He was just about to move towards her when something unexpected caught his attention.
A notice had flashed on the screen:
‘An air raid is now in progress. Any patrons wishing to leave should do so now in a quiet and orderly manner.’
‘Oh, hell!’ he protested indignantly.
‘Sh … sh!’ Ruth’s eyes glimmered mischievously at him through the darkness. ‘They often do that, didn’t you know?
Just looking at her made his indignation melt away. He grinned and winked. ‘Yeah! Who doesn’t!’
She giggled.
‘Everything you say sounds awful! You’ve always been the same, haven’t you?’
‘You too, hen. You sex maniac you!’
Suddenly the building jerked at its roots with a dull thud. Everyone stood up.
‘That was close,’ Alec said. ‘Close enough to be the docks!’
The screen went dead.
‘Oh, Alec!’
‘Come on, hen. I’ll take you back home.’
People had begun to crush into the passage-ways, but there was no panic. It just looked like the normal nightly crush to get home after the show had finished.
Alec shouldered a path for Ruth and reaching the emergency exit a few yards from where they had been sitting, turned to allow her to go through the door before him. At the same time his eyes seemed to explode. Everything around him disintegrated in an angry roar. His hands, clutching out for support, caught at the lintel of the exit door and hung on.
Sound crumpled down under a huge puff of dust. Then there was silence.
He heaved himself out through the door and allowed his feet to slowly, carefully descend the stairs.
The emergency exit led to a narrow lane at the side of the cinema. Alec stood staring dazedly towards the Main Road.
There were sounds of running feet in the black-out and weak little fingers of light from torches frantically criss-crossed. People were shouting and an air-raid warden wearing a steel helmet came clattering over the cobblestones of the lane towards him.
‘Are you all right? Did anybody else get out this side?’
Alec stared at him.
The warden rushed in through the emergency door, aiming his torch upwards. In a few minutes he came out again.
‘We’d better go round to the front.’ He got a grip of Alec’s arm. ‘This wall doesn’t look too safe. You’ve been lucky, Jack!’
Alec allowed himself to be led on to the Main Road. A pale moon showed the Ritzy lying open at the front like an old doll’s house and full to overflowing with a mountain of rubbish. It spilled out on to the street, with lavatory pans and fancy tiles, broken bricks and slabs at grotesque angles like tombstones in an old graveyard and gold-painted plaster, and great beams of wood, and red plush seats gone grey.
Already people were moving over the mountain, a black swarm of burrowing ants. Others were standing dazedly at the foot as he was standing. Some wept.
One woman was moaning and sobbing and talking to herself.
‘We had a fight and he took the wean and went without me. Him and the wean liked them cowboy pictures. I wanted him to mend the pulley. He’d been promising to mend it for ages. Tommy, I says, if you go out tonight again, that’s us finished. But him and the wean liked them cowboy pictures, and they went without me.’
The air-raid warden asked Alec his name and address, and if he had been with others, and if so, did he see any of them here, and if not, what were their names and addresses?
‘Don’t worry, Jack. It’ll come back to you. You’re still shocked. Here, have a cigarette and just stay there until I’ve time to see to you.’
Alec inhaled, his nostrils pinching in with the smoke.
The warden had joined the other ants scrabbling and pulling at the debris.
No one would notice, Alec thought, if he walked away now. He could walk and walk until he felt better. Then he could jump on a tram-car and go home. He could go to Madge as if nothing had happened. No one need ever know.
Somebody was repeating angrily, brokenly beside him:
‘Bloody war! Bloody stupid war!’
He seconded that. War was the stupidest thing that men had ever thought up. Life was short and there were so many better things to do with it. War was a bloody stupid waste!
He saw the warden crushing towards him and tossed away his cigarette. Now was the time to go, the time to say a silent goodbye to Ruth. He cursed himself bitterly because he could not do it.
‘Feeling better, Jack?’
‘It’s Alec. Alec Jackson. Cowlairs Pend, Springburn.’
He flung himself down on his knees with the others to claw desperately at the bricks and the wood and the stone …
‘Someone belonging to you in there?’ the warden sympathised.
‘A woman.’ Dust stung Alec’s eyes and cracked his voice. ‘Ruth Hunter.’
Catriona would have fainted when she learned about Ruth but she discovered that fainting was a luxury she could not indulge in. To escape into unconsciousness when two children were clinging to one’s skirts and a baby was gurgling trustfully in one’s arms, had to be out of the question. She must force herself to go on dandling baby Robert and telling the other children to behave themselves. She must light the fire and dress Robert and cook breakfast and pick up toys in case the old man tripped over them. There were nappies to be washed and beds to be made and she had to decide what to cook for dinner.
Life went on. Mercilessly. There was no escape. The young girl inside her panicked, flapped futilely against the reality of an ordinary housewife shackled with weans, one wife among millions, having to go on and on struggling with endless responsibilities, disappointments and problems, having to accept the pitiless erosion of age and the irrevocable finality of death.
Having to face guilt, having to look herself in the face.
Poor Ruth, she kept thinking. Oh, my God, poor Ruth!
The funeral had been a nightmare and the Quaker meeting for worship afterwards, in which there had been endless painful time to think, was no better.
This was the first time she had seen Sammy since they took him away and what she saw brought more horror.
His head was shaved to a dark red stubble that laid bare bright scarlet weals. His eyes were inflamed and badly cut. Stitches puckered his shin. His nose was smashed and his face twisted with discoloured swellings.
He sat opposite her in the small room of the Quaker Meeting House, his stocky body rigid, his grey pebble eyes hard.
Long wooden forms were arranged in a square with a small table in the centre. On the table a vase of daffodils made the rays of a wintry sun look faded. The clock on the wall ticked interminably like tiny droplets from a vast sea of silence.
Catriona’s gaze wandered over some of the others in the room then she tried to concentrate on the daffodils to keep her mind safely empty. But she kept thinking: Poor Ruth! Oh, my God! Poor Ruth.
She remembered how she had confided in Ruth one night not long before Robert’s birth. She burst into tears and confessed to Ruth that she felt frightened to go to bed on her own in case the baby started during the night and she was not able to help herself.
Ruth had immediately flung her arms round her neck, hugged and kissed her and assured her that she would love to look after her and she must never feel lonely or frightened ever again as long as she was with her.
From that night until Robert’s birth Ruth had slept with her, cuddled into her back with her arm protectively round her swollen waist. And before saying good night every night she would ask in that lilting voice of hers:
‘You’re all right now, aren’t you? You’ll tell me if you need anything else, won’t you?’
She remembered the luxury of cups of tea in bed in the morning brought by Ruth before she went down to her day’s work in the shop. She remembered a thousand little kindnesses eagerly, lovingly, generously given.
In an agony of remorse she recalled her jealousy of Ruth, her c
oldness to the girl and her eventual wish to get rid of her.
If only … If only … The words prefaced a dozen thoughts as she sat in the Quaker silence opposite Sammy.
John Haddington, who had finally managed to get Sammy out of Maryhill Barracks, had wanted to take him home with him but Sammy had come to Dessie Street because Ruth’s belongings were there.
‘You can sleep on the bed-settee in the sitting-room,’ she told him. ‘You can stay here as long as you like.’
She dreaded to think what would happen when Melvin came home again but she would have to face that problem when he arrived. She had no alternative. Life went on. You kept doing what you could in your own way. You made mistakes. You struggled to understand. You failed. You tried again. You took one small step after another. Only kings, politicians and madmen took big steps like war.
You just took one small stumbling step after another because you believed that life was a pattern of small things, a chain in which every tiny link mattered.
She wanted to talk to Sammy on the way back to Dessie Street, to try to explain. She sought to bring words of comfort to her inarticulate tongue but no words came.
And perhaps she had no need to say anything.
In the kitchen, while she was making a cup of tea, Sammy chatted quite naturally to the children and when Fergus, in an embarrassing burst of honesty said: ‘What an awful looking face you’ve got!’ Sammy laughed and replied, ‘I know. Think yourself lucky you haven’t got one like it. You’re a handsome wee lad!’
He took it in his stride, too, when the old man spoke about Ruth.
‘A fine figure of a woman!’ Duncan chewed nostalgically on his pipe as he kept repeating in high-pitched aggrieved tones. ‘A fine figure of a woman. It’s terrible. What am I going to do down in that shop without her?’
‘Da!’
Catriona tried to silence him with a hiss in her voice and a cup of tea in her hand. But Sammy’s gruff voice had assured her.
‘There’s no need to get upset. It’s all right.’
Afterwards he had dandled Robert on his knee while she prepared the child’s evening bottle.
My God! she thought. Alec’s child!
But she smiled and said what a good baby he was and Sammy too admired him.
Madge had agreed that Sammy must never know that Ruth had been with Alec that night, but that was as far as she would go.
‘I’ll make Alec pay for this,’ she vowed. ‘I’ll make the dirty rotten midden regret this for the rest of his f— life.’
‘Madge!’
Catriona had been shocked and distressed, not only by Madge’s language but by the ugly bitterness twisting the normally placid, good-natured face.
‘Madge, please. What’s the good of being like that. You’ll only make yourself ill. I’m sure Alec will regret that night without you making his life a misery.’
‘What do you know about misery!’ Madge shouted. ‘What do you know about anything! Coddled and spoiled and doted on all your life by your “mummy”.’
‘Madge, don’t.’
‘Your own man wasn’t good enough for you. You had to have a taste of mine as well.’
‘You’re upset. I know how you must feel. But hating me won’t change Alec.’
‘You mind your own f— business. You’ve had more than enough to do with my man. God knows how many other wee cows have had their fun and games with him as well. To think there was a time when I actually trusted him. But never again! He’s made a fool of me once too often. Don’t tell me how I should or shouldn’t be with him!’
She agreed, however, that no good purpose would be served by allowing Sammy to know.
It was comfort Sammy needed, and that first night in Dessie Street, Catriona’s tongue still desperately searched for words. Eventually, before saying good night to him, she managed:
‘Ruth used to talk about you all the time, Sammy. She loved you very much and she was always so proud of you.’
Was that small step a failure, she wondered, lying in bed across the hall from Sammy, sharing the same darkness and the terrible sound of his sobbing.
She clutched at the bars of the baby’s cot, longing to go through and hold the man, and hush and soothe him as she would the baby.
But she remained clutching the bars, imprisoned.
Chapter 28
‘You’re like a hen on a hot girdle,’ Duncan complained. ‘You’re more of a hindrance than a help in this shop. Ruth took her time but she got things done no bother.’
‘All right! All right! So I’m not Ruth!’ Catriona hissed, turning to the next customer.
Her father-in-law was still muttering and salivating into his goatee beard after all the customers had gone.
‘I’ll leave you to lock up, Da,’ she told him. ‘I’ll have to hurry upstairs.’
‘Some employee you make!’
‘I’m not an employee.’
‘Ruth always stayed behind and saw to everything. I never needed to worry.’
‘Well, I need to worry. I’ve a baby lying in a pram in that draughty close and I’ve another baby upstairs in Mrs Jackson’s and Fergus has been home from school for ages and I dread to think where he is and what he’s doing. And I’ve everybody’s tea to see to.’
‘That conchie nyuck up there should be doing something for his keep. What’s he doing, eh?’
‘He’s paying good money for his keep and he’s away seeing about a job today.’
‘Aye, he’ll be getting himself fixed up in one of them boom factories. He’ll make his pile here while the likes of Melvin’s away earning coppers. I told that stupid ass that I could have got him deferred. He’s no right to go away and leave me to look after this business by myself at my age. If the likes of that conchie can stay here and make his pile …’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Da!’ she interrupted impatiently. ‘Sammy would rather die than go into munitions. He’s a pacifist. He’s gone to see his Quaker friends. They have an ambulance service. They do jobs like that.’
‘Bloody pacifists! They ought to put them up against a wall and shoot them!’
‘Da, you know you don’t mean that. You’re just tired and needing your tea. I’ll away upstairs and get it started.’
Unexpectedly the door-bell pinged and a traveller shuffled in with no legs, only feet showing on the end of his long blue belted raincoat The coat, shined smooth with age and years of carrying bulky samples, was topped by a milky-moon face devoid of any expression except resignation. His black homburg looked as if somebody had stamped on it and twisted the brim in a fit of rage, a misfortune he had no doubt suffered with the same stoic lack of emotion with which he put up with everything else.
‘What have you got?’ MacNair eagerly pounced on the traveller before he’d even had time to heave his case up on the counter.
‘Bana …’
‘Bananas?’
Excitement exploded Catriona and the old man into one voice.
‘Banana essence. You can make a spread for sandwiches with it. I’ve got a recipe in my case somewhere. Parsnips or swedes or something like that you use. If you can get them. You cook them and mash them up with the essence.’
Catriona sighed.
‘Everybody knows that.’ She took off her apron. ‘Fancy my Andrew has never seen a banana in his life. It’s hard to imagine that I actually used to eat them and never give them a thought.’
‘Bananas!’ the traveller sighed, remembering. ‘Marvellous things!’
‘Them were the days!’ the old man reminisced along with him. ‘Before all these ration books and coupons. Christ, you need to be a Philadelphia lawyer to sort everything out now. It’s terrible.’
The traveller looked around the empty, dusty shelves.
‘This place used to be packed. You always carried a good stock.’
The old man chewed his loose dentures for a minute before saying dreamily:
‘Everything from currant buns to sanitary towels I had in he
re.’
‘Now we spend most of our time cutting out bits of paper from ration books.’ Catriona rolled her eyes heavenwards. ‘Forms, and ration books and coupons. I know how Da feels.’
‘Aye, my shop used to be the best stocked shop for miles around, but now look at all I have! A silly wee lump of butter and a wee bag of tea and sugar. That would have been just enough to feed one family in them days. Now I’ve to share it among everybody. Remember my mutton pies and my nice white bread and rolls?’
‘My God!’ the traveller said.
‘Thick and juicy with meat them pies were. And the bread snowy white with a crisp crust on the top.’
‘Da, don’t be cruel. Tormenting folk doesn’t help. I’m away upstairs.’
Catriona pushed through the piece of sack-cloth that served as a curtain between the shop and the lobby at the back, and went out through the side door into the close.
Despite the hood of the pram being up, and several blankets and covers, a woolly bonnet, coat, leggings and mittens, Robert’s face was pale with cold and his nose looked like a maraschino cherry.
‘Och, mummy’s poor wee love.’
Hurriedly Catriona lowered the hood and began to unfasten the waterproof cover.
‘I would have had you inside in the lobby but you’ve go to get some fresh air some time.’
His eyes beamed love up at her and his mouth opened the whole width of his face, and her heart melted towards him as he showed her every part of his toothless pink gums.
‘I’ll carry the pram up.’
Sammy’s voice made her swing round. It had a jerky gruffness that always startled her when she was not expecting it. She could never quite get used to his appearance, either. His spiky hair, his broken nose and aggressive stare made him look more like a prize-fighter than anything else.
‘Oh, it’s you. I didn’t expect you back so early.’
She lifted the baby and followed Sammy up the stairs.
‘I came across in the ferry,’ he told her. ‘It saves a bit of time and it’s handy being at the end of the street.’
‘I never use it. I don’t like walking down Wine Row.’
‘Wine Row?’
‘The other end of Dessie Street. Everybody calls it Wine Row because of the sheebeens and the meths drinkers.’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 37