Mr Mac and Me (19 page)

Later, I pull up the mattress and I tuck them with my coins into the safety of the bed. And then I kneel beside them and I offer up a prayer. To keep my mother and my sister safe, wherever I am. And I renew my promise to check the beach each morning as soon as I’m awake.

The snow has gone but it’s still cold. There’s a wind that whips in from Siberia, without a mountain range between. Out at sea a naval flying boat shoots along the coast on its patrol, and I follow it with my eyes, raking the waves for what it might have missed. I tread the shoreline, jumpy as a coot, fearful I’ll find another body hidden in the sand, and as I near the harbour wall, I tell myself low murmuring stories, to stop the terror racing in my heart. But there’s nothing here today. Just seaweed, and the low, clumped stumps of groynes, with the water rushing away from me, silver in the sun.

Now I’ve made my inspection I’m free to visit Mac and his My Margaret, for I’ve not forgotten there’s a present waiting for me there. But if I do, I’ll need to take a gift of my own. I search the shingle for a fossil. I found one once, the shape of a shell pressed into flint, thousands of years old, and another time, collecting stones as weights for bait, I came across a hag stone lined with crystal. I gave it to Mother. And I try to picture where she might have stored it before I force away the thought.

I crouch down and inspect the stones. I try to see them as Mac would. There is one pebble shaped like a heart – or almost – and I think of the pamphlet of Mac’s designs. There were hearts carved into a bookcase, and a cluster of them floating high up in the panel of a bedroom door. There were small dropping hearts in lamps, and most beautiful of all, a square of metal moulded to the rise of a heart with a doorway at its centre for a key. But my pebble is lopsided, and only glows when wet, so I leave it on the beach and turn my thoughts to flowers, the twigs and sticks Mac likes to draw, the willow his wife weaves into globes.

I walk through the reedbeds, their stems ash grey, and consider cutting down a bunch. But they are more than six feet tall and their heads, once fine, are tattered and worn. At the fork where the path turns I inspect the stubby twigs of blackthorn as if they are quite new. Their thorns are sharp as razors and even as I reach for one it rips a corner from my cuff. I look around. There is nothing but chaff and grey and silver in this whole low land. What could I find here? What could match a surprise? And I turn towards the church to see what Mother has found to put on the grave.

The churchyard is silent, the last of the snow unmelted here. My footsteps crunch as I walk between the graves. At first it seems there is nothing for our boys, but as I get closer I see the pot is full, the leaves in tiers, white and bowed. I give them a shake and they unbend, grateful, three stems of glossy green. I lean close in and smell, but all scent has frozen away. And so I stick out my tongue and lick a leaf and there it is, the bitter taste of bay.

It is Mac himself who comes to the door. It seems to take him a moment to tell that it is me, but I unwind the scarf from my face and pull off my hat. ‘Tom Maggs,’ he says. ‘I heard you were up and about the place again. Come in.’ He holds the door wide.

Mrs Mackintosh is sitting by the fire. She has a cloth over her knees and a needle in her hand. She rises, a long red thread dangling. ‘Look at you,’ she says, ‘nothing but skin and bone.’ And holding the needle high, she puts her arms around me. I blush, scarlet. And I feel the heat of her blazing through the room.

‘Let’s get you something to eat,’ she is releasing me. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not hungry?’ She slides the needle into her work and laying it on a pile of silken threads she moves out to the kitchen to see what Mrs Mollett has prepared.

I stand still with the bunch of bay I picked on my way here. My coat is on. Old Mac has vanished too, although I didn’t see him go, and so I stand where they have left me and I look around. There is a picture hanging above the fire that I’ve not seen before, the surface of it rough as sand, the shapes raised, as if by sandworms tunnelling from below. I move closer. There are two women, one upright, the other curved, and at their ears and throats are roses made from jewels. I put my fingers out but just then Mrs Mac comes in with a tray.

‘Ah,’ she looks pleased. ‘So you’ve seen my gesso.’ She sets the food down on the table. ‘I couldn’t leave it behind in Glasgow. Not again.’ She comes and stands beside me.

‘But what is it?’ I want to know. ‘How is it made?’

Mrs Mac looks at the picture in silence as if, for once, she’s seeing it through my eyes. ‘Well,’ she says slowly, ‘you mix plaster of Paris, and stir it together with rabbit-skin glue, and you paste it on, layer after layer, until you have the surface that you want.’ She’s staring at it, hard. ‘Then, just as if you were piping icing on to cake, you make your marks on it, form shapes, press stones and glass, into its surface.’ She is smiling, looking up at her own work. ‘It’s not easy, and takes a lot of strength, and the wretched glue stings your hands if you don’t wear gloves. But . . .’ and she looks closely at the jewels studding the picture, the fast swirls of the paste, ‘I’m pleased with this one. There are not many people doing gesso, and it’s been said,’ she colours slightly, ‘mine are some of the best.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I badly want to touch it.

‘I made a larger version of this picture. To go above the fireplace at Florentine Terrace. But now I’ve rented out the house,’ her shoulders lift, ‘I worry for it. And for all the furniture Toshie designed. Even after a week, when I stopped by, I found the house was not as orderly as when we left it.’ She is fretting, twisting her hands. And to help her I suggest she pluck the emeralds and the rubies from the surface of the picture, and then surely she wouldn’t have to rent out the house at all.

She laughs. She laughs so hard her mouth flies open. ‘I would, believe me. But . . .’ and she whispers in my ear, ‘those precious stones are only coloured glass.’

‘Oh.’ I am ashamed. But she takes my sprig of leaves from me, and my coat, and leads me towards the table. ‘Come and have something to eat. Toshie and I were just about to have our lunch.’ There is a plate of cold mutton. A pot of mustard. And three slices of thick bread.

Mr Mac comes in from the next room. He’s trailing a string of orange wool, although it’s not clear that he’s noticed. He sits down beside his wife and as he does, although he doesn’t wink or move his mouth, it’s clear he has told her something, and it is something that she’s understood. I eat slowly. My stomach is too shrunken to gobble. So that I have to chew, and sip and take my time, even if the others have left the table and started on their chores while I hold tight on to my bowl in case anyone gives up on me and wrenches it away.

But everyone eats slowly today. And between mouthfuls there are questions to be asked. They want to know about my illness, if I’m truly well, and each time I answer, they rest their knives and forks and listen while I talk.

‘And you are twice the hero. Is that not so?’ Mac asks. ‘What is this news about a body discovered on the beach?’

I gulp. And nod. And tell them what they haven’t asked. ‘We don’t know who he is,’ I say. ‘There was nothing to be found on him.’ I feel myself flush as I lower my voice. ‘It’s possible he might have been a German spy.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Mac leans towards me. ‘What makes you think so?’

But there is no evidence and I have nothing more to say.

Mrs Mac brings in a plate of seedcake, and dutifully I eat, forking in small mouthfuls, as Mac takes up a letter.

‘It came this morning,’ Mrs Mac tells him. ‘My sister, wondering if you’ll be able to help with the fees for Sylvan’s school?’

‘I had a letter from my own sister last week, asking the same thing. Although she couldn’t resist adding that I was too proud and stubborn for my own good.’ He shakes his head. ‘Although what she thinks grovelling and begging would have done to help the situation I don’t know.’

Mrs Mac pours tea. ‘How much longer is her boy in school? It can’t be long now. Surely not much more than a year?’

It’s clear Mac doesn’t know.

‘And when he leaves? What will he do then?’

‘The police. That’s what he’s planning. To work his way up in the police force like my father.’

‘Assuming that the war is over.’

Mac lays a hand over hers. ‘And it will be. Surely.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Mac agrees. ‘It must be. In another year.’

It seems they’ve forgotten about me. I reach out for more cake. I’ve eaten so much that my stomach aches, but even so, I know if I don’t force down one more piece I’ll wake in the night, regretful.

‘Now, Tom, my boy,’ Mac’s black eyes are resting on me, ‘we have something for you.’ He stoops down to the floor and picks up the ball of orange wool that must have fallen there.

Mrs Mac looks over and she smiles. ‘Take it,’ she says. ‘And see where it will lead.’

‘Really?’ I stand, the wool in my hands, unsure what to do.

‘This was our Christmas tradition.’ Old Mac is smiling too now. ‘Every year my sisters’ children would come over for a party. And they’d each take a ball of different-coloured wool and follow it. Go on, start winding,’ he says, and I see that the yarn is trailing off across the floor. I follow it, feeling foolish. Imagining the other children. A crowd of them tangling up in a spiderweb of thread. But I keep walking, winding as I go, turning the ball in my hand as it leads towards the kitchen.

In the kitchen all is neat, the plates on their shelf, the cups with their fine china stems, the pans hidden by the strip of cloth, black and white and pink. The wool runs under a table, round its leg, and out again, through the main room, along the floorboards, winding round Mac’s desk. I stop there to untangle it. Noticing as I do a tall blue book, wide as the desk itself, tied together with a ribbon.

‘Keep winding,’ Mac is impatient, and I free the wool and follow it over to the fireplace, around the legs of a footstool and back on itself into the bedroom. I stop. The room could hardly be more different from the photographs. No white carpet, no flock of hearts in the panel of the door, but all the same the bed is tucked in with a white cover and there is a silver mirror moulded with the leaf shapes of two women on a ledge above the hearth.

I step into the room. The bright wool leads me to the foot of the bed, round its brass legs, and over to the window where it disappears into a wooden chest. I stop and stare at its orange tail and I imagine throwing open the chest to find a hoard of treasure, briny and glinting, dragged up from the sea.

Both Mac and Mrs Mac are waiting. What can it be? My breath comes fast as I creak open the lid. Inside is a package wrapped in brown paper. It is flat and hard. And my heart sinks to think I’ll be given a picture of a flower, but when I fold away the paper, there is a painting of a boat. It’s a small boat. Upside down and beached on the shore. Blue, with a stripe of white below the rim, and on the white, in curled black letters, is my name. Thomas. ‘I wish I had the real thing to give to you,’ Mac says. But I can see from his face that he believes that this is more.

‘Thank you,’ I manage. And I hold the board in my hands and turn it up so I can see how the boat might look when it is tipped into the water. ‘Thomas,’ I say, for I must say something. And I wind up the last skein of the wool.

I put my boat on the window ledge beside the geese, and from my bed I watch it in the shadowy dark. Ann is asleep beside me, her face turned away, her breath so quiet I can hardly hear it. I close my own eyes and imagine the
Thomas
floating on our river. I see its blue bottom gliding on the high flat water, its strip of white catching the sun. If you can make a building like the Glasgow School of Art, I think, then surely you can build a boat? And I drift about on a tide of tree trunks, each one wide enough to curve into a hull. If you can design air-cooling vents and lamps for electric light, then surely it must be possible to carve a rudder from a plank of wood? I’m so disappointed I have to hold my breath. But even then I see the
Thomas
as if she were alive. And by the time I fall asleep I’ve fixed two riggers to her sides, drawn the oars up into the bow, lain down in her polished hull and, with the current rushing in, floated downriver to the sea.

Chapter 40

It’s New Year’s Day and the Cheshires are back. They stamp into the inn and sling their bags up the ladder and through the open door into their room. They’re shiny with home and a week at a training camp in Stafford where they learnt to throw grenades. They have the story of one old sergeant who took it upon himself to give a demonstration and promptly blew himself up. But the Cheshires are laughing. They heard the explosion, they say, while they were digging latrines, and when they arrived they saw the tree under which the man had been standing, scorched and split, with just a strip of uniform hanging from a twig. Some other men, from another division, were asked to clear things up. And in the mess that night they raised their glasses to his memory.

‘Lost in the service of his country,’ Gleave says now, and he takes a noisy slurp of beer.

Later I hear him in the yard, lighting up a cigarette, talking in a low voice to Ann. I want to go out to them, and warn them about the red glow of the tip, sending signals to our enemy through the dark. But when I creak open the door I see their two shapes, close together, moving out across the field, and the cigarette, if he still has it, must be cupped close in his palm.