A Pinch of Salt

by Eileen Ramsay

  ‘Da said I could stay a week. He said I could sleep in the big chair and do the first baking. I’ve grand light hands.’

  But Kate was adamant. She refused to listen but after their midday dinner sent Bridie off with a well-wrapped-up-baby Patrick while she sat down with her new little daughter in her arms. ‘Let’s enjoy this, my wee Margaret, because there won’t be many days like it, but just think, when you’re a big lassie like Auntie Bridie you can help your mammy after school, and when you’re really big we can stay together every day. I bet you’ll be a better baker than anyone.’

  She was, but baking pies was the last thing young Margaret would want to do with her life.

  10

  IT WAS CHARLIE who decided to move. A one-bed-roomed cottage that was cold and damp in the summer and freezing cold and even damper in the winter was hardly the ideal place to bring up two children.

  ‘Forbye, Kate, I cannot move for cots in the room and I dinnae like the bairns there when we’re, well you know what we do.’ She knew what he did; she merely lay there and prayed; one, that just once she would be able to relax and enjoy it; two, that it would be over even faster than the night before, and three, that she would not get pregnant again. ‘And I cannae move in the front room for pies,’ Charlie continued, ‘could we not put our name down for a council house?’

  Kate looked at him and then at her reflection in the spotted mirror above the fireplace. Their wedding photograph was on the mantel just below the mirror and it was strange to look at how they used to be and at their real selves at the same time.

  ‘We must get a likeness of the bairns, Charlie, to put beside our wedding picture. Do you not think we’re better-looking now? You’ve filled out a bit and it suits you.’

  He blushed with pleasure. Kate never gave compliments and, indeed, as if regretting that she had let her guard down she moved away from him and from the two views of herself. I look older though, she thought to herself and – surely not – do I look hard? I never meant to get hard.

  ‘We don’t want a council house, Charlie. I have enough trouble running a business from here. You know how much Thompson has raised the rent on this ruin since we started to make a go – can you imagine what rent a council would ask from us, even if they would let us run the bakery in the first place?’

  Charlie reached down and retrieved his daughter from her investigation of the coal scuttle. ‘Ach, lambie, your face is near as black as yer beautiful hair.’

  ‘Tie her in her chair, Charlie, and give her a good hard slap. Wee midden. Patrick never ate coal.’

  ‘Aye and the sun rose and set on his head, we all know that.’ Four-year-old Patrick, who was sitting at one end of the table drawing on a slate, looked at his father in surprise. He had no idea what Daddy meant but he knew it wasn’t nice and he had no way of knowing how he had displeased him. Patrick spend his entire day trying to please. First Kate who was so busy that she hardly saw him, then Charlie who sometimes patted him on the head and took him in the cart with him, and even Margaret who either pulled his black curly hair or bit him.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ It wasn’t fair, thought Kate, if he’s angry wi’ me he shouldnae take it out on Patrick, good wee laddie that he is. ‘Patrick, go and get your sister a clean frock. She’s such a pretty bairn you’d think she’d like to be clean.’ Kate opened the oven door and drew out the baked pies. ‘This is the new one,’ she said, holding it up in the air to be admired, ‘we’ll have one for our dinner, then you can take one to Doctor Hyslop on your way in, Charlie, and maybe you could ask him about a house, and give this third one to Molly.’

  Charlie stopped in the act of undressing the squirming Margaret and looked at his wife. ‘Ask the doctor about a house? Is he on the council?’

  ‘We’ll need to buy something,’ said Kate firmly, ‘Not too big, mind. A house with enough rooms and maybe a great big kitchen or one or two rooms that could be made into a bakery. The doctor’ll maybe know if there’s anything near the village. We cannae be too far away because of the school for Patrick next year, and I doubt there’s anything in the village.’

  ‘Buy a house?’ To Kate it was obvious that Charlie had never contemplated such a step, and why should he? In the village of Auchenbeath very few people owned their homes. Even the Manse, the Chapel house and the Dominie’s house were not really owned by their inhabitants.

  ‘You’ll need to do the looking, Kate. Buy a house. You said that like you say, get me some more milk.’

  Kate was already putting the next lot of pies in the oven while Charlie still had a half-naked child squealing in his arms. ‘When am I supposed to have time to look for a house? You’re not after Buckingham Palace, love. Just a house with a bit garden for the bairns and my hens and a big kitchen.’ She turned and smiled at him, the dazzling smile that he very rarely saw these days. ‘And do ye know what I’d really like, Charlie, an inside lavvie and maybe even a bath.’

  Charlie knew his limitations. ‘You’ll have to do this yourself, Kate. I’ll mind the bairns and we can get Bridie tae help.’

  Kate went on taking pies out to cool and putting others in, moving back and forward between the table and the ovens and still fully aware of Charlie and her children.

  ‘Don’t bother, I’ve just minded on yon Mr McAndliss. According to Mr McDonald I already pay him to do my legal business. Well, this is legal so he can start earning his, what was it cried . . . retainer.’ Kate smiled in satisfaction and reached for her daughter. ‘Patrick, put your coat on and take Margaret out to play and keep her away from the hens, lambie.’

  Quietly Patrick did as he was told while Kate efficiently dealt with little Margaret who had been fighting Charlie’s administrations with all her considerable energy. Kate smacked her daughter’s behind, so encased in cloths that she felt nothing, and pulled the sparkling white frock over the angry little head.

  ‘Daft colour for playing,’ said Charlie as he helped with the coat.

  ‘I suppose you’re right but I love tae see her bonnie. Would I no have killed for a frock like yon and this wee tink has too many.’ She put the child down on the floor, ‘Away out with yer big brother, pet, and don’t chase Mammy’s hens.’

  Charlie left with the children to see to the ponies and Kate sat down for her first quiet time of the day. She relaxed in the big chair by the fire and sipped her hot, sweet tea while her mind went over the problems of house-hunting. She had discovered that when she was really afraid of something, it was much better to confront it head-on. I’m away to buy a house, Mam, me, your Kate. It was a big step from farm cottage to owner occupancy. She retraced the route into the village. Nothing there but the Toll House and the Manse. In the village there were no properties big enough. I’d need to circle the village with the pony and trap, she told herself, there has to be something but first I’ll write to Mr McAndliss. Charlie can hand it in to his office.

  Kate took down the big dictionary from the shelf beside the fireplace and got a jotter, her pen and her writing-paper. She would make a rough copy and check the spelling and then she would write the letter. Another new experience, writing to a solicitor. When would she ever take such things for granted? If all gentlemen were like Dr Hyslop how easy it would be. When Charlie returned, she had the letter ready.

  ‘What do you think, Charlie?’

  Charlie read the letter. ‘You could have been a solicitor yourself, Kate Inglis.’

  ‘Away and don’t be daft.’ But Kate smiled at his obvious pride in her. A solicitor. She doubted if she had ever heard the word while she was at the school. How could anyone from Auchenbeath become anything? Surely some children left the village school for places of higher education. It was scandalous if they did not. The steel inside her hardened even more. Patrick, she vowed, Patrick.

  When they had gone she cleaned the tiny cottage and did her washing. What satisfaction a line of washing blowing in the good fresh air gave her. Even more than a tray of pies wrapped in paper with your name o
n it? Yes. No. Just the same. They’re both for Patrick, she told the dancing sheets . . . and wee Margaret and Charlie too, she added guiltily. Everything she did was for her family. That each and every one of them would have preferred five minutes of her time never even occurred to her. She stood for a moment straightening her back in the old gesture she had learned from Liam. A bird flew over her head so close that she could hear the loud slap of his wings against the air. The hills had never looked more beautiful.

  I hope Mr McAndliss finds me somewhere where I can still see the hills, she told the hens. That was one joy of the damp little house where she had lived for almost six years. From windows and doors one could see the hills. I’d hate to give that up. She toyed with the idea of buying the cottage from her landlord, renovating and extending it. She looked back at the open door and she saw herself being pushed through it on her wedding night. She could see the rug where . . . no. Some memories she would be happy to leave here. As for the hills – she could always take a day off now and again – take the bairns for a picnic. Goodness, how Bridie had loved a picnic in the hills. She would find time to take Patrick. A day off with a book and the bairns playing among the primroses.

  It was a strange year. The Earl of Carnarvon entered the tomb of a pharaoh in Egypt and died two months later. Kate knew that it was as the result of a curse. The King’s second son, the Duke of York, had, according to Kate and Auntie Mollie, the great good sense to marry a Scot, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Kate enjoyed the luxury of poring over the newspapers at the miners’ club; she just happened to be passing by on her house-hunting expeditions. There too she read of the appalling earthquake which almost razed the cities of Yokohama and Tokyo to the ground and for the first time in her life Kate sent money to an international appeal.

  ‘There was hundreds of thousands of people dead, Charlie,’ she told him when she returned from the bank. ‘I cannot imagine all those people living in the one place or even two cities. Seven thousand factories was destroyed.’

  ‘Is Japan a big place then? Sure that’s more factories than in the whole of Britain.’

  Kate could not assimilate the newspaper report. ‘It looked like two wee dots in the ocean in the newspaper drawing, Charlie. Where did the people all live?’

  To Kate, Charlie was an experienced traveller. He had seen Glasgow, London, Liverpool and even Paris. ‘Ach, ten in the one room is nothing, Kate, and here’s me complaining about having to step over my own babies.’

  ‘That’s something we’ll have to talk about when we get them to their beds. You’ll never guess what house in Auchenbeath Mr McAndliss says is for sale and absolutely perfect for converting? The Toll House.’

  Kate had seen the Toll House almost every day of her life. It stood just outside the village and had been a toll house in the days of horse-drawn carriages. The house itself faced the road, and was small and white with beautiful windows, into which had been blown lovely glass bubbles. The front door opened directly on to the main road and that would be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Great for business, dangerous for small children, even though a motor car passing through once a day was still a novelty. Kate and Charlie both knew that the motor car would soon take over from the horse and cart but they determined to fight it off as long as possible. On the north side of the house was a huge and beautiful garden, a perfect place for growing children, and what made the property perfect for Kate’s purposes were several solid outbuildings and a wide, cobbled courtyard. The original house was seventeenth-century but the outbuildings had been built later, probably replacing earlier stables.

  ‘There’s an old man lives in it, Charlie. He’d wanted to start a horse-drawn bus company after the Boer War but somebody else got in afore him. He’s been wanting to sell since about 1905, poor man, and we can have the lot for less than five hundred pounds.’

  Charlie nearly choked on his tea. ‘Five hundred pounds. My God, Kate, you say that so casual. Where would the likes of us get a hundred pounds, let alone five?’

  ‘It’s in the bank, Charlie, well almost, and Mr McAndliss says the bank would be honoured to lend us the rest for the repairs that’s needed.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind, lassie. Borrow money from a bank? Never in my born days have I owed a man a penny and I’m no about to start now.’

  ‘Charlie, it’s for our bairns. At least let us go to see it. We’ll do it up bit by bit; this year the kitchen. There’s a barn kind of building right up against the side of the hoose and we could make it the bakery with big ovens and have all the women that bakes for us in the village come there of a morning.’

  ‘They’ll no like that. How can they mind their bairns and hang out the washing . . .’

  Kate interrupted him. ‘If they want to work for me, Charlie, for Inglis Bakeries,’ she added quickly, ‘they’ll have to make arrangements. I have a list of names as long as my arm of lassies wanting work and at a proper bakery I could make sure everything was done my way. We could put off having a bathroom till the ovens was paid for . . . Oh, Charlie, it’s not near so much as Mr McDonald wants; he’d have us with vans and preservatives, whatever that is. It was you said we needed more room, Charlie, and we have to get nearer the village afore Patrick starts the school. He couldnae walk through the snow and rain and the school’s near next door to the Toll House.’

  ‘And why could he not? It’s hardly more than a mile and he has stout shoes and a coat.’

  Eventually Charlie agreed at least to see the house. The rooms were even smaller than those of the cottage and the ceiling was very low but they had a charm that the damp little cottage had never possessed. And although from the windows one could see only the Great North Road, beyond the garden and the courtyard there stretched fields and woods which reached up to the hills. Kate could not foresee the day when the fields would be ploughed up to become housing estates or that the corner on which the house stood would one day become one of the most dangerous blind spots in the whole of Britain. She saw generations of Kennedy and Inglis families who had never dreamed of owning their own homes; she saw an indoor lavatory and a gleaming white bathroom with hot and cold running water where her babies would be safe and comfortable; she saw separate bedrooms for her children. Perhaps it was her whispered ‘I’m afraid Patrick can hear’ – a remark she later regretted – that swayed him, but Charlie submitted. They bought the Toll House.

  Mr McDonald was delighted and so too was Dr Hyslop. Liam was not so sure. He could not bring himself to say, ‘How will you manage if you have another child?’ So far, Kate was following almost in her mother’s footsteps. Another child was overdue. She should be like Deirdre who, since the war, had produced a living child on the average of every eighteen months and weren’t she and Dave as happy as the day was long? Kate’s poor showing in the maternity stakes was due more to prayer and good luck than anything scientific.

  To Charlie, a pregnant woman meant only that she was married to a real man. He did not want his wife to die in childbed, and indeed, the fact that Kate was so seldom pregnant meant that he could enjoy her body more often. But he would not tolerate any artificial means of contraception. He wanted more children – that was only natural – and, although he was sure that Kate did not artificially prevent impregnation, her jumping up and scrubbing herself with hot water immediately he had withdrawn from her did not help; he would not fight her. She allowed him access to her body every time he wanted. No doubt most normal marriages were like that.

  Kate’s recurring nightmare was that there would be another child. Not that she did not dearly love Patrick and Margaret. Sometimes she felt wicked; that the feelings she had for them bordered on idolatry, and she sternly forbade herself to pet and play with the children. At other times she would succumb to her emotions and sweep them up in her arms hugging and kissing them, dancing madly round the kitchen with them, revelling in the firmness of their small bodies. ‘You’ll want for nothing, my lambies,’ she would tell them, ‘nothing, not wh
ile there’s breath in Mammy’s body.’

  Patrick would hug and kiss her in return; Margaret would soon squirm and fight to be put down and the game would be over, but even Margaret would stay for a while on the floor beside her, playing with her doll while her mother worked.

  And Kate would look at them and at the long table of numbers on the positive side of her bankbook and pray to her mother, not to God – that would be wicked. Don’t let me fall yet, Mam. How did you manage so many bairns? Two’s such a handful. I sometimes feel I’m just getting into my bed when I have to get out of it. Mr McDonald’s coming down to go over the Toll House with me. He’s always asking me up there but I’m no going to Glasgow again until the bairns are older. I’ve told him that. ‘Get a sleeper on the train, Mrs Inglis,’ he says to me. ‘Let me put you up in a hotel,’ he says. Charlie near had a fit when he read that letter. ‘My wife’s no staying at any hotel,’ says he, ‘and if she ever does I’ll pay for it.’ I’d quite like to stay at a hotel, Mam. Your breakfast cooked for you . . . can you imagine?

  Mr McDonald drove down in his chauffeur-driven car and Kate showed him round the new premises while the chauffeur terrified Patrick and delighted Margaret with a drive around the village.

  ‘You should have done this years ago, Mrs Inglis,’ said McDonald as they sat at the kitchen table. That was one of the things Kate liked about him; he could be at his ease in his private dining room or drinking tea at her kitchen table. ‘Mrs Inglis, do you know how many shops I have now? Two hundred. I had one wee shop in Glasgow in 1909 and if it hadn’t been for the war I’d have an outlet in every village in Scotland and maybe England too. You should take a trip to London, go to Selfridges, or Fortnum and Mason. Lipton is my hero; good groceries to the working classes; that’s what we want, Mrs Inglis. Good quality at reasonable prices and everything produced as cleanly as possible, like the pictures of Bournville or Sunlight Dairies. We could do an advertising campaign round you and your pies, Mrs Inglis. Once this place is knocked into shape. Gleaming marble baking tables, sparkling ovens, tiled floor you could eat the pies off and a beautiful young woman in a pretty apron, not that sensible one you’re wearing now, Mrs Inglis, but a bit of lace.’