The River Flows On

by Maggie Craig

  1931

  Chapter 19

  ‘Daddy! Up!’

  The young voice was imperious. Robbie, arms folded over his chest, looked down his long length at the child. Arms outstretched, she was reaching up to him.

  ‘Bit of a dictator, aren’t you? Like that chap in Italy, what do they call him again? Mussolini? Come on then, ye wee horror.’

  Reaching down for her, he hoisted her up onto his shoulders. One chubby leg down each side of his neck, Grace Baxter chuckled with delight, and sank her fingers into the dark waves of her father’s hair.

  ‘Ow, you wee bisom! Don’t pull my hair! Shall we run?’

  Grace relaxed her iron grip on his head and clapped her hands.

  ‘Aye, Daddy, aye!’

  Robbie immediately broke into a slow, but deliberately jerky run, designed to shake his passenger up like a sack of potatoes. It provoked delighted chortles of glee from Grace. Kate, following at a more sedate pace along the riverside path, smiled after them. They got on well together, that pair.

  Now and again her conscience still pricked her - when she was having difficulty in getting to sleep at night, or if she woke early on a spring morning. However, as time moved on it had become easier to consign those kind of thoughts to that box of hers and slam the lid on them.

  Occasionally they got out again, like when, worried by her seeming inability to conceive again, she had consulted young Dr MacMillan about the problem.

  ‘What’s your hurry, Kate?’ he had asked. ‘Why not just relax and enjoy Grace? You and Robbie had no problem having her, after all. Quite the reverse, as I recall,’ he added, a distinct twinkle in his eye.

  Kate, embarrassed beyond words, had dropped her eyes under that amused gaze. The doctor could obviously count quite well. Baby Grace had obliged her grandmother Lily by being just five and a half pounds at birth, light enough for it to be casually mentioned that her birth was a few weeks premature. If there were some raised eyebrows at that, Kate knew that most people assumed, as Dr MacMillan did, that she and Robbie had simply jumped the gun a wee bit. Robbie himself, stunned by the strength of his own reaction to the birth of his daughter, had paid such details scant attention.

  He adored the little girl and spent a lot of time with her. It was two and a half years now since she’d come into the world and Robbie had been there right from the beginning, scandalizing the midwife by wanting to be present at the actual birth.

  ‘You cannae do that, Mr Baxter,’ the woman had said. ‘It wouldnae be decent.’

  Surrounded by the disapproval of the womenfolk from both families, Robbie had been forced to bow to the inevitable. He laid a cool hand on Kate’s sweaty forehead before he was hustled out of her mother’s front room.

  ‘I’ll be back just as soon as this gaggle of harridans will let me through the door,’ he said softly, in a voice intended only for Kate’s ears. ‘Don’t go away.’ Bending, he had dropped a kiss on her cheek. As he straightened up, reluctant to take his leave of her, their eyes locked. Kate had never forgotten the look on his face that day. It spoke volumes, said all the things she knew he longed to say to her, about how much he loved her, about the way he loved her.

  She couldn’t return that love in full measure, knew bitterly she wasn’t worthy of it, but she cared for him very deeply. He was her husband, her companion and her best friend, and she would have trusted him with her life - and that was love, too. Of a sort.

  She’d seen too that he was scared, terrified of relinquishing her to the risky process of giving birth. She was frightened too, but for his sake she screwed up her courage, smiled at him and managed a few words.

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  Grace, set down by her father, was running back to Kate, ready for another game of which she never tired. Spreading out both arms at her sides, Kate dodged from side to side across the path. Grace pretended to try to escape. She never did. That was part of the game.

  ‘Caught you!’ Crouching down, Kate wrapped her arms around the .stocky little figure of her daughter, nuzzling her face into her neck. She couldn’t get over the beautiful smoothness of Grace’s skin, or how wonderful it smelled, soapy and fresh and new.

  ‘I think I’ll just eat you for my tea,’ she told her daughter, ‘you taste so good.’ Planting a kiss on the young cheek, smooth as the bloom on a peach, Kate felt a shadow fall across her, and raised her head. Robbie was smiling down at both of them.

  ‘Well, Grace Barbara,’ he asked, ‘shall we go home and see if your mother can find something else to feed us on?’

  He bent down and planted a kiss on the line of Kate’s jaw, just under her ear.

  ‘You taste good too,’ he whispered passionately. ‘It must run in the family.’

  Discomfited, she took Grace’s hand, so that the child walked between them, prattling away as they strolled back to Clydebank after a Sunday afternoon visiting both sets of grandparents in Yoker.

  She wished Robbie wouldn’t say things like that. As husband and wife they had evolved an easy companionship, their family life revolving around Grace, who had arrived so early in the course of their marriage.

  Their partnership was a democratic one. Robbie had astonished Kate, at the end of their first week of living together, by presenting her with his unopened pay packet from the yard. She had taken it from him and looked, uncomprehendingly, first at it and then at him.

  ‘What do I do with this?’

  ‘Keep the house, of course,’ he said easily. ‘Give me back a wee bit for pocket money, and divide the rest between rent and food and anything else we need.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘is that how it’s supposed to work?’ An unexpected shaft of sympathy for her mother pierced her. How often had her father drunk the lion’s share of his pay before he’d even got home? Lily hadn’t had it easy. Robbie, watching the emotions chase themselves across Kate’s face, put a hand over hers, sealing the pay packet between them.

  ‘I earn the money and I trust you to work out how to spend it. My pay belongs to both of us. I go out to work, you stay at home and run the house. We’ve both got our jobs to do - and I want you to take some pocket money for yourself.’

  She seldom did. Emulating Agnes Baxter, she established an emergency fund instead. Kate’s was in a box in the middle drawer of a sideboard she’d bought cheap at a saleroom. Increasingly restless as her pregnancy progressed, she had stripped the piece of furniture back, to its original wood and set about repainting it in an Art Deco style, covering it first of all in white paint and then applying the decoration - the Glasgow rose alternating with her own motif of a rowan tree.

  The project gave her a lot of satisfaction. She missed the Art School, wondered sometimes if she’d been too hasty in relinquishing the grant. She could hardly have gone back straightaway - not when she was growing larger every month with Jack Drummond’s baby - but perhaps it could have been put in abeyance for a year or two. Robbie, she knew, would willingly have minded the baby on Saturday afternoons or one evening a week, but she had given it up and she knew very well that she had no chance of getting another grant, not now she had become a wife and mother. When she was feeling sorry for herself, she told herself firmly that once she’d had the baby and it was old enough she would go back to the local art classes. She wasn’t sure how she would afford supplies, but she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

  She missed the daily companionship of her workmates, although some of them came to visit during the evening or at weekends. Mary Deans, now happily allowed to use her left hand, was one of them. She was walking out with Peter Watt from the Drawing Office. He and Robbie had become firm friends. Mary and Peter were going to wait to marry until Mary had completed her apprenticeship.

  Kate privately wished she could have done the same. In low moments she was bitterly disappointed at the waste of her training. She’d been good at her job and she’d enjoyed it. All his fault, she caught herself thinking one day, and then immediately berated herself. Jack hadn
’t forced her, she had been an all-too willing partner. And despite it all, she knew that she still loved him.

  With too much time on her hands as she grew larger and Robbie nagged her to rest more, she found herself spinning fantasies about Jack Drummond. In her mind she went back in time, imagined him chasing after her that night she’d walked away from his car begging her to marry him after all. Then she told herself not to be so daft. Or so ungrateful to the man who had given her and her baby his name.

  She discovered that holding a brush or a pencil in her fingers was the only way of keeping uncomfortable thoughts like that at bay. She sewed too, buying pretty remnants and stuffing them with rags and stockings that couldn’t be darned any more to make cushions to brighten up their little home.

  Worried by all this frantic activity, Robbie secretly consulted his mother. Agnes nodded wisely, told him about the nesting instinct and instructed him to let Kate get on with it, just not to let her overdo it or lift anything heavy. So he came home from work and helped his young wife with the stripping down of the sideboard, and made her put her feet up more often than she wanted to and brought her frequent cups of tea.

  Then Grace put in her appearance, and Kate, blossoming into motherhood, achieved a calmness and serenity that made Robbie fall in love with her all over again. He didn’t tell her, of course. He was learning how to hide his feelings, seeing how uncomfortable it made her when he expressed them. She was happy with him as a friend and companion. So that’s what he tried to be. Most of the time. Sometimes those self-same feelings boiled over and he just couldn’t help himself. He tried always, whatever it cost him, to be gentle - in word and deed.

  For Kate, as time went on, it became easier to forget what might have been. There was a bit of a hiccup when the Clydebank Press reported, complete with picture, the wedding of Miss Marjorie Donaldson to Mr Jack Drummond. The couple, the paper informed its readers, were to enjoy an extended honeymoon in the United States, sailing to New York from Southampton before returning to set up home in a luxury flat in the West End of Glasgow.

  A bit different from a few days in Millport and a single end in Kilbowie Road, then. Kate wondered if Marjorie knew that it was Mr Donaldson’s money which was paying for it all. Alone in her own house, she laid the paper out on the kitchen table and studied their faces in the wedding photograph. Marjorie looked deliriously happy, Jack his usual amused self.

  Marjorie had tried several times to get in touch with Kate, had even invited her and Robbie to the wedding. She wasn’t to know why that was completely out of the question. Kate had rejected each overture, had gone to elaborate lengths to make sure Marjorie didn’t know that she was pregnant. If she knew, then Jack would know, and that would be unbearable.

  She had worried about Agnes Baxter telling Marjorie or her mother, but the wedding dress and trousseau had been made in London, where the Donaldsons had a flat. It was all far too grand to entrust to a local seamstress, no matter how gifted.

  Bent over the table, Kate looked at his face again. Had he thought about her on his wedding night? She still believed that he cared for her, but he had chosen money over love. She straightened up and glanced across at the baby, sleeping snug as a bug in a well-lined drawer laid carefully on top of the box bed. Money over love. It was the work of a few seconds to move her hands to the diagonal corners of the paper and crumple it up between them. She had a fire to light.

  Taking a defiant pleasure in setting a match to the paper and watching the flames lick up over the kindling and the coal, she forced herself to count her blessings.

  She had Grace and her own home. It might be small, but she was mistress of all she surveyed. Now that she was out from under her mother’s thumb, she had high hopes she might be able to build a new and different relationship with Lily - as equals. There weren’t many signs of that happening as yet, but Kate was eternally optimistic about it.

  The rest of her family - and Robbie’s - were frequent visitors to Kate’s little domain. She had the knack of making everyone feel welcome. Her sister Jessie, in particular, flourished under Kate’s encouragement. She was at teacher training college now – she had won a bursary – and really enjoying it. Robbie, too, was very solicitous with Jessie. It was he who’d gently coaxed her into talking about Barbara again.

  Pearl was a different kettle of fish entirely. There were too many pretty dresses she claimed to have bought out of her own small pay packet, too many nights when, Jessie told her, Pearl came home late from work. Kate confronted her about it one day.

  Exasperated by Pearl’s bland refusal to tell her anything, Kate had finally yelled at her. ‘For Pete’s sake, Pearl! Do you not realize that you could get yourself a reputation? Well, I just hope that if you can’t be good, you’ll at least be careful!’

  Pearl put her cigarette to her lips and smiled sweetly at her sister. Robbie disapproved of women smoking. Kate was going to have to throw the window open wide before he got home from work.

  ‘Careful?’ asked Pearl. ‘Like you were, you mean?’ she said, nodding at Grace, who was sat at the table, happily drawing houses and suns and smiling mummies and daddies on rough sheets of paper with the crayons Kate always managed to find money for.

  Kate drew her breath in sharply. Pearl wasn’t clever like Jessie, but she was shrewd, and she had sharp eyes. Kate often wondered how much she knew and, being Kate, worried that she had set a bad example to her younger sister.

  Her worries about Pearl apart, though, life was not bad. And if Robbie turned to her in bed more often than she wanted and much less often than he did, that was just something which had to be put up with. He was her husband, and he had the right to expect certain things.

  It was harder, though, to put up with the hurt look in his grey eyes sometimes - the look he thought she didn’t see. Robert Baxter was one of nature’s gentlemen. He did his best to hide those feelings from his young wife, but in her more honest moments Kate knew he was both disappointed and hurt by the lack of passion in their marriage. She became very adept at shutting that thought too away in the box in her head.

  Fortunately, Robbie was in work, not at Donaldson’s any more, but along the road at John Brown’s, where the keel had been laid for a new Cunarder. Not just any old ship, but the biggest ever built - one thousand feet long, Robbie had told her proudly, a great liner for the Southampton-New York run. The keel had been laid shortly before Christmas 1930, the first rivet driven home by the shipyard manager. All the men - including Neil Cameron, who had also taken his labour to Brown’s - had cheered, because of the hope the new ship had brought them. Her job number was 534 and as the 534 she was to become famous.

  In contrast to the happy hustle and bustle at Brown’s, things were looking bad for Donaldson’s. It seemed the yard might well become one of the victims of the Depression. Kate sometimes wondered if Jack Drummond was disappointed with the bargain he’d made. She never saw Marjorie these days. Now and again she heard or read something about the pottery studio. Despite the problems facing other businesses, it seemed to be doing well, gaining orders and presumably managing to make a profit. That would suit Jack.

  Kate hoped, quite genuinely, that the new Mrs Drummond was making a go of it. Sometimes she fell to wistfully remembering the conversations the two of them had enjoyed. She missed Marjorie. If things had been different, they could have been good friends.

  Despite her plans to go back to art classes, Kate got her sketch book and paints out less and less often these days, pleading Grace as an excuse. Occasionally, his mouth set in a determined line, Robbie spread the table with newspapers, filled empty jam jars with water and put out his wife’s water colours and paper, announcing firmly that he would look after Grace for a couple of hours.

  Kate tried to respond, but her heart wasn’t always in it. She thought, perhaps, that Grace had inherited some artistic talent. Maybe it would be better to encourage that and leave her own ambitions lying. She would get back to it one day. She was Robbie’s wife
and Grace’s mother. That was going to have to be enough for her in the meantime.

  Chapter 20

  ‘Doesn’t it look pretty, Auntie Jess?’

  ‘It does that, Grace. Everything covered in snow. Even the 534 looks bonnie.’

  Kate sent her sister a smile over Grace’s head. ‘Especially the 534. Mind you don’t slip now, Grace. You could go your length here.’ She extended a hand to her daughter, who was happily skipping between the two young women. It was late on a winter’s afternoon in early December and they were on the way home after a visit to Mary Deans, off work convalescing from having her tonsils out. Mary lived in Radnor Park up off Kilbowie Road. The area was nicknamed the Holy City because the flat roofs of the tenements there were said to resemble those of Jerusalem.

  ‘Except that it’s hot out there, is that no’ right?’ Mary’s mother had asked wryly. ‘I dinnae mind ever being taught at the Sunday School that the Good Lord had a problem wi’ dampness in His hoose.’

  She was right; the flat-roofed design was less than ideal for the damp climate of the west of Scotland, but the residents of the Holy City did have a great view. On a clear day you could see right across the Clyde Valley to the hills of Renfrewshire, or. upriver to Glasgow, the spire of the university standing tall on Gilmorehill. Closer in, the view was dominated by Brown’s, and the skeleton of the 534, which jutted up from the yard towards the sky like some great spire itself.

  The street lamps had just been lit and the pavement in front of them as they walked down Kilbowie Road was already beginning to glisten with frost. The dips in the surface which had been puddles at midday were soon going to be lethal for anyone not watching their footing. Kate shivered in the cold and pulled the collar of her coat more tightly about her. Jessie smiled at her and then at Grace, so warmly wrapped up herself that she looked like a wee ball of wool on legs.