Saturday City Page 3

  He made the decision. ‘Yes, come out to Dounhead. See what it’s like in the miners’ Rows. It’ll be a good radical education for you!’

  They smiled like conspirators. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll do that.’

  *

  Captain Jack Kilgour put an arm round his wife’s shoulders and ushered her gently in the direction of the office door.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy those occasions when, on one of her shopping trips, she chose to rest for five minutes away from the horse traffic in his quiet sanctum.

  It was just that he had so much else on his mind this morning and her annoyance over Sandia, their eldest, was something that could wait till he got home.

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded so much,’ Clemmie mourned persistently, one hand on the door handle, ‘but to hear it from Mrs Farquharson Reid herself. Our Sandia coming out of Cranston’s Tea-rooms on a Saturday, and all these men in there. “You don’t own me, Mama.” That’s what she said to me, Jack. My own daughter!’

  ‘I’ll speak to her,’ Jack promised. ‘Why don’t you buy yourself a new bonnet, since you are here in town?’

  ‘No, Jack. Bonnets are far from my mind. Get your clerk to fetch me a cab, if you would.’

  The Captain kissed his wife’s cheek and watched as she sailed like a little brigantine through the front hall of his lately-acquired company premises. She was too solicitous of all the family welfare. Sandia might have stepped out of line, but he was secretly glad to see her show a little spirit.

  Not that he felt anything but the most tender concern for Clemmie. They were two halves of the same being and when she had one of her nervous headaches or unspecified weak turns, he was filled with a cold ache of terror that he should ever be asked to go on without her. It had been pleasant to see her in town instead of, as more frequently seemed to be the case, retired to her couch or bed for a lightly-steamed fish dinner or a quiet hour with the Lady’s Companion.

  So much of what they had been through in their early life came back to haunt him. Her marriage to someone else because he had not been able to give up the sea for her. Their defiance of accepted morality when she had found out her mistake. Sandia’s birth out of wedlock. And the time the three of them had come near to perishing on the old wooden hulk, the Chancellor, which had burned like a brand in the cusp of the waves. The shame and humiliation of her divorce, although that first marriage had never been consummated. All these had taken their toll on Clemmie’s strength, and Mabel’s death too, had been a cruel blow, although it was a rare family indeed that did not lose a child in infancy or later.

  The determination to care for Clemmie, never to see her or their children in want, was what strengthened Jack’s resolution as he waited now for his next visitor. There would be no more poor furnished rooms in Gourock, as when Sandia was a baby. Now there was the big house in Ashley Terrace, furnished from Wylie and Lochhead as Clemmie wanted it, staffed with maids and heated with best coal. And that’s how it would remain.

  His mouth set in a grim line. He had not found the transition from sailor to businessman an easy one, but he was sure he was on to a good thing with ship refrigeration, which would soon mean the whole of the British Isles could be fed on cheap beef and mutton brought from New Zealand and Australia at twenty degrees below freezing point. Just the same, after the bank scare of a few years ago, he didn’t want all his eggs in one basket. He had to diversify. Diversification could mean a summer villa down the river, his own yacht, Clemmie indulged in clothes and jewellery. Scots-American syndicates were nothing new, after all. He rattled his knuckles against the glass case that held a model of the first ship he had ever sailed, the Titania, sail and steam, and waited for Joe O’Rourke to be shown in.

  ‘Jack Kilgour! Cap’n Jack!’ The little Irishman, dressed in brown hat, suit and Ulster, gold rings gleaming, danced across the expanse of Brussels carpet with a hand extended and pulled Jack into a bear-like embrace.

  ‘It’s grand to see you.’ Jack sat the visitor down with a generous whisky in a glass of Edinburgh crystal and beamed at him with genuine affection.

  ‘D’you know, the older I get the more I value old friends?’ declared Joe. ‘I told the new wife — she’s an expensive one, that, I may tell you, Jack — I told her: Jack Kilgour and me have been friends since we were both knee-high to a grasshopper. D’you think about the old days in New York, the way I do, Cap’n? The time you stowed away from Greenock. Brave as a lion you must have been. How old were you? Ten? Eleven?’

  ‘Maybe twelve.’

  ‘You took half my newspapers and sold them for me. And I took you home to my poor sisters, both long since dead, God rest their souls. A life of adventure you’ve had, Jack my lad.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Jack, more quietly. ‘Who would have thought then you’d have risen to a fortune, Joe? And I don’t forget what you did for me. Gave me my ship when I thought I’d never sail the seas again. When Clemmie and I thought we hadn’t a friend in the world.’

  ‘A roller-coaster,’ said Joe. ‘That’s what life is, Jack. I’ve been up and I’ve been down and now I’m going up again.’ He swallowed his second glass of whisky, took off his jacket to reveal a jewel-encrusted gold watch and chain and said with genial purpose, ‘Let’s get down to business, then.’

  Jack moved the papers in front of him and said without further preamble: ‘These New York companies, Joe. You can vouch for every one of them?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Some you’re involved with, some not?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘As things are, it seems to me that you’re expecting too large a proportion of money to come from this side of the Atlantic.’

  ‘Nothing so unusual about that,’ Joe argued. ‘Glasgow’s where the money is, America presents the opportunity. Lumber, mining, railways, land reclamation, building, agriculture.’

  ‘You come here,’ said Jack severely, ‘because you know you’ll raise money at a lower rate than anywhere in America.’

  ‘Right.’ Joe’s gold tooth glinted as he smiled. ‘But we can even things up a bit if you can get your brother Paterson to come in.’

  Jack looked at his friend speculatively. He wondered how far the whole operation had been set up by Joe to bring in Boston-based Paterson.

  ‘You know my brother could buy and sell everyone on your list?’

  ‘I know that. He’s railroad, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s the shrewdest man I know, and he’s my own brother. Or rather, half-brother. But he’s not coming into this till he knows more of the Glasgow end.’

  ‘You persuaded him to come over?’

  ‘Yes. He’s bringing his wife and their two boys. Clemmie doesn’t know it yet, but she’s going to have to set up the hospitality.’

  ‘His wife is Scottish?’

  ‘From Dounhead. Daughter of our minister, that our mother was once housekeeper to.’

  Joe’s gratification was obvious. ‘I tell you, Jack, we’re going to be all right in our old age, you and me. You think you’re well off now? Just you wait!’ He drew his face into a more sober expression and asked with assumed nonchalance, ‘Hard man, is he? Paterson?’

  ‘Went out there just after the Civil War,’ Jack replied. ‘Crossed the plains in the first steam trains. Saw off Indians and buffalo. Nothing he didn’t know about designing locomotives. He had a genius for it.’ His face softened. ‘I remember him as a ragged-arsed wee laddie in the Rows, asking me to draw an engine for him with a stick in the dust! He was my step-father’s love-child, you know, that my mother brought up as her own.’

  ‘Since he’s from Boston, but was born in Dounhead, why don’t we call our syndicate the Boston-Dounhead Trust?’ suggested Joe. ‘He’ll appreciate the tribute.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Jack drily.

  Their business completed for the day, he took Joe down in the direction of the Broomielaw for a sight of the water and the ships, and then for a solid meal in one of the businessmen�
�s restaurants. The small Irish-American was visibly impressed by the stir and bustle of the city.

  ‘Gee, it’s as good as New York,’ he admitted.

  ‘Funny,’ said Jack, ‘that’s what one of the newspapers called it the other day: “Little New York.” Glasgow folk feel close to America, you know. I suppose it’s all the ships that have sailed from here to there, and back again, in the last forty years.’

  When Jack broke the news to Clemmie that Paterson and Honoria were coming, with the boys, the whole family went into a tizzy of excitement.

  ‘Jack,’ said Clemmie, ‘I shall want new curtains, all through the house. And gowns, for myself and the girls. I expect Honoria will be very à la mode.’

  He noticed she had forgotten all about Sandia’s misdemeanor. When he asked where his eldest was, the others chorused that she was in her room.

  Sandia was pleasurably aware of the stir in the house, but she had other things on her mind. Staring into the heavy oval mirror of her dressing-table, she bit her lips to make them red and pinched her cheeks to heighten their colour.

  She must see the young man in the tea-rooms again. She would go into a decline if she didn’t. It was as though his bold, innocent glance had fallen like a stone into the quiet pool of her life, sending out endless and disturbing ripples.

  Chapter Two

  Lachie Balfour stepped down from his gig at the pithead of Dounhead Colliery and lightly tethered the little black horse, which looked round greedily for its feed-bag. It was growing dark as he walked across to his office and all along the rows of miners’ cottages he could see candlelight and firelight sending soft pools of light into the dusk.

  He stopped for a moment, caught up, entranced. He would have liked to paint the Rows now. In this evening moment, blurred and shadowy, they were mysterious, almost beautiful, and at this distance there was no smell from middens, no screech of fretting babies or shouts from distracted mothers. When he’d been left the pit by his grandfather, he had had no feeling for it. Nor was there much now. But he could feel that gut-response, that pull at the emotions, which preceded the wish to paint a picture, and at the same time the powerful, obscure anger that he was not free to do what he wished to do.

  He stubbed his toe, feeling his way across the office to light the gas, and swore with a vehemence out of proportion to the mild pain. Waiting for Duncan Fleming, he lightly sketched the scene he would like to have painted. How could he achieve that blue — fathomless, like melting into chaos, that was the moment before night? And then the colours of firelight and lamps and candles, delicate blobs of white and yellow and orange. The whole frail and evanescent, like a wisp of smoke or a moth winging into the twilight.

  ‘Aye, you wanted me?’ It was Duncan, clattering into the office in his muddy, tackety boots after a sharp unceremonious knock at the half-open door.

  ‘I wanted you,’ Lachie affirmed sourly. ‘You could have scraped your boots.’ There were times when he was well enough disposed towards his wife’s brother, but this was not one of them. How different they were! His wife, Tansy, with her light, careful, artificial voice guarding each consonant, her ability to convince county and aristocracy alike that she was one of them; and this pig-headed, stubborn, proletarian rabble-rouser, with his show of learning and assertive, wide-legged straddle, as if daring anyone to try and push him — or his ideas — over.

  Tansy wanted the good things in life for herself. She admitted this with a disarming frankness. But Duncan wanted to turn the universe upside down, start again and arrange everything differently. Duncan wanted to play God.

  Well, Lachie had shown him where he got off once already, beating him in the elections. He was prepared to take him on again, but the whole thing was a bore of crashing proportions. He sighed, gritting his teeth at the loss of a rare inspiration. The picture he wanted to paint sat in his mind.

  ‘That’s good.’ Duncan approved the drawing.

  Lachie drew it away.

  ‘We’re not here to discuss my drawings. Can I not get you to see sense?’

  Duncan strode about the room in the insistent, awkward boots.

  ‘It’s not a question of getting me to see anything. The feeling has been building up in the men for a long time. If they decide to strike, I can’t stop them.’

  ‘Nor do you want to.’

  ‘Nor do I want to.’

  ‘This damn’ Keir Hardie,’ said Lachie. ‘He sees himself as the saviour of the masses. Does he know the misery he brings on the men’s families when he brings them out on strike? It’s all right for him up there on the platform, carried away by the sound of his own voice.’

  Duncan looked down at Lachie disbelievingly.

  ‘You refuse to see it, don’t you? The Lanarkshire pits have an accident record that will damn you and the other coal-owners to hell. How many men perished in that Blantyre pit? Two hundred. Not a week passes but some poor bastard gets his back broken or his face smo’ored in slack. You talk about misery —’

  ‘I’ve improved our safety record.’ Lachie was stony-faced. Never far from the surface of his mind was the death of his father-in-law, Findlay Fleming, when he’d tried to rescue men trapped in a fall-in.

  ‘Aye.’ Duncan surveyed him grimly. He was remembering, too. ‘You’ve learned a thing or two there, Lachie. But you talk as though you were extending some kind of privilege. “Right, men, you crawl on your hands and knees from dawn till dusk, swallow the black dust till your inside’s as black as your breeches, and I tell you what I’ll do, men: I’ll make sure the bloody roof doesn’t cave in and break your backs. Can’t say fairer than that, can I?”’ Duncan’s satire was savage, his mimicry of Lachie’s polished accent woundingly accurate.

  He went on in the same lacerating tones: ‘“So you fancy an eight-hour day, men, do you? What would you do with the time left on your hands? Sleep? Dig your gardens? Walk up the hill behind the pit and listen to the larks? Let me tell you, larks aren’t for the likes of you. Nor books. Nor politics.”’

  ‘Cut it out.’ Lachie’s voice sought to deflect argument.

  ‘No I won’t cut it out.’ Duncan’s fist crashed on Lachie’s desk and he sat himself down with a heavy, deliberate thump on the chair opposite. ‘You asked me here to do something I’ll never do: break faith with these men in the Rows down there.’

  ‘I did no such thing,’ Lachie remonstrated. ‘I asked you to come because, despite our differences, we can still talk to each other. You’re a rational being, I hope. You don’t shout obscenities, like some. Even at this late hour, I want to stop a strike that will hurt everybody. I don’t want blacklegs in my pit. I’d much rather have my regular men down there.’

  ‘Then do something about restricting output. Don’t cut their wages so you can sell cheaper and cheaper coal.’

  ‘I’ll sell no coal at all, if I don’t cut prices.’

  ‘You’re timid, man,’ said Duncan. Lachie’s face flushed at the contempt in his voice. ‘You could talk a bit of sense into the other masters. You’ve more humanity than some. But you’re frightened to show it. Aren’t you?’

  Lachie said angrily, ‘I’m wasting my time. You’ll not see sense.’

  Duncan gazed at him levelly. ‘You married my sister. Tansy never made any secret of the fact that she wanted to go up in the world. She wanted soft hands and servants. But it doesn’t mean her brother is a boss’s man. My demands are the same as Keir Hardie’s. Reasonable demands.’

  Lachie held the pencil he’d used for the drawing between taut knuckles.

  ‘I’ve never victimized a man in my pit, no matter what his views. They have a week’s holiday. I’ve spent thousands making it the safest pit in Scotland.’ He looked at Duncan bleakly. ‘But it all comes back to old Findlay dying down there, doesn’t it? You’ve never forgiven me for that.’

  ‘No,’ Duncan said. ‘If he hadn’t been foolhardy, he could have got himself out. I don’t hold it against you.’

  ‘Then why the bitterness
?’ Lachie’s tone was conciliatory. ‘Whatever happens over the strike, let you and I keep up a communication, for Tansy’s sake.’ He rose, opened a corner cupboard behind him, and began to pour out two small tots of whisky.

  ‘Not for me. You know I’m temperance.’

  ‘That small amount wouldn’t hurt a baby.’

  Duncan ignored the whisky and the rationalization.

  ‘I’ll tell you why the bitterness,’ he said consideringly.

  ‘I’ll try to make you understand, although your fancy education has so far removed you from the people you live among that it’ll be difficult.’

  ‘I know you envy me that education. Tansy says so.’

  ‘Ha! Envy you? I consider myself better read and better educated than you are. I’ve done it for myself —’

  ‘Narrow! Hidebound! True pupil of McChoakumchild. You use knowledge like a battering-ram —’

  Duncan sat back in something like amazement.

  ‘What else have we got? As a nation? Only our brains.’

  ‘And they’re all exportable, man. Go down to the Broomielaw and you’ll see him, the Wandering Scot, setting out for the ends of the Empire, his sums and his catechism tied up in a kerchief. Maybe you should join the exodus.’

  Duncan burst out in appreciative laughter, disarmed at last.

  ‘All right. I haven’t had the benefit of your cosmopolitan education. Your grandfather’s money took you abroad, opened your mind to painting and music and literature. Do you see, man, thanks to that, you have a freedom the rest of us will never know?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘The rest of us struggle up towards the light. We know there’s a big, wide world beyond the parish pump. Dimly, dimly we sense it. But we can’t feed the spirit or the mind because the body is always hungry. Or tired. Or, in the case of women, broken open giving birth to children.’

  ‘You sentimentalize, you know. Most of them down there just want a full belly. Their eyes are closed to finer things.’ Duncan said with a contained anger, ‘Right. We’ll settle for full bellies to start with. But don’t think because a man has no soles on his boots he can’t respond to beauty. Whether it’s nature, or pictures, or poetry.’