She pushed past him into the kitchen, but the sudden jangle of the doorbell stopped her.
‘Ah’ll go,’ said Sarah with a hard-core of warning behind the weakness of voice. Nobody opened the door in her house but her.
Tam McGuffie and Sandy MacNulty were standing there like Mutt and Jeff. Tam was only about half Sandy’s size but twice as lively. His checked ‘bunnet’ was pulled well down on his head but he was grinning from ear to ear underneath it, and smacking and rubbing his big hands and bouncing with gleeful impatience from one foot to the other.
Sandy was grinning too and showing as much teeth and gums as Billy the horse. He was holding out his cap and shaking it, making a chinkly noise.
Tam swaggered forward.
‘There you are, hen. It’s from the men and the neighbours. Take it, lassie. We know you’d do the very same for any of us. Take it. Sanny’ll get his cap back after.’
The cap was pushed into her hands. She clutched it to herself, lips struggling, eyes squeezing.
Tam shoved her back so that he could jerk the door shut between them.
‘See you tomorrow!’ he flung at her in an unnecessarily loud voice.
Sandy leaned over Tam and cried a quick word of comfort.
‘You’re all right now, hen!’
Then the door banged shut.
Chapter 17
The paddle steamer Caledonia bulged fat and weighed low down with people. Yet more and more Glaswegians were queuing up at Bridge Wharf across from the Broomilaw and crushing merrily on to swell its sides fatter and fatter.
The hot sun sparkled the vivid kaleidoscope of coloured clothes and polished glass and dazzling paint.
Already the singing had started and men were chugging bottles of whisky from jacket pockets and women were chattering and laughing and children were dashing about getting lost.
A couple of middle-aged women, their fat bouncing and wobbly before them, were facing each other up for a dance, whacking their hands, galloping towards each other, pouncing on each other’s arms and uttering hair-raising ‘heughs’ as they birled each other round, spinning faster and faster, with everybody watching, singing and shouting, clapping hands and stamping feet.
At last the gang-planks were lifted, ropes flung aboard. The steamer gave a warning hoot and with much creaking, groaning and splashing, the Caledonia’s paddles were set in motion, slowly at first, the water foaming and frothing; then gradually as it rocked away from Bridge Wharf, just by the George V Bridge, the paddles quickened and found their joyous rhythm and water-churning strength.
A band began to play in the centre of the middle deck. It consisted of four men in navy-blue suits and caps. One man strummed the banjo, another had a white hanky spread over his shoulder on which rested his fiddle and his head. Another energetically squeezed and pulled at a concertina and the fourth thumped with great concentration on an ancient piano.
Melvin, Catriona and Fergus sat forward on the top deck because they could get all the sunshine and fresh air that was going. They also got quite a breeze and Catriona’s long hair swirled and twirled and flowed out behind her.
‘Make sure you enjoy every minute of this,’ Melvin warned. ‘It’s costing me a pretty penny!’
He had not yet recovered his good humour from the previous night’s debacle with her mother.
Hannah had been either the stronger of the two personalities or the more practised in verbal warfare. Anyway, she snatched the last word before slamming away in triumph.
Long after she had gone Melvin had nagged his anger and bruised pride out on Catriona. In fact she had fallen into an exhausted sleep with his enraged voice pounding in her ears and awakened next morning to hear it, as if he had never left off, never paused for either breath or sleep.
‘It’s lovely.’ She smiled round at him, flicking back glistening strands of hair that kept whipping across her face. ‘And everybody sounds so happy. Listen to the singing!’
‘Drunk, probably!’ The corners of Melvin’s mouth twisted, making his moustache droop low. ‘They don’t know how to enjoy themselves without a glass of whisky in their hands.’
The tubby Caledonia, brought specially up from its home-base in Gourock to help cope with the holiday crowds, waddled its cheery way past the docks, the ferries, the giant cranes jagging the sky, the ships all in different stages of growth balanced on stocks.
The yards were quiet because everything closed for the Fair. At other times when the steamers passed, the shipbuilders, swarms of men high up like ants on the sides of hulls, noisily banging and clanging, or leaning over, or up in the clouds working cranes, stopped and waved hands or caps and bawled friendly greetings.
‘Haw, Bella! Why don’t you buy a ship of your own?’
Today there was nothing to compete with the noisy paddle steamer except the hooting of other ships and the raucous screeching of gulls. The white-breasted birds swooped and dived alongside and followed the holiday cruises from Glasgow, knowing they were certain of generous and eagerly proffered handfuls of food right down the Clyde to Rothesay.
All the old Scots songs were getting big licks - ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’, ‘The Road to the Isles’, ‘Stop Your Ticklin’ Jock’, ‘Ah’m The Saftest In The Family’, ‘I Belong Tae Glasgow’. Sometimes everybody sang together, sometimes one person went solo on the verses and everyone joined with them in lusty chorus.
‘Fergus!’ Catriona twisted round, then stood up to squint across and round the people in an effort to see where the little boy had run off to. ‘Fergus!’
‘Oh, leave him alone,’ Melvin growled. ‘He’ll be all right. Sit down!’
‘He’s too wee to be away on his own. He might climb up high on something and fall overboard.’
She did not wait to hear any more objections from Melvin. The child made her nervous. He behaved very strangely at times. There was no telling what he might do.
Crushing her way along the deck, she caught a glimpse of his blonde head and blue and white shirt disappearing downstairs.
‘Fergus!’
No doubt the music and singing were luring him on to the other deck.
Someone was shouting.
‘Come on! Come on, Jimmy lad! It’s your turn. Get away from that piano, Jock. Let a Clydend man show you how it should be played. A song as well, Jimmy. Come on now! Don’t be shy. We’re no going to take no for an answer!’
Suddenly a cheer went up then gradually tailed away as the piano rippled into tune.
Catriona stopped half-way down the stairs, arrested by the change in the music. The piano keys were being caressed more than played and the young voice was rich and tender.
He was very handsome. Her head bent to one side to study him.
Then, unexpectedly, dark eyes flicked up and found hers.
‘They’ll be pipes down the isle,
Bonny Mary of Argyll,
When the heather gleams like stardust in the glen.’
A hundred voices swelled into the chorus but she could still hear his gentle tone.
‘I’ll be sailing down the Clyde, in my arm you’ll soon abide …’
Held by his strangely perceptive stare, life inside her, and outside, too, acquired a new intensity, an extra dimension; the sturdy Clydebank ship, the sunbright sky, the sparkling water, the people so happily singing, everything concentrated in time, and she saw, and she heard, and she was perfectly tuned in.
Moving away to continue her search for Fergus she felt so acutely disturbed by this new awareness, the strange heightening of sensitivity, she was not sure whether it made her happy or sad.
She found the little boy and returned with him, hand-in-hand, to where Melvin was lounging back scanning a newspaper.
‘He wanted to spend some of his money in the shop. I let him get an apple. I thought an apple would be better than chocolate.’
Melvin grunted from behind the paper.
Sitting beside her husband, hands clasped on lap, Catriona closed her ey
es but she could still see Jimmy Gordon staring at her.
It was a good thing she enjoyed the sail ‘doon the watter’, Sarah told herself afterwards, because the rest of the holiday was a nightmare.
It could have been grand, and no one realized more than she did that she was lucky to have any holiday at all. She was, in fact, hoarse from thanking everybody for their help, although the money gathered barely gave them enough to cover their expenses and Baldy’s pocket-money. Her gratitude knew no bounds and, hoarse or not, she continued to thank everybody she met.
If only Lender Lil hadn’t spoiled the holiday. Every day in Clydend, every afternoon, regular as clockwork she nag, nag, nagged. But in Rothesay her wail never stopped from early morning until late every night. Over and over again she assured Sarah that as long as she lived she would never forgive her for accepting the ‘collection’ money. Water had flooded down her coarse-skinned face.
‘If everybody got up collections when somebody needed money I’d be out of business. Money’s my business, Miss Sweeney, in case you’ve forgotten! I’m a respectable business woman. I’m not in the habit of accepting charity and neither is any of my family. The Fowlers have always been respectable business folk and proud of it. You don’t know the meaning of the word respectable - or pride - if you ask me!’
On and on and on, non-stop, except for the time when Baldy came in from one of his boozy dos with the lads. Usually the women, in between shopping and cooking under much more difficult circumstances than they were accustomed to at home, stuck close together on seats along the front and kept an eye on the children, and gossiped and had a laugh and did a bit of knitting and ‘sooked’ at ice cream.
The men very quickly found their favourite pubs and billiard halls and only emerged for food, a snore in the sun and some loving.
Baldy steered well clear of her during the day and she certainly didn’t blame him, with his mother sticking to her side like a weepy crocodile. No man could be expected to spend his holidays listening to a nagging wet-eyed woman, so the only place she saw anything of Baldy was in bed where he energetically made up for lost opportunities.
The worst of it was, she had never managed to recover from the state of shock she had been whirled into before she left Glasgow. The change of surroundings and routine only made matters worse. Her mind and emotions felt as confused and bruised as her body. Never before had she been more vulnerable, never before had she been at such a disadvantage, in both preventing herself from drowning in Lender Lil’s tears, and coping with Baldy’s needs as a husband.
Defences down, she knocked about in a maze, stumbling miraculously from one day to the other, forgetting things, unable to concentrate, unable to hold things, continuously surprised at articles falling from her fumbling fingers. Little curtains came down over time and peering desperately back she could not see through them, could not prise open her mind to find out what she had done yesterday, or what had happened only a few hours before. Sometimes, to her secret shame, she could not even recall her own name.
All she could do was to keep automatically thanking everyone, and to smile her gratitude.
Free of the all-pervading flour that powdered his black hair and brows and long lashes, whitened his already pale skin, and dusted his clothes and shoes, Jimmy looked a new man. His hair had a gloss and seemed full of vitality. The fresh air had whipped colour to his cheeks and his eyes were brighter and shinier and more eager to find life and enjoy it than ever.
He explored Dunoon on his own and he enjoyed the aloneness as intensely and with as much appreciation as he did everything else.
His mother had soon settled down to her usual routine with her two unmarried sisters in their little house not far from the pier. She was perfectly happy to blether with them over endless cups of tea or go visiting Aunty Jeannie and Aunt Maggie’s friends to have more blethers and more cups of tea.
‘Och, away you go, son,’ she told him in reply to his first polite offer to escort them around. ‘It’s no good for young laddies to be hanging about old women. Thanks, all the same, but never mind us. You get away on your own and enjoy yourself.’
Gratefully, he had escaped to walk for miles, shoulders back and - once he was away in lonely deserted places - breathing deeply in through his nose and out through his mouth in accordance with instructions in a book he had picked up at one of the book barrows in Renfield Street.
It had made fascinating study into the wonders that could be accomplished by proper breathing, exercises and self-discipline.
The self-discipline was the bit that worried him … the self-discipline. All his life there seemed to have been a tussle going on inside him for one reason or another. Take smoking. He reminded himself of the old joke, ‘Of course I can stop smoking, I’ve done it hundreds of times!’ The torments he put himself through trying to do without a cigarette - the torments, the depths he sunk to in defeat were just as bad, every bit as bad. After three or four days of wild pacing about and even wilder piano playing, he reduced himself to searching every pocket and ashtray in the house for dog-ends. It was always Sunday. The shops were always shut.
His mother would reprimand him. ‘Saints preserve us, son, go and borrow some cigarettes from Sarah and don’t stop smoking again. I can’t relax when you’re prowling about the place; you’re like a caged tiger, laddie. You’ll do more harm to yourself like this than by smoking, I’m thinking.’
Every time he persuaded himself that she was right; emotional strain was very bad for his heart. Gratefully, he rushed to have a glorious puff at one of Sarah’s cigarettes. Immediately he took it he despised himself for his lack of will-power. Despised himself. He determined, if it was the last thing he ever did, the last thing, he’d master this smoking business. He just would not be beaten.
After the holidays, he would definitely give it up.
Scrambling up the Castle Hill after one of his walks he flung himself down for a rest and, propping himself up on his elbows, chewed a blade of grass as he gazed down at the pier and listened to the kilted piper playing one of the steamers away.
‘Will ye no come back again?’ the pipers lamented.
‘Oh, we’re no awa’ tae bide awa’,’ the crowd on the ship lusitily sang, ‘we’re no awa’ tae leave ye. We’re no awa’ tae bide awa’ - we’ll aye come back and see ye!’
Jimmy’s gaze roamed across the shimmering water, back to the hills, then round to the rock on which stood the statue of Highland Mary, looking towards the coast of Ayrshire, where she met Robert Burns.
Highland Mary - Mary Campbell of Dunoon who went to work as a dairymaid or a nursemaid in Ayrshire, fell in love with the poet and, according to some people, married him ‘Scotch style’ by exchanging Bibles over running water.
He wondered if there were any connections between Highland Mary and the ‘Bonny Mary of Argyll’ of the song.
As he stared at the state of the woman so beloved by Burns, a sadness seemed to reach out to him.
He took a deep breath to chase the sadness away. Then he felt in his pocket for a cigarette.
As soon as he returned to Clydend, he automatically reminded himself, he was going to give up smoking.
Chapter 18
All the talk after the holidays was centred round Sadie Dawson’s wedding. Slasher had long ago become sick to his back teeth of hearing about it but the women customers crowding into MacNair’s for their daily supply of bread and groceries could not hear enough.
They knew, of course, that it was t o be in the house, although how the house was supposed to hold the huge mob that was going was anybody’s guess. MacNair’s were supplying the food: steak pie, potatoes and peas, Scotch trifle, assorted cakes and biscuits and - the pièce de résistance - the three-tiered wedding cake with a tiny bride and a little model to represent Sadie’s ‘intended’ perched on top under an intricate arch of icing-sugar. The cake was so big, old MacNair couldn’t find a box to fit it.
The street outside the shop was deserted excep
t for Billy the horse, Sandy McNulty’s van, and a mucky-faced boy of about seven called Erchie who was always hopefully hanging about with the - to old MacNair - infuriatingly persistent cry of, ‘Mister, mister, any broken biscuits, mister? Hey, mister, any broken biscuits? Any stale cookies, eh?’
The only other apparent life in Dessie Street was approaching with leisurely gait from the faraway end in the form of Arthur Begg’s horse-drawn coal-cart. Arthur wore a greasy cap back-to-front on his head and a leather saddle-like cape to protect his shoulder-blades, but all that could be seen of Arthur himself was the bulging whites of his eyes.
Cupping his coal-black hand round his ear when he yelled his wares, he looked as if he were trying to catch what he was saying, which was not really surprising as everyone recognized his cry but no one understood a word of it.
‘Co-o-ee any o-o-o-ee f-o-o-ee Co-o-ee!’
Arthur’s mare plodded slowly along, the cart rattling and groaning behind her as she stopped automatically at each close, eyeballs rolling, white-showing, the same as Arthur’s.
Inside MacNair’s there was first an awesome silence when the wedding cake appeared, carried with great difficulty by old Duncan and Sandy, then the silence exploded into generous and noisy praise.
Old Duncan always insisted on carrying wedding cakes out through the shop into the van so that he could bask in the reflected glory of the exquisite confections. It was, after all, his bakery and his material and his employee who had made them.
Although he’d been chiding himself all morning for having anything to do with the wedding - ‘God knows when I’ll get paid for all this. Everybody in Clydend lives off me after the Fair. Nobody’s got a halfpenny to their name. It’s just tick, tick, tick, all the time.’
None of his grumbles dampened the excitement, however.
Jimmy and Lexy came through from the bakehouse to hover proudly in the background.
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