The River Flows On (33 page)

She discovered that holding a brush or a pencil in her fingers was the only way of keeping uncomfortable thoughts like that at bay. She sewed too, buying pretty remnants and stuffing them with rags and stockings that couldn’t be darned any more to make cushions to brighten up their little home.

Worried by all this frantic activity, Robbie secretly consulted his mother. Agnes nodded wisely, told him about the nesting instinct and instructed him to let Kate get on with it, just not to let her overdo it or lift anything heavy. So he came home from work and helped his young wife with the stripping down of the sideboard, and made her put her feet up more often than she wanted to and brought her frequent cups of tea.

Then Grace put in her appearance, and Kate, blossoming into motherhood, achieved a calmness and serenity that made Robbie fall in love with her all over again. He didn’t tell her, of course. He was learning how to hide his feelings, seeing how uncomfortable it made her when he expressed them. She was happy with him as a friend and companion. So that’s what he tried to be. Most of the time. Sometimes those self-same feelings boiled over and he just couldn’t help himself. He tried always, whatever it cost him, to be gentle - in word and deed.

For Kate, as time went on, it became easier to forget what might have been. There was a bit of a hiccup when the Clydebank Press reported, complete with picture, the wedding of Miss Marjorie Donaldson to Mr Jack Drummond. The couple, the paper informed its readers, were to enjoy an extended honeymoon in the United States, sailing to New York from Southampton before returning to set up home in a luxury flat in the West End of Glasgow.

A bit different from a few days in Millport and a single end in Kilbowie Road, then. Kate wondered if Marjorie knew that it was Mr Donaldson’s money which was paying for it all. Alone in her own house, she laid the paper out on the kitchen table and studied their faces in the wedding photograph. Marjorie looked deliriously happy, Jack his usual amused self.

Marjorie had tried several times to get in touch with Kate, had even invited her and Robbie to the wedding. She wasn’t to know why that was completely out of the question. Kate had rejected each overture, had gone to elaborate lengths to make sure Marjorie didn’t know that she was pregnant. If she knew, then Jack would know, and that would be unbearable.

She had worried about Agnes Baxter telling Marjorie or her mother, but the wedding dress and trousseau had been made in London, where the Donaldsons had a flat. It was all far too grand to entrust to a local seamstress, no matter how gifted.

Bent over the table, Kate looked at his face again. Had he thought about her on his wedding night? She still believed that he cared for her, but he had chosen money over love. She straightened up and glanced across at the baby, sleeping snug as a bug in a well-lined drawer laid carefully on top of the box bed. Money over love. It was the work of a few seconds to move her hands to the diagonal corners of the paper and crumple it up between them. She had a fire to light.

Taking a defiant pleasure in setting a match to the paper and watching the flames lick up over the kindling and the coal, she forced herself to count her blessings.

She had Grace and her own home. It might be small, but she was mistress of all she surveyed. Now that she was out from under her mother’s thumb, she had high hopes she might be able to build a new and different relationship with Lily - as equals. There weren’t many signs of that happening as yet, but Kate was eternally optimistic about it.

The rest of her family - and Robbie’s - were frequent visitors to Kate’s little domain. She had the knack of making everyone feel welcome. Her sister Jessie, in particular, flourished under Kate’s encouragement. She was at teacher training college now – she had won a bursary – and really enjoying it. Robbie, too, was very solicitous with Jessie. It was he who’d gently coaxed her into talking about Barbara again.

Pearl was a different kettle of fish entirely. There were too many pretty dresses she claimed to have bought out of her own small pay packet, too many nights when, Jessie told her, Pearl came home late from work. Kate confronted her about it one day.

Exasperated by Pearl’s bland refusal to tell her anything, Kate had finally yelled at her. ‘For Pete’s sake, Pearl! Do you not realize that you could get yourself a reputation? Well, I just hope that if you can’t be good, you’ll at least be careful!’

Pearl put her cigarette to her lips and smiled sweetly at her sister. Robbie disapproved of women smoking. Kate was going to have to throw the window open wide before he got home from work.

‘Careful?’ asked Pearl. ‘Like you were, you mean?’ she said, nodding at Grace, who was sat at the table, happily drawing houses and suns and smiling mummies and daddies on rough sheets of paper with the crayons Kate always managed to find money for.

Kate drew her breath in sharply. Pearl wasn’t clever like Jessie, but she was shrewd, and she had sharp eyes. Kate often wondered how much she knew and, being Kate, worried that she had set a bad example to her younger sister.

Her worries about Pearl apart, though, life was not bad. And if Robbie turned to her in bed more often than she wanted and much less often than he did, that was just something which had to be put up with. He was her husband, and he had the right to expect certain things.

It was harder, though, to put up with the hurt look in his grey eyes sometimes - the look he thought she didn’t see. Robert Baxter was one of nature’s gentlemen. He did his best to hide those feelings from his young wife, but in her more honest moments Kate knew he was both disappointed and hurt by the lack of passion in their marriage. She became very adept at shutting that thought too away in the box in her head.

Fortunately, Robbie was in work, not at Donaldson’s any more, but along the road at John Brown’s, where the keel had been laid for a new Cunarder. Not just any old ship, but the biggest ever built - one thousand feet long, Robbie had told her proudly, a great liner for the Southampton-New York run. The keel had been laid shortly before Christmas 1930, the first rivet driven home by the shipyard manager. All the men - including Neil Cameron, who had also taken his labour to Brown’s - had cheered, because of the hope the new ship had brought them. Her job number was 534 and as the 534 she was to become famous.

In contrast to the happy hustle and bustle at Brown’s, things were looking bad for Donaldson’s. It seemed the yard might well become one of the victims of the Depression. Kate sometimes wondered if Jack Drummond was disappointed with the bargain he’d made. She never saw Marjorie these days. Now and again she heard or read something about the pottery studio. Despite the problems facing other businesses, it seemed to be doing well, gaining orders and presumably managing to make a profit. That would suit Jack.

Kate hoped, quite genuinely, that the new Mrs Drummond was making a go of it. Sometimes she fell to wistfully remembering the conversations the two of them had enjoyed. She missed Marjorie. If things had been different, they could have been good friends.

Despite her plans to go back to art classes, Kate got her sketch book and paints out less and less often these days, pleading Grace as an excuse. Occasionally, his mouth set in a determined line, Robbie spread the table with newspapers, filled empty jam jars with water and put out his wife’s water colours and paper, announcing firmly that he would look after Grace for a couple of hours.

Kate tried to respond, but her heart wasn’t always in it. She thought, perhaps, that Grace had inherited some artistic talent. Maybe it would be better to encourage that and leave her own ambitions lying. She would get back to it one day. She was Robbie’s wife and Grace’s mother. That was going to have to be enough for her in the meantime.

Chapter 20

‘Doesn’t it look pretty, Auntie Jess?’

‘It does that, Grace. Everything covered in snow. Even the 534 looks bonnie.’

Kate sent her sister a smile over Grace’s head. ‘Especially the 534. Mind you don’t slip now, Grace. You could go your length here.’ She extended a hand to her daughter, who was happily skipping between the two young women. It was late on a winter’s afternoon in early December and they were on the way home after a visit to Mary Deans, off work convalescing from having her tonsils out. Mary lived in Radnor Park up off Kilbowie Road. The area was nicknamed the Holy City because the flat roofs of the tenements there were said to resemble those of Jerusalem.

‘Except that it’s hot out there, is that no’ right?’ Mary’s mother had asked wryly. ‘I dinnae mind ever being taught at the Sunday School that the Good Lord had a problem wi’ dampness in His hoose.’

She was right; the flat-roofed design was less than ideal for the damp climate of the west of Scotland, but the residents of the Holy City did have a great view. On a clear day you could see right across the Clyde Valley to the hills of Renfrewshire, or. upriver to Glasgow, the spire of the university standing tall on Gilmorehill. Closer in, the view was dominated by Brown’s, and the skeleton of the 534, which jutted up from the yard towards the sky like some great spire itself.

The street lamps had just been lit and the pavement in front of them as they walked down Kilbowie Road was already beginning to glisten with frost. The dips in the surface which had been puddles at midday were soon going to be lethal for anyone not watching their footing. Kate shivered in the cold and pulled the collar of her coat more tightly about her. Jessie smiled at her and then at Grace, so warmly wrapped up herself that she looked like a wee ball of wool on legs.

‘Your Mammy would think the 534 looks bonnie,’ Jessie told her niece, ‘because your Daddy, who’s helping to fit the ship out, gave her some money out of his pay to buy her nice new winter coat.’

Kate grinned. She was pleased with the coat, all the more so because she didn’t often get new clothes. Robbie, however, had insisted that she buy it. He knew full well how much she’d come to hate the old herringbone tweed coat she’d been wearing for years, and which had been second-hand when she got it. That would now be relegated to the foot of their bed, an extra covering for the cold winter nights.

Jessie, on her Christmas holidays from college, had helped her sister choose the coat on a shopping trip that morning. It was dark green, with a big shawl collar in black velvet. The coat was well cut, hung beautifully and made Kate feel beautiful too. She couldn’t wait to show it to Robbie.

Kate glanced up at the Singer’s clock, rising above the huge complex of the sewing-machine factory. The imposing tower was a landmark for miles around, the clock face, so she’d been told, the second largest in the world. An hour till he was due home. Grace’s feet slid on a patch of ice. Kate tightened her grip on her hand, smiling down reassuringly, and Jessie took the little girl’s other hand.

‘I wonder what they’ll call her,’ mused Kate, nodding towards the 534.

Jessie tossed her head. ‘Andrew Baxter reckons that Queen Victoria is the best bet. Typical, he says, of this country’s backward-looking stance to the glory days of Empire and its refusal to reach out and embrace the modern world.’

Kate bit her tongue. Jessie, however, said it for her, smiling ruefully.

‘I know, I know, he does talk like a political manifesto sometimes, but I-’

She broke off, colour staining her pale cheeks. Kate changed the subject, asking her a question about her studies. That kept them going till they got down onto Dumbarton Road and she and Grace had waved Jessie off on the Yoker tram.

But I love him. Was that what Jessie had been about to say? Kate thought it over as she and Grace walked the short distance from the tram stop back to their little flat. Andrew Baxter might profess to love all of mankind, but Kate had a suspicion he had a rather more personal interest in womankind. She had seen him several times with different girls - all flashy types like Pearl. Jessie didn’t stand a chance against that sort of competition.

Quiet and studious, she didn’t make the most of herself. She was always clean and neat, but she took little interest in clothes and she wore her brown hair as she had done since she was a child, neatly combed back into a pony tail. For the umpteenth time, Kate wondered what would have happened if Barbara Baxter had lived. Would she have brought her friend out of her shell as the two of them approached womanhood, given her some of her own happy-go-lucky spirit? She sighed. No point in heading down the road of what might have been. She knew that better than anybody. She led Grace over the crossing at the bottom of Kilbowie Road.

She’d made one of Robbie’s favourites for tonight’s tea -mince and tatties. The mince, thick with gravy and rich with carrots and onion and turnip, had been cooked that morning before she went out, and the potatoes were peeled and steeped in water, waiting to be boiled. She’d got some butter to cream them with. Normally she bought margarine to save money, but Robbie didn’t like the taste of it. Since things did seem to be getting a bit easier, and the 534 looked set to guarantee work for the next couple of years, she’d lashed out on the butter.