would serve her day, in the tone of resignation that suggested a brief day and a bounded, it was only, Martha noted, in phrases where to speak so had become a habit. When she was not simply making use of a phrase, Miss Leggatt’s talk was all of life. No worms, nor graves, nor epitaphs had entry there. She had turned her back on the incredible folly of dying and was setting again about the excellent business of living with all the astuteness she could muster. ‘Does she understand?’ Martha thought. A few months at the most, the doctors had said. And she pondered whether she ought not to recall the old lady’s galloping ideas. Was it kind to let her deceive herself, build false hopes that could have no foundation?
Miss Leggat understood well enough. She knew that she was dying: but she was not going to smirch what was left of her life by any graveyard considerations. And she said to Martha, ‘It’s high time the kail was planted out.’
‘Kail!’ Martha thought, with a queer contraction of the heart. ‘Where will she be by winter? − But if it makes her any happier, where’s the harm?’ And she planted out the kail.
The old woman’s gallant endurance of pain astounded her. ‘But it’s less awful than spiritual pain,’ she said to herself hastily, ashamed a little of her own cowardice in face of her black nights of craving; and ashamed a little farther at the self-excusing, she would turn to Aunt Josephine with some tender ministration. She was not always tender. Passion, that seeks self very abundantly, left her at times a poor leisure for the concerns of other folk. When the crave was on her, it was dull companionship she gave Miss Leggatt. Luckily, however, Miss Leggatt had other companions. Peter Mennie, whether he had a letter for her or not (and Miss Josephine had no great correspondence), put his head every day round the cheek of the door and cried her good morning. Clem, from Drochety Farm, the rough country lass who since the death of Mrs. Glennie had been mistress in all but name of Drochety’s establishment, and held her empire with an audacious hand, ran in on any pretext, or none at all, and bandied high jests with Miss Josephine.
‘Ye’re a great case,’ Miss Josephine would say, gleaming in spite of her nauseating pain at some of Clemmie’s audacities. Clem was a thorough-paced clown. She had an adaptable body. She could squint at will and her limbs were double-jointed. She would descend rapturously upon Miss Josephine with ‘eyes that werena neebors an’ feet at a quarter to three,’ and take off again ‘bow-hoched,’ her tongue lolling; while the old lady sat in her chair and beamed with pleasure.
‘She’s a tongue in her heid an’ she can use it tae,’ she would tell Martha. ‘She’s some terrible up-comes. She’s a caution, is Clem. A cure.’
A cure she was. The bluffert of her presence did Miss Josephine good. The very sound of her voice, strident and exuberant, carrying across the fields, was companionship in the long lonely days; and when Clemmie made jam, she gave Miss Josephine a taste; when she baked she brought her a scone for her tea.
And Stoddart Semple shambled in once or twice with his dambrod and gave the old lady a game; but she was ‘tired some seen’ for the game to be much of a success. ‘We maun jist tire an’ fa’ tae again,’ she said, ‘that’s fat we maun dae. Tire an’ fa’ tae again.’ They fell to again, Stoddart having ample leisure to await her convenience and in his glum fashion enjoying the stir.
Mary Annie, too, old widowed Mrs Mortimer, would look in, hastily and deferentially, upon her friend. Her visits were conditioned. With the years Jeannie Mortimer had become increasingly peremptory and inquisitorial. She had carried her habit of bigotry from her religion into the minutest affairs of daily life; and surer every hour of her own salvation, grew proportionately contemptuous of the remnant of mankind. For Miss Leggatt in particular, who said straight out exactly what she thought of such a misanthropic variety of religion (‘I’m ane like this,’ Miss Leggatt would proclaim, ‘fatever I think I say.’ And she thought, and said, that Jeannie Mortimer was a besom. ‘She’s blawn up nae handy in her ain conceits. Religion’s nae for plaguin’ ye. A bit prayer’s richt bonny in its ain time an’ place, but yon’s fair furth the gate. She’s nae near han’ soun’.’), for Miss Leggatt in particular Jeannie entertained an unconcealed distaste.
‘I canna bide,’ Mrs. Mortimer would tell Miss Josephine. ‘It’s an offence if I bide awa’ ower lang.’
But when Jeannie’s back was turned, Mrs. Mortimer, with her head poked forward, in her curious mode of progression that was half a walk and half a run, would sneak in by to Miss Leggatt. Some mornings she would arrive a little after ten o’clock.
‘Jeannie’s tae the toon, Miss Josephine,’ she would say. And, jubilantly, ‘I’ve on the tatties. I dinna need muckle breakfast, but I maun hae ma dinner. I’m nae nane o’ yer gentry kind o’ fowk. I’m jist the common dab. I jist eat whan I’m hungry.’
‘The gentry has jist three meals a day,’ Miss Josephine would answer. ‘It’s the common dab that has five or sax an’ jist eat whan they’re hungry.’
‘I dinna ken’ − all her old anxiety was in Mary Annie’s voice and countenance − ‘I dinna ken. I’m jist plain Geordie Williamson.’
And she would trot away, between a walk and a run, to eat gleefully of smoking hot potatoes and salt; and then pick and fidget at the meal she shared with Jeannie.
‘I dinna need muckle mate, an auld body like me,’ she said.
June was a hot and heavy month. Martha found the eight miles to Slack of Mar a little longer every morning. There came a morning when, nauseated by the odour that clung about Aunt Josephine’s room, she sickened and could eat no breakfast. She climbed on her bicycle nonetheless and set off up the road.
‘She has her ain a-dae wi’ they littlins,’ Aunt Josephine was saying somewhat later to the doctor, who chanced to call that morning.
It did not occur to her that Martha might have her own ado in Crannochie as well. How could she be a trouble to anyone, sitting there so quietly in her chair, with never a word of complaint upon her lips?
Quarter of an hour later the doctor came on Martha herself, sitting by the side of the road where she had stumbled from her bicycle, her head sunk in her hands.
‘If you could take me on to the Slack −’ she said.
‘The Slack!’ quoth he. ‘It’s slack into your bed that you’re going.’
And to Miss Josephine he said, ‘You’ll have to get a woman in to notice you, or I’ll be having two patients instead of one.’
‘Weel, weel,’ said Miss Josephine, ‘what we canna help we needna hinder. We’ll jist e’en hae to dae’t.’
But that evening as she sat in her chair her mouth was a little grim. A woman in to notice her indeed! What noticing did she require? It was not as though she were raivelled, as her old mother had been, poor body, or Miss Foubister of Birleybeg, who had been a terrible handful for years before she died, getting up and dressing herself in the middle of the night and trotting away down the road to the yowie woodie in search of a sweetie shop to buy her peppermints; or clearing the dirty dishes off the table into her apron and flinging them like so much refuse on the grate, where they smashed to smithereens. No, indeed, she was not like that. And a stranger body, too, meddling among her things, preventing herself perhaps from going and doing as she pleased. Her mouth was still a little grim in the morning.
‘I’m fine, auntie,’ Martha insisted. ‘I’m quite all right today. Really I am.’
‘Wi’
