The Piper's Tune

by Jessica Stirling

  Lindsay came downstairs in the hazy light of early morning with the words of the love song still running in her head. She had slipped on a summer dress but wore no stockings or shoes. The wine had left her with an unusual thirst; she longed for coffee but neither Giles nor the cook were up yet and she was reluctant to clatter about in the kitchen. It would be two hours or more before the maids arrived from the village to clear the glasses and empty bottles from the drawing-room and make the place spick and span. The French doors had been left open and the room smelled of mist. Lindsay could feel moisture against her skin, not clammy but cool, so cool that when she opened her mouth she could taste it on the tip of her tongue.

  She went outside. Her grandfather was seated on the rustic bench at the edge of the terrace. Forbes was standing behind him. They were drinking from enamelled picnic cups and Forbes was smoking a cigarette.

  Lindsay wondered if they were talking about her but then she realised that they were not talking at all. She observed from a distance as if she were a stranger and had no bond with either man, old or young.

  Forbes straightened and turned round.

  ‘Linnet?’ he said. ‘I thought it might be you.’

  She came to him, barefoot, lifted herself on tiptoe and kissed him on the mouth. She leaned against him, sharing his breath and pleasant taste of coffee for a moment, then she leaned over the back of the bench and kissed her grandfather on the high part of the brow. Pappy turned and looked up at her. Forbes put an arm about her waist and offered the coffee cup. She took it and drank, and Forbes drank and, leaning against the bench, they shared the cup, as close as lovers in the tranquil morning.

  ‘I suppose you think I’m too old to see how it is with the pair of you?’ Owen said. ‘Well, since you are both here, intruding into my quiet time, I’ll tell you why I’m sitting here waiting for you all to go home to Glasgow.’

  ‘Do you really want us to go, Pappy?’ Lindsay asked.

  ‘God, no!’ Owen answered. ‘I’d be happy for you to stay and keep me company for the rest of the summer, if not for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Why are you here at all?’ Lindsay said. ‘It doesn’t seem right for you.’

  ‘I made a promise once…’

  ‘To Grandmother?’ Lindsay said.

  The old man nodded. ‘Kath was born and raised in Kelkemmit. The family still think she came from Perth. Her father was a farm labourer and the family lived in the cottage by the church.’

  ‘Are any of them still here?’

  ‘No, they’ve been gone for umpteen years. There’s a sister in Inverness, I believe, and another in Ayrshire but they didn’t approve of me and after Kath and I married they refused to have anything more to do with us.’

  ‘Perhaps they were jealous,’ Forbes said, ‘because she had made a better life for herself by marrying you.’

  Owen put the picnic cup on the paving at his feet. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now, since they’re more or less all dead.’

  ‘Except you,’ said Lindsay. ‘And this isn’t where you belong.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  ‘What did you promise her?’ Forbes asked.

  ‘I promised her we would live in the big house one day.’ He pointed down the glen past the corner of the pine wood. ‘I recall it as if it were yesterday; your grandmother looking across the loch, hurt and tearful because her family had spurned us. I promised then that one day we’d live in Strathmore.’

  ‘You can’t bring back the past, Grandpappy,’ Forbes said.

  ‘I know, son. I know it.’ He shrugged. ‘I have to try, though. Wouldn’t you do the same?’ He looked at Forbes, not at Lindsay. ‘Wouldn’t you want to honour a promise to someone you’d loved?’

  ‘If I loved her enough, of course,’ Forbes said. ‘On the other hand, if she loved me she wouldn’t expect me to keep a meaningless promise.’

  ‘Then you don’t understand,’ Owen said.

  ‘No, I don’t think I do,’ Forbes admitted.

  ‘I do,’ Lindsay heard herself say. ‘I understand.’

  Owen got up. ‘I’m not as daft as you seem to think I am, Forbes,’ he said. ‘At least I’m out of harm’s way up here, by which I mean the boys have breathing space to get on with running the firm.’ He came around the bench and spreading his arms gathered Forbes and Lindsay to him. ‘Now, promise me you won’t give away my secret. Arthur and Donald think I’m doddering anyway, so let them go on thinking it. I just need a bit more time to pause and reflect.’

  ‘And then you’ll come home?’ said Lindsay.

  ‘I might,’ Owen said, ‘or I might go on somewhere else.’ He released them. ‘Right now, though, I’m off to rouse Giles and tell him I want my breakfast. It’s going to be another scorcher, by the look of it, and we don’t want to waste it, do we? Besides, I’ve the feeling you two might like to have a bit of time alone, without your cousins hovering over you.’

  Forbes said, ‘Don’t you object?’

  Owen said, ‘If you mean do I think it’s wrong for the two of you to fall in love and want to marry, of course I don’t.’

  ‘The others don’t think I’m serious,’ Forbes said.

  ‘Aye, son, but you are, aren’t you?’ Owen asked.

  ‘Deadly serious,’ Forbes answered.

  Owen laughed and, without another word, went off into the house and left them alone on the terrace where for the best part of half an hour Forbes and Lindsay kissed and made promises that in the long run neither of them would be willing to keep.

  PART TWO

  1901

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Coral Strand

  On the twenty-second day of January the old Queen died and her son Edward ascended the throne. In keeping with all shops, manufactories and businesses throughout the land, the shipyards closed for half a day.

  For the Franklins a year that began in mourning soon brightened up. In January the owners of the houses in Brunswick Crescent had electrical wiring installed and even Nanny Cheadle could no longer find an excuse for stumbling about with oil lamps and candles. In January, too, telephone wires connected Brunswick Park and Harper’s Hill and it was suddenly possible for Arthur and Donald to communicate without leaving home.

  In the same month Donald replaced his carriage and horses with a two-cylinder, four-seater, petrol-fuelled Humber motor-car with three-speed transmission and the very latest in drum brakes, an essential component when portions of the family were on board and the damned contraption went hurtling down the steep cobbled streets that flanked Harper’s Hill. Donald was a cautious motorist and Arthur wouldn’t step into a motor-car at all. But Ross and Johnny were perfect daredevils, forever roaring off to test the vehicle’s limit of adhesion on bumpy country roads, sometimes with Cissie and Mercy or Forbes and Lindsay hanging on to their hats in the rear seat.

  Electrical light, telephones and motor-cars were just some of the devices whose appearance shook dust from the heels of many a young man and woman and fostered the illusion that theirs was the first generation in history to be entirely liberated. Speed and excitement were in the air. Older and wiser folk, Arthur, Donald and Lilias among them, could do little to check their offspring’s enthusiasm and remind them that dignity and decorum, not to mention morality, were virtues not vices and that what had been thought proper under Victoria might still provide a benchmark for the twentieth century.

  In the promulgation of such an ethic there was, of course, a fatal flaw, a paradox not entirely lost on all the smart young things who careered about in motor-cars and chatted on the black lobster-claw telephones that graced the hallways of everyone who was anyone: the paradox lay in the fact that while survivors of the nineteenth century preached traditional brands of humanity and enlightenment the seeds of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism and Nihilism had not only been sown but were sprouting like hog-weed, and there was blood all over the map.

  God may still be in His heaven but all was not right with the world. Lin
dsay Franklin, for one, was well aware of it. Newspapers were filled with reports from the Transvaal of the war in South Africa, not white man against black but white against white, Briton against Boer. Almost every evening now the Franklins discussed the latest developments in tactics and armaments. Armaments. The guns. ‘Long Tom’, mobile artillery, German-made Mausers that cut the Irish Guards to pieces at Bridle Drift. The siege at Ladysmith: Buller dragging sixty howitzers and ten long-range naval guns through the mud of the Tugela River to meet disaster on the heights of Spion Kop. Even the replacement of Buller with Lord Roberts, fiery little hero of Kabul, did not radically alter the course of the war. The French were mighty pleased at British defeats, the Russians no less so, and the Germans, naturally, were absolutely delighted at the success of their munitions.

  The jingo press went haywire with every British defeat and celebrated every British victory with unquestioning enthusiasm. ‘Kroojers’ and pro-Boers were set upon and beaten up and when Lloyd George spoke in Glasgow the police had to put every spare man on the streets to quell the violence of the mob. Thus Lindsay learned the painful lesson that conscience has no part to play when business interests are at stake, that cause and effect are all the same on a balance sheet. In the months that brought her to her majority she learned more than a well-bred young lady should about the commercial forces that propelled her family’s fortunes and was forced to acknowledge that every penny added to her trust fund had its origins in suffering, somewhere out of sight.

  Franklin’s order books were full. Admiralty contracts for torpedo-boats and torpedo-boat destroyers had been handed out to three or four British yards – including Franklin’s – and the slips at Aydon Road were crammed with craft in various stages of completion.

  Lindsay’s father spent long hours cudgelling his powers of invention to improve the stress-bearing potential of everything from a new engine’s connecting rods to the shape of a hull. There were launches and lunches galore, speed trials on the Gareloch, prolonged debates about the thermal efficiency of boilers and the loss of feed water per hour, aspects of shipbuilding whose importance Lindsay gradually came to understand. She attended weekly board meetings but said nothing, ever, in front of the managers. She did not dare put questions or let her voice be heard. Later, Martin or Tom Calder would explain things to her and Tom often escorted her into the yard to show her how the various processes of production dovetailed together. As she grew older, she could not help but marvel at man’s ingenuity, a quality that many women tended to take for granted or, in their ignorance, mocked.

  Hanging on to Tom Calder’s arm, she would gaze at the cradled hulls and wonder at the beauty and menace of their lines; the sleek speed-efficient shapes of torpedo-boats or the tapered, high-buttocked bulk of torpedo-boat destroyers – the infamous TBDs – one hundred and sixty feet of planed steel, the maximum length that Franklin’s could accommodate. And when the dog-shores were knocked out and the Mallard or the Boxer or the Havelock, newly named, growled down into the waters of the Clyde it was the men she thought of, the men who had built them and the men who would sail them.

  Seated at luncheon with managers and owners or smartly uniformed naval officers she would watch the champagne glasses being filled and laden silver dishes being ferried in and would glance out of the long window and think of the men out there in the rain, gnawing on dry bread rolls and brewing tea in cans. And she would wonder if they were proud and satisfied or if, as Forbes claimed, they thought of nothing but their pay-pokes and how much drink their shillings would buy come Friday night.

  ‘How do you know what the men are thinking?’ Lindsay asked.

  Forbes had been pulled out of Beardmore’s at the back end of 1899 and brought into Franklin’s to learn the ropes. He studied engineering and ship design at the Maritime Institute one day and three evenings a week, a schedule that he didn’t seem to find gruelling. Hard work had changed him and the brashness that had been so apparent when he had first appeared on Harper’s Hill had gone, though he could still be infuriatingly opinionated at times.

  ‘I’ve worked with them,’ Forbes answered. ‘I know what they’re like.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re not really one of them; you’ve no right to condemn them.’

  ‘I’m not condemning them,’ he said. ‘I’m just glad I don’t have to trail home every night to a house full of wailing babies and a nagging wife.’

  ‘Wailing babies and a nagging wife aren’t the exclusive property of the working class, you know.’

  ‘True,’ Forbes said, ‘but at least when we get married we won’t have to set up in one stinking room.’

  ‘Franklin’s workers don’t live in slums,’ Lindsay said. ‘Our shipwrights are reasonably well paid.’

  ‘Really?’ Forbes said. ‘Have you ever been inside one of the tenements in Damaris Street or along the Portland Row?’

  ‘I must admit I haven’t,’ Lindsay said.

  ‘Then you’ve no right to talk.’

  ‘I’ve every right to my opinion, Forbes.’ She was aware that he had lured her on to thin ice. ‘What about you? Have you ever been inside a tenement?’

  ‘I’ve seen what they’re like.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘None of your business.’ He kissed her lightly on the brow. ‘Just take my word for it, Linnet, poverty isn’t something you should pontificate about unless you’ve experienced it for yourself.’

  ‘And you have, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’ After an almost undetectable pause, he added, ‘Never have and, thank God, never will,’ which was something else that Lindsay would hold against him when the brand-new twentieth century picked up a head of steam.

  * * *

  It was the first time that he had taken her to Kirby’s at the corner of Portland Row and St George’s Road. The neighbourhood was bordering respectable but the big, brash tavern and the private club above it were not. Sylvie was not entirely surprised that Dada Hartnell knew where the doors were situated.

  She had passed Kirby’s now and then on the horse-tram coming home from Coral Strand meetings in town with Mama. She had peeked at the gaudy frontage and, with a shiver, at the dark green windows on the first floor, windows that hid the sort of goings-on that young ladies were not supposed to know about, though some of the girls at school did, of course; her classmates exchanged information – much of it inaccurate – on all manner of worldly things.

  If they had only known where she, Sylvie Calder, had been and what she had seen perhaps they wouldn’t have been so stuck-up. She did not confide in them, though. She did not correct their silly notions about what went on in public houses. She wasn’t one of them. Had never made a friend at school, not even Amelia Rogers whose maid was a regular at Wednesday night Bible Study and whose brother, a divinity student, had once addressed the Coral Strand on the subject of ‘Charity’. In eight years Sylvie had never been invited to tea at anyone’s house, not even Amelia Rogers’, though Mama Hartnell had had a lot to do with that because Mama did not encourage her to form friendships with girls who were unacquainted with God.

  She, Sylvie, was acquainted with God. She knew God intimately. She knew the God who had created Eve out of dirt, the God who had expelled Adam, the God who had brought plagues down upon Egypt and who, a bit like Herod, had slain the children of the Egyptians in their beds; the God who had spoken to Moses, who, through His Son, had raised Lazarus from the dead; the God who looked a little, just a little, like Dada Albert, with his woolly moustache and watch-chain and the broad lap that she sat upon whenever she wanted petting or, less often now, whenever he felt the need to pet her.

  When she imagined Satan, though, the serpent, the tempter, the defiant angel thrown out of heaven, it was Papa Calder who came to mind. She couldn’t see herself sitting on his lap, kissing his thin lips, going out with him with the wickerwork collection basket and sheaves of leaflets that recounted the horrid life that poor benighted heathens had to endure in India or Africa or on the far-off
Coral Strand; couldn’t imagine Papa Calder bestowing charity on anyone, although he did pay for her schooling and her dresses which, so Mama told her, was just his way of striving to save his soul from damnation.

  As far as Sylvie was concerned her father was damned anyway. She hadn’t missed him when he’d stopped popping up in the ’Groveries on Sunday afternoons. Had felt nothing but relief when he’d stopped visiting her at home every other week. She belonged to God, to Dada Hartnell, and her desire to make her other Papa notice her had been a weakness, particularly as he continued to pay for her schooling and her dresses and anything else Mama asked for on her behalf whether she was nice to him or whether she was not.

  Generally speaking she liked being nice to people. The nicer she was the more generous they seemed to be. When Dada Hartnell introduced her to his acquaintances he would refer to her as ‘my little lady’, which was, she supposed, true and accurate. At one time he used to stand her on the bar counter and persuade her to recite a short poem about the Coral Strand and then the men would put money into her basket, heaps of money. Dada Hartnell had stopped doing that now. She was growing up, he said, and it was undignified to treat her as if she were a music-hall turn and that it would be better for them – that is, for the Coral Strand Foreign Mission Fund – if she just acted naturally, which was something Sylvie had no difficulty in doing, for she was a great deal less naïve than she appeared to be.

  Albert had told Florence that they were going to tap the public houses on a stretch of Dumbarton Road between Patrick Cross and the bridges, a favoured beat for the seekers of charity who rattled tambourines or sold heather, flags or cheap paper florets. But, according to Dada Hartnell, there was no money to be made at that game. Instead he conducted Sylvie to the smoky dens of the docklands that lascars frequented, physical embodiments of the self-same heathens for whom the basket was being passed round and who, Sylvie thought, seemed grim and miserable so far removed from the Coral Strand. But they paid up. They were remarkably generous for poor people. They did not have to understand the message that Dada preached, they just had to look at her to know that God, in the shape of a blue-eyed little angel, cared about them.