Sitting on the sofa in the sitting room was more of a challenge than Kathy could have anticipated, because she slid all over the plastic covers. She looked across at Jessie in one of the armchairs, seemingly at ease, and guessed it must be something to do with the fact that she weighed about as much as a tea leaf. There was nothing of her; she looked like an animated skeleton, and once again there was that curious attempt not to exist by twisting her legs around each other till they almost seemed to merge. Her thin arms were crossed tightly over her chest, another attempt to take up as little space as possible, or maybe to ensure that she touched as little of the surrounding environment as possible, and one gloved hand reached up bearing the ubiquitous hankie over her nose and mouth. No wonder Harry had gone quietly insane, she thought, living in this mausoleum, with this mentally disturbed woman who would not allow contact with an endless list of dangerous items that existed only in her own head. How would he know if he had transgressed and therefore exposed his mother to murderous bacteria, if he didn’t know what was and wasn’t on her highly personal list? The only way he would know, Kathy realised, was to himself become as demented as Jessie. Was that, she wondered sadly, why he had lost all his early promise and why he had retreated into his mystic world? Maybe it would’ve been better if Claire had been the one left behind to care for Jessie, because Claire had neither imagination nor intelligence, whereas Harry had been blessed with both, so where was there for him to go in this insane situation but into a slightly insane state of his own?
‘So,’ said the voice behind the hankie – she must keep an enormous supply of new hankies about the place – ‘ye say ye don’t need the cash. Whit dae ye dae, like,’ a bony hand reached out in a vague motion, ‘up there?’
‘Ah work in the Tourist Centre,’ Kathy replied. ‘Started off in the tearoom, then moved on tae bein’ a guide.’
‘An’ ye like that?’ Jessie asked, bemused.
‘Aye, it’s good fun,’ Kathy said.
‘It canny bring ye in that much, though, surely?’
‘Well, Ah, um.’ How was she to say it? ‘I write a bit as well.’
‘Write?’ Such was Jessie’s amazement that Kathy wondered if she had inadvertently told her she water-skied naked behind an elephant. ‘Whit dae ye mean write?’
‘Stories an’ things,’ Kathy said uncertainly.
‘Stories an’ things?’ Clearly she had muddied the waters still further. ‘An’ there’s money in that, is there?’ Jessie asked.
‘Aye,’ Kathy replied, feeling about an inch tall.
‘Well, whit kinda thing dae ye write aboot?’
God, couldn’t she just let it drop? ‘I write wee stories for women’s magazines,’ she explained, ‘and Ah write romantic books.’
‘Like Mills & Boon?’ Jessie demanded. ‘That kinda thing?’
‘Aye,’ Kathy smiled. ‘That kinda thing.’
There was a silence while Jessie mulled this over. ‘Whit name dae ye write under?’ she asked eventually.
‘Lillian—’
‘No’ Lillian Bryson?’ Jessie interrupted.
‘Aye, that’s right! How did ye know that?’
‘You’re Lillian Bryson?’ Jessie laughed. She leapt from her plastic-covered chair, went over to a bureau in the corner, pulled open a drawer and took from it a pile of slim booklets, each one encased in its own plastic cover. ‘That Lillian Bryson?’ she demanded, holding one aloft.
‘Aye,’ Kathy replied quietly, recognising one of her romantic adventures.
The two women stared at each other, shocked by the revelations. Kathy was Lillian Bryson, Jessie read Lillian Bryson!
‘Ah read these a’ the time!’ Jessie said excitedly. ‘You wrote these?’
Kathy nodded. ‘Aye,’ she said again.
‘But these are good!’ Jessie said. ‘Ah love these! But why did ye call yersel’ Lillian Bryson, well?’
‘Ah just liked the idea o’ my mother’s name on the covers,’ she laughed, ‘an’ the publisher thought Lillian was merr high-class soundin’ than Lily.’
‘Oh, that’s great, hen!’ Jessie said breathlessly. ‘Yer mammy woulda loved that!’
Watching Jessie’s excitement, Kathy found herself close to tears. She wrote stories for lonely women, tales of romantic love that always triumphed, of beautiful heroines from good families, living blameless lives and being pursued by handsome heroes with chiselled features and fine intentions. Innocent fantasy, that was what she produced, not literature, fairy tales for those who yearned for romance. Somehow the fact that Jessie the whore, who lived in a sterile, pink-and-white house and spent her life trying to fend off the dirt that she felt polluted the world, that deep down Jessie wanted the true love story that she had said she had given up long ago, filled her with pity and sadness. Not for the first time either. There was that other woman, the one who wrote to her about the fictitious men in her books as though they really existed, the one who had become her penpal without knowing who it was she was writing to. That had taught her a lesson too.
She had wanted to write all her life, that was her fantasy and, when Angus died, Rory had let her have his typewriter. She still had it, though it had long ago given way to a computer that frightened the life out of her. If Rory, who was frightened of nothing and no one, hadn’t more or less stood over her, mentally if not always physically, she would dump the computer even now and go back to doing her writing on Angus’s old typewriter. It wasn’t writing of course, not real writing; she didn’t have the confidence to try, so she had – what was it Rory called it? Frittered away whatever ability she had, that was it, because she was too afraid to take the risk of finding out if she had any. But that was Rory, he said what he thought. Angus and Bunty had, he said, raised him with the knowledge that there was nothing he couldn’t do, nowhere he couldn’t go, and so he didn’t understand how it was with other people who hadn’t had them as parents. The old Major, he said, had recognised in the young Angus a ferocious intelligence cheated of the kind of education it needed, and so, being a decent kind of man, he had made it possible for Angus to expand his mind. If it hadn’t been for that old Sassenach Angus Macdonald might easily have gone to the bad, because with all legitimate avenues to learning blocked, all that intelligence would have taken him in some other direction. So Angus got the house and the land, with the beasts to bring in the money, and a wife who had known him well enough and long enough to understand that he had to go wherever his mind took him. And he had passed his beliefs and his vision on to his son, only the two had very different characters; that had been the flaw in Angus’s grand design. He had, himself, a naturally kind and gentle personality that saw the differences in others and made allowances for them, while his son saw the same traits and regarded them as failings. Regarded them and announced them loudly. Rory was his father’s son, but he wasn’t his father. He was talking of Angus’s philosophy of personal freedom one day, sitting by the fireside in the cottage, when Kathy had remarked that he really didn’t understand, that not everyone had a father like Angus.
‘Dear God, don’t!’ he said.
‘Don’t what?’ Kathy asked.
‘Don’t tell me a sob story about what a hard life you had growing up in the streets of Glasgow, being beaten by a cruel father and all that!’
‘You really are an insensitive pig!’ she said. ‘Ever thought of applying to become a Samaritan?’
Rory didn’t mean to be insensitive, but he was, and he couldn’t understand why others took offence. He had no time for small talk or social niceties, he had been raised to be honest and he expected others to be just as honest as he was himself, whereas Angus had taken care not to hurt people’s feelings. And Rory’s honest opinion of her writing was that she lacked courage. He was the only one, apart from Kathy herself and her publisher, who knew she was Lillian Bryson, and he openly disparaged her for it, finding it impossible to understand why she wasted her time on ‘this trash’, as he called it. Wouldn’t it be better to try
, even if she failed, than to go on churning out this lightweight drivel? Her head knew he was right, but she had never listened to her head, and there were compensations, little incidents that bolstered her position, if only temporarily. Like her penpal, Ishbel Smith. Miss Smith had been a lady of more than seventy when their correspondence began, right back at the emergence of Lillian. Miss Smith had been manageress at William Hodge’s, a Glasgow printing firm where calendars were produced in great numbers, she even sent Lillian one as a sample, though it was by then many years out of date. Kathy hadn’t expected to see those damned white Scotties in tartan tammies ever again. Miss Smith, or Ishbel, as she had gradually become, had a staff of many women and girls under her control and, now that she was older and wiser, she knew that she had often been hard on them. She hadn’t realised it at the time and she greatly regretted it in later years, but it was too late to make amends. The reason and, furthermore, a reason she had never divulged to another living soul outside her family and friends of the time, was that she had lost Bruce, her one true love, in the Second World War. Ishbel had been eighteen and Bruce twenty-two, and they had intended marrying when he came home on leave after Dunkirk, only Bruce didn’t come back from Dunkirk. It had taken her a long time to stop waiting for him, to let her dreams of the life they would share vanish in the cold light of day. The shock had caused her hair to fall out, it seemed, and it had never regrown, so even had she felt like loving again, who would’ve taken her? It had made her bitter, Ishbel confessed, seeing all those other women marrying and having children, and then their children doing the same and, she was ashamed to say, she had taken it out on them. ‘There you are, Kathy Kelly,’ Lillian said to her. ‘You never considered that, did you? You never stopped to wonder how the auld biddy had got like that, did you?’ She recalled the day she had walked out of Hodge’s for the last time, having emptied a pot of thick, brown glue over Miss Smith. She had watched her reach up to protect her always neat hair and was shocked, but not displeased, when it came away in the older woman’s hands. Until that moment she hadn’t suspected that Miss Smith wore a wig, and even when she found out, she had felt no pity. Miss Smith had goaded and abused her, as she had done all the other women who’d worked in Hodge’s, but poor old Miss Smith had her reasons after all. It was Kathy’s penance to keep up the correspondence without letting Miss Smith know who she really was, and how could the old woman ever have suspected? This Lillian Bryson she wrote to had some psychic connection with her and her Bruce, because all the heroes in Lillian’s books were Bruce to the life. It brought their romance back so vividly that it was almost like seeing him again, she wrote, and she would always be grateful to Lillian for that.
And it wasn’t just Miss Smith. As Lillian, Kathy supplied the romance that was missing from the lives of a certain slice of ordinary women everywhere. They married men who wanted to be looked after in every possible way and, in return for all the washing, ironing, cleaning and caring, they wanted a little spark that proved they weren’t being taken for granted, even though they knew they were. A smouldering look across a crowded room, a hand holding theirs, the caress of a finger against a cheek, a single red rose, all totally out of the question as far as the men they had married were concerned. Such things never occurred to them and, even if they had, would have been labelled ‘soft’. Lillian Bryson provided that missing spark, and let the intellectuals scoff, because if it made a difference, if it lightened the lives of those women for even an hour, well, that was worth doing. She wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if Angela Crawford turned to Lillian in moments of extreme stress, of which there must be many in her life in Moodiesburn, and the truth was that it filled a gap in her own life too. You could keep the sex. She had tried that and the very thought of it thereafter had made her feel sick, but romance was something else, something Lillian Bryson brought to Kathy Kelly’s life too. But, that apart, Rory was right, though she would never admit it to him. The longer she was Lillian the less chance there was that she might take a chance and try to write beyond chiselled-featured, impossible heroes.
Her correspondence with Ishbel set her thinking of other loose ends in her early life, of her other adversary, Nigel Dewar, and his acolyte, Ida, in Govan. Con was three years into his illness when the chance came to find out what had become of the corduroy-loving pharmacist. He would’ve taken over Wilson’s by now, he might even have bought it out and be strutting about, white goatee bristling with pomposity, master of the little he surveyed. She had been called to Glasgow because Con was ill with another infection that he wasn’t supposed to recover from, only, of course, he did, and she took the opportunity to stroll down memory lane. The chemist shop across from Fairfield’s Shipyard had gone, as had Fairfield’s, but it didn’t take much searching to find a shopping centre nearby in which was housed an updated Wilson’s. They were everywhere. Had she been asked what changes she noticed in her native city, she would’ve said Glasgow had turned into one giant shopping centre made up of countless smaller shopping centres. She went into the shop and asked the woman behind the counter if she might have a word with Mr Dewar, receiving in reply a strange look. Well, could she then see the duty pharmacist, Kathy suggested, in her best English. Out came a white-coated woman in her thirties. Lillian came smoothly to her aid with a plot.
‘I was looking for Nigel Dewar,’ she smiled. ‘He was a colleague of mine many years ago. We lost touch when I left the country.’ ‘Ahem,’ said her conscience, but she ignored it. ‘I just thought it would be nice to meet up again.’ But what, she wondered, would she say if a silver-haired Nigel was produced from somewhere? She would cross that bridge, she decided, if and when she came to it.
‘Oh, that was a bad one!’ said the pharmacist quietly, beckoning her, as she was a fellow pill-counter and therefore of impeccable character, into the pharmacy. ‘You wouldn’t have heard about it, seeing as you were out of the country, but I understand it caused quite a fuss at the time, though there’s no one here now who was there then.’
Nigel, it transpired, had been accosted in the old shop by two men, relatives of a woman who claimed Nigel had deliberately tried to make a sale, instead of giving her sound advice about the urgency of her child’s condition. If an unknown lady doctor hadn’t been there at the time, the woman claimed, her baby could’ve died, and her relatives wished to have a word with Mr Dewar about the incident. There had been what the Glasgow Courts liked to call ‘a fracas’, and the police had been called to eject the men, but an hour later Mr Dewar had dropped dead of a heart attack in the pharmacy. There were so many thoughts going through his ‘ex-colleague’s’ mind at that moment. There was ‘Hooray!’ and ‘Damn it to hell, Ah shoulda been here tae see it!’ She desperately wanted to ask if Ida had been dragged off in a straitjacket, foaming at the mouth, for some reason, about letting Fenians in to Govan chemist’s shops. But uppermost in her mind was the need to keep a straight face and mouth words of shock and a few platitudes, difficult though this was to accomplish. Thanks to the enthusiasms of youth she was now carrying Ishbel Smith on her conscience and, of course, you should never speak ill of the dead, even if you spoke exceedingly ill of them when they were alive and they had richly deserved it. Some you win and some you lose, but still, amid the philosophy there had to be room for a slight snigger or two as well, surely?
‘So when did you last see Mr Dewar?’ the pharmacist asked.
‘Must’ve been just before Easter 1973. That’s when I went abroad,’ Kathy replied thoughtfully.
‘I’m sure it was about then that it happened. It was definitely around Easter, but I can’t say for sure which year.’
‘Ah can!’ Kathy thought, but she shook her head in an acceptably mournful manner and tut-tutted, as tradition required.
‘I’ve often wondered, actually,’ the pharmacist said, ‘who the lady doctor was. I know Mr Dewar was a friend of yours, and we’re all human, we all make mistakes after all. There but for the grace of God and all that, but by all
accounts he did make a bit of a mistake. The doctor called for an ambulance to take the baby to hospital and apparently it wasn’t a minute too soon, she saved the child’s life.’
‘And there was another pharmacist working with Nigel at that time, as I recall,’ Kathy said, ‘a Mr Riddell was it? Tall, quiet, losing his hair, but he’ll be long gone now too.’
‘You mean Mr Liddell?’ the pharmacist said.
‘Yes, that was it, Liddell. I suppose he’ll be dead now too.’
‘No, no he’s not!’ replied the pharmacist. ‘He’s nearly eighty now but you’d never think it to look at him. He spends all his time sailing his boat, bright as a button and fit as a fiddle.’
Chasing Angels Page 28
