A dutiful daughter, p.13
A Dutiful Daughter, page 13
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘But your dinner’s nearly—’
‘I’m not hungry,’ he snapped, and stormed from the flat.
Mirren, in a quandary, had to ask Mrs White, who occupied the flat across the landing, to sit with her mother so that she could go to work at the fried-fish shop.
She served, salted, wrapped fish and chips, took the money and counted out the change in a dream, moving automatically and scarcely speaking to anyone. It was one of Ella’s nights off and the other assistant could scarcely bring herself to speak to the customers, let alone her fellow workers. This suited Mirren, for all she could think of was Robbie and how they would manage if he had trouble finding another job. He had brought in a very small wage as an apprentice and for years Mirren had been living for the day when he would be able to contribute more to the running of the house. Now the time had come – and had been taken from them even before his first decent pay packet had been brought into the house.
Like the children of all working-class people, she had been taught at an early age to fear unemployment. Without wages, people could lose their homes and perhaps starve to death. No work, no pay. The Jarvis family had always managed to support themselves, but now the spectre of poverty was hovering over her head and she didn’t know what to do about it or where to turn. She felt helpless and frightened.
When she went to the counter by the vats to get some more fish, Vanni put a hand on her arm. ‘Is anything wrong?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘You look ill tonight. Tell me,’ he insisted when she shook her head.
‘It’s just… my brother was turned off today.’
‘That’s bad.’ His brown eyes were filled with sympathy. ‘But he’ll get other work, eh?’
‘I’m sure he will.’ Mirren summoned up a smile, then as Maria called her name she hurriedly scooped up the fish and turned back to the counter.
As she was leaving that night, Vanni pushed a larger parcel than usual into her hands. ‘For you and your brother.’
‘Vanni…’
‘Sshhh. Fish is good for the brain. This’ll help him tae think about where tae find more work. And if I hear of anything, I’ll be sure tae tell you,’ he said, then shooed her outside and closed the door behind her as Maria, who had been in the back shop, suddenly appeared at the other side of the counter.
When she arrived home, wearied to the bone as always, she had to struggle up the stairs on her own, for there was no Robbie to help her. Mrs White smilingly assured her that Helen had settled down early and had slept all evening.
‘Any time ye need me, hen, just chap my door. Yer mammy’s never any bother at all and Scrap doesnae mind me leavin’ him as long as I pop across the landin’ tae speak tae him now and again.’ Mrs White’s dearly loved little terrier dog meant more to her than anyone in the world.
‘Thank you. Here.’ Mirren handed over one of the fish suppers Vanni had given her. ‘There was quite a lot left over at the fried-fish shop tonight. Mebbe Scrap could manage some of this.’
‘Are ye sure?’ Mrs White’s eyes lit up at the sight of the food. ‘Oh, that’s kind of ye, pet. I’ll be sure tae tell him it came from you.’ Pride would not allow her to accept the food for herself, but Mirren knew, as she watched her neighbour scud across the small landing clutching the parcel, that both Mrs White and her dog would go to bed that night with full stomachs.
As soon as she opened the front room door Helen said, ‘I thought ye’d never come home! I need tae use the commode and the sheets are all wrinkled. I cannae get comfortable at all.’
‘You should have asked Mrs White. She doesn’t mind helping you.’
‘I don’t like tae be beholden to folk,’ snapped her mother, who had never considered Mirren to be ‘folk’. ‘And her bletherin’ bothers me.’
‘I thought you’d enjoy listening to her news.’ Mirren, her bones screaming for rest, took Helen’s full weight as the older woman shuffled from the bed to the commode.
‘Mebbe, at times, but not tonight. She was boastin’ about that grandchild of hers who lives in England, with no thought for me who’s just lost mine.’
‘You’ve not lost Thomas at all, Mother. He still comes to visit you every other Sunday.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘I’m sure Mrs White would be more tactful if she knew about Agnes marrying again.’ Helen had forbidden the family to mention her errant daughter-in-law’s remarriage.
‘I could do with another pillow, too,’ she said from the commode, watching her daughter remake the bed. ‘My back’s been awful sore all evening. I couldn’t sleep for it.’
‘Would you like a nice bit of fish?’
Helen shook her head fretfully. ‘My stomach wouldnae take it. Mebbe a mouthful of soup, if you have any.’
‘I’ll heat it up after I’ve got you back in your bed.’
By the time Robbie came in, smelling of drink and looking shamefaced, their mother was asleep and Mirren sat by the kitchen fire with a pile of darning in her lap.
‘Vanni sent a fish supper for you.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You need to eat something. Please, Robbie.’
He pulled the plate from the oven and studied its contents. ‘You’ll need tae have some of it too, then.’
She wasn’t a bit hungry but she forced some food down in order to encourage him. At first he picked at his meal, then his normally good appetite took over and he emptied his plate, then hers. She was pleased to see him eating, knowing that it would help to dilute the drink he had taken. When he had finished he washed the dishes.
‘How did ye manage with Ma tonight?’ he asked from the sink.
‘Mrs White sat with her.’
‘I just needed tae get out for a while.’
‘I know. It was all right. Mrs White didn’t mind.’
Robbie dried his hands and sat down opposite her, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor between his feet. ‘I suppose bein’ out of work means that I’ll be able tae look after her more,’ he said bleakly.
‘You’ll get another job in no time at all.’
‘Ye think so?’
‘Of course. You’re a good engineer.’
‘With very little experience.’
‘And you’ll find something soon. I’ll ask around the women at the mill. Mebbe someone’s husband or son or father knows of a position you could apply for. You’ll find something soon,’ she repeated firmly, clinging to an old childish belief that if something was said often and strongly enough, it would come to pass.
‘Aye,’ he said without much conviction, and went to his bed.
11
Grace took one look at the tender rocking gently at the bottom of the steps, then looked further out on the river at the even more frightening sight of the huge TSS Carpathia moored in deep water at the Tail of the Bank, off Greenock, and said flatly, ‘I’m not going. I can’t go!’
‘Of course you’re going… you promised the government folk.’ Anne was as white and tremulous as her younger sister, but her mind was made up. ‘You’ll get into terrible trouble with them if you turn back now.’
‘Mammy… Daddy…?’ It had been years since Grace had called her parents by these baby names.
‘Ye’ll be fine, my darlin’,’ her father assured her. ‘Anne’ll be with ye.’
‘What if I don’t like it?’
‘Then we’ll find a way tae fetch ye back home, no matter what their government has to say about it.’
Maggie had been unable to get off work and Kate was busy with her small baby, but Catherine and James were there, together with Bill, John, May and Mirren. Stepping aside slightly to let the Proctors say their final farewells as a family, she found herself confronted wherever she turned by identical tearful groups of people all over Greenock’s Princes Pier. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters and sweethearts clung to each other while officials with lists to check and men transporting luggage to a second tender worked around and among them, indifferent to the personal grief they saw day in and day out.
It had been like that for centuries, Mirren knew, for the Scots had a history of emigration and resettlement in far lands, often with little choice in the matter. She had never forgotten a picture in one of her schoolbooks called The Emigrants, and today she was keenly reminded of it, although the women in the picture had been dressed in shawls and bonnets. But the grief was just the same. She had first experienced it for herself on this very pier when, shortly after welcoming Donald back from the fighting, she’d had to bid him goodbye again when he set sail with his parents for America.
One day she herself would be here to board a tender on the first lap of her journey to America and her married life. She wondered how she would feel when the time came, but it was difficult to forecast. She knew only that if she had the chance on that lovely September day she would have taken Grace and Anne’s places without a backward glance.
There was a sudden flurry on the pier as a man with a handful of papers took his place at the top of the steps, ready to mark people off as they boarded the tender. As Mirren hurried back to rejoin the Proctors, Grace threw her arms about her.
‘You’ll not forget to write to me?’
‘Every week. And you mind and write back.’
‘I will. Oh, Mirren, I wish I’d never said I’d go!’
‘You’ll be happy there once you settle down. And we’ll see each other when I go to America.’
‘Let it be soon!’ Grace prayed, completely forgetting that only Helen Jarvis’s death could unlock the door to her friend’s future.
‘Mirren.’ Anne’s hug was brief, her face composed. She stepped back, picked up her bag, smiled at her family, then said, ‘Come along, Grace,’ for all the world as though they were only taking the train to Glasgow for the evening. Mutely Grace followed her to the edge of the pier, where they joined the queue of people waiting to go down to the tender. They had almost reached the steps when May darted towards them.
‘May! Mercy me, she’s not going to try to go as well, is she?’ Catherine asked in a panic. She would have run after her daughter if her husband hadn’t caught hold of her arm.
‘She can’t go, Mother,’ John said reasonably. ‘Her name’s not on the list.’
Grace stepped out of the line to meet her young sister, who rummaged in the large bag she carried and pulled out a shawl-wrapped cocoon with a splash of yellow wool surging from one end. Grace tried to argue but May pushed the bundle into her sister’s arms, then gave her a fierce hug before running back to her parents.
‘Dolores?’ Bill asked in amazement as she rejoined them. ‘You gave Dolores away?’
‘They need to have a bit of home with them. Anyway, she’s just loaned and that means they’ll have to bring her back to Paisley sometime,’ May said stoutly, then burst into tears as first Anne, then Grace, hugging the rag doll’s smiling face to hers, descended the steps and disappeared from sight.
They waited until the tender had gone out to the Carpathia before making their way back to the station to catch the next train back to Paisley. On the outward journey they had chattered like budgerigars, partly because nobody wanted a silence to fall and partly because there was so little time left to say all the things they wanted to say before Grace and Anne left Scotland. On the return journey, however, they were all busy with their own thoughts. Bill and John stared straight ahead and Catherine only lifted her eyes occasionally from contemplation of the floor to look down at May, huddled against her shoulder, her face blotchy with tears.
James too kept his eyes on the floor, apart from occasional worried glances across the carriage at his wife and youngest daughter. Mirren, keenly aware of the relentless approach of Ne’erday – New Year’s Day – had brought her knitting with her; now she took Robbie’s jersey from its bag, the clack of her needles echoed by the rattle of the train over the points. As fields and trees, roads and houses whipped by, she kept wondering what Grace and Anne were doing at that moment.
Grace had begun to have her doubts as soon as they had their tickets in their hands and a firm date for the sailing, and on several occasions she would have pulled back from the whole notion of emigrating if Anne had allowed it. Only Mirren knew how close Anne herself had come to changing her mind.
‘I can scarce sleep at nights for thinking of it,’ she had suddenly confessed one evening when the shop was quiet. ‘And I’m so frightened!’
It was one of Mirren’s few nights off from working in the fried-fish shop and she had a lot to do at home, but clearly Anne had needed to talk to someone. She’d rested her basket of groceries on the counter, folding her arms across the handle. ‘If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.’
‘I do. I must. You saw the state our Grace got herself into over George, and that’d all just start up again if we stayed. She needs to get away and to tell the truth, so do I. My life’s not going anywhere. There’s our Kate happy with her bairn and Maggie’ll not be long in marrying, for she’s the beauty of the family and she’s never lost for admirers. The same goes for May, too… and Grace herself, come to that.’
‘You’re not exactly ugly yourself, Anne!’
‘Mebbe not, but I’m the practical one. I’ve got my mother’s capable nature and they’re all beginning to rely on me, Mirren. In the mornings I stay behind when the others leave so that I can help Mother by cleaning out the fireplace and taking the ashes down to the backyard midden. Then I polish up the fender and the fire irons before I come to the shop. And at midday I always go home to have something with Mother, because I know fine and well that if I didn’t she might not bother eating at all and that’s not good for her.’ She looked down at the counter, tracing a scar on the wood with the tip of a finger, then said in a rush, ‘It’s a terrible thing to say, but I can see myself turning into the one who stays at home and nurses her old parents, and becomes good old Auntie Anne with no real life of her own.’
‘That’s nonsense! There’s nothing to stop you getting married and having a husband and a home and bairns.’
‘There’s one person can stop me, and that’s myself. My trouble,’ Anne confessed, ‘is that I’m too pernickety. I’ve never met a man yet that didnae end up irritating me in some way or another. And I couldnae stand to spend the rest of my life with someone who irritated me, Mirren.’
‘You think the Canadian men are going to be better than what we’ve got here in Paisley?’
Anne laughed. ‘I’m not that daft. I know full well that folk are folk no matter where they live or how they speak. I just know that I need to make a change in my life. And I have to be strong for Grace. If she gets half a chance she’ll change her mind, and it seems to me that as long as she lives in the same town as George Armitage she’ll pine for him, though I can’t see why myself. So—’ she straightened and became her everyday practical self ‘—we’re going… even if the fear of it does keep me from sleeping at nights.’
By the time the train drew into Gilmour Street station one sleeve of Robbie’s jersey had almost been completed. There was still a jersey to be knitted for wee Thomas and a waistcoat for Logan and a cardigan for Belle. And, Mirren had hoped, a warm jersey for Donald, who had written that the winters could be fierce. But it was now the middle of September and she was beginning to run out of time.
The small group walked silently from the station along Paisley High Street, past the central library and the museum and the magnificent Baptist church, all built by members of the Coats family. High Street gave way to Wellmeadow then to Broomlands, and not a word was said. Even talkative May was silent. As they turned down Maxwellton Street and reached Mirren’s closemouth, Catherine – who had been leaning heavily on her husband’s arm – hugged and kissed her.
‘Don’t be a stranger, pet, just because our Grace is gone,’ she said, the tears welling in her striking dark eyes. ‘We’ll need you more than ever now.’
Day after day Robbie trudged round the engineering firms in Paisley and the neighbouring engineering town of Johnstone, but without finding work. His apprentice’s wage, small though it had been, was sorely missed and Mirren found it harder with each week that passed to make ends meet. Although the weather was mild, Helen tended to feel the cold and Mirren had to keep a fire going, usually day and night, in the front room.
Her mother had some money, she knew, but Mirren couldn’t bring herself to ask for any of it. Once a month one of the clerks from the mills called to deliver the small pension due to the widow of a former employee. His visit was always turned into a special occasion, with Helen insisting on looking her best, which meant that her hair had to be done and she required a clean nightgown and bedjacket. The bed had to be changed and every speck of dust removed from the room as though, Robbie used to say, she expected the clerk to carry out a minute inspection instead of just handing over a small envelope. The man was always invited to take a cup of tea and a biscuit with Helen and, while Mirren was permitted to serve the refreshments on a tray, with the best traycloth the house possessed, she was always banished before the transaction itself took place.
The money was carefully stored in a handbag kept by the side of the bed and every week Helen doled out a small set amount to cover the housekeeping costs. The trouble was that she was quite oblivious to the way prices had risen since she herself had run the house, but she guarded so jealously her small income and the power it brought her, and made such a ceremony of counting out and handing over the weekly allowance, that when the money ran out, as it almost always did before the week’s end, Mirren found it easier to make up the difference from her own wages rather than ask her mother for more and have to undergo a lecture on thrift and common sense.
As the weeks dragged by she took to going to the shops just before they closed because in those final minutes the merchants – anxious to get meat, vegetables and bakery produce off their hands while they were still fresh enough to sell – cut their prices. She bought stale bread and toasted it at the fire, or crumbled it and added it to stews and mince to make them go further, or soaked it in a mixture of milk and water, sprinkled a little sugar over it, and served it up as bread pudding. She bought bones for soup, scraping what meat she could from them and serving it with potatoes as a main dish, and she stayed up late making pancakes and scones because it was cheaper than buying them.
