Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  Expansively, an arm round both Sandia and Dandy, Donald explained: ‘I was having a half-and-a-half in this pub and who should I see but Alisdair here. Like a fish out of water! Hogmanay’s no time for a man to be on his own, is it? We’ve been drinking,’ he added unnecessarily. ‘Then I said to him, come and see your sister, I said. And here he is!’

  Donald moved off into the crowd with that slight weaving movement which characterized most first-footers in the city that night, shaking hands with a bonhomie and vigour that made Carlie smile in spite of herself. Why were her feelings towards him always so twin-headed? The pleasure of seeing him always mixed up with an obscure, unidentifiable feeling that was almost — what? Anger? Reproach?

  Still in the hall, Sandia hesitated. ‘Tina’s here,’ she said again to Alisdair. ‘Will it be all right?’

  Alisdair raised and lowered his eyelids several times to indicate the soundness of his judgement.

  ‘Far as I’m concerned,’s all right,’ he intoned. ‘Donald said you would be pleased to see me. Are you, Sandia? Pleased to see me?’

  ‘Daft thing!’ she said affectionately. ‘You shouldn’t have got yourself in such a state. Come and sit by me and Kitty. We can watch the dancing.’

  His sisters observed Alisdair surreptitiously as he sat beside them, lapsing into a morose silence. It tore at Sandia to see him, still dressed in his neat, dark, professional clothes, with immaculate collar and tie, trying to cope with the untidy emotionalism the whisky had forced on him. Every few seconds he would draw himself upright, casting his eyes coldly and defiantly around the room. If Tina had seen him, she gave no sign. Wallace had pulled his chair round almost in front of her and was talking to her entertainingly. Her hand went to her mouth as she stifled little gasps of delicate laughter.

  ‘You’ve done it now, haven’t you?’ demanded Carlie, swinging Donald round to comfort her.

  ‘Happy New Year, my lovely one!’ He tried to kiss her, but she dodged him and shook him by the arm.

  ‘You didn’t need to bring Alisdair tonight.’

  ‘Found him in a pub. Very depressed.’

  ‘You should have left him there,’ she said crisply.

  ‘Now! Now!’ He waved an ineffectual finger. ‘Don’t be heartless. He could have ended up in a shop door, minus his trousers.’

  ‘Well, take a look what’s happening now,’ said Carlie apprehensively. Alisdair was walking towards Tina, knocking chairs aside and bumping into other guests indiscriminately.

  ‘Take yourself off,’ he said to Wallace.

  ‘Now just a minute —’

  ‘I wish to speak to my wife.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Tina. She put out a hand towards Wallace.

  Carefully Alisdair removed his jacket and laid it on a chair. As carefully, as though he were about to conduct a medical examination, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves. He pushed a whitefaced Sandia away from him without ceremony and caught Wallace by his waistcoat.

  ‘I am going to demolish you, you understand,’ he said deliberately. ‘I am going to teach you to leave my property alone.’

  ‘Is that how you see your wife?’ Wallace demanded contemptuously. ‘I don’t wonder she wants nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You bloody upstart!’ Alisdair grabbed the younger man round the middle of his body and began a bout of wild wrestling. A woman guest gave a high-pitched, excited scream. His face scarlet from his efforts, Alisdair kept pounding a fist into Wallace’s groin. After one such blow, the young man straightened in sudden agony and in a reflex of rage sent his fist crashing into Alisdair’s face, so that he fell down on all fours, swearing and sobbing.

  Finn pulled Wallace away then and Dandy heaved Alisdair on to his feet, using all his strength to restrain him when it looked as though he would lumber after Wallace and start it all again. They got Alisdair down to the kitchen, where he put his head on his arms and indulged in a bout of maudlin weeping. Kitty made hot, strong coffee and stood over him till he drank two cups.

  Upstairs, Sandia faced Wallace apologetically. ‘I don’t know what got into him,’ she said.

  ‘Several whiskies too many,’ said Wallace grimly.

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid so. He isn’t used to it. Maybe, Wallace, it would be better if you went, before he surfaces again.’

  Wallace adjusted his shirt and tie. His face was sheet-white, bruised beneath one eye but animated by a dark and dangerous glint of temper. He looked at Tina. ‘Would you like me to take you home, Mrs Kilgour? I would deem it a pleasure.’

  As Tina nodded and took her leave with her protector, Carlie knuckled Donald between the shoulder-blades.

  ‘Did you not see this would happen?’ she demanded. She saw the incident had amused him and glared at him. ‘You have a talent for mischief, you Iago, you.’

  *

  The city in the small hours was criss-crossed by drunken first-footers like dancers in a haunted ballet. They had been unable to get a taxicab and Wallace kept his arm about Tina as they walked towards her digs. Her landlady, a strict Rechabite who loathed the Hogmanay excesses of the city, would have gone to bed.

  Tina explained that for once she had been given the front door key so that she could let herself in, silently, without, it was hoped, waking either landlady or acrimonious dog.

  Strange things were happening to Wallace Mackenzie — he had never taken his father’s surname — as he experienced his first Scottish Ne’erday. He had his arm round a woman for the first time in his life and it was an experience both delicate and disturbing. She was fine-boned, soft, frail, different, giving off mystery as her hair gave off the smell of soap and oil. Yet wholly flesh. Human. Womankind.

  Leading her through the streets away from the merry-making and the music, he felt as though senses were being brought into play he had never known he possessed. Something was watering his bones, changing his make-up.

  Alisdair Kilgour could make all the threatening noises he wanted. He didn’t own Tina, did he? Who did own her, then? It seemed that part of her existence was already mingling with his own and he wanted the process to continue.

  He began to want to know urgently what had gone wrong between them. He stopped Tina in their tracks and, not relinquishing his hold on her, said abruptly, ‘Why did you leave him, Tina?’ In the dark he could use her Christian name.

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘Please tell me. I want to know.’

  Her tongue was loosened, too, by the dark and by what had gone before. She told him all she understood. It seemed as though someone else took over, delivered this long, detailed monologue in an urgent, monotonous voice. Detail upon detail. Almost as though in terror that he would go away before she had made him understand.

  She was not specific about the sexual details, but she was about the bruisings, the arguments, the painful emotions, living through them all over again, and sobbing as she spoke.

  As they entered the close-mouth of her tenement, he pulled her against his chest and held her in his arms, unable to say anything, unable to move away from her.

  He felt her fingers move on his face.

  ‘Wallace,’ she said, in a small, weak voice. ‘I should never have told you all that.’

  ‘Oh, I am glad you did. You wouldn’t tell anyone else, would you? It brings us close.’

  ‘Close?’

  ‘Oh God, what’s happening?’ he appealed. He brought his lips down on her and pushed his body against hers. Her hands fluttered above his shoulders, then went helplessly round his neck. Her mouth opened to his tongue.

  Gasping, at last she pushed him away. ‘Oh, Wallace, I have to go.’

  ‘Please don’t. I’ve just found you. Stay a little.’

  She sagged against him. ‘It is very wrong,’ she said, almost reflectively, speculatively. ‘I am still married. I’m older than you.’

  ‘None of it matters.’ She heard the desperation in his voice and something in her gave up resistance. His untutored hands wandered ov
er her at will and in the total dark of the tiled close-mouth they were in a green country and a little out of their heads.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They met all through that hot summer of 1911. The ferocious social upheavals of strikes, lock-outs, riots and demonstrations with which the class war came to a head touched them scarcely at all.

  She came from her job selling coats bearing him small, unimportant gifts she had picked up during her lunch-hour — a silk handkerchief for his breast pocket, yellow gloves, a mother-of-pearl pocket-knife.

  On his way from the university he stopped to choose earrings for her, or a brooch, or flowers. And they went to have tea in the Palm Court at the picture house in Sauchiehall Street, or to La Scala, where you could eat and watch the film at the same time. When she laughed at the inanities of serials like Who Will Marry Mary? the sound washed over him like sunlit, crystal water. When her hand lay in his he felt a tenderness that enveloped the universe.

  In the hottest summer for seventy years, when the tempers of statesmen and strikers rose to dangerous levels, when the arteries of trade and transport choked and silted, when services trickled away to nothing, all that existed for either of them was this hothouse love. It blazed and flowered like the roses and pelargoniums, the dahlias and the red-hot poker that flamed in the city parks and gardens from dry roots in a relentless sun.

  When Carlie met Donald, she reproached him: ‘It is all your fault. By bringing Alisdair to that party, you threw them together. He sees himself as her Sir Galahad. He’s that sort of boy.’

  The strikes had thrown Donald out of work at Finn’s embattled factory and he was in no mood to be placatory.

  ‘Tina would have latched on to somebody. She was ripe for the picking.’

  She glared at him in distaste. ‘I hate your crude metaphor. They adore each other. She wants a divorce but Alisdair won’t give her one.’

  ‘Then let Alisdair hang on, then. The other thing will burn itself out.’

  They were sitting in her shade-cool parlour at Queen’s Park. She had drawn the fringed and tasselled dark-green blinds against the glare and he could smell the watered earth round the aspidistra by the window and the softened wax of the fruit on the sofa table.

  ‘You are a cynic,’ she said lividly.

  ‘On the contrary.’ He gazed at her with maddening amusement. ‘I speak from experience. I got over you, didn’t I?’

  He looked away quickly from the expression on her face then. He didn’t know what had made him say it, except that, idle and purposeless at the moment, he found his only pleasure in needling others. Maybe it had been only an emotional scratch-wound, but he shouldn’t have taken his frustrations out on Carlie, who had lent him money for the odd bet and the odd drink when no one else would.

  She sat where she could stare out under the blind on to the sun-washed pavement. She was perfectly still, pensive. In her early thirties she had achieved an elusive distinction.

  The red hair had darkened, changed from wild curls into deep waves worn in a large bun at the nape of her neck. The freckles on her white skin had faded and the bone structure, the fine grey eyes she had inherited from Josie, had come into their own. Momentarily, he let his feelings for her simmer in his veins like a sweet, bubbly wine.

  Even so, the words when he spoke were defensive, rather than propitiatory: ‘It’s bordering on the lunatic to talk about personal feelings when the country could be on the verge of civil war.’

  She flashed him a proud, angry look. ‘That’s just wishful thinking.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ he argued. ‘How can you say that when there’s a national rail strike and nearly sixty thousand military, horse and foot, standing at the ready?’

  ‘It’ll never come to revolution here.’

  He got up and strode restlessly about the room.

  ‘It’s either going to be that, or working-class blood spilt anyhow, in a war with Germany.’

  ‘My father believes we can change by peaceful, democratic means.’

  ‘Your father lives with his head in the clouds.’

  ‘He would say it is you who do that.’

  ‘Ach.’ He made the noise of dismissal in his throat. ‘It’s too hot to argue. All I know is, I’m out of work and thousands like me. It’s a good job it’s summer or the poor in Glasgow would be dying like flies.’

  She pushed some silver coins towards him.

  ‘I don’t want you to starve. But use it for food, not gambling.’

  He picked the money up, and examined it ruefully as it lay on his palm.

  ‘You should have been somebody’s mother, Carlie,’ he said softly.

  She said in a careful, joking voice, ‘But all my lovers get over loving me. Like you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. You know I’m fond of you.’

  ‘Fond?’ She perpetuated the joke, smiling dangerously.

  He said with a calculated boldness, ‘I once loved you well enough and it got me nowhere. Do you want me to talk about how I feel?’

  She looked flustered. Looked away from him. Said in a low voice, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then don’t joke. Touch-me-not is not a funny attitude.’

  ‘I am not touch-me-not.’

  ‘You are. All Suffragettes have that — that sort of fierceness that repels males. Why don’t you give it up, Carlie?’

  She picked up a small silver pennant lying on her desk.

  ‘I carried that in our last suffrage procession in London. All of us who’d been in prison had them. I’ve got Kirsten Mackenzie’s too. The one she would have had, had she survived.’ She gave him a small, forgiving smile. ‘How can you talk about giving up, after what happened to her? No, the fight goes on.’ She looked away. ‘We’ve got plans that will force the Government to listen.’

  He came to her and put a tentative hand on her shoulder. He felt her quiver slightly. She looked up and for a long moment their gaze held. Hers was the first to waver and break.

  ‘I have some tickets for Will Fyfe,’ she said brightly. As a freelance journalist, she often had theatre tickets and took him along. ‘Want to come?’

  He nodded, and began to sing the song that Fyfe had written originally for Harry Lauder, but had now appropriated for himself:

  ‘I belong to Glasgow —’

  She let him out into the hot street. A middle-aged Italian, the ends of his moustache waxed and curled, his face above the stiff white collar beaded with sweat, pushed his yellow ice-cream barrow dejectedly alongside the deserted pavement. On an impulse she bought a slider, ice-cream between two wafers, and carried it, already melting, indoors. She ate it quickly as if for comfort or to stifle sensation, feeling her rooms stuffy and oppressive and suddenly the place she didn’t want to be.

  *

  Sandia held the door of the drawing-room open with a nervous smile and, with a gallows expression, Wallace walked inside.

  A three-tiered what-not stood, laden with seed-cake, buttered scones and thin bread and butter. Sandia rang and a pink-faced little maid brought in a silver tray bearing a teapot and hot water for replenishment. Solicitously, Sandia plied her guest with food, talking about the weather and Catriona. Anything except the matter she had asked him there to talk about.

  When she was satisfied he had had enough to eat, she swallowed and took the plunge. ‘Wallace, I think you know how fond we are of you in the family. So I hope you won’t take what I have to say amiss.’

  A dark red rose on his face. He swallowed the last of his tea, but said nothing.

  ‘Some might say it is none of my business, but I’m the eldest of the family and Alisdair matters to me. Do you think it wise — to say the least — for you to be seen going about with Tina?’

  ‘You mean, if we met in corners it would be different?’

  ‘No, no.’ Her tone was gentle. She took her time before her next words, weighing them carefully. ‘Seen or unseen, I simply mean that what you are doing is wrong. Tina is a married
woman. You are destroying her reputation and that of Alisdair, too. He is making his name in the medical profession. There isn’t anyone in Britain, never mind Scotland, who can do more for pulmonary cases than he can. Yet his strength and peace of mind are being ruined because of what is happening.’

  ‘You know what he did to her?’ His gaze was steady and, despite her agitation, Sandia felt a quiver of reluctant admiration. She dropped her head. ‘Yes, I do know. I think she married him, in the first place, to get away from her demanding old father, and did not love him. So the fault in the first instance was hers —’

  ‘No, I won’t have Tina blamed,’ said Wallace hotly. ‘She told me she tried, but he wouldn’t be patient with her. It’s indefensible for a man to strike a woman —’

  ‘But he was tried beyond endurance. He wanted a wife to comfort him when he was going through a difficult time in his profession. All he got was nervous weeping —’

  ‘I don’t see the point of my being here,’ Wallace said abruptly. ‘You are setting yourself up in judgement of a situation you do not understand. Tina and I love each other and she will never go back to your brother.’

  Agitatedly, Sandia brushed invisible crumbs from her skirt.

  ‘Wait. Let me speak.’ She went over and in a disarming gesture took one of his large, bony hands between her soft, padded ones. ‘I was your mother’s best friend, you know. We knew Glasgow in the days of the first big steamships made of steel, when it was like New York is today, but without the skyscrapers. We thought we were very daring when we came in to drink tea in one of Stuart Cranston’s new tea-rooms! We were, too. I got into fearful trouble!

  ‘But Kirsten taught me not to be too hide-bound, Wallace. The kirk has had a very repressive influence on us all, on me as much as the next person. But I do see that it’s inevitable that some marriages should end. I ask you to believe me.’

  Her face was so earnest he relaxed a little and even smiled. ‘All right. I do.’

  ‘But not easily,’ she pressed on. ‘Not till everything possible has been tried to save them. So I’m going to suggest something to you. It’s this. You should go away from Glasgow, so that everybody concerned can have time to sort out their feelings.