The Good Provider (9 page)

It was all too much for her. She stepped back into the clean, well-furnished room. She could not believe that it was her room, at least for a time, that she might sleep in the bed, wash in the basin, sit before the mirror. The pleasure of it had to be expressed somehow.

She pirouetted, arms above her head, her patched old skirt swirling, her auburn hair shaking loose a little form its braids.

Glasgow, she felt, was a warm and welcoming place where a young wife might settle and be happy.

Tomorrow, she would learn the truth.

TWO

The Narrow Place

Kirsty had no idea where they were going when they left Number 19 or what particular plans Craig had made for the day.

She had slept well, undisturbed by the strange noises that floated over the shunting-yards and the dockside. She had not wakened until seven o’clock, a half-hour after her usual time of rising. On the ground floor the dining-room contained eight chairs, a sideboard and a long dark-oak table. There appeared to be no other guests in residence but the breakfast, served by a girl of about Kirsty’s age, was substantial. Mrs Frew, who made only one appearance ‘upstairs’, was not quite so wispy and pink as she had seemed by gaslight. Politely she enquired if they had slept well, was gratified to hear that they had, asked what they would care for for breakfast and whether they would ‘care to partake of an evening meal’. There was no development of that confidential rapport which had shown itself for a second or two in the bedroom and Kirsty was puzzled by the woman.

Craig, however, was much less sensitive to the subtleties of Mrs Frew’s character and, as soon as they had turned from the path and had taken a few steps along Walbrook Street, he said, ‘Old bitch. We’ll have to get out of there quick as we can.’

‘She seems quite nice to me,’ said Kirsty.

‘
Nice!
Not her. I know her sort. Nobody else there, did you notice? Not bloody surprised. Like a damned mausoleum, yon place.’

‘Craig, where are we going?’

‘To look for things.’

‘What things?’

‘Well, since you told her you had a “basket” on the way, we’ll have to buy you clothes, won’t we?’ Craig said. ‘You can’t go on wearin’ what you stand in.’

Kirsty was confused. The prospect of having money to purchase clothing was enormously pleasing but there was a disgruntled and grudging mood on Craig this morning that she believed might stem from regret at yesterday’s impetuous gesture, at quitting Dalnavert’s secure existence just for her sake. She said nothing. They reached the corner by the church and, walking quickly, rounded out of Walbrook Street into the busy thoroughfare of Dumbarton Road.

Craig said, ‘I’ll need to look for a job of some sort.’

She was sensible enough to realise that she must let Craig make the running. He looked untidy, for some reason, and fatigued, as if he had not slept well. The grousing, grumbling note remained in his voice.

‘We need a place to ourselves,’ he said. ‘Anywhere that’s private.’

Kirsty said, ‘Should we not stay where we are at least for a day or two?’

Craig squinted at her. ‘I thought we were supposed to be gettin’ married? It’s not my idea o’ marriage for you to be in the attic an’ me in the bloody cellar.’

‘We’ll look for some place, Craig. It’s a good idea.’

Her response seemed to placate him and, for the first time that morning, though it was broad daylight and the pavement was populated with women, children and elderly men, Craig took her arm in his, drew her against him and kissed her on the mouth.

Kirsty put her modesty aside, let her lips linger.

‘I can’t wait,’ Craig said. ‘Last night was a torment.’

Kirsty said, ‘What can we afford, Craig?’

‘Somethin’ decent,’ Craig said. ‘Some sort o’ place where we can be man an’ wife.’

It was, so she told herself later, all Craig’s fault. If Craig had not encouraged her to ignore the cut-price stalls and bargain-basements that abounded on the nether edge of Anderston and Argyle Street and accompany him instead to the block-long fashion house of Allardyce and Prosser where, on annual pilgrimages, his mother bought all her clothes, then the spending spree might never have begun.

Armed with a paper street map that he purchased along with a newspaper and a packet of cigarettes, Craig confidently led his lady-love to Charing Cross and into Sauchiehall Street, a distance of some two miles from Agnes Frew’s boarding-house. Here, on the sharp corner of Spring Street, eight great pavement-level plate-glass windows displayed modes, mantles and millinery.

Wise in the ways of retailing, Messrs Allardyce and Prosser did not clutter their spacious floors with household goods and domestic commodities to distract and depress their customers with reminders of life’s harsh realities. Within the precincts of the fashion house reality was full-length mirrors and racks of gowns. Between the broad glass-topped counter slender plaster models were decked in handmade laces and Swiss embroidery, in frilly little capes of
peau de soie
and coats of chiffon
glacé
, tea-jackets and Empire gowns, delaine blouses, slips and stoles and nainsook camisoles. Lighting was discreet and indirect, ‘trying-on’ rooms plush and private. The assistants, all female, had been selected for their looks and trained to flatter, cajole and serve as conspirators in acts of outrageous extravagance.

Stunned by the window displays, Kirsty could hardly believe her ears when Craig instructed her to walk inside and buy whatever she fancied, plus a hand-sized luggage basket to give truth to her lie to Mrs Frew. Shopping for anything except ‘buttons and pins’ was a heady new experience for Kirsty. She had never had a penny to call her own, had never enjoyed the exhilaration of shopping for its own sake, an exercise that she was soon to learn lay on a higher plane than mere acquisition. Even so, at that stage it was still Kirsty’s intention to restrict herself to buying stockings, summer-weight drawers, two vests, a nightgown and, perhaps, a one-and-ninepenny skirt to replace the rags she had travelled in. Craig was airily insistent; buy something nice and suitable for city wear. She was no farmyard skivvy now, was she? Soon, indeed, she would be marrying a city gent, though how that transformation would be accomplished was a question that remained unanswered.

Naturally Craig would not be caught dead inside such a repository of feminine culture. He hung about on the pavement, his back to the windows, paced up and down, smoked three of his five cigarettes, watched a gang of labourers tear up cobbles and a tar-boiler pour out pitch, eyed the pert and pretty misses from the professional offices and ogled the elegant ladies as they climbed in and out of cabs and carriages and showed their ankles, all very aware of themselves. He had told Kirsty to take her time, to set the goods she wanted to one side, come out, tell him how much she had spent and he would give her the money. He still had a market mentality. He did not trust swanky city shopkeepers any more than he trusted Irish horse-traders. He expected Kirsty to be absent for about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour; Craig had never been in a clothing store with his mother and had no notion of the sort of haze that can descend on a girl under such circumstances. Kirsty was gone for well over an hour. She emerged – at last – glowing.

Craig said, ‘About bloody time.’

She looked jubilant, radiant.

‘How much?’ he enquired, realising that no matter what sum she had spent it would be cruel to go back on his word. ‘What’s the bad news?’

‘It’s – it’s seven pounds an’ eight shillin’s.’

‘
What!
’

‘But Craig, you told me—’

‘Aye, aye.’

Stoically he dug into his trouser pocket and took out one of the fivers and three single pound notes. Glancing furtively this way and that, as if he expected to be picked up for soliciting a lady’s favours on a public thoroughfare, he slipped the money into her hand. Kirsty kissed him on the cheek and, laughing, whirled and shot like an arrow back through the shop’s swing-door.

‘Seven bloody guineas!’ Craig murmured under his breath, ‘Dear God!’ and lighted another cigarette even though his throat, unused to such indulgence, was sore and constricted.

The essential folly was a powder-blue costume with a shaped bolero jacket and a mermaid skirt. It was totally impractical, hardly the sort of rig she could wear to scrub steps or polish brasses. But she could not resist the appeal of the garment or the patter of the smart Glaswegian counter-hands, who
oohed
and
aahed
and assured her, when she tried the costume on for size, that she would knock all the lads for six in that one. Kirsty convinced herself that Craig would adore it as much as she did, would be proud to be seen with her in the powder-blue.

After spending three pounds and fourteen shillings on the original items, spending more seemed as easy as sweeping a floor. She flitted from department to department with an almost proprietorial air and purchased a pair of quite sensible shoes, a useful long coat of showerproof cloth, similar to Mrs Nicholson’s, and a plain – well, plainish – hat. Finally she bought a dress-hamper in buff wicker, had the assistants accumulate her purchases at the counter in the gown department and total up the cost.

It did not strike Kirsty that she had acted irresponsibly or that Craig, in not clipping her spendthrift wings, was being irresponsible too. In due course she emerged from the door of the fashion house accoutred in all her finery, lugging the basket and an extra brown-paper parcel. She had a suspicion that it hadn’t been quite ‘proper’ to put on the new clothes there in the shop and carry her old ones away but she no longer cared. She cared even less for customs and good manners when she saw the effect that the outfit had on Craig. She slipped her arm through his and made him turn around. His mouth opened, and his eyes were round as saucers.

‘My God, Kirsty! What’ve you done to yourself?’

‘Do you not like it?’

‘Aye,’ he said, inspecting her. ‘Aye, you’re a corker, a real corker.’

‘It cost an awful lot o’ money, Craig.’

‘It was worth it,’ he said.

‘What do we do now, Craig?’

He shrugged. He had formulated no plan for the rest of the day, had only a vague notion that he must soon look for work.

Kirsty said, ‘Then can we get somethin’ to eat, dear? Shoppin’ fair makes you hungry.’

‘No sooner said than done,’ Craig told her, and led her off along Spring Street in search of a tea-room.

In the end the day perished. Not to be outdone, after a ‘luncheon’ fit for a king in Miss Godfrey’s Restaurant, Craig had decided that he too must have a rig suitable for a Glasgow man and had paraded Kirsty about, toting the wicker basket and the parcel, while he inspected gentlemen’s fashions in shop windows within a square-mile radius of Charing Cross. Finally he bought a new cotton shirt, a necktie, a pair of brown shoes, a striped blazer and cream-toned flannel trousers. He put each item on as he purchased it, folding his own garments into a new canvas carrier, then the couple gravitated back towards Walbrook Street, drifting along dusty pavements amid the bustle of the town to which they did not yet, somehow, belong.

With legs aching and back twingeing, Kirsty hobbled on in the unfamiliar constricting skirt. The pavements of the streets became hard and less yielding as the day went on and even Craig, for all his fitness and stamina, was ground down, as much, he claimed, by the racket as by the walking. They found a place to sit at last, not a park but a patch of sour grass against a high dirty brick wall, a bench of wood and iron that seemed so old that it might have been a fossil.

They were no more than a half-mile from Walbrook Street, Craig said, and Kirsty, with inexplicable relief, recognised the skyline. Goods stations and mineral depots crammed the area, a delta of iron rails thunderous with tank engines and shunters and those interminable caravans of trucks and coal wagons. Beyond lay the sheds and moorings of the Queen’s Dock. The sun had gone in and a grey wind swirled about the back street chasing paper scraps and cindery dust and carrying the raw sounds of foundry hammers and timber saws to them. But to sit, even there, was a relief. Craig slumped elbows on knees, lit his last cigarette and inexpertly blew little puffs of smoke at the ground.

Kirsty kneaded her calves with her hands, trying to unknot the muscles. Her new shoe, on her right foot, slipped off and hung suspended from her toe. She looked at it disconsolately, saw that the leather was already scuffed about the toe and that the heel had a scar on it. Away to the left an empty tram rolled along the street, the horses lathered and exhausted, heading for the terminus and their stables.

‘What time does she put out the supper?’ Craig asked.

‘Half past six.’

‘It must be near that now.’

‘Only ten past five,’ said Kirsty.

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw a clock.’

Craig blew more balls of tobacco smoke.

The new boater was tilted back, exposing dark hair curled over his brow. He did not look like a gentleman. In the ill-fitting, carrot-striped blazer he seemed like a boy dressed up.

‘We’ll go back there,’ Craig said ‘For tonight.’