Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  The old man was decisive. ‘Fine. But we’ll do some casting too. Get in the best metal experts we can find. I always go on hunches and if the States are anything to go by, the market’s going to rise one of these days for the mass-produced car. We should tool up for a long run. And we can diversify. Make other machinery. We’ll have to find the premises to expand.’

  ‘You want to know the costs?’ demanded Finn.

  His father slumped down gratefully in an office chair. He had been talking with all the enthusiasm of the old days, but he was suddenly reminded that bodies grew tired even if minds and imaginations did not. He said very deliberately and with a kindness Finn had not found in him before: ‘You’ve shown the mettle, laddie. Now I’ll put up the cash.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Josie stood at the door of the house in the Rows, waiting for Duncan. It was Friday night and her house, like almost every other, shone and sparkled with cleanliness and smelled of lavender polish and rubbing-stone drying on the step. Not that she had done the work. Carlie paid for a willing girl to come in twice a week. Josie thought with wry humour: I’m not going to change now. Housework had always been beyond her.

  Friday night. Pay night. It had a feeling all its own. In the shops, children would be standing by their mothers’ skirts, tugging at their shawls, waiting for the free poke of sweeties that came with the groceries.

  The lucky women would get their pay packets unopened. The less lucky, what was left after the pubs closed. But at least last year’s long dragging strike was over. Asquith had intervened and promised a minimum wage in the pits.

  Through the dark came the rumble of a taxicab and one or two wild laddies running after it, trying to jump on the running-board. Duncan stepped out while the engine kept running and felt in his pockets for coppers for the children. She brought him into the warmth and the firelight, turning up the gas mantle at last to display a table set with a cloth of Darvel lace, a cut-glass cruet and his favourite soda scones, with mutton pies from the Co-op sending up their peppery, cold-water paste aroma from a plate on the hob.

  She officiated over the big brown teapot, stirring his tea, buttering his bread; loosing his boot-laces when at last he had eaten enough and was sitting in his mother’s rocking-chair by the bright, warm fire. Just as she had done when they were first married and they’d come home from a stint selling the Miners’ Clarion. He looked different now. He was stamped as a man of affairs. The beard was distinguished. The watch and chain stretched across the dark-blue waistcoat looked as though it belonged there, not like those which the miners wore on Sundays and holidays with a stiff self-consciousness.

  He looked bone-tired but comfortable, his knitted grey socks singeing. ‘It’s good to be home,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not for long.’ She couldn’t smother the protest.

  ‘I sometimes wish —’

  ‘What do you sometimes wish?’

  ‘That I didn’t have to go away again. That the only travels I had to take were to the Rows’ end to see old Baxter’s canary birds, or down to the river to sit in the sun.’

  ‘Has the day not come yet?’ she said carefully.

  ‘If I had any sense, it would.’ He gave her a shamefaced smile. ‘The trouble is, Josie, I’ve never had any sense. I never know when I’m beaten.’

  ‘Do you have to go to Ireland?’ she pleaded. ‘What with Carson gun-running in the north and Connolly matching him up in the south —’

  ‘We have to show solidarity with the transport workers and Larkin in Dublin. If we can get a negotiated peace in the strike there, it’ll do more to stabilize Ireland than all the wild talkers.’

  Josie sighed. ‘Does there not come a time when a man says “I’ve done enough,” and lives for himself?’

  ‘It’s not like you to talk like that.’

  ‘How do you know what is “like me”?’ she demanded, but without bitterness.

  He did not answer her directly, but lay back in his chair for a long time, staring into the small hissing flames of the coal topped up with tea-leaves and potato-peelings. At last he said reflectively, deliberately using the vernacular for effect, ‘Do you mind on the days we worked in the Clarion? And the time you told me our Carlie was on the way? These were good days, Josie. And you have been a good woman. Forgiven me much.’

  Her face wore a stillness that contrasted with her agitated and clumsy movements as she rose and began to clear the table.

  ‘Sit down, woman,’ he said, gently. She put the chenille cover over the table, then picked up the sock she was knitting before she obeyed him.

  He said quietly, ‘I would like to think I had brought you some happiness.’ He looked at her. ‘But I fear I haven’t.’

  She stopped knitting and placed the work on the table in front of her, her hands resting on it, her face unreadable. Then she said, ‘I got what I asked for. I knew how it would be.’

  ‘Did you?’ He stretched a hand across the table and caught hers. She tried to pull it away but he wouldn’t allow her. He looked down at it. It was a large hand, disproportionately, perhaps. The broad band of the wedding-ring had sunk deep into the flesh of the third finger. The veins stood up like purple pathways on the white skin of the back of the hand, the skin itself mottled with the pigmentation of old age, like freckles. The wrist-bone was big, too, protruding like a doorknob, and the wrist thick, not delicate.

  She said, ‘It’s all rough. From doing the fire.’

  ‘It’s a good hand, Josie.’

  ‘Away with you.’ She snatched it back. ‘Rabbie Burns isn’t in it, with you.’ She picked up the sock again, but her face was bright.

  They had few more moments of rest or reflection during his visit home. The Glasgow papers sent their reporters out to interview him; vehement young Labour men knocked on the door, anxious for argument; constituents brought their problems; neighbours dropped in to bask in the reflected glory of the local celebrity.

  The papers wanted to know what he thought of the anti-German hysteria, started by the British German naval rivalry in 1909 and escalated by the recent Balkan Wars.

  The party zealots wanted to know what the Socialist International would do in the event of war breaking out — would they carry out their promise of a general strike?

  ‘If we don’t know what the diplomats are up to, we’re powerless,’ he told them. Josie read in his face something that disturbed her deeply — a disillusion, almost a desperation, as though events and emotions were tugging him ever more deeply into an irresistible, fatal current.

  She looked at him when sometimes he sank into sleep by the fire. For a man not far off seventy, his resilience was remarkable, but in his sleep his face moved her by its near-total exhaustion. It was strange in a man so set on peace and reconciliation, but in these unguarded moments she thought of him as a soldier whose pack grew heavier with each campaign.

  Her heart was gripped with terror and love and with the same desperate resignation as a soldier’s wife’s.

  *

  Finn edged his car through the crowded centre of Bridgeton, in the East End of Glasgow. Extreme care was necessary for no one here was prepared to give the car precedence: they contested its right to be there by stepping in front of it, standing in front of it, even having conversations in front of it, if it so suited them. He placed his hand on the horn and kept it there. Despite his leather coat, his gauntlets and his cap with the ear-flaps, he was frozen to the marrow and worried about his father, seated beside him, catching a chill.

  With a thick plaid rug over his knees and his chin sunk in a huge knitted muffler, Paterson did not share his son’s frustration.

  ‘I don’t know what we’d have done if we hadn’t got the train for him,’ he declared. He was referring to his grandson. ‘I said he should have it for Christmas, and a promise is a promise.’ He patted the large parcel on his knee.

  They had been forced to come all the way out here to an outlying shop, the Sassenach celebration of Christmas
having permeated the large central stores to such an extent that toy departments were all but sold out. Finn looked at the tinsel gaiety of the East End shops: garish mechanical toys from Germany, nuts and apples in the naphtha-lit fruit stalls, tea-caddies and hams in the Lipton windows. In the front of one window, a large tin trunk for emigrating. And, gleaming above the now wet-shiny cobbles, the pawn-broker’s sign, where the Sunday suit and the Apostle spoons of the indigent poor found a place of rest five days out of seven. From a side street came a rattle of tambourines, voices raised in a Christmas hymn and the heavy thump of a big Salvation Army drum.

  ‘It does nothing but rain in this infernal country,’ Finn grumbled. The smirring wet, turning to ice, infiltrated the folding hood and windscreen. Glancing sideways, he saw women in bedraggled shawls, children in sloppy, gaping boots, or even barefoot, tattered clothes plastered to their bodies with the seeping, relentless rain. He thought of his own in Kelvinside, cinnamon toast for their tea, stone piggies warming their clean beds. There was a kind of indecency about safety and warmth when so many went without; but he could see no way of changing the lot of the poor unless they gave up their big families and drink.

  ‘I see what’s holding us up,’ said Paterson suddenly. ‘There’s a meeting of some kind on the corner there ahead.’

  As they rode past they saw a huge maroon banner with the letters PEACE in gold raised above a small makeshift platform, where a man was addressing the Saturday-night shoppers through a megaphone.

  ‘Did you see who that was?’ Finn demanded. ‘It was Donald Balfour.’ His lips narrowed. ‘He’s on a hiding to nothing there. I don’t think there’s going to be peace, Father. Do you?’

  Paterson peered at his son, puzzled by the note in his voice.

  ‘The big names of the Socialist International Bureau are having a peace conference in London, aren’t they? I read it in the Herald. Jaurès, Molkebühr, Vandervelde, Adler, Anatole France.’ Finn recited the names like a litany. ‘But it’s all too late. I think something savage and terrible will happen in the New Year.’

  ‘Come on,’ said the old man. ‘Don’t join the prophets of doom. We’ve found Junior his train set, against the odds. And there’ll be a great roaring fire waiting us at home.’

  Finn’s face was set, almost gloomy. ‘I can’t help wondering what someone like Donald would do, if we had a war. I’ve given him his job back. Carlie asked me to and he’s family, after all. But I think he could be a very disruptive element.’

  ‘There won’t be a war,’ Paterson insisted.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you till after Christmas,’ said Finn, ‘but I’ve had a visit from Whitehall. They want my help in drawing up certain plans for the factory. We may have to go over to munitions.’

  Donald had not seen the car with his relatives in it drive past. He was too busy painting a picture of the future to his restless, heckling yet strangely hypnotized audience.

  ‘If the workers do not stick together and make it clear to their governments there will be no war, then Armageddon will be upon us.

  ‘We shall be in unholy alliance with the Tsar of Russia, against the Germans. Our ally will be this man who persecutes and murders his people, sends his parliamentarians and editors to prison and maintains his authority through spies and assassins. We shall put our own progress back by a hundred years. So, fellow-workers, I say to you, be prepared to strike if they try to drag this country into war. Join your fellow-workers on the Continent. Tell the rulers they must settle their differences by other means than killing.’

  Donald lowered the megaphone and stepped down into the crowd. His ungloved hands were so cold they had no feeling left in them. His fellow socialists folded up the PEACE banner and by common consent they dispersed. The rain was set to win all arguments that night.

  Donald pushed his way through the shopping crowds, watching the shop windows for something to take to Carlie. Some small offering, for although he was working again he had betting debts to pay off and new boots would soon be a necessity.

  He settled for some scented soap, anticipating the look of her face when she got it. She accepted gifts with the elated delight of someone who never expected to get them.

  ‘Hey! Donald!’ said a voice beside him. He turned to see Albie Macausland, Chrissie’s brother. Another man he didn’t recognize had taken up position on his other side.

  ‘Saw youse at the meeting,’ said Albie roughly. He was an out-of-work carter, a man constantly in search of a dram and perpetually scrounging from his sister.

  ‘Thought you might have the price of a pint on you,’ said the other man.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve nothing,’ said Donald.

  ‘What if I said you’d been two-timing my sister?’ insisted Albie Macausland. ‘Would you have the price of a dram on you then?’

  ‘What is this?’ Donald protested.

  The men moved in, jostling him.

  ‘I don’t like to see oor Chrissie getting bad treatment from the likes of you,’ said Albie. ‘She was greetin’, see? Me and my friend here thought we would teach you a wee lesson.’

  Donald tried to move away as they approached the next close-mouth, but it was impossible. The two men hustled him into the dark, tiled corridor and Albie held back his arms while the other man smashed his fist into his face repeatedly.

  When Albie released him, he staggered to the ground and they kicked him, none too effectively in the dark.

  A woman in a shawl turned into the dark close to mount the stairs to her house.

  ‘What are you villains doing in here?’ she shrieked. ‘I’ll get the polis to you.’ Albie and his partner fled into the night. The woman stepped delicately over Donald. ‘Away hame, son,’ she advised him. If he was in serious trouble, she did not want to know.

  He managed to stagger to his feet. He was bleeding from a cut eye and from the nose. When he managed to get on a tram eventually, he drew only the most cursory of glances from the other passengers. Drunks and fights and bloody noses were common, acceptable fare for a Saturday night You were lucky not to suffer worse.

  The woman in the shawl found the scented soap in the close-mouth the next morning on her way to mass. She gave it to the girl at the baker’s and got some black bun in return.

  *

  ‘Dear Aggie,’ Carlie wrote to her Suffragette friend in London. ‘You must have heard what happened to Mrs Pankhurst when she came to Glasgow. Arrested again! But the police had everything thrown in their way — flower-pots, tables, chairs. St Andrew’s Hall was a shambles. We’re not a lot for’arder, are we? I think you’re right to join Sylvia Pankhurst and her East London Federation. It will show the politicians our movement is democratic, not autocratic as many say it is under Mrs Pankhurst herself. You know I’ve always had that reservation about Emmeline —’

  The bell jangled and Carlie moved slowly along the lobby to answer it. She was totally unprepared for what she saw when she opened the door. Her cousin, Alisdair Kilgour, in an Army officer’s uniform. He stood smiling at her uncertainly.

  ‘Come in!’ she invited. ‘What is all this? The best kept secret of the year?’

  ‘Hadn’t you heard about me joining up?’

  She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen Sandia or Kitty for some time.’

  ‘All done on the spur of the moment, anyhow,’ he said. He stood, cane between his hands, in the sunshine of the parlour. She thought how well the uniform suited his ruddy, earnest looks and bristly moustache.

  She poured him a glass of Madeira.

  ‘Might you be sent to Ireland?’

  ‘To enforce Home Rule? It’s a possibility.’

  ‘I hope it doesn’t come to war there. Or anywhere else, for that matter.’

  ‘Inevitable. We’ll be in Europe before the year’s out. I wouldn’t have joined the Army, had I not thought so.’

  She sipped her own glass and gazed at him consideringly. ‘People generally join up to get away from something. Themselves, perhaps?’r />
  His expression set up a barrier of reserve. No one was better at self-conscious dignity than Alisdair, she thought.

  ‘It will be good medical experience for me. Broaden my horizons.’

  ‘I know you don’t want to talk about Tina,’ she offered gently.

  His blue gaze turned away from her. ‘What is there to say about her? She doesn’t see your half-brother any more.’ His gaze returned, probing. ‘Does she?’

  ‘Wallace is in London,’ Carlie said quietly. ‘He was terribly cut up, but he went. No, I should think that’s all over. Tina has her job, and we all see her from time to time. Have tea with her. Go to the pictures.’ She gave him a swift, covert glance. ‘Will you ever divorce her, do you think?’

  He stared into his glass. ‘Things might take care of themselves, without divorce.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded, shocked.

  ‘Bullets find their target.’ He smiled at her bleakly. ‘Well, you never know.’ Seeing she was upset, he said, ‘It was a joke, Carlie.’

  ‘Did you come here to ask me about Wallace?’ she asked shrewdly.

  ‘Not just that. To say goodbye. Be cousinly.’ He rose. ‘Aren’t you going to marry Donald, then? I thought a year ago there was the distant jingle of wedding bells?’

  It was her turn to look embarrassed. She hedged.

  ‘Thanks for the job you did on him, when he was beaten up by those — those thugs last Christmas.’

  ‘Yes, I did some fancy stitchery on his eyebrows.’

  ‘He had been seeing Chrissie Macausland, you know. Not just casually.’

  Her face had changed. It was as though past misery and tears puffed out the tissues, making her look worn, older.

  He decided the best way to show sympathy was to say nothing. To let her talk if she wanted to. It was a strategy that worked, as it did with his patients.

  ‘I wanted to get married. I wasn’t blind to his faults. I’ve more or less grown up with him, after all. I could take the gambling, the occasional heavy drinking, because underneath it all, there’s a good person who wants to help his fellow-men.’ She lifted her head and looked steadfastly at Alisdair. ‘And I’ve always been — fond of him.’ She blinked at tears. ‘More than that, really.’