’
‘Oh, dear, oh dear,’ sighed Miss Bonar, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her apron, ‘That sounds bad, eh?’
Shona, patting her shoulder, said again that he’d be all right and that he was in good hands.
‘I’ll go and tell the others,’ she finished, and Miss Bonar nodded.
‘Yes, go and tell them. They’ll be wondering what’s going on.’
Me, too, thought Shona.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Brigid, her brown eyes huge on Shona’s face while Isla stood close beside her, fearfully eyeing a lady customer examining peonies who might suddenly ask her something. Anyone could tell that something was wrong, anyway, from the looks on the faces of the two older assistants. Anyone could sense their anxiety that was beginning to hang over the front shop like a black cloud.
‘What can we do?’ Shona whispered. ‘Try to carry on, d’you think? Till we know what Mrs May wants?’
‘But she’ll be going with Mr May to the nursing home; she won’t even have time to speak to us.’
‘Listen!’ Shona cried. ‘They’re leaving; I can hear footsteps coming down from the flat! I’ll see if I can catch Mrs May.’
But Mrs May herself suddenly appeared, looking as they’d never seen her before, wearing a brown jacket round her shoulders and a hat that didn’t match, with her face so colourless it was as though her make-up had now faded away and a woman they didn’t know was showing through.
‘The ambulance is just off,’ she said hoarsely, beckoning Shona and Brigid to come close. ‘I’m to follow. The doctor says Mr May has abnormally high blood pressure and they’re going to try to bring it down before he has a heart attack – or a stroke. I don’t know when I’ll be back.’