Mistress of Green Tree Mill

by Mistress of Green Tree Mill (retail) (epub)

  ‘She’s unusual looking,’ said he, carefully choosing his words.

  Lizzie cheered up and nodded. ‘She’s that all right. But let’s talk about something else. I like your car. It was very daring of you to buy it.’

  He looked down into his tea cup. ‘I thought it’s about time I had a little fun in life.’

  She laughed. ‘Your mother would’ve been horrified.’

  Alex’s mother had died a few months before aged ninety-two and since then he had certainly seemed to blossom.

  His face was solemn as he looked at Lizzie now, however. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about, Lizzie.’

  She felt panic. Here it was at last. Would she accept him? He left her cold physically and even his sudden modishness and adventurous decision to buy a car had not changed that. She remembered making love with Sam, something she deliberately tried not to think about, because the remembrance was too upsetting. She drove it away and mentally argued with herself: Sam would understand. He wouldn’t want me to be lonely for ever.

  She sat down in a chair facing Alex and asked softly, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just that I’ve come to a decision. I know folk wonder why I’ve never married but, like you Lizzie, I’ve been so busy… You understand that, don’t you?’

  She nodded and shifted slightly in her chair so that it would be easier for him to grasp her hand. He did not make any move towards her, however, but leaned back and spoke earnestly. ‘I’m nearly fifty. I thought it was too late but it seems I was wrong!’

  She reassured him, ‘You’re a fine-looking man and in a good way of business.’

  ‘It’s good of you to say so. I’m fit enough. It’s just that I worry about what folk’ll say – when you serve the public, you know…’

  A slight feeling of exasperation seized her for he was indeed a laggard suitor. ‘I shouldn’t let that worry you,’ she said.

  He smiled in relief. ‘So you think it’s all right for me to get married?’

  ‘Of course. My father married Chrissy when he was over your age.’

  ‘And it’s all right if my wife’s a lot younger than me, then?’

  She nodded, slightly perplexed. There were almost nine years between herself and Alex but that was not so great a gap, and he had never seemed to consider it before.

  ‘And from a different class?’ was his next question.

  She bristled. What did he mean? Her father had kept a coffee house and a bar but his was only a grocer. Before she could challenge him however he was rushing on, ‘She’s very young but she’s so pretty, Lizzie. I’ve never seen a girl like her before. It doesn’t matter to me that she’s working in the mills. She’s so bonny.’

  Lizzie had to fight to stop total confusion showing in her face. ‘In the mills?’

  Alex actually looked pleased with himself. ‘She’s a spinner at Brunton’s.’

  Ignoring Alex’s teetotal prejudices, Lizzie rose and poured herself a glass of sherry: Not even a weaver, she was thinking, but when she turned round, she was smiling as she said, ‘Let’s start at the beginning, Alex.’ She surprised herself by longing to laugh, for inside she felt almost relieved that he did not want to marry her after all.

  He looked slightly confused. ‘Don’t you know about Alice? I thought the whole town was talking about us. I met her last month for the first time and I took her to the Music Hall last week. My customers have been quizzing me about her every day since.’

  The longing to laugh grew stronger. Alex in the Music Hall with a spinner! He’d be roaring drunk next.

  ‘I don’t go about much to hear the gossip,’ she told him.

  He was longing to tell his story. ‘Her name’s Alice Donnelly. She’s nineteen.’

  Lizzie’s prejudices rose to the fore. Donnelly was an Irish name. The Irish were the roughest of the mill people. They had flooded into Dundee during the boom years and were notorious for drinking, fighting and bad language. She only employed the Irish if there was no one else available. It did not make her feel too happy to think she’d been spurned by Alex for a nineteen-year-old spinner called Donnelly.

  ‘How did you meet her?’ she asked in a more sober tone.

  ‘It was in my shop in the Dens Road. The mill lassies come in every dinnertime to buy their food. I was up there one day and Alice was in with her friends. She was so joky and friendly that I took to her at once. The next week I looked in and she was there again… She looks like a china doll, Lizzie.’

  She smiled at him across the carpet and said, ‘Getting married would be the very best thing for you. I wish you every happiness.’ It was the truth. Only her pride had been slightly bruised by Alex’s news. Her heart was intact. He was her friend and it was up to her to support him and to hope that he was not making a terrible mistake, for she was beginning to fear that the vulnerable bachelor had been stalked by a predatory girl.

  ‘I hope you like her,’ he said, rising from his chair and holding out his hand to grasp Lizzie’s. ‘I’ve told her about you. We’ll stay friends, I hope, even if I’m married.’

  She grasped his hand and said with sincerity, ‘We’ll stay friends, Alex.’

  * * *

  Lizzie’s anguish about her lost son combined with the febrile summer of 1914 to set nerves on edge both in Tay Lodge and Green Tree Mill. As the temperature soared into the high seventies and eighties, Dundee sweltered.

  Lexie had long ago learned to keep out of her half sister’s way at periods of tension and the only time spent together was in the evening. They did not talk much even then because Lizzie read the newspapers assiduously.

  One night in June she exclaimed with astonishment and said to Lexie, ‘Listen to this!’ Then she read aloud details of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. To Lexie, who never looked at newspapers, that city seemed too far away to have any impact on her life and she only half listened as Lizzie read on.

  ‘There’s been some terrible thunderstorms in England. They’ve caused four deaths. I hope they don’t come here.’ Lizzie hated storms. Next she rustled the newspaper with indignation and said, ‘They do write nonsense. Listen to this: “A Government report has just been published in London revealing the harsh working conditions of women factory workers. Special attention is paid in the report to the conditions in Dundee’s jute mills which are said to be deplorable…”’

  Lexie bent her head over her plate and said nothing but Lizzie was in full flow. ‘Deplorable, that’s a fine word! It’s those liberal-minded politicians and your precious suffragettes who talk about things they don’t understand. They never consider the problems of the people running the mills.’

  Lexie braved a comment. ‘Well, it can’t be very pleasant working twelve hours a day in a shed full of jute dust and then going home at night to a house full of bairns and a man without a job.’

  Lizzie lowered the paper and regarded the girl on theside of the table with surprise. ‘I work in the mills all day. I come home tired. So do lots of people like me. It’s not all one-sided, Lexie.’

  Their different perceptions of society were dividing David Mudie’s daughters. Lizzie’s concentration on success, her resentment of widowhood and her frustrated childlessness now that Charlie was far away and showing no sign of ever coming back again, had closed her eyes to the problems of the workers. She was only interested in her mill and making it turn out as huge a profit as possible. She never paused to ask herself what she was making so much money for, because she had not enough spare time to spend a fraction of it.

  Lexie knew there was no point arguing but she visited homes in the Vaults where the children were cold and hungry, where mothers could not afford to feed the family bread and dripping, and regularly sent a pathetic bundle to ‘the little pawn’ every Monday morning to keep them eating through the week.

  Growing up opened her eyes. She felt guilty because she and Lizzie cut up their food with silver knives and forks. She saw the
homes of Lizzie’s neighbours where huge windows were curtained in silk and the owners drove snorting motor cars or, like Lizzie, stuck to their well-upholstered carriages and pairs with uniformed coachmen. In Tay Lodge, Lexie felt like a traitor to her class, for she associated herself most closely with the people of the tenements, where the shared lavatories smelt so terrible the stomach heaved when the door was opened. In the warm summer weather the tiny children would soon be dying like flies. Rosie had told Lexie that they had a less than one in ten chance of reaching their fifth birthday.

  Lexie felt at home with the Davidsons. She enjoyed their noisy happiness, Rosie’s raucousness and the love that was so obviously exchanged between the three people living in the tiny room. When she was there she talked broad Dundee and listened with sympathy as Rosie raged about the problems of the poor, for she had become very political and was a keen union member.

  Yet in spite of their problems there was more laughter and genuine gaiety in the Vaults than at Tay Lodge, where Lizzie brooded continually over Charlie as if he were dead and even Maggy went around with a long face.

  * * *

  Open dissension between the sisters was avoided because there was to be a party at Tay Lodge, the first for many months. The place was in a ferment of preparation and Lizzie was excited because she was determined that her party would be a success. It was the first time she was officially entertaining the young woman who was about to become Mrs Alex Henderson. Lizzie had to be at her most gracious to show everyone that she was not disappointed at losing her long-time swain to a younger woman.

  Alex had first introduced his fiancée to Lizzie several weeks before but that was only for a few minutes. Alice had seemed shy, hardly opening her mouth, and contenting herself with gazing adoringly at her fiancé. She had blonde hair, a heart-shaped face, sly eyes and a wide mouth. Lizzie considered her nothing special in the beauty line and noted that her clothes were the garish things preferred by mill girls in their off-duty hours. Almost immediately the girl disappeared and the explanation given was that she was visiting relatives in Edinburgh in order to buy her trousseau.

  ‘That’s unlikely,’ said Lizzie to Maggy. ‘There are as good shops for buying clothes in Dundee as there are in Edinburgh.’

  A few days later Alex confided the true reason for Alice’s absence. She was being ‘polished’ at a school of deportment for young ladies in the capital. Lizzie raised one eyebrow at this news, wondering what the school would make of a girl from a Dundee spinning shed.

  Nearly two months had passed and the party was to launch Alice officially among Alex’s friends. It would be interesting to see the results of the school’s labours.

  The young woman who stepped into Tay Lodge’s drawing room that summer night was a fashion plate. Her corn-coloured hair was dressed high and decorated with a diamond-studded clip. The blue-grey dress she wore was low cut and tight fitting, haring out round her legs like an upturned flower. It had been artfully chosen to display her lithe figure with sharply pointing breasts. Alice drew the gaze of every man in the room and she knew it. With eyes that were long, sly and sceptical, greedily glittering like polished lapis lazuli or the eyes of a cobra, she looked from face to face with an awareness that sat strangely on a girl of nineteen years. This was an unlikely mate for the douce Alex, who was showing her off with the pride of a circus trainer displaying his most talented performing pony.

  Some of the other women in the room dismissed Alice as too thin and angular to be beautiful but Lizzie, with her sharp eye for the unique and rare, saw her snake-like appeal at once. This girl was truly a collector’s item and it was easy to see why Alex had been so bowled over by her. Yet as Lizzie gazed at Alice she felt genuine disquiet quite divorced from female rivalry or jealousy. She knew with certainty that her suspicions about Alice putting herself in the way of Alex Henderson were true. The girl had spied a susceptible single man with plenty of money and she’d snatched him. But Lizzie was Alex’s friend and for his sake she advanced towards the couple with her most welcoming smile. Taking Alice by the gloved hand, she introduced her to each member of the party.

  They played cards and Lizzie, to her chagrin, discovered that Alice was also a sharp card player. Alex had taken the precaution of having his fiancée coached in the niceties of the game of bridge during her stay in Edinburgh and she proved to be the most astute player in the room.

  When the party broke up Lizzie sank into her armchair and kicked off her shoes, surveying the disordered card tables with despair. She had lost by forty-two points, and Alice had won them all.

  During the night the thunderstorm hit Dundee and the culverts ran with water. One of Lizzie’s jute stores was swamped and she was called out at two a.m. to inspect the damage.

  ‘It’s a good thing another shipload arrives tomorrow,’ she said when she stood knee deep in water surveying the soaked bales.

  Goldie Johanson had been as good as his word and he never let her down. She had first call on his ships and her mills were working overtime, every loom and spinning frame rattling and clanking away at maximum capacity. Her order book and dispatch sheds were the envy of larger establishments.

  She took a great pride in her mill and when she rode into the centre of town was accustomed to seeing people nudge each other as they recognized her. Lizzie Kinge was becoming one of the mill magnates in her own right. The most exclusive shops knew her too and when her tensions became almost insupportable, she felt better if she went out and made an extravant purchase. The day her sheds were swamped she bought a small clock, a delicate thing of gold and crystal that looked very modern among the Georgian and Victorian furnishings of the house. When she showed it to Lexie, the girl weighed it in her hand and stared at its finely chased face. It was a pretty thing. She turned it over and saw a signature, Cartier, engraved on the base. The cost of it would probably buy a poor family in the slums enough food for a week, she thought innocently.

  On the day after the storm, everyone was talking about the prospect of war. Lizzie listened to her speculating managers, who all agreed, ‘A war’ll be good for business.’ She nodded but she also thought of Charlie: If there’s a war, will he have to fight?

  She was trying not to think about this when Goldie Johanson was shown into her office. It had become his habit to call on her now and again to talk about the progress of business and she found that the sight of him cheered her because he treated her like an equal, never talking down to her. Their relationship was entirely businesslike, however, and she never talked to him about her family.

  They discussed the war, speculating on the effect it would have on trade. When they exhausted that subject Goldie leaned forward with his hands on his cane and suddenly said, ‘You know I’m married, don’t you, Lizzie?’

  She nodded and said, ‘Yes.’ From time to time she had seen a magnificent carriage in front of the same exclusive shops that she patronized. Her coachman told her it was the equipage of Mrs Johanson and her daughters.

  Goldie sighed, his face going serious. ‘My wife’s not well. She’s a little strange. The doctors call it dementia. They say it usually happens to people when they’re old, but she’s only fifty-two.’

  Lizzie felt sympathy for him and for his wife. ‘How terrible. Is there any cure?’ she asked.

  ‘Apparently not. She’s not too bad yet and she’s perfectly well physically, but they say she’ll grow worse. At this stage she’s very forgetful, can’t remember things. It’s a problem to keep her amused and happy.’

  The prospect of losing her mind horrified Lizzie. ‘Does she know what’s happening?’ she asked.

  He replied, ‘That’s the worst thing about it, sometimes she does know and she’s so upset. If she was completely unaware it would be better. We try to keep her entertained but it’s difficult because lots of people don’t understand. They think she’s been drinking or something and so she won’t go out any more. She misses meeting people and she’s heard me talking about you. I wondered if you’
d go to see her. You needn’t stay long, just pay an afternoon visit and cheer her up. It might stimulate her because she’s always been so interested in what I’ve told her about you.’

  ‘Of course I’ll go,’ said Lizzie. Goldie Johanson was her friend and her saviour. She knew very well that without his backing she would have been forced out of Green Tree. Visiting his sick wife was a small way of paying recompense.

  * * *

  It was hard for Lizzie to understand why she was so nervous about meeting Mrs Johanson. Was it the idea of being presented to someone in the grip of an implacable illness, she asked herself? The answer to that was no. She’d seen both Jessie and Chrissy dying little by little.

  Though she could not pinpoint the cause of her nervous feelings, they were very evident and her stomach was fluttering when she alighted from the train at Broughty Ferry and summoned a cab to carry her up the hill to Monte Bello, the Johanson mansion. She had decided not to use her own carriage but to travel by train, almost as if she wanted to keep her outing a secret. But why? She had no idea.

  She had always known that Goldie was rich but how rich escaped her until she was driven up a long winding approach road to his house. It stood on the crest of a hill overlooking the sea, five turrets glittering as the sun struck sparks off their gilded finials. A weathercock in the shape of a golden dragon surmounted the highest turret. The front door was shaped like a portcullis with huge iron chains supporting a drawbridge over an ornamental moat.

  The house was built on the model of a French chateau and was surrounded by acres of gardens, all formally laid out in terraced parterres. They must have an army of gardeners, she thought, trying to compute the wage bill for the gardens alone. Tay Lodge, fine as it was, paled into insignificance beside Monte Bello.

  The women of the house were expecting her but to her relief, for some reason that again she could not analyse, Goldie was not at home.