Yet his father was a much respected member of the community. He had had a splendid record in the army. He was an elder in the church. Oh, the irony to watch him, straight-backed and pious at church every Sunday. His friends included ministers, school teachers and upright ex-army men with medals and courageous forays to boast of.
How often he had listened to these stories, recounted over glasses of whisky, noisy laughter and hearty camaraderie, in the Balornock front parlour.
Listened and hated until he had been sick.
They left the clachan in strained unhappy silence. A horrible thought was growing in his mind.
Did Ruth like his father? Could it be that she admired him? Little incidents flicked across his consciousness, odd glances from Ruth’s dark eyes, the way she laughed at his father’s jokes or the coy way she had of reprimanding him if she thought his stories were vulgar, the heightened self-consciousness in the way she walked in his presence or sat or moved her hands or tilted her head.
The horror grew.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ Ruth said at last. ‘I know how you feel!’
But she didn’t.
Chapter 10
‘May the good Lord forgive him!’ Catriona’s mother shook her head. ‘The man’s not only wicked, he’s stark raving mad!’
Catriona had a feeling that for once her mother might be right. The birth was only a matter of a few weeks away and Melvin was insisting that she must accompany him to the last day of the Exhibition.
As he was always telling her, he believed in being a good family man and would never dream of going anywhere on his own. She tried to persuade him just to take Fergus along with him this time but without the slightest success.
‘You know you want to go,’ he kept assuring her. ‘There’s a massed pipe band parade and an anti-aircraft display. Planes are going to be coming across every ten minutes or so from Renfrew. It’ll be marvellous. You’ll love it!’
She could not imagine anything she would loathe more at this particular moment than the exhausting din of pipes and guns and planes.
Then there was the weather to contend with. Surely this had been the wettest summer for years!
‘It’s not a case of not wanting to go, Melvin.’ She made yet another attempt to make him see reason. ‘I’m just not able to trail around that Exhibition again.’
‘Nonsense! There’s nothing special about being pregnant. It’s not an illness …’
‘Oh, all right, all right!’ she hastily capitulated, putting her hands up to her ears and squeezing her eyes tight shut. ‘Don’t tell me how and where any more animals drop their young, or I’ll scream.’
He had been happy then, happy to be the good husband and father, taking his wife and son for a special treat.
She hated him as they set out for the Exhibition. Hatred battered inside her, hysterical for release, locked in and denied expression because of her need to lean on his arm for support, and to wheedle him for lifts on the autobuses, or reviving cups of tea, or to search for toilets.
‘If you wouldn’t drink so much, you fool,’ he told her angrily, ‘you wouldn’t keep wanting to pee!’
‘Sh-sh!’ she miserably hushed him, her cheeks crimson with embarrassment. ‘People will hear!’
‘So what! Everybody’s got to pee at some time or other. It’s only you that goes to extremes!’
‘You’re awful!’ she hissed. ‘Awful!’
‘Awful? What do you mean awful? I don’t pee all the time!’
‘Stop saying that word!’
‘What word?’
Frantic with desperation, she struggled to quicken her pace, at the same time changing the subject.
‘Listen, Fergus! Look! There’s the pipers!’
A mass of swaggering swinging tartan, disdainfully ignoring the squelching mud underfoot, racketed along, sparking the air with patriotic energy. Young folk pranced in front of and behind it, delighted with the sight and sound.
The child’s eyes grew large and round like baubles on a Christmas tree and he stamped up and down wildly clapping his hands.
Melvin laughed and cocked his head.
‘He’s having a grand time, eh?’
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that Fergus was over-excited but she bit the words down. The slightest criticism of the boy provoked his anger and indignation, and she had no wish and no energy for any more arguments.
They had waited in an enormous crush of people to get into the park, queued in fact for everything, and stood for what seemed a lifetime for a reviving high tea.
Buying a meal or even a cup of tea was an expense and a luxury that Melvin seldom indulged in and she had needed the rest and the food so much. Nothing in the future could ever compete with the utter joy of this.
By the time they had made their way to the anti-aircraft display the park was encased by a black night sky. The Exhibition sparkled in the darkness, a dancing fairyland of colour, the buildings caught in a flashing network of lights.
Despite the mud, people in raincoats and headscarfs and wellington boots were jostling and bumping together, singing at the pitch of their voices and dancing The Lambeth Walk.
‘Any time you’re Lambeth way,
Any evening, any day,
You’ll find us all …
Doing the Lambeth Walk, oi!!’
Crowds were getting denser and the rain, now bucketing down, only served to increase their determination to have a riotous good time.
There was a wildness of spirit about the vast throng, a reckless abandon. It was as if the world were ending at midnight with the Exhibition and they would never be able to enjoy themselves again.
Catriona began to feel frightened.
‘Can’t we go home now, Melvin?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘I’m tired.’
The understatement of the world, she thought. She felt so exhausted she could barely speak. Every bone, every muscle, every organ in her body throbbed. She longed to stop moving; she had wistful dreams of a barrow or something, anything, on wheels to run along underneath her heavy belly to support it. She shuffled along, flat-footed, wide-legged in a daze of fatigue, caught in the centre, pushed this way and that by a mass of over three hundred and sixty-four thousand people.
‘We’d never get out of here before midnight,’ Melvin said. ‘Not through this mob, not even if we wanted to.’
The baby kicked and churned and protested inside her.
‘Oh, Melvin!’
She tried to lean against him but he was lifting Fergus up into his arms.
‘You’re tired too, son, aren’t you, eh? But you’re not complaining. You want to see the guns and the planes, don’t you? So does your mammy. She wants to see them, all right.’
‘I don’t like guns. Melvin, I hate guns!’
Her voice was flattened by the roar of the anti-aircraft guns of the army mobile section.
She stared through tears like a drowning man gazing through a deep undulating sea. She was beyond caring what anyone thought, or what she must look like.
Rain smacked down, making her headscarf a limp rag and her hair a dripping net across her face. Her voluminous coat clung stickily, outlining every bulging curve of breast, buttock and abdomen.
She wept loudly but nobody heard.
Automatics roared, spat flames and shook the trees and buildings. Searchlights, long and powerful, criss-crossed to and fro, blue across the black sky. A plane zoomed off into the night out of range and started the big guns booming again.
Behind the guns were anti-aircraft experts with height-finding, predicting, and sound-recording apparatus. An officer shouted brisk orders.
Then the searchlights picked out another plane flying high above the tower and simultaneously more guns blasted into action.
People had stopped trying to move and just stood making nearly two hundred acres of Bellahouston Park a solid block of humanity.
Catriona was too dazed to appreciate when t
he guns stopped, but gradually she became aware that a roar of voices had taken their place.
People grabbed hands, the park swayed.
‘For auld lang syne, m’dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
For the sake of auld lang syne.’
The swaying heaved, quickened, jerked. Screams and laughter shot about like machine-gun bullets.
‘So - here’s- a- hand - my - trusty - freend,
And - here’s - a hand - o’ - mine.
We’ll - meet - again - some - other - time,
For - the - sake - of - Auld - Lang - Syne!’
Then, from every corner of the park ‘God save the King’ thundered out.
It was nearly midnight. The lights in the Tower of Empire went out and the searchlights concentrated on the top of the tower where the Exhibition flag, the proud lion of Scotland, was being slowly lowered.
Then dramatically, unexpectedly a voice came echoing across the hundred microphones from every corner of the ground.
‘The spirit of the Exhibition greets you,’ boomed the voice. ‘I am no individual. I am composed of all those who have contributed to its success.
‘I express to all who have made me, to all who have entered me, gratitude for their parts in me.
‘I die tonight. May memories of me abide in your hearts.’
In silence the crowd looked up while the strokes of Big Ben donged the hour and the flag slipped slowly down. It disappeared behind the wall of the top balcony of the tower and the Empire Exhibition was officially over.
It was the essence of Scotland that burst into one last song to the many thousands of visitors who had come from all over the world to visit their friendly city.
‘Will ye no come back again?’ Glasgow bawled heavenwards. ‘Will ye no come ba-a-ck again?’
Then began the great exodus. It looked as if three international football matches were all coming out at once.
‘What a night!’ Melvin enthused, still with Fergus in his long, muscly arms. ‘I bet you’re glad you came. I knew you wouldn’t want to miss it.’
Catriona kept silent. She had a tight grip of his coat-tail as they jostled towards one of the exits along with the rest of the crowd and her whole concentration was on keeping hold of him so that he could clear a path for her and get her safely home.
Pain screwed her. Delirium fizzing up like champagne. Clinging to the coat-tail, holding it up, praying. Pain throttling. Head to one side, nostrils panicking.
Going away. At ease. Easy now. Easy now. Easy.
No one else in the world. Alone in a lonely place. Fighting for existence. A wedding ring clamping round guts.
A broad gold band, strangling, tightening.
Relax, the magazines said. Take lovely deep breaths - and relax, you lucky, lucky mothers-to-be. One - two - three!
Who is the editor? Who is she? A man is the editor, he - he - he!
She did not recognise Dessie Street off the Main Road where cranes and ships towered up over the walls of the Benlin yards.
Leerie, leerie, licht the lamps,
Long legs and crooked shanks.
The shop at the corner had the blinds drawn down.
The blinds drawn down.
The blinds drawn down.
Gaslight wavered and flung deep shadows down the back close.
The spiral stairs wound round and round. Round and round. Round and round.
She sank to her knees at the foot of them.
Oh, my God! Her lips puttered out with pain as she nursed herself.
Oh, my Jesus!
‘The thing that puzzles me,’ she said, ‘is how a big baby is going to come out such a wee hole!’
The spiral stairs went up and down.
Up and down.
Up and down.
Way up high.
She was floating, quickly, hurriedly.
In through the front door, across the hall, into the bedroom.
Bed.
Oh, how good God was to her.
Thank you God! Thank you, God!
The wedding ring was destroying her.
She fought it.
She tried to relax to please it.
She said she was sorry.
She cursed it.
She said she was sorry again.
And again. And again.
Yet it kept unbelievably contracting, crunching smaller and smaller with herself inside it not knowing what to do, or what could possibly happen next.
Until she knew that she could not stand any more or no more pain could ever be any worse.
It was then that agony leapt to new heights.
‘Jesus!’ she screamed high. Higher and higher. ‘Jesus!’
Then gradually she came back to the world again.
She felt the bed soft beneath her.
She saw the bedroom ceiling.
She knew she had experienced childbirth.
She told herself: Damn the women’s magazines and all the romances in the world - don’t you ever, ever forget this, girl. Don’t you allow yourself to be conned into this ever again.
There was something soft, something making a strange crunchling sound against her. Utterly exhausted, she struggled to raise her head a little and peer down.
A red rubbery figure was sitting between her legs, tiny arms stuck out at each side and shiny matted head lolling helplessly.
Mrs Jackson was rubbing its back, then she suddenly grabbed it, held it upside down and gave it a resounding smack.
The cry echoed in Catriona’s heart. With one last effort, she lifted, and held out her arms.
Chapter 11
The lights of Glasgow twinkling. Light beaming from shop windows and cinema doors. Neon sparkling high, winking busily. Trams and buses, bright yellow, swooping. Everywhere shimmery light.
Alec never forgot the moment he and Madge came back out of the cinema and found that Glasgow had disappeared. There was only darkness.
Neither spoke for a minute, but stood staring at eerie blackness, skin contracting, hair rising.
Glasgow, second city of Britain, home of over a million souls, lay as dark and quiet as a wayside hamlet. Not a single light anywhere. Tram-cars and buses creeping through the black canyons of the streets without one spark of illumination. Shops, cinemas, theatres, restaurants, houses, invisible behind blinded windows.
Only little obscured crosses of traffic signals and the dimmed warnings of other traffic direction signs hung in the blackness like miniature moonbeams.
People waited quietly and patiently in crowds at the tram and bus stops to get home.
Arms linked, fingers entwined, Madge and Alec toed their way cautiously along until they found their car stop.
They could not see if it was their own tram that came forward like a shadow to the stopping place but out of the darkness they heard the conductor’s voice.
‘Springburn!’
‘Is it war, then?’ Madge asked when they had found seats.
‘Naw,’ he said. ‘No yet.’
Alec chuckled and gave a match to his wife to hold while he searched for their fares.
‘One thing’s for sure. The courting couples will like this. Extra cuddles all round tonight!’
‘Got yer call-up papers?’
Working in darkness seemed to have proved the last straw for the conductor, whose ghostly face was a bleak mask of depression.
‘Go for the old medical tomorrow,’ Alec told him.
‘Well, I hope ye pass awright.’
‘You must be joking,’ Alec laughed, lighting up a cigarette. ‘I’m praying I’ve got flat feet, ulcers, anaemia, and my intelligence is double-sub-normal.’
The conductor sighed.
‘If yer warm, yer in!’
‘He’s applying for a postponement,’ Madge said, pride lifting her voice. ‘On the grounds of exceptional hardship - because of me.’
‘You wouldn’t be any hardship to me, hen!’
Madge enjoyed a hearty laugh.
‘It’s the weans. There’s six now. Two sets of twins!’
‘You’ll never get off with that. Some folks have ten and more. Ah know a wumman down our street, so help ma boab, she’s got twenty! There would be no Glasga fellas in the forces at all if you could get off with that!’
Alec blew out smoke and put an arm round Madge’s shoulders.
‘The wife’s never been the same since the last two. Breech births, the twins were. Terrible, wasn’t it, Madge?’
Madge gave another whoop of laughter.
‘God, don’t remind me! Talk about exceptional hardship!’
‘Aw, well, anyways. The best o’ luck to you, mate.’
Stumbling, groping and cursing, the conductor disappeared upstairs.
The tram crawled cautiously, and Alec impatiently kept count of the stops.
‘This one’s ours, hen,’ he nudged Madge at last. ‘Watch your big feet getting off!’
‘They’ll have to do something about this,’ Madge giggled as she fingered her way along the shops and round the corner into Cowlairs Road.
‘About this?’
‘Get off!’
‘Let’s see your headlamps before you cross the road, hen.’
‘Stop being daft and hold my hand.’
‘I’ll hold anything you want, gorgeous.’
‘Alec, I nearly tripped and broke my neck there. Keep a hold of me, I said!’
The walls of the pend dripped to the touch and stank fustily.
A cat miaowed past.
Madge’s laughter bounced around and kept echoing back to her.
‘You couldn’t mistake this place!’
‘My little grey home in the west.’
‘North!’ Madge interrupted.
‘Home, home on the range,’ he loudly belted out in mock drunkenness. ‘Where seldom is heard - a discouraging word, and the skies are not - cloudy all day!’
They staggered hilariously up the outside stairs, into the close, then up the hollow-beat wooden stairs to their door on the first landing.
Mrs Jackson’s agitation clamped on to them and dragged them inside. A twitch was dancing around her eye.
‘Thank God you’re safe back.’
‘How did the bonny wee wean-minder get on, eh?’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 25