The Good Provider (21 page)

‘You’re all dolled up,’ he said.

Hopeful that he might take her out to the park, Kirsty had not changed out of her Sunday best.

‘I went to church,’ she told him.

‘Church? Why?’

‘I felt like it.’

He seated himself at the table and reached for the pickle jar.

‘Craig, wash your hands please.’

Without argument he got up and went to the sink. ‘Is that what goin’ to church does for you?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Is cleanliness no’ next to godliness?’

‘Your mother wouldn’t let you sit at her table after you’d been muckin’ out stables, would she?’

‘What the hell’s she got to do wi’ anythin’?’

‘I didn’t mean to bite your head off,’ Kirsty apologised.

She filled the brown earthenware teapot from the kettle, fitted on its knitted cosy and put it on the cork mat on the table. Sleeves rolled over his forearms Craig returned to the table and picked up his fork.

‘Are you mad because I’ve been drinkin’?’ he asked.

‘It’s up to you what you do.’

‘Christ, I only had one or two jars in the yard.’

‘So that’s what goes on on Sunday mornings.’

‘Mr Malone offered them. I couldn’t refuse.’

‘How hard did you try?’

‘Mr Malone seems to like me.’

‘That’s good.’

‘He’s offered me extra work.’

‘Paid work?’ said Kirsty.

‘Aye.’

Kirsty put the plate of beef and cold potato in front of Craig, and a dish of tomatoes. The tomatoes had cost her a fortune for they were imports from the south, but the dinner-table would look bare without them.

Craig reached out and took one, cut it dextrously into quarters and began to eat.

‘Night work,’ said Craig, his mouth full.

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

‘Sunday?’

‘Aye, I’ll be goin’ out about ten.’

‘For how long?’

‘Dunno. As long as it takes.’

‘What sort of stuff do you carry at midnight on Sunday?’

Craig folded a slice of bread and pushed it into his mouth. The beef, potato and tomato had all vanished, though she had not been niggardly in her serving.

‘I think,’ Craig said, ‘it might be a moonlight flit.’

‘It’s not against the law?’

Craig grinned. ‘Not if ye don’t get caught.’

He got up from the table, seated himself in a chair by the fire, lit a cigarette and picked up last night’s
Evening Citizen
. When Kirsty brought him a cup of tea he accepted it without a word.

‘The weather’s quite nice,’ she said. ‘Are we goin’ out for a walk?’

‘Nah, I’d better catch forty winks.’

She hid her disappointment.

It was the only time that she felt close to Craig, that she belonged to him; not in bed, not seated on his knee while he fondled her but ‘promenading’ on Dumbarton Road or in the park. If he had to go out late tonight, however, he would be in need of rest.

With a sigh she said, ‘It’s just as well. I’ve things to do about the house.’

‘Do them quietly, dear,’ Craig told her.

Tomorrow afternoon, after her stint at the Cakery, she would have her time in the wash-house in the backcourt, use of the big tub and boiling water and a share of the drying-lines that latticed the ‘green’. She had already accumulated a pile of sheets and towels that had to be done. ‘Arrangements’ regarding use of the wash-house and a stair-cleaning rota were made by Mrs Bennie, empress of the close community and a woman even more formidable than Mrs Dykes.

Kirsty had asked, innocently, if she might do her ‘turn’ at cleaning the stairs and scrubbing out the lavatory on a Sunday. Mrs Bennie had been outraged by the very suggestion. Nobody, she declared, nobody, not even that slut McAlister – who had a family of eleven – would dream of sweeping stairs on a Sunday. It had to be, had always been, Tuesday for the occupant of the top floor right; and that was that. Life in Number 11 Canada Road was a far cry from Kirsty’s dream of a cottage with a rose trellis and a vegetable garden, and ‘marriage’ to Craig was not all kisses and cuddles. It would never be like that, she realised, though the girlish dreams persisted from time to time. Canada Road was certainly better than Hawkhead, however; better than slaving for Clegg or living in a room in Dalnavert and squabbling with Craig’s mother day in and day out.

Craig heaved himself out of the chair, took off his boots and rolled on to the bed. He lay on his back, hands above his head and stared at the pock-marked plaster florets high above his face.

Making as little noise as possible, Kirsty washed dishes and set the table for tea.

When that was done she took off her apron and went over to the bed. Craig’s eyes were closed. On impulse she leaned over and kissed him on the brow. His eyes flew open, startled. His hands flew to her shoulders not to pull her down but to push her away, as if he was afraid of affection.

‘When’ll you be – fit again?’ he asked.

‘Fit?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Oh,’ Kirsty said. ‘In two or three days.’

His voice was husky with vexation.

She wanted so badly to please him and knew that it pleased him to make love to her. The truth of it was that she wanted him now more than she had ever done before but she would have to learn to put up with this trick of nature as part and parcel of being a wife. It seemed, though, so wanton and unfair. It was easier for Craig. All he wanted was money, and to make love to her. She envied him his easy desires. She did not really know what she wanted. She had grown out of girlhood all too soon and into complicated womanhood without, it seemed, acquiring volition of her own.

She drew back from him, from the bed.

She seated herself and lifted her mending-basket. She did not feel at all inclined to spend the afternoon with her new darning-egg and slippery needles, repairing Craig’s stockings and cardigan.

She wished that she had accepted Mrs Frew’s kind invitation to return to Walbrook Street at half past four o’clock and take tea there, after Mrs Frew had given lunch to her reverend guests. But Kirsty had reluctantly turned down the invitation out of a sense of wifely duty, out of loyalty to Craig and in the hope that he would want to spend the afternoon with her. She could hardly appear at the boarding-house now, out of the blue.

She sighed, unspooled a length of coarse brown wool from the ball and threaded a wetted end through a darning-needle.

In the recess Craig snored rhythmically.

He wakened at six. He ate supper. At nine he left again for the Kingdom Road and his share of the night work that Daniel Malone doled out to trusted accomplices and young lads too green to know exactly what was going on and what treasures they carried through Greenfield’s dark streets in the back of the covered van.

Around ten, tired, dispirited, and with the bloom long gone off the day, Kirsty went to bed alone.

FOUR

Night Work

Summer was marred by persistent rain and blustery winds. Steamer cruises on the Clyde, trips to the seaside, band concerts, minstrel shows, Masonic picnics, twilight dances in the parks and most annual Gala days fell victim to unseasonable weather. Even folk like Craig and Kirsty who had not yet discovered the pleasures of the summer city felt cheated by wet grey skies and, before August was out, Kirsty found herself looking forward to winter’s crisp cold days, dry frosty evenings and nights spent before a cosy fire.

The span of time between April and autumn, measured out in occupational and domestic routines, seemed long and monotonous. On the last Friday in every month Mr McCoig would call for the rent. Every Wednesday evening Jack Dunn would clump up the stairs with two bags of best coal and hold out his grimy black hand for payment. Every Tuesday night Kirsty would sweep out the stairs and close from top to bottom and scrub out the lavatory on the half-landing. It did not seem so terribly different from the routine of farming, except that it was more diverse, and that it was shared; and in the sharing of it Kirsty learned that there were worse things to be than a Baird Home orphan or a farm servant, that there were levels of despair and poverty below any that she had imagined.

Mr Kydd of the corner shop allowed tick but only to the tune of three shillings and would grant no extension to that limit no matter how a woman begged. Charlie Phillips, whose cart carried milk in the mornings and fish in the evenings, gave no tick at all, not even on Thursdays, not even to Mrs McAlister who had eleven mouths to feed off one wage and would have taken a dish of fish-heads if she could have had them on credit, who would even have gone round the backcourt with Charlie if he had fancied her which, of course, he did not since she was as skinny and pop-eyed as a filleted cod.

‘That woman,’ Mrs Bennie would snarl, ‘is dirt. Give her the loan o’ nothin’, Mrs Nicholson, or you’ll have her scratchin’ an’ clawin’ at your door mornin’, noon an’ night.’

But Mrs McAlister never ‘scrounged’ from Kirsty or from anyone in the close and Kirsty’s sympathy was kept to herself, separated by the height of the building, though she observed with shame the hungry state of the children that crouched about the door of her ground-floor neighbour, heard them wail and whine like little banshees when Mammy was ‘busy’ with the marble-white infant that had been born in March; wept tears for her lack of charity when, late one Friday night in July, the marble-white infant died in its sleep and was taken away in a box by Doctor Godwin. Mrs Bennie claimed that it was to make sure by examination that murder had not been done but Kirsty felt that Doctor Godwin had removed the tiny corpse only to ensure it had a decent burial at no cost to the McAlisters.

The landing on the top floor of Number 11 was shared with Mr and Mrs Mills, models of rectitude, whose children had long ago gone off to seek fame and fortune elsewhere. The wife was snow-haired, plump, deaf as a post. The husband was fat, bandy-legged and smug as an owl. They existed on a wise little fund that Mr Mills had accumulated through the Northern Life Insurance Company during his forty-six years as a janitor in their offices in Gordon Street. In Mr Mills’ book any person who had not possessed his degree of perspicacity, who had not used his youth and prime to make ready for old age, was a fool and a wastrel. Mr Mills’ reaction to news of the death of the McAlister babe was to declare that if the child had been insured at birth then its passing would not have been in vain.

Alone in the kitchen Kirsty would listen to the noises of the tenement, an orchestra of small strident sounds, and wonder just how soon she would be absorbed into it, no longer protected by her youth and her daily job at Oswalds’. She was not chained by children to the house in the tenement now, but soon, in all likelihood, she would be. The prospect frightened her.

She confided her fears to Mrs Frew one dreary afternoon in August when she had gone to take tea with the widow in Walbrook Street.

‘It’s the way of the world, my dear,’ said Mrs Frew. ‘It’s a woman’s lot to suffer.’

‘Have you—?’

‘No, I could not carry a child,’ said Mrs Frew. ‘It was Andrew’s dearest wish, of course, that our union might be blessed. But the Lord did not see fit so to do. Andrew had five by his first wife before she fell into her final, fatal illness and, after many years of pain – borne with fortitude, I might add – was called to her rest.’

‘What happened to the children?’

‘Andrew saw the boys to school, found husbands for the girls as soon as they were of an age.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘I hear nothing from them.’

‘That seems a bit cruel, Mrs Frew.’

‘It was not my doing. They were too well cared for. Spoiled, if you ask me. I was not “accepted”, you see.’

‘Did they resent you?’

‘They resented the fact that I was their father’s only source of comfort and consolation during those years of trial.’

Kirsty cleared her throat. ‘You – knew him before—’

‘I was a friend, a church friend, that’s all,’ put in Mrs Frew quickly. ‘We shared mutual interests. There was nothing indecorous done between us, I assure you. We waited three years after Evelyn’s death before we took the plunge into marriage.’

‘I thought Mr Affleck said—’

‘Hughie’s a born liar; the bane of my life since the day he was born.’ Mrs Frew switched from wistfulness to sharpness in an instant. ‘We come from good stock, you know, though you’d never guess it to hear our Hughie talk.’

‘What does Mr Affleck do?’

‘He’s educated, I’ll say that for him. He was always more learned than he looks. He could have gone far as a scholar, but he had no taste for the sedentary life.’

‘What job did he find?’

‘He works in the City, for the City.’

Kirsty waited for embellishment but Agnes Frew said no more on that score, reached instead for the big silver teapot and returned to talking of her husband and the position she had once held in society.

By the second week in September Kirsty was convinced that she was pregnant. She said nothing to Craig but ‘stole’, if that was the word, ten shillings and sixpence from the purse that Craig kept hidden under a board under the bed and, on a Monday afternoon, as soon as she was released from Oswalds’, walked to Dumbarton Road and climbed the steep hill to the handsome sandstone mansions of Dowanhill Gardens.