by Webster, Jan
‘Well then?’ he prompted.
‘I have to find a way to trust him. He says it’s over and done with, as regards Chrissie. That she chased him up. But there have been others in the past and how do I know —’
‘There won’t be others in the future?’ he finished for her. ‘It’s not very good for your self-esteem, is it?’
Carlie smiled again, the tight-lipped, tremulous smile that was more of a grimace. ‘We sometimes don’t have much option whom we love. I can’t help my feelings for him. But marriage … no, I pause there. We’ll wait and see.’
He said slowly, ‘I’m glad you’ve told me. We all bottle up far too much. We can’t bear to face up to our imperfections. Why do you think it’s so?’
‘I don’t know,’ she pondered. ‘Perhaps it’s got something to do with the kirk. It seems to me our religion wears an awful, unforgiving face. Can that be right?’
‘I don’t think so.’ She saw he was becoming more relaxed, but it was still difficult for him. Touched by his awkwardness, she invited, ‘Stay to supper.’ He accepted eagerly.
‘I can talk to you more readily than the sisters,’ he admitted. ‘They do tend to judge one.’ They exchanged cousinly smiles of trust and amity.
*
Sandia had met Kitty in Buchanan Street so that they could spend the afternoon picking ribbons for the children’s new Sunday hats. Usually the prospect of a leisurely trip into town pleased her, but today she was low-spirited. Before she had left home, she and Dandy had been discussing the Sarajevo business again. He’d always taken a reassuring line when she’d worried that the assassination could spark off a war. Hadn’t there been trouble in the Balkans for as long as anyone could remember? But now all Army leave was cancelled and there were rumours that the Home Fleet was moving north up the Channel. Even Dandy was finding it hard to sustain an optimistic attitude.
Sandia flopped in the tea-room chair, absently buttering a scone and only half-listening to Kitty’s account of little Paterson’s precocious sayings. Irritated by her lack of attentiveness, Kitty demanded: ‘What’s up, Sandia? You’re miles away.’
She wondered if she should tell Kitty. ‘I dreamt last night of crosses, Kit. Fields and fields of them. Rows and rows. White ones. I had gone to look for flowers but there were none. Only crosses. They made me feel so sad. I began to cry in the dream and I woke myself crying.’
‘What did you have for supper?’ Kitty said.
Sandia smiled wanly. ‘It wasn’t that kind of dream. It was more a Grannie Kate kind. You remember she used to say I was fey? Highland nonsense, of course.’ Her eyes seemed heavy-lidded. ‘But if I believed in such things, I would say it was a premonition.’
‘Don’t.’ Kitty shivered. ‘I have enough gloomy forebodings from Finn these days. They’re tooling up for something quite different at the works. He won’t tell me what but I’m sure it’s munitions.’
The sisters walked out to the street, where arm-in-arm they forced themselves towards more cheerful conversation. In some way, the familiar shops and trams, even the match-sellers and flower-girls, had become fresh and precious to them again. There was something, the scent of change and disorder in the air, and they didn’t want to acknowledge it. They held it off with their quick smiles and laughter, the trifles bought in the haberdashery and the exchange of polite and gracious formalities between themselves and the tradespeople.
Going home in the tram, it seemed to Sandia she had never seen her city look so seductively beautiful. A well-ordered place. She felt a quick twinge of conscience. Of course, there was poverty. She hated when she saw its evil manifestations. She gave generously to the many societies which sought to alleviate it But she did not know how to be a rebel, a leader, a reformer. She knew only how to look after her own. She felt she had possibly been narrow, even selfish, but she could not change now. She was in her mould.
Deep in reflection, she was jolted back to reality by a shout from a man sitting behind her.
‘Did you see that?’ He was pointing excitedly out of the tram window at a newspaper placard, his wife on her feet the better to follow his gaze. ‘It says “Jaurès Assassinated,”’ he cried. The news ran through the tramcar in a ripple of excited conversation.
Sandia thought at first: jauries, that’s the game of marbles that children play. Then her mind focused properly and she realized they were talking about the French Socialist leader, friend of her Uncle Duncan. Murdered? The bright day was shot once again with shadows.
Two days later, Dandy brought in the evening paper with a picture of her Uncle Duncan on the front page, attending a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in London, calling for a general strike by British workers ‘to stop the war’. The Labour Party had issued a manifesto to the same effect.
‘There can’t be a war.’ Sandia found herself saying the words over and over again. She could settle to nothing.
But four days after the Jaurès affair, the newsboys of Glasgow filled the streets with their clamour. War had been declared on Germany by Britain, her Dominions and her Empire. Sandia was no different from the other women in the city. Between the urgent conversations, the bursts of anger against the Kaiser, she withdrew blank-faced into herself, thinking of the men who would have to go and fight.
There was George in the Mercantile Marine. Alisdair, already in uniform. She was glad that her other brother, Andrew, had retired from the Army and was tea-planting in India.
‘It’ll all be over by Christmas,’ she told Dandy. ‘That’s what everyone is saying.’
Her beloved Glasgow, which had expanded since her girlhood to encompass a million souls, seemed to jerk like a bad reel in a moving picture into urgent, febrile animation. The easy-going days of shopping, football, tea-rooms, picture-going, music in the park, faded into limbo.
Kitchener appealed to the country for 200,000 volunteers and in Glasgow the trades and professions conducted their own recruiting campaigns. Illuminated tramcars bumped their way round the city, persuading the wavering to join the Tramway Battalion, which was to be the 15th Highland Light Infantry, while the Chamber of Commerce summoned enough volunteers to make up the 17th Battalion.
Khaki-clad figures streamed in and out of the stations. The paper-sellers bawled out the heavy headlines with incoherent dramatics. Women seeing their sons or husbands off on service wandered the streets blankly, sat in tea-rooms sipping cups of tea they did not taste.
Butter went up by threepence a pound and bread was dearer. A woman wrote to the papers that perhaps war was necessary, as the population was increasing at too fast a rate. Sandia remembered Kirsten and what she had said about birth control, that night more than thirty years ago when they had intrepidly paid their first visit to a tea-room and the glamour of the Empire’s second city had ensnared her heart for good.
She wished Kirsten had lived to see the new status women were at last achieving, even if it had taken the outbreak of war to do it. Those in prison for Suffragette activity were released to work in munitions and special services. Would Kirsten perhaps have stood out against the war? Sandia wondered. Sylvia Pankhurst did. But Emmeline, her mother, was wholeheartedly in support of it and handed out white feathers to young men who would not volunteer.
Far from being over by Christmas, the war had escalated by then and German warships had shelled Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, killing over a hundred people. In January, the first Zeppelin raid took place on Yarmouth, Cromer and King’s Lynn. By May, the name Ypres had entered everybody’s vocabulary, the Germans had used chlorine gas for the first time and America, shocked by the callous sinking of the Lusitania, with 1100 drowned, was no longer talking with quite the same passion about the necessity of remaining neutral.
Sandia heard that Paterson and Honoria had given up all claim to Dounhead House for the time being that it might be used as a hospital. She herself began collecting linen for Red Cross bandages and organized knitting parties to make comforts for the troops.
Soo
n after, Alisdair came to say goodbye.
‘Mother would have been so proud of you,’ she told him, holding him close. She could not judge the look on his face exactly: it might have been relief or expectation. He kissed her and put her away from him firmly. ‘Keep an eye on Tina,’ he asked her.
She nodded. She didn’t cry when she waved him off. Women were learning to put a brave face on it. Besides, when would the weeping end, once started, when every door and gate that opened was for another, and another, and another, leaving Blighty to put the Kaiser in his place?
Chapter Eighteen
Tina Kilgour had been to church and heard the minister pray for the boys at the Front. You could see the change in the congregation now — fewer young men and even the fathers of families missing. Since breaking up with Wallace, she had started church-going again because it helped to fill the terrible blank of Sundays. It was part of her weekly programme, like washing her hair on Fridays, visiting Sandia on Tuesdays, which helped to give some kind of shape and meaning to her days.
In church today she had thought of her husband, Alisdair. Each week, her wife’s allowance came and she put it away, untouched. The fact that she was able to work and support herself was sustaining to her pride. As a separated wife, she had little enough status. But her work made her feel useful and she had recently earned some promotion. It was important to put on a show of managing, of being someone to whom respect, if not admiration, was due. There were some in the congregation who still refused to nod or speak to her, because of Wallace. But if they expected her to cringe, then they did not understand her character. God knew what she had given up, on relinquishing Wallace, and if God forgave her, then those whose lives were narrow and unfulfilled did not matter.
It was strange: sometimes how she couldn’t remember what Alisdair looked like. His body had always been alien to her. She realized this now. She had married him without knowing in the least what it was to love someone, thinking it would be enough to run a man’s house for him, and cook his meals and use his name in store accounts.
She had wanted to be married. Her shyness and nervousness had not made her popular with the brasher types of young men and when she had met Alisdair at a church soiree he had seemed sensible, undemanding, the first and only way out of the dull, unhappy existence she lived with her silent, evil-tempered father. She had liked the idea, too, of being a doctor’s wife, when some of her more confident girl-friends had done less well in the marriage stakes, and married clerks or artisans.
So in church she had remembered Alisdair, not what he looked like, but his baffled, angry spirit, and had prayed that her foolish, selfish ineptitude in their marriage be forgiven. She had tried to picture him mending the broken bodies of wounded men: that somehow unformed boy’s face that gave away so little of the intelligence beneath hovering above stretchers and makeshift operating tables. But he escaped her. She could feel humbled by his task, but untouched by the memory of their days together. There had been blows and cruelty, after all. Maybe forgiveness was best served by turning the mind, deliberately, to something else.
She had a word with the minister at the church door about helping to collect for the fund for wives and children of serving men, many of whom were in dire straits on the Government’s twelve shillings and sixpence a week. And she promised the minister’s wife that she would knit some more socks and balaclavas.
After the stone chill of the kirk it was pleasant to walk along the flower-bordered paths, past the quiet of the little kirkyard, just breathing in the soft air and letting her thoughts wander.
On Sundays, her landlady made a plain and wholesome dinner of broth, mutton and a pudding and they ate it together in the spotless tenement kitchen. Afterwards, refusing even to knit or sew on the Sabbath, her landlady read the Bible and in her own room Tina pressed and mended her clothes ready for the new week. She was in no hurry to get back to the pre-ordained ennui of such a programme. She stared at the lichen-covered stones in the older part of the kirkyard — here Eliza, Jane or Mary; there a week-old babe or a servant of the Lord buried in the fullness of his days.
‘Tina.’
She thought at first she had plucked the sound out of the quiet air. Imagined it. Even that was enough to spin her round on her heel so that, facing him, she knew it was no chimera.
‘Wallace!’ she cried. He put out a hand to steady her. Her face had gone daisy-white.
He began to speak quietly and urgently to her. ‘I thought you might be at church. I just came to say goodbye. I’ve been training in Scotland. Joined the Highland Light Infantry, as you can see. Thought with a name like Mackenzie, it was only right.’ He stood looking down at her as though drinking her in, his face alight with pleasure while his eyes held wariness of her censure.
‘They’ve made you an officer,’ she said. She was beginning to tremble, and her lips felt stiff.
‘God knows why,’ he said lightly. ‘I showed them how to de-louse our billets by running a blow-lamp along the seams of the floor-boards. Obviously thought I could be a leader of men.’
‘You’re too young,’ she said slowly.
‘Not as young as all that.’
‘To me, you’re young,’ she persisted. ‘You are seven years younger than I am, after all.’
‘It never mattered to us, Tina, did it?’ he demanded. ‘To me, you’ve always been just right. In age, in beauty, in everything. My Tina. My girl.’
Her breath began to catch and she realized she was sobbing.
‘You shouldn’t have come here. It was all over.’
‘I had to.’ She felt his hand tighten on her arm to the point of pain. ‘I couldn’t go away and not see you. It didn’t make sense. I came up here to join up because I thought: I might see her. Even in the street. It’s not all over, Tina, and now I see you again, I don’t think it ever will be.’
His pain overwhelmed her own. She said gently, almost cajolingly, ‘My dear, I never want to hurt you. You look so well in your uniform. Let’s walk a little here, where no one sees us. Tell me — when is it you go?’
‘Day after tomorrow.’
Now that she saw him again, nothing about him had changed. Eyes, mouth, hands. That concentration of expression, that earnestness that had been one of the first things to attract her. The straight back in its immaculate officer’s uniform set up powerful reverberations in her mind. He should be wearing the old Norfolk jacket of brown tweed, the one that brought back now its own smell and texture …
She said stupidly, ‘They can’t take you so soon.’
‘Come out with me tomorrow night. It’s all I ask.’
There was no way she could refuse him. It was as though her emotions were hurling her down a great hill at a breakneck speed, too fast for her to analyse any of them.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right. Where shall we meet?’
‘At the Ca’doro? At five. I’ll book tickets for a show. Something cheerful.’
She would have to find some way of leaving work early. Plead a headache. Anything. It didn’t matter. Her fingers were laced up in his, their steps matched, her legs were functioning properly once again.
‘I wish we could have met tonight,’ he said. ‘But I’m on duty.’
‘Tomorrow will soon come.’
‘Will you think of me every minute till then?’
She laughed, all unconscious of the pretty sound she made and how beautiful laughter made her.
‘I don’t suppose there’ll be any help for it,’ she said.
She had to go home and eat the stolid Sunday lunch as though nothing had happened. The next morning, she had to explain why she had suddenly decided to wear her best things to work — she had just felt like it, she said, to cheer herself up.
They had a pleasant meal together and then in the theatre they sat among other Army couples, singing ‘Joshua’ and ‘Hold Your Hand out, Naughty Boy!’ They had gone to the first house of a variety show so that they would have a little time together, just to wal
k and talk, before he caught the last tram back to the barracks.
In the dark close-mouth, they said their farewells. It was where it had all begun, in the dark. She had been determined that if he kissed her, it would stop at that. But it was hopeless, just as it had always been. She forgot everything, the scruples about vulgarity, Alisdair, what They might think.
In the end, she wanted him as much as he wanted her and it did not matter that it was a close-mouth coupling or even that someone might pass them and curse. As it had been the first time, they were in a green country and again a little out of their heads.
*
Wallace Mackenzie went to France with a picture of Tina in his pocket-book. As he route-marched his men through the boiling French landscape that summer of 1916, her memory was seldom far from his mind.
He often thought that it was Tina he was fighting for: not his father, Duncan, to whom he would never feel close. Not even his foster-parents, who had been so proud of him for volunteering, but who seemed to have faded into a childhood image of their silent, Suffolk background. It was Tina who had given him the greatest moments of happiness in his life. And when this lot was over, he was determined he would find some way for them to be together. If she could not face up to divorce, he would take her away to Australia or Canada and they would simply live together. He knew his stronger will would eventually prevail.
He never brought the photograph out in his billets. His brother officers regarded him as a bit of an unknown quantity. When they talked about girls, he was silent, a small, secretive smile playing on his lips. He let them think what they liked.
Sometimes the married men under him queued in the French towns for ‘a bit of grumble and grunt’, paying two francs for the very real possibility of getting a dose of the clap. He thought they were beneath contempt. He struggled to compose poems to send home to Tina. Poems full of passion and high ideals that brought her bright-eyed and palpable into his mind’s eye.