A dutiful daughter, p.17
A Dutiful Daughter, page 17
‘How can I leave my mother?’
‘She’d surely not begrudge ye a wee bit of pleasure on Hogmanay,’ Ruby protested.
‘No, of course not, but it would be no pleasure for me thinking of her on her own at a time like that.’
The other two looked at each other, then Ella suggested, ‘Tell one of yer brothers that it’s his turn this year.’
‘Logan and Belle are always expected to see the New Year in with her father, and Robbie should be free to go out with his friends. One of us has to be with Mother when the bells ring.’
‘I don’t see why it always has tae be you,’ Ella grumbled.
Secretly, Mirren was quite relieved to stay at home, for she was worn out. It was the custom for every corner of a Scottish house to be scrubbed clean on Hogmanay so that it was in pristine condition for the start of the New Year. Mirren well remembered the resentment she had felt year after year because, even from the days when she was a tiny child scarcely able to toddle across the front room unaided, she was expected to help her mother with the Hogmanay cleaning while her brothers were sent outside, supposedly to get from under their mother’s feet, but in actual fact to enjoy themselves while she, as a female, was expected to work.
Now she had it all to do on her own, and as the hands of the front-room clock inched towards midnight and she went into the kitchen to fetch the tray bearing shortbread and to add three filled glasses – sherry for herself and Mrs White, who always came in to listen for the bells ringing, and tonic wine for Helen – she briefly massaged her aching back and looked longingly at the curtains hiding her bed from view.
She herself envied the English their Christmas celebrations, for Hogmanay and Ne’erday could be sad occasions, with older folk tending to look back rather than forward, thinking of happier days and of friends and family long gone. Sure enough, as they waited for the town’s church bells to ring in the welcome to 1921, both Helen and Mrs White fell silent, and there were tears in their eyes as they drank to the New Year.
Almost as soon as the bells had stopped ringing, folk would be out on the pavements to work their way round their friends’ houses bearing with them the traditional gifts of coal, whisky and black bun. There would be partying until dawn all over the town, but nobody was expected at the Jarvises door. Watching the older women, their faces closed as they grappled with their own thoughts, Mirren remembered with a pang that the last person to come laughing into the house bearing the gifts that traditionally represented wishes for health, wealth and a warm hearth in the New Year had been her brother Crawford, a scant month before he was called into the army. Agnes had been with him that night, rosy-cheeked and giggly from excitement and the pleasure of being with her man, not to mention the effects of the single unaccustomed drink she’d had. They had brought Thomas with them, well wrapped in shawls against the cold night air, bright-eyed and intrigued by the sudden and unexplained change in his usual routine.
Helen, Mirren recalled, had ranted at them for taking the child out so late at night, and Crawford had told her cheerily that since he was soon away for to be a soldier he was determined to go first-footing once, at least, with his own son. The comment had triggered another burst of anger from his mother, who had accused him of spoiling her New Year by reminding her that he was going off to fight and might never come back to her. Agnes had burst into tears, and so had Thomas. Crawford, his good mood destroyed, had turned on his heel and taken his small family home.
The bells began to ring, a great clamour of sound from every church in Paisley, and Mirren – wishing passionately that she had recalled earlier, happier Hogmanay celebrations rather than that one – kissed her mother’s cheek.
‘Happy New Year to you, Mother.’
‘No doubt it’ll be the last for me,’ Helen returned sourly, ‘and mebbe that’ll no’ be a bad thing.’
14
By the time Mrs White returned to her own flat and Mirren washed her mother and helped her into a nightgown, a few more glasses of tonic wine had mellowed Helen’s mood. And made her talkative, which meant that Mirren had to sit by the bed for a while listening to her ramble on about her time as a millworker.
‘What about your childhood?’ she asked when Helen paused to catch her breath. ‘You never talk about the games you played, and your friends, and the things you did together.’
‘We played just the same games as you did – skipping ropes and spinnin’ our peeries, and hopscotch and Bee Baw Babbity. Och, what is there tae say about being a child?’ Helen’s voice was suddenly crotchety. ‘These years are over and done with fast enough.’ And she turned the talk back to the mill and the Half-Time School.
Eventually her blue-veined eyelids, fragile as tissue paper, began to flutter and her voice to drift. When the lids finally closed and the memories had been replaced by very faint snores, Mirren sat on, listening to the voices of revellers passing by outside and watching her mother’s face, grey against the white pillow. Once, Helen had been a slender girl with long fair hair, trying valiantly to keep up with the adventurous cousin who had been her constant companion. Mirren would have given much to know more about the shy child she had seen in the old photograph, but it seemed now that she never would.
As she pulled the quilt more securely over her mother’s shoulder, Helen opened her eyes and said sleepily, ‘Ye’re a good girl, Mirren. I mebbe don’t say it as often as I should, but I notice.’
‘Yes, Mother. Have a good sleep now.’
‘I notice…’ The last word floated Helen off into sleep like a hand gently pushing a boat into a stream.
In the kitchen Mirren peeped beneath the recess bed where Catherine’s Ne’erday gifts, a large parcel from Donald and the few things that she and Robbie had bought for each other and for their mother nestled in the shadows. Together they made quite a respectable showing, and she gave a satisfied little nod before poking the fire into a comfortable glow. Then she drew the best gift of all from beneath her pillow and settled down in a chair with it. Donald’s latest letter had been clamouring to be read for the past two weeks but she had refused to allow herself to open it until after the bells, telling herself that reading it then would be like beginning the New Year with him.
It was longer than his usual letters, and more intense. Instead of writing about his daily routine and mentioning towards the end how much he looked forward to the time when they would finally be together, he had, in a most un-Scottish way, poured out his need for her over some three pages.
The day when we first started walking out together seems to me now to be so long ago that it belonged to another life, and so does the day I kissed you and held you in my arms before leaving Scotland. Another year is about to begin and I don’t want it to end with us still apart, Mirren. I am in a position at last to leave my parents’ house and find somewhere for us to live together as man and wife. I have good friends here, all looking forward to meeting my wife-to-be. All I lack is you, and I must confess that I cannot bear to wait much longer. I know that your mother is unwell, but there are others in the family who could and must care for her. You have done more than your fair share and now it is my turn… our turn. Please, if you still care for me, write and tell me that you have booked your passage to America and will soon be here by my side where you belong.
Mirren dried her wet cheeks then wept again as she reread the letter several times more. The pain in it, and her own pain, wrenched at her heart. She felt more keenly than ever before that she was being torn in two. When she had cried herself dry, she kissed each page of the letter before folding it away and tucking it beneath her pillow again. Then she washed her face and put more coal on the fire so that the place would be warm for Robbie when he got home.
She started working on some mending, then jerked awake, startled, when her brother came in, flushed and happy and slightly unsteady on his feet.
‘Still up?’ He bent to kiss her, his breath rich with alcohol fumes. ‘Happy Ne’erday, Mirren.’
‘Happy Ne’erday. D’you want some tea?’
He shook his head, then winked and dragged a small bottle from his coat pocket. ‘I saved a nightcap for myself. There’s enough tae do us both.’
‘You have it. I don’t want any.’
‘Yes ye do.’ He fetched the wine glasses she had rinsed and left on the draining board, poured a minute quantity of whisky into each, and topped it up with water. ‘Here’s tae us, you and me.’
‘I hope…’ The whisky must have been cheap, raw stuff, for even though most of the drink consisted of water, it made her cough and choke and brought tears to her eyes. ‘I hope this is the best year you’ve ever known, Robbie,’ she said when she got the use of her voice back again.
‘I doubt it, but there’s no harm in wishing.’ He was suddenly serious, staring down into his empty glass. ‘That’s all that folk like us have – the right tae wish for better things. They’ve not found a way of takin’ that from us yet.’ Then, with a sudden change of mood, he jumped to his feet and fumbled in the pocket of his coat. ‘I near forgot… I’ve somethin’ for ye.’
‘For me?’
‘Aye. This is from Joe.’
She looked in dismay at the book in her hands. ‘Martin Chuzzlewit. But when I gave the last one to you I said to tell him that I didn’t have time to read any more.’
‘He says there’s no hurry. And he wishes ye a happy Ne’erday.’ He was back in his chair and now he wriggled his backside more firmly into the seat and stretched his legs across the front of the fire to soak up extra heat, holding his glass up to the light and sighing contentedly. ‘That’s Joe for ye: generous tae a fault.’
When the three of them unwrapped their gifts in the morning, Robbie was happy with the sweater Mirren had knitted for him, and Helen delighted with her warm bedjacket. She herself, unable to go out to the shops, gave her son and daughter money from her ‘pension handbag’.
Robbie presented his mother with a small bottle of lavender water and for Mirren he had a necklace of blue beads. ‘I got them because they’re the same colour as yer eyes,’ he said bashfully when she enthused over them.
‘Robbie, they’re beautiful! But how did you…?’ She knew that he had very little spending money.
‘Ye’re not supposed tae ask where the money comes from for gifts,’ he told her firmly, adding, ‘And ye’re not the only one good at managin’ it.’
On the previous Sunday Agnes had handed Mirren a large tin of shortbread for the family and Thomas had brought a wrapped picture which, he informed his grandmother proudly, he had made all by himself. Now, unwrapping it, Helen looked perplexed.
‘What d’you think it is?’
‘A building?’ Robbie guessed through a mouthful of shortbread, although it was only mid-morning. ‘A big grey building in among some funny-looking trees. Only it doesnae have any windows in it.’
‘A jail, mebbe?’ Helen puzzled.
‘Why would the bairn draw a picture of a jail, Mother?’ Robbie asked.
‘No, it’s an elephant. See, there’s its trunk.’ Mirren pointed. ‘And these are palm trees. D’you not mind a few Sundays ago when he brought his new schoolbook and read us a story about elephants in Africa? There were pictures in the book.’
Catherine Proctor’s gifts – a hand-knitted scarf and gloves for Robbie, a lovely blouse for Mirren and a filmy scarf in pretty pastel shades for Helen – had to be passed off as extra gifts that Mirren had managed to buy.
‘I hate having to lie,’ she fretted afterwards to Robbie, who shrugged and said, ‘It’s a lot easier than tellin’ the truth at times.’
Donald’s parcel had arrived two weeks earlier and Mirren had been hard put not to open it early. Now she fetched it from below her bed and unwrapped it to reveal a colourful patchwork quilt for Helen, a handsome pair of mother-of-pearl cufflinks for Robbie and, for her, a box containing a pair of tortoiseshell combs studded with glittering stones.
‘Put them on,’ Robbie ordered as she ran her fingers over them, bedazzled by their beauty.
‘They’re too nice to wear just now. I’ll keep them for when I go to America.’
‘Away! They’re meant for wearin’ – and anyway, do Mother and me not deserve tae see them as much as Donald does?’
Mirren obediently unpinned her long fair hair from its usual bun on the back of her neck and caught it back with the jewelled combs. ‘There. What d’you think?’ she asked self-consciously.
Robbie’s eyes widened, then he joked, ‘If ye werenae engaged you’d be fighting off admirers. You should always wear yer hair like that, it makes ye look younger.’
‘But it’s not practical. Mother…?’ Mirren, admiring herself in Helen’s hand mirror, turned her head this way and that to let the light flash on the paste stones in the combs.
‘They’re very pretty,’ her mother said, then, dismissively: ‘But you’re right, they’re not practical at all.’
Mrs White, who had no family save a married daughter who lived in England and never came north or invited her mother to visit, came across the landing later for her Ne’erday dinner, bringing with her a small chicken and a home-made clootie dumpling. In the evening Logan and Belle arrived bearing their gifts – a bottle of sherry and an enormous tin of biscuits.
As usually happened on Ne’erday they were bilious from overeating and irritable after spending an entire day with Belle’s father, a sharp-tempered and difficult old man. Belle eyed the new combs enviously and remarked that it must be nice to have a young man with so much money to throw around. Logan, taking her comment as criticism, flushed and declared that, speaking for himself, he considered glittery trinkets to be ostentatious and vulgar.
‘Pay no heed tae these two,’ Robbie comforted when he went through to the kitchen to find his sister gazing anxiously into the mirror and fingering the combs. ‘And don’t you take them out… I know fine that that’s what you’re thinkin’ of doin’.’
‘They’re too bright for Paisley.’
‘The town needs a bit of brightenin’, and Belle and Logan are just jealous. You didnae tell me,’ he went on with a touch of jealousy himself, ‘that Mother had sent you out tae buy gifts for them.’
‘I never thought to mention it,’ Mirren said evasively. ‘She gave us money, and I’d as soon have that as a gift just now.’
Her brother snorted. ‘What she gave us wouldn’t have covered the bottle of whisky and the bonny brooch they got. It seems tae me that in this family it’s the ones that are close at hand and doin’ all the work that get the least appreciation.’
Fortunately the kettle came to the boil just then and there was no time for any more talk.
‘It’s funny how the New Year never feels any different from the old one,’ Ella said as the women shed their shoes and donned their calico aprons in the twisting department on the following morning.
‘Ye’d know the difference, hen, if ye’d a man like mine.’ Libby McDaid scratched her greying head and yawned widely. ‘He sees Hogmanay and Ne’erday as an excuse tae fill the house with his pals… and who’s expected tae find food for them tae mop up the drink? Then, when they finally went off down the stair, his snorin’ kept me awake for the rest of the night. I’m glad tae be back at work for a rest!’
To young Ethel’s delight another girl was starting work that morning, replacing her as the baby of the flat. As always, Mirren’s heart went out to the poor child, bewildered by the strangers surrounding her, afraid of the huge machines and of making a fool of herself, and still pale and shaken from the obligatory visit to the first-aid room to undergo a head examination. Nobody liked that ritual.
‘Checked ye for nits, then, have they?’ Libby boomed at her, and the girl’s pale face flushed crimson.
‘We’ve never had head lice in our family,’ she said in a frightened peep of a voice. ‘My mother would never have allowed it.’ Humiliated tears glistened in her eyes. ‘If she knew…’
‘Ach, it’s nothin’ personal, pet,’ Libby assured her cheerfully. ‘They do that tae all the new starts. It’s no’ for our sakes, ye understand, it’s for the machinery. The machines in here are treated like precious bairns, and the gaffers cannae afford tae let them catch nits off any of us.’
The girl’s eyes widened. ‘Can machines get lice?’
‘Of course they can, and they suffer terrible when that happens, for they havenae got fingernails like us. The poor things go daft tryin’ tae scratch themselves.’ Libby roared with laughter at her own joke and went off to her machines, while Ethel led the newcomer officiously to where a large blackboard bearing the department’s rules stood in one of the window recesses. The girl’s first task would be to study the rules until she could repeat them, without pause or error, to the mistress. After that she would be given her calico apron and one of the twiners would be appointed to train her.
‘The Hogmanay dance was grand,’ Ella murmured as she and Mirren made their way to their allotted machines. ‘Ye’d have enjoyed yerself.’
‘Did you click?’
Ella shrugged. ‘I could’ve had my pick of the lads, but you know me, I don’t believe in steady sweethearts. Mind you, there was one…’ Then she caught the mistress’s eye, and hurried to her own machines.
As soon as she opened the door and heard the strange sounds, half snoring, half grunting, from the front room, Mirren knew that something was terribly wrong.
‘Mother?’ She dropped the basket of messages she had brought with her and raced into the room to find Helen sprawled across her bed, her head resting uncomfortably on the edge of the bedside table, breathing noisily through a slack, gaping mouth. When Mirren, after a struggle, managed to hoist her mother back onto her pillow, she saw that her face was flushed darkly.
