Page 70 of Little Wing
Nell was shocked.
‘In Glasgow. When you were twenty-one months old. When I handed you over. After Flora had died. When you had to leave us here for your family down there.’
‘She came to collect me?’ Nell had never really pondered the logistics. ‘My mum?’
‘With your granddad.’
And now the bell rang clearly. ‘Buchanan– of course – that was my granddad George. He died a long time ago.’
‘Iain Buchanan’s brother. I met him that day. The spit, they were, the spit of each other.’
‘Is he alive? Iain?’
Sophia shook her head. ‘A good twenty, twenty-five years, I reckon.’
Nell’s questions were backing up in a logjam; she sipped quickly at the tea, chiding her mind for being in such a muddle.
‘You do look like her, you know,’ Sophia said.
Nell felt her eyes smart. ‘Even though I’m pretty much twice the age she was when she died?’
The blunt fact sounded horrible, tragic.
‘Yes, Nell – you do look like her.’
‘I can’t remember all these things I wanted to ask you. There’s so much. I don’t know where to begin.’
Sophia put her cup down. ‘Well, I’ve plenty to tell you. For starters I want you to know how much you were adored. Adored. You might not have been planned – but you were very much wanted, right from the start. That’s how she found her way here.’
‘Did she run away?’
‘She was sent.’
‘She was banished?’ Nell remembered the pain of being that age, even for a normal sixteen-year-old in a liberal household. She layered upon that the abject fear, the rejection and shame that Florence must have shouldered. Flora. She’d only ever call her that from now on because her mother had found her strength and her bravery and her happiness being Flora.
‘If Flora hadn’t died—’
Sophia sighed fondly. ‘She’d have stayed up here. I’m quite convinced.’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely. She loved it. She had plans, you know – she wanted to be an artist.’
‘An artist?’
‘Here.’ Sophia picked up a piece of paper resting on top of the books on the shelf beside her. She handed it to Nell. Tessellating swirls and arabesques and spirals and paisleys in many shades of mauve and gold and deep greens and rich browns. ‘She was dead good.’
‘It’s the Harris hills, isn’t it? I’ve been places that feel like this over the last few days.’ Nell turned the page.
For Nurse Keaton, we love you! Flora and Nell xxx
And it struck Nell that there had been a time when it really had been just Flora and Nell and she wished, how she wished, she could conjure up some tiny memory. Lightly, she traced her finger over the shapes.
‘I wonder whether I’d’ve stayed too.’
Sophia sighed. ‘Probably not. Employment – prospects – opportunity. So many of the youngsters leave the islands. It’s a problem. It’s always been a problem. Some do return but mostly they go to the mainland or seek their fortunes elsewhere. It was lovely that Flora was intent on making a life here.’
‘But she died,’ Nell said softly. ‘Flora died. Before she could be an artist – before she could fulfil any of her dreams.’ She sensed Nurse Keaton flinch and Nell realized that she too wanted to overlook this fact for the time being, to keep Flora alive, now that she’d found her at last. ‘Did she like being a mother? At only seventeen? I mean – was she good at it? How did she cope? Was I a good baby? Did we have – a bond?’
