Mr Mac and Me (15 page)

I take my leave of the horses and head back towards the post office, where, having sent my letters on their way, I walk towards the sea. I drop down on to the beach and inspect the boats, check which have been out, and how long since they were dragged in. I’d stop here if I could, go into the Sailors’ Reading Room for news of Danky, take a quick look at the yawls for anything I’ve missed, but Allard will be waiting for me. Even now he’ll be standing, fretting by his wheel. And so I cut across Gun Hill, jump over the patches of rough turf that mark the spot of each buried cannon, and run along the towpath beside the canal. Here, the sky is reflected in the water, sheets of it like washing fallen to the ground, and to see it clearer, I climb the bank above the path, and my head in blue, my feet snagging against grass, I march along until I reach the ferry.

At first it seems George Allard isn’t there. ‘Hello?’ I call as I step through into the garden. ‘Mr Allard?’ I wait beside the wheel. ‘I’m here,’ I try again. I see his wife, scurrying away around the side of the house.

When Mr Allard does appear he’s got a streak of oil across his face. ‘So there you are,’ he says. And he stands there looking at me as if he may not have a use for me after all. ‘Right then.’ It’s rare to see him so distracted. ‘We’d better make a start.’

I sit at the wheel as Allard gathers up the hemp, and I catch him glancing from me to the loom as if he’s measuring us against each other with his eyes. ‘Is something wrong?’ I ask, and startled, he tightens the strick around his waist, and takes a step back.

He’s halfway across the garden and he still hasn’t spoken a word. ‘The cannons are gone now.’ I hope to rile him. ‘There’s nothing there but mud.’ But he only nods and checks the tension of his twine, and motioning for me to turn the wheel faster he backs towards the gate.

Chapter 35

If it takes three days for Betty to get home by train and boat, how much longer would it be before a letter arrived if it travelled the same way? It’s the kind of question Runnicles might ask us, but as the days pass by this is a question of my own which I ask each morning as I trudge along the beach.

Mac’s letter has arrived. I know this because when I next see him he’s reading Mrs Mac’s reply. He thanks me, and asks if I’m going that way again, because if I am I might take another letter to the post for him. He has a theory, which he tells me between puffs of his pipe, that letters mailed from Southwold arrive more quickly than from here, and that Mrs Lusher, for all her helpful ways, may forget on occasion to actually hand them over to the postman when he calls. ‘Although,’ and here he lowers his voice, ‘it seems no one is above the censors, for my wife thinks my letter to her may have been looked over, although nothing was crossed out.’

I feel myself go pale, and I ask what the censors might be looking for when they read people’s post.

‘Signs of disaffection.’ Mac shakes his head. ‘Fraternising with the enemy. Information that may lead to an arrest.’

I try to remember what was in Mac’s letter. There was something about his work going slowly, saving money, pictures in a drawer. And what was it that had so impressed Ann that she had set herself down and written to Jimmy Kerridge right then and there? Something about three important words hidden in the letter. Words that could be found in every line.

But Mac’s not as slow as he’s pretending, because he’s started on a new painting and it’s growing fast. Not a flower this time, but the view of the river, a stretch of pale water, and the groynes, ground down with weather, shrinking as they sink into the sea. He’s pasted it to a board and set it on the table where his wife usually serves tea.

‘When will Mrs Mackintosh be back?’ I ask, looking round hopefully for the sandwiches she would have cut, but Mac doesn’t speak, he has pen and paper and he’s writing in a fast and fluid scrawl.

My dear Margaret
.

Ann and I read later by the light of the lamp.

It is teatime and as I can’t come in to tea with you, I’ll have to write to you instead. I’ve worked hard today and I feel I deserve a little relaxation. It feels good to have made a start, and it’s never so bad as before I begin. It was a perfectly glorious morning, cold and bright, the sea absolutely flat, just as I painted it at Holy Island. I took my three-legged stool and tried to do three things – to look about me, to paint, and to think. I must have looked about me, because I did start to paint, although it is only a start, but I did think a lot, and particularly about you – wishing you were there beside me – although after ten minutes you would have complained that your delicate behind was not made to sit on for so long
.

Heat flushes to my face, a vision of Mrs Mackintosh’s white skin appearing so forcefully I can’t see the words. But Ann is still reading.

I’ve caught the light, I think, that is the most important thing. Which makes me wonder, how are you finding the fog of smoke up there in Glasgow? And have you managed to make peace at all between MacNair and your family? I know poor Frances is still attached to him, however he behaves, but that of course is what the others mind so much. And I would too if she were my sister, which of course she is. And how is the dear boy, Sylvan? How much of a confusion must he be in? But more importantly how are you? You do not say that you are in good spirits, which worries me, but then I’m also secretly happy that you are not too light of heart when you are away from me. So there is nothing else for me to say except that the only reason for writing this letter is so that you know that I miss you and I want you and I look forward to the time when I don’t need to write because you will be here.

MMYT

I don’t tell Ann about Mrs Mackintosh’s worry over the censor, but watch instead to see how carefully she sticks the envelope back down. I wonder if now she’ll write to Jimmy Kerridge about it having been a glorious morning, the sea flat, or even of her own delicate bum. ‘Have you heard from Jimmy?’ I ask instead as she smooths the curled edges of the paper.

‘No,’ she lifts her chin. ‘Nothing from him yet.’ And she snuffs out the light.

Danky is fishing again. He’s back in his old spot on our side of the river, and if it wasn’t for his stick you’d never know that he’d been shot. Now I have to queue up if I’m to talk to him; he has so many people asking what it feels like to be mistaken for a spy it’s almost as if it is summer again and he’s modelling for the lady artists on the bridge.

On Sunday I see his sister at church, and I hear her say to Mrs Horrod that she’d have tried harder to get him to come along himself, to give thanks to our Lord for sparing him, but she needed a rest from all his bossing. He’s worse now than he ever was. God bless him.

Later that day, I find him on his bench outside the Bell. I sit with him while he sips his beer, and I tell him about my picture of HMS
Formidable
. How I’ve swapped my matron with her stern black beads and chosen instead the figurehead of a red and gold princess. I count the portholes for him and check over the lifeboats, the gunwale and the boom, and with my hands I sketch out the long curve of the keel, made from one solid piece of wood. But Danky isn’t in the mood for listening. Being shot has lost him his patience for it, and after a few minutes he takes his pint and moves inside.

It seems our man from the Cheshires has taken a fancy to Ann. I find them by the back door, Gleave smoking, leaning towards her, while Ann listens, one foot ready for escape. I don’t need to, but I throw the bucket into the well, hard, so it clangs against the sides and I wait there as it fills and then, slowly, slowly I turn the handle to draw it up.

‘
There’s a foxglove, foxglove in my pansy patch
,’ I sing,

‘Decked so brightly by the rain, there never was its match.

It is made of velvet petals, russet blots and lovely smells,

And the wind he is the ringer for its peal of bells.’

The bucket is up. Ann bites her lips together in a laugh. And I wish I’d chosen a different song, for now the next verse is in my ears.

‘There’s a foxglove, foxglove, in my garden ground,

Never mortal listeners shall hear its tinkling sound . . .

‘Coming through,’ I warn them, and the water sloshes so that Gleave must stand back if he doesn’t want to be soaked.

‘What’s all this?’ Mother asks when I push open the back door, and for once I would have welcomed Father’s interruption, but he’s over at the brewery haggling over the cost of a barrel, and so I shrug and leave the bucket in the middle of the floor.

With Mrs Mac still away, old Mac comes over to us to take his supper at the inn. Mother gives him a rabbit stew and a serving of turnip and he sits in the small bar by the fire and drinks his first drink fast.

‘My father was a religious man,’ he tells us. ‘Aye, and an ambitious man too. Worked his way up from clerk to superintendent in the police force. But what he loved more than anything in this world was his garden, not that he’d allow himself the pleasure of spending even a minute of his time there on the Sabbath.’

‘What would he grow?’ Mother asks, while Father brings him a fresh pint.

‘Flowers,’ Mac says. ‘A few wee vegetables. But it was flowers he was good with. I’d go in there as a boy and draw them.’

In our house it is Mother who tends the garden. Marrow, beans, carrots, potatoes. Although she edges it with marigolds to keep away the pests.

‘So how’d you get started on the buildings then?’ I ask because I can’t see how you’d go from drawing buttercups to building a tower.

‘Well, I was apprenticed to an architect. A Mr Hutchison. That was the deal I struck with my father when it was clear that I was only good for one thing, and that was drawing. With my mother ailing – my ma who indulged me in all things – I had to choose a line of work for it was clear she would not be there much longer to defend me.’ He takes another long drink, and I look at my own ma and try to imagine his.

‘Mr Hutchison was a good man, and he agreed to release me twice a week so I could take classes at the art school.’ Mac shifts round in his chair. ‘But however much I loved the classes, and love them I did, once I’d started with him, taking measurements, working out the pitch of a roof, the angle at which a window might catch hold of the light, I found I couldn’t stop. I entered competitions. I entered the Department of Science and Arts annual competition when I was barely twenty.’

‘Did you win?’ I ask, sure that he must have, but Father’s scowl drops me into silence.

‘No,’ Mac looks amused. ‘But it gave me the idea. And from then on I entered every competition I could. That’s how it happened. I was still attending night classes at the art school. Our premises were in the basement of a gallery, a low dark space and with not enough room for all the students who were pouring in. Painting, metalwork, embroidery, architecture. There was no one who didnae want to study there, under the new man, the new headmaster, Francis Newbery.’ Mac takes another slug of beer, and the taste of it seems to drift the thoughts out of his head. Go on, I want to say. But the sight of Father, leaning up against the fireplace, his fingers restless for lack of a glass, stops my tongue.

‘It was Mr Newbery’, Mac shakes himself awake, ‘that pushed for a new school, and with his chivvying they found a site, a steep slope of hill between Renfrew and Dalhousie Streets, and put it out for competition. There was a budget of fourteen thousand pounds . . .’ Father’s eyes flash wide at such a sum ‘. . . and eleven architects submitted plans. I’d left Hutchison by then, was working for the firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a junior, but it was me that drew up the plans, and submitted them, and it was my drawings that won the commission to design the new Glasgow School of Art.’

‘You won!’ I’m grinning. I knew he would have.

‘Aye.’ Mac drains his glass. ‘I say I won. And it is generally accepted, now at least, that the school is my design. And everything inside it, from the light fittings to the forks used in the students’ canteen. But I put my drawings forward under the name of Honeyman and Keppie – I’d been working for them since I was twenty-one, and so it was in their name that the award was given, and when the first phase of the building was finished, it was the firm that was acknowledged. Mr Honeyman, and Mr Keppie. And your man was left out in the cold.’

Father takes Mac’s empty glass and goes down to the cellar and soon he is back with one fresh pint. ‘What is this
first phase
then? What does that mean?’ he asks, and Mac tells him that fourteen thousand pounds was not enough for the whole building, or even for half of it. They’d started at the eastern end of the plot, at the corner of Hope Street and Renfrew, and worked their way across, but before they’d even come to the front door they were running out of money.

‘Fourteen thousand pounds,’ I whistle. I imagine that would be enough to rebuild our whole village and put back the church to the splendour of its ruins, but Mac turns to me and he is scowling. ‘This, my boy, was to be no ordinary building. It was to be something special. Something to inspire the great work that would take place inside.’ There is sweat standing out on his brow and his hands tremble. ‘And even though by the time we stopped work twenty-one thousand had been spent, I was determined to go on. Ten years, it took.’ He thumps the wooden table. ‘Ten years for the rest of the money to be raised. But raised it was, another twenty-five thousand, to get the art school finished, and by that time I made damn sure it was my name on the design.’ He is pale, and I remember what he looked like when he first arrived here. ‘The finishing off of it’, he says, quiet, ‘nearly finished me off too.’