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Katie Mulholland

Page 48

by Catherine Cookson


  Daniel laughed outright now, and as he looked up into the long, solemn face he realised that here was a wag, a natural wag. Here was a smoother of situations, another person in this house he was going to like.

  Putting out her hand and catching at Tom’s, Katie said, ‘Tom’s been a very good friend to me since my husband died. I just don’t know what would have happened to me without him and Catherine. I know one thing, I wouldn’t have any business left if it hadn’t been for him.’ She gazed up at Tom, but he looked at Daniel and said, ‘I rob her right and left, but she won’t believe me. I’ve feathered enough nests to make a rookery out of her but she still keeps me on.’ He now looked down at Katie and a warm smile spread over his face as he gripped the hand holding his, and, wrinkling his nose at her, he remarked briefly, ‘You’ll do.’ Again looking at Daniel, he said, ‘You’re going to stay to lunch. The flying squad downstairs are rushing about like mad; it’s no use you saying no.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ Daniel’s face now assumed a straightness. ‘If I’m going to be forced to stay, then I can do nothing about it. I was hoping I was going to be asked.’

  ‘Good! Good!’ Tom grinned at him. ‘Well, I think you’d better come on down and have an appetiser before the meal. What do you say, Aunt Katie?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go and get yourselves a drink.’

  ‘What about coming down and joining us?’ Tom was bending over her, and she smiled into his face and said, ‘No, I won’t come down until lunch is ready. Just leave me for a while. I’m fine; don’t worry.’ She patted his hand. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’

  When Daniel rose to his feet she looked up at him and murmured softly, ‘I’m glad I’ve lived to see this day.’

  He could find nothing to say to this; he could only give her a little smile before he turned away and walked slowly out of the room, followed by Tom.

  At the foot of the stairs Tom turned sharply right, saying, ‘Come in here for a minute,’ and led the way into what had been Andrée’s smoke-room and which was now an office, taken up with a desk, a filing cabinet and two leather chairs. ‘Sit yourself down, I won’t be a tick. And, by the way, what’s your drink? Sherry, whisky, port?’

  ‘I’ll have a whisky, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Water or soda?’

  ‘Just neat.’

  ‘Good enough.’

  A few minutes later Tom returned with a tray on which there were two glasses of whisky, and handing one to Daniel he raised his own and, after a pause, said, ‘Well, here’s to a strange meeting.’

  ‘For my part, I’m glad it’s come about.’ Daniel raised his glass, then sipped at his whisky, and Tom did the same.

  When they were seated, Tom, jerking his chin up out of his collar in a nervous movement that was characteristic of him, said, ‘Was that the truth you told her, about her daughter, Sarah, talking of her?’

  Daniel was utterly nonplussed for a moment. He brought his glass halfway to his lips; then, his hand becoming stationary, he looked down into the amber liquid before his eyes lifted to Tom’s waiting gaze and he said quietly, ‘No.’

  ‘She never mentioned Aunt Katie, did she?’

  ‘No…But how did you realise this? If you detected I was lying she is bound to have guessed, too, and that’s a pity.’

  ‘Oh no, no. She’s not bound to have guessed anything. She believed you; she believed you because she wanted to believe you. All these years there’s been a great big gaping void in her concerning her daughter and that one brief meeting they had. And, you know, she may be your grandmother—Sarah, I mean—but I’m going to say this, I don’t think she’s much cop. As far as I can gather, it was back in 1880 when she found out she had a mother, and from that date to this—that’s what? Fifty-six years ago—not a penny postcard from her! No, I don’t reckon she’s much cop.’

  ‘There’s two sides to it, you must remember that.’ Daniel nodded towards him. ‘Under the circumstances, at the time, when the relationship was revealed I think that the shock may have prevented Sarah…my grandmother from responding to her natural mother.’

  ‘Well, all I can say is it’s something of a shock that lasts over fifty years. That’s how I see it.’ Tom jerked his head, then took another sip of his whisky. ‘What is she really like?’ He narrowed his eyes at Daniel, and Daniel replied, ‘Just a younger edition of her’—he lifted his head upwards—‘and not very much younger-looking really. If she’s ninety-two she carries her years wonderfully well.’

  ‘I didn’t mean in looks, I meant—well, what is she like in character and such?’

  ‘Oh!’ Daniel now bit on his lip and put his head on one side as if considering before he replied, ‘Well, everybody’s always considered her very aloof, unapproachable, you know, and my grandfather’s always worshipped her, and protected her. Nobody, as I remember, had to make a noise when Grandmother had a headache. And for her part she adored him absolutely. They could never bear to be parted from each other even for a day, and Father used to tell me that if my grandfather was going to take a trip to a board meeting, or visit another yard—you see, he was partner in a shipbuilding firm—well, she would always go with him…’

  ‘You’re in shipbuilding?’ Tom sat forward.

  ‘Yes. It isn’t a huge yard, but big enough. My grandfather took a partnership with Simon Quarry, then my father went in, and now my three brothers are in it too. I am the odd man out. It didn’t attract me in the least, so when I finished at Yale I came to Cambridge.’

  ‘What are you studying?’

  ‘Mathematics.’

  ‘Oh, my! Bridget’s headache. That was her only weak spot, mathematics. She flew through with everything else—English, Latin, French, the lot—but not maths.’

  ‘Oh, that’s often the way. I think—I honestly do—that mathematicians are born, not made; it’s a kind of deformity in the brain, you know.’ He smiled, and Tom answered, ‘Well, it’s a deformity a lot of people wish they had. Bridget’s always saying, “Oh, if only I’d been good at maths.” She’s a teacher, you know.’

  ‘Is she?’ said Daniel politely.

  ‘Yes, and a good one, although I say it who shouldn’t. And it’ll be wasted when she gets married.’

  A voice now came to them from the hall calling, ‘Dad! Dad! Where are you?’ and when the door opened Bridget said, ‘Oh, there you are. Lunch is ready.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ Tom put out his hand as Bridget turned away, and, going to her, he encircled her shoulders and pressed her to him as he said, ‘I was just telling our friend here that you are brilliant at maths.’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t rub it in, Dad. There are worse.’

  ‘Not much, dear. Now you’ve said so yourself.’ He grinned at her and she turned and dug him playfully in the chest with her fist, saying, ‘I’ve told you before that it’s to do with the psychological make-up. If you could see the types, of both sexes, that take up maths you would…’

  ‘Ssh! Ssh! Ssh! Don’t jump in it with both feet. He’s…’ Tom bent his face towards her and jerked his thumb backwards, saying in a hoarse whisper, ‘he’s up at Cambridge studying maths.’

  Bridget looked over Tom’s shoulder into the dark face. The eyes, like pieces of polished coal, were surveying her with amusement. She bit on her lip and wagged her head before she said, ‘Here I go again…I’m sorry.’

  ‘I should think so,’ he said.

  Tom looked from one to the other, then they all laughed. And as they went towards the dining room Daniel thought, She’s rather nice. Doted on by her father, obviously spoiled by her mother, and likely adored by Aunt Katie…but still rather nice.

  Chapter Three

  It was Friday. Daniel had arrived in Newcastle on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday, after leaving Loreto late in the evening, he told himself that on the morrow he would call and make his goodbyes before returning to Cambridge. But on the Wednesday he went to Newcastle and introduced himself to the solicitor who was dealing with his great-grandfather’s affai
rs, and got a very civil reception.

  The solicitor hardly questioned his relationship to Bernard Rosier; anyone was welcome who might be able to straighten out the intricate affairs of that establishment, and from what he learned of this Daniel Rosier the Third he thought it very likely that the mortgage could be cleared.

  That business set under way, Daniel decided to stay another day or so and took the train down to Shields. He had arrived in the middle of the afternoon and had spent an hour talking with his newfound great-grandmother, and he had realised that the more he talked to this old lady the more he liked her. Her mind was still alert, and in spite of her great, sad eyes she liked to laugh, and he had made her laugh quite a bit on that second visit as he described to her the eccentricities of his brothers and sisters; that was, until he attempted to describe Victoria. And how he described Victoria was that she was a kind of person who had never grown up, and at twenty-four was still a little girl of seven. At this her face had become sad, and she had said something that set him thinking.

  This was another thing he would have to tell his father, but on the quiet. ‘I had a sister, Lizzie, born like that,’ she had said.

  When Catherine and Tom had learned that he wasn’t due back in Cambridge until the Saturday they had kindly invited him to come and stay with them. But, strangely, his great-grandmother had not joined her voice to theirs, and this he found a little odd. When Catherine had said, ‘We can’t persuade Daniel to stay, Aunt Katie,’ she hadn’t replied, ‘Oh, but you must, Daniel’; she had just looked at Catherine and said, ‘Well, he knows what he wants to do best.’ Yet she seemed so pleased to see him, and wanted him to keep talking to her.

  It was on the Wednesday, after tea, that Catherine suggested that Bridget should show him around the town; he must see Marsden Rock, the mile-long pier, and the grand town hall, outside which, Tom had laughingly said, ‘There stood the only natural women in Shields.’ Later, he found out that these natural women were outsize nude figures which he considered a brave gesture on someone’s part. He enjoyed the evening. They laughed a lot. Bridget had a sense of fun not unlike her father’s, he thought.

  When he bade goodnight to his great-grandmother she asked him to be sure to come down the following day for lunch.

  On Thursday he came for lunch, and Katie kept him with her most of the afternoon and he learnt all about Mr Peter Conway, Bridget’s fiancé. Mr Conway was ten years older than Bridget, but that was nothing. He was a splendid man and serious-minded. He had, when the works were in operation, been well up in the offices of Palmer’s. He had been one of the men, too, who had represented the staff when the Duchess of York had come to launch the cruiser York. He had been very well thought of by the management and had fought hard, like all the staff, to keep the yard going. Katie had quoted this great Peter as saying that in 1930, when the razor of nationalisation had started at one end of Palmer’s throat, and Sir James Lithgow of Port Glasgow, the strong man of steel, had chewed at the other with his plan for a nationalised industry, the blood had flowed so quickly that Palmer’s became like an anaemic giant.

  This Mr Peter Conway, Daniel decided, sounded like a stuffed shirt. Had the quoter been any other than his great-grandmother he would have squashed Mr Peter’s simile about the death of the shipyard. He knew of Sir James Lithgow; his father had often spoken of him and the Lithgow firm, which was one of the greatest in Britain. Lithgow came of a shipbuilding family, and the idea of the great steel shipbuilding industry being taken over by the government was anathema to him as it was to all shipowners…Capitalists, as this Mr Peter Conway apparently dubbed them.

  He was more than a little relieved when, after tea, he once again found himself being escorted on a tour by Bridget.

  ‘I’m going to show you Jarrow,’ she said. ‘You won’t like it, but I think you should see it.’

  And he didn’t like it. In fact he was appalled. The town looked dead, it even smelt dead to him. The district around the station had appeared dreary enough, but these dejected grey streets with groups of men leaning against the end walls, all attired in similar uniform, cap, muffler, and greasy-looking oddments of suits, were depressing to say the least. Men who smiled thinly, and chatted, and said at intervals, ‘Watcher there,’ yet who looked bewildered and numb, and at the same time aggressive. He knew this country was suffering under a slump; he wasn’t unused to it in his own country, but here in this town the poverty was so stark, so raw, it was like looking on a body from which the skin had been ripped.

  As they walked up the long road towards the dismembered shipyard that was once the proud Palmer’s, she said, ‘Did Aunt Katie tell you Peter was away helping to organise the march to London?’

  ‘Yes, she did say something about it.’

  They were silent until they came to the shipyard itself where the great gates had stood, and she stopped and, pointing to the vast jumble of contorted iron that the oxyacetylene burners had made of the steel girders and cranes, and the great heaps of bricks where the blast furnaces and their chimneys had once stood, said quietly, ‘I never come into Jarrow but I am drawn here to watch this. I suppose it’s because this whole business—I mean the closing of the yard—hit me personally.’ She slanted her eyes at him, and there was a shyness in her look as she said, ‘You see, it stopped my wedding. Peter losing his savings, all twelve hundred pounds of it, and being responsible for his mother and the house; his father’s dead. Then the fact that if we married I would lose my job…’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t allow you to teach after you are married, not the women. We, too, are dead if we marry. But I suppose it’s to be expected. There aren’t enough jobs for the male teachers. We know a friend of ours who put in for a post down South; he’s a maths master. Do you know how many applicants there were for the job? Two hundred and fifty.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ His brows were drawn together. Then he said ‘Your fiancé—he…he didn’t get any of his money back from the firm?’

  ‘No, but he was just like hundreds of others in the town. There were families who had saved and saved for years and put it into Palmer’s; perhaps it was only a couple of hundred pounds or so, but to them it was a fortune, and they lost every penny, and now they’re on the dole and stunned by the hopelessness of it all.’ He looked hard at her as she looked at the gigantic wreck, and he had the strange disturbing urge to grab her by the hand and run pell-mell from this place. He had a picture of them tearing down the main street, never stopping until they reached an open space where they could see nothing of tangled iron, dreary grey streets and hopeless-looking men and women.

  ‘Come,’ he said, his voice brisk-sounding. ‘Let’s get out of this.’

  ‘What?’ She turned and looked up at him; then, her head drooping to one side, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Then, laughing, she added, ‘There I go again! I never stop saying “I’m sorry” to you, do I? But I know I shouldn’t have brought you here, it’s so dismal; only I thought…’

  ‘I know what you thought. It was for my education. An American should see these things. Life as it really is. Well, I’ve seen it, and now, marm, we are going to see life in a different way…Which is your best theatre?’

  ‘Oh, but we can’t; it’s too late now.’

  ‘Oh…! Well, what about tomorrow night?’

  She hesitated, looking at him the while. Then, on a little laugh, she said, ‘All right.’

  ‘Good. Now come on.’ He grabbed her hand and hurried her away down the road, and for a time they did not speak; then, quite suddenly, she began to talk—gabble would be a better term—and he listened, his face turned towards her, looking at her intently.

  When they reached Dee Street a bus rattled past them, and he broke in on her, saying, ‘It said Shields. We’ve missed it.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She blinked quickly; then, lowering her eyes, she said, ‘All this can be boring to an outsider…Well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do,
Miss Mulholland.’ He was laughing down on her. ‘And for this evening at least I’ve had enough of social science, Ellen Wilkinson, Mr Walter Runciman, that big grand Irish Councillor David Riley, the Mayor, Bishop Gordon and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.’

  ‘Oh, I’m…’

  ‘Now, now, now!’

  They were laughing together again, and after a moment she said, ‘You know, it’s funny how I feel about Jarrow. I like it, in spite of how it looks. Perhaps I should say I like the people—well, most of them. I was born in Westoe, and whether you know it or not, sir’—she moved her head gravely—‘Westoe is the place to live in Shields. But I have always liked Jarrow best. My mother is just the opposite. She can’t stand Jarrow. You see, she was born here…Oh, here’s a bus coming. This one will take us as far as Tyne Dock.’

  When they were seated in the bus she said, ‘It’s a pity I haven’t got the car, but it’s so useful for Peter to get around in.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a car.’

  She turned her head slightly towards him and whispered, ‘My answer to that should be: the Americans aren’t the only ones who have cars.’

  He brought his lips to her ear and whispered back, ‘And then you would have to say again you were sorry.’ They smiled at each other with slanted glance, then they laughed as he asked, ‘Do you drive?’

  ‘Yes, it’s my car. Aunt Katie gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday. It’s a bit battered now, but it’s given me a great deal of pleasure.’

  ‘A bit battered? You make it sound as if your twenty-first birthday was twenty years past. How old are you, may I ask? I’ll give a guess. Twenty-three?’

 

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