Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  Although at first they had regarded his car-building enthusiasm with amusement, the family had to admit that the horseless buggy looked like being more than an overnight wonder. A man called George Johnston had started up the Mo-Car Syndicate and was producing the first all-Scottish car, based on the German Daimler. And as Glasgow was a city of engineers, Finn was by no means the only young enthusiast dreaming up the future in a draughty workshop with what looked like a pile of scrap for raw material. There were dozens of young zealots and they visited and encouraged each other, talking technicalities and arguing about first principles like prophets of some new religion.

  ‘Finn.’ She stepped over the sun-dappled floorboards, the peplum of her cream worsted suit sweeping a spanner off a low shelf, her eyes straining to pick him out after the glare of the sun outside. She realized then he was not alone. A tall, slender figure in a well-cut tweed suit, with lank dark hair, was bending over Finn’s shoulder as they both perused a sheet of figures on the rough surface before them.

  ‘Kitty!’ There was a note of surprise mingled with a faint annoyance in Finn’s voice.

  ‘Am I interrupting?’ she demanded swiftly.

  Both men rose. The dark man said in a deep, cultured voice, ‘My dear lady, would that all interruptions were as delightful!’ He was smiling at her, but she thought he was being sardonic and returned the smile reservedly.

  Finn took her hand and held it towards the other man.

  ‘Frensham, I want you to meet Miss Kitty Kilgour. Kitty, this is Sir Peter Frensham. He is interested in my motor-car.’ His eyebrows were signalling frantically at her that she should now go, that she had come at a critical time in negotiations. But resentfully she stood her ground. Why had he said nothing about Frensham to her? Finn could be so maddeningly close and secretive at times, she despaired of ever getting to know him.

  ‘If you don’t want me to stay, I suppose I can find something else to do,’ she said bluntly, glaring at Finn.

  ‘It’s just that we’re talking technicalities and figures,’ he said embarrassedly.

  Frensham laughed. ‘We shall soon be finished. I heard of Finn in New York, you know. I met his father there, at a convention. I am another with faith in the future of the horseless carriage. Do you think we are all mad, Miss Kilgour?’

  Kitty shook her head, already partly regretting her bad temper. ‘Only a little, perhaps.’ She looked guardedly at Finn. ‘I shall see you later, then?’

  He nodded absently and anger rose in her again as she walked away over the grass. She had built herself up to having an important talk with Finn, away from the house and Sandia’s watchful eyes, and now she felt frustrated and unreasonably hurt.

  A small shop at the corner of the street advertised ginger beer. She asked the shopkeeper to pour some from its cool, stone bottle into a tumbler and stood drinking gratefully, her nostrils assailed by spiced ham, currants sticky in the heat and strong yellow cheese.

  She was undecided whether to go home again or wait about till Finn’s visitor left. In the event, her mind was made up for her, for as she finished the ginger beer she saw Frensham’s tall, droop-shouldered figure stride past the shop and make for the main road beyond.

  This time, Finn stood outside the workshop, straining his eyes this way and that, as though looking for her, and he came towards her almost at a run.

  ‘Kit! Guess what? He’s going to back me. We’ve been invited down to his country place this weekend — you and I, both — and I’m to meet some of his influential friends.’

  She had never seen him so excited. His face was flushed and his fair hair lay damp on his forehead. She put her hand out with a tender gesture and pushed it away from his forehead. He backed away from her into the workshop, grinning like a four-year-old, and when they had got within its protective shade he swept her into his arms and swung her round, so that her feet left the ground. Infected by his joy, she began to laugh, crying for him to put her down, but loving the sweet pressure of his arms. When he did put her down, he would not let her go, but gazed with sudden fierceness into her eyes, then brought his lips down firmly on her mouth and kissed her till her head buzzed.

  She put her hand up to bruised lips and said faintly, ‘Finn, I’ve brought you some money.’ She brought the envelope from her velvet reticule and handed it to him. ‘It’s five hundred pounds. My savings. I want you to have it.’

  She didn’t know what she had hoped for: an expression of pleasure, perhaps; surprise, certainly. She wasn’t looking for gratitude, but she hadn’t expected the look of hurt, of embarrassment. Suddenly it was as though she had been brought down to earth. She had made a terrible miscalculation, misjudged Finn’s attitude completely.

  He took the packet from her, looking down at it as though it were some strange object he didn’t recognize, and turned away momentarily towards his work-bench, saying nothing.

  ‘Finn?’

  ‘I can’t take this. What kind of person do you think I am? The sort who’d take money from a woman —’

  She cried out. ‘It’s not like that. It’s because —’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Because we’re special to each other.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Are we not?’ she persisted.

  ‘What do you mean? Special?’

  ‘Don’t demean me,’ she pleaded. Suddenly as angry as he was, she turned on him with rosy face and sparkling eyes. ‘You kiss me. You take me out. You don’t like me to have other friends. But where do we stand, Finn? Do you love me, or don’t you?’

  She watched the slow red creep up his neck. Still he said nothing. She could feel all the life and promise and vigour seeping away out through her button boots. Her head felt swimmy.

  Well, she had staked everything, and lost everything. Somehow, she lifted her feet, which felt as though they were unaccountably glued to the dusty floorboards, and propelled herself away from him.

  ‘Wait.’

  She turned.

  ‘Don’t you know a man has to do it his way? I have to do the asking.’ He was alarmed by the sullen stillness of her face and burst out, ‘Dammit! I was going to ask you to marry me. But not until I’ve got the car on the road. I thought you understood that, Kitty? It has to come first —’

  She was back in his arms, damping his shirt-front with her tears. Two small boys on their way to play football stopped to watch the scene with interest.

  ‘Will you come to Willow House with me on Saturday?’ Finn pleaded. ‘I told Frensham you were my girl. You see? He thought you were lovely.’

  ‘Did he?’ She dabbed at a small, reddened nose.

  ‘How could he not? Kit, if I can get him and his friends interested, our troubles are over.’

  ‘You won’t take my money?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You keep it, sweetheart. You didn’t really think I’d take it, did you?’

  She said nothing. She was beginning to wonder how well she knew him. But she put the money back in her purse without argument. She was never going to be able to manipulate Finn as she had done most people in her life. Things would have to be done his way. And marriage would come in his time, not hers. She gave a barely audible sigh.

  ‘Where is Willow House?’ she asked.

  ‘Near Loch Lomond. Frensham’s given me careful instructions how to get there.’ She saw from his expression he had something else he wanted to tell her. He drew her back into the workshop and took her right to the far end. There stood a small, neat vehicle which for once did not seem to be missing on any vital detail.

  ‘Is it finished?’ She looked at it apprehensively.

  He nodded. ‘As good as. That’s how we travel on Saturday. Meet the Fleming Flyer!’

  *

  ‘For goodness’ sake, be careful!’

  Jack surveyed his daughter, perched on the Fleming Flyer, her flowered boater tied under her chin with a pale-blue veiling that matched her dress and jacket. She made him think of a young sapli
ng, all slender willowy beauty. So Clemmie had been, when first he knew her. He felt the familiar, grieving need for his dead partner moisten his eyes and make his voice gruffer than need be.

  Finn adjusted his goggles and smiled down at him.

  ‘I’ll take care of her, never fear! We’re safe as houses.’

  With a splutter and a roar, the little car took off. The sophisticated tenants of Ashley Terrace did not come out in the street to watch it, but observed its noisy progress with clicking tongues stilled between gaping jaws from behind their douce lace curtains. On the outskirts of Glasgow it was a different matter. Urchins stampeded from close-mouths and garden gates to race it till their breath gave out. Young men turned and grinningly tipped their hats to Kitty, while old wives, stunned out of a doze by open windows, shook their fists and talked of the Devil.

  Kitty was being bumped up and down so much that even the velvet cushion underneath scarcely prevented her bottom from feeling as it had done when she was spanked with the hairbrush when she was young.

  ‘Suspension’s the next thing I’ll see to,’ Finn promised cheerfully. ‘Beats the train any day, doesn’t it?’

  Kitty reserved her opinion, but once they were out in the open country, at least where the road was good, she began to enjoy it more. Except for worrying what it would be like at Willow House.

  ‘How did the Frenshams make their money?’ she demanded.

  ‘Steel!’ shouted Finn, above the engine. ‘Converting pig-iron through the Bessemer converter.’

  ‘Are they very rich?’

  ‘Filthy rich! So I’m told. Willow House is just one of their summer retreats. Mostly they live in London. There’s Sir Peter’s mother, Lady Pamela, and his sister, June. They have American family connections. Seems that’s how he got to hear about me. Someone told him Paterson Fleming’s son was building cars in Glasgow. Thinks a lot of my old man, it seems. Ironic, isn’t it?’

  ‘When you think about it,’ Kitty agreed, ‘it is. I think you are probably more like your father than you realize.’ Finn’s expression became forbidding, so she did not pursue the conversation.

  Willow House stood a few miles from the banks of Loch Lomond in soft, lush countryside. Finn turned the car in at a long, wide drive lined with rhododendrons, and drew it up triumphantly in front of a sunny terrace where a number of people were having afternoon tea. There was a little scatter of applause as he and Kitty dismounted and Peter Frensham, followed by a fair, animated girl in a pink dress, whom Kitty took to be his sister June, ran down the terrace steps with hands outstretched in welcome.

  Kitty was no stranger to luxury. In the old days before the Trust was broken up, and before her mother’s health had shattered, the house in Ashley Terrace had know its share of parties and grand occasions.

  But she quickly realized the Frenshams were rich on a scale she had not encountered before. Everything about Willow House, from the faintly reserved and languid guests to the servants who seemed to spring from nowhere to attend one’s every whim, spoke not only of money but of people well used to deploying it to provide a constant cushion of luxury and ease in their lives. It made her feel uneasy and provincial. But she had a sudden, unaccountable vision of her Grannie Kate, unassailable in her dignity, though she lived in a humble little cottage in Dounhead, and she felt the family pride stiffen and straighten her backbone. She placed a wide smile on her face and softened the broader edges of her Glasgow accent into gentler consonants and more careful vowels. Every Glaswegian had to do that automatically, anyhow, when faced with a visitor from abroad or the South.

  Of course, the talk after they had been plied with fresh tea and dainty sandwiches was of nothing but the Fleming Flyer. Peter Frensham could not wait to try it out, and drove it carefully along the drive to a volley of applause from the more sycophantic visitors.

  June Frensham patted its radiator.

  ‘This is the honeycomb sort,’ she volunteered, ‘isn’t it?’ Kitty watched Finn’s mouth fall open in surprise and knew a jealous tug as he then went into detailed technological description of the car for June and her brother which the girl seemed to have no difficulty in following. Unlike Kitty herself.

  ‘What I think is so interesting,’ Peter Frensham was saying, ‘is that your design is more in line with the kind of small car I’ve seen in America than the looser efforts I’ve seen over here. The ‘gas buggy’ formula, in fact.’

  Finn gave him that grateful look he reserved for the mysterious brotherhood of the automobile fanatic; a look, Kitty thought with forbearing irony, he seldom bestowed on the rest of the human species.

  ‘You see what I’ve done?’ he explained. ‘I’ve concentrated on a low-speed, centrally-mounted engine, with two cylinders, here and here —’

  ‘Epicyclic gearing,’ enthused Frensham, ‘and drive by the central chain. It’s a beaut. Don’t you think so, June?’

  ‘A beauty,’ June agreed, in her high-pitched, cultivated tones.

  ‘Well, she’s the first,’ Finn admitted modestly. ‘There’s so much I want to experiment with. I can see us doing thirty, even forty miles an hour one day. But I visualize pneumatic tyres for that. And we have to think of covering the driver and passenger from the rain.’

  ‘We have to get away from the old phaeton and landaulet notion,’ observed Frensham thoughtfully. ‘The motor-car is not, in effect, simply a horseless carriage. She must have line and style that are her own.’

  Kitty found she could not take any more car talk. She had sat in the thing for hours, after all, and could feel her spine stiffening and aching as a result. She went off with a shy but pleasant young man to admire the peacocks on Willow House lawn and then indulge in a gentle game of croquet.

  She was almost glad when dinner was over that evening, for she was too tired to enjoy the succession of rich courses placed in front of her and then whipped away before she had done more than toy with them. The champagne gave her a tendency to giggle. She had a vast bedroom in the west wing of the house and didn’t know whether to be amused or nauseated to see that the night table had been furnished with covered dishes of sandwiches and devilled chicken. Bottles of Vichy and Malvern water had been thoughtfully provided, and she sipped from one of these as she undressed. Although it was summer, a fire had been lit in the grate and a kettle purred on a brass trivet. The reading-lamps on either side of her bed had pink shades and there was a coverlet of white swansdown on the brocaded sofa.

  Hopping into the vast bed, she felt her limbs relax but she could not sleep. All day long she had waited and hoped for some attention from Finn, but he had been too taken up with his new friends. Now she imagined his mouth kissing her, his hands moving along the languor of her body. It was all she could do to stop herself getting out of bed and running through the great house in search of him, but she had no idea where his room might be. She said his name, Finn, into the velvet darkness, and her limbs moved constantly, restlessly with the yearning of her body. This is what it’s like to burn, she thought, seared with her own humiliation.

  It was raining the next morning. A curtain of mist had come down between the rolling lawns of Willow House and the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. In the great dining-room, servants were bringing porridge to silent, overhung males who ate it standing up while they watched the sparrows flutter in and out of the bird-baths in the Italian garden. The whole atmosphere was one of shivering ennui, scarcely overcome by the huge log fires that tongued up the chimneys at either end of the room.

  Kitty smiled briefly at Finn who was eating porridge by himself and passed down between laden tables, not knowing where to begin. Her appetite was quite restored and now she peered under their covers to see what was in the silver dishes warmed by rows of little spirit lamps. Kidneys, beef, omelettes, fish. On another table were ham, tongue, cold grouse, pheasant and partridge (she judged) and hot or cold ptarmigan, which she felt pleased to recognize.

  She wondered whether to have a little plain pressed beef, but settled ins
tead for a slice of melon and a nectarine, after which she would have a scone or two, with honey. More decisions … should she have China tea (indicated by the yellow ribbon on the pots) or Indian, with the red? It seemed simpler to have the coffee instead.

  ‘Do you mind going to church with the rest?’ Finn hissed in her ear. ‘I can’t come. We have too much to talk about.’

  ‘Shall I see nothing of you all day?’ she demanded in alarm.

  ‘We’ll meet later,’ he promised. ‘But there’s plenty to amuse you, isn’t there?’ His face was pleading, and she gave in and agreed.

  But it was after tea before they met again. The egg and cucumber sandwiches, the chocolate, walnut and coffee cakes had been wasted on Kitty as she’d tried in vain to will Finn to her side. Everywhere he went, Frensham and a growing band of interested devotees seemed to surround him, and June Frensham was never far away either, her tinkling, affected laugh jarring Kitty like toothache.

  He was wiping chocolate cake from his mouth as he strode over to her. She knew from his excited look that he had something to tell her and prescience rose up in her, urging caution, caution.

  ‘Kit, you’ll never guess. I’m invited to go to London to meet connections of Peter’s who’re already manufacturing. And then he wants me to go to the States to see what this man Ford is doing.’ His feet were tapping with impatience, he seemed raring to be off again. She felt as though her stomach was going down in a lift, down a pit shaft, down, down, down.

  ‘I thought he was going to subsidize you in Glasgow, maybe find you a decent place to work,’ she faltered.

  ‘Oh no, it’s going to be much bigger than that. Much bigger.’ He scarcely seemed to be aware she was there; his gaze wandered almost feverishly about the room.

  ‘When do we drive back?’ she demanded, levelly.

  ‘Eh? Oh, tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon. You can keep yourself amused till then, can’t you, Kitty? The rain’s lifting. It’s going to be a lovely evening.’