A Pinch of Salt

by Eileen Ramsay

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr McDonald. ‘Do we have your permission, Mrs Inglis? Burns can take them round the village while we fill Charlie in on our plans.’

  ‘Be careful going out,’ Kate called to the children as, permission received, they rushed to the door.

  ‘I’m parked well away from the corner,’ Mr McDonald said quietly. It was three months since Liam’s death but it was still very much in everyone’s mind. He looked up the road as he instructed his chauffeur. Not a car in sight and he doubted that anything had passed while he had been in the bakery. What a tragic fluke the accident had been. Mind you, not everyone in the south of Scotland was so resistant to progress as Kate Inglis. The motor car was on its way. Even Edgar Hyslop was talking about having one. What a boon it would be to a busy doctor and to an expanding businesswoman. He returned to the kitchen determined to argue with her.

  ‘You’ll spoil those bairns,’ Kate smiled at him. ‘I’ve been telling Charlie that you want us to expand again.’

  Charlie stirred his tea thoughtfully before he spoke and the others waited, McDonald quietly, Kate busy with the children’s tea. ‘I’m not an educated man, Mr McDonald, and I’ll be honest and tell ye that all this talk of, what is you call it, expansion – scares me. There’s never been one o’ my family with his own house and here we have this big place and the bakery and enough work for the two of us so that I can hold up my head afore my bairns. But Kate works too hard now. She cannae work harder; it’s no fair to her or tae her bairns.’

  Kate looked at him in a mixture of surprise and pride. Never had he said so much at one time. Patrick was quiet like his father, she realized. She had always compared her son to Liam who had been a quiet man, but Charlie was too.

  ‘Where’s your ambition, man?’ asked the grocer. ‘The years of really hard, sweating labour are over for the two of you. It’s time to work with your head, not your hands. Sit back, relax. Hire more people, a housekeeper and a nanny for a start. Move your family out of the bakery, out of Auchenbeath even. Better schools in the city, theatres, restaurants, art galleries.’

  It was the mention of a nanny that ruined it. If Kate had known the word ostentatious she would have said it. Nannies were for the rich, for royalty, not for the children of a delivery man from Auchenbeath.

  ‘Ambition is a funny thing, Mr McDonald,’ she said, ‘and maybe I don’t have the right kind of ambition. I don’t want to be rich. I wouldn’t know what to do with any more money. I want, we want, our children to grow up to be good people, to have the chances in life that we didn’t have. Patrick will be old enough at the end of this school year for the big school,’ she looked at Charlie hesitantly. ‘We want him to go to the university, to get an education, to be . . . a teacher even. That’s our ambition.’

  The street door had opened and they had barely noticed the children return from their drive in the big new car. ‘A teacher, Mammy,’ said Patrick, who had obviously overheard the end of the conversation. He took a deep breath and looked at his father who never went to the wee chapel with them even at Christmas or Easter. ‘I think I want to be a priest.’

  ‘A very laudable ambition, Patrick,’ said Mr McDonald since Kate and Charlie seemed to have lost their voices. ‘You won’t make any money at it.’

  ‘I want to have a brand-new yellow car every single year,’ said Margaret and that roused her mother from her adoring contemplation of her son.

  ‘Get to your homework, miss.’

  ‘I haven’t had my tea yet, Mammy. Neither has Father Patrick.’

  Had Mr McDonald not been in the room Kate would have slapped her saucy daughter. As it was, her look boded ill for Margaret’s future.

  ‘The child’s right, Mrs Inglis. I’ve outstayed my welcome and you and Charlie have a lot to think about. There is another solution and I’ll have my solicitors write and explain it all to you, a compromise, as it were. You don’t expand but I sell Kate Inglis pies in every shop the length and breadth of Scotland. Don’t worry about it tonight.’

  The compromise was that Kate agree to sell her recipes and all rights to the McDonald grocery chain. By the time the solicitor’s letters arrived she would have sold him anything. She had realized that she was pregnant and, unlike her other two pregnancies, this one was accompanied by all the symptoms that Kate had hardly believed existed. She sold over her rights to her recipes and even to her own name. But a huge cheque went into the bank; no thoughts here about investments or stocks and shares.

  ‘That money is going to sit there in the bank getting bigger and bigger,’ said Charlie to the children. ‘Can you imagine that. Now Mammy’s not very well so you two be good and quiet and maybe she’ll let me take you to the pictures.’

  Kate tried to joke. ‘I’d let Amy Johnson fly the both of them to Australia with her.’

  ‘This is no like you, Kate. Will I phone the doctor?’

  She smiled at him. Charlie had always had an incredible knack for doing or saying something to cheer her up. He hated the telephone and never used the machine unless there was absolutely no alternative. ‘I feel better already,’ she said with some truth. She certainly felt better mentally if not physically.

  When they had gone Kate sat down by the fire and sipped hot, sweet tea hoping against hope that it would stay down, then she re-read the letters from the solicitor and tried to assimilate what selling her recipes and all rights to her own name really meant. Heretofores and whereuntos and the party of the first part. I wish I really understood all this. Again they were back to the question of education, that magic word. With an education, a proper one, Kate felt sure that she could understand the terms in which the formal contracts were couched. She had sold her name. How could she sell her name? She was quite sure that she had never agreed to do any such daft thing. But there were all those pounds lying there in nice rows in the bank, growing and growing all the time.

  Would you like to be an executive, Mrs Inglis of Kate Inglis Bakeries? Should you get a nanny for the bairns and a housekeeper and a fancy car with a man to drive it? Would you enjoy being driven up to Glasgow and God knows where else for executive meetings? Mr McDonald says it’s not too late; if I want I can go in with him and become one of the country’s leading businesswomen. Do I want that or do I have enough already? She stood up. No, it’s done. I’ve told them I’m staying small. That’s what I want, isn’t it, just a nice wee business here to provide work for Charlie and a home for the bairns? She looked around. ‘I’ll walk down and tell Bridie about the bairn. Maybe that’ll cheer Molly up.

  She looked in the mirror as she adjusted her hat, one of the dashing new Robin Hood hats. You look like an executive, Kate Inglis Bakeries, and it was with more than a hint of regret that Kate went out closing the door behind her.

  12

  CHARLIE LEARNED TO drive.

  ‘What’s the point in trotting around behind a wee pony, Kate? We have to move with the times.’

  ‘It’s madame has put you up to this, Charlie Inglis. You would never have thought of it yourself. You don’t even like cars.’

  Charlie refused to be drawn. He and Kate would never agree about Margaret, who wanted to follow her big brother to the secondary school in Dumfries.

  ‘A van will make deliveries faster and it’ll get Patrick home faster.’ The second argument won his case. A van was bought but to Margaret’s fury it was black, not yellow, and had The Toll House Bakery painted on the sides.

  ‘Teach me to drive it, Daddy,’ Margaret begged. ‘It’s perfectly safe around Auchenbeath.’

  ‘Away ye go, you wee monkey, and you not even fifteen yet; you’ll get me hung with your wheedling. Aren’t the cars crawling along the roads like beetles these days?’

  Margaret learned to drive. She kept her newfound skill from Kate as she kept many things from her mother. It seemed to Margaret that the older her mother got, the harder and harder she worked and it was all so useless. Kate Inglis pies were being sold all over the country and yet Kate received
not one penny from them.

  ‘I’d never have sold the recipes and the name, Patrick,’ Margaret confessed to her brother. ‘We could be millionaires now.’

  ‘A slight exaggeration, Margaret,’ said Patrick who as usual was sitting at the scrubbed surface of the bakery tables trying to study.

  ‘We could too. Look how hard Mammy works trying to keep a share of the market in this area. Mr McDonald cheated her. Well, he wouldn’t cheat me.’

  ‘Mr McDonald is a good man. He didn’t cheat Mam; he gave her a very good price for her recipes and the right to her name.’ He put his pencil down and turned to look at his sister. ‘I think Mam could probably afford to stop working, Margaret. I just don’t think she knows how to stop.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to stop more like. She loves getting up in the freezing cold when she could be lying in her nice warm bed. Well, you won’t catch me working when I don’t have to work.’

  Patrick sighed. That was patently obvious. Margaret had already finished her homework and he had only done one assignment. No point in suggesting that she read over what she had written. They both knew there was no need. Margaret’s would be correct and she would remember everything she had written.

  ‘God wants me to work harder,’ he said to himself. ‘It’s his plan for me to test me, to see if I’m worthy. If I get my Highers it’ll be a sign that he really wants me and then I’ll tell Mam.’

  Since the day Patrick had told his mother of his intention to become a priest the entire household had revolved around him and that troubled him but he was as inarticulate as Charlie and could not explain his feelings to his mother. He really wanted to be a priest. Since the day of Liam’s death in front of him he had thought of nothing else, even when Mam talked about lawyers and teachers and doctors. It was a priest like old Father O’Malley, a gentle, quiet man who offered Mass every morning and to whom Patrick confessed his sins every Saturday but not his doubts. For Kate wanted him to be a Jesuit which meant going to the university first.

  ‘If I get my highers it’ll be a sign that that’s what God wants too.’ Patrick knew that it wasn’t what he wanted but he had always done as he was told. He wanted to please his mother. She worked so hard for him and she wanted him to go to university. Not much to ask for, Patrick, three or four more years, after you’ve finished school, of swotting desperately to understand or even remember enough to pass the examinations. Margaret never had to swot; mind you, she hadn’t got to the really hard stuff yet.

  ‘Don’t think, Father Pat,’ his sister would tease since she knew he hated it. ‘Just learn it all off and spew it out at exams. That’s exactly what teachers want; remember everything they say, and write it down to show them how clever they are.’

  ‘Don’t be so cynical, Margaret. Facts are important and have to be learned.’

  ‘Then learn them, Patrick, but I would have thought that why they are important is more important than just reciting them, if you know what I mean. 1066. Norman Invasion. Who cares that it was 1066? Why is the Norman Invasion important?’

  Patrick looked at her in exasperation. ‘The date’s important too. It’s . . . tidier. Go away. You’re giving me a headache and I have loads to do.’

  She looked over his shoulder. ‘The subjunctive. We haven’t got to that yet but I could do your geometry for you. I can easily work the proof out.’

  ‘That would be cheating. Go away and play with Liam.’

  Margaret jumped off the table, her skirts knocking several of her brother’s books and his inkpot onto the floor. Unperturbed she picked them up and dumped them all unceremoniously back on the table. ‘I think I’ll teach him to read. That’ll really upset Miss Timpson. Another Inglis she won’t know what to do with.’

  ‘What’s that, Margaret?’ Kate had come in. ‘I hope you’re not annoying your brother.’ Her eyes softened as she looked at her son. ‘What a lot you have to do tonight, Son. I’ll away and bring you a wee cup of tea and keep you company for a while. If you’re finished, Margaret, there’s ironing to do.’

  Quietly Margaret left the bakery and went through to the kitchen. If she did the ironing quickly and put everything away tidily there was just a chance that she could talk Kate into giving her money for the pictures. She put the kettle on first. That little gesture would soften her mother too.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ she asked as her mother reappeared.

  ‘Oh, you’ve put the kettle on, lass,’ Kate smiled at her daughter, standing so patiently ironing one of Patrick’s shirts. ‘Make sure the iron’s nice and hot now and get a good crease in the sleeves. Your Da’s taken the bairn over to your gran’s for a wee while.’

  Margaret looked in amazement at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘At this time of night? It’s way past his bedtime. I was going to give him his bath and read him a story for you, Mammy.’

  Kate smiled at her daughter and stretched her back in the old familiar gesture. How nice it was to be chatting to Margaret who for once seemed as soft as when she was talking to Charlie. Usually Kate felt that, for some unknown reason, Margaret was on the defensive with her. The thought came – Am I too hard on the lassie? And the answer – No, isn’t everything I do for her own good. Please God she’ll realize it one day.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ she said. ‘Your Auntie Bridie came for a wee while and said your gran was a wee bit upset that Liam hasn’t been to see her this week; it’s been the rain.’

  ‘Granny Molly could easily come to see him,’ said Margaret with an almost vicious swipe at the body of her brother’s shirt.

  Kate agreed with her, but not even to her daughter would she criticize Molly. She changed the subject.

  ‘There’s a letter from Uncle Colm on the mantel there. He’s coming for the weekend; says he wants to take his girlfriend to the pictures. Now, who could that be?’ Kate spoke teasingly, enjoying herself.

  Without thought to the shirt Margaret left the iron and went to find the letter. Colm had joined the army two years before. He had said he wanted to see the world. Margaret felt sure it was to get away from Molly who had not allowed herself to recover after Liam’s death.

  ‘He says he wants to borrow the van, Mam, to take me to Dumfries. Does Patrick want to come too – there’s talkies at Dumfries – and we can have our tea at a cafe. You’ll let me go . . .’

  Kate almost dropped the tray she was carrying to rush to the ironing board. Margaret watched her mother fearfully as she lifted up Patrick’s best shirt which now had a large scorch mark in the middle of the back. Kate stared angrily back at her daughter. ‘And here’s that teacher trying to tell me that you’re the clever one and you can’t even iron a shirt without ruining it. You’re just like your Auntie Deirdre – nothing in your head but the pictures and film stars and that lipstick you think you’ve been hiding.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mammy. I’ll get it out. The iron was cooling.’ Margaret desperately wanted to get her mother’s mind away from the beautiful lipstick, the envy of every other girl in 2A. ‘Take Patrick’s tea, Mam, and I’ll have the mark out before you get back.’

  To her relief, her mother picked up the tray she had been preparing. ‘Is it a good hard slap you need, Margaret Inglis?’ Margaret knew that was a rhetorical question and needed no answer. A smart reply would certainly lead to a slap since Daddy wasn’t here to protect her. Not that Kate slapped her often. Margaret tended to goad her mother but wisely chose times when Charlie was there to quietly diffuse Kate’s wrath.

  ‘It’s a good talking to this lassie needs, Kate, and I’ll see to her while you get on,’ he would say, and Kate would ‘get on’ with one of the million tasks she found to overfill her day.

  ‘Get that mark out, madame, and everything ironed and put away afore I get back or it’s you will be ironing all weekend while Uncle Colm sees this talkie on his own.’

  She didn’t mean that. She knew it and Margaret knew it, but it was a game they played. Margaret set herself to removing the scorch mark, and
was re-ironing the shirt when Charlie and four-year-old Liam returned. Liam was a very important young man. His father doted on him as did his older brother and sister, his aunts and uncles, his grandmother and, when she had a moment to spare, his mother. Dr Hyslop, who had retired to a cottage in the Lake District two years after Liam was born, believed that it was the child’s existence which had prevented Molly from dying of grief, if not from spending most of her day lying on the settee being waited on hand and foot by her devoted step-daughter.

  Margaret scooped up the child who had run to her but carefully stood the flat iron on its end first.

  ‘Hello, my wee lambie. Did you see your grannie then?’

  ‘Put him down, Margaret. He’s away too heavy for a wee lassie like you. He’s near too heavy for me an all. Aren’t you, ye rascal?’ Charlie looked around. ‘Patrick still at the books?’

  ‘Aye, Mammy’s taken him a cup of tea.’ Margaret, still carrying her young brother whose arms were tightly around her neck, carefully lifted the cooling iron and set it down on the fireplace before dislodging the child. ‘Now, I’ll get your cocoa, Liam the lamb, so away and see Mammy. I’ve to put you to your bed.’

  Liam obediently trotted off to the bakery and Margaret started to prepare his supper, but Charlie stopped her. ‘He’s that full he’ll burst if you put anything else in him, lassie. Sit doon and let’s have a wee crack afore the others come back.’

  Willingly Margaret sat down. She loved these times alone with her father when they talked non-stop, or at least Margaret did, about anything and everything that mattered. Charlie would have surprised his wife with his comprehensive knowledge of the latest in fashions, in hairstyles, in filmstars and even lip colourings.

  Unlike Kate, Charlie thought their daughter suited the bright-red lipstick. Against her white skin, and framed by the cloud of dark hair she had inherited from her parents it looked, he thought, very nice. He loved watching her chatter with animation, a look that sadly her mother saw very seldom for the girl tended to be quite wooden around Kate, unless they were fighting when she was too animated for her own good.