Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  There was Tina and there was the war. He had joked to her about being ‘officer material’, but he had a steadiness and at times an almost inhuman ability to endure that brought him respect as well as abuse from his men. The war was teaching him, too, whose son he was. Not the son of quiet Jill and Walter, but the son of Kirsten who had been force-fed for her beliefs, and of Duncan who stood like a rock while the muddy waters of Westminster poured over and round him.

  He could take men on route marches that had the weak ones falling like flies. When they fell out, groaning, he could encourage them to get up again and continue, building up the muscle and the will that would make fighters of them when the moment came. And two days later he could get them to do it all over again.

  In the summer heat and rain, the shelling began. ‘Coal-boxes’ and ‘Jack Johnsons’ landed on the trenches and the men he had known as Big Tam and Snowy and Grunter turned into the first dead men he had seen. The unluckiest of all got hung on the barbed wire with their kilts thrown back over their dead heads and their buttocks obscenely bare.

  He led his men in charge after charge. He was a loner who found no camaraderie in battle, but going ‘over the top’ to the skirl of the pipes he sometimes felt a wild, atavistic shriek breaking from him and knew the men who shouted ‘Madman’ after him would follow him to the last gasp.

  Picking the ticks from his blanket during the lulls, he read the mud-spattered mail that came belatedly up the lines. From Tina, the protestations of love and the little pictures she painted from her memory: ‘Do you remember the time we went to Rothesay and my shoe fell in the water?’ ‘I thought of the day we spent at Rouken Glen and a spider fell from a tree into my hair!’

  ‘Only you,’ he wrote back, his eyes closing from fatigue, the pencil slipping in the rain, ‘only you keep me going in this hell that living has become. I tell you, my darling, when all this is over we must make sure it never happens again.’

  They had lost four hundred and twenty-one, all ranks, at High Wood, but they fought on for another six weeks until there were twice that number dead.

  ‘We are still here,’ he wrote her, with bitter irony. They had, in fact, been almost wiped out, but reinforcements from other Scottish regiments were arriving. Somewhat over three hundred and fifty men, some scarcely blooded, some old, some recovering from wounds.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ she wrote, ‘and I don’t know if I should. But it is your right to know and you must remember I am safe and well and will be properly looked after. I am having our baby. Oh, my dearest, dearest love, be glad for me, as I am to be given this precious part of you. Now we can say we truly belong to each other, for ever and ever.’

  They had to move through a sea of mud that swallowed up the moving animals and the dead men. He tried to envisage how this child would look when it was born in the spring. He wiped the tears from his eyes.

  ‘God guard you,’ he wrote. ‘The autumn rains here are turning to sleet and snow. Last night it was so cold the oranges someone had from Blighty froze as hard as cricket balls and the ginger ale went solid in its bottle.

  ‘I wish you had told me sooner about the baby. I hope it is a girl who looks like you.’

  The Battle of the Ancre had begun in November. Once there had been no way back into the trench except over the snow-shrouded body of a brother officer. He had heard the dead lungs groan and grasp. Struggling on through the snow and sleet, the Glasgow Highlanders, the 16th and 17th Highland Light Infantry together, advanced against the Redan Ridge at dawn on November 18.

  He felt the bullets rattle and whizz around him with an almost merry sound and knew the Germans had been nesting their machine-guns and rifles like hornets all over the area. Men fell like ninepins. Presenting bayonets, he led the survivors on. Something hit his shoulder like a hearty, companionable clap and he fell face downwards. His blood spread neatly in the snow.

  ‘I am better,’ he wrote in the New Year. ‘I thought I merited a trip home to Blighty, but it seems I was wrong. I was lucky they picked me up in time. The stretcher-bearers were Quakers, noncombatants, but braver men you never saw. How is little bumpkins? Tell him/her I send my fondest love.’

  In the spring he could look up from the trenches at hills covered in buttercups. ‘It seems a tender blasphemy,’ he wrote. ‘And why is it that the sight moves me so, when I’ve wiped the tears from dead men’s eyes and shed none of my own?’

  ‘It is a little boy,’ she wrote. ‘Philip Wallace Mackenzie he shall be. I can’t begin to tell you how splendid he is! Eight pounds and four ounces! What do you think of that? And every pound and every ounce resembling his father. I am so happy and proud.’

  *

  Carlie and Donald had just been together to see the baby, with gifts of a silver mug and an ivory teething-ring. Before the birth, Tina had settled into a housekeeping position with an elderly retired minister, who took little exception to Philip Wallace Mackenzie, just so long as he did not hear his cries or see his washing.

  ‘Shades of Grannie Kate,’ mused Carlie in the tram going back into town. ‘That was what she did, all those years ago, when she had Uncle Jack out of wedlock.’

  ‘Poor little devil,’ said Donald of the baby. ‘Let’s hope the world is kind to him.’

  ‘Tina’s besotted with him, anyhow,’ said Carlie. ‘And as his aunt, I won’t let the wind blow on him, either.’ She gave Donald a lop-sided, wistful grin. ‘It’s nice to have a baby in the family. Even a little — what shall we say?’

  ‘By-blow?’ he suggested.

  Donald handed the tram conductress their fares. As her broad beam waggled off up the car, Carlie said, ‘I’m not sure that long tartan skirts are the right uniform for the Glasgow female figure.’

  ‘Are you never satisfied, woman?’ demanded Donald. ‘Think yourself lucky we’ve allowed women on the trams at last. And that it’s only the conductresses who are in the tartan. In the old days it was the trams — well, the horse buses. They used to be painted in their owners’ colours, the Menzies and Macgregor tartans.’

  She reined in his mood of gentle frivolity.

  ‘I wonder why Finn and Kitty have asked us to tea?’

  ‘To show what good friends we are nowadays,’ Donald answered, lightly sardonic.

  Carlie peered moodily through the tram window, unconvinced. In the early days of the war, Donald had brought the workers at Finn’s factory out on strike, because American workers brought in to help what turned out to be aeroplanes had been getting a pound a week more than their Scottish counterparts. Donald had organized the hiding of tools and dismantling of machines that had finally brought about an offer of an extra penny an hour for the Glasgow men.

  Like other engineering strikes endemic in the city at the time, it had stirred up public anger and for a while had soured relationships between Finn and Donald. But the factory had been on an even keel for a long time. Industrial relations were excellent and production high. Finn’s brilliant stewardship had made him a very rich man.

  Coolness in the family, however, had prevailed. Kitty persisted in criticism of Donald whenever she and Carlie met, and Carlie in her turn felt Kitty had grown somewhat high and mighty over her husband’s success.

  She said now, ‘I wouldn’t come with you, except that I like to see the children.’

  ‘You’re a proper broody hen today.’ He grinned at her. ‘If you’re feeling like that, why don’t we get married and have some of our own, before it’s too late?’

  She stiffened. For a long time, there had been no talk of marriage between them. Working hard, she had been content to leave it at that. But with his usual sharp perception as far as she was concerned, Donald had spotted the train of yearning thoughts set up in her by the sight of Tina’s baby.

  Their eyes met, trying to read what lay in the other’s mind. She gave a gasping laugh.

  ‘Should we give it a try?’

  ‘I will, if you will.’

  He held out his arms thea
trically as she got off the tram and she jumped into them. To the amusement of the remaining passengers, he hugged and kissed her.

  ‘What will folk think?’ she demanded, but they linked arms and walked towards Finn’s imposing mansion like two people oblivious of the world.

  Donald announced it as Finn brought them into the parlour where Kitty was playing a board game with the children: ‘Guess what? Carlie says she’s going to marry me!’

  They made a great fuss. Finn brought out his special sherry, Kitty kissed Donald with the first seal of approval for a long time and the children clambered over Carlie, the girls demanding to be bridesmaids in fairy-like dresses and Paterson announcing he would only attend if there was cake to eat, and ginger wine.

  High tea was a spirited affair, though as wartime had brought its stringencies and shortages, not so grand as it might once have been.

  Then, afterwards, while Carlie was led away by the children to hear them play the piano and recite, Finn said with a sudden gravity: ‘Come into the study, Donald I have something I have to say to you.’

  ‘Out with it.’ Donald’s dark eyes sparkled with curiosity. His cousin was circling the room as though beset by last-minute misgivings. If it was to be an offer of promotion, Donald felt bound to accept it. It would show he was ready to accept responsibility. It couldn’t come at a better time, with Carlie’s acceptance giving a new edge, a new thrust to life’s purpose.

  ‘What do you know about Russia, Donald?’ Finn’s head was bent, he was cutting the end of a cigar, studiously avoiding Donald’s first reaction to his question.

  ‘Russia? I’ve seen Pavlova dance the Dying Swan.’ Donald smiled, thinking it was some kind of joke.

  ‘Well —’ The word came out like some kind of report. ‘You’re going to need to know more than that, because we’re sending you there.’

  ‘Sending me where?’

  ‘Petrograd.’ At last he looked straight at Donald. ‘I’m sorry. The idea came from higher up. They need someone there who will pass on our know-how for the Russian war effort. They’ve taken a terrible battering on the Eastern Front, as you know. It has to be someone literate, good at explaining things. You know how complex our work can be. If there was someone else I thought could do the job, I’d send him. But it has to be you. I’ve thought and thought about it and the answer always comes out the same.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘I didn’t want it, but now we’ve got it, I suppose we may as well see this blasted war through. You know no doctor would pass me grade four, never mind grade one?’

  ‘They’re not too fussy about the half-mended men they send back to the Somme, either.’ Finn’s hand landed suddenly on Donald’s shoulder. ‘Look, it’s important. I’d go myself.’ As Donald looked up, he insisted, ‘Yes, I would. It would be nice to make a big, heroic gesture. There are times I envy those in uniform, strange as it may seem. So what do you say?’

  ‘If Carlie’ll marry me before I go, I say yes.’

  Finn shook his hand. ‘I should think there’ll be just about time for that,’ he said.

  *

  The wedding was in the register office and Carlie had new shoes and handbag but no new outfit as she couldn’t track down what she wanted in time. Josie was there, of course, shedding a few tears, but Duncan couldn’t get away from Westminster. Sandia somehow contrived to make a wedding-cake and the little nieces, cheated out of being bridesmaids, had to be content with throwing confetti and picking up coppers when the bride and groom threw coins from the window of the departing honeymoon car.

  They were going to live in Carlie’s flat at Queen’s Park. There, they had one night of married life before Donald sailed on a munition ship to Archangel.

  Carlie threw herself into her journalistic work. With so many men away, there were now opportunities for women there, as elsewhere, and her signed articles, serious in theme but with a light touch, were widely read.

  She tried to imagine what the great continent where Donald had gone was like. The map showed Archangel straggling along the River Dvina. To get there, he would have sailed round the coast of Norway to the White Sea.

  It was a pity, she thought, he had not been sent to Moscow. From her reading, she had this mind-picture of sumptuous Moscow cafés and the Mariinsky Theatre, where little ballerinas stretched their gauzy wings towards the candle-flame of fortune.

  Or Tolstoy’s Russia — would it be like that? Long, dreamy sleigh-rides through the snow, with a portable stove and fiery vodka for company, and feather bolsters in the sky opening their soft contents on the wandering entertainers, the skomorokhi, with their drums and their dancing bears?

  She knew it would not be like any of that, of course. From all accounts, Imperial Russia was starving and desperate. After the resources of the Western Allies had been drained at Ypres, Loos and the Somme, the Russians had valiantly challenged Germany’s might all along the Eastern Front. And then, when winter had intervened the reports were that maybe a million frozen, starving Russian troops had deserted and begun a long, thieving, pillaging trek back across the icy wastes of their homeland.

  The Allies were doing their best, in their turn, to stiffen Russian morale. There was a joint delegation in Moscow and commercial firms had sent in their workers, as Finn had done with Donald.

  But as new reports came in of broken ranks and dispirited troops and there was still no word from Donald, Carlie became desperately uneasy. She had known communication might be bad, but even Finn had heard nothing from the Russian firm he was offering aid. Finn was always calm and optimistic when Carlie sought reassurance, but his eyes gave away his concern. They began a grim game of mutual propping-up. Trust old Donald, they said. He would be in there, demanding an extra kopek an hour or whatever for the workers. Of course they would hear soon. British workers would be taken care of and respected. Wouldn’t they?

  Carlie could keep up the pretence no longer when the papers began to speak of revolution. The Don Cossacks, who had always been the strongest supporters of the Tsar, were reported to be joining the peasants and industrial workers in their demands for food and the other necessities of survival.

  One day there was a hollow-eyed man sitting on the other side of Finn when she called to ask for news. Finn’s face was pale.

  ‘This man has been in Russia,’ he explained. ‘He tells me things are a little — difficult.’

  She knew Finn had dared the man to tell her the true circumstances, but she waited for him afterwards and made him tell the truth. He had been working in a timber works in the Russian countryside. One night a band of desperadoes had attacked the stockade where foreign workers lived. They had battered down doors and fences with axes and murdered a dozen people, chopping off heads and sticking them on poles outside the sleeping quarters. He had hidden under a bunk — the one time in his life when being a bantam-weight was an advantage. And eventually he had escaped. But he was in no doubt of the carnage to come. Russia was in the grip of something separate from the war in Europe. She was on the edge of the abyss.

  Carlie didn’t know how she made the journey home. Once there, she retched and was sick, her mind filled with the terrible images the man had passed on to her. Afterwards, she found herself wailing into the silence, calling Donald’s name. She saw the woollen dressing-gown she had bought him as a wedding-present hanging behind the bedroom door, and she held it and wept into it. She had known all along, in some terrified recess of her being, that this was what Russia was all about. Donald was lost to her in its infinity of chaos, perhaps a prisoner in hiding. Or perhaps already dead.

  *

  ‘If Mrs Pankhurst is going to Russia, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t go, too.’

  Carlie stared defiantly at her father. When she had read about the Suffragette leader’s projected visit to Russia, to take the salute of the Women’s Battalion, she had been filled with a wild, crazy hope and a steely determination. She would be able to find out som
ething about Donald if she got to Petrograd. Two months had elapsed since her conversation with the man who got back and even Finn had admitted there was nothing more they could do here. Official British enquiries about the fate of Donald and other Glasgow workers had drawn a blank.

  ‘How can you ask me to use my influence?’ demanded Duncan helplessly. ‘You know what it’s like there. Murder, rape, looting. Even the journey by sea is dangerous.’

  She had grown so thin that her clothes were hanging on her. But on her drawn and anxious face she pinned a wheedling smile.

  ‘Do you think Mrs P. would be going, with the other top brass, if there was real danger? We’ll go in convoy. And Petrograd is settling down again. Really it is. Kerensky wants to heal the wounds of the revolution, to make a gradual transition to socialism. It should be very interesting — good copy.’ Her voice hardened. ‘I will go, you know, Father. Whether you help me or not.’

  They were sitting on the terrace at the House of Commons, watching the peaceful Thames. She had come to a London bristling with soldiers on leave, some recovering from wounds, taking their girls to see Chu Chin Chow at His Majesty’s or tango-ing at the thé dansant.

  ‘I love him,’ she went on, in the same low, determined voice. ‘When you were away when I was little, and Aunt Tansy bolted and left him, we were each other’s family. He’s my other half. I really don’t want to live without him.’

  He gave in then.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he prompted. ‘But you must stick with the official party. Not do anything silly. That’s if I can bring it off.’

  The journey to Petrograd was almost uneventful. Whatever they said about the stability of the Kerensky government, it did seem to be a reconciliatory one. The troops who had defected from the German front were being persuaded by platform appeals to return to the struggle. If that did not work, it seemed there would be no coercion: that a separate peace might well be negotiated with Germany.