The Good Provider (34 page)

‘Did he not tell you?’

‘No,’ said Kirsty, frowning.

She took the newspaper from the woman and read:
Greenfield Police Court: Assault: On Monday, before Bailie Wrayburn, James Reid was fined 30s, or 21 days, for assaulting Thomas Clark and a constable named Nicholson, on Saturday evening
.

‘Was Craig not hurt?’

‘He didn’t appear to be,’ said Kirsty.

‘He must have been in court.’

‘I don’t know. He said nothin’ to me about it.’

‘Still, it’s very gratifyin’ to see his name in the papers,’ said Mrs Frew. ‘Our Hughie’s name was never out of the papers when he was on the beat in the Greenfield.’

‘Why didn’t Craig tell me?’

‘Too modest,’ said Mrs Frew.

Kirsty challenged him soon after he returned from work that evening. She showed him the item in the
Star
as he seated himself at the kitchen table in expectation of supper.

‘Ach, that!’ said Craig dismissively. ‘It wasn’t important.’

‘Mrs Frew wants to know what happened.’

‘Old Reid was stottin’ drunk,’ said Craig. ‘He’s an old josser, about sixty, who got booted out o’ the railway service for habitual drinkin’.’

‘Go on.’

Craig sighed. ‘Am I not to get fed?’

‘In a minute. Go on.’

‘I heard a commotion outside the Vaults. Tam Clark is Reid’s boozin’ chum but they’d had some sort o’ argument an’ Clark was on the ground, Reid kickin’ him.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Requested him to desist.’

‘Did he?’

‘Nah,’ said Craig ruefully. ‘I had to stop him.’

‘It says you were assaulted.’

‘I wasn’t sharp enough. The old bugger crowned me wi’ a bottle.’

‘Craig, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It was only a wee cut, treated at the station. It’s healed now.’

‘An’ the court?’

Craig shrugged. ‘Two minutes on Monday. Reid’s son shelled out the thirty bob an’ lugged the old josser away cursin’ him an’ threatenin’ to send him to the Inebriates’ Reformatory if it happened again. It wasn’t anythin’ special, Kirsty.’

Kirsty ladled soup from the big pot into a plate and put it before him. ‘What else has been happenin’ that you haven’t told me about?’

Craig blew gently over the surface of the broth and, lifting his spoon, shrugged again.

‘Not a bloody thing,’ he said.

Chief Constable Organ was an innovative chap who had not only formed a Police Athletic Association but had even squeezed enough money from the Commissioners to build and equip a gymnasium in Cape Breton Road. He had also ‘borrowed’ Partick’s new shift system which would shorten each man’s duty to nine hours per day and allow more regular time off. Diehards were against the change but the Greenfield Commissioners had the proposal under review and were keen to move for its adoption in an attempt to reduce, if possible, the high incidence of drunkenness that the long shifts encouraged.

Craig heard talk about the station. He even discussed the proposal’s merits with his fellow recruits in the locker room. He had not, however, been on the Force long enough to have strong feelings one way or the other. As a green hand – Constable Third Grade – he was not yet summoned on the beat during the hours of darkness, a nice refinement peculiar to Greenfield and one which recruits and raw young constables appreciated.

Filling off-duty hours, collected into a straight two and half days every seven, was a problem in itself. On a Saturday a man might take himself to the terraced steps of the football park to watch Greenfield Rovers play Linthouse or Morton or arch-rivals Partick Thistle; but an off-duty Saturday came around only one week in nine and, for the rest, there was such irregularity of hours that the majority of policemen found off-duty service even more tedious than pounding the beat and did what other loafers did, which was to hang about public houses and billiard halls in the dead of daylight hours, sleep their heads into engine oil or bicker incessantly with their wives.

Craig, however, had already seen evidence of the havoc that idleness could wreak to a copper’s prospects. Being ambitious he was quick to seek other ways of occupying free time. He took advantage of a scheme that Mr Organ had set up for the improvement of the proficiency of his men, booked in as a beginner with a qualified instructor at Cranstonhill Baths and, shivering and unsure of himself, stepped reluctantly into the freezing pea-green water two or three times a week while boys half his age larked about with abandon and plunged in and out of the pond like porpoises.

Craig did not like it. He did not like being told what to do by the muscular man in the striped bathing-suit who seemed impervious to the cold and who would stand by him and cup his chin in a big unshivering hand and, holding him suspended, would shout, ‘Kick, kick, Constable Nicholson. You’re not a wee puddock, man. Kick, kick, kick.’

On his fourth morning on the beat Craig had been called to a ramp at the old ford at the bottom of Wharf Lane and had seen a corpse being dragged from the river. He had been obliged to stoop close, to grip the thing’s swollen, suet-soft arm and help drag it up the steps, all dripping and sexless and unreal. So he kicked and kicked and spluttered out the water that got into his nose and promised himself that within a year he would earn three swimming certificates and would be ready to go for a life-saving medal, would be able to dive off the high dale that wee boys were forbidden to use, would not be afraid of plunging into the Clyde’s coiling brown currents to save some poor soul from drowning.

Later, with skin wrinkled and eyes smarting, he would soak for ten minutes in a hot tub, knees to chin, and wish that he had already gone through it, had learned everything, knew all there was to know, was not young and uncertain any more, afraid of shouts in the street and dark closes and of what he might find, in the first foggy hour of his shift, lying dead and decaying in a midden or vennel or on the steep cinder slope of the railway embankment.

If only he had his own house, if only Kirsty had been as she was and not all fat and fussy with the baby in her, if he had his mam and his brother and sister close at hand, his dad to talk to, he might not feel as he did, might not prefer the cold pond or the gymnasium and the company of Archie Flynn, a big simple lad only six months down from the Isle of Harris who had joined the same week as Craig and who lived in the barracks in North Ottawa Street; he might not feel more kinship with Archie and with Peter Stewart, another shy Highlander new to the burgh, than he did with Kirsty, his woman, his wife.

Now that she had pulled the trick of womanhood and slipped from him into pregnancy Craig felt that he had nobody to look after him; he must learn to look after himself. Being a man, a policeman at that, he could not tell Kirsty of his fears, could not come close to her because of her swollen belly and swelling breasts, close enough to admit his weaknesses. At the end of the long shift he wanted to go home to his own fireside, to intimacy and fondness. But, though the grub was good, the bed clean, and they were saving money hand over fist, Walbrook Street offered none of these things. He experienced that vague sense of dispossession for which there is no name and for which, unreasonably, he blamed Kirsty.

With Archie or with Peter, in company with the lads at the station, he had no need of her. In the cold pond at Cranstonhill, in the gymnasium in Cape Breton Road, shivering or sweating it out, he could be free of the need of her, of the obligation to tell her where he went and what he did, and might blame his reticence, then and later, on the nature of the job.

What else has happened that you haven’t told me about?

Not a bloody thing.

‘Kick, kick,’ the instructor would shout. ‘Kick, Constable Nicholson,’ and Craig would thrash the freezing water and, within a month, had the hand away from his chin.

It seemed later than it was, for the boarding-house had no guests that night and Mrs Frew had retired to the back parlour, not in any mood of pique or unsociability but to apply herself to making up a list of friends to whom she must send a card at Christmas or New Year. It was, apparently, a procedure that required methodical concentration and the fortification of a large glass of port wine.

Craig had not arrived home and would, he had indicated, be later than his usual hour of nine, though for what particular reason Kirsty did not know; only the appearance of a wet bathing-costume wrapped in a sodden towel or of his gymnastic vest soaked with sweat would give her a clue.

The wave of energy that had buoyed her up over the past few weeks had ebbed since the weekend. She was concerned lest her tiredness presaged a fever or some dreadful turn in the course of her pregnancy that would impair the health of her child and, incidentally, ruin the little celebration that Mrs Frew had planned for Christmas in a fortnight’s time. New Year would follow and she would be past the mark, into that spell which would end in birth and motherhood and another change in the tenor of her life. Somehow she fixed on New Year, on 1st January, 1897, as a magical date and convinced herself that nothing unpleasant would happen before that date.

If she had thought it through logically Kirsty would have realised that her fatigue stemmed from a long Saturday ‘in town’, an early tour of the departments in the Colosseum Warehouse whose advertisements in the
Star
had lured Mrs Frew and from whose laden counters she purchased the gifts required to appease the sensibilities of relatives she hadn’t seen in years. Kirsty and Mrs Frew had wandered too into Johnston’s Corner to admire the Dolls’ Palace and keek at old Santa Claus as he dished out toys to good little girls and boys.

Mrs Frew had nudged Kirsty. ‘You’ll be queueing up there with your wee ones before you know it, dear.’

Kirsty had felt a strange warm glow at the prospect.

The day had been wonderfully rewarding but it had tired her physically and, with energy low, she had become depressed and imaginative.

Craig was out and Mrs Frew was seeking seclusion in the back parlour and, before she knew it, Kirsty had taken herself into the bathroom. She locked the door and brought out the framed mirror which Mrs Frew hid modestly in a cupboard and, with mirror propped on the bathrail, studied herself with furtive attention in search of a rash, a ruddiness or change in pallor that would confirm her belief that she was sickening for something horrible and would be lucky to survive the week.

She was swollen, fat as a piggie. Her eyes, she thought, seemed dull, her hair lacking in lustre. Even her freckles seemed to have expanded and become more prominent.

Kirsty swallowed and bent closer to her image in the glass.

‘Oh, dear,’ she murmured. ‘What’s wrong wi’ me?’

She stuck out her tongue.

At that moment the doorbell rang and, thinking that it would be Craig and that he had forgotten his key, Kirsty hastily put the mirror back into the cupboard and, relieved to be thus diverted from contemplating her own demise, hurried out into the hall.

‘I’ll get it,’ Kirsty called, though Mrs Frew did not seem to have heard.

After nightfall fog had thickened rapidly in the valley of the Clyde. It had been lurking all afternoon, not the damp ectoplasmic mists that often filled the glens of the Carrick grazings in winter but a dour, ochre substance that was as dry and acrid as chimney smoke – which, Craig said, was what it really was. It was Kirsty’s first sight of a Glasgow ‘pea-souper’. It startled her. Street-lamps were obliterated, the bowling-green fence sunk, the railings, even the pavement, had all been absorbed. It lapped against the step and crept past Kirsty into the hallway in sinister swirls. She had an almost overwhelming impulse to slam the door to close it out, to close out the man who stood before her on the step.

He said, ‘You’re not Cissie.’

‘No, I am not.’

‘Is my aunt not at home?’

‘Your aunt?’

‘Mrs Frew, I mean.’

‘Who are you?’ Kirsty said.

‘A lost soul,’ he answered.

He was not so tall as Craig, not quite so young. He wore a dark grey Cheviot overcoat and a long flowing scarf, a Greenlander travelling-cap tilted on his head, the cloth brim pearled with moisture. He was fair, with blue eyes, and when he smiled he showed even white teeth.

‘I’m not really a lost soul,’ he said. ‘I’m David Lindsay Lockhart and I should have been happily rattling back to my digs in Edinburgh except that all the trains have been cancelled.’

‘You’d better come in.’

He was not assertive, not thrusting, though she could tell by his voice and by the quality of his clothing that he was a high cut above her in standing and education. He took off the cap at once. His hair was smooth and dark blond, worn longer than was fashionable. He carried with him an old Bullion bag in scarred brown hide, held bag and cap in his hand while he waited, patient but amused, for Kirsty to do something.

She did not know why she felt so suddenly shy and awkward, tongue-tied and hesitant. From the moment that he had smiled she had sensed that there was no deception in him and that she need have no fear of him.

‘Wait,’ she said, and carefully closed the front door, blotting out the swirling ochre fog.