The River Flows On (32 page)

‘Robbie,’ she began, her voice cracking. ‘I don’t want you to think that I don’t love you . . .’

He was looking rueful again. ‘You love me like your brother. I know that now. I also know that you married me for your own reasons. Maybe because of Barbara ...’ His voice tailed off. ‘All I hope is that, given time, you’ll be able to love me like your husband. Which I am, Mrs Baxter.’ Leaning forward, he kissed her gently on her slightly parted lips.

‘Robbie, I...’

He tapped her mouth with his forefinger. ‘You don’t have to say anything. I don’t want you to say anything. Let’s just give it time, eh?’

‘But I do love you,’ said Kate urgently. ‘I do. And I’ll try to be a good wife to you, and try to like ... that. You can bother me whenever you like. Och, Robbie, you know what I mean -and stop laughing at me!’

‘I’m not,’ he protested. ‘Honest.’ But he was grinning widely. He stood up and extended a hand to  pull her to her feet, too. ‘Give us a kiss, Mrs Baxter.’

Kate did her best. She knew it wasn’t quite good enough. She knew he knew it too, but he was still smiling when he released her, his eyes full of hope. She couldn’t extinguish that. Maybe, if she tried really hard, she could make him happy, never let him know that he’d been second best.

‘Right, madam, what do you want to do today?’

‘Whatever you want,’ she said earnestly.

Robbie’s dark eyebrows shot up. ‘I know you promised to obey me, but I didn’t think either of us had taken that seriously!’

‘I took my wedding vows very seriously.’

There was a pause which went on for just too long.

‘Did you?’ His tone was neutral. She forced herself to look at him. He couldn’t know. Could he?

His apparent composure cracked. He took her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. ‘I don’t want a wee doormat, Kate. I want you. Full of life and full of ambitions. The Kate I know and love. My Kate.’

He finished on a quick, rapid breath, looking intently down at her.

My Kate.
He must never know that she’d been someone else’s Kate. Never. She lifted her face.

‘Give us a kiss, Mr Baxter.’

Robbie took her in his arms enthusiastically and did as she asked, then held her in a loose embrace.

‘Will you do something for me?’

‘Anything,’ she promised recklessly.

He lifted his hand to her head, touching the short chestnut-brown strands.

‘Grow your hair for me? It’s so bonnie, and I’d like to see it dancing on your shoulders again.’

‘Dancing on my shoulders? You’ve definitely got a way with words, Robert Baxter,’ she teased. ‘Yes, I’ll grow my hair for you.’ It was a small enough thing for him to ask.

‘Good.’ He took her hand. ‘Why don’t you do some painting while we’re here? You can look at the sea and the rocks and I can look at you.’

‘I didn’t bring my water colours. Not even my sketch book.’

‘No, but I did. I got Jessie to smuggle them out for me.’

She turned to him, genuinely touched. ‘Och, Robbie, that was kind of you! Whatever made you think to do that?’

‘I reckoned,’ he said, trying to look severe, and failing miserably, ‘that if I didn’t keep my promise to encourage you, yon wee Miss MacGregor of yours would have me hung, drawn - and quartered.’ He dropped a kiss on her nose. ‘Come on, bonnie lass, let’s go and fetch your stuff now.’

PART III

1931

Chapter 19

‘Daddy! Up!’

The young voice was imperious. Robbie, arms folded over his chest, looked down his long length at the child. Arms outstretched, she was reaching up to him.

‘Bit of a dictator, aren’t you? Like that chap in Italy, what do they call him again? Mussolini? Come on then, ye wee horror.’

Reaching down for her, he hoisted her up onto his shoulders. One chubby leg down each side of his neck, Grace Baxter chuckled with delight, and sank her fingers into the dark waves of her father’s hair.

‘Ow, you wee bisom! Don’t pull my hair! Shall we run?’

Grace relaxed her iron grip on his head and clapped her hands.

‘Aye, Daddy, aye!’

Robbie immediately broke into a slow, but deliberately jerky run, designed to shake his passenger up like a sack of potatoes. It provoked delighted chortles of glee from Grace. Kate, following at a more sedate pace along the riverside path, smiled after them. They got on well together, that pair.

Now and again her conscience still pricked her - when she was having difficulty in getting to sleep at night, or if she woke early on a spring morning. However, as time moved on it had become easier to consign those kind of thoughts to that box of hers and slam the lid on them.

Occasionally they got out again, like when, worried by her seeming inability to conceive again, she had consulted young Dr MacMillan about the problem.

‘What’s your hurry, Kate?’ he had asked. ‘Why not just relax and enjoy Grace? You and Robbie had no problem having her, after all. Quite the reverse, as I recall,’ he added, a distinct twinkle in his eye.

Kate, embarrassed beyond words, had dropped her eyes under that amused gaze. The doctor could obviously count quite well. Baby Grace had obliged her grandmother Lily by being just five and a half pounds at birth, light enough for it to be casually mentioned that her birth was a few weeks premature. If there were some raised eyebrows at that, Kate knew that most people assumed, as Dr MacMillan did, that she and Robbie had simply jumped the gun a wee bit. Robbie himself, stunned by the strength of his own reaction to the birth of his daughter, had paid such details scant attention.

He adored the little girl and spent a lot of time with her. It was two and a half years now since she’d come into the world and Robbie had been there right from the beginning, scandalizing the midwife by wanting to be present at the actual birth.

‘You cannae do that, Mr Baxter,’ the woman had said. ‘It wouldnae be decent.’

Surrounded by the disapproval of the womenfolk from both families, Robbie had been forced to bow to the inevitable. He laid a cool hand on Kate’s sweaty forehead before he was hustled out of her mother’s front room.

‘I’ll be back just as soon as this gaggle of harridans will let me through the door,’ he said softly, in a voice intended only for Kate’s ears. ‘Don’t go away.’ Bending, he had dropped a kiss on her cheek. As he straightened up, reluctant to take his leave of her, their eyes locked. Kate had never forgotten the look on his face that day. It spoke volumes, said all the things she knew he longed to say to her, about how much he loved her, about the way he loved her.

She couldn’t return that love in full measure, knew bitterly she wasn’t worthy of it, but she cared for him very deeply. He was her husband, her companion and her best friend, and she would have trusted him with her life - and that was love, too. Of a sort.

She’d seen too that he was scared, terrified of relinquishing her to the risky process of giving birth. She was frightened too, but for his sake she screwed up her courage, smiled at him and managed a few words.

‘I’ll be here.’

Grace, set down by her father, was running back to Kate, ready for another game of which she never tired. Spreading out both arms at her sides, Kate dodged from side to side across the path. Grace pretended to try to escape. She never did. That was part of the game.

‘Caught you!’ Crouching down, Kate wrapped her arms around the .stocky little figure of her daughter, nuzzling her face into her neck. She couldn’t get over the beautiful smoothness of Grace’s skin, or how wonderful it smelled, soapy and fresh and new.

‘I think I’ll just eat you for my tea,’ she told her daughter, ‘you taste so good.’ Planting a kiss on the young cheek, smooth as the bloom on a peach, Kate felt a shadow fall across her, and raised her head. Robbie was smiling down at both of them.

‘Well, Grace Barbara,’ he asked, ‘shall we go home and see if your mother can find something else to feed us on?’

He bent down and planted a kiss on the line of Kate’s jaw, just under her ear.

‘You taste good too,’ he whispered passionately. ‘It must run in the family.’

Discomfited, she took Grace’s hand, so that the child walked between them, prattling away as they strolled back to Clydebank after a Sunday afternoon visiting both sets of grandparents in Yoker.

She wished Robbie wouldn’t say things like that. As husband and wife they had evolved an easy companionship, their family life revolving around Grace, who had arrived so early in the course of their marriage.

Their partnership was a democratic one. Robbie had astonished Kate, at the end of their first week of living together, by presenting her with his unopened pay packet from the yard. She had taken it from him and looked, uncomprehendingly, first at it and then at him.

‘What do I do with this?’

‘Keep the house, of course,’ he said easily. ‘Give me back a wee bit for pocket money, and divide the rest between rent and food and anything else we need.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘is that how it’s supposed to work?’ An unexpected shaft of sympathy for her mother pierced her. How often had her father drunk the lion’s share of his pay before he’d even got home? Lily hadn’t had it easy. Robbie, watching the emotions chase themselves across Kate’s face, put a hand over hers, sealing the pay packet between them.

‘I earn the money and I trust you to work out how to spend it. My pay belongs to both of us. I go out to work, you stay at home and run the house. We’ve both got our jobs to do - and I want you to take some pocket money for yourself.’

She seldom did. Emulating Agnes Baxter, she established an emergency fund instead. Kate’s was in a box in the middle drawer of a sideboard she’d bought cheap at a saleroom. Increasingly restless as her pregnancy progressed, she had stripped the piece of furniture back, to its original wood and set about repainting it in an Art Deco style, covering it first of all in white paint and then applying the decoration - the Glasgow rose alternating with her own motif of a rowan tree.

The project gave her a lot of satisfaction. She missed the Art School, wondered sometimes if she’d been too hasty in relinquishing the grant. She could hardly have gone back straightaway - not when she was growing larger every month with Jack Drummond’s baby - but perhaps it could have been put in abeyance for a year or two. Robbie, she knew, would willingly have minded the baby on Saturday afternoons or one evening a week, but she had given it up and she knew very well that she had no chance of getting another grant, not now she had become a wife and mother. When she was feeling sorry for herself, she told herself firmly that once she’d had the baby and it was old enough she would go back to the local art classes. She wasn’t sure how she would afford supplies, but she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

She missed the daily companionship of her workmates, although some of them came to visit during the evening or at weekends. Mary Deans, now happily allowed to use her left hand, was one of them. She was walking out with Peter Watt from the Drawing Office. He and Robbie had become firm friends. Mary and Peter were going to wait to marry until Mary had completed her apprenticeship.

Kate privately wished she could have done the same. In low moments she was bitterly disappointed at the waste of her training. She’d been good at her job and she’d enjoyed it. All his fault, she caught herself thinking one day, and then immediately berated herself. Jack hadn’t forced her, she had been an all-too willing partner. And despite it all, she knew that she still loved him.

With too much time on her hands as she grew larger and Robbie nagged her to rest more, she found herself spinning fantasies about Jack Drummond. In her mind she went back in time, imagined him chasing after her that night she’d walked away from his car begging her to marry him after all. Then she told herself not to be so daft. Or so ungrateful to the man who had given her and her baby his name.