The Camerons by Robert Crichton

Author:Robert Crichton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

P.S. Have an arrival plan prepared for me. I expect I should arrive at Cowdenbeath in the evening and be walked to Pitmungo under cover of night.

“You know who it is, of course, Daddie?” He was so excited.

“By the way you handle the paper, I would say at least an apostle of Christ.”

“I want you to be serious, Daddie.” It was true; they communicated too much through banter. “It’s no occasion for jokes.”

“No, you’re right.”

“Keir Hardie. The great labor leader. Writing to your son.” Gillon was happy for him, and disturbed. It seemed out of his depth. Rob was a dreamer and so little of a doer.

“You must have written a fine letter.”

“I did, Dad. I would be lying to say otherwise. I wrote it twenty times until I got it down perfect. Even Mr. Selkirk couldn’t make a change.”

Gillon felt a moment of jealousy at the idea of his son carrying draft after draft of his letter to the librarian.

“I’ll be the one to meet him at Cowdenbeath. Can you see that, Daddie? Walking the great Keir Hardie through the night? What will I say to him?”

“I wouldn’t worry. He’ll do all the talking when he wants to talk.”

“Aye, you’re right. And the meeting can be held up in the plantation where the old house used to stand. Go straight out back from the house and never be seen at all.”

“What house?”

Rob Roy looked confused. He opened his mouth to say something and closed it again and finally, in an irritated way, as if the question had been answered many times and long before, said, “Why, our house. Where else?”

It was Gillon’s turn to be confused. He wasn’t ready for it: Keir Hardie in his house, a wanted man, a fugitive perhaps, a Communist leader almost certainly.

But that wasn’t all there was to it. Rob Roy should have known; he’d spent his youth in this family too.

“Your mother won’t allow it. It’s her house, too. She’ll never have it.”

“Won’t allow it? Make her allow it!”

Gillon blamed it on Maggie but it was Sam he was frightened about, Sam some days seeming to be walking on the very edge of something dark and violent and dangerous. Gillon shook his head.

“I can’t do it.”

Rob would not believe what he heard. He had counted on it far too long. “You have got to do it,” he shouted, his voice echoing back to them from the dark blackboarded walls. Gillon didn’t like the look in his son’s face. He turned away and stared into the cold bland blue eyes of Queen Victoria looking disapprovingly down on him.

“I crawled to you and you let me down,” Rob said.

“There are things you don’t understand now and…”

“You let me down. I came back to you and you let me down.” He had put his hands on his father’s coal-stained jacket, but now he took them away and went across the room away from him, as if he couldn’t stand to be near him.

“You know what they call you, don’t you? I hear it because they forget I’m your son sometimes.

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