When the Lights Come on Again (49 page)

Thirty-seven

It was Hope’s third birthday, and there was to be a family tea party. As Liz climbed the steps from the platform of the railway station she saw her grandfather waiting for her at the top of them. Although back now in a house of his own, he remained a regular visitor to his son’s home.

‘Sadie sent me out for some lemonade,’ he explained, ‘so I thought I’d hang on and see if you were off that train.’

‘Changed days,’ Liz observed as they fell into step together. ‘You and me walking along to Queen Victoria Row together. In broad daylight, too.’

The glance Peter shot his granddaughter had something in it which might have been reproach.

‘D’you not think you should give your father a bit more of a chance, Lizzie?’

Hurt, she returned his look. ‘Did he ever give me one?’

‘He’s changed a lot since Hope came to stay.’

‘I can’t say that I’ve noticed,’ she said tightly and looked away, out over the street. That was a lie. There had been a huge change in William MacMillan over the last two and a half years. Outwardly he was as stiff and formal as ever, but anyone who knew him well could see the difference.

Little Hope was a constant joy - a cheerful and happy child with her mother’s blue eyes and her father’s dark hair. It was a devastating combination, especially when that hair grew into a mass of curls. And as she grew older, the sense of fun Liz knew she’d inherited from her mother was beginning to show itself. That enchanted everybody, including her grandfather. However much he tried to hide it.

As she had grown and blossomed, there had been a kind of’ blossoming in him too. He could be brusque with her sometimes, but that seemed to be water off a duck’s back to Hope. She just laughed. And there had been many other occasions when Liz had noticed him watching his granddaughter with a little smile on his face.

He was even known to smile at his wife these days, usually over something funny Hope had said or done. The little girl had connected them again, given them a focus, allowed them to carry on some sort of family life together. For their granddaughter’s sake.

Liz’s own relationship with her father remained a distant one. Correction, she thought. We don’t have a relationship. Not one worthy of the name.

‘And have the two of you resolved your differences?’ she demanded now of her grandfather. He shrugged.

‘We’re never going to be best pals, but we did have a long conversation last New Year’s morning. It might have been the whisky talking, of course, but we got some things sorted out.’

‘So what did the two of you fall out about in the first place?’

There was a pause, and a curious look passed over Peter’s face. ‘It’s best left alone, lass.’

‘No,’ Liz insisted. She stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, forcing him to stop too. ‘I think I’ve a right to know. It affected me, after all. Wouldn’t you say?’

He turned to face her slowly and with obvious reluctance. ‘You’ll mind that he and I had an argument around the time your granny died?’

‘Yes.’ She remembered it well: the raised voices and the slammed doors, her mother in tears and completely distraught. ‘But Eddie and I never knew what it was about.’

‘Jenny was in the back bedroom,’ he said, his voice very soft. ‘It was the morning of the funeral. Your mother had come downstairs before we set off for the cemetery to... to pay her last respects.’ His voice had gone husky, and he had to swallow before he could go on. ‘She was that fond of your granny, you know?’

‘I know,’ said Liz gently, putting a comforting hand on his arm. ‘And Granny loved her too.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘and you too, pet. She had lost three of her own children. Bruce was sailing the seven seas and Bob was on the other side of the world. Your father...’

His mouth tightened and the sentence went unfinished. ‘You and your mother and Eddie... well, you were all very precious to my Jenny. And to me,’ he said. ‘And to me.’

Unable to speak, Liz squeezed his arm. Her grandfather gave her a faint smile. Then he shifted his gaze to something he saw over her shoulder.

‘Your mother began to sob. Your father told her to pull herself together, that he hoped she wasn’t going to behave like that at the service and at the graveside. He didn’t want her disgracing the family in public.’ Peter’s voice had grown very dry.

Liz looked up at him, but he seemed unwilling to meet her gaze, his eyes focused on something only he could see. ‘I asked him what kind of a man he was, that he could stand dry-eyed by his own mother’s coffin, that he could watch his wife breaking her heart over it and offer her no comfort. I asked him why he had no heart. I told him he was the one who was a disgrace to the family.’

Peter paused, and swallowed again. There was pain in every word that he spoke. ‘I told him I was ashamed to call him my son.’ He stopped, his face working. Liz saw anguish there. She saw something else too. Regret.

‘Och, Grandad,’ she breathed, gripping his arm once more. ‘Och, Grandad.’

He looked at her at last. There was more to come. His voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear the words. ‘And I told him his mother had been ashamed of him too, because of how hard he was on his family. Especially you, Lizzie. Especially you.’

Liz remembered another conversation she’d had with her grandfather.
Your father has strong feelings, he’d said. About a lot of things
. Don’t we all? she thought bitterly. Don’t we all?

Her words were clipped. ‘And now you think it’s up to me to forgive him? Don’t you think that’s asking a bit much?’

‘I’m asking you to have a bit of understanding, lass. Because you’re capable of it. He’s not.’

Liz’s voice was bitter. ‘He shuts himself off from me, but he’s opened up to Hope.’

Peter’s piercing gaze saw far too much. ‘And are you a wee bit jealous of that?’

She watched her father that afternoon, saw the smile on his face as her mother played peek-a-boo games with Hope, looked on when the little girl clambered up on to his lap, the smile growing as she laughed up at him. Liz wondered if he’d ever been like that with her. She searched her memory and came up with one long-lost image of being hoisted up on to his shoulders.

She seemed to remember they’d both been laughing then. Had they been watching a launch? The
Queen Mary
perhaps? No, it must have been earlier. The recollection was of herself as a much smaller child - before she had contracted the scarlet fever.

Watching his face now as he looked at Hope, Liz wondered if her grandfather might be right
Was
she jealous?

Troubled by the thought, she was restless and unhappy when she took her leave of her family after the party. About to head back for Riverside station, she turned the other way instead, obeying some inner compulsion to walk up to the ruins of the Holy City houses. She would get the train back to Partick from Singer’s and then take the tram along. It was growing foggy. She didn’t want to have to grope her way all along Dumbarton Road.

She loved Hope so much. The thought that she might be jealous of the attention her father was giving her little niece was an extremely uncomfortable one.

Sometimes Liz felt as though she were two separate people. There was the cheerful and competent student nurse MacMillan, calm and efficient, always ready with a joke or a comforting word. And then there was wee Lizzie, so terribly lonely when so many of the people she had cared for were gone.

As she reached what remained of the Holy City, she forced down the lump in her throat. She stood staring at the rubble, at the sheer bloody mess of what had once been homes full of families. It had taken weeks to bring all the bodies out. Some had never been found - or at least never identified. Liz tried not to think too much about that.

No one was entirely sure how many people had died in the Blitz. Officialdom, with the justification of not wanting to spread gloom, despondency and panic, had deliberately underestimated the numbers, quoting a figure of five hundred deaths. One of the rescuers who’d lived through those terrible nights responded to that with a bitter question. ‘Five hundred? Which street do they mean?’

Despite the devastation wrought - only seven houses in Clydebank had escaped damage of some description - the town was rising from the ashes. Buildings which could be saved were being repaired and rebuilt. Industry was recovering, getting back into production. In some cases that had happened astonishingly quickly. John Brown’s and a few other places had been working again only days after the Blitz. The German bombs had done great damage, but people told each other gleefully that Jerry had missed a hell of a lot as well: the Singer’s clock, for one thing. It had come through the onslaught intact, a symbol of survival.

And because it was Clydebank, people found things to laugh at. There had been government compensation for losses sustained in the bombing. Some folk had worked out very quickly how to milk the system. As Annie Crawford had drily remarked, ‘You’d never have guessed there were so many pianos in Clydebank.’

On her last visit home, Liz had bumped into Nan Simpson. She’d been up in arms about the compensation too. ‘Her downstairs from me claimed for window blinds. That woman never had blinds on her windows in her life!’

All of that passed through Liz’s mind as she stood in the rubble. It was all mixed up together - life and death, laughter and tears. She was visualizing it too, the horror of the Blitz, the Gallaghers singing and teasing each other, Marie and Brendan arguing incessantly about which part of Ireland they were going home to, Finn stealing the gingerbread and getting away with it, Conor’s pride in his faithful companion.

Then she saw Helen and Eddie on the day of his graduation. Her big brother had been so handsome in his hood and gown, love and tenderness in his eyes as he had looked at Helen in the brown georgette dress. What an effort it had been getting the independent Miss Gallagher to accept that!

She thought of Mario. Would they ever see each other again? Maybe not in this world...

He’ll not be an atheist now.
Helen’s voice was ringing round her head, happy because she was going to be reunited with Eddie. Oh, God, she missed them all so much!

Turning to leave, her eye was caught by a flash of yellow. Curious, she picked her way through the rubble. Clinging on to a rough piece of masonry, in much less earth than you would think it needed to survive, was a daffodil, flowering bravely in the misty March air. A fragment of blue earthenware pot still stuck to it. It had to be one of Helen’s.

Liz stood for a moment, remembering the pots of flowers which had dotted the Gallaghers’ living room. That had been so like Helen, brightening up her surroundings, making the best of things, never complaining about the hand which fate had dealt her.

Liz reached for the daffodil, then stopped herself. She should leave it here, a tiny memorial to the brave girl who had been her friend. Eyes blinded by tears, she stumbled back to the main road. She was cold. Terribly, terribly cold.

She shouldn’t have taken the short cut. It was a stupid thing to have done, but she was anxious to be on time for Adam, now a senior house officer at the Infirmary. They had agreed to meet outside the nurses’ home and go for an early evening drink and a bite to eat somewhere up Byres Road.

As if the blackout wasn’t enough, the fog was now a pea-souper, blanketing everything in thick yellow folds. Her wee torch, carefully pointed downwards so she didn’t get yelled at to ‘Put out that light!’, wasn’t making much of an impact. Liz coughed, and drew her woollen scarf further up around her mouth.

The trouble with fog was that it disorientated you - made familiar surroundings unfamiliar. She’d hopped off the tram at the front entrance to the University on Dumbarton Road. Instead of going the long way round to meet Adam, along to Church Street and then up and around, Liz had decided to cut through the hospital complex, past the Andersonian Institute and round behind the ophthalmology department.

That ought to have brought her round the back of Outpatients and then out on to University Avenue, but she’d taken a wrong turning somewhere. She suspected she was near the mortuary. That was a happy thought.