The Keys of the Kingdom (4 page)

‘I think so, woman … if we take it slow.’

She thought feverishly, battling her panic, her confusion. All her instinct was to move him to warmth, light and safety. She saw that his worst wound, a gash to the temple bone, had ceased to bleed. She swung round towards her son.

‘Run back quick, Francis. Tell Polly to get ready for us. Then fetch the doctor to the house at once.’

Francis, shivering as with ague, made a blind, convulsive gesture of understanding. With a last glance at his father he bent his head and set off frantically along the quay.

‘Try, then, Alex … let me give you a hand.’ Bitterly dismissing Mirlees’ offer of assistance which she knew to be worse than none, she helped her husband up. He swayed slowly, obediently to his feet. He was dreadfully shaky, hardly knew what he was doing. ‘I’ll away then, Sam,’ he muttered, dizzily. ‘ Good night to ye.’

She bit her lip in a torment of uncertainty, yet persisted, led him out, met by the stinging sheets of rain. As the door shut behind them and he stood, unsteady, heedless of the weather, she was daunted by the prospect of that devious return, back through the mire of the fields with a helpless man in tow. But suddenly, as she hesitated, a thought illuminated her. Why had it not occurred to her before? If she took the short cut by the Tileworks Bridge she could save a mile at least, have him home and safe in bed within half an hour. She took his arm with fresh resolution. Pressing into the downpour, supporting him, she pointed their course up-river towards the bridge.

At first he did not apparently suspect her purpose, but suddenly, as the sound of rushing water struck his ear, he halted.

‘Whatna way’s this to come, Lisbeth? We cannot cross by the Tileworks with Tweed in such a spate.’

‘Hush, Alex … don’t waste your strength by talking.’ She soothed him, helped him forward.

They came to the bridge, a narrow hanging span, fashioned of planks with a wire rope handrail, crossing the river at its narrowest, quite sound, though rarely used, since the Tileworks which it served had long ago shut down. As Elizabeth placed her foot upon the bridge, the blackness, the deafening nearness of the water, caused a vague doubt, perhaps a premonition, to cross her mind. She paused, since there was not room for them to go abreast, peering back at his subdued and sodden figure, swept by a rush of strange maternal tenderness.

‘Have ye got the handrail?’

‘Ay, I have the handrail.’

She saw plainly that the thick wire rope was in his big fist. Distracted, breathless and obsessed, she could not reason further. ‘Keep close to me, then.’ She turned and led on.

They began to cross the bridge. Halfway across his foot slid off a rainslimed board. It would have mattered little another night. Tonight it mattered more, for the Tweed, in flood, had risen to the planking of the bridge. At once the racing current filled his thighboot. He struggled against the pull, the overpowering weight. But they had beaten the strength from him at Ettal. His other leg slipped, both boots were waterlogged, loaded as with lead.

At his cry she spun round with a scream and caught at him. As the river tore the handrail from his grip her arms enfolded him; she fought closely, desperately, for a deathless instant to sustain him. Then the sound and the darkness of the waters sucked them down.

All that night Francis waited for them. But they did not come. Next morning they were found, clasped together, at low tide, in the quiet water near the sand bar.

One Thursday evening in September four years later, when Francis Chisholm ended his nightly tramp from Darrow Shipyard by veering wearily towards the blistered double headboard of Glennie’s Bakery, he had reached a great decision. As he trudged down the floury passage dividing the bakehouse from the shop – his smallish figure oddly suppressed by an outsize suit of dungarees, his face grimy, beneath a man’s cloth cap worn back to front – and went through the back door, placing his empty lunch pail on the scullery sink, his dark young eyes were smouldering with this purpose.

In the kitchen Malcom Glennie occupied the table – its soiled cover now, as always, littered with crockery – lolling on his elbow over
Locke’s Conveyancing
, a lumpish pallid youth of seventeen, one hand massaging his oily black hair, sending showers of dandruff to his collar, the other attacking the sweetbread cooked for him by his mother on his return from the Armstrong College. As Francis took his supper from the oven – a twopenny pie and potatoes cremated there since noon – and cleared a place for himself, aware, through the torn opaque paper on the half glazed partition door, of Mrs Glennie serving a customer in the front shop, the son of the house threw him a glance of peevish disapproval. ‘Can’t you make less noise when I’m studying? And God! What hands! Don’t you ever wash before you eat?’

In stolid silence – his best defence – Francis picked up a knife and fork in his calloused, rivet-burned fingers.

The partition door clicked open and Mrs Glennie solicitously scuffled in. ‘Are you done yet, Malcom dear? I have the nicest baked custard – just fresh eggs and milk – it won’t do your indigestion a mite of harm.’

He grumbled: ‘I’ve been gastric all day.’ Swallowing a deep bellyful of wind, he brought it back with an air of virtuous injury. ‘Listen to that!’

‘It’s the study, son, that does it.’ She hurried to the range. ‘But this’ll keep your strength up … just try it … to please me.’

He suffered her to remove his empty plate and to place a large dish of custard before him. As he slobbered it down she watched him tenderly, enjoying every mouthful he took, her raddled figure, in broken corsets and dowdy, gaping skirt, inclined towards him, her shrewish face with its long thin nose and pinched-in lips doting with maternal fondness.

She murmured, presently: ‘I’m glad you’re back early tonight, son. Your father has a meeting.’

‘Oh, no!’ Malcom reared himself in startled annoyance. ‘At the Mission Hall?’

She shook her narrow head. ‘Open air. On the Green.’

‘We’re not going?’

She answered with a strange, embittered vanity: ‘It’s the only position your father ever gave us, Malcom. Until he fails at the preaching too, we’d better take it.’

He protested heatedly. ‘ You may like it, Mother. But it’s damned awful for me, standing there, with Father Bible-banging, and the kids yelling “ Holy Dan”. It wasn’t so bad when I was young, but now when I’m coming out for a solicitor!’ He stopped short, sulkily, as the outer door opened and his father, Daniel Glennie, came gently into the room.

Holy Dan advanced to the table, absently cut himself a slice of cheese, poured a glass of milk and, still standing, began his simple meal. Changed from his working singlet, slacks and burst carpet slippers, he was still an insignificant and drooping figure in shiny black trousers, an old cutaway coat too tight and short for him, a celluloid dickey and a stringy black tie. His cuffs were of celluloid too, to save the washing; they were cracked; and his boots might have done with mending. He stooped slightly. His gaze, usually harassed, often ecstatically remote, was now thoughtful, kind, behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. As he chewed, he let it dwell in quiet consideration on Francis.

‘You look tired, grandson. Have you had your dinner?’

Francis nodded. The room was brighter since the baker’s entry. The eyes upon him now were like his mother’s.

‘There’s a batch of cherry cakes I’ve just drawn. You can have one, if you’ve a mind to – on the oven rack.’

At the senseless prodigality Mrs Glennie sniffed: casting his goods about like this had made him twice a bankrupt, a failure. Her head inclined in greater resignation.

‘When do you want to start? If we’re going now I’ll shut the shop.’

He consulted his big silver watch with the yellow bone guard. ‘Ay, close up now, Mother, the Lord’s work comes first. And besides’ – sadly – ‘we’ll have no more customers tonight.’

While she pulled down the blinds on the fly-blown pastries he stood, detached, considering his address for tonight. Then he stirred. ‘Come, Malcom!’ And to Francis: ‘Take care of yourself, grandson. Don’t be late out your bed!’

Malcom, muttering beneath his breath, shut his book and picked up his hat. He sulkily followed his father out. Mrs Glennie, pulling on tight black kid gloves, assumed her martyred ‘meeting’ face. ‘Don’t forget the dishes, now.’ She threw a mean, sickly smile at Francis. ‘It’s a pity you’re not coming with us!’

When they had gone he fought the inclination to lay his head upon the table. His new heroic resolution inflamed him, the thought of Willie Tulloch galvanised his tired limbs. Piling the greasy dishes into the scullery he began to wash them, rapidly probing his position, his brows tense, resentful.

The blight of enforced benefactions had lain upon him since that moment, before the funeral, when Daniel had raptly told Polly Bannon: ‘I’ll take Elizabeth’s boy. We are his only blood relations. He must come to us!’

Such rash benevolence alone would not have uprooted him. It took that later hateful scene when Mrs Glennie, grasping at the small estate, money from his father’s insurance and the sale of the furniture, had beaten down Polly’s offer of guardianship, with intimidating invocations of the law.

This final acrimony had servered all contact with the Bannons – abruptly, painfully, as though he, indirectly, had been to blame: Polly, hurt and offended, yet with the air of having done her best, had undoubtedly erased him from her memory.

On his arrival at the baker’s household, with all the attraction of a novelty, he was sent, a new satchel on his back, to the Darrow Academy: escorted by Malcom; straightened and brushed by Mrs Glennie, who watched the departing scholars from the shop door with a vague proprietary air.

Alas! The philanthropic flush soon faded. Daniel Glennie was a saint, a gentle noble derided soul who passed out tracts of his own composition with his pies and every Saturday night paraded his van horse through the town with a big printed text on the beast’s rump:
‘ Love thy neighbour as thyself.’
But he lived in a heavenly dream, from which he periodically emerged, careworn, damp with sweat, to meet his creditors. Working unsparingly, with his head on Abraham’s bosom and his feet in a tub of dough, he could not but forget his grandson’s presence. When he remembered he would take the small boy by the hand to the back yard, with a bag of crumbs, to feed the sparrows.

Mean, shiftless yet avaricious, viewing with a self-commiserating eye her husband’s progressive failure – the sacking of the van man, of the shopgirl, the closing of one oven after another, the gradual decline to a meagre output of twopenny pies and farthing pastries – Mrs Glennie soon discovered in Francis an insufferable incubus. The attraction of the sum of seventy pounds she had acquired with him quickly faded, seemed dearly bought. Already wrung by a desperate economy, to her the cost of his clothing, his food, his schooling became a perpetual Calvary. She counted his mouthfuls resignedly. When his trousers wore out she ‘made down’ an old green suit of Daniel’s, a relic of her husband’s youth, of such outlandish pattern and colour it provided derisive outcry in the streets, shrouded the boy’s life in misery. Though Malcom’s fees at the Academy were paid upon the nail she usually succeeded in forgetting Francis’ until, trembling, pale with humiliation, having publicly been called as a defaulter before the class, he was forced to approach her. Then she would gasp, feign a heart attack by fumbling at her withered bosom, count out the shillings as though he drew away her very blood.

Though he bore it with stoic endurance the sense of being alone … alone … was terrible for the little boy. Demented with sorrow, he took long solitary walks, combing the sick country vainly for a stream in which to guddle trout. He would scan the outgoing ships, consumed with longing, stuffing his cap between his teeth to stifle his despair. Caught between conflicting creeds, he knew not where he stood; his bright and eager mind was dulled, his face turned sullen. His only happiness came on the nights that Malcom and Mrs Glennie were from home, when he sat opposite Daniel by the kitchen fire watching the little baker turning the pages of his Bible, in perfect silence, with a look of ineffable joy.

Daniel’s quiet but inflexible resolve not to interfere with the boy’s religion – how could he, when he preached universal tolerance! – was an added, ever-present goad to Mrs Glennie. To a ‘Christian’ like herself, who was saved, this reminder of her daughter’s folly was anathema. It made the neighbours talk.

The climax came at the end of eighteen months when Francis, with ungrateful cleverness, had the bad taste to beat Malcom in an essay competition open to the school. It was not to be endured. Weeks of nagging wore the baker down. He was on the verge of another failure. It was agreed that Francis’ education was complete. Smiling archly for the first time in months, Mrs Glennie assured him that now he was a little man, fit to contribute to the household, to take his coat off and prove the nobility of toil. He went to work in Darrow Shipyard as a rivet-boy, twelve years old, at three and six a week.

By quarter-past seven he had finished the dishes. With greater alacrity, he spruced himself before the inch of mirror and went out. It was still light, but the night air made him cough and turn up his jacket as he hurried into High Street, past the livery stable and the Darrow Spirit Vaults, reaching at length the doctor’s shop on the corner, with its two bulbous red and green vials and its square brass plate: DR SUTHERLAND TULLOCH: PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON. Francis’ lips were parted, faintly, as he entered.

The shop was dim and aromatic with the smell of aloes, assafútida and liquorice root. Shelves of dark green bottles filled one side and at the end three wooden steps gave access to the small back surgery where Dr Tulloch held his consultations. Behind the long counter, wrapping physic on a marble slab spattered with red sealing wax, stood the doctor’s eldest son, a sturdy freckled boy of sixteen with big hands, sandy colouring and a slow taciturn smile.

He smiled now, staunchly, as he greeted Francis. Then the two boys looked away, avoiding one another, each reluctant to view the affection in the other’s eyes.