“You could do me one favour, at least,” he said, shouting at his uncle over the noise of the train winding down from its journey.
“What is that, boychik?”
“The aeroplane fabric. Can you find some for me?”
Uncle Mendel picked up his suitcase of samples. “All right. All right. I’ll ask some questions. But you should be the one to do it. To return to Glasgow, it is time. It’s not right you should stay away like this.”
“Why should I go back? There is nothing for me there.”
“What about the family? So much they want to see you.”
“You tell me everything I need to know.”
“You remember the servant Mary?”
“Of course I do.”
“About Mary I forgot to tell you.”
“What happened?”
“Two weeks ago she died. From influenza.”
Thirty-seven
IT WAS ARCHIE WHO SPREAD THE NEWS. The announcement had come over the wires when he was at the post office and he raced to tell his father and his cronies down in the fishyards. All the men in the yard cheered, as did the women gutters. Even Archie’s father who never opined on any subject apart from the state of a barrel said:
“Just what we need to put the heart back into this town.” And then he returned to welding the metal hoop in front of him without another word on the subject.
Archie then rushed to inform the driver of the post bus, who whistled all the way to Connel thinking about the prospect. He passed on the news to Davey of the Caledonian Railway Rail-Motor Service, who in his turn carried the information across the swirling Firth to the doorstep of Kenny Kennedy in Lorn. Mrs Kennedy reported later that her husband immediately pulled his only bottle of Oban malt from behind the dresser and toasted Davey, the Lord and Lenin in that order for bestowing such good fortune on the town.
“It’ll be like wan big holiday,” he said after sharing a few more drams with the train driver.
Later that day, Jean Munro heard the news when she dropped by the Kennedys on her way to pick up her husband from Benderloch station. Jean chalked the magical words down on a slate for Megan the next afternoon when she was down on her day off from the castle. Megan couldn’t wait to tell Avram.
“I’ve got something to tell ye. And it’s the biggest news ye’ve ever heard in yer life.”
Avram lay on the bed waiting for Megan to get in beside him. He knew her tendency to get over-excited about the least morsel of gossip, but she did really look fit to burst from whatever it was she had to reveal.
“Go on then, tell me.”
“Give me a kiss first.”
He hadn’t seen her for two weeks. He had thought about her every moment his mind wasn’t full of conversation with customers or totting up figures and percentages in his head. His body craved her now as she stood in front of him, her breasts heaving in excitement underneath the coarse cloth of her shift.
“Tell me first.”
“No. Kiss me first.”
He shook his head.
“It’s really important,” she said, clutching her chest to quell the information that was forcing itself to rise out of her lungs. “Really, really important.”
“I don’t want to know. It’ll just be some tittle-tattle from the town.”
“Much, much mair than that.”
“I’ll tickle it out of you.”
Megan folded her arms even more tightly across her chest. “Wild beasts couldnae drag it out of me now.”
He leapt for her, pulled her to the bed, started pinching her waist.
“I’m no tellin’,” she screamed as she wriggled her legs, riding her shift to above her knees. A hand over her mouth to muffle her shouts from Jean downstairs. The other hand into the warm flesh of her thighs.
“Tell me.” He felt himself go hard from the furious heat between her legs. He let his other hand go free and continued to pinch her. “Go on. Tell me what it is.”
“I’m gonna be sick.”
He eased off slightly. “I’m not interested in your gossip.” His erection poked out between the buttons of his long johns. He thought he might ejaculate over her there and then. All over her shift and the Munro’s starch linen bedclothes. He tried to catch his breath. “I just want you, Megan,” he said, leaning gently over her so that he could slip his erect penis up between the tight cloth of her shift where her legs were now stretched wide apart. He pushed back her hair, breathed into her ear, licking and nipping the fleshy lobe as he spoke. “Let me inside you. Please.”
Megan’s breath came as quick as his own. There was a red flush across the yoke of her shoulders and up her neck. A taut mound of one nipple pushed against the cotton of her shift. He placed a hand against that one breast, rolled the teat between his fingers, feeling it harden even more. Megan twisted under him, let out a small moan as she turned her head one way on the pillow and then the other, spreading out her hair in a golden arc. He felt himself stiffen even more. He couldn’t remember being this hard. There was a heady combination of her pleasure, mixed with this sheer physical power he had over her. His stiffness pushed against the moist slit between her thighs.
“No,” she breathed, even as her legs seemed to part more for his entry.
“Please, Megan.”
“I dinnae want to.” Her hands were at his shoulders pushing him away. But he continued trying to enter her. What she wanted didn’t seem to matter any more. This was all about him and his pleasure. Her hands, clenched now, beat at his upper back yet he continued to press against the reluctant membrane between her legs. Her slip had risen to above her waist, he felt the sweat of her thighs dampen the cotton of his underwear. He was ready to explode.
“Oh God, Megan. Please let me inside.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“Celtic,” Megan panted, almost biting the word into his ear. The word came at him from a distance, not registering at first. But he pulled back slightly, not knowing why she was saying this now.
“What?”
“It’s Celtic.”
His pause had allowed her to come back in control, letting her slow down his heaving torso, wriggle her legs closer together so that his penis was trapped between her thighs. He peeled himself off from her body, unplugging himself from the clench of her.
“What are you talking about? It’s Celtic?”
“Like I said. It’s Celtic. Argyll Thistle against Celtic in the Cup.”
“Honest?”
“Cross my heart.”
“Glasgow Celtic?”
“There’s no’ other.”
“Home or away?”
“Here. Here in Oban.”
He jumped off the bed.
“Yes,” he shouted, his now flaccid penis wagging in time to his dance around the room. “We’ve got Celtic in the Cup.” And then he stopped, sat back down on the bed. “I don’t believe it, Megan.”
“Well, it’s true.”
He took her hand, stroked her palm. The flesh was rough and hard. “Do you know what this means?”
“Aye. I can imagine.”
“It means everything to me. I’m going to be playing against my hero. Against Patsy Gallacher. Me and Patsy on the same pitch.”
“Well, I’ll tell ye something. Something that means everything to me too.”
“What’s that?”
“Just dinnae do that again.”
“Do what?”
“Try to get into me.”
“I’m sorry. I just got too excited.”
“Well, it’s no excuse. Excited or no, dinnae try that again. Or ye’ll never set eyes on me again, never mind yer clammy fingers. I dinnae want any fatherless bairns running around the place. D’ye hear me? Dinnae try that again.”
Thirty-eight
FOR CHRISTMAS EVE, Avram stayed alone at Uncle Mendel’s cottage where flecks of snow had threatened a heavier fall throughout the day, the frosted turf crunched pleasantly underfoot, and a light film
of ice coated both the rain barrel and the loch. He spent the late afternoon down by the waterside, pressing his boot sole at various points against the frozen surface until it split and the crack ran out across the icy expanse to disappear in the empty dusk. No birds grazed the freezing sky and a hushed bleakness hovered over everything. Nothing stirred. Except for his breath in a cloud in front of his face. Here was a loneliness he had never experienced before. An isolated Jew in a Christian land at a Christian time of year.
Under the lean-to, the slabs of peat had frozen together and he had to hack them apart with an axe. A splinter from the handle embedded itself deep into his finger, but such was the cold he felt no pain in digging out the skelf with the blade of a penknife. He watched with detachment as the blood flowed until it clogged in a pool in the cup of his palm. With a rough bandage over the wound, he stoked up a fire in the cottage. He dressed in every item of clothing he possessed, wrapped himself in all the bedclothes, but still the cold chilled his bones. Pondering the sputtering flames, he ran through in his head the speech he would make to the gamekeeper the following day. And when the thought of that troubled him too much, he tried to warm himself to a day-dreaming of the cup-tie against Glasgow Celtic.
He remembered how he and Solly had snuck into Cathkin stadium to watch Celtic play for the first time. There on the touchline, Patsy Gallacher had smiled at him from out of the mist, picking him out from the crowd as if to say: “I know you. You are like me.” There had been a war since, players went and never returned, but Patsy had survived to turn out for Celtic. Opposite numbers they were now – inside forwards – left and right. He and Patsy. Soon they would be standing by each other on the centre line of the Argyll Thistle pitch, jersey sleeves pulled down tight against the cold. Letting go to shake hands before the whistle. Patsy with his flat cap of slick hair and an old pro’s wink. And he wanting to tell the Celtic player how above a fireplace in a cold cottage a few miles north there stood a well-preserved cigarette card of his hero.
The Oban press had been full of the magic of the Cup, how it could pit a football giant like Celtic against a wee West Highland league club. Avram had read how the hotels in the town were booking up quickly as supporters from Glasgow sought to turn their away game jaunt into a full weekend with their pals. Canny townfolk were turning their dwellings into temporary bed-and-breakfast establishments, the pubs were ordering in extra barrels from the distillery. In the letter pages of the Oban Gazette, some readers complained about this Fenian invasion of Covenanter soil. Others suggested the banning of the Irish tricolour or the Celtic green from a twenty-mile radius of the town.
But out on his rounds, Avram’s customers were full of pride, slaps on the back and advice. Even Tam MacIsaac had heard the news from his watch on the hillside. As the old shepherd ran his fingers in a comb through his long oily beard, he said nothing would stop him coming down for ‘the big gemme’. That was how everyone called it now. ‘The Big Gemme.’ As if life didn’t exist before and after, and that everything would stop for it. A reporter had even sniffed out Avram at the cottage, and with a licked stub eagerly poised over pad he asked how if felt for a Glasgow boy to play against one of his city’s two greatest clubs.
“I’m not a Glasgow boy,” he told the reporter.
“Where are ye from then?”
“Russia.”
“Like the Revolution?”
“You could say that.”
“I don’t think I will.”
Avram rose at dawn on Christmas day and part-walked, part-cycled his way in the bitter cold along the ice-rutted paths. The stars had faded away and the firmament was now shot with a blue as light and pure as any he had ever seen. The hillsides lay sprinkled with a soft layer of snow. Like the frosting of flour on Madame Kahn’s rye bread. What he would do now for a slice of it dipped in the sauce of a sweet herring. He felt his fingers welded to the handlebars and the pus-filled cut from the previous day’s skelf throbbing in the cold. Inside his boots, his toes were chunks of ice. By the time he reached Lorn, the kirk bell was tolling the festival day and some village-folk, bundled up so thick as to be unrecognisable, were already slipping and sliding along the road on their way back from church.
Megan seemed nervous when she answered the door.
“What’s wrong?” Avram asked.
“Ye’ll see.”
He followed her into the warm kitchen. Kenny Kennedy sat in his rocking chair, a poultice pressed against his cheek.
“He’s had the ache since yesterday’s morn,” Mrs Kennedy said in a fuss about her husband. She was still dressed in her Sunday best but with a full apron to cover her finery, her everyday kitchen-cap perched on her head. Megan in a crouch by her father’s chair, adjusting the blanket over his lap.
“The sudden cold snap is what did it,” she told Avram. “Is that not so, faither?”
Kenny Kennedy’s face, the colour of sour milk, was still covered in a morning stubble. The gamekeeper dipped a bony finger into a shot glass of malt, squirming as he coated the painful tooth with the liquor.
“The Captain said he’ll drop by,” Jamie said, with a stoop into the kitchen from the byre, two pails of milk carried light and easy in his large hands. “I spoke to him at church.”
A knock on the door. Avram stepped out of the way as Jamie crossed the kitchen, his bulky frame throwing a shadow across the room and the rest of the family. Even Kenny Kennedy stopped his moaning.
Avram knew the Captain well enough. One of his best customers. A retired ship’s doctor, usually well oiled with drink, who swayed and stumbled through the village as if he still roamed the lurching decks of his vessel. For once, Avram was grateful for Papa Kahn’s supervision of his family’s teeth. Bicarbonate of soda every day. Keeps the Captain away.
The Captain positioned Kenny Kennedy in a chair by the cold sunlight of the window, twisted the gamekeeper’s head this way and that, peering into the open jaws.
“I can tell what ye had for dinner last night.”
Kenny Kennedy rubbed his aching cheek. “What are ye saying, mon?”
The Captain ignored him. “Tweezers. Are there tweezers in the house?”
Megan ran to fetch a pair.
“Scald them with water,” the Captain shouted after her. “And ye, Kennedy. Swill yer mouth out with some whisky.”
“I’m no having ye pulling anything.”
The Captain laughed. “What? With tweezers?” He hauled open Kenny Kennedy’s mouth, started to poke around. Megan stifled a giggle as her father roared and writhed in his chair.
“Give us a hand, young man.” The Captain beckoned for Avram to come close. “Hold down his arms.”
Avram took a stance in front of the gamekeeper, leaned forward and grasped the man’s wrists to the arms of the chair. The Captain came at his patient from the side, armed with the pair of tweezers.
“Hold still,” the Captain shouted. “And I’ll have ye fixed in a moment.”
Avram felt Kenny Kennedy’s body lurch in the chair, then relax. The Captain withdrew the tweezers snapped tight in a pluck. “There!”
“What is it?” Avram asked, struggling to see anything in the tweezer’s grip.
“A herring bone. Wedged between tooth and gum.” The Captain turned triumphantly to his patient, wiggled the offending bone in front of his eyes. “Swill out with whisky. If ye’ve any cloves in the house, press them on to soothe the pain. Ye’ll still ache for a while.” He flicked the bone to the floor. “Now, Avram. Yer quite a star for the Argyll Thistle, I hear. The whole shire’s full of talk about the cup-tie. Well, make sure ye do the United Free Church proud against these Papists.”
“United Free?”
“I forgot. Yer no’ one of us.”
Thirty-nine
CHRISTMAS LUNCH TOOK PLACE in the ‘front room’, as Mrs Kennedy always called it, although Avram never quite understood why, given that the whole cottage was built in a single row of rooms all facing the front. He helped Jamie move throu
gh the kitchen table, which Mrs Kennedy covered with a fine cloth and laid out with the best dishes to receive the roast chicken and potatoes. Avram tried not to think of the task ahead as he tucked into the hot meal, washing it down with several glasses of dark ale. At the top end of the table, Kenny Kennedy was slumped down in his chair in a half-glazed stupor. The man had hardly touched his food and was half-singing, half-mumbling to himself one of the psalms from the church service.
Avram was about to stand when there was a hard rap at the door.
“Who could that be?” Mrs Kennedy asked.
Jamie rose. “I’ll get it.”
“Aye. Get the door,” Kenny Kennedy slurred.
“It’s one of the Laird’s men,” Jamie announced on his return. “Adam Baird.”
“Well, show him in,” said Mrs Kennedy.
Baird was already stood in a crouch behind Jamie, with his cap clutched in front of him. His bald crown shone red from the cold like a burnished hillock. He poked his head round Jamie’s frame.
“I’ve some gifts for my Master’s gamekeeper,” Baird said. “Christmas appreciation from the Laird of the shire to his loyal servant.” He nosed his gaze from Kennedy at one end of the table to Mrs Kennedy at the other, then back to the middle. “Miss Megan,” he said to his fellow employee. “Ye’ll get something back at the castle.”
“Well, Baird from the Laird,” Kenny Kennedy shouted. “Show us what ye’ve got.”
“I’ll need a hand.”
“I’ll help ye,” Jamie said and went back outside with Baird. Mrs Kennedy stood to straighten her cap and dress. Jamie returned with a large wicker basket of apples with several bottles of ale spread across the top. Baird held a bottle of whisky in his hand.
“That’s very kind of the Laird,” said Mrs Kennedy. “Isn’t that right, faither?”
“Aye, so it is. Ye must stay for a drink, mon.”
“I cannae,” said Baird. “I’ve mair rounds to do.”
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