The Low Road (5 page)

Annie answered the phone. “Why didn't you call last night? We were waiting.”

He took no offence at being lectured by a child, feeling he deserved it.

“Sorry. I got caught up with some colleagues.” He knew his excuse was pathetic. “How's your mum?”

“No change.” There was a clear sigh from the phone receiver. “Wait a minute, I'll get her.”

“I've lost my book, and I can't decide if we should have fish or a nice bit of lamb for dinner . . .” He winced at the lack of a “hello” or “how are you?” or acknowledgment that he was not at home.

“Maybe you could stop by the butcher on St. Steven's Brae,” she continued.

He heard Annie's voice call out, “Mum, McAllister is in Glasgow.”

“Sorry, sorry, you're not here, are you?” Joanne's voice trailed away. Her voice was light and sweet and breathy, and it terrified him. It was as though there was no substance to her. As though she were a glass with no contents.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” he said. “Can I bring you anything? Books? Magazines?”

“You come back safe,” she said, “that's enough.”

“Are you well? Are the girls well? Is everyone looking after you?”

“You've only been gone a night.” She hadn't noticed it had been two. “I know, bring me music, Scottish music. See if that new singer I heard on the wireless, Moira Anderson, has made any records. Or that singer on the television, Kenneth McKellar.”

Not to his taste, he loathed
The White Heather Club
, now Joanne's favorite program, but he said, “I'll go shopping today.”

“I have to go now, the roses need watering. 'Bye, McAllister.” And she was gone.

Gone before he had a chance to reply, a chance to connect with the once laughing, teasing, woman he loved. He was left holding the receiver and wishing that candid news of Joanne's health, her state of mind, would mysteriously transmit through the ether, reassuring him all was well. Or otherwise. He thought of calling back. He didn't. He considered calling the
Gazette
and asking Don McLeod his opinion. But didn't. He left the call box, knowing that only thirty-six hours had passed. It seemed so much more.

The miles between himself and his fiancée were not the only distance between them. He accepted this as a consequence of her injuries. His fading enthusiasm for the post of editor of a local newspaper, in a place so foreign to a Glaswegian it might as well be Iceland, was not a new sensation. But never before was it so plain.

Unable to resolve his unease, he did not wait for a bus. Instead, in unusually clear sunshine, he strode out for the
Herald
office. The light showed just how shabby the city was; the coal-smoke-encrusted sandstone facings of the elegant but intimidating architecture around George Square seemed more pigeon-splatted than he remembered. The empty spaces around Queen Street train station, where a stray wartime bomb had fallen, were bright with fireweed. And all around, morning traffic was building up, and the crowds on the pavements were moving quickly, in and out, shoppers busy shopping, before the Saturday noon closing time.

He made his way down Buchanan Street, between the substantial buildings with ornate doorways and foyers with carved stonework around the windows of the upper floors invisible to the passer-by. The offices of the law firms and businessmen and insurance companies loomed over the street, turning it into a canyon of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture.

He first stopped at the tobacconist he knew kept his brand. That done, he visited his favorite record and sheet music shop. He bought jazz for himself, the requested Moira Anderson for Joanne and, on a whim, also bought her a new recording of Beethoven's
Pastoral
Symphony.

Once more at his borrowed desk, he realized he should have bought something for the girls. Books, he decided. He was on his way out when he ran into Mary.

“Where're you off to?” she asked.

“To the bookshop to buy presents for the girls.” Why he left out that they were his fiancée's daughters he didn't know. But he was aware of being equivocal.

“How old are they?”

“Nine and eleven and a half.”

“I'll come with you. I'm good at choosing presents for girls.” She was remembering all the birthday presents from relatives who always underestimated her intelligence. “Besides, any excuse to spend time in a bookshop . . .” She laughed.

They made their way up to Sauchihall Street. He told her he hadn't heard from Mr. Gerald Dochery senior. She told him she hadn't any news either. Neither of them mentioned the previous evening.

McAllister chose the books, Mary added some colored pencils and notebooks and a writing set with pretty kittens on it for Jean.

“Perfect for a nine-year-old girl,” she told him. For Annie she'd selected a journal in red leather with a gold-colored lock and key and matching gold trim. It was expensive. He didn't mind.

“There's no dates in this, so she can start her journal anytime,” Mary said.

He was surprised to see that she had chosen for herself a novel by Ian Fleming. The lurid book cover, the author, and content were not at all to his taste. He offered to pay for the book. She refused. Purchases paid for, she turned to him, and as the sun caught her hair he was reminded of a raven's wing.

“If I hear anything of Jimmy McPhee I'll leave a message for you at the
Herald
. And remember, I want to know immediately if Mr. Dochery, father or son, contacts you. You've got my home number.”

“I promise.”

She smiled, and then was gone, walking up the steep slope to
Garnethill and the Art College without a break in her stride. It reminded him of the difference in their ages.

That evening, after cooking fish in milk with mashed potatoes for his mother, and not knowing what to do with himself on his last night in the city, other than drink, he went to the Cosmo Art Cinema to see an Italian film. The cinema was packed with students, and he found the subtitles hard to read, but he enjoyed it. A stray thought that he would have enjoyed it even more if Mary Ballantyne were with him he dismissed.

Leaving the cinema, the white-light night carried a sense of the Highlands, the air, the water, the mountains shadowing the horizon, but not the scent. And on the walk back past the pubs, the hum of the city, the dirt, the trams and buses and taxis, the shouts and the singing of the well inebriated, the murmurs of lovers as they kissed before parting—home to their parents and overlarge families filling every space in the too small tenement buildings—he could feel the city worming its way under his skin, reclaiming him.
You're Glaswegian, McAllister, and don't you forget it.

Y
esterday, without any expectations, his mother had suggested he come to early-morning mass. Hearing her moving about the kitchen, McAllister surprised himself by getting up, quickly dressing and joining her over her single cup of tea, as she would be taking communion.

“I'll come with you,” he said.

The small nod was all the approval she'd show, but as they walked down the hill she allowed him to link her arm through his. For the first time in many years, if not a lifetime, he felt a connection with this distant woman who was his mother.

He sat at the back of the church, an observer, a former Christian. Nothing in the service made him consider changing his nonbelief. But he enjoyed the sense of community, enjoyed his mother's presence there on the wooden pew next to him. Since meeting and loving Joanne Ross he had begun to understand what family meant to most people—not that he regarded himself as most people; his sense of himself as a freethinking Scottish intellectual had set him apart from his family. He was, he hoped, now wiser, able to mock his former, youthful, self-importance.

They walked back, nodding to neighbors and fellow parishioners. Many were curious and not a few astonished to see John McAllister coming out of the church with neither a funeral nor a wedding being celebrated.

“Oh, it's yerself, John,” one man acknowledged.

“Aye. Fine day,” McAllister replied, racking his brains for the man's name and not finding it.

“ 'Morning, Mrs. McAllister,” said a short round woman dressed entirely in black, a faded browning black, as though her clothes had been made from blackout curtains left over from the war.

A couple, middle-aged,
my age
, he thought, the woman with childbearing rounded stomach and hair more grey than birth-blond, smiled, saying, “Great to see you, John. How you doing, Mrs. McAllister?”

“Fine,” he and his mother replied.

“Well, here's a surprise,” said two women, obviously sisters, as they were as well matched as a pair of bookends. Again he couldn't place them.

“The McCrossan sisters,” his mother quietly informed him when they were out of earshot.

This he found hard to take in, as he remembered them as stunning, and remembered how he had fancied both of them, flirting with them at church socials, which, when still at school, his father had forced him to attend.
To please your mother
, his dad had said, the emotional blackmail usually working—that and the chance to be in the presence of the McCrossan girls.

Outside the tenement, McAllister could feel his tummy rumbling. He was holding his mother's elbow, steering her over the broken flagstones, when a man came towards them out of the gloom of the close entrance. In the bright light of a sunshiny June day, he could not make out who it was. A neighbor, he would have thought—if he had given it a thought; he was busy thinking of breakfast, for he could almost smell the bacon frying in the pan, and he would make the ten-o'clock train back to the Highlands.

“Is that you, Gerry?” His mother was peering up at the large
man standing in front of her blocking her way. “What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Mrs. McAllister. I was wanting a word wi' your John.”

McAllister examined the man who was keeping to the shadow just under the archway as though coming into daylight might damage him, much as light would damage a vampire. Gerry Dochery was the spitting image of his father when he was in his forties, the time McAllister remembered the older man best. But McAllister felt that the resemblance was surface only; his father's friend had been cheerful, always ready with a joke and a laugh, always including the children in his smiles. This younger version was desolation personified with a side serving of malice.

This Gerry, “Wee Gerry,” at well over six feet tall, and looking like half of that wide, was carved from granite, and his obsidian eyes, which were fixed on his former childhood friend, were as animated as the stone itself. A folded cutthroat razor was keeking from the top pocket of his black suit, worn with a matching black shirt.
Used to be black was only for funerals and existentialists,
McAllister thought, then suppressed a smile, mocking himself for being so pretentious.

“Something funny, McAllister?” Gerry Dochery had a high voice, not in the least in keeping with his hard-man image.

“Not at all, Gerry . . . just pleased to see an old childhood pal.”

Gerry Dochery said nothing, not willing to pursue the subject in front of Mrs. McAllister.

The razor was an unseemly declaration of his trade. McAllister didn't immediately see that. His mother did.

“I can't be standing about for all the neighbors to see,” Mrs. McAllister said. “Come on, John, Gerry, I'll put the kettle on.” She bustled down the close and had the door unlocked and open before either of them could find excuses to refuse her.

“Thanks all the same, but I have to be going.” Gerry Dochery
tried his best to get out of the offer of hospitality, but Mrs. McAllister was firm.

“You'll do no such thing, Wee Gerry.” She was off down the hallway to the kitchen, not checking they were following her, knowing they would. She took off her coat, kept on her hat, put the kettle on, told her son to fetch the milk and the bacon from the outside meat safe. “A cup of tea with old friends,” she said, looking directly at him so Gerry had to look away. “Surely you've time for that.”

And she didn't like what she saw, and she too looked away. His father's pronouncement that his son was lost to him now made sense. Remembering the times she had fed the boy, wiped his nose, cleaned him up when he fell off a high wall, carefully picking out the tiny stones stuck in the flesh of his knees and palms before dabbing the wounds in iodine, made her look again to see if there was anything of that lad left.

He caught her eye. Seeing himself as she saw him—an altogether different Gerry—made him flush. And angry. But he knew he had to swallow it if he was to find out what he needed to know.

It was the strangest of tea ceremonies, the three of them in the sitting room—it was Sunday, after all.

She was using her best china wedding service, which she kept for visitors. “How's your father?” she asked Gerry as she handed him a cup and saucer.