The One and Only Read online

  THE ONE AND ONLY

  Doris E. Smith

  Someone had described Angus MacAllan as “John Knox, Calvin and Queen Victoria rolled into one”—and that was pretty much the impression he made on Maggie Campbell when she first met him.

  Later on she changed her mind about Angus—but could she expect him to do the same about her, if he ever learned how she was deceiving him?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dublin Airport, swarming with Saturday late summer traffic and with a delayed flight to London on its hands, was doing its best, but obviously Flight 224 to Edinburgh was not going to leave on time.

  ‘Don’t wait, Phyl,’ Maggie urged. ‘You’ve enough to do.’

  ‘Well—if you’re sure...’ Duty and inclination warred in Phyllida’s sun-bronzed face. Duty won. ‘Tell Derek he’s a lucky man,’ she boomed heartily. ‘And remember we want to meet him soon.’

  Phyllida was an angel, but there were times when having Gabriel for an ancestor was a doubtful blessing to those outside the clan. As the inherited ‘Trump of Doomsday’ voice rang through the crowded departure lounge Maggie could feel every eye upon her. She turned blushing to Kelly, the third member of the party, and received a strangling hug.

  ‘You will be good, sweet one? Help Aunt Phyl as much as ever you can.’ Kelly at seven-minus was already a first-class stable boy, and the horses liked her all the better for being a mouse as well. That she was apprehensively totting up the bedtimes between now and Tuesday did not escape her aunt as she watched the small figure go down the hall.

  It was now time to find herself a seat in the area of the boarding gate for Edinburgh, and disconcertingly few seats there seemed to be, since the delayed London passengers who should by this time have been over Anglesey were still awaiting their aircraft. As Maggie hesitated a voice rang out in astonishment: ‘Sally! It’s Sally Gibson, it must be!’ A girl, totally strange to her, was on her feet waving wildly. ‘Come on. You remember me! Pat Martin.’

  It had not happened for ages and over here in Ireland it was incredible that it should. Once it had been a commonplace; before that, in the long past, two little girls’ favourite joke.

  ‘Sorry, I’m not Sally. I’m Maggie, Maggie Campbell. Sally was my twin sister.’

  ‘Was? The enquirer’s face changed. ‘Oh no! I’m terribly sorry, calling out like that!’ she added confusedly as Maggie sat down.

  ‘Please don’t feel badly. You weren’t to know.’ Twenty months ago such an incident would have brought a physical reaction—dry throat, spinning head, faintness.

  They had not been identical twins, Sally had been the beauty, Maggie the brains, but in true twin tradition they had been close, perhaps all the more so because from five years of age they had also been motherless. The first break when Sally had married Tom Gibson and gone south with him while Maggie stayed on with their father and the riding stables he managed in Dumfriesshire had been hard to take, but Maggie had weathered it, and, of course, there had been visits and the joy of Kelly, her niece and godchild. It was not until their father’s death some years later that Maggie had uprooted herself and gone to London to be near the rest of the family.

  Pat Martin—she was waiting for the London flight—had had a flat across the landing from Tom and Sally in the first months of their marriage. She had not linked them with the tragic plane crash in the Spanish mountains from which there had been no survivors, and now she listened pitifully as Maggie explained how Tom after months on overtime had decided to splurge on a winter holiday. ‘And Kelly? Was she with them?’

  ‘No, thank God. She was staying with me.’

  ‘And where is she now?’

  ‘She’s here. London wasn’t suitable.’ No need to enlarge on the weeks of fretting that had seemed to turn Kelly, never robust-looking, into a walking wraith. ‘She needed to get away. And I had a secretarial job with office hours so I couldn’t look after her properly. Besides, I’m not really a city type. We had friends in Dublin, the Foxes. They have a riding stables and they suggested I come over and help them with it. It’s made all the difference.’

  An announcement about the delayed flight had just been made. Boarding would take place in five minutes.

  ‘Well, it’s been incredible meeting you,’ Pat Martin pronounced. ‘Though it gives me a queer feeling you’re so like poor Sal. That divine hair! I used to be so envious. It’s like primroses and she could do anything with it.’

  ‘Sally was much better looking than me,’ Maggie said firmly. ‘I just have the colouring, that’s all.’

  It was unusual to find Nordic blondness in the Scottish borders, but Duncan Campbell, Maggie’s father, white-polled, blue-eyed and fair-skinned, had had a great-grandmother whose maiden name was Davidson and he had always maintained it was a contraction of Davidsen and had come from Norway. Be that as it might, Maggie was tall and had the hair Sally’s friend had envied—it was a primrose mane that, if let, swished about like a curtain in a breeze. Her face, however, broad at the cheekbones and stubby at the chin, was peasant, not poet Sally had been the poet The cry: ‘London passengers, please,’ had now gone up and Pat Martin hurried off to the checkpoint Ten minutes later Maggie’s own flight was called and soon she too was listening to the stewardess’s bidding:

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Aer Lingus Irish welcome you aboard their Boeing 737 St MacCartan which is leaving shortly for Edinburgh.’

  The flight had been fully booked for months, Maggie’s seat being made available through a last-minute cancellation. A lucky omen? She hoped so. On the other hand there was the saying: ‘Good advice—never start something you can’t stop’ and certainly she could not stop St MacCartan now lifting itself off the runway.

  Pat Martin, patently curious, had not had time on her side. Otherwise she would certainly have tried to find out why Maggie, avowedly happy in Ireland, was at this moment taking off for Edinburgh and leaving Kelly behind. And if she had been able to cross-examine her witness she would have ferreted out the name of Derek Grant Maggie had met him at a party to which Tom and Sally had taken her. Sally, from cradle days a party girl, had worried quite unnecessarily over her twin’s social life at home in Dumfriesshire. ‘Don’t worry.’ How often had Maggie said it? ‘I’ve lots of company, lots of male company if that makes you feel better.’ It had not the ‘male company’, mostly Duncan Campbell’s ex-Army friends, had not been what Sally intended. Her sister’s move to London became a personal challenge. Maggie had stayed at home and missed the fun for too long. Henceforth it was to be all go.

  At first she had had reservations, typically Sally ones, about Derek.

  ‘You wouldn’t be afraid if you sat him down with you at a blazing log fire that he’d get up to cut the next batch of wood?’

  ‘I should think it very kind if he did,’ Maggie had retorted.

  Derek had grown up in West Lothian, which made him a fellow exile. His straight towering lines, casually swept hair and marksman’s blue eyes made him a dish. The hair, once dark, was sweeping into premature ash grey, but Sally had graciously overlooked this. ‘Age doesn’t matter these days, and after living with Daddy you’re probably more used to older men.’

  She had wrinkled her nose a little on hearing that Derek’s work sphere was security—’Oh, darling, I was afraid he’d turn out to be a goodie!’—but that too had eventually been accepted. Derek had spent Christmas with them and three weeks later it had been his car that had taken them to Heathrow to see Tom and Sally off to Malaga.

  St. MacCartan was coast-hugging. The patchwork fields, some green, some peachy with harvest, were now somewhere behind the tail plane and under Maggie’s window the blue of Belfast Lough was plumed in white. Looking back, the last slivers of coast melting
into the distance were like blackcurrant puree.

  Maggie felt as though she were leaving hospital. Eighteen or nineteen months ago Charles and Phyllida Fox had opened the doors of Fairley Hall Riding Stables to someone for whom the end of the world had come. Duncan Campbell’s fatal illness had been brief and simple, pneumonia following ‘flu. He was not young; Sally and Maggie were the children of a late marriage, and all his life he had put his horses before his health, but he had always looked so wide-spanned and magnificent that even the doctor’s warning had not been unduly disturbing. It made the shock all the greater. The bolt that not a year later had taken Tom and Sally away from her had been stunning, and within weeks of it she had lost Derek also.

  Not, of course, as final a loss. Derek was merely transferring to Edinburgh. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he’d promised. It had sounded like the classic: ‘I’ll ring you,’ especially when he had added: ‘But bear with me. I am the world’s worst correspondent.’ It was understatement. The trickle of brief unsatisfactory notes had dried up completely within six months.

  Maggie had worked all the harder at forgetting—and at counting her blessings. The foothills south of Dublin were beautiful; each June their buttercups and daisies rippling in a kiln of blue had been like the crocus and edelweiss in Swiss pastures. Kelly had been safe on a pony since her fifth birthday and for over a year now she and the Fairley Hall ponies had been trundling up and down and round about Glencullen. For her quite obviously the past had sobbed itself to rest. And largely for Maggie too. She had stopped feeling faint when the name ‘Sally’ came up in conversation or when she saw a man’s grey head tower over others in the street. But jumping off the springboard was not easy.

  ‘You should go out more,’ Phyl had urged recently. ‘Give the fans a break.’

  ‘Should I know what you’re on about?’ Maggie had asked. ‘You should, honey, unless you need a check-up,’ Phyl retorted. Very large and seldom out of wide trousers, she was cheerfully unrepentant about the care she had never taken of clothes or complexion. ‘We’ve had a boom on the strength of it. Every birdwatcher for miles has discovered the Horse this summer.’

  ‘And that has something to do with me?’

  ‘Yes. It’s something to do with the glands, I think, quite simple, quite scientific,’ Phyl had answered gravely. ‘It affects all normal males from around the age of twelve when they come in contact with a raving beauty. My own not excluded. Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed Charlie in the queue!’ Suddenly her face had changed. ‘All right, bless you, I know you haven’t. But you’re twenty-six, honey, and you’re gorjus! It’s time you threw an eye again—and I don’t mean at a gelding!’

  She would have been tickled to know that as Maggie had strode across the apron to St. MacCartan that morning a rather dishy male fellow passenger had chatted her up and as soon as they were airborne had sent the stewardess to enquire if she would like a drink.

  Last week this wouldn’t have happened, but as of Tuesday Maggie was a different person. It was on Tuesday that Derek’s letter had come.

  Sight of the postmark and handwriting had made her heart turn over. A second later sentences had swum up at her. ‘Time you came back to Scotland.’ ‘Able to pick up the threads again.’ ‘Lucky to get it as being the closing weekend of the Festival hotels here are booked to capacity.’

  Ten minutes later she had poured it into Phyllida’s ear. A job had come up in Scotland, near Aberdeen, managing a small riding stables for a friend of Derek’s. He wanted her to go over at the weekend to discuss it and had made her hotel booking on chance. ‘You’ll have to tell me honestly, could you manage?’ Weekends were Fairley Hall’s busiest time. It was very short notice. She had looked at Phyl doubtfully and Phil had not failed her. ‘Does the girl think she can’t be done without?’

  Saint MacCartan glided over Campbeltown and the heavy green lobe of Kintyre. Scotland was map-clear, its flittered west coast, its mounts and creased defiles, its sombre colours of brown and sullen green, the jigsaw of inlets in the Firth of Clyde and Greenock hanging on the bank like a swarm of bees.

  ‘We shall be passing over Glasgow at twelve-thirty,’ the captain had said. ‘And are due to land at Edinburgh at twelve-forty-five.’

  How did she look? The trouser suit was new, deep blue and military. So was the shoulder bag. So, in a way, the sophisticated French knot that gleamed pale gold on her neck. A cool look, almost severe—and very very misleading.

  Not long now. They were through the clouds and flying in sunshine up the wide blue Forth. Beyond St. MacCartan’s nose the two suspension bridges hung like filigree between two blues, the sky above them and the firth below.

  The plane banked and tilting in from Queensferry came one golden field after another. As far as eye could see the land was yellow, crowned by the chunky oblongs which the baler had left. Barley, Maggie thought warmingly, was nearly as Scottish as heather. Spread below, it was like a great flag put out to welcome the exile.

  There followed a wedge of forestry and then the ground was green again with birds flying over the black and white

  Friesian cattle.

  Maggie looked back, trying to recapture the sloping harvest fields. St. MacCartan flew on, crossed from MidLothian into West Lothian, found its path to Turnhouse and put itself down dead on time on the runway.

  Frustratingly, the capacity load made baggage handling and customs a long job. For eighteen months Maggie had thought off and on about reunion with Derek and the first words she would say to him.

  In fact, the meeting was quick, inconsequential, a little untidy.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. Were you waiting long?’

  ‘Long enough to be thankful you weren’t on a Jumbo!’

  ‘Indeed!’ Confusedly she let her case be taken, and her arm.

  ‘All right. Still plenty of time,’ Derek reassured her.

  He was broader in the shoulder but still had cowboy hips. His hair was dense ash grey and thick. Wisps of it curled on his neck and snicked up from where he had brushed it. He was casually smart, pincheck trousers, a navy blue cardigan, a sweat shirt with a grey pattern.

  He walked her past the waiting coaches, stopped at a shiny red saloon in the car park and opened its boot.

  ‘Nice new car!’ Maggie quipped.

  ‘She’s not. She’s just had a run through the car wash in honour of the lady she’s come to meet.’ He let the lid down and straightened his long back. ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she told him glowingly. ‘And happy to be here.’ Derek’s lips curved. One thing she’d forgotten was his trick of speaking from the side of his mouth. He did so now. ‘Good girl! Let’s be moving.’

  Edinburgh was its bright clean self. Near the airport front gardens were psychedelic with geranium and calceolaria. On Corstorphine Road a church’s red notice board flashed past the car. There was the Zoo on the left and on the right the misty Clevelands and the bold red stands in Murrayfield Rugby Ground.

  ‘How is Kelly?’ Derek asked. ‘Still as quiet as ever?’

  It was a little deflating, but she couldn’t deny that in the past Derek had seldom managed to drag more than two words out of her niece. ‘She’s fine. Glencullen’s been marvellous for her.’ Unnecessary to add that when other children came to the stables Kelly had a habit of disappearing and that her schoolteacher said she was not a good mixer.

  ‘Good.’ He pulled up for the traffic signals at Haymarket. ‘It puts a load on you, though. After all, you’ve a life to lead too.’

  ‘And Kelly is a most important part of it—now,’ Maggie reminded him gently. This job—you haven’t told me anything about it—will references be necessary?’

  The straight lips curved. ‘No. No worries on that score. I’ll tell you when we’re having lunch.’

  West End saw the beginning of travel poster Edinburgh, on the corner the massive Caledonian Hotel and ahead Princes Street with a triangle of red flagposts near the railing of St. John’s
. The years had brought changes along its shopping side, but the stone fretwork of the Scott Monument still reared over Waverley Bridge and to the right, high up above the green of the gardens, the castle still looked like a grey destroyer. Princes Street could be bleak, today it was sunny and festive, arches of black and red at the castle entrances, fountains and blazes of dahlias and cherry pie near the monument.

  ‘Very lucky to land a hotel room,’ Derek commented.

  She was very conscious of it. She would have been glad to attain a corner anywhere; in fact, it was all delectable, pale built-in furniture, a gay red bedcover and a bathroom with medallion wallpaper and a black suite.

  ‘This is lovely, Derek. I don’t know how you managed it.’

  When at the reception desk the porter had started away with her suitcase she had not expected Derek to follow. The fact that he had, and into the bargain had given the room a careful look over, made even the eight-floor hotel seem personal.

  ‘Ah well, I’ve had plenty of time to practise,’ he said now. ‘Haven’t I?’ The blue eyes beautifully set under straight and still dark brows looked at her challengingly.

  ‘Then you get ten out of ten,’ she said lightly. ‘I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘No such word as can’t!’

  The room all at once seemed to have grown close. She thought wildly; ‘It’s too soon, we haven’t picked up the threads yet.’

  Even in this he seemed to be intuitive. ‘Did you ever know us give something for nothing? I’ll collect—one of these fine days. Just now it’s lunch and what you’d like for starters. I’m going down to claim the table.’

  There was no time to change or unpack. She hung her jacket in the pale oak wardrobe and had a quick wash and brush up.