‘I couldn’t give her name.’ Janie was frightened by the anger in Beulah’s voice. ‘I just couldn’t give my Grandmother’s name. She doesn’t smoke. And she’s a lady, you see.’
‘A lady is it?’ Beulah’s face closed nearer till it almost touched Janie’s own face. ‘So it’s Grandmother is a lady? But the McPhee has to feed it. Highland pride and scab and hunger!’ A harsh quality had entered Beulah’s voice. ‘The lady Grandmother doesn’t give you rice, does she? No. No fear of that.’
Janie’s fear left her, she was filled with an incomprehensible anger against Beulah. ‘My Grandmother gives me soup. She gives me it in a blue bowl with roses round it. And a spoon that shines like anything. My face looks twice as fat when I look at it in her shining spoon. When we have pudding we get another clean spoon. She would give me rice too, if I stayed with her. But it’s too far away for me to stay with her. I don’t know her address, but I know the road to her house. It’s away in the country. In Grandmother’s country.’
‘We would have got some rice too,’ Gertie grumbled, when herself and Janie were safely away from Beulah’s curses. ‘We’d have got it if you hadn’t said that your Grandmother’s a lady. That made Beulah awful mad. Besides,’ Gertie went on suspiciously, ‘it’s a funny thing, Janie, I’ve never once seen your Grandmother. She never comes to the Lane, does she now?’
‘No. And do you know why she doesn’t come, Gertie, she doesn’t like the smell of cats. She lives in a red house on top of a hill. It shines like anything. I’m glad she doesn’t come to the Lane to see us. Someday I’ll ask her just to pass by the causeway. I’ll ask her hard to do that. Just so that you can see she is real. She’ll be wearing a black hat with a purple feather, and she carries a stick with a gold handle. And she’s got a dog called Bruce. You’ll see all that when my Grandmother comes.’
‘Do you know something, Janie?’ Gertie asked, anxious to make up for her unbelief. ‘That old bitch Beulah wasn’t in a dwam at all. She just wasn’t ill at all. Janie, she winked to me after you’d gone to beg tobacco for her.’
Janie knew that now. And with the knowing, also knew that she didn’t want to be a real tinker any more.
five
THIS was the time to catch the Lane unawares. This early hour. Before day took over. The Lane still slept. Its grey face relaxed; a fine mist drifting up through the causeway mellowed its gaunt tenements. Soon the dustman’s cart would clang and alarm the Lane into wakefulness, but now only furtive cats padded across its cobblestones.
Leaning from the high window at 285, Janie watched it all. Excitement had banished her sleep. More, her frock and her liberty bodice, washed in the dying minutes of the previous night, hung over the window-sill to dry. It wasn’t the first time that Janie’s sole wardrobe had fallen from this drying place on the window-sill into the gutter below. This was one time when no such risk could be taken. Today she was going to visit her Grandmother.
The rarity of a visit to Grandmother magnified it into a high occasion. And although such visits never lasted longer than a day, that one day encompassed so much that was strange to the Lane, that Janie looked on it with the apprehensive sense of seeing it for the last time.
Her liberty bodice still felt damp. That didn’t worry her, it could dry when it was on her, and nobody saw your liberty bodice anyhow. And, if the worst came to the worst, her print frock would dry in front of the gas-ring.
The first of the workers went clattering past now; then the bairns would follow with their pillow-slips, in a great rush to Riley’s back door to get the first chance of yesterday’s loaves. Janie watched impatiently for a sight of Gertie. Like a genie, fretting to get out of his bottle to work his magic. It seemed so long in coming, that moment for shouting: ‘I’m off to see my Grandmother today, Gertie. Didn’t I tell you last night that she was real?’
Last night Janie had arrived home, after her encounter with Beulah, to find her Mother home before her, sitting wiggling her toes and silently watching them wiggle; this was one of her Mother’s ‘thinking’ attitudes, so it wasn’t really a surprise to Janie when her Mother stopped wiggling and announced abruptly: ‘I was thinking we’d go to see Grandmother the morn. A day away will do us both good. You’d better get your clothes off and nip into your bed, till I give them a wash through. You ought to have been home long since. Where did you get to till this time of night?’
‘Just down to the Green. To Beulah’s caravan.’
‘Not one word out of your head to your Grandmother the morn, about Beulah,’ Liza warned. ‘God only knows what she’d think about you hobnobbing with all the tinkers in the town.’
‘Not a word, Mam,’ Janie agreed, struggling out of her bodice and beginning to share her Mother’s anxiety over the visit. ‘There’s only one button on my bodice. I always think Grandmother can see right through my frock to the lost buttons on my bodice.’
‘Hardly,’ Liza laughed. ‘Your Grandmother can see far, and deeper than most, but she just can’t see through your frock. I’ll stitch your bodice together when it’s on you, tomorrow.’
The bairns were running down the Lane now. Gertie stopped under the window. ‘Coming, Janie? Betsy’s just got back from Riley’s with loads of stale cakes with pink ice on them. We won’t get none if we don’t hurry.’
‘I can’t.’ Loads of stale cakes with pink ice on them momentarily clouded Janie’s other prospect. ‘I can’t, Gertie. I’m standing here mother naked. All my clothes are washed.’
‘What are they all washed for?’ Gertie shouted up curiously.
‘Because I’m going to see my Grandmother today. That’s what. If it’s appletime at Grandmother’s, I’ll bring you back loads. There’s hundreds of apple-trees.’
‘Come away from that window,’ Liza grumbled from the bed. ‘And pull it down, you’re letting the draught in and I’m freezing. What time is it?’
‘Gone seven. The mill hooter went a while back. It’ll soon be time to go to Grandmother’s.’
‘What like’s the weather? If it promises rain, we’d maybe better bide at home,’ Liza said, beginning to regret the necessity of getting up so early.
‘It’s not raining, Mam.’ Janie was alarmed. ‘There’s a mist. It’s going to be a fine day. And you promised we’d go.’
‘Oh, all right. Fling over my corsets. They’re under the chair somewhere.’ Anger crept into Liza’s voice. ‘And my stockings, there! On the fender. It’s the damned last time I’ll promise anything.’
Janie searched unbidden for her Mother’s shoes and skirt, quietly, wordlessly. In moments like these it just took one word, one false move to wreck a promise.
The real business of going to see Grandmother had begun. Liza sat on a corner of the table counting the money in her purse. Janie, watching her, prayed silently: Let there be enough money for two train tickets. Please let there be enough money for the two of us. If not, I’ll have to hide under the carriage seat again and I’m afraid that the Ticket Man will catch me one day.
‘There’s enough for my ticket,’ Liza said. ‘You’ll just have to hide under the seat. Or, maybe,’ she considered, looking out of the window, ‘maybe we could walk there, and have enough for both our train fares back.’
Janie seized the alternative, before her Mother could change her mind.
‘That’s a good idea, Mam. If we walked we’d have enough for your tobacco then. You can smoke all the way to Grandmother, and sing Rolling Home To Bonnie Scotland all the way back in the train without having to worry about the Ticket Man.’
‘We’d better get on our road then,’ Liza agreed, still looking out of the window. ‘It’s a sea mist that’s in it. Mist from the hill brings grist to the mill. But mist from the sea brings honey to the bee.’
It was spring along the road to Grandmother’s country. Not the dusty, daffodiled, yellow spring that Janie glimpsed on the barrows in High Street, but a spring that was sharp and white. Star of Bethlehem flowers clustered together in grou
ps, like milestones flashing along the way. Hawthorn wound itself in thorny whiteness, smelling like heartbreak, if heartbreak could smell. The great fir wood of Laveroch shadowed the road; yellow primroses and blue vetch lost their own colour in its shadow, pale, like the wood’s own wild, white anemones drifting down the banks.
‘This is Grandfather’s wood, isn’t it, Mam?’ Janie knew the answer, but wanted to hear it all again.
‘Aye. Every inch of it,’ Liza said, wanting to tell it all again. ‘There’s no one so acquaint with a tree as your Grandfather. He can tell if it’s in good heart just by listening to it. When I was little, I used to think he could speak to the trees.’
‘He never speaks to me,’ Janie remembered. ‘Not once ever. He just looks at me.’
‘That’s his way,’ Liza said casually. ‘He seldom spoke to us as children. And we never spoke to him until we were spoken to.’
‘Was he a wild man, then?’ Janie asked, thinking it very possible that he was.
‘No. Your Grandfather never lifted his hand or voice to any of us in anger in his life. It was never necessary. A look from him was enough.’
‘Was Grandmother afraid of a look?’
‘Never her.’ Liza laughed. ‘Your Grandmother could manage him. She always knew the right moment to speak. That was all that was to it. And Grandmother knew it.’
‘I like Grandmother best,’ Janie said decidedly. ‘Did you like her best when you was little, Mam?’
‘No, Janie. I was Grandfather’s favourite. He tried not to show it. But you just always know when you’re somebody’s favourite. I was always Miss MacVean to Grandfather. ‘Where’s Miss MacVean?’ he’d shout, when he led the men and horses home. He’d lift me up beside him and I’d ride home on the first horse as proud as anything. We’ll take the short cut through the wood now,’ Liza concluded abruptly. ‘Mind your feet jumping that ditch.’
Janie wondered at her Mother’s easy intimacy with this country; her quick recognition of the flowers in the woodworkers’ gardens, with names unheard of in the Lane; Snow in Summer, Dead Man’s Bells, Love in a Mist, Thyme, yellow St. John’s Wort, pink-starred bramble-blossom. ‘There’s going to be a good crop of brambles the year.’ Liza cast an experienced eye over them. ‘We’ll need to come for a day in autumn for the bramble picking.’ They wouldn’t of course. But Janie had learned to enjoy the prospect more than the reality.
The wood thickened and dimmed. Great patches of wild hyacinths waved darkly blue. The sky was crowded out. Moss sprang beneath their feet, and the dust of it rose like thin smoke. The foosty guff of an ancient wood drifted over and past in great imprisoning waves. The Hangman’s Tree loomed high in this dark heart of things. ‘Tell me all about it again, Mam,’ Janie pleaded, fearful but fascinated.
Liza, in one of her rare, enchanting moods, willingly complied:
There was a man that wadna’ hang
Three times upon a tree.
Three times they strung him up aloft
But never hang wad he.
‘Why couldn’t they hang the man, Mam?’ Janie kept the question till well away from the darkness of the Hangman’s Tree.
‘I’m not sure.’ Liza considered carefully. ‘It may be, you know, that he was so bad a man that even the Devil didn’t want him.’
But there were others, less wicked, who had hanged on the gallows tree. MacPherson was one. The fiddler. ‘And anyone that had music as deep as he had couldn’t be all that bad, with the exception of your Father of course, Janie. And there was none badder than him.’ Burns told of how MacPherson had gone to the Tree. You could hear MacPherson’s fiddle in the way Burns told of it:
Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, sae dauntingly
Gaed he.
He played a spring and danced it round,
Beneath the Gallow Tree.
Those rare moods of communication between Janie and her Mother more than made up for the other things lacking in their relationship. And yet, if these moments had never existed, it would have been so much easier for Janie in the years to come.
Meanwhile the path through the wood widened. The sky pierced its way through the trees again; hyacinths blazed truly blue. And the light of the world outside the wood surprised the eye with momentary blindness. Primroses took on their own colour again, and vetch shouted in masses along the bank.
Grandmother’s house stood high and red as Janie had remembered it. Where the sky met the fields marked the end of the world. But Grandmother’s house stood safely in the centre, looking down over all the world. And all the world looked up and saw Grandmother’s house.
‘We’re nearly there,’ Liza warned, tucking her pipe down the leg of her stocking. ‘That’s the men yoking their horses. Thank goodness, Grandfather’s had his dinner.’
‘If he’s had dinner there might be none left for us,’ Janie said, alarmed at this prospect.
‘There’ll be plenty left for us in the pot,’ Liza assured her, ‘only, it’s easier. Grandfather won’t go without his dinner now.’
‘Why would Grandfather have to go without his dinner?’ Janie asked curiously. ‘If there’s plenty in the pot.’
‘Not from necessity,’ Liza answered. ‘From choice just. Once anyone does anything wrong to Grandfather, he never sits down at table nor breaks bread with them again.’
‘We didn’t do anything wrong to Grandfather,’ Janie protested. ‘I’ve never even spoken to that man.’
‘He thinks we did.’
‘Grandmother takes her tea with us then?’
‘Grandmother sees things differently. If she didn’t, Janie, I can assure you we wouldn’t be walking up her roadway this day.’
The last steps to Grandmother were harried with last-minute warnings: ‘Mind now! Say please and thank you, Janie. Don’t blow on your broth if it’s too hot. Just have patience till it cools. And say “No, thank you” if Grandmother offers you a second helping. Don’t be gorging into you as if you hadn’t seen food for days. And giving me a red face. And give your nose a good blow. And not sniff, sniff, sniff into your bowl all the time. And come here till I give your face a dicht. It always gets as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat.’
The last and most important warning came more slowly and more clearly: ‘And, for the love of God, Janie, don’t be asking to look inside your Aunt Morag’s box.’
‘It isn’t a box,’ Janie pointed out. ‘It’s a treasure chest, Mam. Aunt Morag’s got beads and hankies and pencils and scent and books. And she never gives me one of them.’
The white flowers were coming out on the Butcher’s Broom. Liza stood amongst them, explaining carefully: ‘Your Aunt Morag is a poor thing. She hasn’t got a treasure chest at all. She’s got a box. That’s all it is, a brown box. And all the things she has inside it are just things her brothers and sisters gave her, because they’re sorry for her. And mind, don’t you go asking her to open that box. Because you won’t get anything out of it.’
‘She’s just greedy then,’ Janie concluded, pushing her way through Butcher’s Broom, with its faint, bitter smell. ‘And I hate my Aunt Morag.’
‘She’s a poor thing,’ Liza said in her voice that you never argued with. ‘And don’t you forget that.’
It was dim in Grandmother’s kitchen. The uncles’ long, sprawling legs broke up the pattern of her red stone floor. Grandfather sat in his corner chair, his face hidden behind a newspaper. Aunt Morag, in her wheelchair, sat staring out of the window, not turning her head to look upon the visitors.
The first dimness passed. The eyes sought out familiar brightness; the glinting brass-work on Aunt Morag’s treasure chest, the shining top of Grandmother’s bellows; the gleaming face of the wall clock, ticking away the timelessness of this wait on the threshold.
‘You’ve got here, then?’ Grandmother’s voice startled the uncles’ long legs into their right places; the floor lay clear and red and patterned. Aunt Morag turned her head to stare on the visitors and looked away out of the wind
ow again. Grandfather stayed hidden behind his paper, and Grandmother bustled into a noise. ‘Sit you both down then. You’ll be tired after your long travel.’ Her black apron rustled, so stiffly starched that it could have stood on the floor by itself without Grandmother being inside it at all. Liza found her voice and talked through the new, comforting noise.
‘We thought we’d be better of a day away. A neighbour of ours died last week. Sudden kind. Janie and herself were very thick. And, to tell the truth, I felt a bit lost myself. We were so used to her.’
‘Poor soul,’ Grandmother said. ‘What would have ailed her like?’
‘Nobody was rightly sure,’ Liza answered. ‘Some said this and others said that, but no one was sure.’
It’s Mysie Walsh Mam’s telling of, Janie realised with surprise. But it wasn’t like that at all, she thought excitedly. I could tell Grandmother all about it and what it was like. Something in the atmosphere prevented Janie from doing so; words that you volunteered got lost here, somehow, drifted up out of you, foundered in the air, and hurried back to the safety of your secret self again. Perhaps it all sounded best the way her Mother was telling it. Unreal. Just as the Lane and Mysie Walsh seemed unreal and far away in this kitchen.
‘No man knows his dying hour,’ Grandmother said, never dreaming that Mysie Walsh had chosen her own hour. ‘And that’s a true mercy. I’ll away to the milk house for a bowl of buttermilk for the quean, it’ll put body in her, till the broth comes to the boil again.’
Grandmother took away with her the large safety she had thrown over the kitchen:
The White Bird Passes Page 5
