‘But surely you wouldn’t want to be under Communist rule?’
He considered for a moment. ‘I’m not so sure about that, I’m all for sharing profits. The way we are, Dickson and the other bosses keep their workers down too much.’
‘Most people are happy to be getting a wage,’ Cissie said, indignantly. ‘They’d be a lot worse off if they didn’t have a job, for they’d end up on the parish.’
Johnny gave a light laugh then. ‘I’m sorry, Cissie. I don’t know what you must think of me getting on my high horse, but I was at a meeting last night, and one speaker got folk all fired up about the unfairness of the present system. That’s the words he used. I shouldn’t preach to you, though, or you’ll maybe not come out with me again.’
Taking her arm, he gave it a squeeze. ‘Are you annoyed?’
‘No, I’m not annoyed.’ She had been a little perturbed by his views, but he had only been repeating what he had heard.
‘Good. I don’t want to scare you off.’
Having walked around the park for almost an hour, they made their way back to the Overgate, and though she tried to make him leave her at the end of the street – she was ashamed to let him see the hovel she lived in – he kept holding her arm. They passed several shops, but when they came to the little pawnshop – deep in shadow because it was nowhere near a lamppost – he pushed her against the door’s iron grille, laughing as it rattled loudly. ‘Can I kiss you goodnight, Cissie?’
‘If you like, she murmured, praying that it would only be a kiss, or maybe more than one, not anything else.
It was only one, long and tender, and when he drew away, he breathed, ‘I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.’
‘Before tonight, you mean?’ she whispered, surprised.
‘For weeks. I’d never have dared to ask you out, though, if it hadn’t been for . . .’ Not having meant to tell her about Phoebe’s request, he stopped in dismay. ‘I was wanting to,’ he floundered, ‘but I . . .’
‘What made you, then? Oh, I bet Phoebe said something.’
‘She thought we’d been out before, and she told me to ask you again and not take no for an answer.’
Feeling rather hurt now, she said, ‘So you were forced into it?’
‘No, Cissie, don’t think that. I wanted to, and I was pleased when she . . .’ He paused, then asked, ‘Why did she think we’d been out before?’
It would be better to tell the truth, Cissie thought. It would make no difference now. ‘I went out with Mr Laidlaw, but I told her it was you, for she wouldn’t have let me go if she knew it was him.’
His eyes had hardened at the mention of the overseer. ‘Did he threaten you if you didn’t go out with him?’
‘He said he’d get Phoebe sacked and me, too, and he would make sure nobody else would hire us.’
‘The bugger o’ hell! I wish you’d come and told me, I’d have given him what-for. Did he do anything to you?’
‘He tried to,’ she gave a nervous little smile, ‘but he couldn’t – if you know what I mean.’
‘He wasn’t able to? God, that’s a laugh, he makes out he’s a great ladies’ man.’
‘Johnny, please don’t tell anybody.’ She was annoyed at having mentioned it, but it had just slipped out.
‘Aye, he’d likely be after your blood if he thought you’d shown him up, but don’t worry, I’ll not tell anybody.’
‘I’ll have to go in now, it’s getting late and we’ve an early morning, both of us.’
Her lips were still tingling from his last kiss when she went upstairs, her starry eyes making Phoebe and Jen look knowingly at each other and hold back the teasing remarks they had intended to make.
John Laidlaw kept away from Cissie over the next month, but she suspected that he was marking time until he could find some excuse to have her dismissed, so she worked carefully and diligently, determined not to give him one. She was meeting Johnny twice a week now at the end of the Overgate, walking with him to Baxter Park occasionally, sometimes back to Dudhope Park or strolling along the quayside at the docks and watching the lights from the merchant ships and whalers. One night, however, as soon as they met, he said, ‘There’s another meeting on tonight. Why don’t you come with me? You’ll see what I was meaning about the last one.’
She didn’t want to go, but she could see that he did, so she accompanied him to the school hall where the meeting was being held. She was quite impressed by the first speaker, a tall man with a slight lisp who spoke in a down-to-earth manner, but the second one, the one everyone had come to hear, judging by the applause that greeted him, got too worked up for her liking, whipping the crowd into such a frenzy that they shouted encouragement and clapped their hands wildly every time he stopped for breath. Only one little man in a cloth cap and muffler, on Cissie’s right, seemed less than happy. ‘Bloody Reds!’ he muttered.
Cissie was inclined to agree. It had been advertised as a Labour meeting, but the sentiments being expressed were definitely Communist. She turned her head to look at Johnny, but he was engrossed in a long diatribe against all capitalistic employers, nodding his head at the points that were being made. When at last the speaker came to an end – after fully seventy minutes – he waved his hand in acknowledgement of the standing ovation he was being given, and walked past his cheering audience to the door, smiling when a few men thumped his back to congratulate him.
‘That was some speech, wasn’t it, Cissie?’ Johnny burst out triumphantly. ‘God, it made you want to rise up against all the bosses and tell them what you think of them. See how they would get on if they had to stand for twelve hours at a time spinning jute onto spindles, or better still, shifting full spindles and putting on empty ones. They wouldn’t like it if their fingers got caught in the machines, like some of the poor wee shifters, bairns most of them.’
Standing up, Cissie said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but I can’t agree with what that man said. We need bosses to run the mills. What do the workers know about buying the raw jute? Or about getting orders and sending them all over the world? Could you work out how much it would cost to make a carpet, or to make a hundred sandbags? Oh, yes, the workers do the work, make the finished goods, and they’re not paid well for it. Maybe the bosses are wrong about that, but there has to be somebody in charge or the work wouldn’t be there for them to do.’
‘Well,’ Johnny gasped. ‘You’d make a pretty good speaker yourself.’
Embarrassed now, she turned to go into the passage, but the little man in the muffler took her hand and shook it. ‘That’s the kind of talk I like, not that pudding face of a man spouting things he doesn’t live up to. Does he work in a mill or a factory? I’m bloody sure he doesna. He sits on his backside all day writing out speeches. You should go in for politics, lass. You’d make a better job than that lot.’
‘I couldn’t stand up in front of a lot of people,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know the first thing about politics.’
‘Neither do half of them,’ growled the little man.
Cissie and Johnny were both laughing when they left the hall, and as he took her arm, he said, ‘You’ve made one convert, any road.’
‘He was converted long before that,’ she told him. ‘He called the speakers “bloody Reds”.’
‘Och, well, everybody to their own opinion, I suppose. I shouldn’t have taken you there tonight, for I’ll never get you to see things my way.’
‘And you’ll never see things my way.’
He gave a loud laugh. ‘We’d better leave politics out of it in future, eh?’
On November the eleventh, when the great news came that an armistice had been signed and the war had come to an end, Cissie and Johnny joined the celebrations at Magdalen Green, dancing and singing the night away along with the rest of the crowd. In this charged atmosphere, she felt the first stirrings of love for him, but when he, in the same highly emotional state, said on their way back to the Overgate that he loved her, she shied from telling h
im how she felt. If she did, he might ask her to marry him – she had told him that she was a widow – and it wasn’t fair to lead him on, because she could never be his wife. He would expect to make love to her, and she was certain that she couldn’t bear to let any man touch her in an intimate way ever again. The very thought of it was making her grip her insides as if she were about to be violated. Johnny wasn’t an easy-going man like Jim Robertson had been, and though he had never tried anything, and might not try unless they were married, his body was so strong she could imagine the force of him when he did. He would be her father all over again, and she couldn’t bear that.
As long as they were only walking out together, it would be all right, and she would stop seeing him at the first sign of him wanting anything else.
At Huntingdon, his large house on the Perth Road, Richard Dickson had been discussing the mill with his father. ‘I am quite glad that I took Mrs McGregor into the office,’ he observed, as he refilled their whisky glasses. ‘She is very capable.’
Old Dick – as everyone knew him – gave a little cackle. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I kent she must have guts to beard you in your den, so to speak, and I bet she’s a good-looker.’
‘Oh, Father, what an old reprobate you are.’
‘A reprobate, is it? What’s wrong with having an eye for a pretty woman, even at my age?’
Richard had to laugh. ‘I hope I’m as sprightly as you when I’m seventy.’
‘I was thinking,’ Old Dick said, smiling a trifle slyly, ‘your secretary, that Miss Thingummy that looks as if she’d drop down dead if a man as much as looked twice at her, she should be retiring shortly, should she no’?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘It would kittle you up to have a bonnie woman beside you for a change.’
Richard frowned, but not at his father’s turn of phrase, he was accustomed to that. Old Dick had just been a millhand before he worked his way to the top and bought the mill when the owner retired, and although he, too, had retired some time ago, he still took an interest in what went on. ‘Are you saying I should make Mrs McGregor my secretary when Miss Lovie retires?’
‘You could do worse. A working-class woman aye makes a go of whatever she tackles.’
‘I get the impression that Mrs McGregor hasn’t always been a spinner,’ Richard said, thoughtfully. ‘I am sure she has come down in the world.’
‘I think you’re smitten wi’ her, and it’s time you took another wife. Lydia’s been dead for . . . how long is it?’
‘Eight years.’
‘That’s a long time to be without a woman, Richard.’
‘Oh, Father! I’m not like you.’
‘I ken that, though my wenching days are done, I’m sorry to say. Mind you, I hope Bertram doesnae take after me when he comes out o’ the army, for I’d like to see the day you hand over the mill to him. From my son to his son.’
His father’s suggestion that he should make Mrs McGregor his secretary came back to Richard later. Perhaps it would not be such a preposterous idea, after all. She had warned him that she had never worked in an office before, but, in the ten weeks she had been there, she had mastered the book-keeping system, her handwriting in the ledgers was as neat a copperplate as he had ever seen, and in addition, she had learned to type. Everything she did was perfect, but there were times when he wished she would unbend a little with him. She was a widow, and, as his father suspected, he was strongly attracted to her.
He had discovered that she did not live in the Overgate itself, the address she had given, but in one of the old, overcrowded tenements just behind. Moreover, she seemed inordinately close to the two spinners with whom she lived, especially the one she called Cissie. He had checked in his staff records, and had found that the girl’s surname was Robertson, and this had given him cause to think. The names Cissie Robertson and Phoebe McGregor were vaguely familiar. He had heard them, or seen them, somewhere before – could it only have been when Laidlaw told him he had taken them on? Whatever it was, Cissie seemed to be quite a decent young woman, but the other spinner, Jen Millar, was much rougher, not the type of person he would associate with Phoebe. She may, of course, share with them because she couldn’t afford to rent a house herself, so it might be wise to increase her salary to enable her to find somewhere better, he thought.
‘Mr Dickson gave me a Christmas bonus,’ Phoebe announced, as soon as Cissie and Jen came home, ‘and he’s putting up my wages starting from the second of January.’ She looked at them proudly. ‘It’s a good thing he didn’t make me learn to be a weaver, or I’d never have been so well off.’
The other two were grey-faced after their twelve hours on the spinning machines, but they cheered up at her news. She went on happily, ‘We’ll be able to look for a house now, somewhere a lot better than this.’
Cissie clapped her hands in delight, but Jen said, sadly, ‘Aye, I suppose you want more room. It can’t have been easy for you here. Well, when you go, I can throw out that old mattress seeing I’ve the single bed now. Or maybe you want to take the bed wi’ you?’
‘Of course we’ll take it with us,’ Phoebe exclaimed, not understanding, ‘but we’ll get two more single beds so we can have one each, and we’ll get rid of that old flea-pit.’
‘Oh!’ Jen mulled this over for a moment, then said, ‘If you’re meaning me to come wi’ you, I can’t. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but I’d not be happy anywhere else.’
‘You can’t stay here.’ Phoebe let her eyes roam round the room, much more presentable than it had been but still not what anyone could call attractive.
Jen sighed. ‘Me and Eddie was just seventeen when we wed, and that much in love we didna care where we bade.’
‘I can understand that,’ Phoebe declared, ‘but Eddie isn’t here with you now, so what . . .’
‘He didna leave me, if that’s what you think,’ Jen burst out. ‘I’ve never told anybody this, I couldna bear to mind about it, but he was labouring for a builder, and we made this room real nice – a double bed, a dresser over there, and . . .’ She stopped, her voice wavering. ‘We was that happy, and when I found I was expecting . . .’
In the short pause, Phoebe and Cissie exchanged glances, wondering what had happened to spoil Jen’s idyll. ‘I was seven months on when Eddie’s boss came and said he’d fallen off a roof. I thought he’d been killed, and the shock made me miscarry, but he’d just been unconscious when they took him away in the ambulance. It might have been better if he’d been killed, though, for he lost both his legs.’
Phoebe’s sympathetic gasp went unheeded. ‘He took it hard about the bairn, and when he come hame, he hardly ate for weeks and sat without saying a word, till I wanted to scream at him. He did come round, but he was never the same. Then he took a cough, and I thought it was pneumonia . . .’
‘Not much wonder in this place,’ Phoebe muttered.
‘. . . but it was consumption,’ Jen continued. ‘Well, I nursed him for over a year, and I’d to sell the furniture to buy food for him, and I’d to make do wi’ boxes I got from the grocer, till the only thing left was the bed. After Eddie died, I’d to sell the bed to pay the rent, for I’d got behind, and I slept on that second-hand mattress for fifteen years – till you bought me the single bed.’ Her eyes, misty while she recalled the past, suddenly filled with remorse. ‘Ach, I dinna ken what made me tell you about Eddie, though maybe you’ll see why I canna leave. My memories o’ him are here.’
‘Jen,’ Phoebe murmured, ‘you’ll always have your memories wherever you are. If we got a house with two rooms, Cissie and I could share one, and you could have one to yourself.’
‘It’s awful good of you to think of me, but I’m stopping here. I’ve never been used to much, and it’s no hardship.’
Jen was so resolute that Phoebe accepted defeat, but over the next few weeks, she and Cissie discovered that it was impossible to find a furnished house at a rent they were willing to pay, and
they couldn’t afford to buy furniture for the unfurnished flats which were much cheaper. They had almost given up hope when fate intervened.
Cissie was in the butcher’s shop one Saturday afternoon when a woman happened to remark that her mother had died, and that she would have to clear everything out of the house before she gave it up. Scarcely daring to hope, Cissie said, ‘I might buy your mother’s furniture if you’re not asking too much for it.’
The woman turned to her eagerly. ‘She’d four rooms, so there’s quite a lot, old but good. I’ll let you see it, and we could maybe come to an agreement about the price.’
The house was on the second floor of a well-kept tenement in South Union Street, opposite a railway station, and the furniture was old-fashioned but solid, as the woman had said. ‘What d’you think?’ she asked. ‘Is there too much? How many rooms were you wanting to furnish?’
Cissie shrugged. ‘We haven’t found a place yet, but we were thinking of somewhere with two rooms, so we wouldn’t need all this. Maybe, if you were willing to sell some . . .’
‘I’ll tell you what. Come with me to the factor, and I’ll tell him you’re after the house, and maybe he’ll let you have it. I know it wasn’t a big rent, my mother couldn’t have afforded it if it was, and he’ll likely be glad to be saved the bother of looking for another tenant.’
An hour later, Cissie burst into Jen’s room. ‘Where have you been?’ Phoebe demanded. ‘We thought you’d got lost.’
‘I’ve got a house and we can move in as soon as we like.’ Cissie’s explanation was a little incoherent at first, but she went over it again. ‘And the woman was that pleased not to have to clear everything out, she let me have the whole lot for just two pounds.’
‘What?’ Phoebe gasped. ‘For four rooms of furniture?’
‘Yes, and dishes and pans and everything else. I told her it wasn’t enough, but she wouldn’t listen and I can still hardly believe it myself.’
‘What’s for the supper?’ Jen asked, drily. ‘I’m hungry.’
Waters of the Heart Page 13
