The Piper's Tune (3 page)

‘Regarding money?' Tom said. ‘School fees, by any chance?'

The cost of child-rearing seemed to escalate year by year. At Florence's insistence Sylvie had been put to the Park School and Tom paid the fees, along with everything else on Florence's carefully itemised account.

‘I have no intention of conducting monetary business in a public park on the Sabbath,' Florence said. ‘I would be obliged if you would call at our house not later than Thursday. We will be at home, I believe, on Tuesday after nine o'clock, and from eight o'clock on Wednesday.'

‘I have a choir meeting on Wednesday,' Tom said.

Sylvie gave a huffy little grunt, her first unprompted utterance.

Florence said, ‘Is a choir meeting more important than your daughter's welfare?'

‘We're joining in a special performance,' Tom interrupted, ‘in the cathedral.'

‘Oh! That will be
The Messiah?
'

‘No, an Easter Cantata. Massed choirs with soloists.' He risked touching his daughter's shoulder. ‘Why don't you ask Aunt Florence to bring you along, sweetheart?' he said. ‘I'm sure you'll enjoy it.'

Again the grunt, a dainty snort; a flinching, flouncing away.

He looked down at her and, startled, recognised that she was spoiled, a ruined child still capable of cutting through his indifference like a hot knife through butter. It riled him that she should have so much power over him. For a moment he was linked to Sylvie not by love or guilt but by annoyance.

Without quite knowing what he was doing, he bent his long shanks and crouched before her. She tried to sidle off but he would have none of it. He gripped her firmly by the shoulders. His hands looked huge against the rounded velveteen. He squared her, steadied her and peered into her grey petulant eyes.

‘Do you not know who I am?' he asked.

She said nothing.

‘
Do
you know who I am?'

She nodded.

He felt cruel, but unrepentant. ‘Tell me who I am, Sylvie.'

‘You're my – you're my – my father.'

‘And whether you like it or not I always will be.'

‘Tom, please don't chastise…'

He ignored Florence. ‘I will not be treated like a fool, not by you – especially not by you – or by anyone else. You may not like me, Sylvie, but at least you will do me the honour of being courteous. Do I make myself clear?'

‘Yes.'

She pursed her small, sweet, rosebud lips and scowled defiantly. She sensed that she had been exposed, her power diminished, but she would not surrender everything to him, not all at once.

‘Yes, what?' he said.

‘Yes, Papa.'

Tom grinned a crooked grin, like a crack whispering across ice. It was a small triumph, petty in every respect, but decisiveness gave him a strange thrill, eliminating, if only for a little while, the hollowness within.

He got nimbly to his feet.

‘That's better,' he said, then to Florence, ‘I'll drop my cheque for the summer term round to the house on Tuesday.'

‘After nine o'clock, please,' said Florence.

‘After nine o'clock,' said Tom. ‘Is there anything else I have to pay for?'

‘I think that's all in the meantime.' Florence hesitated. ‘Do you wish me to bring her to the cathedral on Wednesday? If it means so much to you…'

‘It means nothing to me,' Tom said. ‘I just thought she might enjoy it.'

‘Unfortunately she has no affinity for music,' Florence said.

‘And I have a Mission class on Wednesday,' Sylvie said, ‘Papa.'

He nodded. ‘It would never do to miss a Mission class.'

She was looking up at him, not hiding now. She had adapted quickly to his changed attitude. She had replaced truculence with coyness, a niceness that was entirely self-serving. Perhaps she was not so very different from her mother after all.

‘I will come to hear you sing very soon, Papa,' she said, then, to his astonishment, lifted herself on tiptoe and presented her gossamer cheek for a kiss. ‘I promise.'

He paused, then brushed his lips against her cold little brow.

‘Goodbye, Papa.'

‘Goodbye, sweetheart,' he said and, with more relief than regret, watched Florence lead Sylvie away towards the Radnor gate.

*   *   *

Dining in the grand style had never been her grandfather's forte: dining well was quite another matter. Owen Franklin, his sons, daughter and grandchildren were blessed with healthy appetites and a fondness for good food that kept cooks and kitchen hands thoroughly on their mettle. It was not uncommon for a dozen folk to settle around the long table in the dining-room and the entire domestic staff, including the latest fumble-fingered little parlour-maid, to be marshalled to lug tureens, trays and steaming casseroles up from the kitchens.

The dining-table was the family's meeting place. It was also the place where the Franklins' wealth was most obviously displayed in silverware, tableware and fancy linens. Those who fancied themselves in the know – stockbrokers, accountants and lawyers – claimed that the Franklins devoured more in a week than the shipyard earned in a month. That if it hadn't been for its appetite the family would have achieved a higher place on the social scale and that Owen, or possibly Donald, would have been elected to positions of civic responsibility. Although the slander contained more than a grain of truth, it took no account of the fact that Owen and his sons cared less about power than they did about pleasure and devoted themselves to good food and good music with a panache that, in some quarters, was regarded as vulgar.

What the snobs would have made of Kay, who ate scallops with a spoon and chicken breasts with her fingers, was anyone's guess. Safe to say that even the most high and mighty would have been impressed by soft-spoken Forbes whose combination of charm, rapacity and impeccable table manners few aristocratic heirs could match. Lindsay's cousins, Cissie, Mercy and Pansy, were so impressed by Forbes that they neglected their own nutritional requirements and passed him salt cellars, pepper mills and mustard dishes at such a rate of knots that Grandfather Owen eventually had to tap his plate with a steak knife and wag a warning finger just to give the poor lad respite.

Lindsay, too, was impressed by her Irish cousin. She was delighted by his attentions, attentions too discreet to draw sarcastic comment from Martin or Johnny but just obvious enough to confirm that he, Forbes, had also experienced an instantaneous rapport and that of all the girls at table she was the one he found most appealing. They were seated together at the end of the long table, separated from the girl cousins by Uncle Donald and Aunt Lilias. By mischievous coincidence Kay and Lindsay's father had been placed side by side and, with slightly less tact than their offspring, soon fell to bickering and recrimination which, Lindsay guessed, echoed old rivalries between them.

She was unsure just how serious the display of mutual animosity was until Forbes leaned towards her and murmured, ‘Mam's bark is a lot worse than her bite, you know. She has a sharp tongue but a kind heart.'

‘I have never seen my father so heated,' Lindsay whispered.

‘Is it not that he's just enjoying himself?' Forbes said.

‘No. I really don't think they're very fond of each other.'

‘Oh, now, and I'm sure that they are,' said Forbes. ‘It would be a fine thing if they were still enemies after all these years, especially now I'm going to be one of you.'

‘What do you mean,' Lindsay said, ‘one of us?'

‘I'm coming to stay in Glasgow while I study.'

‘Are you?' Lindsay tried to hide her excitement. ‘What will you study?'

‘Engineering.'

‘Marine engineering?'

‘Well, that will be a part of the course,' he said. ‘But it's not on my mind to be going to sea as a regular thing. I'm aiming higher than ship's engineer.'

‘What
do
you aim to be?' said Lindsay.

He eased himself away from her, not impolitely.

He speared a final piece of beef from his plate and put it into his mouth. He did not appear to chew, merely to swallow.

Lindsay watched his throat move, a soft undulation.

Everything about him suggested precocious self-assurance, a physicality that she could not equate with a man – a lad – who was twelve or fourteen months younger than she was. She wondered if all young Dubliners were like this or if being the eldest in a family of ten had forced maturity upon him.

He glanced at her, placed knife and fork evenly on his plate, and smiled.

The smile was in lieu of an answer.

She might have put the question again if Cissie, all broad cheeks and freckles, hadn't leaned forward and told her excitedly, ‘He's coming to stay here with us. Aren't you, Forbes?'

‘I am; for a time at least.'

‘Here?' Lindsay's excitement diminished at the prospect of Forbes McCulloch lodging under the same roof as her predatory cousin. ‘I mean, here in Pappy's house?'

‘In the boys' room,' Cissie said. ‘He'll sleep in the boys' room.'

Martin laughed and informed his new-found cousin that he would have to sleep head to toe with Ross since there was no room for another bed. Ross protested. Johnny supported him. Aunt Lilias joined in the teasing. Lindsay stared down at her meat plate, watched the manservant's gloved hand remove it and replace it with a small dish of iced sherbet.

She could feel a tingle in the room, the family's vibrant energy beginning to revolve like one of the new steam turbines that Donald had taken them to see at Spithead last summer. She could feel the energy beginning to flow about her and wondered why she no longer revelled in it, why she felt so cut off and apart. For the first time she felt obliged to acknowledge that Martin was not her brother, Cissie not her sister and that she stood a half-step apart from the others.

She ate the sherbet ice, three small silver spoonfuls, cold and fizzy on her tongue; heard the laughter all about her.

He did not laugh: Forbes did not laugh.

He too had brothers, four of them, five sisters. He knew what to do, what to say, how to take care of himself in the maul. But he didn't laugh, didn't roar, didn't clamour for attention. He smiled and watched, and swallowed the cold confection, his throat undulating as the sherbet slid smoothly down.

He leaned lightly against Lindsay once more.

‘I would rather sleep with you,' he said, so quietly that Lindsay could not be sure that he had spoken at all.

‘What?' Lindsay said. ‘What did you say?'

‘In your house. I would rather stay in your house,' Forbes said.

‘No, that's not what you—'

‘Hush now. Hush,' he told her. ‘I think our dear old grandpappy is about to make a speech.'

*   *   *

The manservant, Giles, was last to leave the dining-room. He took with him the empty sherbet dishes, decanters and those glasses that did not contain wine. Before lifting the laden tray he carefully swept crumbs from the tablecloth and collected them in a little brass-handled pan. He balanced the pan beneath the tray and used his elbow to open the dining-room door.

Outside, the April sky was tinted brown, not pretty or pastel but flat and sombre and, just before the servant left and Grandfather Owen rose to speak, a few speckles of rain laid themselves against the window panes. At a signal from the old man Donald and Arthur lit the candles and sat down again. Silence in that uproarious room seemed oppressive, almost uncanny, so much so that Pansy, the youngest, turned her face away and clung to brother Johnny as if she feared that she might need protection.

Lindsay too was tense. She might have sought her Irish cousin's arm except that she was no longer sure of him, no longer sure at all.

‘First,' Owen began, ‘may I bid a special welcome to Kay, who we haven't seen for far too long, and to my grandson Forbes.' He paused, cleared his throat and went on: ‘I must say it's grand to have all my children and so many of their children gathered together at last. I wish' – another hesitation – ‘I just wish that Helen had been spared to bear children too. That, however, was not the Lord's intention, and we can't go questioning the ways of the Lord.'

With an unusual twinge of resentment Lindsay wondered why her grandfather hadn't mentioned
her
mother, hadn't mourned for the children that
she
had never borne.

‘I'm no longer as young as I was,' Owen continued. ‘It has been in my mind for some time to clear the decks for the next generation; not a bad generation either, in my biased opinion. Be that as it may, I have decided to retire from—'

‘What's this you're saying, Pappy?' Donald blurted out. ‘You can't retire. What'll we do without you?'

‘Are you ill?' said Kay in that piercing voice of hers. ‘Are you a-dying, Daddy, is that why you've brought us from Dublin?'

‘No, damn it,' Owen said. ‘Don't go getting your hopes up. I am not a-dying. You don't get rid of me as easily as all that. I am, however, just a bit too rusty for many more repairs. I've got to face the fact that my next voyage or the one after might take me to the breaker's yard.'

‘Are you giving up the chairmanship?' Lindsay's father asked.

‘Yes.'

Out of the corner of her eye Lindsay noticed Aunt Lilias cover Uncle Donald's hand with her own, a gesture not of commiseration but of excitement. Apparently no hint of her grandfather's intentions had reached the Franklins. She suspected that the McCullochs might have guessed what was in the wind, though; that Kay, her husband and possibly Forbes had discussed its implications and made plans in advance.

Grandfather Owen held up his hand. ‘Be easy now, be easy. I'm not selling the yard. I'm not leaving you stranded. I've gathered you all together to hear what I've got in mind for the future. First,' he said, ‘let me tell you that Forbes will be joining the firm to train as a manager. He will follow the same route of learning as both of you did. Do you remember what that was like, Donald, Arthur?'