Wait Till I Tell You

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘She’s missing, not having had children, do you mean?’ asked Mr Stuart. ‘Oh no, I see what you mean, right enough. She’s a mystery woman. But good at her job. And handsome.’

  ‘Somewhere near beautiful,’ said Mr Gilbert, who kept Mr Stuart right on these things since Mr Stuart was not, as he put it, in the business of appreciating women in the very flesh. Mr Stuart lived with a friend whose widowerhood had come like balm in reward for forbearance. Mr Stuart and his friend kept quails in their greenhouse and went on water-colour courses around the coast of Great Britain. It was a beautiful life, when the only thing you ever need complain about was rain or cats, Mr Stuart said to his friend. He described Miss Montanari often to his friend, for her air of foreignness, her dislocated elegance, ‘Like Garbo’s,’ he said, meaning something about her private life that he could not say aloud. And that could explain her talking to the young girls quite so much lately. There was only so much hiding a body might take.

  ‘It’ll be she’s Italian,’ Mr Stuart’s friend said.

  ‘She’s born in Inverness even if the blood has garlic in it,’ replied Mr Stuart, wanting his own romance of Miss Montanari to be kept intact, as Mr Gilbert wished her to be pining for the bonny babes she never was mother to.

  ‘It’s not unusual for a woman of the older sort to take on. Especially if she’s sailed through the earlier part,’ said Else to Lindsay Kerr in China, one day when they saw Miss Montanari smiling at some night-lights in the shape of mushrooms and moons, as they were all about to leave.

  ‘See that,’ Lindsay shrieked, muffling it at once. But Miss Montanari, putting on her new overcoat of mauve and russet mohair with a swing back, purchased in the Outerwear department two weeks before, did not turn around.

  Else and Lindsay Kerr looked with astonishment at the neatly filled-in order form that was inadequately hidden in a pile on the China cashdesk. Miss Montanari had put in an order for mugs with a message on them, a number of such mugs, the very mugs that she had made an infernal fuss about permitting to be sold at all through her precious China outlet.

  ‘I’ve a good mind . . .’

  ‘Oh, leave it, Lind,’ said Else. ‘Leave it, leave it. Any road, you’ve not. Leave it with me. Come away out of it now and we’ll go and get blootered at the Deacon.’

  ‘Ech, posh,’ said Lindsay Kerr.

  In this way Else kept events in China on an even keel until the day when Miss Montanari, having unpacked the last of the oversized kitchen crocks, decorated so gloriously, radiantly, appealingly, with animal antics, slipped upstairs to the staff ladies to check the neatness of the wings of grey in her nutmeg hair and her thin formidable face and to wash her cool hands, before slipping downstairs back to China, which she wanted to leave without fuss, simply handing over to her colleagues in token of farewell the personalised mugs with the name of the recipient and, crammed in rather, the words ‘From Benedetta (Montanari)’.

  Later, when Miss Montanari had been scattered, the most elderly of all the three cousins spoke at the service of remembrance. He spoke as though the store were a ship or a great school or a regiment. He spoke of all it had given to Miss Montanari, how it had been for her more than a home.

  At the stand-up drinks after the service, she was quick in the memory of the youngest people there, who kept saying to each other and to the older employees of the shop, ‘She was someone, we thought she was someone.’

  ‘What,’ said Else, loyal now she was in charge of China, and tipsy too on the wine Miss Montanari had surprisingly left to be drunk on this occasion, ‘and not just a shop assistant?’

  ‘Girls,’ intervened Mr Stuart. ‘Girls, indeed now, stop a minute, would you? Lend me your expertise. Are these flowers not a surprise in themselves? Bearing in mind like what she was . . . Benedetta?’ In death Miss Montanari fitted her long-hidden Christian name.

  Tottering-flowered blue delphiniums, bunched siläverleafed stocks and heaps of rowdy roses stuffed in containers all anyhow filled the borders of the church hall, ruffled bright coarse flowers embroidered roughly around the edges of the plain white hall in which those who had known Miss Montanari for the longest still slumbered in the illusion that it was they, not the people who had seen her in the last weeks of her life, who knew her best.

  ‘We should perhaps have known it was the end,’ said Mr Stuart, who had brought his friend, the widower.

  ‘My word,’ said the widower, ‘a real party, this is. Wine, and several jellies.’

  Sweetie Rationing

  ‘In the main a discriminating man, Davey, would you not say? Not the sort to get in with . . . leave alone engaged to . . .’ Mrs McLellan’s voice fell and joined those of her companions, good women in woolly tams.

  With its freight of sugar (‘freight’ pronounced ‘fright’ to rhyme with bite and night in those days when the Clyde was still an ocean-going river), the cake-stand flowered high among the women. At each of the six tables in the tearoom there was such an efflorescence, encircled by blunt knives for spreading the margarine, and white votive cups. The celebrants sat in small groups. They had all been born in another century.

  ‘Old ladies, that’s the business. There’s always more of them. The men don’t hold on the same way. Then there was that war, too.’ Erna’s mother had told her right when she nagged her to take over the tearoom, even though it meant a move into the city. Erna’s mother was known as a widow. Erna had not met her father. He was gone long before he was dead.

  ‘What are you, Mother, if you’re no’ an old lady?’ asked Erna.

  ‘An old woman.’

  Erna wondered about the difference. Her mother wore a scarf munitions-factory style and had brass polish round her fingernails from cleaning the number on the front door. Out by the lochan they’d had no number, but good neighbours. Now, in Argyle Street, the old woman went to kirk to get her dose of grudge at whatever new daft thing God had let happen. She had a top half which she kept low down in her apron-bib till the Sabbath, when it went flat under a sateen frock with white bits under the arms in summer and a serviceable coat over that in winter. Erna had always had shoes.

  Well, now they had the tearoom, and Erna’s mother had silver polish round her fingernails, from all the paraphernalia ladies use to take their tea in style. Cleaning the cake-stands was a long job because of the ornamental bits, curly at the top and four feet like the devil’s at the bottom. Without the silver plates for the cakes, three of them getting smaller towards the top, the things were just tall skeletons. The plates were all right to clean. Wire wool made them shine up softly, like metal that has been at sea. Erna’s father was said to have been in the Merchant Navy. Erna did not know whether she herself was destined to become an old woman or an old lady. Marriage would tell. It would be soon, she guessed, from the way he was on at her.

  At Mrs McLellan’s table, the cakes on the bottom level of the cake-stand were almost finished. Not that it would be right to progress upwards until every crumb had gone.

  ‘Discriminating?’ Mrs Dalgleish, as though her hand were just a not totally reliable pet she had given shelter among her tweeds, took the penultimate iced fancy. ‘You might say that, Mrs McLellan, but I might not.’ The last cake, pink like nothing on earth, was reflected in the silver dish which bore it. Its yellow fellow was in the throat of Mrs Dalgleish, and then even more intimately part of her. When she had truly swallowed and licked all possible sugar from her lips and extracted all sweetness from the shimmery silence she had brewed among her friends, she went on.

  Miss Dreever, who was excitable, never having been married, could not stop herself; she took the pink cake. She forgot in her access of pleasure to use the silver slice, but impaled it on her cake fork with its one snaggle tooth.

  A doubly delicious moment: the ladies were free to progress up the shaft of sugar and to slip deeper into the story. Mrs Macaulay eased off one of her shoes at the heel. The ladies wore lace-ups perforated all over as though for the leather’s own good. They wer
e good shoes and kept up to the mark by shoe trees and Cherry Blossom; the good things in life do not grow on trees. Mrs Dalgleish had at home a shoe-horn, which she sometimes showed the lodgers; the late Mr Dalgleish had given it her, she explained, before he died. Only one lodger had ever dared to respond, ‘Not after, Mrs Dalgleish, then?’ The shoehorn was to save her bending. ‘Though a widow has to do worse things than bend,’ Mrs Dalgleish would say. She was not having a joke.

  Nor was she today. ‘Davey is no more discriminating than any of them when it comes to . . . women. And he’s been cooped up in engine rooms for half his natural life. All that oil and steam. Not to mention foreign parts.’ Mr Dalgleish too had been to foreign parts, but without the fatal admixture of oil and steam. Davey was an engineer, the sort with prospects. After the war, he’d done university.

  ‘But the girl’s not foreign, is she? Is her mother not from Kilmahog? Didn’t you say that? And the wean brought up on Loch Lomondside?’ Miss Dreever had a grouse-claw brooch which she touched with her own thin hand as she spoke. Since the war, she’d not got about so much, with her mother and the breakdown, but she did pride herself on her penetration beyond the Highland Line. So many people lived in a country and didn’t know the half of it.

  ‘Yes, but a father from where, that’s what I’m asking myself.’ Mrs Dalgleish looked down at her wedding ring. ‘Maybe I’ll just try one of those coconut kisses.’

  She gave a hostess’s inclusive smile. ‘Will you none of yous join me?’

  In stern order of precedence, Miss Dreever last, the lowest in order below the sugar, the ladies took the cakes. The coconut was friable and soapy as Lux flakes, which the ladies hoarded to care for their good woollens. Today, Mrs Macaulay was in a lovat pullover, Mrs Dalgleish in ancient red, and Mrs McLellan (who had always been a redhead) had a heather twinset which had lasted well. Miss Dreever did not dress to please. She had the proper pride not to be eyecatching.

  ‘Would the girl’s father be an islander, then, Janice?’ Only Mrs McLellan was allowed to call Mrs Dalgleish Janice. Sometimes they took tea in each other’s houses. Mrs McLellan had a tiger skin on brown felt backing, which had seen better days not long ago.

  Although the second rung of cakes had been reached, Mrs Dalgleish was not sure that the perfect moment for familiarity had arrived.

  ‘Not an islander or a Highlander, Ishbel. And now we’ve all had quite enough of nephew Davey. What of your family, Miss Dreever?’

  It was a bony, unappetising topic, though it had to be tackled at some point during these teas. Miss Dreever was an only child. Her fiancé (had he existed? the other ladies wondered) had been killed. No meat there, of the sort at any rate which you could really chew. Certainly no fat.

  Miss Dreever’s mother could not be discussed in safety because she intermittently went mad which upset Miss Dreever who had been raised in a tenement and bettered herself through reading. What a true relief for her to get out and about like this then, the once a week.

  ‘You know me,’ said Miss Dreever, ‘always busy. There’s Mother and the teaching and there is a chance I’ll be the one to take the form outing this year. We’re hoping the petrol will stretch to a beauty spot.’

  Magnanimous, placated – how dull could be the lives of others – Mrs Dalgleish turned to Miss Dreever and looked at her. She was a poor skinny thing and probably had nothing in the evening but her books. Mrs Dalgleish had any number of activities. She never wasted a thing, not a tin, not a thread; there was all that putting away, all that folding, saving, sorting, to be done. She often had to stay in to do it, specially.

  ‘Miss Dreever, dear, take that cream horn.’ Mrs Dalgleish referred to a sweetmeat on the topmost rung of the cake-stand. The horn was of cardboard pastry and the cream was the kind whipped up from marge and hope and dairy memory, but it was a lavish token. The horn stood for plenty. The sugar on it was hardly dusty. In reverse order of precedence, the ladies took their cakes. Mrs Dalgleish was grace itself as she hung back.

  Erna took away the teapot and freshened it in the kitchen at the back. She had torn the sole of her shoe jumping on old cans to flatten them for the dustbin man. She was glad she could get away with just drawing a brown line down the back of her leg to look like the seam of a nylon. All those old ladies had gams like white puds, and then there’d be the darning. With her shade skin anyhow she’d no need for stockings. He said so. She’d let him draw the line once, with her eyebrow pencil, but it got dangerous. Then it was her had to draw the line.

  ‘Seemingly,’ Mrs Dalgleish said as she distributed the tea, ‘seemingly – though it could be talk, to do with which I will as you know have nothing – Davey’s girl’s father wasn’t all he might have been. In the colour department.’

  Miss Dreever wondered, in the instant before she understood, whether this future relative by marriage of Mrs Dalgleish could have worked in a paint shop. Then, clear as in a child’s primer, came the bright image of a pot of tar, and the soft, dark, touching tarbrush. She bit the sweet horn.

  A Jeely Piece

  ‘Never in my wildest would I have, would you now? Would you indeed? Or would you not?’ It was restful to converse with Rhona; the energies that went into the necessary emotions, outrage, offence, dignity, were all hers, but there was an aspect of her talk that was demanding, on this warm day, to Mollie. Something to do with having to keep an eye on the subject, that was apt to change, tuck itself in and rethread with the imperceptible flicker of an invisible mender’s needle.

  They had known one another all their lives and soon they would be dead, thought Mollie, undisturbed as a teenager in love by the thought of death, whom she thought of as a friend of the family. Dying, though, was more hard to get on with, she could not fancy that. Her ideal would be to be taken after a morning’s gentle exercise, gardening perhaps, or a turn round the park, something that would tire her out and reward her curiosity with something to puzzle over so that she would be happily distracted when she was taken. Rhona would die talking, of course, ambling around the subject, approaching it, changing it, holding possibilities up to the light like negatives to check them for light and colour and shade.

  Sixty years ago they had spent the night together in a plum orchard. If that was the word? Maybe prunery, or pruníre? Anyhow, it had been in Rhona’s father’s plot which he had down to plums, and in which he had built a playhouse for Rhona, with a ladder leading up to a wee platform where you could just fit two camp beds. Downstairs there were three chairs about right for porridge-eating bears, a small dresser and a toy cooker that cooked when primed with paraffin. Matches, though, were to be used only under supervision, so Rhona and her friends tended to take things out to the cooker already cooked, insert them and remove them after a while with expressions of relish such as, ‘My word, what a crust,’ and, ‘You must let me have the receipt for that one day soon.’

  An indiscriminate archaism was part of the game of the playhouse. Its limitations of scale and equipment demanded further refinements. Especially when the girls began to grow up and to become aware that they were doing so, they worked at setting the playhouse and the games connected with it in times safely past, if they had ever been. The small house in this way became a hallway to expansive ideas and tall dreams.

  Rhona was one among brothers, handsome boys with big teeth and eyelashes, who wanted to be lowland farmers like their father. Of course the farm could not be divided, so two of the boys would eventually have to find their own places. They would never go to England, that was a certainty, a place they had been raised to consider the source of all that was not right in their lives, a coward country that, like all cowards, was a bully too. India had been mentioned, and tea planting, if it was not to be Scotland. The number of Scotsmen out there planting the tea was something amazing, it was said, so a man need never be lonely seeking his fortune with the tea.

  The timbers of the playhouse were proofed against rot by a protracted soaking in a bitumen tank that was in the woods
behind the barn and the byres in a dark grove of ponticum. Over the tarpaulin roof Rhona’s father had laid over-and-under pantiles, curved like letter S’s lying down, tucked one into the next with a snugness whose pattern satisfied like that of the feathers on an ordinary bird. The windows of the house went out on casement latches that curled at the end like creeper trails.

  Rhona’s father had an unnecessary streak that made him do things more ornamentally than other men. Her brusque mother was not like this. It could hurt Mollie to see Mrs Gordon overlook on purpose some fillip the farmer had added to the breakfast table, nasturtium flowers in a bowl perhaps, or treacle initials written on the children’s oats. Mollie had seen the farmer’s wife stir these initials to a blur one day before the children came down, her face disproportionately full of something close to vengeance. She made bread on a Saturday and the farmer liked to make a single plaited loaf that he would decorate with seeds halfway through the baking. When it was done he would lift and tap it as though it were a warm instrument of percussion. He sang out of doors; Rhona said that he was an atheist who kept his eyes open during grace, said by her mother. Mollie had several times spent Christmas with the family, when the farmer said grace himself, looking holy as holy and bringing a kind of conviction to Mollie that did not usually assail her, a desire to be seen to be extremely good, more especially in the eyes of Mr Gordon than the terrible eyes of God.

  In the First World War, he had been wounded and one time, not meaning to, at the seaside at Gullane on a tart summer day, Mollie had seen the wound. Or rather she had seen through the upper arm of the father of her friend. It was his right arm, white, and when she saw the hole, which he was drying carefully by patting it with a beachtowel as one pats a sore baby, it reminded her of the separate flesh packets, muscles, that composed the drumstick of a chicken. Mr Gordon had spectacles and a temper, he was tall and thin and grey, but the fear Mollie felt for him did not make her want to avoid him. This feeling grew in her when she saw him drying thin air on the brisk beach at Gullane while they sat on rugs among seaholly and thrift and sharp grass watching the sternly inert sea.