Mr Mac and Me (16 page)

‘A drop of whisky,’ Father offers and he fills a glass, and watches thirstily as Mac raises his chin and swallows the liquor down.

‘And what did Mrs Mackintosh say when you was overlooked?’ Father asks, for he must distract himself with something, and I imagine her standing in the doorway, her back straight, her eyes fierce.

‘Well,’ Mac pauses, ‘when the first phase of the school was built I was not yet a married man.’ He stops as if he’s noticed who his audience is, but there’s no one else, so he goes on. ‘Although there was an understanding that I was to be married, but to another lass. To the sister of a partner in the firm.’ He swallows. ‘To John Keppie’s sister, Jessie.’

Father sighs as if the whole sad business is falling into place.

‘But Margaret Macdonald and I, we were friends already.’ Mac stares past him. ‘She was a student at the art school, and we’d exhibited together. A very talented artist she was. Still is. And yes, Margaret Macdonald went to the opening ceremony, and she stood in the street and saw the silver key that I’d designed, sitting on the pearly silk cushion that she’d made herself, and she listened to the speeches, on and on while everyone huddled under umbrellas. She told me how the chairman of the board took up the key and opened the door, my door, and that everyone hurried in with great enthusiasm – even if it was just to get out of the rain – and how once inside there were speeches, and more speeches, nine in all – including one by John Keppie himself – but she never did tell me what I’d guessed, that my name was not once mentioned.’

Mac takes his whisky and tips up the glass, although even I can see that it is empty. ‘Not a mention of me in that whole damn building. Not in the heating ducts, or the double-hinged doors, not in the sculpture studio, or the boardroom with its hanging lights – you know it is the first building in Glasgow to have electricity? No one commended me for the drawing gallery with windows divided into even panes, to better frame the views of the city and the Clyde, or the rough brick of the entrance hall to stop students from lingering and wasting time. There was not a whisper about the long white corridor of the basement that made you think you were up on the top floor.’

Father pours more whisky, and then in one quick movement, his resolve breaking, he pours one for himself. I watch the two men drink. And when they have finished they drink more until Mac, mumbling about the work he must get done, tomorrow, at first light, sways to his feet and looks round unsteady for the door. I take his arm and help him out, and our heads bent against the salt wind from the beach we struggle down the road, arriving at the gate of his garden, ghostly with its shadows, and I wait there and watch as he stumbles up the path and, after some fumbling, forces open the door.

The bottle is empty when I get home, and Father is asleep on the seat by the fire.

‘No letters for me tonight?’ Ann whispers as I climb in beside her and I shake my head and close my eyes and think of the photographs I’ve seen of the fortress of Mac’s school, the windows that rise high as a whole wall, and the wide black doors that open like a flower.

Chapter 36

The Cheshires are in no hurry to move on. Not that they have any choice in the matter, but if the war is to be over by Christmas, they’d better get across to France soon if they’re to see any kind of action. Instead they practise manoeuvres on the common, steaming and grumbling in the cold, their boots stamping in the early-morning frost. They’re not the only soldiers in the village, Mary has half a regiment of Lancasters up at Blyfield House. But whenever I see a division it seems that Gleave is always at the front, waving to me, winking, and when his sergeant’s back is turned, dragging his foot behind him, twisting his body round so that he’s grimacing like an oaf. I don’t wave back. I can’t. Although it is against Dora for all I know. Instead I turn away as quickly as I can, and when I see him at the inn I do my best to stay out of his way. ‘How can you stand to talk to him?’ I ask Ann, but she shrugs her shoulders and says he’s not so bad. And I notice she’s not so frantic when the postman walks by empty-handed, although she still waits eagerly to see the letters I collect from Mac.

My dearest Margaret.

We read them together.

How much longer must you be away? I woke this morning early, the sun was shining through on to the bed and for one moment I thought you were there beside me, a russet darling on the pillow. To distract myself I went straight out to the river with my board and I sat there, wrapped against the cold. It’s strange to think of you being in Glasgow, my home before it was ever yours, and now I’ve been gone from it longer than at any time in my life. Even when I went to Italy on the scholarship money I won, I was only away three months, although, if they’d had the decency to pay both parts of it to me, I could have stopped in France instead of rushing back, half starved, through Brussels, Antwerp, Paris and London, before catching that last slow train up to Glasgow to claim the second half. What did they think? That if I took the whole £60 I’d have stayed away for ever and deprived my home city of those countless sketches of Italian churches that I’d drawn?

So how is Glasgow? Have you been past our school? Is it bearing up? Are the doors swinging back and forth as busy students rush from class to class? And have you seen Miss Cranston? If you do, please say to her your frieze is ready, wrapped against the damp, sitting in our studio, which you may or may not tell her is actually a shed. I wonder – has anyone asked after me up there? I expect you would have written if they had.

This landscape drawing is now practically finished and I think it is quite good of its kind – I shall give it another short morning as there are one or two things that might still be done – little points of closer observation – I find that each of my drawings has something in them but none of them have everything. This must be remedied. But enough of all this chatter. I hope you can read the meaning in these pages, for there is only one, and that can be said in three short words.

Ann sighs and seals up the letter, and then, just as I’d hoped, she starts in with a letter of her own. I stand behind and look over her shoulder but she keeps her arm around it and I can’t see what she’s written. ‘Shall I take it to the post for you?’ I offer, but she eyes me sharply and answers shortly.

‘No.’

There’s not always time to go over to Southwold, however firmly I tell Mac I’ll do so, and there are days when I pass Mac’s letter on to Mrs Lusher, with a promise from her that she’ll hand it to the postman herself.

‘What else am I likely to do with it,’ she leans forward to stare into my face, ‘eat it for my tea?’ and flushing and mumbling, I back out of the shop.

‘For thousands of years,’ George Allard has been fierce of late, ‘people of all kinds have relied on rope. They’ve used grasses, vines, hair, weaving it together to make twine. They found a fossil in a cave in France, from twenty-eight thousand years before Christ, although how they knowed that is beyond me, but it was marked with the twisted threads of rope. You see?’ His voice is a challenge. ‘And now they don’t want rope, they want metal. Even at Bridport,’ his mouth is bitter, ‘they’re twisting twine from manufactured oil.’ He is disgusted, but it’s true, our orders have dwindled to almost nothing, and each day I come to turn the wheel Allard warns it may be my last.

‘And how do you think they made the pyramids?’ He turns on me again. ‘Dragging all those stones across the desert? With rope of course. Could never have done it without. Rope, and nets of rope that pulled across the sand.’

‘I thought they used elephants.’ Runnicles must have told us this, and after all my copying, I feel duty-bound to repeat it now.

George Allard glares at me. ‘Maybe they did use elephants. But I’ll tell you one thing, the elephants used rope.’ And he warns me that he can’t pay my shilling if there’s no shillings coming in.

But today when I arrive, he’s waiting by the wheel. Stamping his feet and restless as a horse. ‘We have an order.’ He is triumphant. ‘A rode for an anchor. Double-braided with a braided core and cover. We’d better make it fast, before they change their mind. Sit down. Hurry now. There’s no time to lose.’

But there’s only so fast we can make a rope that must drop one hundred and twenty fathoms to the sea floor, and I wonder if Mr Allard will have the strength to walk all that distance backwards, and backwards again four times, with the strick of hemp like a great thick skirt around his waist.

Even when times were good we didn’t often get an order this large. Usually for an anchor rode they went to the factories where engine-powered machines sat in great covered walks as long as streets. ‘My father was the man for making rodes for anchors,’ George Allard tells me, and not for the first time he describes the run his father had at Southwold. ‘Spinners Lane. Stretched from the high street right down to the common. It’s known by that name even now, although nobody works it. There were so many orders he had to hire three boys, in rotation, to turn the wheel. Glad my own son has gone into another way of life,’ and he’s distracted for a moment by the thought of Abb, out there in France, fighting, with so much more to fear than the end of rope.

‘Everything that’s worth anything’, Allard teases out the dense gold hemp, ‘comes from God’s own ground. And now this war has turned men towards unnatural things and we’ll see no good in it.’

I want to say the world will soon turn back once the fighting’s finished. But I’ve stood on the cliff path beside the strings of wire, and I know, because I’ve felt the jagged barbs, that this new rope will outlast us all.

There’s nothing much flowering to put on the grave, but I glance in anyway to see what Mother has found. Sometimes she gathers leaves, or bracken, their edges rusting, their stems still green, and today when I walk through the churchyard, I see a twig of acorns, the shells open like a row of bells.

There’s nothing on the new grave. It’s been dug behind the church, and the turf looks lumpy and uneven where they’ve laid it back. I kneel down and place my hand on it, and hope poor Mrs Cady isn’t watching from on high, and will never know that her children are wandering snot-nosed through the village with holes in their clothes and all wrapped up in strips of cloth for that they don’t have enough coats to go round.

I hear a noise behind me. It is Mac, inspecting the ruins of the old church walls, stepping through a priest’s door in the curtain of the chancel. I go and stand beside him but I don’t speak for he’s murmuring calculations under his breath. When he’s done he moves around the churchyard, reading the inscriptions, pointing out to me the carved angels, the clasped marble hands, as if I’m the stranger and not him. That’s enough, come on out now, I will him towards the gate, but his attention is caught by the nodding heads of Mother’s acorns, and he hobbles down towards our plot.
William, William, James, William, James, Thomas . . .
and underneath in larger letters,
beloved sons of William and Mary Maggs.
He looks over at me then. A studying sort of look. And he tells me that he had brothers too. The eldest of which was Billy. William like his father. And mine.

‘What happened to him?’ I have to whisper. And he frowns as if it’ll help to get the memory back. ‘He ran away to sea. He can’t have been much older than you. It’s true to say I hardly remember him, being so much smaller. But the years went by, and we hoped for news, my mother especially who had taken to her bed, and stayed there, but when the letter came, it was from South America, written by a seaman who’d befriended him, and the reason for the letter was to tell us what we most feared to hear. That Billy . . . William was dead.’

‘And your other brothers?’ I didn’t mean to ask so fast.

‘Just babbies’ he says. ‘There would have been eleven of us if they’d survived. But as it was, the house was full of girls.’

‘And you.’

‘Aye. And me.’ And I hear it, the sad note of the
mee
, and I know that he is thinking about his foot. I look slantwise at it. The black boot, laced and stacked into a club. And I wonder why the foot is called a club. For it only looks like one when it’s laced into that boot.

I shift uneasily. My own foot is forced into a leather shoe, worn down on one side where it drags out from the ankle, and I wonder if he’s heard the story, that in every seventh gener­ation there is a boy born with a deformity, who brings with him a gift. A gift that’s cursed, some say. But Mother says that’s not to be believed.

I listen for my starlings. I’d like to hear from them, one whistle or a squawk, and I close my eyes and ask them for a sign. But they’ve grown big, their feathers and their beaks turned dark for winter, a scattering of white across their backs like snow.

‘Will you look at that,’ Mac’s head is raised, and there, above us, like a great black mass of sand, a thousand birds have gathered. My starlings are among them, I can see them, I’m sure of it, the undersides of their wings silver, their backs black, and as one, they turn, and glide out across the marsh. I hurry after them. Mac is by my side. ‘A murmuration,’ he says. ‘Like nothing that I’ve ever seen.’ And my ears are so full of their hard fast beating that I can’t say a word.

‘Look at that now,’ Mac gasps as the starlings darken to a knot, there must be more than a million of them, and soaring up they are off again, each bird taking its place so that the lines they make are perfect, a question mark, a heart. We stand still to watch them. And although each winter I have seen them, scissoring down into the marshes, swooping round again as they prepare to nest, I’ve never seen so many or heard their wings so loud.