‘Don’t tell me the boss is charging us for hot water now? Measuring it out, charging us so much the gallon?’
‘Och, of course not, there’s plenty hot water.’
‘Well, well, then?’ Black brows pushed up, dark eyes filled with fun.
‘But Friday night’s bath night. Everybody takes their bath on a Friday, son.’
‘And Monday’s washing day?’
‘That’s right.’ Her round apple face shone with pleasure again. ‘And Tuesday’s the ironing.’
‘And all the time you have a renegade son, a terrible deserter of tradition.’
‘Och, you’re an awful laddie. Away and have your bath if you want to. But I’ve never heard the likes of it in my life.’
‘You’re the best mum in Glasgow.’ He stretched up from the piano stool, massaging and exercising his fingers.
She shook her head at him but her hazel eyes were soft.
‘Away and take that floury apron off in the kitchen.’
‘Your word is my command, my command, Mother!’
He gestured for her to go through the door first. As she passed him, small and plump and dear to him, her head nowhere reaching the height of his shoulders, he couldn’t resist the temptation to touch her and the touch immediately sprang into a passionate bear-hug that triggered off laughter and squealing as he swung her round and round the hall, not putting her down or setting her free until they’d together crashed noisily into the kitchen.
‘Saints preserve us! Behave yourself, you cheeky young rascal. What’ll the neighbours think? What a terrible carry on. You’re an awful wee laddie.’
‘Wee, did you say?’ His handsome young face twitched mischievously. ‘Wee, did you say, Mother?’
Tidying back stray wisps of hair and brushing the flour off herself Amy gazed ruefully up at him. ‘No, you’re no a wee laddie any more, are you, son? One of these days you’ll be leaving your old mum to get married. Oh, here!’ Her face suddenly alerted, remembering. ‘You’ll never guess who I had visiting me.’
Jimmy untied his apron, unbuttoned his white coat and stood naked to the waist, intent on stretching and massaging his shoulder muscles.
‘Not Lizzie again. The old story, was it? What a good mother she’d make for Fergus? What a good wife she’d make for Melvin MacNair? She has as much chance of marrying him as I have of playing the piano in St Andrew’s Hall.’
Amy screwed up her face. ‘God forgive me, Jimmy. I’d like to be kind and civil and act as a Christian woman should but I’m sorely tried with her.’
‘When have you been anything but kind to Lizzie, Mother?’
Amy shook her head, then, remembering again, she brightened.
‘Och, stop putting me off what I was going to tell you. You’re such an awful blether nobody else can get a word in edgeways. It wasn’t Lizzie. It was Mrs Munro.’
‘Mrs Munro?’
‘You know, Rab’s wife. She’s the Grand Matron at the meeting - the Band of Jesus. She’s president of the Women’s Guild as well, and dear knows all what. Although she’s quite a young woman. She can’t be much more than forty. Well, maybe half-way between forty and fifty. A fine-looking woman. She does a lot of good work, that woman, and, oh, I was fair upset.’
‘Hold it, hold it!’ Jimmy held up his hand. ‘Just a minute. Why were you upset? Who upset you?’
‘Well, you see …’
‘Sit down!’ He hustled her over to the rocking-chair. ‘You just tell me all about it.’
She smiled up at him, eyes twinkling.
‘I will son, if you give me half a chance. It was nothing to do with me really, except that I was coming up the stairs with my messages and just as I reached the first landing and stopped to get my breath back, I heard raised angry voices from Melvin MacNair’s house. Then suddenly the door burst open and out stumbled a wee fair-haired lassie and Mrs Munro punching her between the shoulder-blades to help her on her way.’
‘Grand Matron of the Band of Jesus!’ Jimmy’s lip curled with distaste.
‘But it was so unlike Mrs Munro to be violent like that. Punching the bairn sore she was. But she explained it all to me later, poor soul. She was so overwrought and upset she just didn’t know what she was doing. I had her up here for a cup of tea and she rested until she felt better.’
‘What about the child? She was the one getting hurt and upset.’
‘Well as it turned out, she isn’t as young as I thought. I thought about thirteen or so. She just looks like a wee school-bairn. I can quite understand her mother getting all angry and upset about what Melvin’s going to do.’
‘What’s Melvin going to do? What do you mean?’
‘That wee lassie’s the one he’s going to wed.’
‘My God!’
He could not help laughing.
Chapter 7
The Band of Jesus was having a special meeting in the front room. The proper meeting hall was in town in Dundas Street, a forbidding Victorian building of sooty black stone above the entrance of which a neon sign made a startling contrast, with bright busy letters telling the people of Glasgow that Christ died for their sins.
Special meetings of the Matrons, however, were held in the front room. The opening hymn wailed loud and long, some voices strong, others continually stumbling.
Catriona sat perched on the edge of the chair at one side of the living-room fire, her thoughts rapidly chasing each other. Her father filled the chair opposite, overflowed it, a gaunt silent mountain of despair staring helplessly at nothing, swamped, slumped, round-shouldered, long arms and square hands dangling.
Catriona felt as if there were a big placard hanging round her neck, shouting to the world in foot-high letters, IT IS ALL MY FAULT! She had not only been the cause of increasing her father’s miseries but of her mother’s obvious worry and distress as well.
There could be no getting away from the truth of what her mother said. If she had not agreed to marry Melvin MacNair, none of this would have happened.
First the embarrassing scene in the shop, then the anguish of seeing her mother, trembling and breathless, climbing the high stone stairs, hat slightly askew, hair-pins escaping unheeded from the bulky bun of hair at the back of her head.
‘You wicked, wicked girl!’ she kept repeating, puffing for breath and voice jerking near to tears. ‘I don’t know how you can do this to me, your own mother, After all I’ve done for you too. After all the sacrifices I’ve made for you.’
Melvin had taken a long time opening the door and when he did appear he wasn’t the dapper smiling man that they expected. His eyes had shrunk and become red-rimmed. He was needing a shave and his normally smooth, wax-tipped moustache stuck out like a bushy old brush. He stank of sweat, and, horror of horrors, he stood there for anyone to see in nothing but his pyjamas. The blue-striped trousers, by the look of things and the way he was holding them bunched forward in his hands, had no cord to hold them up and were an obvious, terrifying and hypnotic menace to both Catriona and her mother.
‘I was in bed!’ he accused. ‘But come in.’
They remained rooted to the doormat, their eyes as one pulled along by his bare-footed, trouser-drooping stomp across the hall. Reaching his front room he had suddenly noticed they weren’t beside him and twisted round, one hand clutching his pyjamas, the other pushing open the room door.
‘Come in, if you’re coming.’
Afterwards Catriona became convinced that her mother would never reach the end of her harangue about him.
‘I’ve never seen such a disgustingly vulgar man. He’s not modest, Catriona. He’s a vulgar and immodest man. How can you have even thought of a man like that? You! A well-brought-up, well-protected, well-sheltered girl like you! How could you have thought of that man?’
Catriona no longer knew what to think of Melvin.
She hoped the meeting would be a short one. No chance of bed until the Matrons of the Band of Jesus left. They would be sitting stiffly-corseted and barrel-bottomed on the b
ed-settee.
Once, after a particularly long session, not of the Band of Jesus but the committee of the Help the Helpless, she’d burst out: ‘Thank goodness they’ve gone! I’ve been dying to get to bed for hours.’
‘How dare you, you impertinent child!’ Ruddy cheeks had purpled with anger. ‘This is my home and this is my room and this is my bed-settee. Nothing here or anywhere belongs to you and never you forget it. Every stitch of clothing you wear, I paid for, every crumb of food that goes in your wicked ungrateful mouth, I bought!’
Not that Hannah had many worldly goods herself. She believed it her Christian duty to give everything away. Rab had two locked drawers in the bedroom to protect his treasures against his wife’s generosity. Catriona’s clothes and possessions were kept in a suitcase behind the settee but Hannah had long since wrenched the lock apart so Catriona had not Rab’s enviable good fortune. Long ago she’d abandoned any idea of possessing real things. Her mother had got her hands on every single item from the dearly prized and jealously guarded bangle, a Christmas present from Uncle Alex, to her Sunday silk knickers.
As far back as Catriona could remember, Hannah had always loved to quote in a husky dramatic voice: “‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”’
At other times she’d straighten her shoulders and raise her strong chin and look the fine figure of a woman that she was and make the impressive pronouncement: “‘Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”’
But they’d all have to eat something and wear something at the wedding. That was one of the subjects under discussion at the Band of Jesus meeting now. Someone, it seemed, had offered the loan of a wedding dress.
‘You want to marry me, don’t you?’ Melvin, the front of his trousers still puckered up in his hands, had asked.
She’d nodded wide-eyed.
‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘As soon as possible, eh?’
She’d nodded again as if her mother later accused, he had hypnotized her or she was a puppet with him jerking the strings.
‘And we’ll make it a quiet affair, eh?’
Another movement of her head with her hair slithering forward and her eyes clinging to his unshaved, unwashed face.
‘Nod, nod, nod,’ her mother said. ‘Like a gormless dumb donkey!’
The hymn singing stopped and now there was the drone of the Lord’s Prayer. Automatically Catriona’s hands clasped on her lap.
“‘Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done …”’
‘Her will, she means!’ Rab sighed.
Catriona’s eyes sprang open.
‘What did you say, Daddy?’
He sighed again. ‘Oh, never mind.’
The fire was dying in the hearth. Wind sang a melancholy tune in the chimney. Catriona’s attention wandered round the room. An ancient railway-station waiting-place with limp cotton curtains, dark brown linoleum, a scratched wooden table, a few wooden chairs.
A memory of Melvin MacNair’s house eased cautiously into her mind but guilt and fear flicked it away. Hastily she concentrated on Norma Dick next door. It would be nice if Norma could get married. What a lovely bride she would make walking down the aisle, a white veil frothy and spreading to vie in generous length with the long glistening train of her ivory silk brocade dress.
Norma would love to have a house of her own, full of things of her own, things like cushions and carpets and ornaments and …
‘Catriona!’ Her mother’s voice exploded through the living-room door, and forced Catriona to her feet.
‘Come through here at once and say thank you. Mrs Campbell’s brought the wedding dress.’
Big women, fat women, double-chinned bewhiskered women, spread themselves in a circle round the room.
Smiling at everyone, like a performer acknowledging applause before doing a turn, Hannah prodded Catriona into the centre.
‘Look at the nice dress Mrs Campbell is giving you a loan of. Say thank you like a good girl.’
‘Thank you,’ Catriona muttered, eyes down, not daring to look at anything.
‘Mrs Campbell,’ Hannah said at the same time, ‘may the good Lord bless you, you’re far too kind.’ Then to Catriona, ‘Don’t just stand there, dear, hurry through to the bedroom and try it on.’
The dress had once been beautiful but it was now yellow-tinged with age and musty with mothballs. Catriona unrustled it from its wrapping paper and held it against herself without enthusiasm. There was a veil, too, limp and grey and sad-looking.
She put them on, then was hardly able to credit the humiliation of her reflection in the long wardrobe mirror. Little girls playing out in the street dressed up in their mothers’ old clothes had looked better.
‘It’s no use,’ she told Hannah, who appeared in the bedroom to circle her, muscular arms folded across her broad bosom. ‘I’m too wee for it.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers! It’ll do very well. Come on through and let the ladies see you.’
‘I can’t do that!’ Her voice raised incredulously. ‘To be seen in your wedding dress before the wedding is bad luck. ‘
‘Being seen in your wedding dress isn’t what’s going to bring you bad luck, my girl. Melvin MacNair’s your bad luck.’
‘No, please, Mummy. I read in a book. It’s a bad omen.’
‘Come on! Hold it up in case you tramp on it.’ Hannah spoke at the same time as Catriona. Always, even after she’d asked her daughter a question, she never paid the slightest attention to the girl’s voice.
Shame at her appearance, as well as fear, made Catriona dig her heels in, close her eyes, and stiffen her back when her mother pulled her.
Her mother let go. They both turned to speechless wax models. It was Hannah who recovered first.
‘Honour thy father and mother,’ she said and pointed dramatically towards the door. ‘Go through there at once! No daughter of mine is going to break one of God’s commandments. You’ve sinned enough as it is. He’s watching you, Catriona. God misses nothing. Everything, every unkind, selfish thought, every cruel disobedient act, He takes note of and adds up for the terrible Day of Judgement when you’ll stand before Him to await your final punishment. But make no mistake about this, Catriona, you’ll be punished here, too. For every sin you’re guilty of, there’s a punishment.’
Her brown eyes acquired a faraway glaze and her mouth drooped at the edges with the weight of her bitterness. ‘Your disobedience, your ungratefulness, your wicked selfishness will be punished. After all I’ve done for you, this is what I get. I nursed you and protected you and wrapped you in cotton-wool as a child and wouldn’t ever let a draught get near you. I wouldn’t allow you to play with other children in case they hurt you or contaminated you with their germs. Nobody could have had a stricter Christian upbringing. I’ve gone out to work since you’ve grown so that you can stay in the house all the time and I still look after you and watch over you as conscientiously as I did when you were a baby. And this is all the thanks I get. This is all the thanks.’ She heaved a big shuddering sigh. ‘You leave me!’
Chapter 8
It was more like a funeral-day than a wedding-day, Rab thought as he hitched his trousers up, fastened his braces then buttoned his fly. He went through to the living-room struggling irritably with his back stud.
Hannah was still sitting over the fire, chair jammed against the fender, big flat feet splayed out inside the hearth, skirts pushed up, legs wide apart, palms nearly up the chimney. She hadn’t done her hair yet and it flowed over her shoulders and down her back like a girl’s, a river of rich burgundy, its fruity glimmer heighte
ned by the flames of the fire.
There were times, and this was one of them, when Hannah exuded sensuality.
Forgetting his irritation and leaving his still-white collar dangling, he gently laid a hand on her shoulder and felt the gloss of her hair and the firm warm flesh. He longed to bend over her and slide his hand down over her bulbous breasts, and his breathing immediately became noisy, but with a quick disdainful jerk of her shoulder Hannah knocked him away.
‘Have you no shame? Even on your daughter’s wedding day, can you not think of anything else?’
She got up, bumping and crashing the chair aside, and began with brisk bitter movements to twist and pin up her hair. Peering at all angles of her reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece she elbowed him out of the way.
‘A lot you care about her, of course. The only person you care about is yourself.’
‘What are you on about now?’ He tugged furiously at his collar. ‘You stupid fool of a woman.’
‘May the good Lord forgive you for saying that, Robert, because I’m no fool and don’t you forget it.’ She faced him. ‘I’ll find out exactly why you were coming down those stairs at Dessie Street, and why when you saw me there you went as white as a sheet with guilt and nearly fainted.’
‘Guilt?’ He raised his voice to a roar, fighting his collar now, avoiding his wife’s eyes like the plague and hating himself for his lack of courage. ‘Fainted! You’re as mad as a hatter, woman. I never know what you’re raving on about.’
‘You were supposed to be home in bed, weren’t you?’
‘I told you, you fool! We’ve been over all this a hundred times before.’ He sneered his hatred at her. ‘I went back to see Francis MacMahon. He lives in one of the attic flats. So does his mother when she’s not doing the scrubbing. So does his brother. So does his sister Maisie when she’s not serving in the shop. Francis works in the yards. He promised to get me paint. I just wanted to remind him. That was all!’
‘That was all?’ Hannah faced him. ‘Bad enough even if that was all! Don’t you dare bring any stolen property into my house.’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 5