Mr Mac and Me (10 page)
Authors: Esther Freud
It’s peaceful here in their house. I stand and breathe. There is a jug on the table filled with rosehip, and on the mantel are brambles thick with berries. The pile of books is still there, stacked and orderly, the spines lined up against the table’s edge. They are the same books as before but in a different order and I slide my pamphlet in amongst them. I feel myself lighten, my conscience clear. I can go. But as I turn away I catch sight of an oblong purple box at the far end of the mantelpiece. There is a card tucked behind it and as I approach I get a whiff of that same sweet smell of liquor that seeped through the paper of the parcel I delivered.
Dear Herr Rennie Mackintosh
, the card says.
Here is a small gift for you and your wife. I hope it gives you some pleasure in these difficult times. And that you do not see it as a bribe. As you know I await eagerly news of more flower drawings so that I may collect them together for a book. There are twelve you have been kind enough to show me, including those you did on Holy Island, but if I am to publish I will need considerably more as each one adds to and reflects the beauty of the others
.
Do let me know how you are getting on. And never imagine that our warring countries have altered my deep affection for you both.
In hope of better times.
With kind regards,
Your friend, Hermann Muthesius
Hermann Muthesius. I struggle over the name, trying to find the Gaelic in it, imagining it in one of Betty’s songs. But I am stopped by the double Herr of Hermann and Herr Mackintosh, for I’m sure that it means Mr in German. ‘Herr Mackintosh’. I shouldn’t say it. And I lift the top of the oblong box and find, nestled there, six round chocolates resting in the paper.
They can’t like them very much. Or maybe they like them so much they are saving them for best, and I count the four dented empty nests and imagine Mac and his wife limiting themselves to one each week. I slide my fingers into the box and draw one out. It sloshes hollowly, and the smell of the dark chocolate fills my nose, but when I put it into my mouth the taste of cherry brandy explodes there. I freeze, blowing my cheeks out like a bloater to avoid the risk of swallowing, and step as carefully as I can to the window where I force open the catch and spit it out. A dribble of chocolate runs down the wall and I spit again, leaking the syrupy mess over the sill. But all the time I’m coughing and gagging I know that I’ll have to take another of the evil chocolates or they’ll guess someone was here. If there are four, they might forget from one long week to the next how many they have eaten. But if there are five . . . And so with my nose pinched up I take its twin, and looking round to check nothing else is disturbed I slip out of the house, waiting until I’m in the marshes before I hurl the black bomb with its liquid centre far out into the grasses where a bittern might come across it and, cracking it open with her beak, feed it to her young.
Our soldiers are being sent to France. Father slaps them on the back and stands them a drink, taking one himself, seeing as they’re nearly gone. ‘William,’ Mother frowns across at him. But he ignores her.
I take out my copying. There are no boats in the margins now, not since I have my own sketchbook, and almost no crossing out and blots. Runnicles is pleased with me. He doesn’t say so. But he’s happy that I’ve stopped wasting my time with drawing and dreams of sailing off to sea, and I’m careful to keep the paper Mac gave me stored away out of sight.
‘Thomas,’ I don’t realise at first it’s my own name that’s being called. ‘Thomas!’ Father’s pint slams down on my table, sending a long pale splash of beer across my words. ‘Tell these gentlemen about your friend old Mac. They’ve seen him in the village. Been wondering about him. Say he’s out all hours.’ There is a raised ridge of paper where the ale has settled and the ink I’ve used is bleeding from the words. ‘Snooping around with those spyglasses of his.’
‘Mr Charles Rennie Mackintosh’, my heart is beating, ‘is an architect from Glasgow. He built a school there.’ I don’t tell them it’s a school of art. Because I’m not sure what that is. ‘And a church. And he’s made furniture too. Chairs taller than a man, and clocks like merry-go-rounds with the numbers upside down. And now he’s here. Painting. He’s taken over Thorogood’s shed, down by the river. And he’s made it into a studio.’
Father is staring at me. The soldiers too. And Gory, who is propped up in a corner, rolls his eyes. I drop my head and frown at the underwater writing like an inlet on my page.
‘He uses the binoculars to examine things more clearly. Colours . . . and shapes . . .’ I’m making this up now, ‘so he’ll know where the green of a leaf might change from one shade to the next.’
Father slurps his beer. ‘We’ve had all sorts in here,’ he turns to the men. ‘Before the war. Artists and poets. A playwright even. All gone back to London now.’
‘All gone,’ Gory echoes him. ‘Except old Mac.’ And one of the soldiers spits, right there on the floor. He’s a broad man with a meaty face. I don’t like him. Or the other one either. ‘Going about with his spyglass. A wonder no one’s reported him.’
Mother says nothing and nor do I. Instead I run over the words I’ve used to check I’ve not betrayed him.
Hertz, Dekorative, Wiener, Rundschau
. No, I’ve not let any of these out. Nor have I told them about the requests from Hermann Muthesius to hurry up and send him more of our village’s flowers.
‘Ahh well,’ the soldiers bend in to their beer. ‘Probably harmless enough, although where there’s smoke there’s often as not fire,’ and in the lull I rip out my page, and with my arm around the paper for protection I begin copying out my copying again.
I’m glad the next morning when the soldiers set off for their boat, their long cloth bags heaved across their shoulders like sorry-looking sows. When our first soldiers left we were down on the shore waving them off, and our second too, but today as we stand in the doorway of the Blue Anchor Mother says we can’t spend our life on goodbyes. We’ll have new men billeted with us by the end of the week and what will we do two weeks later when they leave?
Father catches hold of me as they walk away. ‘You’ve been warned then?’ He frowns down at my foot. I nod, although I don’t know what he means. ‘No more roaming about with your old Mac. You hear me?’ And he thumps me hard on the shoulder, just because he can.
I was planning to do it anyway, but now I’m more determined than before. I take my paintbox, and after school I scoot along the river, ducking from one shed to the next till I come out by Thorogood’s. There’s no wind today, not even a breeze, and the sky lies crisp and blue above the boats. ‘Hello,’ Mrs Mac looks up, and I take a crate and sit myself in the shadow of their hut. I ease the lid off my squares of paint, the colours dancing, and I stare down at them, my brush hovering, too afraid of turning any one of them to sludge.
‘What will you paint?’ Mac swivels round, and when I hesitate, he shows me how to soak the board in a basin if the colours need a wash. ‘You can even clean your paints,’ he eyes me, guessing. ‘Just take a cloth and wipe off the top layer.’ And, relieved, I tell him that I’m going to make a picture of HMS
Formidable
, Jimmy Kerridge’s boat.
‘Has that not sailed?’ Mrs Mac looks up. ‘You’ll not choose something you can actually see?’ And I smile, because I can see it – Jimmy and his friends waving from the deck. I can see the hats they wore and the scarves around their necks, and the wide grins they had as their ship headed away, just as if I had been there myself. I wet my brush and dip it into blue, and once I’ve made the first line, it’s easier to make another, so that soon my page is streaked across with colour.
There’s a thick, warm silence as we work. I’ve sensed that silence, when I used to watch them, but now that I’m inside it, it’s as solid as a coat. If it was flax you could twist it into rope, and I glance at Mac, growing the centre of an aster as if he’s God himself and just created it, the way he sits so still and fierce in his dark suit. He is nothing like any of the artists that I’ve seen, certainly not like the Miss Bishops, who wore cotton smocks when they went out, and came home – at least the younger of the two – with paint in their eyebrows and their hair. But if Mac is neat then Mrs Mac is tidier still, standing, so sure and precise that not a drop of colour falls on to her clothes, not even on to the pale gloves she wears to protect her hands from the sharp sting of the turps. I imagine her painting on the white carpet of her Glasgow home, the white curtains hanging at the window, a glow of embers smouldering in the bed of the fire.
HMS
Formidable
has twenty-one sails. At least I imagine she must if she’s to carry seven hundred and fifty men, and supplies for them all, and ammunition. I give her three masts, and a multitude of rigging, so that soon my page is one big shimmery mess of canvas, halyards and flags. There are portholes, cannons, lifeboats, oars. I take the paper to the tin basin and I wash it clean. Colours dribble off the page, but my boat remains there in a mist, and rather than ask for Mac’s old toothbrush to scrub it off entirely, I take out the pencil I’ve brought and sketch in its shadowy shape.
When I next look up, the afternoon is gone. The sun, streaming downriver from the west, has turned the water turquoise and the sky is glittering with its last bright light. I stand up and squint behind me at the village. The inn will be about to open its doors, Mother may even now be standing on the street, waiting to give me a sharp word. And Father will be storming. Quickly I wash out my brush and taking the handkerchief from my pocket I wipe my hands, my arms, even my legs below the knee. ‘There’s a mark on your face,’ Mrs Mac tells me, putting down her own tools, and when I clean it off, she laughs and points at my nose. ‘Let me,’ she shakes her head, and dipping the corner of the handkerchief in water she dabs at the smudge.
‘Goodbye,’ I say as I back away, but Mac is still working on his flower, his eyes boring into the paper, and he only grunts as I turn around and run.
I’m up early to check the beach. The tide is in, and there are hoofmarks from the soldiers cantering across it at first light. But there’s nothing sinister. Not that I can see. And so I head back into the village to do an hour with Allard before school. As I round the corner I see the herring girls hurrying to catch the first ferry, their shawls around them, their boots sparkling with dew. There is Betty, and Meg, and the two girls from the blacksmith’s, and on the corner, Mrs Lusher’s three, waving to them with high arms.
Allard is already muttering when I arrive: ‘For all the nonsense they teach you at that school of yours, you could be here with me all day, learning a trade, it’s high time you did something useful.’ And I let him grumble because, after a year turning that wheel, there’s nothing he can say that I’ve not heard before.
‘If you let me twist the rope again?’ I offer, but it’s only jesting, because we both know I’d never risk missing even five minutes of school. Mother would hear of it, the news would reach her like a dart, and there isn’t a single person in the village who wouldn’t fear for my hide when she found out.
But even so, as I sit turning my wheel, I watch Allard closely, the way he measures out the twine, chooses the thickness, binds it smooth and slippery and strong. ‘If only you had a brother,’ he muses. And I hang my head, and wonder that he hasn’t noticed there are other boys in the village. And some of them with brothers, as many as three. ‘The other boys,’ he shakes his head, as if he’s heard me, ‘they’re not cut out for this work. They’re rough and fidgety, with no patience for listening. It’s a dying art, the rope-making, and one reason that it’s dying is that those that have the patience for it are dying out themselves.’
I keep turning. It’s not true that I have more patience than the next. But I’ve seen the look on Mother’s face when I hand my money over, and one day I hope to surprise her, when she sees how much I’ve managed to keep back.
The Sailor’s Reading Room is empty, although behind the partition door that leads into the snug, I can hear the low murmur of fishermen, their day’s work done. Outside is bright and squally, the front door shivering when the wind whips in from the sea, but no one lifts the latch to enter, and for the most part the wooden room is quiet and still. I search the glassed-in cabinets for a ship which I can draw. It seems I do need to look at the
Formidable
after all, but without it, or any chance of seeing it, I settle on the
Wrestler
– a three-masted frigate, made over the winter of 1897 by the fisherman Sloper Hurr. It sits in a glass cabinet, its sails set into the wind, its bow curved to support the figurehead, made in miniature, a woman, her neck banded by a necklace of black beads. I kneel down beside the cabinet and take out my notebook, my eyes on the details of the ship – the keel, the stern, the square rig sail, while my fingers do the work.
It is a little like the copying I do at Runnicles’, writing up the progress of the war, Battle of Tannenberg, Battle of Heligoland Bight, Siege of Tsingtao, without ever taking my eyes from the board. But today I count the lifeboats strung along the gunwale, the portholes below, the stays, shrouds and backstays of the rigging.
‘Hello, old boy, what you doing here?’ It is Danky, standing in the doorway to the snug.
I struggle to my feet, forcing my notebook into a pocket, sliding my pencil up a sleeve. ‘Nothing much,’ I tell him, ‘just keeping out of the weather.’ And as Danky pulls on his jacket, I give a last quick look at the
Wrestler
as I follow him out through the door.