The River Flows On (38 page)

‘I was not making funny wee noises,’ said Kate indignantly, struggling up onto her elbows. Then she stopped. ‘I was, wasn’t I? I’m sorry,’ she mumbled.

Robbie laughed and took her in his arms. ‘I loved your funny wee noises, hen. In fact, I was hoping I might hear them again sometime.’ He raised his eyebrows in enquiry. ‘How about tonight?’ He kissed her. ‘And maybe tomorrow night? And maybe the night after that, as well? Mmm?’ He punctuated each question with a kiss.

Kate, safe and warm and loved in his arms, smiled. ‘As often as you like.’

He smiled warmly back, turning with her in his arms so that he lay on his back with her above him, her hand lying lightly on his chest. He played idly with a strand of her chestnut hair, tousled now as his so often was.

‘Do you really mean that?’

‘I do.’ Then, seeing that he still needed reassurance, she bent and kissed him. ‘You did good work last night, Robert Baxter. Maybe I’m going to become insatiable.’

His eyes lit up at her choice of word. ‘Insatiable?’

‘Aye. I’ll be wanting you to m-make l-love to me all the time.’ Kate stumbled over the phrase, shy still for all her bravado, but she went gamely on, poking him in the chest. ‘You’ll be worn out before I’m finished with you.’

His grin was a joy to behold. He kissed her again. Very thoroughly.

‘All the same, Kate,’ he said a few moments later, ‘much as I would like to, we can’t make love all the time.’

‘No?’ She lifted her head in mock-surprise, waiting for the joke.

‘Not when you’re at work, certainly.’

‘What?’ She jerked up, her heart beating too fast.

Robbie was trying for the pained look. ‘Well, you don’t think I’d have spent the emergency fund on frivolities like flowers and hand cream if I hadn’t been planning to send you out to work, do you? You’d better go and see Marjorie Drummond first thing on Monday morning.’

Kate, her green eyes wide, came up on her knees onto the bed. ‘You mean you don’t mind? You’ll agree to me going out to work?’

Robbie nodded smugly.

‘You pig!’ yelled Kate. ‘You rotten pig!’ Bending forward, she yanked the pillow out from under his head and began hitting him with it. Laughing, he fended her off.

‘Help! Help! I’m being attacked by a wild woman. Ow! Stop it, ye wee bisom.’ But he was laughing too much to stop her. When she paused for breath, he grabbed her by the waist and turned her neatly over so that she was lying beneath him, the pillow between their bodies.

‘We’ll just get rid of this.’ He raised his body and pulled out the offending object.

‘Ahhh ...’ breathed Kate a few seconds later.

‘Going to stop hitting me now?’

Her eyes, which had closed, opened enough to show him a gleam of green. ‘Not a chance, pal.’

‘Wild woman, eh? I’ll have to use devious methods to pacify you, then.’

Which he did, to his and Kate’s complete satisfaction, until it was time for them to go and fetch Grace.

Chapter 25

Robert Baxter was walking with a spring in his step these days. People who knew him saw that he smiled more readily and that the look of defeat had gone from his eyes. Those who met him for the first time saw a darkly handsome young man with a charming smile and an air of quiet self-assurance. It made him very attractive - to both sexes - and it got him more work. He had lost the air of desperation which had hung around him before.

When Kate started working in Marjorie’s studio two days a week - Mondays and Wednesdays - Robbie matter-of-factly stated that he would confine his tramping around looking for homers to Tuesdays and Thursdays. On the other days he would look after Grace and do the housework and make the tea for Kate coming in. Kate had raised her eyebrows at that one, but wisely said nothing. The arrangement would give the three of them Fridays and all weekend to spend together. And if Grace’s doting grandparents or equally besotted young aunts and uncles offered to take her for a few hours at the weekend to allow Kate and Robbie some time to themselves ... well, so much the better.

What Marjorie paid Kate for the two days at the studio was a good wage, a lot more than the dole Robbie had been getting previously. If they were careful, it would allow them to live quite well. There was really no need for him to wear out shoe leather, searching for wee jobs. Except that there was every need for him to do it.

Kate said resignedly, ‘I suppose you feel you have to?’

‘Aye.’ Grinning, he had dropped a kiss on the end of her nose. He wondered how he had never noticed before that it turned up very slightly at the end. He adored it, but then he adored everything about her, from her chestnut-brown hair, dancing very satisfactorily on her shoulders, through her trim but shapely figure to her neat, size five feet, now shod in smart little brown leather shoes with no leaks. On his insistence, those had been the first big purchase from her pay.

She came home after that first week working for Marjorie and handed over her pay packet to him. That made him laugh, but there was a rueful tinge to it, and he handed the small brown envelope straight back to her.

‘No, hen, it’s your money. You earned it fair and square.’

‘It’s our money,’ Kate insisted. ‘Just like the money you earn is our money.’

Robbie smiled at her logic, but shook his head. ‘No, Kate. It’s best if you deal with money matters.’

‘But you’ll take some money out of this.’

He didn’t answer, and she saw that she was going to have a fight on her hands to get him to take any pocket money at all from her pay, but she was wise enough to bite her tongue for the moment.

‘Aye, I need to go out and look for work. To prove my manhood, like.’

‘I thought you had found other ways to do that,’ murmured his wife. Grinning, Robbie took her in his arms and kissed her. He couldn’t believe how lucky he was. Sometimes he wanted to shout it out in the street.

‘Kathleen Cameron loves me!’

He had found a poem in the course of his voracious reading by someone called Leigh Hunt which seemed to sum it up perfectly.

Jenny kissed me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get,

Sweets into your list, put that in:

Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

Say that health and wealth have missed me,

Say I’m growing old, but add,

Jenny kissed me.

He didn’t shout out his love to the heavens of course, but the knowledge gave him confidence, so that when he knocked on doors looking for any chairs that needed mending, or cupboards to be fitted out, the householder felt confident too, and he got a lot more jobs than he had previously.

One morning about four months after Kate had started working for Marjorie, he knocked on the door of an elegant modern flat in the West End of Glasgow. A woman in her thirties answered. She was very attractive, with a mass of blonde hair loosely piled on top of her head. She initially opened the door just a crack, made as though to swing it wide, then hesitated when she saw him standing there in his working clothes. However, she listened attentively while he politely asked her if she had any carpentry jobs that needed doing, her head cocked to one side, as though she was concentrating hard on what he was saying.

When she spoke, he understood why. She was foreign - French, he thought, her English heavily accented, but she nodded her head enthusiastically.

‘Yes, yes, I do have some work for you. Come in.’

She led him to a bedroom where a wardrobe was half-built into an alcove. The original builders had gone bankrupt, she told him, and she had not been able to find anyone to finish the work. Could he do it, did he think? Gesturing vaguely at the pieces of wood stacked up neatly inside the structure, she said that she thought everything necessary was there.

He checked the wood lying around, evaluated the half-finished job with a practised eye and calculated that it would take him the better part of the day to complete. He quoted her a price and she accepted without demur.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

‘Baxter. Robbie Baxter.’

Busy unpacking his tool kit, his mind already on the job, he glanced up at the woman as she stood framed in the doorway. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Robbie?’

‘Robert,’ he explained, smiling at her.

‘Ah! Now I understand. Robert.’ She said it in what he assumed must be the French way, rolling the r softly on her lips and leaving the t unpronounced.

‘Aye,’ he grinned, copying her way of saying it. ‘Robert.’

‘I am Jeanne,’ she told him. ‘I shall fetch you to lunch at one o’clock.’

He had brought his own piece and a flask of tea with him, but if she wanted to feed him as well as pay him, he supposed that was all right.

Five minutes into lunch, he had worked out exactly what sort of a house he was in. If the rather racy paintings on the red-painted walls of the dining room hadn’t given him enough of a clue, the fact that they were joined at the table by three young ladies wearing various forms of elegant sleeping attire left him in no doubt. How much sleep anyone got in this house was probably debatable, he thought, hiding a smile as he applied himself to a bowl of the most delicious soup he had ever tasted.

He raised his eyes to find Jeanne surveying him with a smile.

‘Are you shocked?’

Robbie shrugged his shoulders, filling out again now that he and Kate could afford to eat properly once more.

‘Why should I be shocked?’ The surroundings were pleasant, the girls were chatting happily to one other and to him. There didn’t seem to be any compulsion. To be sure, it wasn’t something he would have wanted for his own - or Kate’s - sisters but nobody was in a position to judge anybody else, he reckoned. We all do what we have to in this world. He said as much to Jeanne. She smiled.

‘I think you are a very nice man, Robert.’

Robbie asked what the soup was. When he learned that it was cream of mushroom he told her that he’d never tasted mushrooms before - in soup or in anything else. All four women around the table expressed surprise.

‘Give him another plate, Jeanne,’ said one of the girls, an attractive redhead. Her name was Marie-Louise, although she sounded as west of Scotland as himself. No doubt she put a French accent on for her clients. ‘He could do with some fattening up.’ She gave him a wink and cut him a second slice from the loaf which sat on a breadboard next to the white china tureen which held the soup.

Towards the end of his second helping of soup, he became aware that no one at the table was talking. Looking up, he saw that all four women were sizing him up with what looked like a professional eye. He had a horrible feeling that he knew what was coming next. He did.

Blushing a beautiful shade of dark red, he stammered an apologetic refusal of their offer to pay him for his day’s work not in money, but in kind.

‘One of my young ladies - or maybe all three?’ enquired Jeanne, looking at him over the soup tureen. As though she was offering me three for the price of one at the greengrocer’s, thought Robbie through a haze of embarrassment, shot through with an insane desire to burst out laughing.  That and the real terror that his anatomy was going to react to an all too vivid image of himself entwined on a bed with the three girls. What a story to tell Kate!

‘It is not that we are short of money, you understand. We thought perhaps you might appreciate the offer.’