Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

‘You’ve got lovely hair, Finn. For a chap. You really have. I mean it.’

  In the front room, Chrissie sang:

  ‘The River Clyde is very wide

  Especially where it’s narra.

  There’s mony a chiel stands at the bar

  That couldnae wheel a barra.’

  She slapped down the piano lid.

  ‘Play more,’ Donald pleaded. ‘I love those Glasgow nonsense songs. Think of another.’

  Chrissie slumped into one of the highly-polished horse-hair chairs placed round a solid mahogany table bearing a crystal bowl of realistic wax fruit. She had run out of songs.

  ‘I once tried to eat the pear, when I was younger.’ She mimed the act now. ‘That’s how I came by this broken tooth.’

  He peered into her mouth. ‘I like it broken. It gives you character.’

  ‘I think I’ve had too much,’ said Chrissie. Her face fell into remorseful lines. ‘When I’ve had too much, that’s when I think of oor Jimmy.’

  He stretched across the table and took her left hand, playing with the wedding ring. ‘Do you miss him very much?’

  She nodded without speaking. ‘I dream that he’s getting killed. Time after time. I see this Boer soldier with a rifle cocked and then I hear the bang and Jimmy’s lying there. And another time I dreamt he had his — his you-know-what-I-mean blown off. That must be the very worst thing that could happen to a man.’ She began to weep softly, plucking each tear away delicately with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Do you miss his love-making?’ Donald persisted.

  ‘You cheeky wee blighter!’ She looked at him through her fingers, caught half-way between laughter and annoyance.

  ‘No. The question’s serious,’ he protested. ‘What do you do? I want to make love to my girl, and she won’t let me.’

  ‘Quite right, too.’

  ‘I’d marry her.’

  ‘Won’t she have you?’ She flicked his dark hair teasingly and then saw that he, too, was near to maudlin tears.

  ‘Och, poor wee man. Here, here!’ And she kissed him impetuously. He took her in his arms, kissing her back with interest. It was altogether different from Carlie. This woman was soft and giving.

  ‘The bed!’ She turned her head towards the decorously recessed bed along one wall, covered with an Indian silk spread, draped with curtains. He bundled her towards it, helping her to take off her skirt, untying the tapes that held up her striped bloomers. Gracelessly but successfully he straddled her. Her smile spread away on her face like milk.

  In the kitchen, Finn slept with his head on the table, while Nellie donned her coat and hat and went home. The nerve! He had actually fallen asleep as she stroked his hair. She had had to lift his head from off the fob watch and the coral beads and lay it on his arms.

  She left the photograph where she’d put it, on the mantelpiece. The girl had dark hair and a slight cleft in her chin. It was signed ‘Fondest love — Kitty.’

  Chapter Eleven

  When Donald Balfour let himself in at the heavy front doors of Dounhead House the next evening, he realized it was so late the housekeeper must have retired to bed and in all likelihood his father also.

  His first reaction was one of relief. They had been expecting him yesterday. He could always say he had been with Finn. But even if his excuses were accepted, there would then follow the over-anxious enquiries about his health and the interminable discussions about his future. At least these were postponed for a little longer.

  And then he heard it. A sound between a groan and a shout. It came from his father’s study on the ground floor. Donald hurried along the red-carpeted hall to the open door and saw his father spreadeagled across his reading-desk, a glass of water overturned and seeping into the blotting-paper.

  ‘Father! What’s happened?’ With difficulty, he lifted Lachie back against his chair. The eyes fluttered. ‘Are you ill? Shall I get the doctor?’

  ‘No!’ With an enormous effort, Lachie pulled himself upright. ‘Where’ve you been? Waited for you. Get me some coffee. Best thing. Black coffee,’ he stipulated.

  Not very efficiently, Donald made a pot of black coffee and carried it back to the study with two cups and a bowl of sugar. He held the liquid to his father’s lips, making him drink two cups before he was satisfied. Lachie got up, his movements still clumsy and swaying, and moved to his chair by the dying fire. Donald stirred the ashes and put on more coal.

  ‘Sorry I didn’t get back sooner,’ he offered. ‘I had some business with Finn in Glasgow, and stayed the night.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ said Lachie shortly. ‘Are you better?’

  ‘Much better. Don’t worry about me. It’s you I’m concerned about. Were you drinking, Father?’

  ‘You know I don’t drink.’ Lachie picked up a small, dark-blue bottle from the sofa table and held it up. ‘I take a few drops of this stuff from time to time, when the headaches get beyond bearing.’

  Donald saw the label on the bottle. ‘Laudanum! Isn’t that addictive?’

  ‘What isn’t? Whisky’s addictive, smoking’s addictive. All I know is I have to have some relief from the pain. The doctor can do nothing.’

  Donald stared at his parent, thinking how little he knew him. After Tansy had left, Lachie had spent long periods abroad and on the Isle of Arran with his painter friends. Painting had become his entire way of life. Donald remembered now coming on his father in the atelier he had built in the grounds of Dounhead House. It had been a warm, sunny evening and Lachie had been inspecting a picture he had just finished. It did not seem to Donald to be representational at all, although it was called ‘Seascape and Sunset’. It was so incandescent with colour you felt it might burst, not into flames, but to reveal some ultimate beauty of nature beyond.

  Lachie had scarcely seemed aware of the boy’s presence at first Then he had put an arm about his shoulder and they had looked at his handiwork together.

  ‘Are you pleased with it?’ Donald had asked.

  ‘Yes. I think so.’ Perhaps he had been hoping his father would talk about the picture, what it meant, what he’d been hoping to achieve in it. But he didn’t. He seemed mesmerized by it. Donald slipped his arm and left him to it. He had felt a great anger against the picture, and the look of love his father had for it. Now the feeling of exclusion was always there. Funny. He had thought himself old enough to be immune to that kind of pain.

  As though somehow he had detected the trend of his thoughts, Lachie said, ‘It’s time you and I had a heart-to-heart. While you’ve been away I’ve thought a lot about us. I think I may have neglected you.’

  Donald looked at him in surprise and Lachie gave a short, unamused laugh. ‘Well, we’re getting the chance to try again. Cards on the table. I wanted you to know about the laudanum. About the pain I’ve suffered. But you’ve had your share of ill-health, haven’t you? Now you’re better, I want you to tell me what you want out of life. Do you want to stick to your law studies?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ To his surprise, Donald realized this was true. Over the past few days, a steady resistance to the thought of going back to the university had been building up in him.

  ‘I’ve had a word with your teachers. They don’t think you have the application for it.’ As Donald started up in protest, Lachie silenced him with a raised hand. ‘Even allowing for the decline in your health before you went to Switzerland, they felt there was a certain lack of dedication to your studies. In short, they’d as soon not have you back.’

  ‘That suits me,’ said Donald grimly.

  His father looked at him in some exasperation, but for a few moments said nothing. Thoughtfully, he fed a meerchaum pipe and drew on it. From time to time, he passed a hand across his forehead, as though to clear his thoughts. But the effects of the laudanum seemed to have worn off.

  ‘You have an alternative,’ said Lachie slowly, ‘now that you’re of age. You can take over the management of Dounhead. You can marry and have the house. There�
�s a cottage in Arran where I’d be more than content to spend the rest of my days.’

  ‘You’ve hated it here, since Mother left’

  His father nodded.

  ‘I don’t think I want it either.’ Donald let his words fall away into the waiting silence. The big clock in the corner ticked in rhythm with his heartbeat. If he could have brought Carlie here … But she would never come. She would laugh at the very idea of being the lady in the big house. How was he going to get her to listen to him? For despite what had happened with Chrissie, it was still Carlie who possessed his mind. She needn’t think that going away to London was going to stop him loving her. And one day they were going to be together. He had even checked out the question of being cousins with Alisdair, who had said there was no reason they should not marry, as there were no inherited weaknesses on either side. If he had to turn into the kind of person Carlie would take seriously, so be it. She would never take him seriously in the role of county gentleman.

  His expression as he looked at his father was more open than he realized. ‘I don’t want the big house, or what goes with it, either.’ Lest his words were tainted with — could it be revenge? — he added slowly, ‘I always felt there was something bogus about us living up here, away from the rest of Dounhead. Maybe it was because Mother came from the Rows —’

  ‘And Carlie Fleming.’ His father watched the effect of his words through a thick haze of tobacco smoke. ‘I hear she’s going to London. You’re fond of her, aren’t you?’

  ‘Is it us talking like this?’ Donald spread his hands in embarrassment and something more. Amazement. ‘I’ve never felt before I could bring my problems to you —’

  ‘A year’s a long time. I realized that if you’d died I would have been faced with a lifetime of regret. I realized that fathering a son doesn’t give you ownership of his life. I was trying to shape you for a life I had never wanted myself. Well, now I’m saying to you, Donald: tell me what you want to do. Does London come into your plans?’

  ‘Do you think I should follow her?’

  ‘With some, the harder you chase them the faster they run.’ Lachie came near to smiling.

  ‘Suddenly, I’ve too many options!’ Donald cried. ‘Finn’s even talking about giving me a job —’

  ‘Why don’t you take it meantime?’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me to stand on my own two feet?’

  They smiled at each other. ‘Could be,’ said Lachie.

  ‘Then I say to you: sell up this damned place, pit and all, and run like hell for Arran. You’ll have enough money to live like a king till the end of your days.’

  ‘I want to make you an allowance —’

  ‘I’ll not take it, Father.’

  ‘It’s there if you need it.’

  Donald shook his head. It was like being given a kind of freedom, but like all freedom, it was strangely alarming at first. For the first time, he felt the warm bond of kinship with his father and wished it might always have been like this. They sat talking long into the night, cronies who could say anything to one another.

  *

  It was a day made for the gods, that Saturday in April 1902. Coming up in the train from Ayrshire, Sandia looked through the carriage windows at fluffy cotton-wool clouds scudding for their lives across a brilliant blue sky. Even she felt some of the excitement and she knew nothing about football.

  Her husband, John Beltry, was sitting opposite her with the expression of a schoolboy out on a treat. He would not, he told her many times, miss the International at Ibrox for all the tea in China. Today, England was bound to go down against Scotland. The Scots footballers had everything on their side — skill, speed, intelligence, grace. It was a wonder, she teased, that the feet of such exemplary creatures ever touched the ground, never mind the ball. It was daft nonsense, she averred, but it was nice to see him so happy.

  ‘You’ve not to get too excited,’ she scolded. But his high spirits were not to be dampened. Looking at her fondly, he said, ‘I’ve never seen you look bonnier. That hat suits you.’ And he gave her that intimate, cherishing look that always stripped die years from him in her eyes and made her wonder at the unexpectedness of human love.

  She had gone into the marriage not loving but respecting him. Then together they had built up something that certainly approached the state of happiness. He never took her for granted. What she wanted, he saw that she got, and that did not merely apply to material things but to a listening ear when she was uncertain and a gentle but surprisingly passionate approach to love-making.

  It was as though the marriage gradually cancelled out the years between them — he grew younger and sprightlier while she grew mature and ever more maternal, towards him and everyone else.

  She had come to terms with her childless state — well, almost, and that was the only thing, the only sadness, she thought now.

  John was going to the match with Finn, Alisdair and young Donald, who had all promised to shield him from the rougher excesses of the crowd. They expected a gate of 75,000. Sandia couldn’t envisage that many people, but they’d be mostly on the terraces. John had paid the top price for all four tickets. It was his treat.

  She had come in to supervise matters in her first and favourite tea-room, for Glasgow would be bursting at the seams today, its trams overflowing with the usual Saturday shoppers as well as the football supporters, and her poor girls rushed off their feet. Even if she didn’t do much, it was good for morale for them to see her there.

  At the station, she watched John go off with the others and then pushed her way through the touts and rosette-sellers to the comparative calm of her restaurant, half-wishing it were already time to return to the high-ceilinged mansion in Troon and their evening game of cards.

  Her mind flicked back to Donald, and his pale, dark-eyed face as he’d greeted John. The family were worried about him. She permitted herself a small, inward smile. The family, John was fond of pointing out to her, meant as a rule Sandia herself. Now that Grannie Kate was getting on, she’d assumed the mantle of matriarch and was never content unless trying to smooth the path of life for some relative or other. He did not mind, she knew. He quite enjoyed the ramifications of family, having been an only child himself and undervalued and uncosseted by his daughter in Edinburgh.

  Finn was concerned too, she knew. He had been pleased to take Donald into the factory, but was disappointed at his lack of ambition. He seemed quite content to remain on the shop-floor and to have his friends among the gambling, hard-drinking element and the young radicals who enjoyed nothing better in the lunch-hour than a good hard-hitting argument.

  She had tried to persuade Donald to stay with Finn and her father at Ashley Terrace, where they could keep an eye on him. But he remained in what had been his student digs near Glasgow Cross, in a grey tenement up a musty close that smelled of urine. Once he had been seen at the theatre with Chrissie Macausland, whose husband had been invalided out of the Army, minus a leg. He’d explained that the poor girl needed taking out of herself, but Sandia did not feel he should be the one to do it.

  When she’d said this to Finn, he had laughed and declared Donald was young and was working out a philosophy of living. She had then asked Finn what his philosophy was and he had given her a dry look. He knew she meant he was still giving too much time up to work. She had wondered sometimes if there had been anything between him and June Frensham, whom he had escorted to occasional social occasions and theatrical first-nights, but that had obviously petered out and she was now engaged to a peer’s second son.

  Afterwards, Sandia was to think it uncanny how the premonition that something had gone wrong at the match reached her before the actual news spread through the Glasgow streets. Maybe it was when she saw the first ambulance thread its way through the packed street outside. Or it might have been the second, since one was not all that remarkable.

  Or maybe it was the ripple of disquiet running through the crowds, changing their sound somehow. But conf
irmation came when a distraught woman rushed through the tea-room swing-doors, catching her feather boa in them, and saying to anyone who would listen: ‘There’s been a disaster at the grounds. People killed …’

  The floor, the walls, tilted away from Sandia momentarily. She grabbed the woman’s arm and shook it. ‘What’s happened? What did you hear?’

  ‘The ambulances,’ the woman babbled. ‘I’ve never seen so many. One of the terraces, I think that’s what the man said —’

  She didn’t really take in any of the descriptions that began to flood in with the pale-faced crowds seeking the familiar comfort of a cup of tea. A corner kick. The mass of men surging and swaying to watch it being taken; the creaking and groaning as the structure gave way —

  ‘John.’ She said the name, thinking of the supper tray laid at home in Troon, with its white-on-white Ayrshire embroidery.

  She knew, before they brought the news to her. She should never have let him go. But how could you stop a grown man? You couldn’t say to him, ‘Live like the old man you are.’ He had never done that. He had wanted life, been greedy for it.

  It was Alisdair who came to her later to explain: ‘We didn’t even know anything had gone wrong at first. The game went on, even after the terrace had collapsed. It was afterwards, the crowds and the crush. A kind of hysteria seemed to run through our section of the crowd, as word spread about the disaster. Everybody wanted out. We got pushed up against the barrier. We protected John as best we could but I could see what was happening, that the pain in his chest was overwhelming him. I did what I could, but it was inevitable, Sandia. It could have happened at any time.’

  It had started out a day for the gods. It had left her rich, a widow of substance. Yet all she could think of then was his happy schoolboy face on the train and his words, ‘I like you in that hat.’ Afterwards, she could never wear navy with a veil. Somebody moved the tray set with the white-on-white embroidered cloth before she went back to the high-ceilinged parlour in Troon.

  *

  It was Captain Jack who suggested the trip to visit Kitty in Canada. He was convinced it was the only thing to shake Sandia out of her depression following her husband’s death. She had always been a soft-hearted girl, her father acknowledged, but he had not accurately gauged the depth of her feelings for her husband. She had a bee in her bonnet that she had not watched over him as she should: that she should never have let him go to the football international. They were all getting a little impatient over her frequent visits to poor John’s grave, her refusal to have anything to do with the tea-rooms, her tendency to stay in the villa at Troon and do little but brood.