The New Breadmakers (21 page)

‘See how you feel after taking the medicine,’ Catriona said. But she made an appointment and Mrs McAllister went away hopefully clutching her package of powder and tablets.

Mrs McAllister had just gone when, to Catriona’s surprise and consternation, Melvin appeared in the doorway.

‘Hello, dear,’ she greeted him, hastily getting up from her desk and hurrying over to deflect him from entering the room. She knew he would hate to see her sitting at her desk, a calm, confident figure of authority.

‘You’re home early. Is there anything wrong?’ She steered him into the passageway and shut the consulting-room door behind her.

‘Damn weddings!’ he complained. ‘They must be getting infectious. Now Baldy announces he’s getting hitched and wants two weeks off. Two weeks! He wants to go to some fancy place abroad. Can you beat it? Dunoon or Rothesay’s not good enough for him any more. It must be that woman he’s got mixed up with. It’s her that’s behind this.’

They were safely out in the hall now. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea,’ Catriona soothed.

In the kitchen, he was still raging. ‘I told him. You’ll be the ruination of me, I said. You’ll be the ruination of this business, I said, and then where will you all be?’

‘Sh, sh, drink your tea. It’ll be all right.’

‘What do you know? The man’s gone off his head. Flying. Flying to some foreign country for two weeks.’

‘That’s what people are doing nowadays, Melvin. Holidays abroad are all the fashion now.’

She could see his problem. Baldy practically ran the whole place now. Melvin was afraid to be without his right-hand man.

‘The place won’t fall to bits in two weeks.’ She had meant it to be reassuring but immediately the words were out of her mouth, she knew she’d said the wrong thing.

‘My business won’t “fall to bits”, as you put it,’ he sneered, ‘even if Baldy never came back. My business depends on me. Not him, or anybody else. He couldn’t run or manage it any more than you could. I run that business and always have done. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes, Melvin.’

She stared at his hollow-cheeked, sallow face. Even his untidy straggle of a moustache was quivering with indignation. He was pathetic. She could read him like the proverbial book now. Yet, despite everything that had passed between them, she genuinely wished she could help him. She knew different homeopathic remedies that she was sure would work. But no way could he be persuaded to take any of her ‘stupid rubbish’ or listen to her ‘mumbo jumbo’.

She had been forced to resign herself to the worst – both in the deterioration of his health and of his business. She had lost count of the times she had tried to persuade him to stop smoking, for instance, without the slightest success. No matter what she said or what warnings she gave him, he continued to smoke and suffer paroxysms of coughing. He preferred to buy cough medicine from the chemist’s, ignoring or denying the fact that the medicine upset his stomach.

She had tried, as tactfully as she could, to suggest changes and warn him of the dangers of supermarkets to his business. All to no avail. He hated her ‘acting the clever dick’. ‘What do you know?’ was his usual response.

Oh, how she would have loved to have said to him, ‘Obviously a lot more than you.’ But she hadn’t the heart. Nor did she want to endanger her business by proving her point to him.

Sometimes she could hardly believe herself how successful she had been and was continuing to be. In commercial terms, she had found a niche in the market. People were becoming disenchanted with conventional medicine and were turning more and more to alternative or complementary therapies. Her dream was still to have different therapists under the same roof. She believed, for instance, that massage and osteopathy could work wonders. Even hypnotherapy could have its uses. The Alexander technique was marvellous and there were other treatments she had been reading about that intrigued her.

She was so glad that she had found her place in life. One grateful patient had remarked to her, ‘It must be wonderful being a healer.’

A healer? She supposed she could be called that now. She had helped a great many people. The thought made her feel truly happy. Lucky too.

Then suddenly her happiness was shattered by grief. Word came that her father had collapsed and died of a brain haemorrhage. She immediately cancelled all her appointments for a week and took a taxi to the street in Partick where her mother and father had rented a house. She found Hannah distracted and in a state of collapse.

‘Oh, the pity of it, Catriona,’ she kept saying. ‘Oh, the pity of it.’

Catriona assumed she meant their whole life together, which had been little more than a battleground, as far as she could see. Then her mother gazed up at her with tragic eyes and said, ‘Was I not nice to him, Catriona?’

‘Of course you were nice to him, Mummy,’ Catriona lied in an effort to reassure her. ‘He thought the world of you.’ Which indeed he had. Her father had loved her mother despite all their differences and disagreements. Of that at least she was sure. And maybe her mother, in her own way, had loved him too.

She gave her some homeopathic ignatia for grief and took some herself. It helped calm and comfort them both.

But her mother said, ‘This is an unlucky house. I’m not going to live here any more.’

‘You don’t need to make any decisions about anything just now, Mummy. It’s too soon. Just come home with me for a few days, or a few weeks if you like, until you feel a bit better.’

‘It’s an unlucky house,’ Hannah repeated.

‘Daddy’s death had nothing to do with this house.’

‘We should never have left Farmbank. Neither of us could settle in Partick and your daddy never liked that Byres Road shop. It wasn’t the same as the old one he was used to in Govan. He had worked in that bakehouse in Dessie Street all his life. He couldn’t settle in that Byres Road shop. It’s an unlucky shop and this is an unlucky house.’

Catriona didn’t know what to say. She’d never heard her mother talk in these terms before and, as far as Catriona knew, she had never believed in anything like that. Gambling of any sort had always been regarded as a sin by her mother.

‘Do you want to come home with me just now, Mummy? I think you should. I’ll pack a case for you. All right?’

Her mother nodded, making tears hasten down her cheeks. Catriona worried about what Melvin would say and how he would react to her mother coming to stay – even just for a short period. She would never hear the end of it. He would be so furious. He had always hated her mother.

To her astonishment, when she did return supporting her weeping and trembling mother, who seemed to have shrunk in height in the few hours since the tragedy, Melvin was kind and sympathetic.

‘Oh, that’s terrible! What a terrible shock!’ he said, on being told the news. ‘Rab was one of the best. But don’t you worry. You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like.’

Catriona could hardly believe her ears. Although of course she felt relieved and grateful. It would have been really terrible if Melvin had been nasty to her mother as he’d so often been in the past. Not even the knowledge that he was now short of one of his oldest and best bakers was making him show any anger – at least not to her mother. Or any other emotion except sympathy. He even went away to put the kettle on and make a cup of tea.

An explanation for his unexpected behaviour came to Catriona eventually. She felt guilty at the thought. After all, she could be misjudging Melvin. But she couldn’t help thinking that Melvin only felt happy and came into his own with people he believed to be weaker than himself. Previously her mother had appeared a strong character and a threat to him. Not any more. Her mother was now pathetically grateful for any act of kindness and support anybody gave her.

As days and then weeks passed after the funeral, Catriona was plunged back into the desperate, despairing days when she had nursed her father-in-law. She didn’t need to actually nurse her mother, who wasn’t physically ill. But her mother had developed a neurosis. She could not bear to be alone. Not even for a few minutes. She even followed Catriona to the toilet. If Catriona went out, her mother had to come too, rather than be left alone in the house.

During the day, she sometimes went down to sit about in the bakehouse or stop to pass the time of day with the bakers, the shop assistants or the customers. If she stayed in the house, she followed Catriona around, stuck to her so close that if Catriona stopped suddenly, they collided.

Catriona struggled to keep seeing her patients but it was very distracting to her, and to waiting patients, to have her mother chatting ceaselessly to them.

After two months, Catriona was getting really desperate and tight-lipped. Eventually, she could hardly utter a word to her mother, as she struggled to control her feelings of frustration and anger. It was an added stress that Melvin continued to be extremely nice to the old woman because it added guilt to all her other emotions.

Then she discovered that her mother had given up her flat in Partick because, ‘Melvin agreed with me that it was an unlucky house and he said I was welcome to stay here for the rest of my days. He’s such a good man, Catriona. I hope you realise how lucky you are!’

She had exploded then and before she could catch her tongue or her emotions, she cried out, ‘No, I’m not bloody lucky. It was the unluckiest day of my life when I set eyes on that pathetic excuse for a man.’

It was just her luck that Melvin had come back from work earlier than usual and had heard her. Her mother burst into tears and Melvin assisted her away to the kitchen to administer tea and sympathy.

‘Don’t worry about me, Mother.’ Mother, he called her! Catriona could hardly credit it. ‘I’ll be all right. I can cope. I’m used to her.’

Everything was all right after Sean caught Chrissie and Ailish together. At least for a time. After their first moment of horror, Sean’s burst of laughter at their shocked faces made them relax into laughter as well.

‘You’re not angry at us being pals, then?’ Ailish asked.

‘Ailish,’ Sean said, shaking his head, ‘I thought you knew me better than that. This is Sean not Dermot.’

For the first time, Chrissie was able to chat easily to him. The three of them strolled along laughing and chatting. Ailish said, ‘Chrissie, tell Sean that story about Mr Farquhar.’

So Chrissie, in between her own giggles and those of Ailish, related the story of the false teeth. They were all enjoying themselves so much that they were on Broomknowes Road before they knew it.

‘I’d better run,’ Chrissie said, suddenly agitated. ‘In case my mother’s at the window.’

Sean put a detaining hand on her arm. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s time we put a stop to all this nonsense.’

‘I know you mean well, Sean,’ Chrissie said. ‘But you don’t understand.’

‘What are you talking about, Chrissie? My parents, not to mention my brother, are every bit as bigoted as yours, if not worse.’

‘I know, but I’ve had a right battering from my mother before over this sort of thing and I don’t want a repeat performance.’

‘Not since you’ve been a grown woman, surely?’

‘Well, no. But that’s because over the years I’ve learned to be more careful. Not to let her know about Ailish and me, for instance.’

‘You don’t want to go through your whole life like this, do you?’

‘No, but …’

‘She’s dying to go out with you for a start,’ Ailish interrupted, much to Chrissie’s horror. When she saw Sean’s face light up with boyish delight and joy, her feelings for him immediately changed to love. Not the dreamy crush spiced with sexual fantasies she’d had for him before. This was serious, heart-melting love.

‘Oh Chrissie,’ Sean said. ‘I’ve wanted to ask you out but I was too embarrassed after making such a fool of myself the last time.’

‘I was just a wee schoolgirl then. And you were just a wee boy. We’ve both grown up and it’s different now.’

‘I’ve always felt the same about you.’

‘And I’ve always felt the same about you.’

Ailish gave an impatient groan. ‘OK. Is that it all settled then? The pair of you are both crazy about each other and are going to start courting – to use an old-fashioned word.’

Chrissie blushed but she had never felt so happy before in her life. Sean said, ‘Definitely!’

Laughing, Chrissie echoed, ‘Definitely!’

Then, remembering the realities of the situation, she became worried again. ‘It still doesn’t change our parents though. My mother and my father will have a fit if they find out. Let’s keep it a secret – at least for a wee while, Sean, until we see how we get on.’

‘We’ll get on just great.’

‘You know what I mean. Maybe if we take things gradually, they’ll change.’

‘Huh, you don’t really believe that, Chrissie, any more than I do. But OK. I’ll go along with the secrecy ploy for a wee while at least, if that’ll make you feel any better.’

Ailish said, ‘Well, thank goodness we’ve got something worked out at last. I thought the pair of you were going to go on being a couple of idiots to the end of your days.’

Chrissie laughed with relief now and Sean, his dark eyes mischievous, said, ‘Let’s meet tomorrow night round the corner at the Co-op and then go down to the Princes. I promise to give you the whole bar of Fry’s Cream this time.’

And so it was arranged. Chrissie couldn’t sleep that night for excitement and for planning what she was going to wear. Eventually, she decided on a navy mini skirt with a striped top and white buckled belt. Before she set out next evening, she made up her eyes with lots of black mascara so that they looked as large as possible. Carefully she backcombed her hair into a beehive at the top but with the ends flicked out – she’d long since abandoned her childish pony tail.

As soon as she met Sean, they linked arms and strolled across the road and down the Wellfield hill to Springburn, chatting easily and happily. They both liked the Bee Gees and The Beatles but they both agreed that John Lennon should not have said, ‘The Beatles are more popular than Jesus Christ right now.’

‘That jarred with me,’ Sean said.