Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  ‘Kirsten! Look at me.’

  Suddenly she could not. With her face averted, she said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. I shouldn’t be here.’ She looked at him pitifully. ‘I can’t help it.’ With more vehemence she added, ‘It doesn’t feel wrong. It feels necessary. As though I have to do it to survive.’ She threw herself into his arms. ‘Oh, I want to belong to you, Duncan. I love you, I love you.’

  He moved her arms down and said harshly, ‘I’m the one who should know better. But I’m compelled, too. You’re all that matters to me. Right or wrong.’

  Her cheeks, her eyes were brilliant, as the fire warmed the room. ‘We can’t go back now. Can we?’

  ‘You’ve never been with a man before?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She moved away from him, trance-like. Reaching up to a shelf, she brought down two chipped, rough cups and set them on the table. She found the brown teapot and the rusty caddy on the mantelshelf. Extracting two spoonfuls of tea from the scanty hoard, she poured the boiling water over the leaves. Then, as though it were some kind of ceremony, sacrament even, she handed Duncan his tea.

  Holding her own cup, but not drinking, she said, ‘I am frightened, Duncan. I have read about love, but I am still frightened.’

  He took the tea from her. ‘Not of me. Dinna be frightened of me.’ He kissed her temple gently. ‘You can’t know love from books. You have to go through love, like fire. Dive into love, like water. I’ll take you there. You’ll see.’

  He unbuttoned her dress, slipped her arms out of the sleeves and as she shivered he kissed her and drew her nearer the fire. She put her hands up under his coarse shirt and vest and felt the tender skin of his body beneath. ‘You, too,’ she urged boldly and they peeled off clothes till each stood naked, in front of the other, hands on each other’s ribs. He had never seen Josie naked in all the years of their marriage.

  She kissed his shoulders and his starveling ribs where her hands had rested.

  ‘Don’t look at my skinny body,’ he said.

  ‘I love it for being skinny. I love you.’

  ‘Aye,’ he groaned. He led her over to the set-in bed and there he held her. He was delicate and careful with her, but her passion was a quick teacher. He took her and they reached a climax of loving together, her long wailing cry ricocheting against the firelit walls.

  Afterwards she lay back and said in wonder, ‘I did not know it would be like that.’

  ‘Nor did I.’

  ‘Oh, Duncan. Come to me again and stay in me. Make us one person.’ She placed her slender girl’s body on top of him, kissing his face, smiling, laughing. He pulled the grubby blankets about her, rolled her over and still held her. It seemed like a new form of existence for both of them, that if skin peeled away from skin, each would wither away and die. The wag-at-the-wa’ clock ticked away another hour and at last she sat up, aware of the chilling of the room and the minutes slipping away.

  ‘I must get home. They will wonder what has happened to me.’

  He watched her dress and rose to help her do up the tiny buttons on her bodice. The stuff of her gown was finely woven, soft to the touch, delicately trimmed with silk braid. Reminded of their difference in station, his fingers fumbled and stiffened.

  ‘Are you sorry?’ he demanded.

  She put a hand up to his cheek and answered him soberly. ‘Never. Never, never, never.’

  She saw with a terrified joy that the act that had transformed her life had done the same for him. He looked different, younger, more vulnerable. It was as though hardship and disappointment had melted away, leaving a Duncan she had never seen before.

  Going down the dark, evil-smelling stairs from Jamie Pullar’s single-end, he said in her ear, ‘What difference will this make to your going away?’

  Down in the cold street, under a yellow street lamp, she looked at him hungrily and said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t want you to go.’

  ‘It isn’t for a few weeks yet. We have time to think and talk.’

  He put her on her tram to go home, saying almost formally, ‘Come to Jamie’s again tomorrow. Same time.’ Her nod was casual. When she was seated in the tram, she looked out into the slushy street in desperation to see him once more. Their eyes met and he sketched her a salute.

  Their affair had a desperate, lunatic intensity about it. Just as he lied to Josie about having to stay in Glasgow on union matters, about living at Jamie Pullar’s in order to help him with a mythical report, so she found ways of deceiving her parents with stories about temperance and women’s suffrage meetings.

  With a disregard for the dangers, they met in tea-rooms, walked arm-in-arm through Glasgow Green, oblivious of the cold. Sat on benches, talking about philosophers. Stood in cold closes or shop doors, talking about her hair, his father, memories, her eyes, wishes, the cold, songs sung in childhood, coal dust in the lungs, summer. Fingers laced. Cold felt in the feet, in tense, importunate bladders. And while Pullar was away, almost always ending up in the dingy apartment up the dank stair, where they burned in the fires of love, and drowned in the sea of love, and came back each time to be reborn and die again.

  Sometimes they played games. Walking in Argyle Street, she would pretend to be his wife, choosing from a butcher’s cheery window the mutton pies and other delicacies for his tea. Or he might see a ring or gown he wanted for her, or books they might read together.

  Each waited for the other to say the words they knew had to come. It was getting more and more difficult to be together. Jamie Pullar returned and his room was no longer available. At home, her parents talked encouragingly of the new friends she would make at Cambridge. She was to have a little special tuition before joining the university itself and no doubt there would be some pleasant socializing. Bright in her mother’s eye she saw the hope of a good match, a fine mind to suit her own.

  In one of the new tea-rooms one night, sharing frugally in the pre-theatre bustle of high teas, she said the words: ‘Help me to go, Duncan.’ He had been quiet all evening, guilty because the money that had brought him to meet her should have gone to Josie, for food.

  The next time they met, he was grimly smiling and jaunty. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said. ‘You’ve to stick to your studies. If you are going to be of use in this world, and you are, you must learn all you can. And I expect you’ll meet a nice, upstanding young fellow, and marry him, and give him bairns.’

  Her eyes looked as though he had bruised them. ‘And do to him what we’ve done to Josie?’ They had been all round and over the topic of Josie, many times. Josie and Carlie. Who would not go away.

  Relenting at what her words had done to him in turn, she said with the same terrible jauntiness he had patented: ‘If I’ve to go away and work, you’ve to remember what you’re in the world for, too. You’ve to remember what there was, before us.’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he said dully.

  ‘Remember the night you enumerated the different kinds of hunger?’

  He smiled then. It had been in Jamie Pullar’s mankie bed.

  ‘Hunger for beauty, hunger for books, hunger for dignity. Poor folks need their dignity, you said. You have to make sure they get it. In Parliament. One day. You hear me, Duncan?’

  He shook his head. ‘I hear nothing. I feel nothing.’

  She was drawn down into his despair. ‘I can’t even pray for us any more,’ she admitted.

  In the end there were no more words. Even touch became unbearable. Her parents were travelling south with her, so there was no question of him seeing her off. They met for the last time three days before.

  He had wanted desperately to give her a memento, and had persuaded his mother to let him have a small doeskin edition of Burns’s poems, on the pretext that it would be useful for quotations in his writings and speeches.

  When he gave it to Kirsten, a paper-thin, dried wild rose fell out from between the pages. ‘A Scotch rose!’ she exclaimed. ‘Look at its brown leaves! They call it th
e burnet rose.’ He picked it up with great care, laying it in her palm. ‘Beautiful,’ she said, and he agreed, his eyes never leaving her face.

  By a strange irony, he was in Glasgow for a genuine union meeting the day of her departure. He could not stay away from the station, but mooned about in the shadows near the London platform, rewarded when he caught a glimpse of her, pale and dreamy, between her parents.

  The train was late in leaving. They held it up, as quite often happened, for the great scientist, Sir William Thomson, who was going down to London on important scientific business. Duncan remembered the first night he’d spoken to Kirsten, her jokes about explaining Sir William’s mirror-galvanometer to him.

  He walked up towards the university afterwards, because it felt like being nearer her there. Sir William’s house sparkled with the new, sharp gleam of electric lighting, the first in Scotland.

  That was a miracle, wasn’t it? Energy jumping from pole to pole. If only he could find such a miracle, that would transport him to the world of talk and ideas she would soon inhabit Who was there to understand him, now she was gone?

  He would go home to Josie. Maybe the time would come when he would feel comfortable with her again, when her cool look would warm and the child would stop looking at him with that wide-eyed, disquieting stare.

  He could only think of fires going out in dirty grates, and women coming to their door in smelly shawls for a bit of butter, or an eggcup of tea for their men’s snap tin. Warmth and sunshine were draining away in a train going south.

  His burnet rose.

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  In the Jubilee year 1887, Kate Fleming was seventy and the old minister who had always styled her Kate Kilgour, because that had been her name when she was his housekeeper in Greenock, died. She had been with him when he raised his head to listen to his church bell toll for the last time; then he had fallen back on his pillows with the look of a mighty spirit resigned to obey its Maker, and move on. James Galbraith was buried in the small Dounhead kirkyard, beside his daughter Lilias, and a new young minister, who played golf and told jokes, took his place.

  For Kate, there was a void nearly as great as when her husband Findlay had died, and the family realized it Which was why Tansy was picking her way carefully over the frozen February puddles towards her mother’s cottage, with the gift of a gold and seed-pearl locket and an invitation to birthday tea at Dounhead House.

  The years since Lachie’s resignation from Parliament had changed Tansy greatly. A number of them had been spent with him in Paris and the South of France, mixing with painters who were breaking away from the old traditional ways, and she moved with a stylish freedom and grace that were the outward signs of a loosening of the many inhibitions that had been laid upon her as a child in Scotland.

  She was still the old Tansy in regard to fashion, ahead of her time in that her gown was bell-shaped, not bustled, and the sleeves quite daringly wide. Her face, though sometimes sad and reflective, was more often lively, mobile, responsive. Not the customary contained, watchful Scots face, so careful of its dignity. Tansy was cosmopolitan, as at home in the salons of Paris as she was in the little greystone cottage adjoining the Rows that she now approached.

  Kate received the locket in its blue velvet box with admonitory cries about extravagance, but she admitted it looked beautiful once Tansy had fastened it round her neck, and her fingers strayed frequently to touch and cherish it. She confessed to having a ‘hoast’ on her chest and from her rough cough Tansy decreed it would not be wise to go out, and prepared instead a small celebratory tea for the two of them. Kate showed her, with evident pleasure, a long letter from Isa, describing her life at the mission station.

  ‘Nothing from Jean?’ She was almost afraid to ask the question. It was many years since Kate’s eldest daughter had written home. The busy demands of family life in New Zealand obviously took all her energies. Tansy knew Kate grieved and hoped. She shook her head now, but uttered no criticism. ‘It’ll be in her mind to write,’ she countered gently. But Tansy begged leave to doubt it.

  ‘Where’s your Donald?’ Kate demanded. She found her seven-year-old grandson and his chatter vastly entertaining if on occasion tiring.

  ‘I left him playing with Carlie down at Josie’s,’ said Tansy.

  Kate looked at her in some surprise. Josie had not become any more houseproud over the years and the house in the Rows was often in need of a good turn-out and brooming. Tansy acknowledged this now with a rueful smile, but said, ‘I felt Josie needed cheering up. She’s fond of Donald and he and Carlie get on together. He’s teaching her a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. You should see her face! She hangs on his every word.’

  While Tansy fed the fire and set the table, Kate pondered the unlikely friendship that existed between Tansy and Josie, one a natural autocrat, the other so down-to-earth and uncompromisingly working-class.

  ‘You and Josie get on well,’ she volunteered.

  Tansy put down the cut-glass jam dish that brought back the bitter-sweet memories of childhood Sunday tea and sank into the rocking-chair on the opposite side of the cosy hearth.

  ‘You know why?’ She hooked her chin on her hand, rocking and half-smiling, reflectively. ‘We’ve both had difficult husbands. Josie scarcely sees hers and although mine is sometimes there in body, his mind is always elsewhere.’

  ‘He is generous with you,’ Kate said. She had heard the note of bitterness in her daughter’s voice and was anxious to be fair to Lachie. ‘You have all the nice clothes you want, lass, good food, a life of variety.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ It was as though Tansy shook herself mentally. ‘The managers and I have to run the pit between us. He puts in a token appearance at the office, once in a while. But I don’t complain. I like meeting his painting friends. They are amusing and different I sit for them sometimes, and I listen to their confidences. Sometimes I play a little Chopin for them, to soothe them when a picture goes wrong.’

  She laughed, to tease a smile from her mother, who was looking solemn.

  ‘The latest thing is we are to take a house on the Isle of Arran for the year. Lachie is there now and will stay painting for some weeks, and his friends will come and go in the summer as they please. They want to practise plein-air painting — nature in all its guises. It is quite serious, really. Lachie talks about establishing a “Glasgow School”, which will bring in poor young painters who have not been able to study abroad, as he and some of his friends have, and they will be able to criticize each other’s work and help each other.’

  Kate looked at a print of ‘The Light of the World’, by Holman Hunt, which hung in a heavy gilt frame beside the dresser. James Galbraith had been doubtful of any literal delineation of Our Lord, but she found it very beautiful and moving.

  Tansy followed her gaze and said, ‘The Glasgow School won’t be anything like that. You see, Maw, the camera could produce a picture like that. It is very exciting, what someone like Lachie can do with colour and composition to make you see more than the camera ever could.’ She broke off. She had been about to try and explain about the relation of colour to mass when she remembered all this was doubtless unintelligible outside the ateliers of Glasgow and Paris. ‘At any rate,’ she finished, ‘the Glasgow boys are trying to do something different from the English or even the Edinburgh painters — and influential people in Boston and New York are buying. First commerce, now art, Lachie says. It is the one thing he really cares about.’

  She lapsed into thought for a moment, then added, almost as if to herself, ‘I have learned not to mind too much, to develop my own tastes and interests. I have tried to tell Josie this, but she’s obsessed with Duncan —’

  ‘Aye, well, poor lass,’ said Kate, ‘she’s held down by poverty. Not like you. Duncan gets to London and all over the place on his union business and now it’s this new Miners’ Federation with all its fighting talk about the eight-hour day. He says it has twenty-five thousand members —�
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  ‘It’ll just mean more strikes.’

  ‘And more suffering for the likes of Josie and the other wives. You know she scrubs out the butcher’s shop — I saw her scattering the sawdust for dirty boots. And she runs the Clarion.’

  Tansy said sombrely, ‘You and I know she doesn’t care what she does, Maw. She would wear a sack for a dress, if it would help Duncan. No, it’s the old business of his eye for other women — she suffers agonies of jealousy when he’s away about the country.’

  ‘His father had an eye for a bonnie lass when he was young,’ mused Kate.

  ‘She wonders if he still sees Kirsten Mackenzie. She’s convinced they once had an affair, you know.’

  ‘How could he be seeing her? She’s in London —’

  ‘And he goes there sometimes. Like last year, when there was all that labour agitation.’

  ‘He’ll always come back to Josie.’

  ‘Maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe it would be kinder to make a clean break.’

  Kate sighed, and poked the fire. She was remembering the time that Findlay had brought home his illegitimate child by Nancy Paterson and handed him to her, and how then she had not been able to reject him, because of the terrible bond of love.

  ‘You have to compromise,’ she said softly. She knew there was some rift, some dissonance that she was unable to talk about, in Tansy’s life too. Yet surely she had compromised also?

  ‘Maybe,’ Tansy said in a whisper. What would her mother say if she knew she, Tansy, had a young lover? Not in the scandalous sense. Hamish Macleish had been content to sit near her feet all that summer at Antibes, ready to fetch and carry, obey her whims. His painting of her had caused much comment later in the Paris salons.