Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  ‘Do you know what I thought of, when I was at my weakest? The cakes in Sandia’s tea-rooms! Scottish cakes. Glasgow cakes. Even Hazlitt praised them. I could see them so clearly, in all their glory. And this time I haven’t been able to eat a single one!’

  ‘You should be taking a long rest,’ said Carlie helplessly. ‘And I should make you see a doctor.’

  ‘Where’s your Scottish spirit, Duncan’s daughter?’ Kirsten teased, but gently. ‘I must show them all. I am not done for yet.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Finn had arranged to meet Kitty in the Japanese Tea-room of La Scala picture-house in Sauchiehall Street, and let her know the result of his meeting with Peter Frensham.

  In this, her third pregnancy, she did not mind so much being seen in public, although she carried this baby neatly and a pretty, loose jacket hid her condition well. When he teased her about her modesty, she said her mother had dragged them indoors at the sight of a pregnant woman and it was no use expecting her to change her ideas entirely.

  ‘Darling, how pretty you look!’ He pulled up a chair beside her. ‘Have you had your lemon tea?’ This was something she had demanded from her second month.

  ‘Yes. Don’t worry about me. How did the meeting go?’ She gave him her warm, dimpled smile but her eyes were shadowed with concern.

  He knew there was no point in concealing anything from her. He swore she sometimes knew what was in his mind before it got there.

  ‘He wants out. He says the signs are that Glasgow’s on the wane. He cites coal, iron, cotton, marine engineering. He says it can’t support a car industry and that if I had any sense I’d go with him to America.’

  ‘Did you give him the figures?’

  ‘He says 55,000 cars don’t represent a British motor industry and that we haven’t the roads to put them on anyway. He’s right, he’s right, but there must be a way we can keep going.’

  ‘Did you suggest branching out into agricultural machinery and rolling stock?’

  ‘I don’t think he was listening to me. The truth is, he has gambled heavily in the casinos and I think the family want him out of Europe for a while.’

  ‘What will you do, Finn?’ Her voice, though fearful, still carried the note of her total trust in him.

  ‘Do?’ He shook his head as though he could not believe the position he was in. ‘What can I do? Rationalize. What’s that saying of yours? — “Draw in my horns.” I may have to diversify, take in jobs I would have considered beneath me a year ago.’

  ‘Couldn’t we sell the house? I don’t mind where I live. I’ll do without servants —’

  ‘No, you won’t. Come on, drink up your tea and we’ll go out and buy you a new hat.’

  Denial was on her lips but in time she saw, obliquely, what he was getting at. The hat was a flag, and the flag was still flying.

  ‘One with egret feathers?’ she suggested. She held his arm lightly as they walked out of the tea-room and her head was very high. She knew they made a handsome couple.

  When they had picked the hat, in midnight-blue velvet with ruby beads securing the grey feathers, and bought some wide satin ribbon to make dress sashes for the girls, she said consideringly, ‘Finn, I think you had better take me home.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded. ‘I think so. It can’t be the baby. He’s not due for a month.’ But her face increasingly told him she could be wrong.

  He had parked his car in a quiet side street and now he got her into it and drove as fast as the engine permitted for home, while she made strange little squeaking noises as the contractions increased in frequency.

  ‘There’ll be no one at home. I told Cook she could take the maids to pick Beenie’s wedding present’ — Beenie being a former parlour-maid. ‘Thank goodness the babies are at Sandia’s. You’ll have to call the midwife. And the doctor.’ Between gasps and squeaks, Kitty was being intensely practical.

  Finn swore as an elderly lady in shawl and mutch took her time crossing the road in front of him. He pushed the lock of fair hair from his eyes as once again he let in the clutch.

  Cold sweat ran down his back and a kind of primal terror robbed him of straightforward, rational thought. He lifted Kitty down at the doorsteps, unable to look at the stress in her face.

  ‘Phone the doctor.’ She pointed to the instrument in the hall, as though addressing a dullard child, and painstakingly began the climb to her bedroom upstairs. When she got to the top, she felt she had climbed Ben Nevis. But in an orderly fashion, though unable to stifle her groans, she removed her outdoor clothes, climbed into a clean nightdress and began to prepare the bed for the birth with thick brown paper and sterile sheets.

  ‘He’s coming — she’s coming. I mean they both are — the doctor and the midwife.’ In shirt-sleeves, his hair on end, his tie awry, Finn made Kitty think of nothing so much as the mad scientist in a living picture she’d seen recently. She began to laugh weakly, and the laugh turned into a primitive sound that was half-shout, half-scream.

  ‘Finn, you have to help me.’ Kitty had gained momentary control over the pains. ‘Hold my hand. Let me push against you when I bear down.’ She smiled at him, her face damp with the perspiration of effort. ‘It’s all right. You won’t die, you know.’

  At the critical moment, Finn looked anywhere but at the bed. He could feel his head spin round and thought he was going to faint. There was a whooshing sound, a sound he was never to forget, and then unbelievably, a thin, mewing wail.

  He fought back from the edge of panic and looked down. A small, blue-tinged creature lay between his wife’s legs. Undeniably alive. Undeniably a boy.

  ‘It’s — it’s a he,’ he stammered, taking in Kitty’s look of joyous achievement. He kissed her brow and her lips. ‘You wonderful darling, you.’ Just then, the midwife’s urgent ring came imperatively from downstairs. Kitty’s hand clung momentarily to his; they knew a moment of mystical union. Despite everything else the day had held, he felt touched by a near unbearable bliss.

  *

  When the letter came for Carlie, she recognized Aggie Fermoyle’s writing at once. Who else used loops and curls with such a flourish? She opened it, amused to note from the jammy pink stain on the bottom left-hand corner that Aggie still conducted her correspondence from an edge of the kitchen table. But the contents took the smile from her face.

  Dear Friend [wrote Aggie],

  I thought you ought to know the news about Kirsten Mackenzie, as I know you know her quite well. She is in a public ward at the London Hospital and I do not think she will ever come out again. Do you think something should be done about her? She has done a lot for our movement but folk have short memories. Write and tell me what you think. Your sincere friend, Aggie Fermoyle.

  Carlie gave the matter much thought before she took action. Should she tell Wallace? Or perhaps, first of all, her father? Impulsively she decided on the latter, caught the train to London and then was pulled up short to discover her father had gone down into Wales.

  ‘Why?’ she asked the young man who helped her father with his secretarial work.

  ‘Because of the trouble at Tonypandy,’ he replied.

  She decided on the spur of the moment that she might as well follow him. She was moved by the urgency of letting her father know how desperate was Kirsten’s condition, the conviction that it was important he should know. She had read about Tonypandy, of course. Striking miners had gone on an orgy of window-smashing, angry at the import of blackleg labour, and the Home Secretary Winston Churchill had sent in the troops. An ugly situation had escalated into something worse and a miner had been killed.

  The general opinion was that Churchill had over-reacted, partly because colliery managers had exaggerated in their reports of ‘rioting’. But it wasn’t as simple as that. A black spirit was abroad in the valleys. Twenty-six thousand men, ostensibly seeking better conditions and a minimum wage, were claiming back something more — the debt of thirty thousand lives pai
d to the Great God Coal in the past twenty-five years.

  Carlie tracked her father down to a meeting in a miner’s hall in the Rhondda. She had never heard working-men so articulate as here and most articulate of all was a young man who was calling for a ‘fighting brigade’ to meet what he alleged was the violence of the police towards the strikers.

  When her father joined her after making his speech, Carlie found her legs were shaking. He had not been listened to patiently. There had been cries of ‘Old Phlegm’ — Fleming the Phlegmatic — a nickname he hated, and foot-stamping and shouts when he had tried to catalogue what the Labour Party sought to achieve in Parliament.

  She had never seen him so shaken. His hosts tried to smooth him down but he shook off their arms and said to her with a gruff, uncharacteristic impatience, ‘What brings you here, lass? Have you come to see democracy buried?’ His mouth set in a furious line. ‘They wouldn’t listen to me out there tonight and I’m on their side. No one has fought harder for the miners than I have.’

  She took his arm and walked him out into the calm Welsh night. She did not know how to be less brutal about it. She said simply, ‘Father, Kirsten Mackenzie is dying. She has no funds. Everything has gone towards the Suffragettes. She’s in a bare hospital ward —’

  She could not go on. The emotionalism of the occasion clogged her throat. She took his arm and moved him still farther away from the knots of angry, arguing miners. They held up their faces to the evening wind. It was blessedly cool.

  ‘You were right to tell me.’ The breathing space had calmed him. He said in a low, resolute voice, ‘We’ll go back to London straight away.’

  In the train she told him what little she knew of Kirsten’s condition. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she admitted. ‘It seemed all wrong that she should be left there, as if no one cared.’ She gave him a careful look. ‘Mother needn’t know any of this.’ He looked up at her, his expression sombre but admitting her to full adult status, and full of gratitude and love.

  He went alone to the hospital. An old crone without teeth, obviously a patient well enough to be allowed up, was holding a glass of water to Kirsten’s lips as he went in. The old woman first stared at him curiously, then moved slowly back to her own bed. Kirsten’s eyes were closed. He took her hand and waited. After what seemed like an eternity her eyes opened and slowly focused on him. She said through stiff lips, ‘Is that you? Duncan? I didn’t think you would come.’

  ‘She has been given something for the pain,’ said the little nurse who had accompanied him to the bedside. ‘Don’t let her talk too much. She needs to rest.’

  ‘I came,’ he said simply. Even in her drugged state, she was holding on to his hand as though she would never let it go. ‘Carlie told me, and I came as quickly as I could.’

  She smiled, then something which could have been present pain or past misery clouded her face and she said, turning her head away, ‘You’re too late, you know. You shouldn’t have troubled.’

  He felt a constriction in his throat, unmanning him.

  He said gruffly, ‘Did you think I would leave you here, facing up to pain on your own? I’m here to share whatever it is that ails you. Would you like to come and stay at my flat? I could look after you — get a woman body in to nurse you, if you like. What do you say to that, bonnie bird? You need a bit of feeding up and looking after, that’s all.’

  She turned her beautiful, ironic gaze on him, at once naked and candid, and he found himself urging, ‘Say you’ll come. I want to do this for you, Kirsten.’

  She did not answer. All the while, her grip on his hand had never lessened, but her eyes closed again and he began to think the medication was sending her to sleep. The pause lengthened, while he took in the chill, white tiles of the hospital walls, the still, silent figures on the other beds. Then her eyes opened once again, this time carrying a different expression, one that sent his heart beating wildly with a daft, irrepressible hope. She nodded, almost imperceptibly. ‘I’ll arrange it,’ he said. ‘It shall be done.’

  He gave up his bedroom to Kirsten. It offered a brief glimpse of the Thames and caught the morning sun. He carried her from the hospital bed into the carriage and from the carriage into his home. She was light in his arms. Carlie helped to settle her in the big brass bed, then excused herself to go and visit Aggie before catching the train back home.

  He had spoken to the doctor at the hospital and been told there was nothing more they could do. But once he had her settled in the cosy, firelit room, he permitted himself more idiot optimism. Nothing was irreversible, people recovered from the brink of death, Kirsten had the strong constitution of her Highland ancestors. He put more coal on the fire and set a tray for tea, his hands trembling over the unaccustomed effort to make things look dainty.

  He cut sponge cake into minute portions and fed it to her as he had once fed Carlie. She refused any more after the second mouthful, but took a sip or two of milky tea. He brought a chipped bowl from the kitchen, poured hot water into it from the spirit kettle and with the end of his rough towel sponged her hand and forehead, gentle as a girl.

  ‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ he coaxed. He lifted a wisp of dark hair off her forehead and said, ‘No more campaigning for you, lass. Plenty of rest and good care from now on. I know of a girl with nursing experience. I’ll arrange for her to come in. But mostly I’ll be here. It’ll be just like old times.’

  He saw that the small effort he had demanded from her had exhausted her and so he left her to sleep. When he went in a couple of hours later, she was lying awake, her expression tranquil. He went over to her and she took his hand. ‘It’s so peaceful here,’ she said.

  ‘Is there anything you want?’

  ‘Just to talk. Shall we talk of old times?’

  He took the pace from her. Sometimes she recalled the winter nights in Glasgow when they had first started meeting. The trams, the snow, the skaters on the Clyde. Sometimes it was the Rows, when times had been so hard they’d crawled all over the bings for coal or pinched turnips from the fields.

  Just as he was thinking he’d tired her enough, she said, ‘There is something I want, Duncan. I would like to see Wallace once more. I wouldn’t let him know I was in the hospital. Here is different.’

  ‘I’ll telegraph him,’ he said. ‘You know he’s been seeing Carlie while he’s been in Glasgow? They get on well together.’

  ‘Yes. That’s good. Tell him to come quickly, Duncan.’

  When Wallace arrived off the late train the next evening, he strode into his mother’s bedroom with an expression of acute concern. Without saying anything, he sat down beside her and took her hand. The look on Kirsten’s face, one of hunger and gentle entreaty, was enough to make Duncan turn away.

  ‘Mother.’ Wallace’s voice was low. ‘I’m glad you asked me to come. What can I do? I want to help.’

  Kirsten indicated Duncan with a nod of her head. ‘Your father has been taking care of me beautifully.’ She smiled at her son then. ‘It’s good that the three of us are together.’ She rubbed his hand. ‘I wish it could have happened more often. But you’ve been happy, haven’t you? You’ve had a good life with Walter and Jill. Tell me you have, dear. I need to know.’

  ‘You need have no regrets.’ He kissed her brow clumsily. ‘I understand. Jill helped me. She always said I was luckier than most, with two mothers and fathers.’

  Duncan left them to talk and made a simple meal in the kitchen, which they shared. Despite the fact that Kirsten was sometimes in pain, the evening was one of strange, heightened happiness and fulfilment. Duncan watched his son covertly. He had the gentleness of the large and strong and his sensitivity to his mother’s needs was something that moved Duncan profoundly.

  Before Kirsten settled to sleep she looked from one to the other, her expression unreadable. Then she said, with total unpredictability, ‘Wallace, take his name. Take your father’s name, now that you’re a man.’

  ‘Kirsten!’ It was Duncan
who burst out. ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted this.’

  ‘Will you?’ Kirsten persisted, looking beseechingly at her son.

  ‘I don’t think I can.’ Wallace looked from one to the other.

  ‘Banks isn’t your true name,’ Kirsten protested. ‘It was just to protect you while you were at school. You are our son —’

  ‘Let me tell you why I can’t,’ said Wallace abruptly. ‘I’ve been using the name Mackenzie since I’ve gone to live in Glasgow. It’s your name, after all. It’s how I’ve always thought of myself since I was a very little boy. I knew Banks was only a temporary convenience. Won’t that do for you, Mother?’ Seeing her look of distress, he rushed on, ‘Why shouldn’t I bear your name? As an emancipated woman, I thought you would understand.’

  ‘I wanted you to do it for Duncan.’

  Duncan stepped forward now with a raised hand, forbidding further discussion.

  ‘Mackenzie will do for me,’ he said. ‘You have a brave and independent woman for a mother, Wallace. I would like you to carry her name.’

  Kirsten looked as though she would like to argue further but he straightened her top sheet, smiling down at her. ‘You must submit to the democratic vote. Two out of three are for Mackenzie.’ Wallace was still looking at her anxiously, wondering if he had upset her. She gave in. ‘All right. Mackenzie will do.’

  Wallace’s visit, though only one night, seemed to have done her good. She brooded happily over his good looks, manly figure and straightforward manner rather like a miser poring over his hoard of gold.

  The next day, Duncan went down to the House of Commons after first seeing a young Cockney woman, Vera, installed as nurse. He knew that a debate on the trouble in the coalfields was coming up the day after and there were people he wanted to see before getting down to the draft of the speech he was determined to make.

  To his astonishment, he returned home to find Kirsten seated by the bedroom window, fully dressed. Vera made an apologetic grimace. ‘She wanted to get up, sir. Nothing I said would stop her.’