‘In a place like this? I couldn’t sit in peace and I don’t know how you can either. It’s a disgrace. A young woman like you, too. I never kept a house like this in my life. My Baldy’ll tell you. He’s never been used to this.’
Sarah’s face creased into a smile.
‘My Baldy remembers how ah used to keep this place like a new pin. Ah had the floor that clean and shiny you could have ate your dinner off it.’
‘I warned him. You’re a fool, if you ask me, I said. You’re leaving a good clean roof over your head and three square meals a day just to go and sleep with a bastard.’
‘Look, hen,’ Sarah struggled to retain some modicum of good humour knowing instinctively that this was the only defence she had that Mrs Fowler didn’t understand or know how to fight, ‘Ah’ve cabbage to boil for my man’s dinner. Ah haven’t time to stand here listening to you calling me names. Away you go and enjoy yourself somewhere else. Away home and count your money.’
‘A bastard you were. You can’t deny it. I remember your ma even if you don’t. A proper tart, she was, a disgrace to the street. Your granny turfed her out. Back she came, though, and you in the oven. Who your da was is anybody’s guess. And your granny was nothing to boast about, either. Night and day that woman was at the bottle.’ Her voice tuned up like the bagpipes. ‘Night and day. If she wasn’t in the pub she was in one of the shebeens. And to think my only son had to get mixed up with the likes of that.’
Distress skittered inside Sarah like panic. The kettle boiled. The lid hissed and danced. She switched off the gas, straining a cotton-wool mind to remember what else she had to do.
She lifted the heavy shopping-bag on to the table to search out the tin of corned beef and the cabbage but she had to lean her arms over the bag before looking into it, her belly pressed hard against the table’s edge.
‘A proper wife you cannot be to him, either,’ Mrs Fowler lamented. ‘How many “misses” is that you’ve had? I always said there was something wrong with you atween the legs. There’s something wrong atween her legs, I always said.’
‘There’ll be something wrong between your eyes, hen, if you don’t chuck it,’ Sarah managed in quite a pleasant tone between grimaces.
‘Strike me? Are you threatening to strike a poor old woman, Sarah Sweeney? Of fancy! Well, go on, then. It’ll be worth it to put you behind bars where you belong. I’ll have the police up here to cart you away in the Black Maria before you’ve time to draw another breath.’
‘Ah’m Sarah Fowler, Fowler! Now chuck it, Lil.’ Eyes shimmering with pain, she felt out the cabbage, shuffled over to the sink and doubling over it, standing on one leg with the other bending and twisting in time to the spasms of abdominal pain, she cut and cleaned the cabbage and stuffed it into the pot for Baldy’s dinner.
She put the gas up high and it was boiling in no time and ready long before she’d finished wandering about washing and drying the dishes, opening the tin of corned beef, frying yesterday’s spuds and setting the table all to the wailings of her mother-in-law.
Nearly every day without fail Lender Lil came round from Starky Street to Dessie Street, bought her messages at MacNair’s then came up to nag and criticize her and either sympathize with Baldy, splash tears over him and tell him what a poor neglected lad he was, or rage at him and cuff his ear and accuse him of being all the big fat fools of the day.
‘Hello, Ma!’ The reek of cabbage now filling the house brought Baldy’s big square box of a body crashing into the kitchen to crush, crowd and dwarf everything, even his mother, in size. ‘Hey, Sarah, that’s a rer smell, hen. Cabbage, eh?’
The boom of his voice and the bang of the door as he shut it and the screech of a chair as he pulled it out and thumped down on it made Sarah wince. It was strange how noise had an effect on pain, the dragging, the bearing down labour-type pains, they jumped and strengthened with noise and flared up to catch at the breath.
‘Aye, and ah’ve mashed it with a big dod of butter.’ She grinned. ‘You and your big belly.’
‘You and your big bum!’ Baldy thumped a hand like an iron shovel across her buttocks, gave a coarse gravel roar of a laugh and turned to his mother again. ‘How’s tricks, Ma? Still coining it, eh?’
‘You shut your cheeky gob!’ Mrs Fowler’s beady eye fought to extinguish her son’s exuberance but filled with water and gave up.
Still reeling under Baldy’s blow, Sarah couldn’t get a grip of what was happening or where she was for a minute or two. She dished the dinner like a drunk woman.
‘Could you eat some, hen?’ She asked her mother-in- law automatically. ‘You’re welcome and there’s plenty.’
‘Fancy!’ Mrs Fowler was genuinely exasperated. ‘Dishing her man’s dinner with an old pair of woolly gloves on. She’s plain daft, if you ask me! A scarf round her head, too, as if the gloves weren’t enough!’
‘I’m awful cold rifed, amn’t I, Baldy?’
‘Never mind, hen, I know the way to heat you up.’ With a bull-bellow he made to swipe her again but she plunked herself down at the other end of the table so quickly he missed.
She poured herself a cup of tea then wrapped her hands around it, hugged it, revelled in the heat of it. She watched Baldy enjoying his heaped high plate of food, stuffing it into his mouth with such rapidity she began to worry about his digestion.
The tea cleared her head and brought her back to grips with what was going on.
‘You could have married her. You’re a better man than Melvin.’ Mrs Fowler sighed. ‘A young thing like that, you could have trained her.’
Sarah’s eyes wrinkled up with mischief.
‘Hear that, Baldy. You’ve missed your chance, lad.’
He guffawed, squeezing a big eye shut in a muscle-hard face.
‘Don’t you be too sure, hen!’
Sarah sucked in another mouthful of tea.
‘Today, isn’t it, Lil?’
‘The Band of Jesus Hall in Dundas Street. Nobody from Clydend’s been invited. Just a quiet family affair Mrs Munro told Mrs Gordon. Her family she means, of course, but I can tell you this, everybody in this close and all old MacNair’s customers are going to the Hall. Supposed to be to support Rab and Melvin but nosiness is more like it. Pity they hadn’t more important things to do with their time. Anthing for an excuse to dodge work and enjoy themselves, it you ask me.’
Baldy opened his mouth in a roar of laughter that made some of his cabbage spill out.
‘If I know Rab he’ll need supporting. He’ll be as drunk as a coot.’
‘Maybe I’ll go!’ Sarah said in between sips of tea.
‘Oh, yes! Oh, of course! You’ve nothing else to do. Not a thing!’ Mrs Fowler wiped her eyes and it occurred to Sarah that Lender Lil needed to see a doctor about this continuous overflow which surely could have nothing to do with real heartfelt tears. ‘I knew it,’ the older woman went on, “‘I know one,” I thought to myself, “who’ll be up at that hall in Dundas Street like a flash, if you ask me!”’
Sarah crinkled with good humour.
‘Ah’m no asking you, hen. I’m just going.’
She couldn’t explain why she wanted to drag her weary limbs away to town to the wedding. She knew instinctively that no good would come of it.
What was that word that Jimmy Gordon once used? A lovely fella, Jimmy. Up to the eyeballs in book-learning and it hadn’t spoiled him one bit.
Massakists - that was the word!
She smiled wryly to herself.
‘That’s what you are, hen! You’re a massakists!’
Chapter 10
Tam sat propped like a tailor’s dummy between his wife Nellie and his daughter Lizzie on one of the hard wooden benches in the Band of Jesus Hall. At the other side of Lizzie perched Melvin’s five-year-old son Fergus with his long blond curls like a girl and lantern jaws like an old man. Tam’s whiter than white hair had been energetically brushed down and back but already the fuzzy wisps of it were springing up and sprea
ding out in untidy excitement. His skin had been scrubbed clean and inspected by Lizzie, his shirt and collar had been starched with her usuaI fiendish efficiency so that he had no choice but to sit as straight and stiff as a poker with his head bulging up like a sugar-iced onion.
He felt sorry for Melvin. It looked as if Hannah Munro had won after all, because so far there wasn’t a sign of the wee lassie.
He’d heard it said that Hannah was one of Christ’s sergeant-majors. He chuckled to himself. He wouldn’t mind being bullied by a Christian soldier like that.
Cautiously he stretched his head higher to get a better view of her sitting down front. Handsome was a better word to describe her than pretty. By God, she was a healthy looking specimen: fine ruddy cheeks, eyes full of fire, chin held high, hair thick and glossy.
Rab was a lucky man. Not content with having his fun and games with Hannah he had his bit of nonsense every now and again with Lexy as well.
Lexy would be holding the fort with Jimmy back in the bakehouse just now, bouncing and wobbling about wearing nothing but her white coat and apron. She couldn’t wear anything underneath because of the heat, she always said. He could believe that. She was a hot piece of stuff was Lexy.
He wriggled restlessly in his seat, his trousers tight.
‘I know what you’re doing!’ Lizzie hissed round at him, her pink cheeks in shadow under a wide-brimmed straw hat. ‘You’re annoying me on purpose. Just because I’m upset today. Everyone’s trying to take advantage. Don’t think I don’t know. I know!’
‘You’re wrong, hen. Nobody’s trying to get at you, honest. We’re all fed up sitting here waiting so long, that’s all.’
Despite his high starched collar his head twisted round in a determined effort to see something, anything, to break the monotony.
‘There’s Sarah! Baldy’s not here, though.’
Lizzie let a titter out. ‘Maybe his mammy wouldn’t let him!’
Tam choked short in mid-chuckle with a wince of pain and, mouth hanging open, he eased a gentle finger round inside his collar.
‘Lassie, lassie, I wish you wouldn’t make things so stiff. You’re choking the living daylights out of me.’
His daughter’s face tightened again.
‘I know how folks talk. I know their rotten twisted minds. Their tongues are busy enough flaying me and making a fool of me behind my back. They’re all gloating because they’ve done me out of my place there beside Melvin. I know the way they’ve been whispering and telling lies putting him against me. They’re not going to say I don’t keep you clean.’ Unexpectedly her elbow pierced his side. ‘Look what she’s wearing!’
‘Who?’ He wheezed in pain.
‘Sarah! I’m not surprised she’s cowering away at the back by herself. She ought to think shame. Look at her. What a disgrace. In church with a scarf tied round her head - a scarlet scarf. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s wearing her slippers. Have you seen these sloppy things she wears, red and fawn check with fuzzy red stuff all round them? Supposed to be fur, all matted and greasy. She’s a filthy lazy slut. Look at her. She’s even too lazy to sit up straight.’
‘Aw, just a minute now, hen. She never did anybody any harm. Sarah’s one of the kindest souls anybody could meet. All the wee bairns in the street go daft when they see her. She’s always got sweeties on her somewhere.’ Tam made a brave attempt at a laugh but was given such an immediate and violent indication to remember where he was and keep quiet that he dropped his voice to an apologetic whisper.
‘Och, well, she’s not had much of a life. I remember when she was a bairn herself - hail, rain or shine, there she was hanging about the streets or squatting in the close or on the window-sill waiting for her granny to come home. God knows what she had to put up with when that old harridan did arrive with the key. If it hadn’t been for other folk in the street giving her a bite to eat, or a cup of tea, or a wee heat at the fire, I don’t think that lassie would have survived.’
‘I’ve had to survive, and nobody helped me. They’ve always been jealous of me, always gossiped and whispered behind my back.’
‘Don’t be daft, lassie!’
His attention retreated away from her, his head tugged round in the direction of the hall door. Still no sign of the bride and her father. Rab was a queer fish. A damned good baker but close, never much chat with him. And booze? Rab could drink anybody under the table, even Baldy. Rab could be rampaging drunk one minute and that sober, that depressed the next, it would take nothing less than a bomb to break up the terrible black cloud of him.
Nellie dug into his other side.
‘Here they are at last, thank goodness. If I’d had to suffer another minute on this hard seat I would have fainted. My back’s just about broke.’
Rab had had a few. He wasn’t staggering but he was walking so straight and stiff with his head riveted so hard back it didn’t look natural.
Brother Stevens, the nervous wee budgie of a man elected to perform the ceremony, obviously didn’t know whether to relax with relief at the arrival of Rab and Catriona or to keep his already twittering nerves keyed up at the ready.
‘“Dearly beloved,”’ he began, too soon. ‘“We are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony which is an honourable estate …”’
From somewhere at the back of the hall, not at the front from the bride’s family where you’d expect it, came a sniffle and the scalp-tingling beginnings of a wail.
Brother Stevens secretly cursed whoever it was.
‘“…which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with His presence …”’
The sniffle became a sob.
‘“… and is commended in Holy Writ to be honourable among all men and therefore is not by any to be taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly; but reverently, discreetly soberly, and in the fear of God …”’
Sarah’s sob burst into broken-hearted words.
‘Mammy, Daddy, Mammy, Daddy!’
The words swelled up to a hair-raising wail of anguish.
‘Mammy, Daddy, Mammy, Daddy!’
Brother Stevens damned the woman forever in hell, and her mammy and daddy!
Tam nudged Lizzie then Nellie.
‘What’s the wee lassie trembling for? Fear of God, Melvin, or the commotion at the back?’
Nellie sniffled a reply. ‘That howling’s upsetting me, Tam.’
‘Not half as much as the preacher, lass. He looks as if he’s going tae have a stroke.’
‘Look at the disgrace of a dress!’ Lizzie giggled again. ‘Just look at it!’
‘It was ordained for the procreation of children, for increase of mankind according to the will of God.’ Brother Stevens was so unnerved he hardly knew what he was saying. ‘And that children might be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord …’
All it needed now, he thought, was for someone to stand up and object. He gazed pleadingly at the congregation.
‘“If any man can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now declare it or forever hold his peace.”’
‘Mammy, Daddy, Mammy, Daddy!’ howled the tear-streaked woman in the scarlet scarf, huddled in the far corner at the back.
‘“I require and charge you both.”’ He raised his voice determined not to be beaten. ‘“As ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know of any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do confess it.”’
The wailing and the sobbing reached such a pitch that everyone, including Melvin and Catriona, turned round.
Near to hysteria now, Brother Stevens shouted at Melvin’s stocky back, ‘“Wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other
, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”’
‘Oh!’ Sarah choked, exhausted at last. ‘Poor, poor wee lassie!’
Chapter 11
Melvin said Lizzie would be willing to mind Fergus after the wedding for the few weeks until the Glasgow holiday fortnight started.
He didn’t like leaving the business now that his father was on days instead of nights though. The days weren’t so bad, especially with Jimmy on the job. It was the nights that worried Melvin. True, there was Rab and Tam and Sandy and wee Eck the halfer in the early hours, and Baldy was a good enough foreman, but they were all partial to a dram and if he wasn’t there they’d be in the barm room drinking the stuff. They’d be stretched out helpless in all odd corners of the bakehouse in no time. God knows what kind of bread could be made and only Billy the horse sober enough to deliver it.
So there was no honeymoon until the Fair fortnight, and after the wedding tea they just went straight back to Dessie Street.
Melvin had decided to take the wedding night off but told Baldy that his father had instructed him to check on the bakehouse at least once during the night and they accepted this with sympathetic shaking of heads because they all knew old Duncan.
‘Wipe your feet,’ Melvin told Catriona as she stepped over the door holding up the long white dress she was still wearing.
She’d already wiped her feet on the prickly brown and orange mat on the landing. Now she silently repeated the process on the first little remnant of rug inside the hall. It slithered about awkwardly under her shoes on the highly polished linoleum.
‘See that polish.’ Melvin switched on the light and proudly surveyed the hall floor. ‘Maybe you think that’s a good shine. Lizzie MacGuffie thinks it’s perfect and I’ve never bothered to contradict her but you should have seen that floor when my Betty was alive.’
‘It’s lovely.’
‘Speak up,’ Melvin rapped out. ‘Nobody could hear a voice like that behind a car ticket.’
‘This is my bedroom.’ He flung open the door with a flourish. ‘I decorated it all myself.’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 7
