But tea was over and could not be prolonged. There was an unhappy silence. What had happened to him? … Would he never, never come? Sick with anxiety, Elizabeth could restrain herself no longer. With a last glance, charged with open foreboding, towards the marble timepiece, she rose. ‘ You’ll excuse me, Aunt Polly. I’ll have to run down, and see what’s keeping him. I’ll not be long.’
Francis had suffered through these moments of suspense – haunted by the terror of a narrow wynd, heavy with darkness and surging faces and confusion, his father penned . . fighting … falling under the crowd … the sickening crunch of his head upon the cobblestones. Unaccountably he found himself trembling. ‘Let me go Mother,’ he said.
‘Nonsense, boy.’ She smiled palely. ‘You stay and entertain our visitors.’
Surprisingly, Aunt Polly shook her head. Hitherto she had betrayed no perception of the growing stress. Nor did she now. But with a penetrating staidness she remarked: ‘Take the boy with you, Elizabeth. Nora and I can manage fine.’
There was a pause during which Francis pleaded with his eyes.
‘All right … you can come.’
His mother wrapped him in his thick coat; then, bundling into her plaid cape, she took his hand and stepped out of the warm bright room.
It was a streaming, pitch-black night. The rain lathered the cobblestones, foamed down the gutters of the deserted streets. As they struggled up the Mercat Wynd past the distant Square and the blurred illumination of the Burgess Hall, new fear reached at Francis from the gusty blackness. He tried to combat it, setting his lips, matching his mother’s increased pace with quivering determination.
Ten minutes later they crossed the river by the Border Bridge and picked their way along the waterlogged quay to Bothy No.3. Here his mother halted, dismayed. The bothy was locked, deserted. She turned indecisively, then suddenly observed a faint beacon, vaporous in the rainy darkness, a mile up-river: Bothy No.5, where Sam Mirlees, the underwatcher, made his lodging. Though Mirlees was an aimless, tippling fellow, he could surely give them news. She started off again, firmly plodding across the sodden meadows, stumbling over unseen tussocks, fences, ditches. Francis, close at her side, could sense her apprehension, mounting with every step.
At last they reached the other bothy, a wooden shanty of tarred boards, stoutly planted on the riverbank, behind the high stone butt and a swathe of hanging nets. Francis could bear it no longer. Darting forward with throbbing breast, he threw open the door. Then, at the consummation of his daylong fear, he cried aloud in choking anguish, his pupils wide with shock. His father was there with Sam Mirlees, stretched on a bench, his face pale and bloodied, one arm bound up roughly in a sling, a great purple weal across his brow. Both men were in their jerseys and hip-boots, glasses and a mutchkin jar on the near-by table, a dirty crimsoned sponge beside the turbid water dipper, the hurricane swing lamp throwing a haggard yellow beam upon them, while beyond the indigo shadows crept, wavered in the mysterious corners and under the drumming roof.
His mother rushed forward, flung herself on her knees beside the bench. ‘Alex … Alex … are ye hurt?’
Though his eyes were muddled he smiled, or tried to, with his blenched and battered lips.
‘No worse nor some that tried to hurt me, woman.’
Tears sprang to her eyes, born of his wilfulness and her love for him, tears of rage against those who had brought him to this pass.
‘When he came in he was near done,’ Mirlees interposed with a hazy gesture. ‘But I’ve stiffened him up with a dram or two.’
She threw a blazing look at the other man: fuddled, as usual on Saturday night. She felt weak with anger that this sottish fool should have filled Alex up with drink on top of the dreadful hurt he had sustained. She saw that he had lost a great quantity of blood … she had nothing here to treat him with … she must get him away at once … at once. She murmured, tensely:
‘Could you manage home with me, Alex?’
‘I think so, woman … if we take it slow.’
She thought feverishly, battling her panic, her confusion. All her instinct was to move him to warmth, light and safety. She saw that his worst wound, a gash to the temple bone, had ceased to bleed. She swung round towards her son.
‘Run back quick, Francis. Tell Polly to get ready for us. Then fetch the doctor to the house at once.’
Francis, shivering as with ague, made a blind, convulsive gesture of understanding. With a last glance at his father he bent his head and set off frantically along the quay.
‘Try, then, Alex … let me give you a hand.’ Bitterly dismissing Mirlees’ offer of assistance which she knew to be worse than none, she helped her husband up. He swayed slowly, obediently to his feet. He was dreadfully shaky, hardly knew what he was doing. ‘I’ll away then, Sam,’ he muttered, dizzily. ‘ Good night to ye.’
She bit her lip in a torment of uncertainty, yet persisted, led him out, met by the stinging sheets of rain. As the door shut behind them and he stood, unsteady, heedless of the weather, she was daunted by the prospect of that devious return, back through the mire of the fields with a helpless man in tow. But suddenly, as she hesitated, a thought illuminated her. Why had it not occurred to her before? If she took the short cut by the Tileworks Bridge she could save a mile at least, have him home and safe in bed within half an hour. She took his arm with fresh resolution. Pressing into the downpour, supporting him, she pointed their course up-river towards the bridge.
At first he did not apparently suspect her purpose, but suddenly, as the sound of rushing water struck his ear, he halted.
‘Whatna way’s this to come, Lisbeth? We cannot cross by the Tileworks with Tweed in such a spate.’
‘Hush, Alex … don’t waste your strength by talking.’ She soothed him, helped him forward.
They came to the bridge, a narrow hanging span, fashioned of planks with a wire rope handrail, crossing the river at its narrowest, quite sound, though rarely used, since the Tileworks which it served had long ago shut down. As Elizabeth placed her foot upon the bridge, the blackness, the deafening nearness of the water, caused a vague doubt, perhaps a premonition, to cross her mind. She paused, since there was not room for them to go abreast, peering back at his subdued and sodden figure, swept by a rush of strange maternal tenderness.
‘Have ye got the handrail?’
‘Ay, I have the handrail.’
She saw plainly that the thick wire rope was in his big fist. Distracted, breathless and obsessed, she could not reason further. ‘Keep close to me, then.’ She turned and led on.
They began to cross the bridge. Halfway across his foot slid off a rainslimed board. It would have mattered little another night. Tonight it mattered more, for the Tweed, in flood, had risen to the planking of the bridge. At once the racing current filled his thighboot. He struggled against the pull, the overpowering weight. But they had beaten the strength from him at Ettal. His other leg slipped, both boots were waterlogged, loaded as with lead.
At his cry she spun round with a scream and caught at him. As the river tore the handrail from his grip her arms enfolded him; she fought closely, desperately, for a deathless instant to sustain him. Then the sound and the darkness of the waters sucked them down.
All that night Francis waited for them. But they did not come. Next morning they were found, clasped together, at low tide, in the quiet water near the sand bar.
II
One Thursday evening in September four years later, when Francis Chisholm ended his nightly tramp from Darrow Shipyard by veering wearily towards the blistered double headboard of Glennie’s Bakery, he had reached a great decision. As he trudged down the floury passage dividing the bakehouse from the shop – his smallish figure oddly suppressed by an outsize suit of dungarees, his face grimy, beneath a man’s cloth cap worn back to front – and went through the back door, placing his empty lunch pail on the scullery sink, his dark young eyes were smouldering with this purpose.
In the kitchen M
alcom Glennie occupied the table – its soiled cover now, as always, littered with crockery – lolling on his elbow over Locke’s Conveyancing, a lumpish pallid youth of seventeen, one hand massaging his oily black hair, sending showers of dandruff to his collar, the other attacking the sweetbread cooked for him by his mother on his return from the Armstrong College. As Francis took his supper from the oven – a twopenny pie and potatoes cremated there since noon – and cleared a place for himself, aware, through the torn opaque paper on the half glazed partition door, of Mrs Glennie serving a customer in the front shop, the son of the house threw him a glance of peevish disapproval. ‘Can’t you make less noise when I’m studying? And God! What hands! Don’t you ever wash before you eat?’
In stolid silence – his best defence – Francis picked up a knife and fork in his calloused, rivet-burned fingers.
The partition door clicked open and Mrs Glennie solicitously scuffled in. ‘Are you done yet, Malcom dear? I have the nicest baked custard – just fresh eggs and milk – it won’t do your indigestion a mite of harm.’
He grumbled: ‘I’ve been gastric all day.’ Swallowing a deep bellyful of wind, he brought it back with an air of virtuous injury. ‘Listen to that!’
‘It’s the study, son, that does it.’ She hurried to the range. ‘But this’ll keep your strength up … just try it … to please me.’
He suffered her to remove his empty plate and to place a large dish of custard before him. As he slobbered it down she watched him tenderly, enjoying every mouthful he took, her raddled figure, in broken corsets and dowdy, gaping skirt, inclined towards him, her shrewish face with its long thin nose and pinched-in lips doting with maternal fondness.
She murmured, presently: ‘I’m glad you’re back early tonight, son. Your father has a meeting.’
‘Oh, no!’ Malcom reared himself in startled annoyance. ‘At the Mission Hall?’
She shook her narrow head. ‘Open air. On the Green.’
‘We’re not going?’
She answered with a strange, embittered vanity: ‘It’s the only position your father ever gave us, Malcom. Until he fails at the preaching too, we’d better take it.’
He protested heatedly. ‘ You may like it, Mother. But it’s damned awful for me, standing there, with Father Bible-banging, and the kids yelling “ Holy Dan”. It wasn’t so bad when I was young, but now when I’m coming out for a solicitor!’ He stopped short, sulkily, as the outer door opened and his father, Daniel Glennie, came gently into the room.
Holy Dan advanced to the table, absently cut himself a slice of cheese, poured a glass of milk and, still standing, began his simple meal. Changed from his working singlet, slacks and burst carpet slippers, he was still an insignificant and drooping figure in shiny black trousers, an old cutaway coat too tight and short for him, a celluloid dickey and a stringy black tie. His cuffs were of celluloid too, to save the washing; they were cracked; and his boots might have done with mending. He stooped slightly. His gaze, usually harassed, often ecstatically remote, was now thoughtful, kind, behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. As he chewed, he let it dwell in quiet consideration on Francis.
‘You look tired, grandson. Have you had your dinner?’
Francis nodded. The room was brighter since the baker’s entry. The eyes upon him now were like his mother’s.
‘There’s a batch of cherry cakes I’ve just drawn. You can have one, if you’ve a mind to – on the oven rack.’
At the senseless prodigality Mrs Glennie sniffed: casting his goods about like this had made him twice a bankrupt, a failure. Her head inclined in greater resignation.
‘When do you want to start? If we’re going now I’ll shut the shop.’
He consulted his big silver watch with the yellow bone guard. ‘Ay, close up now, Mother, the Lord’s work comes first. And besides’ – sadly – ‘we’ll have no more customers tonight.’
While she pulled down the blinds on the fly-blown pastries he stood, detached, considering his address for tonight. Then he stirred. ‘Come, Malcom!’ And to Francis: ‘Take care of yourself, grandson. Don’t be late out your bed!’
Malcom, muttering beneath his breath, shut his book and picked up his hat. He sulkily followed his father out. Mrs Glennie, pulling on tight black kid gloves, assumed her martyred ‘meeting’ face. ‘Don’t forget the dishes, now.’ She threw a mean, sickly smile at Francis. ‘It’s a pity you’re not coming with us!’
When they had gone he fought the inclination to lay his head upon the table. His new heroic resolution inflamed him, the thought of Willie Tulloch galvanised his tired limbs. Piling the greasy dishes into the scullery he began to wash them, rapidly probing his position, his brows tense, resentful.
The blight of enforced benefactions had lain upon him since that moment, before the funeral, when Daniel had raptly told Polly Bannon: ‘I’ll take Elizabeth’s boy. We are his only blood relations. He must come to us!’
Such rash benevolence alone would not have uprooted him. It took that later hateful scene when Mrs Glennie, grasping at the small estate, money from his father’s insurance and the sale of the furniture, had beaten down Polly’s offer of guardianship, with intimidating invocations of the law.
This final acrimony had servered all contact with the Bannons – abruptly, painfully, as though he, indirectly, had been to blame: Polly, hurt and offended, yet with the air of having done her best, had undoubtedly erased him from her memory.
On his arrival at the baker’s household, with all the attraction of a novelty, he was sent, a new satchel on his back, to the Darrow Academy: escorted by Malcom; straightened and brushed by Mrs Glennie, who watched the departing scholars from the shop door with a vague proprietary air.
Alas! The philanthropic flush soon faded. Daniel Glennie was a saint, a gentle noble derided soul who passed out tracts of his own composition with his pies and every Saturday night paraded his van horse through the town with a big printed text on the beast’s rump: ‘ Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ But he lived in a heavenly dream, from which he periodically emerged, careworn, damp with sweat, to meet his creditors. Working unsparingly, with his head on Abraham’s bosom and his feet in a tub of dough, he could not but forget his grandson’s presence. When he remembered he would take the small boy by the hand to the back yard, with a bag of crumbs, to feed the sparrows.
Mean, shiftless yet avaricious, viewing with a self-commiserating eye her husband’s progressive failure – the sacking of the van man, of the shopgirl, the closing of one oven after another, the gradual decline to a meagre output of twopenny pies and farthing pastries – Mrs Glennie soon discovered in Francis an insufferable incubus. The attraction of the sum of seventy pounds she had acquired with him quickly faded, seemed dearly bought. Already wrung by a desperate economy, to her the cost of his clothing, his food, his schooling became a perpetual Calvary. She counted his mouthfuls resignedly. When his trousers wore out she ‘made down’ an old green suit of Daniel’s, a relic of her husband’s youth, of such outlandish pattern and colour it provided derisive outcry in the streets, shrouded the boy’s life in misery. Though Malcom’s fees at the Academy were paid upon the nail she usually succeeded in forgetting Francis’ until, trembling, pale with humiliation, having publicly been called as a defaulter before the class, he was forced to approach her. Then she would gasp, feign a heart attack by fumbling at her withered bosom, count out the shillings as though he drew away her very blood.
Though he bore it with stoic endurance the sense of being alone … alone … was terrible for the little boy. Demented with sorrow, he took long solitary walks, combing the sick country vainly for a stream in which to guddle trout. He would scan the outgoing ships, consumed with longing, stuffing his cap between his teeth to stifle his despair. Caught between conflicting creeds, he knew not where he stood; his bright and eager mind was dulled, his face turned sullen. His only happiness came on the nights that Malcom and Mrs Glennie were from home, when he sat opposite Daniel by the kitche
n fire watching the little baker turning the pages of his Bible, in perfect silence, with a look of ineffable joy.
Daniel’s quiet but inflexible resolve not to interfere with the boy’s religion – how could he, when he preached universal tolerance! – was an added, ever-present goad to Mrs Glennie. To a ‘Christian’ like herself, who was saved, this reminder of her daughter’s folly was anathema. It made the neighbours talk.
The climax came at the end of eighteen months when Francis, with ungrateful cleverness, had the bad taste to beat Malcom in an essay competition open to the school. It was not to be endured. Weeks of nagging wore the baker down. He was on the verge of another failure. It was agreed that Francis’ education was complete. Smiling archly for the first time in months, Mrs Glennie assured him that now he was a little man, fit to contribute to the household, to take his coat off and prove the nobility of toil. He went to work in Darrow Shipyard as a rivet-boy, twelve years old, at three and six a week.
By quarter-past seven he had finished the dishes. With greater alacrity, he spruced himself before the inch of mirror and went out. It was still light, but the night air made him cough and turn up his jacket as he hurried into High Street, past the livery stable and the Darrow Spirit Vaults, reaching at length the doctor’s shop on the corner, with its two bulbous red and green vials and its square brass plate: DR SUTHERLAND TULLOCH: PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON. Francis’ lips were parted, faintly, as he entered.
The shop was dim and aromatic with the smell of aloes, assafútida and liquorice root. Shelves of dark green bottles filled one side and at the end three wooden steps gave access to the small back surgery where Dr Tulloch held his consultations. Behind the long counter, wrapping physic on a marble slab spattered with red sealing wax, stood the doctor’s eldest son, a sturdy freckled boy of sixteen with big hands, sandy colouring and a slow taciturn smile.