Wildflower Hill (2 page)

B
eattie Blaxland had dreams. Big dreams.

Not the confused patchwork dreams that invade sleep. No, these were the dreams with which she comforted herself before sleep, in her trundle bed rolled out on the floor of her parents’ finger-chilling tenement flat. Vivid, yearning dreams. A life of fashion and fabrics; and fortune, of course. A life where the dismal truth about her dismal family would fade and shrink and disappear. One thing she had never dreamed was that she would find herself pregnant to her married lover just before her nineteenth birthday.

All through February, she obsessively counted the weeks and counted them again, bending her mind backward, trying to make sense of the dates. Her stomach flipped at the smell of food, her breasts grew tender, and by the first of March, Beattie had finally come to understand that a child—Henry MacConnell’s child—was growing inside her.

That night she arrived at the club as though nothing were wrong. Laughed at Teddy Wilder’s jokes, leaned in to the warm pressure of Henry’s hand in the small of her back, all
the while fighting the urge to retch from the smell of cigar smoke. Her first sip of the gin cocktail was harsh and sour on her tongue. Still, she kept smiling. She was well used to navigating that gulf between how she felt and how she behaved.

Teddy clapped his hands firmly twice, and the smoke rose and moved with the men and their brandy snifters to the round card table that dominated the room. Teddy and his brother, Billy, ran this not quite legal gambling room above their father’s perfectly legal restaurant on Dalhousie Lane. It was at the restaurant that Beattie had first met them. She’d been working as a waitress; that’s what her parents still believed she did. Teddy and Billy introduced her to Henry, and soon after, they’d introduced her to the club, too: to the darkly glittering underbelly of Glasgow, where nobody cared who she was so long as she looked pretty. She worked half the night serving drinks and half the night keeping Teddy’s girl, Cora, company.

Cora patted the chaise to invite Beattie to sit down. The other women gathered near the fireplace; Cora, her short curls flattened over her ears with a pink satin headband, was the acknowledged queen of the room. Though none of the others liked the idea, they were careful enough not to stand too close for fear of unfair comparisons. Beattie probably would have done the same if Cora hadn’t decided that they should be bosom friends.

Cora grabbed Beattie’s hand in her own and squeezed it: her usual greeting. Beattie was both in sacred awe of Cora and excruciatingly jealous of her heavily made-up dark eyes and her platinum hair, her easy charm and her endless budget for
tasseled dresses in muslin or crepe de chine. Beattie tried, she really tried, to keep up. She bought her own fabric and sewed her own clothes, and nobody could tell they weren’t designed and made in Paris. She wore her dark hair fashionably short but felt that her open face and large blue eyes ruined any chance of her seeming mysterious and alluring. Of course, Cora was born to her confident glamour; Beattie would always struggle for it.

Cora blew a long stream of cigarette smoke into the air and then said, “So, how far along are you?”

Beattie’s heart spiked, and she looked at Cora sharply. Her friend looked straight ahead, her red lips closed around the end of her cigarette holder. For a moment Beattie even believed that she’d imagined the question: surely her shameful secret couldn’t make its way from the dark inside to the brightly lit club.

But then Cora turned, fine curved eyebrows raised above her sloe eyes, and smiled. “Beattie, you’re practically green from the smoke, and you’ve not touched your wine. Last week I thought you might be sick, but this week . . . I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Henry doesn’t know.” The words tripped out, desperate.

Cora softened, patting her hand. “Nor a chance of me saying a word. I promise. Catch your breath, dearie. You look terrified.”

Beattie did as Cora said, forcing her limbs to relax into the languid softness expected of her. She accepted a cigarette from Cora, even though it made her stomach clench. She couldn’t have another soul noticing or asking questions. Billy Wilder,
for example, with his florid cheeks and cruel laugh: oh, he would find it great sport. She knew, though, that she couldn’t hide it forever.

“You didn’t answer my question. How far along?” Cora said in a tone so casual she may as well have asked Beattie what she’d eaten on her lunch break that day.

“I’ve not had a period in seven or eight weeks,” Beattie mumbled. She felt unbearably vulnerable, as though her skin had been peeled off. She didn’t want to speak of it or think of it another moment. She was not ready to be a mother: the thought made her heart cold.

“Still early, then.” Cora pulled her powder compact from her bag and flipped it open. Loud laughter rose from the card table. “Still a chance it won’t stick.”

For a breath or two, the oppressive dread lifted. “Is that right? I know nothing. I know I’m a fool, but I . . .” She’d believed Henry’s promise that if he withdrew from her body at precisely the right moment, this could never happen. He’d refused to take any other measures. “French letters are for the French,” he’d said. “I know what I’m doing.” He was thirty, he’d fought in a war; Beattie trusted him.

“Listen, now,” Cora said, her voice dropping low. “There’re things you can do, dearie. Have a hot bath every day, take cod liver oil, run about and wear yourself out.” She snapped her compact shut, her voice returning to its usual casual tone. “It’s early days. My cousin’s friend was three months along when the bairn just bled away. She caught the wee thing in her hands, no bigger than a mouse. She was devastated, though. Longed for a baby. Married, of course.”

Married. Beattie wasn’t married, though Henry was. To Molly—the Irish wolfhound, as he liked to call her. Henry assured Beattie it was a loveless marriage made between two people who thought they knew each other well but had slowly become strangers. Nonetheless, Molly was still his wife. And Beattie was not.

She puffed her way inelegantly through half of the cigarette, then excused herself to start work. As she brought round the drinks tray, she considered Henry’s square jaw and his red-gold hair, longing to touch him but careful not to break his concentration. She dared not tell him yet about the child: if Cora was right and there was a chance Beattie could miscarry, then why create problems? Nothing may come of it. It might all be over tomorrow or next week. All over. A few long, hot baths; certainly, it was hard to spend too long in the shared bathroom on their floor of the tenement block, but if she went down early enough in the morning . . .

Henry glanced up from his cards and saw her looking. He gave her a nod: that was Henry, no grand gestures, no foolish winking or waving. Just his steady gray eyes on hers. She had to look away. He returned his attention to his cards as she returned her tray to the little bar in the corner of the room and lined up the bottles of gin and brandy along the mirrored shelves. She loved Henry’s pale eyes; strangely pale. She could understand him through them when he didn’t speak, and he spoke rarely. Once, right at the start of their relationship, she’d been watching him play poker and noticed how stark the contrast was of his pupils against his irises. In fact, she could read his hand in his eyes: if he picked up a good card,
his pupils would grow, while a bad card made them shrink. Almost imperceptibly, noticeable only by the woman who gazed at those eyes endlessly.

This led her to watch the other men at the table and try to predict their hands. Not always easy, especially with Billy Wilder, whose eyes were practically black. But in instances of high stakes, when the men were trying hardest to keep their faces neutral, she could nearly always tell if they were bluffing. Henry thought it a load of rot. She’d tried to show him what she meant, but he’d tipped her off his lap and sent her away from the card table. He’d lost the game for not following her advice and had been in a devil of a mood for days. So now she stayed away. It wasn’t so important.

Cora signaled for her to return; she had gossip to share. “Can you believe what Daisy O’Hara is wearing?”

Beattie switched her attention to Daisy, who wore a sequined tube of beaded net over a silk slip, a silk flower at her neck, and a pair of high Louis heels. The shimmering dress was cut too tight for her wide hips: modern fashion was so unforgiving of hips. It wasn’t Daisy’s fault. A good dressmaker could drape those fabrics so she looked divine, tall, a goddess.

“Lordy,” Cora said, “she looks like a cow.”

“It’s the dress.”

Cora rolled her eyes. But tonight Beattie hadn’t the heart for Cora’s razor-sharp analysis of every other woman’s failings. She listened disconsolately for a while, then returned to the bar.

The evening wore on—clinking glass and men’s laughter, loud jazz music on the gramophone and the ever present smoke—and she began to feel bone-weary and to long for
bed. She could hardly say that, though. Teddy Wilder liked to call her “break-of-dawn Beattie”; many was the time she’d turned up for work at Camille’s dress shop after only an hour or two of sleep. Tonight Beattie felt removed from the noise and merriment. In her own little bubble of miserable anxiety.

At length, Henry rose from the table and scraped up an untidy pile of five-pound notes. He’d had a good evening, and unlike the others, he knew when to stop. Half-joking recriminations followed him across the room. He stopped in front of the bar, seemingly oblivious to what his friends were saying. Without smiling, he stretched out his hand for Beattie. Henry exuded a taciturn authority that nobody resisted. Beattie loved him for it; other men seemed such noisy fools by contrast. And just one glance at his hand, at his strong wrist and his clean square fingernails, reminded her why she was in this predicament in the first place. Her skin grew warm just looking at him.

He pulled her close against his side with his hand down low on her hip, and she knew what he wanted. The little back room waited, with its soft daybed among the stacks of empty crates and barrels. As always, she shivered as she moved out of the warmth of the firelit club, and Henry laughed softly at her, his breath hot in her ear, assuming her shivers were of desire. But in that instant, Beattie felt the full weight of her lack of wisdom, and it crushed her desire to dust.

If he sensed her reluctance, he gave no indication. The last sliver of light disappeared as he closed the door and gathered her in his arms.

The rough warmth of his clothes, the sound of his breath,
the beat of his heart. She fell against him, all her bones softening for love of him. Away from the eyes of his friends, he was so tender.

“My dear,” he said against her hair. “You know I love you.”

“I love you, too.” She wanted to say it over and over, in bigger, brighter words.

He laid her gently on the daybed and started pushing up the hem of her skirt. She stiffened; he pressed himself against her more firmly, and she saw how foolish it was to resist. It was already too late. Why shut the gate after the horse had bolted, as her father would say.

Her father.
Another wave of shame and guilt.

“Beattie?” Henry said, his voice soft, although his hands were now locked like iron around her knees.

“Yes, yes,” she whispered. “Of course.”

Beattie’s skin was pink from the heat of the bath as she dressed in the dank bathroom. A week had passed, and the hot baths were giving her nothing but odd stares from Mrs. Peters, their neighbor. She returned to the flat to find her father at the kitchen table, already at work on his typewriter. A sheen of anxious perspiration lay across his nose, despite the chill air. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Pa relaxed. With every passing day, he drew himself tighter and smaller, like a spider drawing its legs in to die. Laundry hung from the pulley that ran parallel to the kitchen ceiling. Ma was still asleep behind the curtain that divided the living area from the sleeping area.

“An early start?” Beattie asked.

He glanced up and smiled a little. “I might say the same for you,” he said in his crisp English accent. Ma’s Scots accent was thicker than Glasgow fog, and Beattie’s lay somewhere between the two. “You were late home from the restaurant, and here you are up and ready to work again.”

Beattie worked at Camille’s boutique on Sauchiehall Street. Or at least she had for the last three weeks. Prior to that, she’d worked in the dress section at the Poly, a department store where the customers were far less demanding but the clothes were far less beautiful. All the latest fashions from the continent came in to Camille’s, and the wealthiest women in Glasgow shopped there: the wives and daughters of the shipping magnates and railway investors. Beattie regularly witnessed them spend fifty pounds or more on a gown without blinking, while she was taking home four shillings a week.

“You won’t need to work two jobs much longer,” he said, ducking his head and adjusting his spectacles. “I’m sure to be finished soon.”

“I don’t mind.” Guilt pinched her. Pa would be appalled if he knew she was working at the club, relying on the tips of men who found her pretty, or on Henry to slip her a few pounds if he’d had a good night’s winnings. Pa thought she was a respectable lass with her virginity intact.

He returned to his work.
Tap, tap, tap . . .
Seeing him, anxiety so apparent on his brow, made Beattie’s chest hurt. It had all been so different just a year ago. Pa had been a professor of natural philosophy at Beckham College in London. They’d not been well off, but they’d been happy enough, living in a
tidy flat at the college with sun in its windows in the afternoon. Life in London had been exciting to Beattie after growing up in the little border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, with their tiny cold garden that Ma tended so carefully. But Pa had been an outspoken atheist—even though Ma had strong Scottish Protestant objections—and the new dean, a Catholic, had quickly developed a dislike for him. Within two months he’d lost his job and the flat with it.

Just as she was about to step through the curtain to roll away her bed and find her shoes, Pa said, “Do take care of yourself, Beattie, my dear.”