Beneath the Abbey Wall (33 page)

“Betsy!”

“I'm sorry. I'm desperate. I'm starting to show. And you don't have as much to lose as me. Your reputation is already . . . ”

“What?”

“I'm sorry.” And she was. In spite of their rivalry, as Betsy saw it, and in spite of knowing they would never be friends, she liked Joanne. “Maybe Neil Stewart will take you to Canada with him.”

“Maybe you and Bill could go to Australia. Or New Zealand.”

“My brother is in Australia. He's doing really well. He has this building business . . . ”

They stared at each other.

“It only costs ten pounds to get to Australia,” Joanne reminded Betsy. “And they are always advertising for tradesmen. Maybe your brother would help you.”

“I could write.” Betsy was considering the idea of being away from all this—the cold, the job, the other wife, her child a bastard—all the future gossip, which she knew would shame her mother.

“If you get on well with your brother . . . ”

Betsy nodded. “I do. And so does Bill. They played football together for Thistle when they came back from the war.”

Joanne remembered that as another of Bill's fantasies—that he could have been a division one player if Joanne had not trapped him into marriage.

“Send him a telegram, tell your brother you're desperate. No, tell him it would break your mother's heart.” Joanne saw that this had hit home. “But don't tell Bill. Not yet. Get your brother to offer him a job first.”

“I'm always telling him how my brother has heaps of work and is desperate for qualified tradesmen.”

“Say it's a partnership, not a job. That sounds better.” Joanne had the good sense not to say what she was thinking,
Bill will want to be important
.

Betsy was nodding fiercely. “And I'll tell him we can build our own house. He really wants to do that.”

And knowing how good a saleswoman Betsy is, Bill hasn't a chance.
Joanne knew the telegram had to be sent immediately, before Betsy had second thoughts. “The post office is next door.” But looking at the pale determined face with the sweet baby-doll eyes, she saw there was more steel in Betsy than she had thought.
I once told Rob that Betsy reminded me of a blancmange,
she thought.
I take it all back.

They spent the next fifteen minutes composing the telegram. Joanne put a one-pound note on the table to help cover the cost of what would be a very expensive cry for help. They smiled at each other, went next door, and sent the telegram, both praying for a reply, soon.

A
unty Chiara, you're ginormous,” Jean said as Chiara opened the door.

“Jean!” Joanne scolded, but she was laughing and couldn't help agree that for a tiny person, Chiara's bump was indeed ginormous.

Chiara led them into the hub of the house—the kitchen. She was babysitting the girls, as she wasn't going to the dance.

“Dancing? In my condition?” she had squealed down the phone at Joanne. “Don't be daft!”

The Scottish Italian inflection in “Don't be daft!” was still ringing in Joanne's ears, making her feel much, much better.

Chiara had invited them all for supper, saying, “A plate of spaghetti and you can dance the night away.”

After a bowl of ice cream each, Annie and Jean scampered into the sitting room to watch television.

“Thank goodness that ‘Toddlers' Truce' is over, though the government should have called it the Parents' Nightmare.” Chiara laughed. She had never seen the point of the government regulation closing television between six and seven in the evening to safeguard family life. But, as she had no children, she couldn't express her opinion. “We'll have at least an hour of peace before they get bored.”

“Not my two,” Joanne said. “We can't afford a television, so they'll have to be dragged away from yours.”

“What time are you going?” Chiara's husband had left early
to help set up the stage. “And have a beer or two,” she had said, and he agreed.

“Peter says he's getting too old for the band,” Chiara told Joanne, “so this is his last night as a member of the Meltdown Boys.”

“I can't be a Meltdown Boy,” he had said. “I'm thirty-six. We're playing the Everly Brothers hit, and the oldest brother is twenty. No, rock 'n' roll is for youngsters.”

“So why am I going?” Joanne laughed when Chiara repeated Peter's remarks. “I'm nearly thirty-one.”

“You don't look it,” Chiara said. But she was lying.

Her dearest friend had lost that bonnie Highland bloom—a phrase Chiara had heard from a customer in the café. The weariness she saw in Joanne reminded her of the refugees she had seen in her tramp across Europe after the war. It was the look of a person who had lost and was lost.

“I like your skirt.” Chiara stood, rubbed her back. “And I envy you your waist. I can't believe I'll ever find mine again.” She had noticed Joanne was thinner—one more reason to worry about her friend.

Joanne birled around, and the circular skirt with the stiffened petticoat crackled and swooshed. The white sleeveless blouse with a turned-up collar she had finished the night before, the buttons sewn on only minutes before leaving her house.

“Not too young?”

“Never. You look smashing.”

*  *  *  

As Joanne walked towards the ballroom that spread between Church Street and the riverbank, she agonized over her skirt.
Rock 'n' roll is for young people.
So what was she, a mother of two in her thirties, doing? Why was she rushing off to a
Saturday-night dance, without a partner, to pick up a free single ticket left at the door by Rob, ten years her junior?

She would have to go to the bar by herself, order, and pay for her drink—even if it was only lemonade—all by herself. She almost turned and fled back to her bungalow.

I promised Rob, so I must go.
She was lying, and she knew it; the enchantment of Neil was drawing her to the ballroom.

She had timed her entrance for an hour after the dance had started, and she could hear the resident Harry Shaw Band blasting away with a Duke Ellington number. Although local, the band was surprisingly good, and had a big following in the town and county and neighboring counties.

She collected her ticket, left her coat and scarf in the cloakroom, and went in, keeping to the edge of the dance floor on the opposite side to the bar area, which was crowded.

She watched the safely married couples dancing like one body. She could tell the soon-to-be-married couples, holding each other in a tight clinch with a promise of more later—made permissible by the ring on the left hand. She watched women dancing with other women—their men, glasses in hand, at the bar, engaging in the immortal dance of drunks.

The young crowd congregated in clusters near the front of the stage, girls in one group, boys in the other, waiting for the real action of the evening, the Meltdown Boys. Joanne could see that a circular skirt with cute blouse and hair in a ponytail were all the rage. One stylish lass was wearing pedal pushers, a fashion Joanne had only seen on
Six-Five Special,
the new top-of-the-charts program on television. But seeing Shona, her occasional babysitter, and Fiona from the office with their girlfriends, and one of the lasses who, she was sure, was still in the Girl Guides, made her even more aware of the age difference.

I belong to the Highland Dance crowd,
Joanne thought,
and I'm dressed for rock 'n' roll.

When the band finished their last number, a slow waltz, the bandleader thanked the crowd, then announced, “For all you youngsters, the Meltdown Boys will be on in ten minutes.”

This rated a cheer from the front, and a tidy exit for the cloakroom from the back of the floor. Some of the men knew they too would have to leave with their wives, but the hard-core drinkers stayed.

I hope Bill is not there,
Joanne prayed, glancing at the bar. She was surprised to see the long lean body of McAllister, his back to her, obviously buying a drink. When he turned, she saw he was carrying two glasses and making his way towards her.

“I bought you a sherry,” he said without asking if she wanted it or not.

“Rob left me a ticket, I couldn't refuse,” she blurted out.

“Sláinte,”
he replied, holding up a double whisky.

They stood side by side. She sipped her drink, glad of it. He did the same. They were relieved when the lights dimmed and Rob appeared at the microphone. A spotlight clicked on, and the squeals from the girls at the front made her smile.

Rob, hair in a quiff in imitation of Tommy Steele, announced the first number. “‘Singing the Blues.' Tommy's British version, not Guy Mitchell's old man's version.”

Making me feel my age again,
but Joanne smiled at Rob's cheek.

McAllister couldn't stop a foot from tapping. This wasn't his music, he was a jazz man, but some of it, the blues parts, he recognized and liked. Muddy Waters, B.B. King, he and Rob had talked and laughed and exchanged records that summer, before . . . McAllister felt sick. He knew that once again he was
drinking without having had anything to eat since a sandwich in the office for lunch.

“I have to go.” He turned to Joanne. “I'll see you on Monday.” He had to leave. Immediately. He was afraid of falling, falling backwards in an effort to stop his hand from reaching out and smoothing that strand of hair that had escaped from the hairband and was falling over her left cheek where the freckles were faint and the skin much paler than her usual, out-on-her-bicycle-in-all-weathers, brown.

He didn't tell her he had to go because the fish-and-chip shop in Eastgate closed at nine, and it was now eight thirty and he was faint from hunger and whisky and longing.

He didn't tell her he had been glad to see her, to stand by her side, to remember the smell of her hair and the nearness of her skin. He didn't tell her because he, the wordsmith, could find no words.

She didn't tell him how miserable she was, how lonely, how out of place she felt. She didn't tell him, because she couldn't admit it yet, that she had made the biggest mistake of her life, even bigger than the mistake of her marriage, because this time she was all grown up, so, she would later tell herself, and him, she should have known better because she knew Neil was leaving, he had never pretended otherwise.

Neil was sitting on a high stool at the left of the stage, waiting for his songs. Rob had announced him, “All the way from America . . . ” He ignored the looks that description got from Neil, “our blues harp player, Mr. Neil Stewart . . . ”

With everyone else, she looked at Neil. The spotlight had switched back to Rob. But in that flash of spotlight, the image of Neil she had glimpsed, and would always come back to, was of a moderately tall, moderately good-looking man, wearing what he told her were blue jeans, a garment unknown in Scotland, a man grinning, holding a mouth organ in one hand, watching the band
and the spectators from the side of the stage. It was an image of a man on the edge of everywhere.

Then Rob stepped up and broke her heart.

“We'd like to play one of my favorites.” He didn't announce the title. Peter strummed in the opening on acoustic guitar. It was enough to have the girls at the front let out a little cry, except for Eilidh, who gave a small scream.

Rob took up the refrain, also on acoustic guitar and both leaning in the microphone, they sang, “Bye bye love, bye bye happiness, hello loneliness, I think I'm a-gonna cry . . . ”

On the second chorus Joanne fled. She forgot her coat, her scarf. She didn't notice the rain, that at first was a drizzle, quickly turning into hard rain. She had on ballet flats that she had dyed black. She couldn't afford new shoes. They soaked up the water like blotting paper, the dye turning her feet blotchy dark. Her new mascara made rivulets of coal down her face; hair escaped from the ponytail and stuck to her face. And she ran.

She ran and walked and ran, and when she reached her little prefab bungalow, she realized she had left the keys in her coat in the cloakroom. The spare was under one of the flowerpots by the back door. Which one she didn't know, as Annie never returned them to the right place. She knocked the pots over, spilling dirt and parsley and the remains of the summer pansies over the doorstep as she scrabbled in the dark rain, November freezing her fingers as she felt for the key.

It's always the last one,
she sobbed, in what was now a storm, the trees in the lane shaking out the last vestiges of autumn, the sky warning it would be many months before real sun returned.

She ran to the bathroom. She stripped off her sodden clothes, leaving them lying at her feet, rubbing her skin hard with a small threadbare towel as though punishing herself. And still she couldn't stop shivering.