by Joan Lingard
‘What in the name could that be?’ asked Ina. ‘Ma, whatever it is?’
‘We’re going to find out,’ said Willa.
‘How long now till he’ll be home?’
‘Seven or eight months.’
His mother sighed.
Willa cocked her head. ‘What’s that noise? Is it Malcolm?’ She was on her feet straightaway. He was asleep in the bedroom. But the noise was too loud for a baby to have made.
‘It’s Mrs MacNab,’ said Ina, shaking her head. ‘He’s at it again, God help her.’
‘Maybe we should go and see.’
‘Now listen, Willa, you stay out of this. You can’t interfere between man and wife.’
‘What if he’s knocking her about?’
‘But even the polis don’t like to butt in. Not when it’s a marital dispute.’
‘So we’re just supposed to sit here and not lift a hand?’
‘He might lift his hand to you too, that’s the trouble.’
‘I wish Tommy was here. He’d go through.’
‘Aye, he probably would. He’s got a hot temper on him when he gets his dander up and he wouldn’t stand for a woman being harmed.’
Willa went out into the lobby to listen. When the screams grew louder she opened the door and went across the landing. Ina came and stood in their doorway, cautioning her, telling her to mind herself.
Suddenly the MacNabs’ door flew open and out came Lecky, the oldest boy. ‘He’s going to kill my ma,’ he shouted.
Willa went straight in. Mrs MacNab was in the bedroom cowering against the wall, her body buckled. Blood was running down her face. Her husband was facing her, his puny right hand balled into a fist. He’s mad, thought Willa, stark raving.
‘Leave her alone!’ she cried.
‘You bloody well leave us alone! Bitch!’ He swung round towards her and she ducked and ran out of the room.
The other children were bunched up in the kitchen. Their eyes looked glazed.
‘Go next door!’ she told them, taking two of them by the shoulders and propelling them. The others followed as if in a trance. ‘Go and see Granny Costello. She’ll look after you. Take them in, Ina,’ she said, once she’d got them as far as the landing, ‘and don’t open the door. I’m going for the police.’
She ran then, as fast as she could, down the stairs and out into the street, hoping desperately she might find a policeman on the beat instead of having to go to the station. They patrolled the area regularly. As she rounded the clock she saw one standing on the opposite corner chatting to the postie.
She yelled across to him and he came hurrying over.
‘What’s up, hen?”
He began to run when she yelled out that a man was murdering a woman on her stair. He went ahead of her, taking two stairs at a time, his boots clumping on the steps. At the top they paused to listen. There was no noise now coming from the MacNabs’ flat and their door was shut.
The constable pulled the bell hard, then rapped with his knuckles.
‘Go away and bloody well leave us alone!’ Mr MacNab’s voice came from the back of the door. ‘I don’t want to have to tell you again, you interfering bitch, or I’ll give you what for too.’
Willa marvelled, for normally the man had such a quiet, almost feeble voice.
This time the constable banged on the door with the flat of his hand, and roared, ‘Open up in the name of the law!’
Nothing happened.
‘I’m warning you. This is the police here. I’ll break your bloody door down if necessary.’
The door opened and Willa saw, standing there, the pathetic little man that she was accustomed to passing on the stairs. He didn’t seem capable of swatting a fly. He didn’t look at her.
‘May we come in, sir?’ asked the constable, pushing past without waiting for answer. ‘I would like to interview your wife.’
‘She’s in the bedroom,’ said Willa.
Mrs MacNab had slid down against the wall and was sitting with her back to it looking like a broken doll.
‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ said the policeman. ‘And, you, sir, will please go into the kitchen and remain there and not attempt to leave.’
Mr MacNab meekly went.
When the ambulance arrived Willa said she would go with it to keep Mrs MacNab company. She went through first to tell her mother-in-law what was happening.
‘And am I supposed to look after all this lot?’ demanded Ina. ‘Help my kilt! I’ve only got one pair of hands.’
She had Malcolm in her arms who, today, as luck would have it, was not in such a happy mood as usual. He was teething and one cheek was bright red, and he kept arching his back, which was making life even more difficult for his grandmother. She was having a struggle to control him. He was strong for his age. Like a wee bull, his Great-aunt Bunty had once remarked. The five MacNab children were sitting round the kitchen table with the air of startled rabbits caught in the headlamps of a motor car.
‘I’m afraid so. Can you manage?’
‘I’ll have to, won’t I? Maybe Elma’ll look in. She said she might after she’d done her Saturday shopping.’
The ambulance bore Mrs MacNab and Willa the short distance up the street to the Infirmary while the constable led Mr MacNab off to the police station.
Willa sat on a hard bench in an overheated corridor that smelt of disinfectant, listening to the various hospital noises around her, the clink of instruments, the running of water, the tap-tap of the nurses’ white-shod feet as they moved up and down, the murmur of voices talking of life and death, or so she imagined, but perhaps they were only asking a patient if he needed a bedpan.
She wished she’d brought her book with her but she’d been in too big a rush to think of it. She was reading Sense and Sensibility. She sat thinking about the Dashwood sisters and their troubles. It seemed such a gentle world that they inhabited. A man might have a nasty side to him like the calculating Willoughby who broke girls’ hearts without any feeling of remorse but there was no actual violence involved. None of the women got beaten up and given black eyes or had miscarriages. But then who knows what had gone on underneath the surface of those genteel lives?
She was lost in the early nineteenth-century world of Jane Austen, where large houses stood in parkland and mothers wrung their hands in anguish over their daughters’ failure to make good marriages and thus be assured of financial security for the rest of their lives, when she became aware that a nurse was standing in front her. A sister, to judge from the starched hat and the starchy manner. Willa got to her feet.
‘Are you a relative of Mrs MacNab’s?’
‘No, just a neighbour.’
‘Does she have any relatives?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know. Well, apart from her husband and children of course. Is she all right?’
‘Depends what you mean by “all right”. She’ll live. She’s got a broken nose and three broken ribs.’
‘Can I see her? Would she like to see me?’ Willa had no idea if she would. They had never exchanged more than a few words in passing, often about the weather.
‘She’s asleep. We’ve given her a sedative to quieten her. She was very agitated. Worried about her children. Five, I believe?’
‘Yes, five.’
‘We may have to arrange for them to be taken into care until she is fit enough to look after them. Where are they now?’
‘With my mother-in-law.’
‘Would it be possible for you to keep them overnight until arrangements are made?’
‘I suppose so. Well, I mean we don’t have much room. But, yes, that would be all right.’ Willa thought she’d like to feel someone would look after Malcolm if she were ever to be in a similar situation, though she couldn’t imagine Tommy raising his hand to her. Not that they’d lived all that long together of course. He’d said that was the good thing about his coming and going: it was like being on honeymoon every time. There’d be no chance of their marriage gettin
g stale. ‘Look at Aunt Elma and Gerry!’ he’d said. ‘Married nearly forty years and never a day apart! It wouldn’t do me.’
Willa had been a little hurt that he had linked the two of them to Elma and Gerry. Also, it would have been nice to think that he’d hated parting from her as much as she had him. Of course he’d been excited about his round-the-world trip. Pauline thought men were different from women in that way. They could switch on and off more easily. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ ‘Or else,’ Willa had countered, ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ Did she believe it?
Walking home down Lauriston Place from the hospital she thought of Richard, wondering if he would be in the library writing. She had hoped to go herself today but there would be no chance of that now.
Elma was in the house. She had been given Malcolm to hold while Ina made lentil soup to feed the children. She had a towel over her shoulder and she was holding the baby as if he were a stick of dynamite.
‘Thank goodness, Willa!’ she said, thrusting her charge into his mother’s arms. ‘I could scarce keep hold of him, he’s that strong. Like a wee right bullock, as Bunty says.’
One of the little girls had wet herself, Willa saw. There was a puddle under the table. She gave Malcolm to his grandmother and took the child into the bathroom and asked if she’d have any clean knickers in her house. Mary shook her head. She didne know, she said. The policeman had given Willa a set of keys to the MacNabs’ flat he’d found lying on the kitchen table so Willa went through to look. She was appalled at the poorness and shabbiness of the children’s clothing. In the end she put a pair of her own knickers on Mary and pinned them at the waist.
When Ina and Elma heard that the children were to stay the night they almost threw a fit and Willa had to hush them and say, ‘The children!’ Elma said she was terribly sorry she couldn’t stay and help but she had to get back for Gerry’s lunch.
‘I thought you said he was playing golf?’ said Ina.
‘I’m not sure when he finishes, though.’
Elma departed.
After they’d eaten the soup, Willa suggested a walk across the Meadows, thinking that a blow of fresh air would be good for the children. They were still looking stunned by what had gone on, too stunned to ask where their mother and father were. Willa told them that their mummy was in hospital but she was getting on fine and would be home in a day or two. She did not mention their daddy.
She took the two-year-old on the end of Malcolm’s pram and the others trailed along behind, the two youngest clinging to Ina’s hands. They were calling her Granny. Malcolm was not pleased at having to share his carriage with another and girned all the way. And he kept pulling his mitts off so that he could get at his cheeks with his nails. He’d drawn blood in a couple of places.
‘Keep your pawkies on, Malcolm!’ Willa snapped at him, her patience beginning to frizzle out.
He paid no attention.
‘We must look as if we’re on an outing from an orphanage,’ said Ina. The MacNab children’s coats were missing buttons, their socks full of holes, and their shoes held together with string. ‘I hope we don’t meet anybody we know.’
They called in briefly on Bunty who, as they had hoped, gave each of the children a lollipop, except for Malcolm, which gave him something else to complain about.
‘I’ll have one though,’ said Ina. ‘I could do with a wee sweetener.’
‘You’ve got your hands full there,’ commented Bunty, as she stood in the shop doorway watching them set off again.
Going up Middle Meadow Walk, they met Richard.
For a moment he stood, stock-still, on the path, his eyes goggling, as he took in two small children in a pram and four others with granny behind, all sucking lollipops. Willa did not speak. Neither did he. He stood to the side to allow them to pass.
‘Thanks, son,’ said Ina, taking out her lollipop. Her tongue had turned green. ‘Nice manners,’ she commented in a loud voice, as they continued on their way.
Willa did not look round.
So, one way and another, they managed to put in the day. By early evening the children were exhausted, even Malcolm. The MacNabs were bathed and put to sleep, head to toe, in Ina’s bed-settee, which had first had a rubber sheet spread over its mattress. Ina was to sleep with Willa.
The dishes cleared away, the two women settled down by the kitchen range. Willa took up her book, Ina, the Edinburgh Evening News.
‘We must ask Tommy to buy us a wireless when he gets back,’ said his mother. ‘Elma says there’s some great programmes on it.’ Gerry had recently bought a set. ‘She heard Dame Nellie Melba singing the other day.’
Within minutes, Ina was fast asleep and snoring, the newspaper in danger of sliding off her knee.
They went to bed early and the next morning were relieved, yet a little sad, when a policeman arrived with a lady in a grey serge coat to take the MacNabs away. The children cried and tried to hang on to Willa and Ina. But, as Willa was forced to say, it was out of the question for them to keep them. By the time the children’s cries had died away down the stairs she felt wrung out.
She went through to Ina’s room and stripped the wet sheets from the bed. Then she put on the copper boiler, in spite of it being Sunday. Ina wasn’t as bothered as her sister Elma would have been about working on the Sabbath. They agreed that they would give church a miss that morning. To push the pram down the hill to St Cuthbert’s seemed rather daunting. They were both tired.
They’d got married in St Cuthbert’s, Willa and Tommy, she in a navy-blue suit and a little navy hat with a half-veil both of which she’d bought in Patrick Thomson’s on North Bridge, he in his naval uniform; and they had promised the minister that they’d bring up any children of their union to be God-fearing and adherents of the Church of Scotland. He hadn’t known there was one on the way already; there had been no need to disclose that. Pauline had been their bridesmaid, Gerry the best man. A photograph of the four of them stood on the dresser. It had been a quiet affair, with the half-dozen of Tommy’s family and only two from Willa’s, her Aunt Lily and Uncle Alec, who lived on the Clyde coast in Ardrossan. Uncle Alec had given her away. Aunt Lily had had a few words with her the day before.
‘I hope you’re going to be able to make this marriage work. He’s too handsome for a husband, if you want to know what I think.’ Willa had not, of course, but was hearing anyway, with as much patience as she could muster. ‘I feel I can speak plainly to you, with your poor mother having passed away. She’d have wanted me to speak to you. He’s too flash. You’ll never have a minute’s peace. Of course I can understand you falling for him. He certainly knows how to turn on the charm!’
‘It’s too late now, Aunt Lily,’ Willa had said with a little smile. She had not told her, though, that she was pregnant.
Mrs MacNab refused to press charges against her husband so he was to be released and allowed home. The policeman said there was nothing they could do if she didn’t charge him. They’d given him a stern warning and had to hope that might have an effect. But interfering in marital disputes was tricky. Well, you never knew exactly what was going on, did you? Often it was not as one-sided as it seemed. Willa looked at him.
‘You’re not suggesting that it might be Mrs MacNab who starts the fights, are you?’
‘Keep the heid, dear! I’m not suggesting anything. It’s just that some women seem to provoke their men as if they want him to—’
‘Break their nose?’
He held up his hands. ‘I’m not saying it’s right.’
‘Good.’
‘If there’s any more trouble let us know.’
They didn’t hear Mr MacNab returning. He must have come stealthily, during the night. In the morning, they heard his hacking cough.
Mrs MacNab was allowed home from hospital after a week, with two blackened eyes and a large plaster covering her nose, and the next day the children were ushered back up the stairs by the lady in the grey serge coat. Willa watche
d them go inside and the door close behind them. For better or worse, the MacNabs were reunited.
~ 8 ~
Fremantle, Western Australia
8th March, 1924
Dear Willa,
The squadron was met on arrival by several small pleasure steamers, one of which displayed a notice saying ‘Cooee City of Perth entertainments. Goat races nightly.’ We were much amused. By the way, you are probably unaware that cooee is a long drawn out call used in the bush and can be heard a great distance away, which would be very handy should one get lost.
‘It sounds like the back-of-beyond.’ said Elma, who had popped in to see how they were getting on and if there had been any more dramas at the MacNabs’. There had not, or none that they knew about. All seemed quiet on that front, for the moment. Uneerily quiet. They couldn’t even hear the children when they listened at the door and Ina had begun to wonder if he might not have murdered the lot of them. But they’d surely have heard that?
Elma had been at the hairdresser’s up the road having a perm. Her hair was screwed into tight curls against her head and when she’d asked them what they thought Ina had said that she looked like a flattened golliwog, which hadn’t pleased her. She still smelt of the perm solution.
‘Goat races!’ said Elma. ‘I mean to say!’
‘We have dog races,’ Willa pointed out. Elma disapproved of Bunty frequenting them so that subject was allowed to drop.
‘I hope Tommy’s not planning on going into the bush,’ said Ina. ‘You wouldn’t like your daddy to do that, would you, Malkie? No, you would not.’ She was dandling him on her knee as usual.
‘I don’t suppose he will and if he did I’m sure he wouldn’t get lost.’ Willa wondered if her mother-in-law knew what the bush was. She had read an article about it in a geographical magazine, which reminded her that she must go to the library today. She’d finished her books and she couldn’t bear not to have a book on the go.