The River Flows On (23 page)

Where had the saleslady got to? It seemed suddenly very quiet. Even the noise of the Saturday-afternoon traffic on Sauchiehall Street, audible through the closed windows, had diminished. Jack was very serious, his eyes searching her face. She did want to make him happy ...

‘All right,’ she whispered. Smiling, he bent and kissed her.

There was a discreet cough from behind them.

‘Would Madam perhaps care to look at these wraps now?’

They settled on a lacy white stole, decorated with beads in the same colour. She told her mother both it and the dress had been sale items. She thought she’d got away with that. With Pearl she wasn’t quite so sure. Her sister gave her one of those sly looks which never failed to make Kate uncomfortable. The invitation from Jack’s mother caused enormous excitement. Lily showed it to everyone in the close, including Agnes Baxter. She, in turn, standing at her own front door, showed it to her son as he trudged up the stairs on Monday night coming home from his work.

‘Look at the circles our Kate’s mixing in, Robbie. Bearsden for her dinner! Up among the posh folks. Just fancy!’

Pearl Cameron, who had come in close on Robbie’s heels, rolled her eyes. ‘Lunch, Mrs B. Posh folk have their dinner at night.’

Robbie took the card thrust into his hand - he could hardly do otherwise - read it and handed it back to his mother without comment. Kate felt a flash of irritation. Couldn’t he at least try to be pleased for her?

Chapter 13

Kate was experiencing a strange mixture of emotions: elation, irritation and embarrassment. Elation because of how well the show had gone. Her work had been admired by many people, including the influential art critic of a respected Glasgow newspaper, who was to be one of the guests at the lunch in Bearsden the next day. He and others like him had said lots of nice things. They had called her talented and advised other people that here was a name to watch. It might have turned her head if it hadn’t gone hand in hand with barely concealed surprise that a working-class girl should turn out such fine work. That was where the irritation came in.

Kate thought of all the folk she knew who were, in one way or another, talented: men who, in their spare time, took and developed photographs, or mended intricate clocks, or spent hours painstakingly building model ships, which they then displayed in a bottle; women who made clothes or turned out beautiful knitting and embroidery; men and women who wrote poetry and songs; the pianists and the accordion players and the singers who were so much in demand at local weddings. They worked on their hobbies in their few spare hours, going to evening classes or joining clubs with other like-minded people.

Clydebank was overflowing with people like that. There were horticultural and operatic societies, drama groups, evening classes in a wide variety of subjects. With very little spare cash, and not much free time, people went to enormous efforts to express their creativity. It was a safety valve, a way of saying, this is what I am capable of, this is the real me, and a very necessary antidote to the hard physical labour of their daily grind. Some of the people Kate had met this weekend had seemed surprised that she could walk and talk at the same time, let alone turn out pottery to her own design. She said as much to Marjorie.

‘Whereas my problem is that I don’t know whether the praise is really genuine, or because I’m my father’s daughter!’

‘Your stuff’s excellent, Marjorie,’ Kate said stoutly. ‘We all know that.’

Marjorie patted her on the shoulder. ‘You’re a good friend, Kate.’

‘And you’re a good potter.’

Marjorie grinned, the freckles dancing on the bridge of her nose. She glanced over Kate’s shoulder.

‘Oh look, Kate, it’s your family!’ She moved forward, hand outstretched, her plain face wreathed in smiles. ‘Mr Cameron, how delightful to see you again.’

That was where the embarrassment came in - oh, not because of her father or Jessie. Despite their shabby clothes, she could never be ashamed of either of them. They both looked attentively at all the exhibits. Her fellow students were quite taken with her father and sister, she could see that, even if there was a hint of condescension in their reactions. Imagine a working man asking such intelligent questions about art!

Seeing her father standing with his arms folded in front of a painting, head cocked as he listened to the artist - a rather shy young man - explaining his picture, Kate felt a real pang. If only her father could have expressed himself this way, she thought sadly, instead of trying to find the answer to life’s problems at the bottom of a bottle. Why did life defeat some people, and not others?

Her mother hadn’t come, of course. She tried not to feel too disappointed. Lily would probably only have been an embarrassment - like Pearl, who was completely ignoring the paintings and pottery and happily flirting with every man in sight, including Jack Drummond. She darted sly little glances at Kate every so often to see whether or not she had noticed. Suzanne Douglas did, smiling her cool and sophisticated smile. It was a relief when Pearl finally left, trailing reluctantly after her father and youngest sister.

Half an hour later Kate was standing in a small group, discussing how they were all going to manage to get out for a bite to eat.

‘We’ll operate a shift system. Six of us can go out at a time. What d’you say, Kate?’ asked the shy young man who’d been talking to her father. He’d come out of his shell quite a bit this morning. He’d never called her by her first name before. Then she heard her name again.

‘Kathleen,’ came a quiet voice from behind her. Laughing, she turned around, and experienced embarrassment of a different sort. Robert Baxter, flat cap held between his hands, stood there.

‘Robbie,’ she said in surprise. Then, recovering herself, ‘I’m so glad you could come.’ She gestured round the room. ‘Have you had a look at all the exhibits?’

‘I’m only interested in yours.’

The comment fell into a silence which seemed all at once to descend on the whole room. Kate saw eyebrows being raised. Robbie pulled himself up to his full height.

‘I’ve come to invite you to dinner. L-lunch, I mean,’ he said, clearly all too aware of the number of ears which had pricked up. ‘If you’re free,’ he added. His voice was clipped, his face unsmiling.

‘Sounds more like an order than an invitation,’ murmured Jack, who had strolled over to join the group. There were a few stifled giggles. Robbie glanced without interest at him and bent his grey gaze again to Kate.

‘Will you come?’

Jack took out his gold cigarette case and extended it to Robbie.

‘I don’t smoke, thanks,’ he said stiffly.

‘Nor drink, either, I hear,’ drawled Jack. ‘How terribly good of you.’ Suzanne Douglas came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder, then draped herself over him - as fluid as a piece of silk, thought Kate. The two of them looked Robbie up and down, taking in his smartly pressed but old suit, his stiff collar and neat tie and his obvious discomfort. Compared to them, he was over-dressed: like her on that first day, when she hadn’t known any better.

‘Don’t you have any vices, Mr Baxter?’ purred Suzanne. ‘A good-looking chap like you?’

Robbie’s spared her and Jack Drummond the swiftest of glances before turning once again to Kate.

‘Will you come?’ he asked again. ‘I thought we could go to Sloan’s in the Argyle Arcade. I - I’ve booked a table,’ he added self-consciously. Out of the corner of her eye, Kate saw Suzanne’s mocking reaction. That, if nothing else, made her mind up.

‘Of course I’ll come,’ she said, impulsively reaching out to touch his arm. ‘Just let me get my coat.’

Robert Baxter was ill at ease, and it had nothing to do with his surroundings. In fact, thought Kate, glancing surreptitiously at him from behind her menu, he fitted in well here. Put him in better clothes and he would be more than a match for any of the men enjoying lunch at the tables round about them.

Her childhood friend had matured into a broad-shouldered and quietly handsome young man, who normally had an air of quiet calm about him. Not today, though. He was jumpy about something.

Could he be worried about Barbara? No, she dismissed that straight away; If Barbara’s illness had got worse, her mother would have heard about it from Agnes. And if anything had happened, Barbara’s brother certainly wouldn’t be sitting across a restaurant table from her today.

She had hoped he might relax once they got away from the Art School, but he stayed tense on the short subway ride down to St Enoch’s. Sitting silently beside each other, experiencing the shoogly motion of the train, Kate considered the fact that the world in which she had come to feel so much at home was unfamiliar territory to him. She had changed and he hadn’t. She was leaving him behind and she was sorry about it. Perhaps, she thought, with a sudden burst of affection for him, there was some way for them to stay friends, even if she and Jack did ... but that was counting her chickens before they were hatched. His mother might have invited her to lunch, but Jack hadn’t yet asked the crucial question - not in so many words anyway.

Robbie relaxed slightly during the meal but passed only the briefest of comments on her exhibits at the show, and then only when pressed - and that wasn’t like him at all.

‘Ice cream?’ he asked at the end of the meal, returning the menu to the waitress who stood hovering, waiting to take their dessert order.

‘Cheese and biscuits,’ said Kate, smiling up at the woman.

‘Then I’ll have cheese and biscuits too. Coffee or tea, Kate?’

When the waitress had gone, Kate looked at him. ‘You called me Kathleen earlier on. It’s only you and my father who do that. It sounds so formal.’ She laid one hand flat on the white damask tablecloth. Robbie extended his own hand and put it over hers. There was an abruptness about the movement.

‘Maybe I called you Kathleen because I wanted to be formal today.’

Kate’s heart started to thump, so loud in her ears that she was sure the other people in the restaurant must be able to hear it. She glanced around, but no, they all seemed to be involved in their own conversations. She was not at all reassured when Robbie took a visible deep breath and squeezed her hand.

‘Kate... Kathleen... you know that I’m time-served now. I’ve got a good trade. Things might not look too rosy at the moment, but there’s always work for a good cabinet-maker. If the orders dried up, I could go to sea, although I’d hate to do that and leave you all alone.’

‘Leave me all alone?’ Kate’s voice sounded as though it belonged to someone else.

Robbie nodded his head. The unruly lock of hair escaped as usual, felling over his pale brow. He had been staring fixedly at the table. Now he looked up, tossed his head, took another deep breath and plunged in.

‘Och, Kate, I’m making a bit of a hash of this. What I mean is, well, Kate... Kathleen, I mean ... I suppose what I’m asking is - will you marry me?’

The waitress brought their biscuits and cheese.

Robbie jumped back, lifting his hand off Kate’s so quickly it caught one of the plates the waitress was setting down on the table.

‘Tut-tut. Now, never you mind, sir, we’ll clear this up in a jiffy.’

Kate looked away, but not before she had seen that Robbie’s colour was up. She knew he was in an agony of impatience for the woman to leave them alone. She also knew that when the waitress did go, she herself was going to have to utter words she’d rather have left unsaid. Something gentle and kind, but a refusal, all the same. When the woman finally left, she steeled herself to meet Robbie’s grey eyes, but he had one hand up in a gesture of rebuttal.

‘Before you give me an answer, let me just say this.’ He stretched his free hand across the table. His voice was very soft. ‘Give me your hand again?’ Reluctantly, she did as he asked.

‘You know I’d never stand in the way of your art and your pottery. I’m a modern man. I would hope we’d have children, of course, but apart from that, I’d want you to keep doing all that.’ He nodded, a gesture which took in the Art School and the exhibition and her friends there and everything which was, she knew, so alien to Robert Baxter. He was rubbing her hand now, gently drawing his thumb backwards and forwards over her knuckles. ‘We could go out, to places like this - or to tearooms ... Well, we couldn’t afford it every week, but maybe once a month, or something.’