by Webster, Jan
A lot had changed since that moment in the near-dark when what was left of a man had been held in his hands. But this was a time when he saw the future darkly, and the vision of what he had to do was blurred, elusive and oppressive as nightmare.
*
‘This has been a sorry time for Dounhead.’ Dr Pettigrew raised the glass of Madeira to his lips and gazed across the expanse of carpet in the Lavender Room at Tansy. He could see her fingers nervously working at her handkerchief and sought to distract by his reference to the wider scene.
‘Nothing but broken heads to see to,’ he lamented. ‘I’ve never known anything like it. I hear the Fifeshire miners sent in their support. Their John Weir is a respected figure, a moderate, thinking man. But it makes no difference. The miners know they have to go back on terms of total surrender.’
‘They will have to learn how to negotiate with words, not strikes,’ said Tansy sharply. ‘It may appear very weak and frivolous of me, Doctor, but my chief concern at the moment is my son upstairs.’
The doctor put his glass down on the sofa table and said as reassuringly as he could, ‘Scarlatina is not a disease to be taken lightly, as you know. But the children who succumb to it are mostly those who are ill-nourished. Your child is well fed, his nurse is a most capable body and she has my instructions.’
Tansy bit her lip to stem the tears and said anxiously, ‘Should I think of getting in a specialist from Glasgow?’
‘I doubt he would have more experience of this than I,’ the doctor said shortly, ‘but you must please yourself. Would you like me to arrange it?’
‘Yes, please. The best man there is.’
Distractedly, Tansy climbed the stairs to Donald’s bedroom once the doctor had gone. The child was in a troubled sleep and his nurse put her fingers to her lips and persuaded Tansy in a whisper to go to her own room and lie down.
She couldn’t settle. Whenever she closed her eyes, the sense of self-reproach seemed to swell in her chest till she felt she must suffocate. If only she hadn’t taken Donald to Josie’s! Now it seemed that Carlie was over the worst, while with her child, the crisis was still to come.
She had loved him too dearly, that was it, and he was to be taken from her. Why wasn’t Lachie there to reassure her? The weather had broken and for two days the steamer had not been able to put in at Arran, so he didn’t even know yet that the child was ill.
She heard the front-door bell jangle and hoped it would not be her mother or Josie, come to enquire about Donald. She didn’t even want to see them just now. But she heard the maid’s protesting voice and then the rapid tread of feet taking the stairs two at a time and the deep rumble of a man’s voice saying it was all right, Mrs Balfour would see him.
There was a peremptory knock on her door and it opened before she had time to answer. Hamish Macleish stood there, gazing at her anxiously. Even in her distress, she thought with a spurt of near-mirth that he looked like a Punch caricature of a painter. Floppy tie, floppy hair. Those wild, pale-blue and hypnotic eyes. ‘Look,’ Lachie had once said jokingly, ‘he has the typical mad Highlandman’s eyes — all that white around the iris.’
‘Please go away,’ she said now. ‘I don’t want to see anyone.’
He ignored her words and strode into the room.
‘I came, the minute I heard you couldn’t get word to Lachie. You shouldn’t be on your own. How is Donald now?’
‘Poorly.’ She bit her lip hard, feeling the tears rush to her eyes at the warmth of his sympathy. The others in the painting brotherhood regarded him as the rough country boy, reared on porridge and oatcakes, bare-bottomed under his kilt, but he had an extreme emotional sensitivity many of the others lacked. And although Lachie teased him about his social um certainties, the way he embraced new fads and fashions to keep up with the beau monde, she knew he thought his work advanced, exceptional, bordering on genius. He had helped Hamish to sell paintings both in Britain and America, in markets where they were in competition with his own. Lachie had his faults. Lack of generosity towards his fellow painters wasn’t one of them.
‘You shouldn’t be here, you know.’ There it was, whenever she looked at him. That rush of feeling that wasn’t quite maternal, answering the open, defenceless pleading in his eyes. He was so young. And she felt old. When she had asked her mother once, in childhood, how old she was, Kate had said with a smile, ‘I’m old as the hills.’ That was how she felt now. Old as the hills.
‘You could catch the illness yourself,’ she told Hamish.
‘I had it. When I was ten.’
‘Oh, well, I suppose you should sit down.’ She was ungracious, abrupt, annoyed that her attention had been taken from Donald.
She went along now to the little boy’s room, sending his nurse, young Ina Jamieson from the village, to have a meal and a walk in the fresh air. She fed Donald soup, sponged his hands and face, sang him snippets of music-hall songs till, fretfully, he fell asleep.
‘Come on. Your turn to rest and eat now,’ said Hamish, when she returned to her room. He had been down to the kitchen and had organized a tray of food. He buttered toast for her, handing her little pieces as though she were a child or a pet dog, fussing over her like a mother.
She smiled in spite of her anxiety, ‘Hamish, apart from Lachie, you’re the only person I could tolerate just now.’
‘He leaves you too much on your own.’ His face was pink from the compliment and now deepened to red with the rashness of his statement. ‘No, I didn’t mean that. It sounds disloyal —’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Why dissemble?’ She began to cry harshly, putting the backs of her hands up to wipe away the tears. He watched her helplessly for a moment, then offered her a spotless kerchief from his top pocket.
‘Don’t you and he — make out?’
‘I don’t know where it all went wrong.’ Her face tilted up towards him. ‘But it did. We were happy up till that time of the strike, when that man attacked him. He was never the same after it. He shut himself away. In here.’ She tapped her temple. ‘Only his painting means anything to him now. I am to be given respect, money, even affection, such as you might give a sister.’ She shook her head, shakily composed. ‘But not love.’
‘I’ve known you weren’t happy.’ He sat down opposite her, so that he could look into her face. ‘It’s bothered me. Someone as beautiful and full of life as you, Tansy, but with shadows on your face. I wondered why.’
She looked down at her hands, folded on her lap.
‘Have you ever felt you’ve failed someone?’ she asked reflectively. ‘I was hard with him, when he gave up his political career and wanted to give up the pit. That was when the bad times began, the closeness changed. And once that closeness goes —’ she moved her hands apart in a gesture of resignation — ‘a marriage can quickly fall apart. In its true sense.’
Very matter-of-factly he said, ‘You know I love you?’
She shook her head tiredly. ‘You only think you do.’
She rose and moved to the window, looking down into the trees in the drive. They were tossing and waving in a stormy wind; their soughing reached her ears like distant seas.
When she turned and looked at Hamish, he seemed a great distance away. She realized then how desperately tired she was and there was another night of Donald’s illness approaching, another night of nightmare, fever and delirium. He grew frailer and frailer, her child. She could hear him crying now and she went running down the corridor to his room, desperate to soothe and save his ebbing strength.
Why wasn’t Lachie there? She felt a great, bruising anger against him sweep through her. And although she felt like weeping, this time she did not. It was as though she had passed beyond that, to a harder place.
Chapter Six
Fifteen-year-old Kitty Kilgour skipped along the passage from the kitchen, across the wide hall, and began the climb up the stairs towards her father’s first-floor study. At least it was cool in here. Outside, everything broil
ed and burned in the sun. She pushed the ringlets away from a damp nape, hitching and flapping her skirts to cool her body.
She was furious about having to leave the summer house at Helensburgh to come back to Glasgow in this heat. Watching Father and the boys sail the boat had been such fun. Why did they all have to come back home, pray, just because Sandia wanted the business of her and Dandy settled once and for all? It was Sandia who was upsetting Mama again. That and the heat. Mama had certainly looked very pale and ill as they’d helped her to her room. Alisdair was there now, reading to her. Little mother’s pet, thought Kitty. Mama was patterning him on those sickly little boys in American novels.
‘Go up and tell your father his brother Mr Duncan wants to see him,’ Cook had bade her. She had been about to protest that the maids were there to run errands, when something in Cook’s face had stopped her. That, and the figure of her uncle sitting on a hard chair by the kitchen door, his cap in his hand, staring straight ahead and not seeing her. ‘Go on, Miss Kitty,’ Cook had urged. ‘This is family matters.’
Jack ushered Duncan into the smaller of the two parlours downstairs. Duncan refused his offer of tea or ‘something stronger’, saying he had been given a glass of water by the cook.
‘What did you come to the back door for?’ Jack upbraided him.
Duncan indicated his clothes. The elbows were out of his jacket and the soles starting to gape on his boots. ‘I might have embarrassed Clemmie, coming to the front.’
‘Dear God, man,’ said Jack, ‘you might have let me know things were so bad. I could have helped.’
‘That’s why I didn’t tell you,’ responded Duncan, with a glimmer of a smile. ‘But I am here to beg something. Six guineas. Six guineas to take me to New York. You’ll get it back —’
Jack dismissed the last words with a wave of his hand. His face was red and concerned.
‘Are you throwing it all up, then? Getting out? What’s to happen to Josie and Carlie?’
‘I’ll send for them when I can.’
Jack looked down at his half-brother, noting that his hands were so frail they appeared to have no blood in them. His face was cadaverous, his neck so thin a sharp blow could snap it. Without further argument, he rang for the maid and ordered her to bring tea, sandwiches, cake and the whisky decanter. When Duncan had eaten and was looking less like some desperate spectre conjured by the heat, Jack said emotionally, ‘You should have come to me sooner. For our mother’s sake, if for nothing else. Does the union pay you nothing for all your hard work?’
‘When there’s nothing in the kitty, I get nothing,’ said Duncan. ‘The men get behind with their dues.’ His voice roughened, and Jack saw with alarm that he was on the verge of shaming tears.
‘I’ll give you the wherewithal to make a new start,’ he said hastily. ‘And enough to take Josie and the child with you, too.’
‘Six guineas is all I want.’ Duncan’s voice was hard and Jack knew it was useless to argue.
He took some gold coins from an inner pocket and placed them in front of Duncan, studying him soberly.
‘I never thought you would emigrate,’ he said reflectively. ‘Are things so bad, then, that they’ll never get better?’
‘Who said anything about emigrating? I’ve got to find temporary means of staying alive. I can’t even get work down the pit here. So what option have I? But I’m coming back.’
‘What happened to your Miners’ Federation?’
‘Faded away.’ His tone was bitter. ‘Like so much else in the past few years. Jack, I’ve given them the skin off my back and I’ve achieved nothing. I doubt if I’ve put one hot dinner in a hungry belly or a pair of boots on a single pair of bare feet.’
‘Well … it’s been a bad time for the whole country,’ Jack said. ‘If it hadn’t been for the Dounhead-Boston Trust, I could have been in deep water myself.’
‘It’ll continue till the government takes responsibility for unemployment,’ said Duncan. ‘You know what happened two days ago? You read it? They had the police and the Life Guards laying into the unemployed when they tried to demonstrate in Trafalgar Square. Bloody Sunday, they call it.’
Jack shook his head. ‘There’s plenty who’ll neither work nor want. What do you do with a man who drinks his wages and turns up for work half-cut?’ As he saw Duncan about to argue, he held up his hand. ‘No, no. I know all about the chemical works with twelve-hour shifts and no meal hour and the dirty attics where girls like Kitty wind bobbins for a pittance —’
‘And what about the single-ends that a quarter of Glasgow lives in? Over-crowded? That’s an understatement, if ever I heard one. Most of them take in lodgers at that. No wonder nearly a quarter of the babies die before they’re a year old —’
‘I’m not starting a political argument with you,’ said Jack, firmly but with good humour. ‘It’s too hot and, besides, I’ve been through all that radical stuff as a lad. I’m for self-help and independence. For folk marrying later, having only the children they can afford. I’m for temperance — like you — although I take a little whisky for my health. And then for a limited amount of government direction to soak up the unemployed.’
Duncan’s pale face stretched in a grin. ‘We’ll make a Possibilist of you yet, man.’
‘You’ll not stick any of your new-fangled labels on me,’ countered Jack. He gave Duncan a long, considering look and then admitted, ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing a few working-class candidates in the next election. You’ve heard of this man Champion?’
‘H.H.? The one that calls himself a Tory socialist?’ Duncan’s laugh was genuine.
‘Would you not take help from him? He wants working men to confront the Liberals next time.’
Duncan shook his head. ‘And be accused of taking Tory gold? I would never live it down.’
‘Then maybe America is the best place for you. You’ll find no shortage of bosses to fight over there.’ Jack’s tone was jocular, but his expression serious. ‘I could find you some kind of job, if you want to stay here.’
He saw it was better not to press the point, but went on, ‘Let me at least give you one of my jackets. One that’s too small for me — you’ll do me a favour, taking it out of the way.’
‘Thanks.’
Jack beamed with relief at having his offer accepted. He put his hand on his half-brother’s shoulder and said, ‘I’ve been glad to talk to you. It’s taken my mind off Clemmie. The doctor says her heart is bad —’
‘I’d no idea.’
‘And now we have Sandia wanting to leave home and marry.’
‘Is that not the natural state of affairs?’
‘Her mother depends on her. To run the house. Keep an eye on the others.’
‘But —’
‘Her young man’s from Belfast. It would mean her living there. Clemmie would see little of her.’
‘Do you want her to go?’
‘I’ve told her she must decide for herself.’
The quiet opening of the door made both men turn.
‘Papa.’ Sandia stood in the doorway. ‘I’m off now to meet Dandy.’ She advanced into the room, hand outstretched. ‘Uncle Duncan! Kitty said you were here.’ She kissed Duncan’s cheek lightly. ‘I wish it were not so hot! The Herald says it was 149 degrees yesterday at Greenwich!’
‘You out-dazzle the sun!’ said her uncle warmly. She was wearing a gown of pale-blue voile with mauve bands and rosettes, and the short, embroidered jacket called a zouave. The blue hat trimmed with mauve feathers sat jauntily on her fair hair. Her complexion was flawless.
‘Flatterer!’ She smiled at him, but a little subduedly.
‘Your uncle is going to America,’ Jack informed her.
Sandia looked astonished. ‘I somehow never thought of you as the sort of person who would leave Scotland. I mean, with your politics and such —’
‘Scotland has nothing for me at the moment.’
Her next innocent words fell on Duncan’s ears as though from miles
off. ‘I must tell Kirsten. She will be most interested to hear it. She was always such an admirer of yours, Uncle. She has just come back to Glasgow, you know.’
‘She’s back? Here?’
‘Only yesterday. I heard from her mother, whom I met in town. She was involved in the London riots, bruised and injured when the police set about the crowd with their batons. Her mother hopes to keep her home for good.’ She looked at him concernedly. ‘Are you all right, Uncle?’
‘Certainly. It’s this heat.’
‘I must go.’ She smiled guardedly at them both, her eyes shadowed and thoughtful. ‘Mama is sleeping. She’ll be all right till I get back.’
*
She was glad when she stepped into the comparative cool of Miss Cranston’s Tea-rooms, below Aitken’s Hotel in Argyle Street. She threw Miss Cranston a timid smile when she saw the little restaurateur seated behind her cash-desk, as usual. Sandia had unbounded admiration for Miss Cranston who, she heard, had had to fight family opposition tooth and nail to set up this place on her own. But why shouldn’t women run tea-rooms? They knew far more about providing a pleasant, relaxing atmosphere and attentive waitresses than any man could. She would not mind such a career herself …
Dandy Peel was seated there, in the corner, and her heart gave a great spontaneous leap of pleasure. How handsome he was, no longer the gangling youth who had first courted her, but a mature and prepossessing figure.
He had gone home to Belfast after he had taken his degree at Glasgow University, three years ago, and was now in the family shipping business. His work brought him sometimes to Glasgow, when they always met, but their chief contact now was by letter, and his latest one had made his attitude clear. He loved her, of course he would always love her, but he could no longer put up with her procrastination. Either she had to accept his proposal of marriage and come and set up home with him in Ireland, or they had to stop seeing each other and writing. And he means it, she thought, noting the firm and resolute set of his unguarded face before he saw her.
‘How’s Ould Mother Oireland?’ she greeted him.