the hall outside the front-room door Sally took a deep breath and smoothed her damp palms against the pleats in her neat flecked tweed skirt. She’d bought the skirt on a shopping trip with Morag early on in the autumn before her mother had died. Morag had said how much the heather colours had suited her, bringing out the colour of her eyes, and had persuaded Sally to buy a pretty violet twinset to go with the skirt. She wasn’t wearing that twinset now. Instead she had chosen a plain dark blue blouse.
She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.
Callum was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, his hands folded behind his back. Seeing him in uniform was disconcerting. In her memories of him he was always wearing his patched tweed jacket softened by wear, a Tattersall checked shirt worn with a sleeveless pullover, and a pair of cavalry twill trousers. In his naval uniform he looked taller, stood straighter, the slight scholarly stoop she remembered gone. She looked away from him, aware of the pulse beating in her throat and the unwanted pang of longing seeing him brought her. His cap was on the coffee table.
‘You’re in the navy.’
It was stupid thing to say, but somehow the words had formed and were spoken, sounding, to her own dismay, almost like a reproach, as though she had the right to reproach him for doing something without her knowledge.
‘Yes. Sublieutenant. I’ve just finished my training at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and I should receive orders as to which ship I’m to join pretty soon.’
He paused and then came towards her, saying, ‘Sally . . .’ Immediately she stepped back from him, holding up her hands as though to ward him off, relieved when he moved away.
‘Your father misses you,’ he told her abruptly, ‘and so too does Morag.’
‘He’s all right?’ Sally couldn’t hold back her anxiety.
Immediately Callum’s smile deepened, as he said reassuringly, ‘Yes, apart from the fact that he misses you.’
Sally stiffened and turned her head away as she told him fiercely, ‘I miss my mother and I always will.’
‘Sally, you aren’t a child,’ he told her in a sharp voice. ‘I can understand your loyalty towards your mother but do you really feel she would want this? For you to cut yourself off from your father?’
‘He cut himself off from her and from me when he married Morag.’
‘You’re being unfair.’
‘I’m being unfair?’ She made a small bitter sound. ‘Morag married my father three months after my mother’s death.’
‘Your mother would never have wanted your father to be alone; she would have understood.’
‘Understood what? That your sister, and my best friend, whom she had treated as another daughter, was offering him the . . . the comfort of an intimate relationship whilst she lay dying? And as for my father being alone, he would have had me. I’d like you to leave. Now. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know why you came here. After all, I’ve made my feelings plain enough. Your sister betrayed our friendship and the kindness my mother showed her.’
‘Your mother encouraged them to be together.’
‘Not in that way! You say that because it’s what you want to believe, because Morag is your sister, but it isn’t the truth.’
‘Because you don’t want it to be the truth? Your mother wanted your father to be happy, to be cared for and loved as she had cared for him and loved him. She told Morag so.’
‘Do you really expect me to believe that? Well, I don’t.’
‘I thought better of you than this, Sally, I really did.’
Now his voice had become colder, sharper, critical, stabbing into the soft vulnerability of her emotions.
‘Just as I thought better of your sister,’ Sally defended herself. ‘Now we’ve both been disappointed. How would you have liked it, Callum, if our positions had been reversed? It’s all very well for you to come here and tell me how I should feel; you’re bound to take Morag’s side.’
‘Sally, it isn’t a matter of taking sides. Your father loves you and misses you. I know you were upset and shocked by their marriage, but surely out of your love for your father – and I know that you do love him – and the friendship that you and Morag shared, you can find it in your heart to accept that they genuinely want to be together?’
‘What, and betray my mother, like Morag betrayed our friendship?’ She shook her head. ‘No. Never.’
‘Sally, it’s almost Christmas. A time for families to be together, to stand together, especially when we are a country at war. And besides . . .’ He paused and looked at her and there was something in that look – a mixture of sadness and pity – that ripped at her defences and made her want to cry out to him, ‘What about your loyalty to me and what we could have had? What about taking my side? What about understanding me?’ But of course she didn’t; couldn’t when he had put himself so clearly on Morag’s side.
She saw his chest rise and fall as he took a deep breath. Then he told her, ‘I was hoping that you would agree to see your father and Morag before I had to tell you this, but obviously you won’t. There’s to be a child, Sally, due in May. Your father and Morag desperately want you to share in their joy.’
The room spun wildly round her, nausea clawing at her stomach, the sound of her vehement denial echoing inside her own head.
Callum caught hold of her, his hands gripping her upper arms as she fought against the faintness threatening to overwhelm her.
Above her she could see the once beloved face of the man she had hoped to spend the rest of her life with, a man she had thought so morally superior, so kind, so everything she could ever imagined wanting in a man and more; but who was now her enemy, and the pain inside her was so strong she thought it would break her apart.
‘Sally?’
Was that yearning she could hear in his voice? If it was then it was a brother’s yearning for her to uphold a sister, not a man’s yearning for her love.
Bitterly, she shrugged off his hold.
‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ she told him. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again, Callum, or them.’
‘Have you no message for your father, Sally? He loves you and misses you.’
‘Does he? Well, he will soon have another child to love in my place, won’t he?’
She turned to the door and held it open, telling him, ‘I want you to leave, Callum.’
Silently, his mouth grim, he collected his cap and walked past her to the front door where he paused to say, ‘I thought better of you, Sally, I really did.’
‘Maybe I thought better of you as well, Callum,’ was the only response she allowed herself to make as he opened the door and disappeared into the darkness beyond it.
A child. Her father and Morag were to have a child. Revulsion filled her. Revulsion and anger, and pain. If things
