The River Flows On (17 page)

‘I’ll treat you, then.’ He grinned. ‘Or Marjorie will. She’s got enough dough to treat us all.’

Kate’s eyes grew cold. ‘I don’t think so.’ Clearly taking him by surprise, she turned and walked off in the opposite direction.

He followed her, falling into step beside her, adjusting his long stride to hers as they turned the corner and went down Dalhousie Street.

Kate stopped dead. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Seeing you to your tram. Are you walking out with someone, Miss Cameron?’

‘No.’ Should she cross her fingers for that one?

‘Strange,’ mused Jack Drummond. ‘All the fellows in Clydebank must be blind, then.’

Suzanne Douglas was waiting for him as he ran back across Sauchiehall Street.

‘Tea? On to cocktails, later?’ he asked. ‘Thanks for keeping Marjorie busy, by the way.’

Ignoring both the comment and the question which had preceded it, she inclined her head towards the retreating tram. ‘Rejected your advances, then? The little mouse?’

‘For the moment,’ agreed Jack equably, extracting a gold cigarette case from his inside pocket, opening it and extending it to her.

‘Thanks.’

He brought out his lighter and lit both their cigarettes. Suzanne put hers to her bright red lips and took a draw. Then she fixed Jack with a hard stare. ‘You won’t get anywhere with her, you know. Working-class girls are incredibly strait-laced.’

He paused, his cigarette halfway to his lips, a faint look of surprise on his face. ‘Give that girl a bit of attention and she’ll open up like a rose.’

Suzanne, her own cigarette held in one elegantly upraised hand, narrowed her eyes at him.

‘Jack ... You’re not really smitten, are you? With a wee girl from Clydebank?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling. I just think it might be fun to introduce her to ... things. Expand her horizons a bit.’ He drew deeply on the cigarette and blew the smoke out in rings.

A small child, passing by on the pavement in front of them, turned and stared up at him, fascinated. Her mother pulled her round, but not before her own face had registered her disapproval of Jack and Suzanne. Only fast people smoked in the street.

Jack went on in a dreamy tone of voice, ‘She’s got an absolutely luscious figure, as far as one can tell under the shapeless garments you girls wear nowadays. Do you think she’d let me buy her an evening dress?’

‘No, and I don’t think she’d be prepared to pay for it either. Not in the way you have in mind.’

His eyes crinkled at the corners. ‘Now, there’s a challenge.’

‘Do you have
any
scruples, Jack?’

He tapped some ash onto the pavement. ‘Not many.’

‘It’ll get you into trouble with Marjorie. She seems to have taken a liking to little Miss Cameron for some reason. Wants to take her under her wing.’

‘Marjorie doesn’t have to know, does she?’ Jack Drummond’s voice was very soft. The blue eyes which held Suzanne’s gaze were not. He took another draw on his cigarette, looked up at the buildings across the street and then back at Suzanne.

‘You’re a swine, Jack Drummond.’

‘But you love me all the same?’

‘You’ll never know how much.’ For a second there was naked longing in Suzanne Douglas’s eyes. An expression which held genuine sympathy passed across Jack’s face.

‘I have to marry money, sweetie. You know that.’

The smart, brittle mask was once more in place. ‘So you come over all sympathetic to the little mouse while I continue to play the wicked witch?’

‘You do it so well, darling,’ he murmured.

‘And you don’t want Marjorie to know.’

‘Correct. I’ve no desire to queer my pitch there. Sooner or later I’ll have to bite the bullet and’ – ‘
press my suit
,’ - he said the last three words in a tone full of irony and with one fair eyebrow raised ‘- but there’s no reason not to have a bit of fun first, is there?’

‘And that’s all it is - a bit of fun?’

‘Of course, my darling. What else?’

They stood for a moment or two in silence. Jack turned to look along Sauchiehall Street in the direction of Charing Cross. After a while he spoke again. ‘She’s rather good-looking, don’t you think - for a wee girl from Clydebank? Not beautiful, exactly, but very attractive. Lovely smile.’

Suzanne frowned. Dropping her cigarette, she ground it out on the pavement with a twist of her crocodile-skin shod foot. ‘Are you coming?’ she asked abruptly.

‘You run along. I’m going to have another cigarette.’

Suzanne turned, once, on her way to the tearoom. Jack Drummond was standing where she had left him, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette and staring along a Sauchiehall Street from which Kate Cameron’s tram had long since disappeared.

Kate, by this time clanking past the Art Galleries and swinging into Dumbarton Road on the tram, had dismissed Jack Drummond from her mind. The trouble was, he kept sneaking back in. Just when she was hugging to herself the praise from the tutor and thinking how pleased her father and Robbie and Jessie would be for her, she would see those mocking blue eyes again, laughing with Suzanne Douglas at her home-made clothes. Or she would hear his voice.
My, but you’re fierce. The name’s Jack.

Fancy suggesting that Marjorie would pay for Kate’s afternoon tea - and his, for that matter! The men she knew would be horrified at letting a woman pay for them - or even for herself. What a fight she’d had with Robbie when she’d insisted on paying for her own ticket to the pictures! Posh folk were different, she supposed.

She could still feel Jack Drummond’s fingers, wiping the smudge of paint from her cheek ...

‘Kate, hen!’

Kate looked up. The tram had stopped at Partick Cross and Mrs MacLean, one of their neighbours from Yoker, was making her way up the gangway - with some difficulty, as she was carrying a huge basket of shopping. She settled her comfortable bulk beside Kate.

‘This is me since Tuesday,’ she announced, not only to Kate but to everyone sitting within earshot. Kate hid a smile. It was a common opening gambit, usually the preamble to a long description of how hectic the speaker’s week had been.

‘Have you been getting the messages, Mrs MacLean?’

It was all that was needed. Her neighbour launched into a discourse on the merits of the shops in Partick versus those in Yoker and Clydebank. As this included all the people sitting around them, Kate, so long as she contributed the occasional ‘Oh, aye?’ or ‘Do you tell me that?’ was free to let her thoughts wander. The fact that they so frequently took a route back to green paint and blue eyes was entirely her own problem.

Chapter 9

Marjorie Donaldson was holding forth about a pottery demonstration she’d seen on a recent visit to London.

‘It was marvellous - held at Waring and Gillow - that’s one of the big department stores, you know.’ She divided a smile between the group sitting around the table. ‘Fantastic colours and patterns, all designed by this potter called Clarice Cliff. She’s got these girls working for her and they were painting the things there and then. That was really interesting - to see the work actually being done. Miss Cliff is beginning to experiment with different shapes.’

‘How can you make a cup or a teapot a different shape?’ asked Suzanne Douglas, slanting a smile across the table at Jack Drummond.

Marjorie turned eagerly towards her. ‘Well, that’s just it, you can. There are restrictions because of the function of the thing, of course, but there are innovations to be made. It’s a matter of looking at things from a different angle, with fresh eyes.’ She stretched out an impulsive hand and touched the arm of the girl sitting silently but attentively next to her in the tearoom. ‘You’d have loved it, Kate, you really would.’

Kate smiled. To her own amazement she had warmed to Marjorie Donaldson. When she was interested in something - as she was now - her enthusiasm bubbled over and infected everyone around her. She could make even the sophisticated Suzanne drop the pose of languid disinterest in everything and everybody.

Kate had discovered that it was only because of Marjorie that Suzanne and Jack were regular attenders at the Saturday-afternoon class. ‘Because you insist we have to do something useful with our lives, Marjorie darling,’ Jack Drummond had drawled in explanation.

From what she’d been able to gather, his life seemed to be an endless round of amusement. He didn’t work and still lived with his mother in Bearsden. That seemed odd to Kate. He was twenty-six years old. She knew that for a fact, because it had come out in conversation. Surely he would prefer to be working and in a place of his own?

He and Suzanne Douglas talked merrily of cocktail parties, golf parties and weekends staying with friends in the country.

‘Only,’ Suzanne Douglas had said a couple of weeks ago, a gleam in her dark eyes, ‘Jack keeps turning down weekend invitations these days. I wonder why that is, darling?’ His only answer had been to lean forward and light her cigarette.

Marjorie was part of the circle too, but she was more serious-minded than the other two. Kate wouldn’t have gone so far as to claim her as a friend, but she was beginning to like her - very much. A few weeks after the start of the term, Marjorie had persuaded her to join the midweek ceramics class which Marjorie herself had been attending for the past couple of years. Since Barbara Baxter’s condition seemed, at least for the moment, to have levelled out, and since the grant made it possible, Kate yielded to temptation.

As soon as she felt her hands on wet clay and began learning how to form it into shapes, she knew she’d found something special, something she really wanted to do. Getting her first pieces out of the kiln, fired and ready for decorating, had been a huge thrill. Next week she was going to be allowed on the potter’s wheel for the first time.

It was a passion which united the two young women, Kate forgetting her shyness and her consciousness of the differences between them in their shared enthusiasm. Marjorie, who’d been attending classes for the past three years, was talking about opening her own studio next year, and Kate got caught up in the excitement of it, flattered when Marjorie consulted her about different aspects of the project.

The other girl had even managed to persuade Kate to join the rest of the group for tea after class, which was why Kate, on a Saturday afternoon in December, was sitting in a tearoom in West Regent Street.

Outside the mullioned windows the city was locked fast in a typical Glasgow fog - thick, yellow and smothering. They had found their way down from the Art School with great hilarity, scarves around their mouths and noses to keep it out, linking arms and holding on to each other’s belts as though they were climbers caught out on a mountainside in the dark. Kate had managed to avoid being next to Jack Drummond at any point, which hadn’t been easy, as the giggling group - five girls and three boys - had been constantly shifting position, deriving as much amusement as possible from the journey. This was their last meeting before Christmas, and they were as light-hearted as schoolchildren about the holidays ahead.

Since that first day, she hadn’t exchanged a word with him alone. She was, nevertheless, all too aware of him - in class, at the occasional evening lectures she had been to with Marjorie, in company afterwards. She got the distinct impression that he was full of contrition for his rudeness to her, and then, being Kate, wondered if she was flattering herself. Probably he hardly knew that she existed. Yet once or twice she had looked up from her easel and found him studying her with a little self-deprecating smile, as if to say, ‘Am I forgiven yet?’

His behaviour towards her now was impeccable - almost too good. In a group which prided itself on its informality, and where first names were the order of the day, Jack Drummond insisted on addressing and referring to Kate as ‘Miss Cameron’. Once or twice she had intercepted a look between him and Suzanne Douglas and had wondered if the two of them were laughing at her, but she didn’t think so. Jack did seem genuinely contrite. Had she been too hard on him? Maybe it was Suzanne Douglas who had led him on to behave badly and he, being chivalrous, had gone along with her.