The River Flows On (20 page)

‘Why? Are you mad, bad and dangerous to know?’ Kate asked, one of Miss Noble’s lessons on the life of Lord Byron coming back to her. She laughed up into his face, wanting to tease him, to help him forget the sad things they’d been talking about, to forget her own worries, to have some fun. Yet there was no corresponding teasing glint in Jack’s eyes. He looked very serious and it was a minute or two before he spoke.

‘Answer me a question, Kate. Are you happy? Right now, at this moment? Being here with me?’

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘I am.’

He smiled. ‘Then let’s go and have that picnic.’

So she went and sat in his car with him and he behaved like a perfect gentleman. Apart from tucking a tartan travelling rug around her knees, as promised, he didn’t touch her. He had brought sandwiches, and soup kept hot in a silver flask – and champagne.

‘On a day like this, there was no trouble keeping the champagne cold. I do think it makes a picnic, don’t you? Can you hold the glasses, Kate?’

Kate took them from him and stared at him – and the bottle he was opening – in utter amazement. Champagne? He had removed the wrapping round the cork and was untwisting the wires which held it in place.

‘I never thought people actually drank champagne. I thought it was just something you saw at the pictures – and at launches, of course.’

Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve never drunk it?’ Carefully easing off the cork, which gave a satisfying pop, he poured the foaming liquid into the two glasses. Then he bent forward, slid the bottle to stand on the floor between his feet, straightened up and took a glass from her.

‘To you,’ he said softly, touching his glass to hers, ‘and your beautiful green eyes.’

And your beautiful blue ones, thought Kate. She took a cautious sip.

‘Oh! The bubbles are going up my nose!’

Jack Drummond threw his head back and laughed. ‘Drink some more then. It’s the only cure.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said, laughing with him after she had taken another sip. ‘Robbie would really disapprove if he could see me now. He’s signed the pledge.;

‘Robbie?’

Was it a wee bit tactless to mention one young man when you were drinking another’s champagne?

‘Robert Baxter,’ she explained briefly. ‘A friend.’ Better change the subject quickly.

‘You remind me of the Man in Armour.’ She told him why. Well, she told him half of it – how she had watched the sun strike his hair and make it look like a gleaming helmet.

‘I’m flattered,’ he murmured. ‘And here was I thinking that you had hardly noticed me.’ He chuckled at the look of disbelief she directed at him.

‘You laugh a lot, don’t you?’

‘Isn’t that what life’s about?’

Kate lowered her champagne glass towards her lap. Barbara Baxter’s face had suddenly appeared in her mind’s eye. ‘Not always.’

‘Now you’re said,’ Jack observed. ‘Want to tell me why? Is it to do with this Robbie you mentioned?’

‘Not exactly.’ She looked away from him and out of the car window at the park. The sun was stronger now. It had melted all the icy puddles. No, she didn’t want to tell him why she was sad. She turned away from the view and looked at him, sitting back on the bench seat. He appeared very relaxed, but his eyes were watchful.

‘I don’t want to talk about sad things.’

He gave her a searching look and then a long slow smile. ‘Then, my dear Miss Cameron, you’ve come to the right man.’ He bent to retrieve the champagne bottle. ‘Have some more.’

Afterwards, when Kate admitted that she’d never been in a car before either, he insisted on driving her home, although she made him let her out two tram stops before Yoker Ferry Road. He raised his eyebrows at that.

‘Ashamed of me, Kate? Or don’t you want to make your friend Robbie jealous?’

Kate blushed and denied both vehemently. She struggled to put it into words as Jack pulled in the kerb and stopped the car.

‘Today’s been really special for me. I don’t want to have to – to have to explain anything to anybody, that’s all!

She was turned towards him, hoping he would understand. He took her hand.

‘Today’s been really special for me too. How about doing it again soon? We could go for a spin – out to Loch Lomond, perhaps?’

She wanted to say yes, to speed through the countryside laughing and chatting as they had today, but if she did, was she agreeing to something more? He saw the conflict raging in her face.

‘Go on, Kate, say yes. We could have some fun together, you and I.’

‘Just fun? You wouldn’t want anything else?’

‘Just fun. I promise.’

She should say no, she really should, stop this right now before it went too far. But oh, how she longed to have some fun!

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, please.’

Chapter 11

Mr Asquith, lying in front of the range, stretched luxuriously.

‘Makes you feel warm just to look at him,’ said Neil, smiling at Jessie, who was sitting on the rug beside the cat.

‘Mmm,’ she agreed, sending Mr Asquith into paroxysms of pleasure and demented purring by stroking him from the tips of his ears to the tip of his tail. ‘Look how long he is when he does this.’ She beamed up at her father. He had wee Davie on his knee and he was singing to him.

‘This is your big sister’s song,’ he told his son, before launching into, ‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen...’

Kate, sitting at the table reading, exchanged a happy glance with her sister. Neil was making another heroic effort to stay off the drink. It was nearly a month now since he’d been to the pub and there was no alcohol in the house. So far, so good.

She bent her head to the magazine Marjorie had lent her. It had an article devoted to new developments in ceramics, complete with photographs. There were so many interesting things going on. Down in England a potter called Susie Cooper had joined Clarice Cliff as one of the names to watch.

In Glasgow too, small studios were springing up to produce pottery with a difference – miles away from the mass-produced ware most people, rich and poor, had in their homes.

Finishing the text of the article, Kate studied the pictures in detail. Ideas were forming in her head. She reached for her sketch pad and pencils, lying at the ready on the table in front of her.

Granny was in her usual corner, diagonally behind Kate where she sat facing the range.

‘Jenny!’ she hissed.

Kate threw her the swiftest of smiles over her shoulder. ‘Sorry, Granny,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got to get this down on paper.’ Ideas were like that, she’d found. They seem so clear in your head, but they disappeared like snow off a wall if you didn’t capture them right away.

There was a knock at the front door. Kate hardly heard it, absorbed in the sketch growing under her pencil.

‘I’ll get it,’ Pearl sang out, eager as always for any distraction.

A rowan tree, Kate thought – that would make a good motif.  If she drew it naturally first, and then worked out how to stylize it... Engrossed in the work, the familiarity of the voices at the door didn’t penetrate her consciousness until the visitors were actually in the room.

‘Kate’s communing with her muse,’ drawled a light, amused voice.

‘Yes, her tongue’s sticking out in concentration.’

Kate’s head snapped up. Suzanne Douglas and Jack Drummond were standing on the other side of the table. They both looked pretty pleased with themselves. Behind them she saw Marjorie’s face, peering over their shoulders.

‘You don’t mind, Kate, do you?’ There was a tinge of anxiety in Marjorie’s voice. ‘We thought we’d just drop in.’

‘As we were in the neighbourhood,’ murmured Suzanne, turning her head and laughing up into Jack’s face. He was looking at Kate, his eyebrows raised in enquiry. Is this all right?

Kate caught a glimpse of her mother’s face as she hovered behind the unexpected visitors. Lily looked completely panic-stricken. No, it damn’ well isn’t all right, Kate thought, a pang of sympathy for her mother, as intense as it was unexpected, shooting through her.

People like these, in their expensive and beautiful clothes, with their cultured accents and exquisite manners, were like some alien species to her mother. Lily could have dealt with the King and Queen coming to the door more easily than she was going to be able to cope with Marjorie Donaldson and her friends.

Lifting Davie gently off his lap, Neil Cameron spoke.

‘You’ll be Kathleen’s friends from the Art School?’ he asked in his soft accent. ‘Let’s see if we can find you all a seat. Lily?’

As he rose to his feet, drawing himself up to his full height, Kate saw Suzanne Douglas give him an appraising look.

Lily recovered herself. ‘Perhaps youse would all care to step through to the parlour?’

Kate cringed. Her mother was unsuccessfully putting on the pan loaf. Kate saw Suzanne Douglas smother a snigger. She also saw Marjorie elbow her discreetly in the ribs.

‘Oh no, Mrs Cameron, it’s fine and cosy in your kitchen. It is Mrs Cameron, isn’t? I’m Marjorie Donaldson. She held out her hand. Lily took it – and bobbed a curtsy.

Jessie, Kate knew, was about to die of embarrassment, any second now. Her own sympathy for her mother had been swallowed up by irritation. Why didn’t she know how to behave?

Kate was suffering from a considerable amount of embarrassment on her own account too. It was one thing to sit in a tearoom with her fellow students, as equals, setting the world to rights. It was another to look at paintings and then sip champagne with Jack Drummond, or drive out to the country with him, chatting merrily all the way. They’d had several Sunday afternoon dates although, at Kate’s insistence, without the champagne. Usually they went to some little place for lunch or afternoon tea.

It was, however, quite another thing for her Art School friends to visit her here, in the poky and cramped two rooms which housed the Cameron family. How must her home look through these sophisticated eyes? Poverty-stricken? Squalid?

Maybe she would just join Jessie, Kate thought wryly. They could both slide gently to the floor and regain consciousness once the visitors had left. Pity there wasn’t really enough space to do it.

Marjorie, a friendly smile on her face, ignored Lily’s disastrous gesture and turned to Neil, obviously determined to manage the introductions single-handedly if she had to.

‘Mr Cameron? I hope you don’t mind us dropping in like this. I believe you work with my father, don’t you?’

Neil Cameron smiled down at her from his great height, his handsome mouth quirking.

‘I’m not sure that with is the right word, lass, but it’s nice of you to say so. May I introduce the rest of my family?’

Kate was proud of him. Their house might be too small and more than a little shabby. There might be laundry hanging down from the pulley above the range, but the Cameron family was going to rise to the occasion.

This, Kate felt sure, had been Suzanne Douglas’s idea – a bit of a wheeze, a good laugh. ‘Let’s go slumming, see where the little mouse lives.’ Jack, in his usual relaxed fashion, had gone along with it. If he’d thought about it for two minutes, he must have realized how embarrassing it would be for Kate. Honestly, he was hopeless!

Behind the backs of the visitors, Lily was making frantic signals to her and Pearl. Pearl shook her head. Kate fixed her with a look and, murmuring an excuse, grabbed her sister’s wrist as unobtrusively as she could, and let the way out into the lobby.