Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  ‘Aye. Well,’ Jamie temporized, playing with a leaky pen on the table in front of him. ‘There’s something else, Duncan. Something else I have wind of. By the time you come back from America, you’re going to have an election on your hands in Dounhead. And this time, we’re going to make bloody sure you get it. Now we’ve got the Independent Labour Party boys behind us, we can bring up the big guns.’

  He looked up with a pretence at a casual air, seeing the colour recede from Duncan’s face.

  ‘Do you tell me, man?’ he exclaimed. ‘What’s happened to Scoular, the Liberal man, then?’

  ‘He’s been involved in some scandal with a Minister’s wife. I haven’t the full details. But I hear he has been given three months to wind up his affairs and then he has to fade quietly from the scene, no doubt they’ll say for health reasons.’

  Josie was clutching Duncan’s arm. Now she shook it, her face alight.

  ‘Your time has come at last.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ he said, half-apprehensive, half-euphoric.

  She never took his arm as a rule but this time, on the way back to the station, she did: awkwardly, her fingers pinching his arm. The placards for the newspapers had brought out their tallest print: the newsboys, hoarse from yelling, could not keep up with the queues of would-be buyers.

  One placard read: DUCHESS OF YORK: A SON. Another: WELSH PIT DISASTER: 251 DEAD.

  Josie heard Duncan swear beneath his breath. He bought a paper and read it closely on the way home. She reflected that it was too much ever to expect untrammelled pleasure. The day had been a good one for them but seeing the pit headline had suddenly shut out the sun. When she closed her eyes, she could feel what it was like, having slurry fall on them, shutting them in for ever.

  Going up the Rows, she held his arm again, her face grim enough to match his own.

  ‘Is it true?’ shouted an old man from an open door. ‘Is it Blantyre all over again?’ And, like Duncan, he swore in helplessness and rage.

  A child of about three, from a house farther down the Rows, was playing on the step as Duncan and Josie reached home. A dirty, barefoot child, with scabs where she had picked at flea-bites. Josie scooped her up and carried her indoors.

  ‘Would you like a piece, Annie?’ She spread some bread with jam and handed it to the little girl, first wiping hands and face with a piece of damp rag. The gesture was automatic, second nature. The child sat quietly and companionably while Josie stirred the fire and put the kettle on for tea.

  Later, she put the new hat Duncan had bought her on top of the dresser, carefully, in its paper bag. She was consumed with guilt. It had cost one shilling and elevenpence.

  *

  If Duncan had been apprehensive about Kirsten and Josie both travelling to New York, he was not the only one, but the opposition, when it came, was from an unexpected source. Jamie Pullar sought him out after a meeting and made an excuse to accompany him on his way. Duncan could feel that the union organizer had something on his mind, but he was unprepared for the blunt question out of the darkness:

  ‘What does the wife think of Miss Mackenzie, then?’

  ‘She has not said. Has she any need to think anything?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Jamie said.

  No one knew better than he the draughty halls, the chill station platforms, the suffrage meetings and labour rallies that Kirsten Mackenzie had shared with Duncan since she came back to Glasgow after a brief stay in the South that must have been all of seven years ago. But now, with the election in the offing, Josie who had always been a figure in the background at Dounhead seemed suddenly determined to play a more prominent part. Well and good, Jamie thought. She had many friends and supporters in the co-operative movement. She was too valuable an ally to lose. If she had not been, he might not have put his next question, but it had been swimming around in his mind ever since Josie had shown her determination to accompany Duncan on his American trip.

  ‘Have you been playing a double game, man?’

  For answer, Duncan quickened his pace. Jamie followed him, dodging in and out of the pools of lamplight, protesting his lack of intention to offend.

  When Duncan had won back a measure of composure, he turned and said evenly, ‘I wouldn’t have thought such prying part of your nature.’

  Jamie refused to be put off. ‘I’m going to see you win this election that’s coming if it’s the last thing I do. I believe in you, man. Now listen, for your political life depends on it. Don’t be seen on too many platforms from now on with your friend Miss Mackenzie. And travel out on a different ship. It’s Josie who must be beside you from now on. Do you think the Tories and Liberals alike won’t be watching your every move? A breath of scandal can kill you stone dead. There’s nothing more puritanical than the working-class vote.’

  The face that Duncan turned towards him in the semi-darkness was strained and angry.

  ‘There might be a limit to what I’ll put up with for the working-class vote,’ he said furiously. ‘And that might just include you, Jamie.’

  ‘She’s a bonnie lass,’ said Jamie, none too perturbed. ‘I’ve seen the look she gives you, when you’re up on some box, jawing.’ He put a conciliatory hand on Duncan’s arm. ‘You can’t take offence at me, laddie. We’ve been in this struggle too long together. Just remember where your greater loyalties lie — to the party, to me, and to the folk who believed in you when the arse was out of your trousers.’

  When Jamie had gone his way, Duncan walked on unheeding, not caring that his steps were leading him in the direction of Kirsten’s house. To be deprived of her now, when he had looked forward to the voyage, to seeing her daily, transformed the journey into exile. Without Kirsten, what was the New World to him? But the New World with Kirsten would indeed be a new world. Thousands of others had gone there to make a fresh start. He thought of Jamie’s words: A breath of scandal can kill you stone dead. What sort of scandal would it be if he were seen by some of those watching Tories and Liberals, visiting her house late at night? Or even by some of his own party? Nothing so puritanical as the working-class vote.

  Resolutely he lifted his hand and knocked.

  When Kirsten appeared at the door she had her dressing-gown clutched about her, her hair hanging down over her shoulders.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he demanded shortly.

  For answer she opened the door more widely.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He sat down and buried his head in his hands.

  ‘I’ve just had an exchange with Jamie Pullar. The thought of the election when we get back seems to have turned his brains. He claims I’m making too much of you in public.’

  She brushed sleep from her eyes, amused in spite of her perturbation at his turn of phrase.

  ‘Making too much of me?’

  ‘He thinks it’s obvious — what we are to each other. That it could jeopardize my chances.’

  ‘How could that be?’ She was as wide awake as he was now. ‘Duncan, we’ve always taken care. Kept it formal in public.’

  ‘It seems to even Jamie’s untutored eye that you look at me in a certain way.’

  She gave a strained little laugh. ‘I can’t be the only one.’

  He pulled her down beside him. ‘I’ll not have you blackened. If there’s any more talk of this sort, I’ll tell them what to do with my nomination.’ He kissed her on the lips. ‘Kirsten, have you ever thought? We could stay in America, you know. I could tell Josie everything. She could say what she liked when she got back. You and I could make a new start —’

  She pulled away from him.

  ‘You’re talking nonsense. It’s a form of cold feet, that’s all, because the election’s getting nearer. I won’t let you give up. I’ll stay out of your campaign, if that’s what Jamie wants. Someone else can tell them in America about women’s suffrage. It doesn’t have to be me.’

  ‘No,’ he said, protesting the enormity of her sacrifice halfheartedly because it was a measu
re of her love.

  She turned towards him. ‘Do you think I’d ever do anything to harm you? I’ll keep out of your life altogether, if need be.’

  He pulled her close and groaned in her ear, ‘Don’t say that. Tell me about our boy. Have you heard from him recently?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had a letter. And one from Jill, saying he was using the surname Banks at School because they thought it would make life easier for him. They mentioned adoption again, but grateful as I am to them, it’s one thing I’ll never agree to.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he murmured into her hair.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For this unholy mess. For loving you. For not making it possible for us to have Wallace with us.’

  She stopped his protest with a fierce kiss. He pulled her hair down like curtains round his face, parted her gown and kissed her breasts. She went to him as easily as she had done the first time. But afterwards, when he had gone, she lay wide awake in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the night. Duncan would be away three months. Was she being given a chance to make their temporary parting permanent, to grow used to his absence from her life? Beyond the window the white brilliance of moon and stars reminded her that winter was approaching. She shivered, but not with cold. She had wanted to go to New York.

  *

  In the dark of the small cabin he shared with Josie aboard the SS Northern Star Duncan tossed and turned. The ship was rolling and pitching her way across the Atlantic, and an unaccustomed glass of whisky taken to ward off incipient seasickness had set his thoughts whirling like dervishes through his brain.

  The American trip had been a success, but now he was exhausted. Lecturing, travelling as far afield as Chicago, talking — often far into the night; it had been stimulating while it lasted, but once on board ship the reaction had set in. Josie, by contrast, had spent the time in New York, staying with Jamie Pullar’s brother Eric and his family on Lower East Side. Eric was a labour agitator who had served a prison sentence for his part in the riots during a recent railroad strike, but his wife was a pleasant Ayrshire girl with whom Josie had at once felt at ease. Even so, she had made it no secret that she was glad to be going home to Dounhead. Duncan too was glad to be going home, but to him home meant Kirsten. He whispered her name in the darkness. Kirsten, my bonnie bird.

  He remembered the last time they had made love, that night when he had thrown caution to the winds and gone late at night to her house. There had been a kind of aching desperation about it that had frightened them both. ‘I’ll keep out of your life,’ she had said, but what was life without her? And yet a part of him knew that there was a truthful shrewdness in what Jamie Pullar had said. He had supposed they would always be able to go on working together, he and Kirsten, but if their closeness became too apparent, it would put an end to his election chances. He thought of Dounhead and the hold the Kirk had there, even on those who never attended a service. Nothing so puritanical as the working-class vote …

  And Josie — did she suspect something? Her attitude throughout the trip had been one of aggressive comradeship, but sometimes when she stood beside him he had surprised a look almost of terror in her eyes. Was it over his own indecisions, the knowledge that behind the public man and his speeches he was being torn apart? For some reason he remembered the night she had lost her job with Tolley the draper and had stood at the end of the Rows, afraid to go in and face a beating from her father. From then on he had felt responsible for her. In its way it was as powerful a feeling as his love for Kirsten, because it was bound up with the way he felt about Dounhead and its poverty, its dirt, its narrowness, its lack of proper expectations — all the things he had set his heart on getting to Westminster to change.

  And if he chose Kirsten, he would never achieve it. A strange dry sob burst from him. He felt as though his guts were being torn out, as though his head would burst from the conflict within it. Kirsten and Josie, Kirsten and Dounhead. The woman he loved and the woman he was bound to, and his duty to those who had nothing, which in a strange way bound him to them both. A shuddering he could not control went through him, and he gripped the sides of the bunk until he felt as though his knuckles would burst through his skin.

  ‘Duncan!’ Josie was sitting up in the bunk opposite, fumbling for the light. He saw her eyes wide with alarm. ‘Duncan, what is it? Are you ill?’

  He could not answer her at first. She took his hand and chafed it, brought him a drink of water and held it to his lips. ‘You’ve been overdoing it. Too many meetings. Too much travel. I was afraid of something like this.’

  ‘No, Josie, no. I’ve something to tell you.’ He looked pleadingly up into her face.

  ‘It’ll wait till morning,’ she said, suddenly defensive. ‘I don’t want to hear it now.’

  ‘You must,’ he said. ‘I have lain with Kirsten Mackenzie and I am the father of her son. I have feelings for her such as I have never had for a living soul. I want my freedom, Josie. I can keep it from you no longer. Seven years is long enough.’

  She said at last in a small, light voice, ‘I knew there was something between you. I never knew it had gone that far. What do you expect me to say, Duncan? Go to her? Do you think it would be the answer?’

  He said nothing, but he had stopped shivering. He felt weak, yet bathed in a kind of relief.

  ‘You would have to give up the idea of standing for Dounhead,’ Josie said. ‘Give up all we’ve worked for, me as well as you. They would never stand for it. You know that.’

  A breath of scandal can kill you stone dead …

  ‘I could still be of use to the cause.’

  She said then, with bitter vehemence, ‘The cause? That’s not what I’ve worked for. Nothing so airy-fairy as a cause. I’ve worked for my own folk. You’ve moved away from them, haven’t you? And it’s been through her. Well, when you led the miners out on strike for sixpence a week, I was behind you. When you fought the masters to start the union, and give the men a week’s holiday, and look after their widows and orphans, I was behind you. I don’t belong to the world of grand ideas and fancy words, but I know where the help is needed. I know where the bairns go hungry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Josie,’ he said inadequately.

  ‘I’ll not let you do it!’ she cried, and he was reminded poignantly of Kirsten, who had uttered a similar cry. ‘I could never go back and face them if I had a man who let them down. I’d never hold my head up again.’

  She swore at him then, Joakie Daly’s daughter who had never been a stranger to words of violence. She broke down and wept, wiping her tears with her hair or her nightgown sleeve, it did not matter. ‘I don’t care if you go to your doxie,’ she raged. ‘Go to her when you like and where you like. But I’ll not divorce you. You’re my man and my man you’ll remain. You hear me, Duncan Fleming? God, how I hate you! I could kill you.’ She pummelled him with both fists.

  He tried to hold her hands. ‘Be quiet!’ he pleaded, fearful that someone would hear above the creaking of the ship.

  ‘You stayed away from my bed,’ she spat at him. ‘So be it. You’ll never touch me again.’ Her eyes burned their contempt and rage at him. ‘Never mind the promises you made me, but at least I thought you were man enough to keep your promises to the folk in Dounhead.’ He watched as her face crumpled and she flung herself down on her bunk and broke into uncontrollable weeping.

  It was his turn now to stand over her, touch her shoulder.

  ‘We’ll go on together,’ he said. ‘Calm yourself and we’ll go on.’

  At last her weeping tapered off, and he got back into his bunk, pulling the blankets around him, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the ship. The Northern Star was taking him nearer to Kirsten, but he could no longer picture her face. Pain blotted it out. Eventually, as the dawn came, he and Josie both fell into a spent sleep.

  *

  Duncan and Josie got back to a Britain held in the grip of snow and ice. Small steamers tried to bre
ak up the frozen surface of the Clyde so that their ship could berth, but it took two days and one of the little ships sank in the process, though fortunately no one drowned.

  Josie handed the evening paper over to Duncan as they sat in the train on the final stage of the journey home. ‘Read it,’ she ordered. ‘While we’ve been away, folk here have been dying like rats of the cold. Fifty-four to every thousand, it says.’ She pointed to a particular headline. It declared: AUTHORITIES ALARMED, and underneath was a story carrying the civic admission that many people were too undernourished and badly housed to withstand the bitter weather.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Josie, with a set face. ‘I read that the out-of-work in London are finding employment sweeping the ice for skaters on the Thames.’

  Prompted by her grandmother, Carlie had prepared a royal welcome home for her parents in the cottage in the Rows. She had brought her cousin Donald down from the big house to help her scrub, polish and shine and the two of them awaited the return of the travellers with ill-concealed impatience to see what New World presents would be theirs as reward.

  On the very day of their return, Scoular, the farmer who had held Dounhead, announced his resignation as MP and Dounhead was plunged into the frantic preparations for a by-election.

  Duncan had had no further discussion with Josie about whether he would stand. Now that his relationship with Kirsten was no longer a secret from his wife, the worst of an intolerable burden seemed to have rolled away from him. He wanted to see Kirsten, to agree on circumspection for as long as was necessary, but willy-nilly he was caught up in the political machine. It was as though his nomination carried him along on an irresistible tide.

  A week went by while he made no attempt to get in touch with her. Then after he and Pullar had spent a long day canvassing and were on their way to a supporter’s house to rest and eat, Jamie said with a certain truculence, ‘I have words from the woman Mackenzie. She says to meet her in Miss Cranston’s Tea-rooms on Friday, after the St Andrew’s Hall meeting on land reform. I am instructed to tell you it’s important. Six o’clock.’ Jamie’s expression closed down, indicating he had given the message but would brook no further discussion.