The River Flows On (14 page)

There was laughter and a few teasing comments.

‘He’s that good-looking, too.’

‘With a lovely smile.’

‘And Kate just keeps him dangling. How do you do it, Kate?’

‘I’ll bet she’s never even let him put his hand on her knee!’ yelled Bella Buchanan. ‘If it was me, he wouldnae have to ask twice, but our Kate’s that lady-like, is she no’?’

Kate smiled sweetly. They soon got tired if you didn’t rise to the bait. She drew a comb through her short hair.

She and Pearl, greatly daring, had gone up to Glasgow a few weeks ago and come back with their hair shingled. Pearl had even bought lipstick and powder in Woolworth’s, and they’d applied them in the Ladies’ at Central Station, giggling all the while. Jessie, although she’d accompanied her sisters on the expedition, had declined to participate in either activity, sniffily disdainful of such vanity.

‘You see, Pearl,’ Kate had said, smiling at her youngest sister to take the sting out of her words, ‘Jessie’s the intellectual of the family. She’s above this kind of thing.’

‘The intae-what?’ Pearl had asked, her pretty face such a study in puzzlement that it had been Jessie and Kate’s turn to burst out laughing. When they had recovered, Kate explained.

‘Jessie likes books and studying and discussing ideas, Pearl. She’s not interested in make-up and frivolities like that. Boys, for instance,’ teased Kate.

Pearl tossed her newly cropped head. ‘Oh, really? Well, she may be an intae-whatever it is, but she isnae above fancying boys. Have you seen the way she looks at Andrew Baxter?’

Jessie had gone an immediate deep shade of red, as furious with Pearl as she was embarrassed on her own account. Kate had had to step in to separate her two sisters.

Smiling at the memory, she plonked her cloche hat onto her smooth head and followed the other girls out, running across the yard to the gate. She smiled again, remembering how her father’s mouth had dropped open when he’d seen two of his daughters shorn of their crowning glories.

‘What have you daft lassies done to your bonnie hair?’ he’d asked, his voice so mournful that she and Pearl had taken another fit of the giggles, until he’d asserted his authority and thundered at them to ‘get that muck off your faces!’ Robbie hadn’t liked her with short hair, either.

Well, she liked it. It made her feel grown-up, and modern. And Robbie Baxter didn’t own her, not by a long chalk. She supposed people did think that they were walking out, but going to the pictures together once a week didn’t make them boyfriend and girlfriend, not in Kate’s book. She waited for a Dalmuir-bound tram to clank its way past before crossing the road to her own stop.

She and Robbie went to the pictures together every Monday night - a carefully neutral evening. They went Dutch on the tickets, at her insistence, and although they sometimes walked home together afterwards, enjoying each other’s company, that was all there was to it.

Well ... if she was being honest, she had to admit that on one occasion there had been a bit more to it than that. It had been late summer last year and they had strolled along the river in the twilight, chatting quietly, but had both fallen silent, stuck for something to say, by the time they reached the Renfrew ferry. As they walked into the darkness of the close mouth, Robbie had suddenly pulled her to him, his voice rough-edged and his breath warm on her face.

‘Let me kiss you, Kate. Please?’

So she had let him. Just to see what it felt like. To see if it felt any different from that Hogmanay when he had kissed her. She couldn’t say it had been unpleasant, but when his hands had begun, very tentatively, to explore her body, she had pulled back, breathing heavily, panic rising in her throat. Then the leerie had come in on his nightly rounds to light the gas mantles in the close and made a coarse comment, and it had all descended into farce, with Kate running up the stairs and Robbie calling after her in a frantic whisper, so that neither of their families would hear. She had avoided him for a week after that and agreed to resume their weekly trips to the pictures only on the strict understanding that their friendship was to be exactly that and nothing more.

Kate sighed. She knew Robbie wasn’t happy with the situation, but it was all she could manage. She tried to encourage him to go to the dancing on Friday and Saturday nights - there were plenty of halls - in the hopes that he might meet someone nice.

‘I’ve already met someone nice,’ he always said, his mouth set in a mutinous line. Kate sighed again.

As her tram pulled up to the stop she caught a glimpse of herself in her new cloche hat, reflected in the gleaming windows. Not bad, she thought. Not bad. She had succumbed to it last Saturday afternoon in the millinery department of the Co-op. She made most of her own clothes, so the hat had been a big treat.

Granny had taught her to knit when she was a wee girl and she went to night school for dressmaking with some of the girls at work, with Agnes Baxter always on hand if she had a problem with anything. She hoped she was getting a bit better at it and that her skirts and blouses didn’t look too home-made.

Anyway, she thought, jumping off the tram at Kelso Street, her clothes might have cost a fraction of those Marjorie Donaldson was wearing, but they were as fashionable as Kate could make them. And she’d made and paid for them with her own money and her own efforts. Could Marjorie Donaldson beat that? Kate doubted it.

The first thing she heard when she got in was Pearl’s voice, going on at Jessie. That was nothing new.

‘What do you know about life, you wee nyaff?’

‘That’s enough,’ said Kate, coming into the kitchen and taking off her hat. ‘Is there any tea on the go?’

Jessie leaped up from the schoolbooks open in front of her.

‘I’ll get you a cup, Kate.’

‘Where’s Ma and Davie?’ She didn’t ask where her father was. The rent strike had all but collapsed, suffering a terrible blow when Andrew Leiper, one of the leaders of the protest, had died in August after being knocked down by a car. Now that the Vigilantes had been disbanded her father had lost a role - and he’d consoled himself in the only way he seemed to know how.

‘Up at the Baxters’,’ said Pearl.

Kate sat down at the table and looked with interest at the book Jessie had been studying. Botany. She turned over the pages. There were some beautiful illustrations of plants and flowers, and she said as much to Jessie. The girl turned eagerly towards her, her face lighting up as it always did when someone took an interest in her studies.

‘Aye, they’re dead artistic, aren’t they?’ She set a cup of tea down in front of Kate, well away from the book. ‘D’you want a wee biscuit, Kate?’

Kate shook her head. ‘You know, when I finally get to the Art School I think I’d like to do something like china painting - maybe try painting flowers and trees and that sort of thing, but onto crockery.’

Jessie smiled. ‘You’d be real good at that, Kate, I bet.’

Pearl, sprawled in their father’s chair at one side of the range, yawned ostentatiously.

‘Listen to the pair o’ you. One wants to bury herself in books, and the other wants to paint cups and saucers. Me, I think life’s about having fun.’

Kate shot her an old-fashioned look. Pearl was an attractive girl, clad now in the smart black dress with white collar and cuffs which she wore for her work serving behind the counter at a confectioners in the West End of Glasgow. Her smart blonde bob and the make-up Kate knew she applied once she’d left the house and their father’s disapproving gaze made her look much older than fifteen. Kate had a shrewd idea that her sister equated what she called fun with young men - or maybe not even young ones. Her conversation was peppered with tales of well-spoken gentlemen who came into the shop and were so light-hearted with her as she sold them elegant boxes of chocolates for their wives.

‘What’s that look for?’ demanded Pearl, sitting up in the chair and squaring her shoulders. She made a move towards her handbag, lying on the floor beside her, and then checked it.

‘Just be careful, that’s all,’ said Kate. Her eyes flickered from the bag up to her sister’s face, suffused now with a pale rosy glow. ‘Fun’s fine, but watch that it doesn’t get you into trouble.’

They all knew what she meant by ‘getting into trouble’.

‘And if you’re going to smoke,’ Kate went on, ‘at least get rid of the smell out of your hair before you come home.’ Pearl, about to take offence at her sister’s previous comment, allowed her hand to fall protectively towards her handbag. I am right then, thought Kate. She’s got a packet in there. Just lately, in bed at night, lying next to Pearl, she’d caught the faint whiff of something.

‘Daddy’ll hit the roof if he finds out you’ve started smoking.’

Pearl shrugged. ‘He can’t talk. With his drinking, I mean.’

‘Don’t speak about him like that!’

Pearl shrugged again.’Why not? It’s the truth. Where d’you think he is now?’

Kate was saved from saying something she might regret by the sound of her mother’s key in the lock. Also, perhaps, by her own honesty.

Frances Noble smiled at the pretty girl standing on the doorstep of the neat little house she shared with Esmé MacGregor in Scotstoun.

‘Come in, my dear, come in!’

She ushered Kate into the parlour, talking all the while. Esmé was out, but she’d be back very soon. She particularly wanted to see Kate, so would Kate wait for her, take some tea perhaps?

‘I don’t think I will, Miss Noble. Perhaps I could just leave the money for my savings account with you.’

Frances Noble looked at Kate more closely. The girl was bunching up the cloth of her skirt with her hand. It was an unusual gesture for a young woman who, although shy, was extraordinarily self-possessed for her age. And she had expressed no desire to know why Esmé MacGregor wanted to see her. That, too, was unlike her. She was staring fixedly at the silver framed photo on the mantelpiece, the one of Miss Noble’s brother Alan, who had died on the Somme back in 1916.

‘Is something the matter, my dear?’ Frances indicated the two armchairs at either side of the fire. ‘Won’t you sit down and I’ll make us some Russian tea?’

Kate turned sombre green eyes on her.

‘Miss Noble ...’ Then, as though making up her mind, ‘Miss Noble, do you know anything about brain tumours?’

Frances Noble came forward and took Kate’s hand between two of her own.

‘Who is ill, Kate? You?’

Kate shook her head vehemently. ‘Oh, no. It’s Barbara -Robbie’s wee sister - the daughter of our neighbours,’ she added, but her initial method of describing Barbara Baxter told Frances Noble more than Kate knew.

‘Sit,’ she commanded, ‘and to hell with tea. I’ll fetch the sherry.’

Esmé MacGregor came home during Kate’s retelling of the story, letting herself into the house and bouncing into the room. She was halted immediately by her friend putting a finger up to her lips with a brief, ‘Go on, Kate.’

It was a relief to pour it all out: the Baxters’ anxiety over the past two years; Barbara’s dizzy spells; the additional symptoms which had appeared recently - double vision, bumping into things - until, finally, the hospital doctors to whom Dr MacMillan had referred the girl had said the dreadful words. Barbara had a growth on her brain - a tumour. It was the first time Kate had heard the word. She was to come to know what it meant only too well.

‘They say they may have to operate, but not yet. They’re going to wait and see if it grows any more. Sometimes they shrink, apparently. Disappear completely.’ She looked at her listeners. ‘Have you ever heard of that happening?’ She asked the question with a pathetic eagerness which caused Esmé MacGregor and Frances Noble to exchange swift glances of sympathy.

‘Of course we have,’ Esmé MacGregor said stoutly. I’m sure it happens all the time.’