Wives at War (45 page)

‘No,' Kenny said. ‘I'm not taking him away.'

He touched her arm, drew it back and lifted the toddler.

For an instant he was awkward and unsure, but when Davy sagged against his shoulder Kenny suddenly discovered how easy it was to support him.

‘Well, Master Davy Quinlan MacGregor,' Kenny said, ‘I think you're here to stay. What do you have to say to that now?'

But Master Davy Quinlan MacGregor had nothing to say, for in spite of Rosie's yelp of delight, he had quietly fallen asleep.

*   *   *

The day was grey and windy with a spit of rain. Eleven funerals were taking place that afternoon and several retired council workers had been drafted in to help keep traffic flowing.

Mourners were crowded between the monuments and hearses were lined up on the gravel driveway like tanks on a production line. Babs found it hard to believe that death had undone so many for there were mounds everywhere and, even as Doreen's coffin was carried along the pathway, workmen were digging more graves.

Polly wore fur, black fur, and the Russian hat. Christy Cameron looked disreputable by comparison, his reefer jacket buttoned up to the throat. Rosie and Kenny were models of respectability, however, in their Sunday-best clothes, the baby, in a faded romper suit, clinging like a limpet to Kenny's chest. He seemed to be aware of the sober nature of the occasion and was unusually quiet. Babs and Archie came last, Archie looking dignified and mature in a navy-blue three-piece, pinstripe suit, topped by a bowler hat. Babs had sponged her best black skirt and had dyed a pair of stockings to a shade that approximated black, but her one black coat was thin and threadbare and she had settled for a charcoal grey swagger instead.

Archie had closed the office at one. They had come up by tram to Paisley Cross and had eaten lunch in Hubbard's tearooms. It was odd to see Archie detached from the office, to watch him use a fork and eat his pudding with a spoon, to ride up to Manor Park in the back of a taxicab with him.

The droning voices of priests and preachers rose and fell in the air. The cemetery was situated above the suburbs and provided a panoramic view of shipyards and factories and a multitude of tenements, villas, bungalows and mansions, the pattern pierced by steeples and cranes all wreathed, all shrouded in the silent advance of the rain.

Polly had arranged everything, had paid for everything. Possession of money and a telephone certainly made life a lot simpler, Babs thought. The only thing Polly had been unable to do was find a minister to commit poor Doreen Quinlan's body to the ground. Archie had taken care of that and Walter George's brother was already positioned at the graveside, his robes flapping in the wind. He clasped a Bible in one hand and looked, Babs thought, not bored or indifferent but weary, for, so Archie had told her, he had been burying the dead in his parish across the river all week long and his faith in the Resurrection and the Life had been shaken because of it.

There were flowers on the coffin, flowers from Kenny and Rosie, flowers from Polly and Christy. The cards looked white and mournful, the ink beginning to run in the lightly falling rain.

Babs felt guilty at not having taken flowers to the funeral home. She wondered how it was done, how the body was picked up from the morgue, what formalities were called for, what signatures. She trusted Polly – Polly and Kenny – to keep everything within the letter of the law, or almost so, for the orphan who wasn't really an orphan added a certain shiftiness to the proceedings and strengthened her need to have it over and done with.

Halfway through the committal, just as two hard-pressed grave-diggers in overalls and flat caps came loping up to lower the coffin into the ground, Babs began to weep. She hadn't expected to shed tears and didn't know whether she was crying for the Belfast girl, for herself, or for Jackie. She watched the toddler swing and kick in Kenny's arms, restless now and beginning to grizzle, watched her brother-in-law divert him, tickling him with his forefinger. She heard Davy laugh. She watched the coffin going down and saw the wind riffle the pages of the Bible and the minister, his muddy black shoes close to the edge of the grave, mouth words of farewell – and she wept for Jackie, just Jackie.

Rosie scowled and shook her head. Polly leaned into Christy, touching his shoulder, taller than he was in her Russian hat and leather boots: Lizzie Conway's girls gathered together at the grave of a stranger who had been caught in a web of her own naïve desires, who had searched for the man who had loved her in the forlorn hope that he would love her still.

Babs wept until the first spadeful of earth struck the coffin lid and Kenny put Master Davy down to toddle along the path and Polly went to thank the minister and, presumably, pay him for his trouble; then she blew her nose on a handkerchief Archie had whipped from his breast pocket and, leaning close, whispered in his ear, ‘God, but I'm dyin' for a cigarette.'

‘Don't pretend you're not upset,' Archie told her. ‘I know you're thinking about your husband.'

‘Yeah,' Babs admitted. ‘Be odd if I wasn't.'

‘Well,' Archie said, ‘take comfort, Mrs Hallop; wherever they lay our mortal remains it's the same short road to heaven for all of us.'

‘Heaven?' said Babs, surprised. ‘Don't tell me you believe in heaven?'

Very tentatively, Archie took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘Don't you?'

18

Angus was sure that his sisters were up to something. He was too straightforward a chap to spy on them but during the past few days he had detected a change in their behaviour that he'd found puzzling.

As a rule he didn't have much to do with May and June and they were so self-contained that they more or less ignored him, apart from a bit of bickering about who got the last pancake on the plate or the last wine gum in the packet. Angus was too gallant to argue over trivialities and invariably let them have their way, not out of a sense of inferiority or because his sisters intimidated him but simply because they were girls.

He was surprised when May and June took to the woods, though, and rather resented the fact that his sisters had invaded his kingdom without asking his permission or suggesting – as if they would! – that he provide an escort.

There were no dangers in the woods, no leopards waiting to pounce or head-hunters skulking in the ferns. Primroses and daffodils grew wild in the clearings and if May or June had been astute enough to gather a posy or two to bring back to the farmhouse then Angus wouldn't have thought twice about it, particularly after he overheard Miss Dawlish tell Grandma Lizzie that the girls were growing up and spreading their wings, though he wasn't quite sure precisely what that meant.

He kept a wary eye on the pair from the top of the wall by Ron's sty as they headed, hand-in-hand, along the dirt path that led to the fence that bounded the trees. If Grandpa Bernard had been there or Aunt Polly's American friend he might have persuaded them to accompany him on a little sortie just to see what the girls were up to. But Grandpa Bernard was at work and Mr Cameron hadn't been back since Christmas, and he had a feeling that if he told Dougie then Dougie would accuse him of being a tattle-tale.

On Thursday afternoon, with light rain falling, the girls trotted in from school, ate the scones and jam that Miss Dawlish had laid out for them, changed shoes for Wellingtons, overcoats for oilskins and, with a casualness that didn't fool Angus for one minute, announced that they were going out for a walk.

Outside in the yard, Angus shouted after them, ‘Hang on, I'll come with you,' but May glanced at June, June at May, and the pair, giggling, took to their heels and left him standing there with a bucket of pigswill clasped to his chest, and egg all over his face.

Frowning, he poured swill into Ron's trough and rubbed Ron's head with his knuckles while Ron grunted and snorted and lapped up the slop. Then, deciding that his little sisters were definitely up to something, Angus dumped the bucket and set out for the woods.

He slipped along the back of the stable-byre where Dougie and Grandpa Peabody slept, darted across open ground to the hawthorn hedge and, using the hedge as cover, ran down to the fence, climbed over it and headed for the big beech tree that had been blown down by a gale the year before he'd been born.

The branches had been sawn off and carted away long since but the trunk, grey and smooth as elephant-hide, still lay where it had fallen, and he had ‘camped' under it many a time to observe the rooks feeding their chicks in the tall elms and squirrels rooting about in the birch and willow trash. He pulled himself up on to the slippery surface of the beech and, braced like the Jungle Boy, like Mowgli, cupped a hand to his ear and listened to the faint, ever-present mutter of industrial activity from the valley far below and, much closer, the flighty alarm call of a blackbird.

The woods were uncannily quiet this afternoon. The rooks had abandoned their spiky half-built nests and there wasn't a squirrel or a rabbit to be seen.

Then he heard it, a tiny, tinny, unnatural
Tink.

Angus rotated his head.

Tink. Tink.

He slid from the beech and crept stealthily towards the sound.

He could make out his sisters' frail voices now. He was used to hearing them complain, whisper, cajole and giggle, but excited chattering was so unusual that it made the hair on the back of his neck rise as if a cold wind had blown over him from behind.

Tink, tink, clink.

May saying, ‘Oh, you silly. That isn't going to do. If you're going to do it you have to do it properly.'

June saying, ‘I'm telling you, we'll never manage it. We need a rope or a ladder and where are we going to get a rope or a ladder?'

‘There's a rope in the barn, I think, but what good would a rope do?'

‘I don't know. We could lasso it, I suppose.'

And May saying, ‘Try another stone.'

Clink, clang
– then a skittering sound, like rats running over grain.

‘See, see,' May cried out. ‘It moved. I saw it move.'

The girls had their backs to him and were so intent on what they were doing that a German tank could have come crashing through the undergrowth and they wouldn't have noticed.

Angus watched May fish another stone from her oilskin pocket, a pebble that she'd brought down from the field or had collected on the road home from school. He felt a strange surge of annoyance when she stood under the broken branches of the pine tree and tossed the stone up, a typical girl's throw, so feeble as to be laughable. The pebble failed to reach its target.

May jumped back as the stone fell to the earth.

Angus said, ‘I wouldn't do that if I were you.'

May and June spun round.

‘Go away,' June snapped. ‘Go away. It's got nothing to do with you.'

‘It's ours,' May snapped. ‘And we're not sharing.'

‘What do you want it for anyway?' Angus enquired.

‘It's a nice piece of material and it's just going to waste,' said June.

‘Grandma Lizzie can sew it up for us,' said May.

‘Make dresses,' said June and, stooping, picked up the pebble and weighed it in her hand.

‘Don't
do
that,' said Angus.

‘Will if we like,' said May.

‘Don't you know what that is?' said Angus.

‘It don't belong to anybody,' June said. ‘It's ours. We found it.'

‘It's a parachute mine,' said Angus. ‘It's dangerous.'

‘Nonsense!' June told him.

‘It could go off at any time,' Angus said. ‘We'll have to report it.'

‘It's ours, it's ours,' June cried and, fired by anger, turned and pitched the pebble high into the branches of the pine.

The mine was enormous, much bigger than Angus had ever thought a mine would be. It had an odd shape, not spherical, more like the hull of a sail boat. It was made out of a light grey metal so clean and pale that you could see the little screws in their sockets and the two curving welds that held the plates together. It dangled on eight or ten cords, all twisted, from a ragged balloon of material that had hooked itself on one of the pine branches.

Angus watched the pebble tumble through the branches like the ball in a machine in an amusement arcade. It took a little hop, struck the edge of the mine casing and dropped to earth.

The mine swayed and the tree branch creaked.

‘Bloody hell!' said Angus.

‘You swore. I'm telling Miss Dawlish you swore.'

The mine reversed direction, spun slowly and ponderously clockwise as the twisted cords unravelled. Then it sagged, jerked down eight or ten inches and the parachute above it ripped a little more.

‘See what you're doing,' June shouted. ‘You're ruining it.'

She dipped and snatched up the stone and raised her arm.

Angus cuffed her open-handed across the mouth. He saw her mouth open and her tongue flick spit on to the fuzzy lapel of her oilskin coat and heard May scream and felt her little fists pounding ineptly on his shoulder.

He didn't move, didn't apologise, didn't fend her off. He stared up at the object in the pine tree and watched it sway again and sink a little further towards the ground. Then he swung round, grabbed May by the belt of her oilskin and dragged her back, tripping and lurching, dragged her away from the menace in the tree while June, her face scarlet and tears jumping from her eyes, scooted for the fence and the farmhouse, shrieking at the pitch of her voice:

‘He
hit
me. Angus
hit
me. Angus hit me and – and – he
swore.
'

*   *   *

When Christy told her that they would be sailing from Greenock on Friday night Polly indulged herself with a moment of absolute panic. She threw up her hands and let out a cry that seemed to come from the pit of her stomach, and when Christy sought to console her by taking her in his arms she pushed him off so violently that he stumbled and almost fell.