The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Chapter 1
Old Duncan MacNair kept more and more to the tiny bedroom allocated to him. There he crouched inside his second-hand, loose-fitting clothes, his boots toeing the fender, his gnarled hands palming close to the heat of the gas fire. There he chewed his dentures and scratched uncomprehendingly at his beard and filled sticky glasses from bottles he kept hidden in the wardrobe.
He had never recovered from the shock of losing his property. He had owned a general grocery and bakery shop with a bakehouse at the back and above three stories of flats and a couple of attics.
He never tired of rambling on about War Damage Premiums and how he was going to rebuild his shop and bakehouse and carry on business as usual. He was over seventy now and Catriona could not see much hope of it happening.
On her way to work each day she passed the place that had once been her home. Her husband Melvin MacNair, old Duncan’s son, had been so proud of that flat above the bakery. She remembered how he strutted like a peacock as he showed her round and told her how his first wife had polished the floors, and the doors and even some of the walls until they shone like glass.
‘There’s not another house in Clydend or even in the whole of Glasgow that could hold a candle to this,’ he often boasted.
She had been sixteen then, much younger than Melvin and as innocent and unsuspecting as an infant. Only the romantic fairy tales she avidly read and her desperation to escape from her mother’s house had made her blurt out a rash ‘yes’ to his sudden proposal of marriage.
Now Melvin was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, and Catriona had capitulated to her mother and moved to her parents’ house in Farmbank taking the children and old Duncan with her.
In Farmbank the pale grey uniformity of the houses created their own desolation. It was not very far from Clydend but there the MacNair building had been mellow with age and its tenants and customers spiced with a richness of character that the Farmbank housing scheme lacked.
Travelling to the centre of the city every day she felt magnetised to the right-hand side of the tramcar where she could sit rocking gently to the motion of the tram and gaze out the window, her eyes searching for Dessie Street. The hope never left her that maybe that night three years ago in 1941 had just been a dream. Only in nightmares could things like that happen. Over and over again her mind groped to sort out the facts, like a schoolteacher determined to make a stupid child comprehend …
The sirens go. Everyone in the building troops downstairs to the bakehouse lobby. The bakehouse lobby is warm and safe.
They gossip:
‘Did you know Slasher Dawson’s home on leave?’ somebody says. ‘A friend of mine in Govan was telling me she saw Slasher sauntering along with a pal when one of these incendiary bombs dropped in front of him. “Sandbags,” he bawled, and quick as lightning his pal, a wee bachly fella about half the size of Slasher, streaked into the nearest close and came staggering out with sandbags on his back. With a flourish Slasher flicked a razor from his waistcoat pocket, slashed at the sandbags and emptied sand on top of the bomb. It frized out, no bother, and he strolled away.’
Everybody laughs.
They are sitting arms and legs atangle on the lobby floor. Fergus’s mattress and Robert’s pram are crushed in the middle.
She says, ‘Look at that wee pet. Wide awake and not a whimper.’
She is crouched on the floor lose to the pram with her knees hugged under her chin. Her head is leaning to one side as she gazes at her baby. She begins to sing to him. He stares back at her, wide-eyed with love and delight.
Wee Willie Winkie
Runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs
In his nightgown,
Tirling at the window,
Crying at the lock,
“Are all the weans in their beds,
For it’s now ten o’clock?”’
There is more singing. Broad Glasgow voices. Somebody leads with the shout, ‘Everybody together …’
‘I belong to Glasgow,’ they sing.
She goes through to the bakehouse to make tea. It is her turn.
They are belting out another song now. Voices are bouncing and swaggering.
Just a wee doch and doris,
Just a wee yin that’s a’,
Just a wee doch and doris
Before ye gang awa’ …’
She smiles to herself as she sets cups on a tray.
‘… And if you can say, “It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht”, Yer aw richt, ye ken!’
The song screeches to an end in a hurricane of hilarity.
Despite the noise of the laughter she hears a fast, piercing whistle …
Catriona’s mind kept stalling with horror at that point. She remembered what happened but the pain of it was to much to bear. Yet she had borne it. She had wept. She had not wept. For long hours she ignored all thought of it. At other times she moaned and nursed herself, and saw Robert’s face, eyes beaming adoration up at her, mouth opening in toothless trusting smile.
‘I told you so,’ her mother kept saying. ‘I told you you ought to have let me keep those children safe with me in Farmbank. God works in strange and mysterious ways, Catriona. I told you you’d be punished and someone you loved taken from you. If you had done what I told you, that poor wee lamb would have been alive today!’
Grief sank into secret places. Guilt carved terrible wounds. Now the blue tramcar clanged along the side of the Benlin shipyards, and Catriona’s heart raced with hope. Opposite, at the corner of Main Road and Dessie Street, was the MacNair building. Above the shop were her windows with the shiny gold curtains. Inside the glistening promise of the windows had been home, privacy, a place to rest, comfortable chairs, familiar beds, a nice square hall, a kitchen with children’s toys strewn about.
Smells from the bakehouse had wafted up the stairs with the warmth, hot spicy gingerbread, juicy meat pie, crispy rolls, crusty new bread smells. They had blended with other aromas from the houses: porridge, chips, bacon, rich Scotch broth, toast burning, milk boiling.
Sounds too: a wireless medley - the jaunty strains of ‘Peg o’ my heart, I love you’; echoes of Alvar Liddell’s polite new announcements, his voice like a tranquil river that nothing can disturb.
The bickering of a husband and wife eddying to and fro in the distance then hastening louder into whirlpools of anger. Little girls playing with happy concentration:
‘I wouldn’t have a lassie-o,
A lassie-o,
A lassie-o,
I wouldn’t have a lassie-o,
I’d rather have a wee laddie,
Laddie, laddie, laddie …’
The shock of seeing the now desolate piece of waste ground instead of the familiar tenement building never lost its impact for Catriona.
Every day the tram jangled to a stop opposite. Every day she stared and stared. Then the tram carried her away. As usual she alighted further on at Govan Cross and took the subway from there because it was quicker; she could get out at St Enoch’s station and just cross over to Buchanan Street and Morton’s, the shop where she worked.
Buchanan Street was one of the greatest business and shopping thoroughfares in the city and a most popular rendezvous of the wealthy. There were some very old established and expensive shops in Buchanan Street and Morton’s was one of the oldest. The war and higher-paid jobs in munitions had led to a shortage of staff but there were still a manageress, two elderly ‘alteration hands’ and another saleslady called Julie Gemmell.
Julie was nineteen and up in the clouds about going to marry an Air Force officer. There were so many of these rushed wartime affairs now and they reminded Catriona of her own over-hasty although pre-war marriage. The mere thought of Julie’s unsuspecting eagerness distressed Catriona. She had agreed to be Julie’s matron-of-honour, as married bridesmaids were called, and she looked ahead to the ceremony with nothing but dread.
Only fo
ur years separated them in age, yet Catriona felt so much older and sadder. In outward appearance she could have been taken for younger than Julie: despite childbearing she still had a small, boyish underdeveloped body, and her fair hair and timid hazel eyes were on a level with Julie’s shoulder.
Julie came from the Gorbals and had a habit of repeating, in a slightly aggressive tone as if she thought you had not heard her the first time, that she was not in the slightest ashamed of the fact. She would toss her glossy hair and make her pageboy roll spring and bob about, and her eyes would acquire a dangerous green sparkle.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the Gorbals, you know. Plenty of decent, hardworking folk live there.’
Catriona agreed wholeheartedly every time she said it.
Julie’s excitement about her romance with Reggie Vincent was embarrassing to watch. Her skin took on a fiery hue as if she ran a temperature when she spoke of him.
‘An officer!’ In an ecstasy of joy she clapped her hands. ‘Fancy me going with an RAF officer, Catriona. And he’s so well educated and all that. Did I tell you he’s been to the university?’
She had innumerable times before.
‘And imagine, just imagine - he comes from Kelvinside!’ Julie always laughed then and repeated with a comic roll of the eyes and an exaggerated accent: ‘Kailvinsaide! Cain yew jast aimaigine me raisaiding in Kailvinsaide, Caitriona?’
Memory splintered Catriona’s eyes with pain.
Kelvinside was away at the north-west end of the city along Great Western Road, its elegant crescents and terraces curving up on either side and giving the road an even wider and more splendid appearance. Great Western Road led to Bearsden, with its sprawl of large villas and gardens and trees and high walls.
Catriona had been taken there after the Clydend blitz and been fed burned porridge and soup in the Bearsden town hall. Afterwards, but before her mother came to collect her and hustle her off to Farmbank, she had been given sanctuary in what seemed to be the house of her dreams. Too shocked and dazed, she had not paid much attention at the time. Often since, though, she had remembered the place and been amazed at how it matched her pre-war childish imaginings of the home she would have when she married. Many a time as a young girl curled up in the lumpy bed-settee in Farmbank she had seen that house, felt the comfort of it, the luxurious carpets, the fluffy satin quilts.
She thought of it now. One day she would have another home, she vowed. She would have a home of her own for herself and her children, and it would be like that.
Her husband, Melvin, never came into the picture. She dared not allow his big gorilla body and his bulbous-eyed mustachioed face to harass her mind. Fear had always been the strongest emotion Melvin aroused in her and she had not yet gathered enough courage to confess to him in her letters that the house and business and everything that meant so much to him had gone.
She persuaded herself that it was kinder in his circumstances that he should not know. Surely it must be torment enough for Melvin to be locked up behind barbed wire. He had always been such an active man and so proud of his physical fitness; he never used to miss a day of conscientious practice at his physical jerks, as he called them. That was how she most vividly remembered him, hairy hands gripping wrists, shoulders hunching, muscles rippling and ballooning.
Yet every now and again other memories disturbed her like rumbles of thunder that warned of a coming storm.
The last time he had been home he had come straight from Dunkirk and he had been a strange Melvin, thinner and hollow-eyed and prey to mercurial moods that twisted her fear into panic.
Her thoughts dodged him and other harassments. A protective barricade grew inside her head but its walls were never quite high enough or strong enough and always seemed on the verge of crashing down.
Everyday strain, mostly caused by her mother, heaved at her defences.
Her mother had literally snatched the children away from her and insisted on doing everything for them. At the slightest sign of protest or attempt to have anything to do with the children, her mother would remind Catriona of her sin in causing baby Robert’s death. If her father, Robert’s namesake, tried to come to her rescue, his wife’s tongue would immediately lash him, her face twisted with contempt and bitterness.
‘Why are you alive and my baby dead and buried?’
Catriona’s angry reply snapped out like a reflex action:
‘He wasn’t your baby! He was mine!’
‘May God in His infinite mercy forgive you!’ The retort never varied. ‘You ought to be ashamed to admit you’re a mother. You’re not fit to lay claim to the word. What kind of mother were you? What did you do to a poor, helpless, trusting wee infant?’
And so it went on, leaving Catriona drowning in a secret whirlpool of agony.
The shop gave her some respite and sometimes, chattering and laughing with Julie, she forgot to be unhappy. Then something Julie would say about love or marriage would unexpectedly tug the strings of her hidden pain and she could barely keep up the pretence of girlish normality. She just wanted to cry and turn away.
On the Saturday before Julie’s wedding, Julie explained all the arrangements. The ceremony was to be on Monday at 3 o’clock in Blythswood Registrar’s Office. They were both being allowed the afternoon off work. It was a quiet time and the manageress assured them that she would be able to manage and the alteration hands could always come forward and serve if necessary. Julie was to have the next day off as well so that she could spend some time with her new husband before he went back.
‘We’ll both go straight to the Gorbals from the shop,’ Julie instructed. ‘You remember and bring all you need. We’ll have a cup of tea and a sandwich or something, and change and then take a taxi to the Registrar’s Office.’ Then she did a little dance and gave a strangled, ‘Yippee, Reggie, here I come!’
A couple of late shoppers appeared and forced her to stop talking of her plans. They both went to attend to the customers, Catriona shyly, with a timid smile of enquiry, Julie, head tossed high, swooping forward in style, arching pencilled eyebrows.
‘Yes, modom?’
Afterwards they said a giggling goodbye at the corner of Argyle Street and St Enoch’s Square.
‘Reggie’s telling his mother tonight and I’m visiting there tomorrow for afternoon tea. Afternoon tea ait Kailvinsaide, no less!’
‘I hope everything goes all right. I hope his mother will like you. You know what mothers can be like.’
‘Och, I’ve seen a photo of her. She looks quite a nice wee soul. And don’t you worry!’ Julie patted her hair and arched her brows and gave a little bouncy wiggle of her hips. ‘After I get through with myself tonight she’ll think I’m the cat’s pyjamas. I’m going to clean and polish myself from top to toe. I’ve got beer in to give myself a special shampoo and all the old curlers are lined up at the ready. And I’ve bought a new nail buff. I’m even going to polish my toes.’
She gave a nonchalant demonstration of buffing her fingernails. ‘Buffety-buff-buff! I’m telling you, pal, once my future mother-in-law sees me, she won’t want to change me for the Queen of England! Don’t forget to bring your glad rags to the shop on Monday.’
Julie waved gaily as she swung off and disappeared among the jostling Argyle Street crowds.
Catriona’s laughter faded. The hand raised to return Julie’s wave drifted down. Uneasiness itched her mind. Talk of Julie and Reggie’s wedding made her think of her own marriage again. Somehow it had brought Melvin closer.
She trembled as she turned into St Enoch’s Square, as if her husband might be waiting for her.
She must tell him about the air-raid. She did not dare pretend any more.
Chapter 2
‘For God’s sake, Madge! Have a heart!’ Alec Jackson appealed to his wife. ‘I could go back off this leave and never be seen again.’
Madge wrestled with the nightdress over her head while he lay in bed boggling at her nakedness. At last her freckled face p
opped into view and she wriggled the nightdress down over milky body and brown nipples and curly pubic hair.
‘I couldn’t be that lucky. Not me! Oh, no, you’ll come f—ing back all right.’
‘Madge!’
He could not get accustomed to Madge using the swear word. On the ship it was used all the time and he never gave it a thought, but to hear it coarsen his wife’s mouth shocked him deeply.
Not that Madge had ever been an angel. She could bloody and bugger occasionally and she was never above a bit of violence either. Many a female acquaintance of his had been chased off by a battling Madge, dishing out squashed noses and black eyes. He had been at the receiving end of Madge’s fist himself and although his mates back on the ship thought it a howl of a yarn when he told it to them, in actual fact it was no joke. Madge had nearly knocked his teeth out.
Still, she had always remained attractive with it. Big, high-hipped, melon-breasted Madge with her long, lean legs, her toothy grin and candid stare.
Only now was he beginning to notice the change in her. She had lost the naivety that he had once found so attractive. Sometimes there was a hard twist to her mouth and her eyes could change to ice chips. Perhaps the change was more noticeable because he had not seen her very often these past few years, what with Dunkirk and one or two other places. Join the Navy and see the world, they said. After this lot was over they could keep the world. Give him Glasgow any day and his wee house in Springburn and Madge and the weans.
There could be no escaping the fact, though, she was definitely not the same easy-going big-hearted girl she used to be.
Take sex, for instance. She had never denied him before and certainly never quarrelled as she was doing now about him not having a French Letter.
‘The queue was about a mile long, hen,’ he tried to explain. ‘I would have missed my train if I’d waited.’
‘You’re not bothered about what I might miss. You’ve never bothered. I’ve had six weans and I would have had more by now if the bloody Royal Navy hadn’t hauled you off.’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 39
