The River Flows On (39 page)

‘Th-thank you. It’s very kind of you. Th-thank you,’ he stuttered again. It’s very kind of you? What was he saying? ‘But I’ll have to say no.’ Surely that was definite enough. They would take no for an answer - wouldn’t they? He could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead.

‘Quel dommage. What a pity. My girls would have enjoyed a handsome young man for a change.’ She swept him a glance which went from his head to his toes - and all points in between. ‘And you would have enjoyed it too.’

‘I-I’m s-sure ... but I-I’m a married man, y-you k-know.’

One of the girls spoke. ‘Darling, most of those we get in here are married men.’

The others laughed.

‘Only not the sort who are madly in love with their wives,’ said Marie-Louise, and just for a moment an expression of the most profound sadness passed over her face. It was gone so quickly that Robbie wondered if he had imagined it. He stood up.

‘I-I’ll be getting on then. Thank you for the meal. It was delicious.’

‘Any time,’ murmured the girl who had made the comment about married men. Somehow Robbie knew she wasn’t talking about mushroom soup.

‘Ow!’ He had hit his thumb with the hammer. Swearing softly under his breath, he extracted a handkerchief from his pocket and bound it round the offending digit. Kate would have bawled him out if she’d seen it. It was none too clean. For a moment he toyed with the idea of asking one of the girls for a bandage. No, daft idea. Presenting himself as a wounded soldier might well lead to other things.

He swore again. He was as human as the next man and he was too honest to pretend that the image of himself entwined with the three girls hadn’t flitted across the private picture screen in his brain several times that afternoon. Three of them together, just imagine it. He didn’t doubt that they could teach him a thing or two ... quite a few probably. But really tempted? Not in a million years.

Sitting on the floor by the almost finished wardrobe, he allowed his head to fall back against the wall and his mind to wander where his thoughts most often went these days - to Kate. Kate, her eyes bright and expectant, turning at the sound of his key in the lock. Kate, standing at the range stirring something, sinking back against him as he slid his arms around her trim waist.

He heard the doorbell ring and then voices - one male, one female. He wondered idly if Jeanne rented out rooms by the hour. Then his mind went back to Kate.

She was turning in his embrace now, lifting her lovely face for his kiss. He could feel the soft warmth of her breasts against his chest. Now he could see them in his mind’s eye, rising to the touch of his gently exploring fingers ...

Something else was going to be rising soon if he didn’t abandon this train of thought, he thought, his lips twisting in a wry smile. But not yet, not just yet. She was shy still - they both were - but she was beginning to offer him her own tentative caresses in return for his own. Caress. What a lovely word. He said it out loud, rolling it. around his mouth.

‘Caress.’

It was a rare word. Could he work it into a poem, somehow? He’d always liked reading poetry, now he was beginning to write it. He hadn’t had the courage to show Kate any of his efforts yet, but he would soon. Most of them were about her. He didn’t think she would laugh at him.

His mind drifted back to the mental image of her, beneath him in the gloom of the box bed, her hair shining against the dull gleam of a white pillow. She was so warm and willing, so loving ... His eyes snapped open and he scrambled to his feet. He was the luckiest man alive, and he wanted to get home to her right now. It was early yet and the days were beginning to lengthen as spring approached. They could go for a walk by the river before tea.

It took him twenty more minutes to finish the job and pack away his tools. Jeanne pronounced herself delighted with his work and paid him what had been agreed, plus an extra half-crown.

‘Call again in a month or two,’ she told him, as they stood in the lobby of the flat. ‘I might be able to find something else for you.’

‘Aye, of course.’ He wondered if he would. Maybe Kate would ban him from coming back once he’d told her the story. She’d be scared he wouldn’t come home with his virtue intact the next time. Aye, this was going to make a rare story.

A door opened behind them. Swinging around in automatic reaction, Robert Baxter stared at the couple coming out. An untidy bed, testament to what they’d been doing for the last half hour, was visible behind them. The girl was still doing up her blouse. The man turned to kiss her, one hand resting, casually proprietorial, on her breast. He squeezed it, and she giggled.

Robbie looked at them with horrified eyes.

‘Pearl Cameron!’ he thundered. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing here? You’d better have an explanation for this, young lady!’ Which, as he reflected afterwards, was a bloody stupid thing to have said. The explanation for what she had been doing was only too obvious.

Pearl jumped as though she’d been stung by a wasp, and went as white as paper. Her companion, however, raised his head and looked Robbie in the eye.

‘Well, if it isn’t the puritanical Mr Baxter,’ he drawled in his elegant, well-bred tones. ‘How very nice to see you again, old chap.’

It was Jack Drummond.

Chapter 26

It had happened at last. Kate felt like dancing out of Dr MacMillan’s surgery. Even when she had missed a period she hadn’t dared to hope. She was beginning to think she and Robbie weren’t meant to have any more children, but now the doctor had confirmed it.

She was walking on air as she went down Yoker Mill Road. It was March, but one of those days when you knew that spring was just around the corner. The sun was melting patches of snow on the top of walls, and crocuses were opening up in the gardens she passed.

Just like me, thought Kate happily. I’ve opened up to Robbie and now our child is opening up within me. He was going to be so happy. When they’d married he’d said that he wanted a house full of bairns.

She was going to miss the studio: the company, the sights and sounds, the smell of the clay, the satisfaction of seeing her designs transformed from paper into a three-dimensional object. Marjorie had given her a great deal of freedom to experiment and develop her ideas. Within a month of starting, Kate had developed a range of crockery which was to become known as Rowan Tree Ware. Marjorie was delighted with it and convinced it was going to become a huge success.

The two young women had developed an easy working relationship. Marjorie, Kate knew, would happily have taken it further. Kate had two objections to that. Politely but firmly she turned down every invitation to the Drummonds’ flat in the West End of Glasgow. There was no way she could sit and drink tea or sip cocktails with Jack Drummond - and she knew damn’ well that Robbie, normally the most amenable of husbands, would refuse point blank to do so. It was bad enough that she occasionally had to meet Jack at the studio, although he didn’t call in often. His interest in the pottery was restricted to the profits it produced.

The greatest obstacle in the path of her friendship with Marjorie was Grace. Not only had she blithely knocked a year off her daughter’s age when responding to Marjorie’s friendly interest in the child - fingers firmly crossed behind her back of course - she had gone out of her way to avoid Marjorie ever catching a glimpse of the little girl. The resemblance was there. She couldn’t take the risk of Marjorie noticing it.

It took all the efforts of the madam and the three girls to stop Robbie punching Jack Drummond in the mouth there and then.

‘You’ll bring the police to the house and they’ll close us down and my girls will be out on the streets,’ said Jeanne urgently. ‘You wouldn’t do that to them, would you, Robert?’ She was pleading with him, her lovely face troubled. She gestured towards Pearl. ‘And she’s willing, this girl-’

‘My sister-in-law.’ The words were innocuous, a mere explanation of the relationship between Robbie and Pearl. The look which accompanied them was anything but. Pearl flinched under the force of it. She hadn’t known Robert Baxter was capable of such anger. Neither had he.

‘You won’t tell Kate, will you, Robbie?’

He was breathing heavily. They had dragged him to a couch in the hall and sat him down on it - a girl at either side of him, hanging anxiously onto an arm each. He shook them off.

‘It’s all right. I’m not going to hit him. Not here, at any rate.’

The girls looked alarmed, but they released their hold on his arms, although they remained seated like sentinels beside him.

Jack Drummond, leaning nonchalantly against the door jamb of the bedroom which he and Pearl had been using, brought out his gold cigarette case. He took one out, lit up and blew several smoke rings before he spoke.

‘Is that a threat, Baxter?’

‘Take it any way you like, Drummond.’

The air crackled between them. There was something in it Robbie didn’t quite understand, but one thing he knew. This man had hurt his Kate, and now he was hurting her sister - only the silly wee bisom couldn’t see that. She was pleading with Robbie now, begging him again not to tell Kate. He lifted a hand to stem the flow of talk.

‘He’s a married man, Pearl. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’ An image of Marjorie Drummond flashed across his mind’s eye. This would crucify her, if she ever learned of it.

‘I know what I’m doing.’

It was a front - he could see that. As much of a mask as her marcelled hair and the heavy make-up she wore.

‘You’re only nineteen, for God’s sake, Pearl. Nineteen!’

‘Mmm. Old enough,’ came the drawl he was learning to hate. ‘And deliciously young enough. You ought to try it sometime, Baxter. Variety is the spice of life, after all. But I hear from Jeanne that you’re quite the old faithful married man. How touching.’

Robbie rose so quickly from his seat that he took his two guardians by complete surprise. As his fist made contact with Jack Drummond’s face he felt nothing but satisfaction. The bastard was going to be nursing a beautiful black eye tomorrow. Good. Let him explain that to his wife and their rich friends.

Jack Drummond, however, albeit pushed back against the wall by the force of Robbie’s blow, was smiling at him. Then he began to speak. And as the words spilled from his mouth, Robert Baxter’s world shattered into a thousand pieces.

As she came down onto Dumbarton Road an elderly man stopped at the sight of her.

‘Have you come into money, hen? Naebody’s got the right to look as happy as you do this afternoon.’

Kate beamed at him in passing. ‘Much better than money,’ she said. ‘Much better.’

He smiled back. ‘Well, God bless you, pet.’

Money, in fact, was going to be tight. However, she could go on working for the next three months - maybe four - and the emergency fund was healthy. A mile or so along the road, the hull of the 534 was still looming, rusting, over the town. Now and again the Clydebank Press reported plans to get work started on her again, but so far nothing had come of it.

Surely something would happen soon? Of course it would, Kate told herself firmly. On a day like today anything seemed possible. Work would restart, the men would be earning again. Once the baby was old enough, she could go back to working for Marjorie. Everything was going to be fine. She walked across the road to the tram stop.

‘Hello there, it’s only me,’ she called out as she pushed open the front door. The house seemed strangely quiet.

‘Robbie, did you forget that you were to collect Grace today? Robbie?’

He was standing staring out of the window, his back to her, and he hadn’t turned to greet her. Sharp as a shard of broken glass, a bolt of anxiety shot through Kate.

‘Robbie, is something the matter?’ She crossed the room and put a hand up to his shoulder, taking an involuntary step back when he whirled around and hissed at her through gritted teeth. ‘Don’t touch me!’