by Webster, Jan
He rose and kissed her brow, took her parasol and settled her in her chair, signalling to the waitress to bring tea and cakes.
‘Why don’t you come over and see for yourself?’ So he was going into the attack straight away.
‘You know why.’
‘No, I don’t. You tell me.’ He could be very brusque.
‘There’s Mama —’
‘But there’s always been Mama,’ he mocked her. ‘What Mama says, what Mama does. Mama’s iron will.’
Her face had flushed a delicate pink. She said defensively, ‘Her health isn’t good, Dandy. And she misses the boys terribly — she can’t understand why Andrew had to join the Highland Light Infantry so soon after George went into the Merchant Service.’
‘Doesn’t she see they do it to get away from her tentacles? She’ll make a fine job of young Alisdair, now the other boys have gone. She spoils him enough as it is.’
‘You have no right to criticize,’ she protested.
‘I have, when I see what she does to you. You’ll end up the old maid of the family, at everybody’s beck and call.’
He could see she was near to tears, but he felt all the bitterness of a lost cause and went on vehemently, ‘It seems you don’t care anything about me. Anything at all.’
The look she gave him through glistening eyes made him feel a monster. ‘You know that isn’t so. But it’s not as simple as that. I don’t think I could settle in Ireland. It’s so far away and such a restless country.’
‘When the Home Rule issue arrives at Scotland’s door, you may have some sympathy for us.’
‘Scotland doesn’t want Home Rule.’
‘Some radicals do. Even Campbell-Bannerman is thinking about it; maybe being Irish Secretary gave him the notion. I hear he used to put “North Britain” on his letters but has changed it back to “Scotland”.’
‘You see, if we lived here, in Glasgow, I could be near Mama to help —’
‘But my job is in Belfast. You know that.’
‘You could find work here. We have no shortage of shipping lines.’
The angry knot grew deeper on his forehead. He said in a low, furious tone, ‘You’re being deliberately provocative. You know ours is a family firm. And you also know it is a wife’s duty to be where her husband is.’
Her lips were trembling. ‘I know that love doesn’t lay down duties.’ She lifted her cup to her mouth with a hand that shook. ‘So, it is all over, then,’ he said, defeated.
Her voice was very small. ‘Do you have someone else in mind?’ She could not look at him.
‘No one.’
‘Could we not still write to each other?’
‘What’s the point? That could go on till we’re both a hundred years old. You won’t break your mother’s apron strings. Perhaps you can’t. And there’s an end to it.’
She knew there was no way of explaining how she felt. When she saw her mother’s pale, exhausted face after one of her attacks, for example. That expression that said: ‘I’m depending on you, Sandia.’ It was as though in a very real and terrible sense her mother owned her. The others in the family felt it too. Was it true what Kirsten had once argued, that her mother manipulated their feelings to her own ends? If it was, could her mother help it? She seemed to need the constant reassurance of her family’s presence and love. But she was blind to the emotional needs of others. Whenever Sandia tried to discuss her own dilemma, her mother’s eyes filled with tears and she would gently say, ‘You have plenty of time, dear.’
What was Dandy saying? ‘I must make it plain. I don’t intend to sit around waiting to hear from you. But if you change your mind, then write and tell me.’
He paid the bill with a hangman’s face. They stood up together, each expression as set as the other, and he walked her along Buchanan Street in the grilling heat and saw her on to her tram. Afterwards, he remembered her white-gloved hand waving and her head turned partly towards him, but not all the way.
*
When Duncan walked away from his brother’s house in Ashley Terrace, it seemed to him the heat was affecting his legs. They felt full of lead, while his head felt woolly. He shook himself mentally. Even the bailies in the courts were refusing to sentence Glasgow termagants for brawling in this weather. It affected everybody.
He took off the clean, decent jacket Jack had given him, folding it neatly over one arm, and rolling up his shirtsleeves, showing scrawny arms. One thought pushed out all others in his mind: she was back in Glasgow. His burnet rose. So she’d been in the riots down south, had she? He felt obscurely glad of her show of spirit. It made up somehow for his own defeat.
He wanted to see her. Tell her he was quitting Scotland. Explain his reasons. The likelihood was she wouldn’t be interested. Not after all this time. He could have seen her, on his trips to London. He never had. But now she was crowding into his imagination again, filling it everywhere with her presence, so that her scent and her smile and the shape of her hands were as real to him as though he had been with her only yesterday. It was like being struck by a sudden illness. He fought against it, yet it was invading him.
Gilmorehill. In the university grounds, he looked through shimmering heat and saw hundreds of red-gowned students. Waggons, led by milk-white horses. Kilted pipers. Crazily he thought: they’re there to welcome her. Another spectator, a little grey man with a head like a tortoise, informed him that the election of the Lord Rector was in progress. The reds were for Lord Rosebery, the blues for Lord Lytton.
‘It’s all right for the privileged few,’ muttered the little man, glaring at the flag-waving, high-spirited students in procession. ‘But what about the rest of us?’ And he stumped off without waiting for an answer.
She would say: you heed an intellectual elite to lead the rest. He answered the old man in his mind. He was nearly at her parents’ home. He was going to see her. Make sure she was all right. Pity he felt so fuzzy, but there was no going back on the decision. He lifted the door-knocker and swung it hard.
Her mother glared at him suspiciously before recognition dawned. ‘Mr Fleming! You’re a stranger.’ He wondered whether she knew anything about that time seven years ago, but decided not, as she led him hospitably into the parlour.
‘You know my husband is retired? But he’s gone down to the university to see the fun.’ She gestured to him to sit down. ‘I’ll get you some tea —’
‘No, don’t,’ he pleaded. ‘I came to see how — how Kirsten was. My niece has just told me she was hurt.’
‘Oh, she’ll soon be fine.’ She looked at him, mild questioning and reproof in her eyes. Perhaps, after all, some rumour had reached her. Glasgow was a gossiping city. ‘She’s got a few bruises. But she’s young and strong.’ Had she emphasized the ‘young’ for his benefit? He was past caring.
‘Will she see me, do you think?’
He was never to know her answer, for the door opened and Kirsten herself came in. She was wearing a long blue skirt and a cream blouse and her hair was piled high above her pale face. On one cheek a deep bruise was changing from purple to yellow.
‘Duncan!’ Her mother might not have existed. He said, ‘What have you been doing to yourself, lass?’
‘Getting myself knocked about. Stupidly.’
Her mother’s voice broke in on them, a little strained and cool. ‘I’ll make some tea.’ She went out of the room.
‘I was just passing —’
‘I didn’t expect —’
They could not take their eyes from each other. She said, directly, softly, ‘What have you done to yourself, Duncan? You look — ill.’
‘Look who’s talking!’ he joked.
‘I used to nag you about taking care of yourself. I can see I’ll have to start again.’
‘No point. I won’t be here. I’m going to New York.’
She looked frail. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Her shoulders were thin, sharp, her posture a little stooped. Was that what study had done for her? She
made the smallest sound in the world. ‘Oh.’
‘Is that all you can say?’
‘What do you expect me to say?’
Her mother came bustling back in with the tea-tray, looking from one to the other and saying busily, ‘She’s come back for good, we hope, Mr Fleming. Has she told you? And not before time. It seems to me she’s swallowed too many London notions as it is.’
He took the tea from her hand, saying cautiously. ‘What notions? Do you mean palmistry? Horoscopes? Head bumps? That’s what’s all the rage just now, isn’t it?’
Kirsten glared at him. ‘Hardly that.’
‘She’s talking about this quack from Vienna, this Freud, who denies there is a God,’ said Mrs Mackenzie bitterly. ‘She’s left the church —’
‘Now, Mother.’ Kirsten upbraided her parent firmly. ‘I’ve merely said I don’t want the formal constraints of religion any more.’ She looked at Duncan. ‘I’ve met Salvationists, Spiritualists, all sorts, and I’ve begun to think there are many ways to God.’
‘Or away from Him,’ her mother interjected.
‘What about Frank Smith, the Salvationist? He runs farm colonies on the Essex marshes, and city workshops for the poor? Is he un-Christian?’
‘Perhaps not. But I don’t like you dabbling in Spiritualism. All this talk about one incarnation before birth and another after death —’
‘Mother!’ Kirsten held up her hand. ‘We’ll continue our arguments later. Mr Fleming has come to tell us he is going away. To New York.’
The older woman looked at Duncan, then said gently, but with a hint of relief in her expression, ‘Times very bad, are they?’ She looked from one to the other and then seemed to make up her mind on something. She rose and said, with an unexpected directness, ‘Then I’ll leave you two to have a word together. I have matters to see to in the kitchen.’
When her mother had gone, Kirsten blurted out, ‘When I came back, I had the wild hope of seeing you. And you came. I think it must have been thought transference.’
It was odd, he thought. As though she had never been away. The same feeling that was near to delirium. Maybe he was delirious? He certainly felt strange. Hot. And there was this piercing pain in his chest.
He smiled at her and said, ‘They’ve filled your head with too much airy-fairy nonsense, down there in England. Was there someone in particular —?’ He had to know.
She shook her head. ‘There were friends.’ Her eyes met his. ‘Never anyone like you.’
‘What about all those young academicals at the university? You must have met trained and exalted minds —’
‘I did.’ She nodded. ‘None you couldn’t have measured up to. Besides, they are taught how to think, not how to feel. You could have shown them how to do both.’
He knew, if she didn’t, the gap between them now intellectually. His reading, though wide-ranging and catholic, was no substitute for the meeting of like minds. He had always felt his intellectual isolation like a hair shirt. Never more so than now.
He said angrily, ‘I hope you’ve not come back here to impose high-minded Liberal notions. Here we’re moving on. Here a Labour party will be a reality, sooner than you think.’
‘All right.’ She met his anger with an almost joyful recognition. ‘I concede that no one could live and work at Cambridge without being influenced in some way by the Liberal tradition there. But I never met anyone there who put it better than Burns. “A man’s a man for a’ that.” It says it all. And we know it better here in Scotland than anywhere else.’
He felt the words sustain and nourish him like food from the gods. He had waited so long for this, while the world grew cold. No one knew, no one understood, as Kirsten did. He watched as her eyes filled with tears. His arms opened to hold her. He felt his chest rise in a great sigh of relief, as hers did. He kissed her, feeling his whole universe judder and shake back into its true proportions.
‘Don’t go to America. I’ll help you make a go of things here.’ She looked at him pleadingly.
‘I’ve promised Josie I’ll go. There’s Carlie, with the soles hanging off her boots. I’ve no option.’
‘Oh, you have,’ she urged. She looked at him curiously. ‘Are your teeth chattering? What’s the matter?’
‘I’m cold. I’ve felt like this all day. I’m coming down with a chill or something.’
She insisted on paying for a cab to take him to the station for the train home. She said nothing more about America. Perhaps he wouldn’t have taken anything in, anyhow. His illness, whatever it was, had suddenly taken over. His eyes were bright in a feverish face and he walked and breathed with difficulty. She put some money in the pocket of his decent jacket. He did not even seem to notice.
*
‘There.’ Josie put her hand up the chimney and brought down more soot to smear over Carlie’s already sooty features. ‘You’re a proper sight now.’ Carlie wore an old, long skirt of her mother’s, a tatty feather boa someone had given her and an old tile hat Grannie Kate had donated. She gave a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Do you think anybody’ll know me?’ she demanded.
Josie shook her head obligingly, then laid down the rules for Hallowe’en guisers.
‘You’ve not to bang on old Mrs Hope’s door — the old body’ll be in her bed. Don’t go to old Willie Dunsmuir — he wouldn’t give the time of the day. And if folk give you anything, mind and say thank you very much.’
Carlie nodded dreamily. She had been thinking of this last day in October for weeks, preparing ‘tumshie’ lanterns and practising her ‘turn’, which might be her own version of the Highland Fling or maybe one of the several poems her father had taught her.
‘Get Betty Grey to take you up to your Aunt Tansy’s,’ Josie reminded her. ‘It’s too dark to go up there on your own. And stay there till I come and fetch you.’
The spoils from the houses in the Rows were very gratifying. Carlie counted three apples, an orange, some nuts and fifteen conversation lozenges, plus two pennies and a ha’penny. She set off with Betty for Dounhead House, urging the older girl to ask there for her Hallowe’en. Betty, however, was incurably timid. She delivered Carlie to the front door then ran off, crunching her teeth into her fourth apple that night Carlie thought of Donald while she awaited entry. Poor Donald! While she, Carlie, had got over the scarlet fever quite quickly, and could now run and play as well as ever, Donald had nearly died and was still an invalid. Aunt Tansy had thought it would cheer him up if Carlie came in for an hour to ‘dook’ for apples and eat champit tatties with charms in them, although there would be none of the customary ghost stories as too much excitement would be bad for Donald’s heart.
Carlie went up to the big house quite often these days to play with her cousin. Once Aunt Tansy had lifted her red curls and tut-tutted at the ‘tidemark’ she’d left on her neck (she couldn’t be expected to wash her neck every day, could she?) and another time had asked her if she had ever had nits in her hair. But she’d asked quite nicely. And she’d said several times that Carlie was a good little nurse and playmate, and cheered Donald up better than anyone.
The trouble was, he grew quickly tired and then he behaved like a big spoiled baby. The last time Carlie had visited him, he had told his mother he didn’t like living in Dounhead House, and that it would be more fun living in the Rows.
Carlie found this hard to understand. He had everything, a rocking-horse, a fort and lead soldiers, a musical box and all the books he wanted. Certainly he couldn’t run about the Rows, playing games like The Fiery Cross and rattling the snecks on people’s doors with a piece of thread or string stretching away into the darkness. He missed a lot of fun. But Carlie had only to think of the silk fringe on his bedspread, the soft feel of the woollen rug over his knees when he sat up on the sofa, the sugared plums he got on demand and the puddings which were such a rarity in her own life, and she couldn’t see what he had to grumble at.
A maid admitted her and took her through to the parlour where Donald l
ay back listlessly on his sofa. Aunt Tansy greeted her with cries of pretended horror. There was another visitor there, Mr Macleish the painter. He said nothing. He was lying back on the big luggie chair by the fire, one leg over the side. Carlie decided that if he did not speak to her, she would not speak to him. That seemed best manners. She had seen him before and sometimes he was nice and jokey, at others preoccupied and quiet.
‘What are you supposed to be?’ Donald demanded grumpily.
‘A tattie-bogle.’ Carlie hopped around with her arms outspread. ‘To frighten the birds.’
‘I don’t think you’re a good tattie-bogle,’ Donald argued. ‘You should have straw for hair, for one thing.’
She ignored his ill-temper. That was the best way. Instead, she spread her Hallowe’en spoils in front of him. ‘You can share,’ she said generously. ‘Except for the money. I’m saving that up.’
It seemed nothing she could do would improve Donald’s mood, however. Even when they dropped a fork over the back of a chair into a big wooden bine full of water and apples, and he speared six apples to her four, he was still disconsolate and hard to please.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Carlie expostulated at last. ‘He’s been in trouble today,’ said Aunt Tansy. ‘He’s been very naughty.’
Donald stuck his head underneath his plaid blanket. A rumble of angry, tearful sounds came out. ‘I hate you! I hate everybody!’
Aunt Tansy looked down at the heaving blanket vexedly.
‘Donald, behave. Play a quiet game with Carlie. I am going to see Mr Macleish off to catch his train.’
When the two grown-ups had left the room, Carlie folded the blanket back inch by inch till she saw Donald’s rosy, angry face.
‘What did you do? Were you very bad?’
‘Somebody squeezed the paints all over his paintbox!’
‘Was it you?’ She was scandalized.
‘It was somebody.’ His dark eyes glittered with anger.
‘You?’
‘She says it must have been me. She didn’t see me. I went in quiet as a mouse.’
‘It was a bad thing to do, Donald.’