Saturday City Page 8

  ‘Damn your unions.’ Paterson’s eyes flashed. ‘They will be the end of independence, the end of the spirit of adventure, as I see it I’m offering you a job, a proper job. You’re the only one in the family, Duncan, who hasn’t got on.’ Now it was Duncan’s turn to colour with anger.

  ‘What if I don’t subscribe to the great god Get On,’ he shouted. ‘What if I cry “Stop. Think what you’re doing to your fellow-men, in the coffin ships and the sweat shops and the filthy stinking hovels they’re forced to live in.” You damned little Carnegie, you! You think you can make your money regardless and then come here and hand me a sinecure like old Carnegie hands out his public libraries — “Take this, and wheest about the labour I’ve undercut, the pits I’ve failed to make safe —”’

  ‘Save your preaching for the converted,’ Paterson ground out. ‘In America, any man can start from scratch and make a living. A good living. America’s full of homesteaders, millions of them, exploiting nothing but the plot of land they live on.’

  ‘Well, Scotland’s good enough for me,’ said Duncan, his anger subsiding. The very thing he had hoped would not happen, had happened. Despite everything, despite his business deals, his obvious wealth, there was something about Paterson that brought out his compassion. He remembered the valiant little boy who had never given in to that limp or that heavy surgical boot. He held out his hand. ‘We’ll not part in anger?’

  Paterson shook his hand reluctantly. ‘We’d best get back to the rest,’ he muttered ungraciously.

  Jack looked up enquiringly as they re-entered the parlour. Carriages had been ordered for midnight and people were beginning to pick up cloaks and overcoats. Jack had been encouraging the men to have one last drink and now he hastily handed a whisky each to Duncan and Paterson.

  He looked round the ponderous and ruddy faces of Glasgow’s business elite, and raised his own glass: ‘A last toast, gentlemen. To the fortunes of the Dounhead-Boston endeavour. May they bring Scotland and America ever closer.’

  ‘To work for the hungry,’ said Duncan, holding his glass towards Paterson.

  Paterson replied unsmiling, vaunting his own glass higher, almost as though it were a torch: ‘To rewards for the brave.’

  *

  Josie Fleming climbed the dusty wooden stairs to the Miners’ Clarion office, remembering the old radical Alf Maclaren who had handed the paper over to Duncan after his defeat the last time he had stood for Parliament. The time Lachie had got in.

  She was remembering, too, how Duncan had got her the job with Alf before the old man had retired. And thinking how she still loved this ramshackle place, where she had first learned to turn her angers and resentment into words. Not elegantly, for she had not Duncan’s gifts. Painstakingly and awkwardly. But without that outlet, she did not know what would have happened to the burning reformatory zeal inside her. She could have become a street-corner ranter, a vehicle for mockery and jibes, instead of which she had painfully earned for herself some of the dignity that clung to Duncan and all he did and said.

  People pretended not to think much of the Clarion. It had to be printed on the cheapest paper and sometimes the ink got smudged beyond legibility. Yet when they had grievances they knew the Clarion would print them. And two other things helped to keep the paper going. Orders for copies from London, where proliferating socialist societies were beginning to accord Duncan great respect. And printing orders from Dounhead Co-operative Society for such things as soirée tickets and posters for the annual gala.

  If Duncan became an MP, she would have to run the Clarion on her own. But it wouldn’t be the same. Nothing would be the same if he took south. She sat down on a rickety chair, hugging her arms to her stomach as though she had some internal ache.

  Was there any chance at all of him standing as an Independent Labour candidate? He had gone to meet other miners’ leaders to discuss the possibility and had promised to meet her here and let her know the result. It was what she wanted for him, but he had made it clear the chances were not good.

  ‘Politics is the art of the possible.’ He was fond of telling her that. Nor did he like arguing politics on a class basis, as she did. He wanted ‘evolutionary radicalism’, and when she made a face at his phrase-making he advised her to go and read John Stuart Mill. ‘The human race is one and indivisible,’ he told her. ‘Not one class against another.’ She often thought that although he had never been inside a church since the death from diphtheria of Lilias Galbraith, his first love, he was still basically a reforming Christian, and should maybe have been a lay preacher like his father, old Findlay Fleming, had been in his young days.

  As for her, she had long turned her back on her own church and as a lapsed Catholic was regarded in the village with a mixture of suspicion and uncertainty. She had long since given up thinking about rewards in Heaven or punishment in Hell. She was obsessed by the need for simple, practical improvements here on earth. Like people not drinking so much. Like babies not sickening after weaning and dying from undernourishment. Like an absence of bad smells, scabs and running noses, consumption and scarlet fever. Like not hearing the sounds of shrieks and weeping when men who had drunk most of their wages came home and battered their wives. Like not seeing men carried up dead from the pit, so black and stiffened with coal dust they were like inanimate matter.

  She put a few bits of dry firewood in the office stove and set the kettle above it to boil. Then, strangely drained and tired, she stood by the Clarion window, staring through the peeling gilt lettering, waiting for that lift of the heart when Duncan should come in sight.

  There he was! There were times when she wished he did not fill up so large a part of her universe. Nerves, fibres, heart, mind, pulsed with a stronger life whenever he was around. And she was not alone in feeling this, she knew. He had a kind of power, an aura. It would be too easy to agree with all he said. Well, she would not do that. She had her own fire, and she would guard its flame as jealously as she guarded his.

  Wordlessly, she handed him his mug of cocoa as he came in. He put his cold hands playfully against her cheek, then sank into his chair and rattled his leaky boots against the little fender in front of the stove. Josie threw on some more wood, wiping her hands on her skirts in an absent gesture.

  ‘Wed?’

  ‘It has to be the Liberals.’

  ‘Why?’ It was a despairing wail

  ‘We’re not organized. The likes of Willie Small, in Lanark, and Bob Smillie, in Hamilton and Larkhall, they do their best, but in the whole of the country I doubt if we have more than two thousand union members. You can’t campaign without funds, and we’ve no funds. I go in as a Lib-Lab, if I go in at all.’

  ‘You’d get support from more than the miners,’ said Josie desperately.

  ‘A few land reformers, a handful of contentious Irishmen from Glasgow, maybe three home rulers and a couple of socialists from London,’ he said humorously. ‘It doesn’t add up to a Labour Party. No, I’ve lost enough time already. If I want the Liberal backing, I’ve got some hard work to do.’

  He saw her face change, tighten with disappointment. He said bracingly, ‘You have to face facts, Josie. We’re not ready yet to strike out on our own. As Lib-Lab I could do some spadework. You’ll have to be satisfied with that.’

  ‘So what happens next?’ Her voice was subdued.

  ‘I’ll have to seek the Liberal nomination. Go before their committee. I think Kirsten and her father will be some help there.’

  Her expression darkened. She fiddled with the stove, throwing in small pieces of wood, rattling the lid. He said in exasperation, ‘What’s got into you?’

  She denied anything had got into her. But he took her roughly by the shoulders and forced her to face him.

  ‘Josie?’

  ‘It’s Kirsten this, and Kirsten that.’ She felt physically ugly in her jealousy. ‘She’ll be only too happy to run your campaign for you, if you’re chosen. But it’s not votes she’s after, it’s you, and you’r
e too blind to see it!’

  She made a sound that was half-way between a sob and an explosion of rage.

  ‘Do you know what I feel here?’ She struck her heart in a dramatic gesture. ‘When I see the likes of her looking at you that way, and you looking back?’

  He took up his defiant orator’s straddle.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘Aye, but you do.’ She was suddenly deflated. She said in a quiet voice, ‘Let her come and wash your clothes for you, and cook your dinners, and take off your boots. I’ve had enough.’

  He didn’t argue with her. He put his arms around her and held her, presently making rough stroking motions over her hair, till she raised her face to be kissed. He could see the expression on his own face in a cracked and fly-spotted mirror over his desk. It was like a distortion, no one he knew. But Josie knew him. The certainty filled him with a kind of dread, like a sickness. Kirsten, my bonnie bird, he thought.

  *

  ‘Come in, man,’ said Kirsten’s father, Dr Mackenzie, warmly.

  The nomination committee was meeting in the ante-room of a large public hall. Kirsten had met Duncan outside. ‘Measure every word,’ she advised tersely. ‘They’ll try to catch you out. Remember your trump card — the support you have from the people in Dounhead itself.’ He nodded at her calmly enough, but as he went in his mouth was dry.

  ‘What do you think of the Transvaal question?’ A burly man on Dr Mackenzie’s right threw the first question. ‘Do you think Mr Gladstone is right to refuse to return it to the Boers?’

  ‘I think Transvaal should have independence,’ said Duncan briefly.

  ‘Tell us some more of your avowed aims,’ suggested Dr Mackenzie.

  Duncan looked round the gathering. Well-fed, well-clothed, they had an ease and assurance about them that spoke of scant acquaintance with poverty.

  ‘My chief concern is to improve the conditions of the working man, and especially of the miners. To this end I would press in Parliament for the establishment of the eight-hour day — it worked for a time in Fife, you know, so it could work elsewhere. I would like to see a court of arbitration set up to settle labour disputes and we could then have agreed regulations of output according to the requirements of the market.’

  ‘There are those who think your pit unions will be the ruination of the industry,’ said a portly red-faced man urbanely.

  ‘I can’t see why,’ responded Duncan. ‘There has to be co-operation between the men who own the pits and the men who work them. I see no reason for conflict between capital and labour and surely organized labour is easier to deal with than wildcat outbursts that arise from frustration through needs not being recognized.’

  ‘Not all your supporters are as reasonable as you are, Mr Fleming,’ said the man, and got a sympathetic rumble of laughter.

  ‘Leaving aside your sympathies for the miners, of which we are all aware,’ said Dr Mackenzie strategically, ‘what other views do you take on matters of public concern?’

  ‘My mother is a Highland woman, and I would be a poor Scot if I did not want a stop put to the clearances that are still oppressing the crofters in the north, and a system of land reform set up that would give the land back to the people. I want the vote for agricultural workers, and for women.’

  ‘Would you support home rule for Scotland?’

  ‘I would, and for Ireland, too.’

  There were murmurs of dissent at the latter.

  ‘There are many sides to the Irish question,’ said Dr Mackenzie. ‘You would agree?’

  Duncan nodded. He was well aware that Kirsten’s father was steering him in the direction he wanted him to go, and rebellion rose up in him like a black tide.

  His voice strengthened as he looked towards Kirsten, remembering and rejecting her rejoinder about measuring words. He wasn’t here to measure words but to fight for what he believed in.

  ‘I should make my position clear, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The poor in my own county are my chief concern. I want those poor to be represented in Parliament as I do not think they have a voice at present. They can be crushed by the whim of any ironmaster or coal-owner, who can answer any argument by taking foreign blackleg labour into the pits. The poor have a right to work, and a right to dignity.

  ‘If they protest when their miserable wages are cut, they are thrown out like slatey coal. These are men with wives and children to clothe and feed. I tell you — if we do not heed the grievances of these poor, then we play into the hands of revolution itself. I am here to tell you: time is short.’

  The questioning went on for another half-hour or so, but Duncan knew that by his display of passionate conviction he had lost his chance of nomination. Faces were hardening around him, faces that denied the uneducated poor knew what was good for them. He had let anger take over, and anger was a poor advocate with this audience.

  He did not wait to exchange pleasantries at the end, but avoiding Dr Mackenzie’s patent disappointment and Kirsten’s stricken look strode off to catch a horse-tram. Hardening inside him was the knowledge that his own lack of judgement had caused his failure. He should have presented himself in a more worldly, protean way. He had to learn to be all things to all people. They had wanted somebody who could stand up in Parliament and put his case trenchantly, perhaps even elegantly. He had been the pithead demagogue. It came to him that perhaps he hadn’t wanted this nomination, after all. To be going in as anything but a straight Labour man had been too big a hypocrisy to swallow. But that was to rationalize. He had failed, missed his chance. What was he but a blundering idiot?

  ‘Duncan!’ He had forgotten all about Kirsten, but now she came running after him.

  ‘You rubbed them the wrong way.’ It was a statement, not an accusation.

  ‘And they me. But I should have kept my head.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not half as sorry as I am. I found out something today though, Kirsten. I found out I’m not a Liberal. Or even a Lib-Lab. I want a Labour Party of our own here in Scotland.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed instantly. ‘I am with you.’

  ‘Dear Jesus,’ he said. ‘Have any of them in there been down to the slums here in Glasgow? Have they seen how people live? Police checking out how many adults there are to an apartment, while folk hide up on the roof till they’re gone? If a bairn dies, it has to lie in its wooden box on the dresser, with its brothers and sisters playing round it —’

  ‘I know,’ she said. She patted his arm tentatively, but the contact made him turn towards her, the passion he had felt for his cause spilling over into that other area, his feelings for her.

  ‘I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind,’ he said harshly, directly.

  Her colour came and went. She said nothing, merely walked beside him, carefully pacing her steps. He could hear her breath coming fast and light.

  ‘Duncan. I have something to tell you.’

  ‘Is it that you feel the same?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m going away to university. To Cambridge, as I told you. It’s all been arranged by friends of my father.’

  He stopped, forcing her to do the same, and stared into a shop window displaying ship’s instruments. A light snow had begun.

  ‘It would be the best thing,’ he said. ‘But I’ll miss you.’

  ‘You see, it would be very wrong —’

  He turned and looked at her now, relentlessly. The cold had stolen the colour from her face, except for her nose, which was pink. The beauty came and went from that face, part of its attraction.

  ‘Aye, it would be wrong.’ His hand took hers, holding it so fast she winced. ‘As many things are wrong. My Kirsten.’

  The snow had begun to fall with that inconsistent, inchoate lightness that always takes by surprise. They put their hands up to it, felt it melt on their faces. She said, with an intense, trembling intimacy, ‘You are so poorly clad. You must get a warm coat.’

  ‘I am har
dened to the cold,’ he said carelessly. He had been denied something, back there in the hall. It was almost like retaliation now, taking her. He pulled her into the shop door. His lips tasted melted snow on hers. She struggled a little, then her lips responded.

  ‘Kirsten,’ he said. ‘My bonnie bird.’

  *

  ‘Are you sure no one will come?’ Kirsten looked out of the tenement window near the Cowcaddens and saw it was still snowing. The room behind her smelled of stale bodies and tobacco and liquor, but Duncan was coaxing a fire in the grate and the small, eager flames suddenly made the place more homely. He looked up at her, with that look compounded of guilt and longing that she was to come to know so well.

  ‘Would I lie to you?’ he pleaded. ‘Jamie Pullar is away to Manchester for a union meeting. I have the run of this place when I’m in Glasgow.’

  ‘He has no wife nor family?’

  ‘He’s a widower. No bairns.’ He came over and stood beside her in the gloaming, saying gently, ‘We aren’t trespassing. He has stayed with me many a time. We’re union brothers.’ He looked round the shabby room almost with affection. ‘This has been where many a campaign has been hammered out. It’s a kind of radical headquarters. Pullar is no kind of a domestic animal. He lives for the labouring poor.’ He was trying to indicate to her, delicately, that they were not intruding on the sanctity of someone’s hearth; that this was an impersonal place. Seeing she still hesitated, he added, ‘If you want to leave, bonnie bird, I’ll take you down the street to your tram.’

  For answer she came over to him and put her arms about him and lifted her face to him. They kissed with a passion that was almost violent, broke off and kissed again. He began to peel off her coat and she took her hat off, and drew the curtains on the thick-falling snow, which was descending as though someone at a window above was emptying a feather bolster.

  ‘Shall I make some tea?’ he suggested. He put a blackened kettle on the spirited little fire. She tidied papers on the bare wooden table, automatically, till he dragged her down on to his knee on a rickety chair by the fire. Before he kissed her again, her mind automatically registered the headline on a paper Pullar had left lying on the bed set into his kitchen wall: ‘SINGER’S TO START FACTORY IN GLASGOW’. That would be good, she thought. That would bring work. The thought slid away as his arms tightened about her, squeezing her till she had to fight away from him, gasping for breath.