Sammy turned the handle and went in.
‘Come on. Come on,’ he growled at Ruth. ‘There’s no one waiting to jump on you with a gun.’
But the mere sight of the place made anxiety descend on him like an invisible cloak of fleas.
They made their way in single file along the dark lobby and into the gloomy parlour.
Hodge Hunter stood huge and wide-legged, blocking the smouldering fire. Thumbs hooked in waistcoat, head sunk low in a coarse bull neck, he cocked a glittering eye at them.
‘Well, well! Here’s my youngest.’
‘How are you keeping, Mother?’
Sammy went straight over to his stepmother, a delicate little English lady, Hodge’s third wife, and kissed her on the cheek.
‘Oh, she’s fine, fine.’ Hodge’s sandpaper voice rubbed out Mrs Hunter’s reply. Sammy flashed a look of disgust before turning to him.
‘Ruth’s going to help you with the tea.’
‘Well?’ Hodge cut in hoarsely. ‘Where’s my dram?’ His voice surged up like sea roaring against rocks. ‘Stop simpering over your mammy. Give your old father a dram.’
Hodge had made it a ritual on the few and far between occasions of family gatherings that everyone should toast the event and come well supplied with liquor for the purpose.
‘Now, now, Father, don’t be rude,’ Mrs Hunter chirped smiling brightly round at Sammy’s brothers, who could hardly be seen because the room was so shadowy and dark and they seemed to be shrinking back in their chairs as if desperately trying to make themselves invisible. ‘We ought to offer our guests a refreshment. I have it all ready.’
‘You mean thon filthy slops you made the other day, you daft gowk! Do you want to poison us all?’
‘Tt. Tt.’ Mrs Hunter ducked her tongue and flashed quick apologetic smiles all round. ‘He is a naughty man, isn’t he? I’ve got whisky out as well, Father, but I thought perhaps Ruth might like to sample my raspberry.’
‘Prrr-rr - !’ Hodge made a loud rude noise. ‘There’s your raspberry!’
‘For God’s sake!’ Sammy’s face rivalled the dark red of his hair. ‘Stop behaving like an animal. You make me sick.’
‘I love your home-made wine,’ Ruth interrupted, coming forward with a defiant tilt to her head and a swing to her hips. ‘I can’t stand whisky.’ Hodge made a growling noise in his throat as if he were getting ready to spit.
‘Ye’ve no taste in your mouth, woman.’
Ignoring him, Ruth accepted the glass of wine Mrs Hunter poured out for her.
‘Now, Sammy, here’s yours, son. The boys have all got …’
‘Here’s to Scotland’s grand Exhibition!’ roared Hodge, swinging his glass high.
His sons eased cautiously to their feet to mumble down their whisky, but their father’s voice, bawling out again, made them wince into silence.
‘Here’s tae us, wha’s like us!’ He flung back his drink, clattered the empty glass on to the mantelpiece, then screwed a fat neck round to his wife. ‘Where’s my tea, woman?’
‘I’m just away to the kitchen to dish it, Father. I’ve made a nice …’
‘Come on, come on, jump to it.’ His sarcastic black beads of eyes straffed his sons. ‘Get round the table. Some have meat that cannot eat,’ he suddenly roared piously heavenwards. ‘Some no meat that want it. But we have meat and we can eat and so the Lord be thankit!’
‘I’ll come through and help you, Mrs Hunter,’ Ruth murmured, fluttering a worried glance at Sammy who was sitting down with the rest, eyes lowered like his brothers but fists white-knuckled.
‘Well.’ Hodge marched stiff-legged over to take his chair at the head of the table. ‘I hope you come up with something better. This time for your dinner was rotten!’
Sammy stood up and his stepmother immediately tinkled with laughter.
‘Sh, Father, you rude silly man.’ Then brightly to Sammy, ‘Sit down, son.’
Sammy was leaning forward, heavy-jowled and ugly.
‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Hunter went on as if she were imparting exciting news to a crowd of favourite infants. ‘We’re all going to have a lovely tea, and a lovely time, and everybody’s going to enjoy themselves!’
Chapter 5
Catriona was terrified to tell either Melvin or her mother that she was pregnant. She dreaded the look of revulsion in her mother’s eyes that would greet the announcement, the shrinking, the twist of the mouth and nose as if it was a filthy stinking disease Catriona was harbouring instead of a baby. She was caught in claustrophobia, unable to escape. The horror, the uncleanness, the guilt, was at the centre of herself.
Often she puzzled over her mother’s attitude, at the same time not wanting to see the answer, dodging it, being temporarily reassured by her mother’s insistent concern and dogmatic protestations of affection, yet all the time knowing what the answer was. Her mother hated her.
Only a few years ago, before her marriage, her mother’s hatred of her had been made only too obvious. She had been panic-stricken by stabbing pains between her legs and a sudden gushing of blood that soaked her knickers and made her woollen stockings cling to her legs.
Shocked, and certain that she must have developed some dreadful disease, she hobbled through to the living-room where her mother was down on her knees raking out the fire.
‘What’ll I do? There’s something wrong. I’m bleeding!’
‘Get away from me!’
She could still see the turning of the head, the loathing in her mother’s eyes, the screw of the nose and mouth against something foul smelling.
After that, not daring to mention the shameful bleeding again, there had been many anguished months worrying about when she was going to die, months of secretly ferreting for odd bits of rags to mop up the blood, of trying to find efficient ways of securing the rags between her legs so that they would not fall out and shame her while she was at school.
She could not remember how or when she discovered that the bleeding was something known as menstruation and common to every woman - only that the knowledge had come too late.
The intimation of her first pregnancy had brought the same grimace, the same disgust to her mother’s face. Only this time the words had been different.
‘You poor child! A lot that man cares if you survive this ordeal or not. His first wife didn’t!’
Melvin had puffed up with pleasure when he heard the news and immediately delivered a long lecture about animals and their similarity to humans, the tits of cows and the maternal instincts of female monkeys.
She had appealed to him to stop these uncalled-for and revolting comparisons but her distress had only encouraged him to launch into further explanations and illustrations.
Nature was a wonderful thing, he kept assuring her, hitching his shoulders and bulging his muscles to prove it. He insisted that she show him her abdomen and her breasts every day. He made her stand naked while he examined her and then, still naked, do exercises while he sat close, eyes bulging; a smile making his bushy moustache spread up.
He told her she must be massaged with olive oil or her skin would be ruined and when she protested he further horrified her by declaring:
‘You’ll have a belly like a plate of tripe. That’s what happens when you don’t get oiled. After the baby’s born your belly will shrivel up like a plate of tripe.’
So she had been oiled. Gleefully he massaged her while she stood in the middle of the room with head lowered trying to hide her growing deformity, her distortion, her unloveliness, by allowing her long fair hair to droop forward and her hands to act as tiny ineffectual screens.
Although Melvin and she were alone, she always felt her mother’s eyes upon her, the stare growing and multiplying until every eye in the world despised her nakedness. The eyes never left her, could see beyond the outward sin to the greater sin inside, to the moment when despite self-loathing - she felt a quiver of pleasure.
The miscarriage had been her punishment, another scar in t
he mind, something to blank out and never speak of, yet a scar that would always be there.
The stabbing pain, the sudden gush of blood, the cry for help, this time to Melvin, and Melvin bawling out:
‘For Christ’s sake watch my good carpet! You’ll ruin it. Wait till I get a pail or something.’
Kneeling on the carpet unable to wait, the horror of the spreading stain, far outweighing her physical agony.
‘I’m s-sorry, Melvin. I’m s-sorry, I’m s-sorry,’ she stuttered as he rushed about with pails and cloths before he even phoned for an ambulance.
Then the humiliations of the hospital examinations and the peculiar callousness of the abortion ward where doctors and nurses seemed to take it for granted that their patients, unmarried or married, had purposely caused their conditions. The whole staff were a vengeful God’s representatives, whose duty it was to punish the miscarriers.
The thought of going through it all again appalled her. Even if she did not miscarry this time, the prospect was bleak. Her mother and her mother’s friends had prepared her with plenty of gory tales about childbirth.
Most of all, she feared Melvin’s reaction, and kept putting off the dreaded day of telling him until suddenly he said:
‘For God’s sake try and make a better job of it this time.’
‘A better job of it?’ she echoed, eyes anxious to understand.
‘You’ve got another bun in the oven, haven’t you?’
‘A bun in the … ?’
His eyes bulged upwards with impatience.
‘Pregnant! Pregnant!!’
‘Oh.’ She turned a deep pink, making the pale colour of her hair more noticeable in contrast. ‘Yes, I am.’ A delicate little sound as she cleared her throat. ‘And please don’t start comparing me with animals, Melvin. I don’t like it.’
Melvin’s moustache flurried out with a loud guffaw of laughter.
‘I bet you don’t like having a bun in the oven either but it’s there, darlin’. You can’t beat nature.’
She tried not to tremble. She struggled to smooth calmness around her for protection because instinctively she knew that she must protect herself.
‘It upsets me and I mustn’t get upset while I’m pregnant.’
‘Well, don’t!’
‘There was nothing physically wrong with me before. They told me. It must have been caused by nerves.’
‘Well, don’t have nerves. Physical jerks, that’s the thing. And deep breathing.’ He widened his nostrils and expanded his chest to enormous proportions. ‘Nothing like physical jerks and deep breathing to keep you fit.’
An aura of stubbornness descended on her. She lowered her head, this time not submissively, but aggressively.
‘Don’t talk about animals.’
‘“Don’t talk about animals”,’ Melvin mimicked, then still with hilarity in his voice he added, ‘Don’t you tell me what to talk about. I’ll talk about what I like.’
‘Don’t talk about animals and don’t make me do exercises.’
‘Aw, shut up.’ He turned away.
‘No, I won’t. I won’t.’
The trembling was beyond control now - a series of rapid convulsions growing in strength.
‘You’re the one who’s like an animal. No, you’re worse. You’re coarse. You’re ignorant. You’re insensitive. I wish I’d never set eyes on you. I wish I was home! I wish I was home!’
‘With your holy cow of a mammy?’ he sneered, swinging round on her, broad-shouldered and long-armed.
‘I wish I was home!’
‘What home, you idiot? “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth”, your mammy’s always quoting from her precious Bible, and she’s carried it out to the letter, hasn’t she? Your “home” is as bare as a railway waiting-room and you hadn’t a stitch to your back when you married me. Your mammy’s that holy and generous she’s given everything away. What have you got to go back to? “Home”, did you say?’ He laughed again and suddenly pulled her into his arms. ‘Forget it!’
She could never credit how different marriage was from the fairy-tale land of women’s magazines and romantic novels. She had read so many of them after she had left school only a few years ago, and they had been so cosy and enjoyable that no matter what happened, part of her would always believe them.
In fiction-fairyland the husband never knew about pregnancies until he was told and then, after being speechless with joy for a few minutes, he suddenly rushed for a chair to ease his wife into as if she were made of the most delicate, the most precious china.
After that, during the whole pregnancy in fact, he watched her anxiously while she kept laughing and assuring him that she was perfectly all right. And she was perfectly all right, except perhaps for little fads and fancies like wanting a melon or a bowl of soup in the middle of the night, when the husband would walk miles searching for titbits.
In real life she had once taken a terrible craving for chips. She was usually in bed alone most of the nights because Melvin worked downstairs in the bakehouse but this had been his night off and she had timorously tugged at his arm until he had grunted awake.
‘Whassa matter, eh?’
‘Melvin, I’m sorry, but I fancy some chips.’
‘You must be joking, darlin’.’
‘No,’ she assured him. ‘I’d love some chips.’ Her mouth watered at the thought. ‘With plenty of salt and vinegar.’
‘Chips be damned!’ he chortled, pulling her towards the hot sweaty smell of his body. ‘I know what you want!’
‘No, Melvin, please!’ She tried to flurry away his octopus hands but he jerked on top of her, his massive shoulders and hairy chest pinning her down gasping for breath.
Sometimes she hated the writers of romantic fiction for deceiving her so outrageously and yet all the time she longed for their rosy, gentle world and hoped that one day she might find it.
The only person in the family who took the news with acquiescence was Fergus, her stepson.
‘You’ll like having a little baby brother or sister, won’t you, Fergie?’ She knelt down in front of him and held his hands together.
‘Yes, thank you,’ he replied, his blue eyes empty.
‘Oh, you will, you will!’ she repeated more to reassure herself than the child standing so still in his scuffed shoes and drooping socks and school-cap slightly askew.
Her mind was speeding along two concurrent lines. She would have to tidy Fergus up before Melvin saw him or she would get a row. Melvin was almost as fussy about the care of Fergus’s clothes and person as he was about the scrubbing and polishing of everything in the house.
‘My house’, he often expostulated, ‘has always been the best furnished, best-looking place in Clydend and I want it kept that way. There isn’t another floor in the whole of Glasgow that’s ever had such a marvellous polish as that!’
Or about Fergus he would hitch back his shoulders and boast:
‘That child is the best-behaved, best-mannered, most obedient child in Scotland.’
Indeed, for most of the time with adults, and especially with his father, Fergus was a model of quiet perfection.
Yet he was capable of unexpected extremes of emotion that frightened Catriona.
Sometimes she would walk past him when he was playing contentedly on the floor, or so it seemed, and suddenly he would lunge at her, clinging to her legs and hugging them with the strength of a maniac who would never let go. More than once after unsuccessful attempts to free herself, she had panicked and screamed for Melvin. But when Melvin arrived on the scene Fergus was always innocently playing with his toys again as if nothing had happened.
Now, since he had started school odd reports were reaching her of violent behaviour towards other children.
‘You’ll love a little brother or sister, and look after it, and be kind to it, won’t you?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Fergus replied.
She released his hands and allowed him to walk away. He was a stran
ge child.
She struggled to her feet to stand absently nibbling at her nails. She felt far from happy.
Chapter 6
Sammy marched along Clyde Street from the office of the wholesale warehouse where he worked, hands in pockets, eyes down on shoes. Normally when he reached the Saltmarket he jumped on a tram-car for home. This time he decided to stretch his legs and walk for a bit.
The Balornock ordeal was well in the past, with time deadening it, pushing it further and further away like a comforting growth of cotton wool. The return visit had become another milestone that he tried to leave far behind him too. Although visions still streaked across his mind’s eye, and every now and again an echo startled him.
He hated his father’s voice. It made him feel sick. His father sounded as if he were perpetually gathering phlegm in his throat in readiness to spit. His voice had the unnerving habit of changing in tone and volume, for no apparent reason. Even a normal remark about the weather was liable to swell into a lion-sized roar. It see-sawed between correct, carefully intonated English and a coarse Scots dialect that twisted into a sneer.
Sammy hated the sound of his father’s voice but even more he hated his silences.
He had watched him enter the house in silence and silently march around poking at things with his heavy silver-topped stick as if he were conducting a kit inspection. He watched until he could bear it no longer. Ruth and he were painfully proud of their room and kitchen, proud but unsure. They had in their eagerness for originality and perfection experimented with colours and new ideas, and spent rather more than they could afford.
‘There’s still a lot we’d like to do,’ he burst into his father’s silence eventually. ‘But we’ve had to call a halt. It’s a question of money.’
Hodge poked underneath a cushion, caught a silk stocking on the end of his stick and hitched it high in the air.
‘You’ve had to call a halt!’ his voice exploded before settling down to a hoarse rasp. ‘About time, too!’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 22
