Water gushed down Catriona’s cheeks and she stuffed a handkerchief tightly against her mouth. It was a still silent kind of weeping. She just stood there, eyes open wide and tears overflowing.
They were all laughing. People laughed as they surged past defying the rule not to litter the place with confetti. The air shimmered with colour.
Wiping her face, Catriona began to laugh too.
She allowed herself to be thrust outside to the waiting cab. Soon they were honking towards The Rogano licensed restaurant and from there to Green’s Playhouse to dance to Joe Loss and his band. The dance-hall was on the top floor. Underneath it, Green’s Playhouse Cinema boasted the biggest seating accommodation in Europe.
The lift spilled them out and Julie grabbed Catriona’s hand and almost skipped into the ladies’ cloakroom.
‘Gosh, that wine’s gone to my head!’ She rolled her eyes and pretended to stagger. ‘Casheeona, aye shink aym a lirrle tiddly!’
‘Stop it!’ Catriona hissed with embarrassment and nudged her and darted a look around. Then feeling reassured that no one was paying them any attention, she captured an explosion of giggles in her hands. ‘I feel quite light-headed myself!’
Julie clenched her fists, screwed up her face and closed her eyes.
‘I’m so happy, happy, happy, and I want you to be happy too.’
Catriona had an affectionate impulse to hug her friend, but instead she laughed and said:
‘Tonight I’ll forget all my troubles and really enjoy myself, just to please you!’
They squeezed their way through the crowd of girls in front of the wall mirror and pushed their faces close to the glass to concentrate on smearing lips, and curling eyelashes and tidying eyebrows with stiff wet pinkies.
A high-pitched crescendo of chatter beat against the walls and filled the cloakroom with heady excitement. Outside men laughed and smoked and mooched and chewed gum while Joe Loss pounded the building with the bouncy ‘In The Mood’.
After fluffing powder over their faces and lightly teasing their curls, and screwing round to check the backs of their dresses and the seams of their stockings, Julie and Catriona pushed through the swing doors and rejoined Reggie and Jeff.
The foyer was just a raised part at the back of the hall and in a couple of minutes they had descended the steps into the ballroom. It was a huge hall with pillars holding up a balcony where people sat at small tables littered with ash and empty cigarette and chewing gum packets and sipped lemonade and coffee. At one end of the floor, raised on a stage, Joe Loss in white tie and tails jumped and twisted and flashed his teeth and flayed the air with his baton. His men earnestly pulsated and blared out and pulsated and blared out above the bobbing heads of the dancers.
Julie and Reggie melted into one another’s arms and floated away, cheek to cheek. Jeff gripped Catriona tightly against him and swooped her off with long fast strides that kept speeding unexpectedly into dainty spring-toed steps. She was never quite quick enough for the change of pace and kept stumbling and trampling on his feet.
Other dancers jostled them as people vigorously contorted themselves about. Men threw women high in the air and twisted them round their bodies like snakes and swooped them down to side between their legs. Women bounced and twitched and twirled, skirts spun and opened like umbrellas to show wide-legged French knickers. Plum lips and rosy cheeks glistened and thin pencilled brows arched high with effort and excitement.
Catriona giggled. ‘I’m trampling all over you. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not used to drinking so much wine. I feel quite dizzy.’ She pushed without success at his shoulders to try to lever him off.
The drink, the music, the heat, the frenzied people, all intensified her reckless need to be happy, but to be happy she needed to escape from Jeff. The mere fact that he had a moustache was enough to remind her of Melvin.
‘Please, Jeff, let me go. I want to stand at the side for a breath of fresh air from the window.’
Her voice wheedled and softened with promise and Jeff gave one of his excited whinnies and led her from the floor. Once out of his grip she felt delirious with freedom, pleaded with him to go and fetch her a glass of lemonade, then as soon as his back was turned she slipped away to hide by herself.
She could have swirled around and danced by herself and shouted to everyone that tonight she did not care about anything. Instead she edged through he crowds whispering, ‘Excuse me, please, excuse me,’ and avoided people’s eyes and kept her gaze lowered shyly.
She had never been to a dance before. She had barely finished school when Melvin wrenched her from her mother’s apron strings and installed her in his house in Dessie Street. Now, for the first time, she caught a glimpse of a dimension to life she had been missing. Not that she wanted to participate; she felt much safer being a spectator and observer of the scene. It was more than enough to listen to the music, to watch the dancers, to quickly brush against the men as she passed, and feel the heat of them and smell the tobacco and the sweat, and the cloying perfume of the women.
But a hand gripped her elbow and stopped her in her tracks like a startled doe and before she knew what was happening she was in a sailor’s arms and shuffling with him cheek to cheek.
Up on the platform someone mouthed close to the microphone:
‘All of me …
Why not take
All of me …?’
The lights had gone out and a spinning ball of mirrors sprinkled a confetti of colour through the darkness.
The sailor did not speak but held her with comfortable familiarity and after the dance he kept a grip of her hand and smiled and winked at her before drawing her to him for the next dance.
She noticed the Canada flash on his shoulder and wondered what Canada could be like. Before the war she had only heard Canada and America mentioned at school. They were just statistics to be learnt parrot-fashion for exams. They never had seemed real places where real people lived, reality had always been bounded by Glasgow.
‘What’s Canada like?’ she asked curiously.
His voice in reply was a slow, gentle drawl that enchanted her.
‘It’s God’s own country, honey! God’s own country!’
‘What a wonderful voice!’
He eased her back for a moment to give her a lopsided grin and an amused stare.
‘I guess you’re the sweetest little thing this side of the pond!’ he drawled.
Wide-eyed against his chest she watched the speckle dancers drift around. It seemed as if she were in fairyland.
The sailor was called Johnny and was French Canadian, she discovered later over a glass of lemonade. He talked nostalgically of a lovely old city called Montreal, Quebec, and how his father had been a peace-time skipper on one of the boats that worked the great lakes.
Catriona listened entranced, elbows propped on the small table, hands clasped under chin, as she gazed admiringly at the sapphire blue eyes, the tanned face crinkling kindly.
They danced again and again. The band played the haunting ‘Lili Marlene’ and everybody sang.
They were still clinging together and moving around the floor in a kind of dream when the band played the last dance.
‘You must remember this …
A kiss is just a kiss …
A sigh is just a sigh …’
‘You’re wearing a wedding ring, honey,’ he murmured. ‘Does that mean there’s a husband somewhere you’re crazy about?’
Suddenly the impact of her personal tragedy drained her happiness away. She had not only lost a child, she had lost her own life too. In the middle of a song called ‘As Time Goes By’ she remembered about Melvin.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to go now,’ she told the sailor abruptly.
‘Can’t I see you home?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
In a panic of distress she fled before he could speak to her again. A whirlpool of dancers sucked her away and by the time she reached the outer side of the hall she had l
ost sight of him. She caught a glimpse of Jeff laughing and talking and obviously making a hit with a warm-eyed brunette. Julie and Reggie were nowhere to be seen.
The colourful, crowded scene disturbed her all the way back to Farmbank. The feel of it, the sight of it, the sound of it, each facet of the experience stayed alive and became more vivid in contrast to the house in Fyffe Road.
Everyone was in bed and, after checking that the boys were safely asleep, Catriona retreated to the living-room and to her horse-hair sofa prison where she crouched in an almost unendurable fever of restlessness.
Chapter 8
‘I won’t let you down, Reggie. You’ll never need to feel ashamed because I come from a working-class family.’
‘Of course not, darling.’ He folded his uniform neatly over a chair beside the bed. ‘You talk such rot at times. Who worries about class nowadays?’
‘Your mother!’
‘Oh, I know how you must feel about Mother, but honestly, she isn’t as bad as you think. I admit she’s old-fashioned, a minister’s daughter and all that, but give her time. You’ll find her pretty decent once you get to know her.’
‘Do you think I ever will?’
‘For my sake you will.’
‘Oh? You’re very sure of yourself.’
‘I’m sure of you.’
‘That doesn’t sound very complimentary.’
‘You do love me, don’t you, Julie?’
His eyes became suddenly very young and anxious. In a face that confidently sported a handlebar moustache and sideboards his youthful uncertainty seemed incongruous but it was an incongruity matched by the vest and pants and woollen socks he was wearing.
Julie giggled.
‘I’m glad you don’t wear Long Johns!’
She lay in bed happily watching him. She did not care in the slightest if he looked ridiculous. For better or for worse, he was her man, and a background of the crowded tenements had long ago taught her the true facts of life. She had romance, she was bubbling over with the excitement of her whirlwind romance with an RAF officer, but she had no romantic illusions. Reggie was her man and that was that. In the Gorbals no woman thought or spoke of her ‘husband’, it was always her ‘man’, and Julie felt there was something basic, fundamental and right about the expression. It got back to the root of things, to the time of the cavemen when a woman depended on a man’s physical strength to protect her or to kill something so that they could eat and survive. Yet woman’s physical weakness had caused her to become much more wily and tougher in spirit, and there was something marvellously right about that too. One strength complemented the other. Sometimes the one strength helped to endure the other and that was as it should be.
She had watched marriage in close-up in the overcrowded tenements, seen husbands who worked hard and always handed over their wages and never raised their hand in anger. Their wives spoke proudly of ‘my man’. She had seen other husbands who gambled and drank and beat their partners and their wives spoke of ‘my man’ with the same possessive lilt to their voices.
Julie savoured the words as she watched Reggie strip.
She had a wonderful feeling of completeness, of something accomplished that would never change. She did not like change. She had lived in the same house in the same district all her life. She had attended only one school. Her loyalties had clung tenaciously from childhood to a single friend until that friend married and moved to England. Since leaving school she had worked for only one firm.
Reggie was the first man she had ever loved and she was happy in the certainty that he would be her only love.
She felt unashamedly proud of him. She felt like a cave-woman who not only fulfils the basic necessity of finding a mate but who succeeds in ensnaring the very best mate in the cave.
‘I’ll always love you,’ she told him.
He looked away, stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside locker.
‘Damn this bloody war!’
As he said the words, Julie’s quick eye saw his mind drift far away from her.
‘Come to bed.’ She pushed the covers down to reveal white breasts bulging over a black nightdress. ‘Forget about the war.’
He came in beside her and she sighed with satisfaction. ‘We’re all that matter. We love each other and we belong to each other and we’re here in this hotel in each other’s arms. Nothing in the whole world could be more important.’
She could feel him trembling against her and she was glad of her soft woman’s skin and breasts and belly and full hips arching under his exploring hands. She was his and it was right and proper that he should be pleased with her.
Here was her strength and her love and generosity guided her in an infinite variety of ways to increase his pleasure until she was exhausted but triumphant and he was gasping for breath and half-weeping in her arms.
Gradually his jerky breathing soothed and after a long peaceful silence, she remarked:
‘I think there’s blood or something on the sheet.’
‘It’s all right, darling,’ he murmured sleepily. ‘That happens when it’s the first time.’
‘But it’s on the sheet.’
‘Don’t worry!’
‘I can’t stay the night in a hotel and leave dirty sheets on the bed next morning.’
‘Darling, the sheets are stripped off every morning.’
‘I’m not having people say that I left stained sheets.’
‘They’ll know what it is. They probably gossip and laugh about these things all the time in hotels.’
Immediately the bedclothes flurried back. She struggled up.
‘Well, they won’t get the chance to gossip or laugh about me!’
‘What the devil are you doing?’
‘Get up! Come on, I want that sheet! It won’t take a minute.’
‘You’re joking!’
She tugged the sheet from under him.
‘It’s only a small stain. I’ll get rid of it in a couple of minutes at the washhand basin and then hang it over the chair at the window to dry.’
‘Good Lord!’
‘I’ve got my pride, Reggie. I don’t sleep in other folks’ beds and leave stained sheets.’
Her breasts jiggled about and she became pink in the face and breathless as she attacked the offending part of the sheet with a soapy nailbrush.
Reggie relaxed among the disorder of blankets with his arms folded behind his head and roared laughter up to the ceiling.
‘Be quiet!’ she scolded him. ‘Somebody might hear you. How would it look if we were chucked out the hotel for noisy behaviour in the middle of the night? I’d never live it down.’
She held the crumpled linen under a gush of cold water and then wrung the water out, her face contorting with the exertion. ‘There, that’s better. I told you, Reggie, I’ll never let you down. I’ve got pride and I’m not afraid of hard work. I’ve always kept a spotless clean house and my mother before me.’
Reggie grinned over at her. ‘You’re only nineteen. What do you know about keeping house?’
‘I’ve kept one for seven years. My mother died when I was twelve. Move over till I tidy the bed, you big oaf.’ Her voice softened reminiscently. ‘I remember Mammy, and my wee brother. He died just before her. There was first one funeral and then another, and do you know what sticks out most vividly in my mind?’
‘What?’
‘The worry about money - about not having any, I mean! Mammy used to worry about that all the time when she was alive. As long as we can manage to keep a roof over our heads and a brave face to the world - she always used to say. And she always managed. But at the funeral it was terrible. You know how there has to be a funeral tea for everybody. Well, talk about feeding the multitude with a loaf and a few fishes!’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I knew Mammy wouldn’t have wanted me to borrow from anybody. But I thought it would be all right to take the stuff Mrs Goldberg offered. We always lit her fire and did odd jobs for her on Sat
urdays and I reckoned she owed us something.’ She cuddled into bed beside him. ‘Dad kept wailing -“I m no use without my better half.” But I told him, “We’ll have to show everybody we can manage right from the start or they’ll have me away in a home and you’ll end up in ‘the Model’ and what would Mammy think about the disgrace of that?”’
Reggie’s arms tightened around her. ‘I want to look after you for the rest of your life. I don’t want you to have to worry about money or anything else again.’
She sighed with happiness.
‘Oh, Reggie, just think - we’ve our whole long lives before us. We’ve so much to plan and talk about. What kind of house do you reckon we’ll have one day?’
‘A small one, to start with anyway, modern and easy to run. Life’s for living, old girl. I don’t believe in women being chained to the kitchen sink and all that rot. No, were going to enjoy life and we’re going to live it together!’
‘A bathroom’s a must!’
‘Definitely!
‘And a kitchenette. It’s terrible this idea of sinks and cookers and beds all in the one room. I’d like to have met the man who designed Glasgow tenements. I’d have given him a piece of my mind.’
‘Tenements aren’t all like that though, darling. You must see our flat. You’d love it.’
‘Your mother and father’s, you mean?’
‘Yes. I was hoping you could have stayed there while I was away.’
‘Reggie, your mother hates the sight of me! She made it perfectly plain she didn’t even want to see me at her place on Sunday.’
‘She didn’t mean it, darling. It was just the shock of everything. You must admit it was a bit sudden. In her day there were long courtships and everything was so different.’
‘Everybody knew their “place”, you mean? People from the Gorbals stayed in the Gorbals and never sullied the fair banks of the Kelvin?’
‘Julie! She just didn’t expect me to get married so suddenly, that’s all!’
‘That’s what you think, pal! But anyway, what about my dad?’
The Breadmakers Saga Page 44
