by Webster, Jan
*
‘Why won’t she speak to me?’ Finn asked Sandia. His bags were packed and strapped, waiting in the hall at Ashley Terrace to be taken to the station.
‘I don’t know,’ responded Sandia, a little impatiently. ‘She’s so moody these days I can’t make anything of her. She simply says she has a headache.’
‘Well, tell her goodbye for me,’ said Finn. ‘I’ll write to her from London.’
‘There’s nothing really amiss between you two, is there?’ Sandia demanded curiously.
Finn shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. We talked last night and I explained as best I could why I would be away for six weeks or so. I think she feels it is too long. But I have no option. I’m sure she’ll see that for herself, when she has time to think about it.’
He suddenly dashed upstairs, knocked on Kitty’s door and called: ‘I am off, dear girl. Can I come in and say goodbye?’
The answer must have been in the negative for he came slowly downstairs again, his face clouded.
‘I don’t know what to make of her.’
‘She’s a bit spoiled, that’s all,’ Sandia assured him.
She fastened her fur tippet. ‘Come on, Finn. You said I could share your cab. It’s time I was down at the tea-rooms.’
Because she felt sorry for Finn, Sandia went into the station with him and waved him off. Some complicated emotional game was in progress between him and Kitty, but as an outsider she had no way of knowing the rules. She felt marginally sorrier for Finn, if anything, with so much concerning his future at stake, and Kitty behaving like a spoiled child. But then, Finn had had Kitty on a string ever since he arrived in Scotland and it was understandable that she wanted their relationship moved forward and properly defined.
Once at the tea-rooms, Sandia became so busy she had no more time to puzzle over her sister’s affairs. Business was so brisk, both in shop and tea-rooms, that the staff scarcely had a moment to themselves. They were all good, reliable girls, willing to curtail their dinner-break when things were busy, clumsy at times but anxious to keep up the standards she had set them. But then she took no one without a recommendation from the minister of the church the girl attended.
She had, besides, decided that this would be the day she would approach Mr Beltry. They had become very friendly of late and she had taken to having tea with him, at her own special table near the cash-desk, when he came in around four o’clock.
He was a lonely man. He told her how empty his house at Troon was, in the years since Mrs Beltry had died. His only child, a daughter, was married to an eye specialist in Edinburgh, and he saw little of her. The house at Troon was from all accounts a mansion, richly furnished with rare objects Mr Beltry had brought back from his travels. There was an elderly housekeeper who gave him scant comfort, dishing up eternal cold meats and watering the whisky.
Sandia knew well enough the road Mr Beltry was leading her along when he described such discomforts. ‘These little tête-à-têtes we have, Miss Kilgour, are like an oasis in my day,’ he said more than once. ‘But it’s the company that does it. You’d make a mausoleum like home, with your cheery smile.’
Would she be committing herself to anything deeper if she asked his financial help? Sandia pondered this all day as she sat behind the cash-desk, watching the constant trudge of Glasgow humanity to the tables. She knew it was probably risky. But she was suddenly tired of being cautious. Like Kitty, she wanted life to move on and even if it was in an uncharted direction, it was better than doing nothing.
She was still absorbed in her thoughts when the tea-room doors swung open and Kitty came in. The time for high tea was approaching, the aroma of hot mutton pies wafted from the kitchen and Kitty knew her help would be needed. She was wearing a deep-blue velvet costume trimmed with dark fur, and two bright spots of colour burned on her cheeks, making her look fiercely beautiful. She stopped in front of Sandia, who judged she had been crying, because there were two little puffy lumps under her eyes.
‘Well, he got away, then, Finn, did he?’ demanded Kitty.
‘Yes.’ Sandia looked at her musingly.
‘That’s that, then.’ She tapped her toe.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s all over. I told him so last night.’
‘Oh, I wish the pair of you would grow up!’ said Sandia impatiently.
‘I have. At last.’ There was something in her face that moved Sandia to sudden pity. ‘You did warn me, Sandia. He’s not in a hurry to marry, me or anyone else. Cars are his obsession.’
‘He needs time. He’s got a lot to think about — ’
‘He can have all the time in the world. I haven’t. I can feel the days and weeks go by and I’m no farther forward. Sandia —’ Kitty impaled her with a hard look — ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m emigrating to Canada. You remember I wanted to go, before Mother died? The Wilsons still want me to go to Saskatchewan. I had a letter from Jean just the other day.’
‘So you don’t love Finn any more?’
Kitty looked away. ‘What’s the point? Seems he doesn’t return the compliment.’
‘You’re being silly. Spoiled and silly.’
‘You think so? You’ve changed your tune. Well, I’ve just been down to the shipping office to enquire about a passage.’
‘What would you do?’ Despite her alarm, Sandia almost laughed. Kitty’s ploy, for surely that’s all it was, seemed so implausible.
‘The Wilsons have a livery and feed barn. They supply coach and horses to settlers who want to look over the land and provide stabling for the ranchers’ horses.’
‘Just your cup of tea,’ said Sandia with heavy irony.
‘Jean and her mother make lunches for the lodgers and ranchers. A dollar a week. I’ve had some experience, thanks to you —’
‘Oh, you don’t really mean it?’ Sandia demanded wearily.
‘I do,’ Kitty said defiantly. ‘See if I don’t!’
Mr Beltry was sitting at the usual table, waiting for his tea and toasted bun. It had been Sandia’s intention to sound him about the money today, but now she was too confused and upset to tackle him. She simply sat down opposite him in silence, and, sensing something was wrong, he tactfully waited till she felt like speaking.
‘What a day!’ she said at last.
He poured her tea from the silver pot, put in the sugar and milk, and stirred solicitously. She did not demur when he put his large, dry hand over her hot, tense one and squeezed it briefly but gently.
‘Sandia!’ She saw hope light up his ruddy face like a beacon. ‘Tell me if I can be of help to you. I am here, at your service. You only have to ask.’
She looked at him speculatively, tiredly, trying to be as honest with herself as she could. Could she get used to the thinning hair, the somewhat blubbery skin, the reedy voice? Underneath was kindness, that she knew. But the years between seemed illimitable. Like the gap between Glasgow and Belfast. Between herself and Dandy, who had never written back.
‘Maybe you can help, John,’ she said, like him, using Christian names for the first time. ‘And maybe you can’t. I want to open another tea-room.’
Part Three
Chapter Ten
Donald Balfour, son of Lachie and Tansy, was twenty-one that year, the year of the old Queen’s death and of The Groveries, the biggest and best international exhibition Glasgow had ever staged.
1901. Crowds half a mile deep had trampled the small railings flat in Hyde Park during the Queen’s London funeral procession, before the doughty old lady was finally laid to rest two days later at Frogmore.
The Boer War was still in progress, despite the victories at Ladysmith and Mafeking which had had those same crowds jigging for joy up and down Fleet Street and elsewhere, though there wasn’t quite the same enthusiasm for it now. Donald remembered the day it had started. Had there ever been such heroes as the first hundred picked men of the London-Scottish, feted and petted and bought drinks by strangers? Then in �
��Black Week’ two thousand British troops had been slaughtered and that had emptied the theatres and concert halls. Now everyone wanted it over, wondered how much longer it would go on. Those who spoke up for the Boers’ case, like his Uncle Duncan, no longer went in direct fear of their lives.
But sitting in the new electric tram, swaying towards his cousin Alisdair’s consulting rooms in the West End, Donald decided ironically that, war or no war, the Empire had not exactly crumbled away during his sojourn in the clinic in Switzerland. Perhaps the worst most people had suffered was the sugar tax, to pay for the war. It was as though his absence enabled him to see everything very clearly and objectively. Wasn’t there almost a smugness about the country, and Glasgow in particular? Or was it just his own heightened sensibility, his crushing wish to see his cousin Carlie again and the uncertainty about how she would react to his feelings for her?
Sometimes the concept of Empire overwhelmed him. Victoria, the papers pointed out, had acceded to one-sixth of the world’s surface. Her profligate Eddie would reign over one-fourth. He decided he still wasn’t strong enough to face up to the corollary to all that — the fact that someone, some day, was going to try and take it all away.
He’d been pretty ill when they’d decided to pack him off to Lucerne a year ago. He remembered the concern in Carlie’s face when he’d told her. Although since starting at Glasgow University he’d had digs in the city, he had tried to get home at weekends to see her. They’d been going for walks together, their talk getting deeper and more intimate. He’d been getting serious about her. She was so easy to talk to and that face, with its wide mouth and grey eyes and gentle animation, had been so easy to look at.
Lying in his neat, hard bed in the sanatorium, he had got wound up about that face. They said TB increased the sex urges, didn’t they? He’d wanted Carlie badly, but her letters had been friendly, informative and funny, in no way passionate like his. Was it that she was just too shy to put her real feelings on paper? She had a vein of reserve running through her make-up. Or didn’t she really care for him at all?
He knew he had come to depend on her. When his parents’ marriage had broken up and his mother started her continental travels with her paramour, Carlie had been the one fixed point in his shaken universe. Carlie laughing, joking, cajoling. How he wanted to see her again!
Well, he soon would. He had to report to Alisdair first of all. He was his doctor, a clever one, they all said. But then he was going to meet Carlie at The Groveries. He wondered how much she could have changed in a year.
To distract himself, he stared hard through the tram windows at the Glasgow streets, trying to reconcile what he saw with the ecstasies of some Americans he’d encountered abroad over this city.
Had he heard how pure the Clyde was, with its marvellous new methods of sewage disposal? Did he know how much they admired the Glasgow tramways system in Chicago? What about social advances, like municipal crèches and kindergartens for the children of Glasgow widows and widowers, and the model lodging-houses where the unmarried could find good food and accommodation for sixpence a night? And those marvellous Clyde ship-builders, fitting up new cargo steamers with fast turbine engines?
He had to admit there were prosperous-looking folk about Ladies in velvet costumes with jade and ivory necklaces and hats trimmed in excess of anything he’d seen in Paris. But still plenty of poor-looking women, too, carrying infants in shawls. Still barefoot urchins and beggars with a permutation of missing limbs.
When his tram stopped outside a large dairy-cum-grocery store, he looked at the price tickets in the window. Milk a penny-ha’penny a pint, cheese sixpence a pound, sugar twopence, tea one shilling and fivepence and, in sacks by the door, potatoes at a ha’penny. Suppose you earned a pound a week and your rent was about an eighth of that, and you had six children to support, could you have any kind of a life?
He smiled to himself, thinking how Carlie would have an immediate answer to that She was following in the parental, socialist tradition, but while she could make him feel guilty on occasion about privilege, he wasn’t sure yet where his own opinions lay.
He had been sickened by the excesses of the very rich in Marienbad, for example, on his way home. He’d gone there to see his mother and her painter paramour — Macleish had any number of commissions from the wealthy, loose-living hordes who took coffee at the Café Rubezahl, or flocked to hear Yvette Guilbert, or Beethoven played in the woods. Everybody who was anybody went to Marienbad. The new King himself. And Campbell-Bannerman, who would be Prime Minister if the Liberals came to power — he went there year after year, stodgy Liberal haggis that he was, with his plain wife Charlotte whom he so doted on.
But on the other hand, what was the point of Carlie’s father, his Uncle Duncan and his like, trying to set up their socialist paradise when it was plain that at the moment most folk were more or less content with what they had?
Alighting from the tram, he dodged one of the alarming new motor-taxicabs that had sprung up in his absence, ran up the steps to Alisdair Kilgour’s consulting rooms and rang the bell.
‘My dear fellow, you’re better. Not all the way there. But better.’
Alisdair had given him a thorough going-over and now after helping Donald on with his velveteen jacket he patted his shoulder paternally. Alisdair had suddenly acquired middle-aged gravitas and self-importance along with a pretty wife and a practice.
‘That chest of yours is a lot clearer. Switzerland has done the trick, as I said it would.’
‘Can I take up my studies again?’
‘I don’t see why not. Though why you stick to law, I can’t imagine.’
‘I’m not harming anybody but myself,’ countered Donald. ‘You know what Grannie Kate says about doctors — they kill more than they cure!’
Alisdair smiled. ‘She exempts me from her strictures. At least, I hope so. Now you’ve to watch your diet. Plenty of milk, butter, eggs. Build up your resistance. Don’t smoke.’ He looked at Donald’s nicotine-stained fingers and shook his head. ‘I see my warnings haven’t gone home. And don’t overstrain yourself.’
‘I’ve heard that all my life,’ said Donald. He compared Alisdair’s robust, stocky frame with his own narrow shoulders and concave chest.
‘“We maun do as things do with us,”’ quoted Alisdair. ‘Another wise saw from our aged grandparent.’
‘You should charge for them too,’ Donald observed drily. ‘You’d make a fortune!’
After the consultation Alisdair took Duncan through to the living quarters to meet his wife, Tina, and share a pot of tea with them. Tina was small, dark and rather nervous, with a smile that turned her from pretty to entrancingly beautiful. She moved and talked in little spurts, looking to Alisdair to confirm or qualify everything she said. Donald saw that this was probably what had attracted Alisdair to her in the first place. He had a certain affection for his cousin, but Alisdair had always had this tendency to pontificate and lay down the law. He was a kirk elder now, taking Tina twice to church on Sundays. And of course, he was also a snob. There was no getting away from that. Tina’s father was a rich city landlord, with family properties going back to the days of the great tobacco barons in their scarlet cloaks, those same lords who’d thought so much of themselves they’d allowed no one else to walk on their plain-stanes at Glasgow Cross.
It was Tina who in her nervous, darting way brought Donald up-to-date with the rest of the family news, between plying him with sultana cake and shortbread.
Sandia seemed to be happy in her marriage to Mr Beltry. She had just opened her fifth shop and tea-room, so that her little chain stretched profitably right down into Ayrshire. Her style was carefully stamped on each establishment. Rich, dark-green carpeting; dark-green curtains with gold cord ties. And the motto, ‘Miss Kilgour’s, For Comfort and Cleanliness’, above a mock coat-of-arms showing a milkmaid with snowy bosom and dainty feet.
Captain Jack and Finn Fleming still lived in the house at Ashley Terrac
e, looked after by Mrs Jessup. The only difference was that the bottom half of the house had been let off to a fashionable dentist.
And Kitty? Oh yes, they heard from her frequently, from Canada. She was the most reliable correspondent in the world.
‘Not married yet?’ enquired Donald.
Tina shook her head and smiled. ‘No. But she’s a pillar of the temperance union and she writes about literary evenings, where I’m sure she’ll meet some nice young men.’
‘Fred Wilson’ll get round her in the end,’ opined Alisdair. ‘I note she mentions him often — Fred this and Fred that.’
Tina giggled. ‘I sometimes wonder if Finn Fleming has got over her.’
‘Of course he has.’ Alisdair nodded decisively. ‘Finn’s a big, important car-manufacturer. A man of substance, with his own factory.’
‘But it doesn’t mean —’
Alisdair cut her off. ‘He’s had more things to think about, these past few years, than women
‘Hold on!’ cried Donald, obscurely needled by Alisdair’s treatment of Tina. ‘Finn’s no different from the rest of us. He must need — well, love.’
‘Money’s the next best thing,’ said Alisdair hardly.
‘But it can’t make up for affection,’ Tina murmured.
Alisdair was glaring at her irately. Hastily, Donald rose to go, saying, ‘I’m meeting Finn tonight. After I’ve been to the exhibition with Carlie. I did some business for him in Marienbad. Got the specifications from a very rich cotton man there for a custom-made automobile.’
At the door, Tina said, ‘I’m glad you’re seeing Finn. I think he works far too hard. Try and get him to enjoy himself for a change.’
He smiled at her. ‘You have a kind heart, Tina.’ Impetuously, he kissed her cheek.
On the grassy slopes outside the university, he stopped to take in the view of the exhibition. Some fanciful imaginations had been at work, filling the prospect with towers and gilded domes, glaring white palaces and stucco minarets. It was so unlike the sober, Presbyterian image of his native land that he couldn’t restrain a smile. Venetian gondolas on the Kelvin! It seemed a most unlikely fancy.