Authors: Esther Freud
Mr Mac and Me (13 page)
‘Yes,’ he looks at me. It seems he has travelled out to sea.
‘There’s nothing there,’ I tell him as strongly as I can. ‘You can put the spyglasses away.’ And with my arm flung wide, I sweep the beach. ‘You’ve no need of them.’ I can’t seem to find another way of saying it. ‘There is nothing there to see.’
‘Nothing?’ he mutters. ‘No danger, you think?’ And together with our bare eyes we scan the horizon to check that it is true.
The next Sunday Betty is on the marsh before me. I hear the whistling of a blade of reed grass, stuttery and squeaking, even before I round the corner to our hollow.
‘You have to keep it straight,’ I tell her, ‘stretch it tight between your thumbs,’ but as I bend to strip my own leaf from a cane, I catch my foot against a root and I am down. Blood courses through me as the ground comes up to slap me on the back.
‘Here,’ Betty has her hand out to me, but I’m too ashamed for help.
‘Thomas?’ she says, as if to check that I’m alive, and when I still don’t rise, she lies herself beside me, and together we look up at the sky.
‘How’d it happen?’ she says.
‘How’d what happen?’ But all the same my heart is hammering in my chest.
‘Your foot?’ And the air around me freezes, for as long as I can remember no one’s asked me to explain. ‘Why’s it twisted?’
The sky is very pale. The crash of the sea is running in my ears. And all I want to do is get up and race away.
‘It’s not twisted,’ I tell her. ‘That’s how it’s meant to be, that’s how it’s growed.’
‘No need to be angry.’ She’s up on one elbow.
‘I’m not angry.’ And it’s then I hear that I am shouting.
‘There was a storm,’ I tell her. ‘Three fishermen from Dunwich lost their lives. And Father was out after a rabbit. When he came in . . .’ I drift off, because she doesn’t want to know how he came in with a bottle of whisky, empty, in his pocket, and how my mother said it was the bells she could hear, pealing from across the marsh, and how she cried and held me tight against her and would never have let me go if she hadn’t had to crawl to the top of the ladder and lower herself down to open up the snug.
‘I don’t mind it,’ Betty says. ‘Not for myself.’ And we lie like that watching the seagulls flapping lazily as they arc in from the shore.
I try my hardest with the picture, but it doesn’t improve. Even when Betty sets her narrow shoulders and turns her face to me without a flicker of difference from the week before. I strengthen her mouth, and work on the sad, bare outline of her eyes, and when she doesn’t look away, I force myself to keep looking, just the same.
And then rain flies in against us, slanting down from a cloud that isn’t even overhead, and I slap my sketchbook shut and slide it in between my jacket and my shirt. ‘It’ll have passed by in ten minutes,’ I say, but Betty stands. ‘I can’t afford to take a chill. Not with . . .’
Shivering she wraps her shawl about her shoulders, and bent forward into the weather she walks fast towards the lane.
I’ve already been to church that day, but once Betty’s gone I traipse across the marsh towards its pebbled tower. The graveyard is empty. Even the starlings have deserted. I stop by the back gate and look in at my mother’s offering, a late-flowering rag of rose, quivering in its pot. I step inside, and kneeling, I put my nose to it but there is no smell. William, William, James, William, James, Thomas, I whisper, and I huddle beside them and imagine it is James who is my friend today, the second James, alive till the end of his first year. We’re alike as streaks, that’s what I’m sure of, up to no good, clattering stones on windowpanes, scrumping apples from the orchard, daring each other to rush across the yard at Dingle Farm before Buck comes out with his fist raised. When I’m with James my foot is straight. And I can run as fast as any of them. It’s crooked only for the sake of those who’ve gone before, and we race, the two of us, hurtling to safety under cover of the Hoist, admired by everyone who’s quick enough to see us go.
The next Sunday I have a griddle cake for Betty. ‘Here,’ I say, but before I can even reach for it she dips her hand into her own pocket. ‘Look,’ and she draws out a narrow slip of paper, smelling as it does of fish. It is a letter, her name written on the envelope in thick black ink. And without a thought I speak it out. ‘Betty Maclellan.’
‘Yes?’ she looks at me, her eyes as clear as glass. ‘That’s me.’ And flushing, I steady myself by staring down at the familiar name of Mrs Horrod’s house.
‘Open it then,’ she’s nodding, and so I slide the thin page from its envelope. But I cannot tell one word from another. Only the last, and it’s the word she’s pointing at as she stretches her arm over mine.
‘Meg.’ I swallow. And I feel the shadow of her sister’s ghost wash cold across my skin.
‘Yes,’ Betty smiles. ‘She said she’d write as soon as she was well.’ And she takes the letter from me and begins to read: ‘I am still not allowed to step out of the house, and Mother is feeding me up with mash and mutton. I’ve promised to eat anything at all, as long as it’s nae herring.’
Betty laughs and her mouth opens like the bow of a boat. If I could draw her now, I think, and I sit down on the grass and flick through my book until I find her.
‘Ready?’ I wait while she arranges herself, and I see that I will have to start again for there’s nothing of this new glad girl in what I’ve drawn. I take a last glance at her old sad face before I turn the page, and with the blaze of happiness coming off her I sketch fast with quick upward lines until I have her, until I have the inside of her at least.
‘Let me see,’ she says when I stop. But I snap shut my book. ‘It’s not done yet.’ I imagine the colours in my paintbox, and the mixing I will have to do to get the creamy denseness of her hair and the flecks of sun against her cheeks. ‘Will you come next week?’ I ask.
‘Next week?’ she looks surprised. ‘Next week we’ll be away. The train leaves on Friday and by Monday I’ll be in Stornaway waiting for the boat to take me home.’
Of course. The herring season has to end. I know that. All week the weather has been closing in. And if the girls stay away too long they’ll have nothing to show for their hard work, with the lodgings they have to pay for and the meals they must buy, and I remember the scone I lifted from my mother’s baking, wrapped in a cloth for her and already crumbling in my pocket.
‘Thank you.’ Betty stretches out her hand for it, and breathing in the singed smell of currants, she breaks it open and offers back a half.
‘No,’ I shake my head, although my stomach winces, and I sit and watch her as she eats, pulling off small pieces and dropping them, one by one, into her mouth.
‘Will you have the picture done before I go?’ she asks, still chewing, and I promise that I will. That I’ll bring it round to her at Mrs Horrod’s before the end of the week. I think of offering up the use of the handcart too, and myself with it, to bring her trunk down to the ferry, but I daren’t risk the laughter of the village boys as I push along beside her.
‘Or if it’s not done,’ Betty leans towards me, ‘you can send it in a letter.’ She eases the pencil from me and writes her address in a large looped hand on the last page of my book.
Mac is restless with Mrs Mackintosh gone. It’s been three weeks and still she’s not returned. I sit beside him outside Thorogood’s shed and work on my picture of the
Formidable
, and I say nothing when he leaves the second winter stock half done and starts in on a sprig of gorse. In the evening Mac comes regular to the Blue Anchor now. He orders a pint of ale, and before he has drunk it, he’s off, and word is he’s down the Bell chasing it with whisky. Father saves his beer, slowly going flat on a shelf above the fire, for often as not he’s back within the hour, needing more whisky to stomach the taste of it gone sour. I watch him from the corner where I’m working at my copying, and I watch Father too, topping up his own beer, which is never watered down. But Father’s drinking is companionable tonight. And Mac, by the third visit, is in the mood to talk. Mrs Mackintosh, he tells us, is being held captive by her family, forced to intervene in her sister’s wretched marriage. Frances Macdonald is an artist too, married to a man once feted, now overlooked, much as he himself has been. The lot of them once worked together, Margaret, Frances, Mackintosh and the husband, Herbert MacNair. They exhibited together, and much was thought of the promise of The Four, as they were known. But not everybody liked them. The Spook School, some Glasgow critics called them, hobgoblins in the cupboard, and MacNair took himself off to Liverpool to the art school there, to work as a professor.
Spook School. I can see Frances Macdonald’s naked women, their fingers on their lips, and I watch my father listening, and wonder what he’d think if he knew. ‘A professor,’ he smiles encouragingly, and he nods in my direction as if four years with Runnicles will set me on my way.
‘But MacNair,’ Mac sucks the last drops of whisky from his glass, ‘Bertie MacNair, he had trouble with his drink, too exuberant it made him, and unpredictable, and there were some at Liverpool who did not appreciate his work. After a few years, and he was a married man by now, the art school let him go. So there was no work for him, and no studio to paint in, and a young boy – Sylvan – to support. They travelled back to Glasgow so that Frances at least could teach embroidery at the art school there, but his wife’s family,
my
wife’s family, the Macdonalds, unhappy with his behaviour, came up with a plan to send him off to Canada on a one-way ticket.’
‘Canada?’ Father looks hopeful, as if there might be someone prepared to give him a new start.
‘But now,’ Mac sighs, ‘he has returned. With less than no money. And so my poor wife has been called away to see if she can smooth things out.’
Old Mac closes his eyes as if he’s said more than he intended. And indeed there’s a pause while we gulp down our surprise at hearing so much of his talk. But the truth is, Father too has much to say on the subject. And soon he is telling a story that I’ve not heard before. It is a story about a man called Wideawake, a preacher in these parts who’d had no formal training and never was ordained because, for the first half of his life, he’d been a villain and a drunk. He’d had a rough start, that was for sure, his mother died when he was young, and he’d grown up in the harsh care of his father, who’d cast him out to live with the farm workers who beat him and taunted him and drew him into their bestial ways. When eventually he came into his inheritance – his father falling, drunken, from his horse – he used every penny that might otherwise have gone to his young family at home on drinking and whoring until they were all but ruined. And then, his daughter, a little thing who’d failed to thrive, for all he’d deprived her of his notice, sickened and died. Hearing she’d called his name in the last hours of her life, he felt so wretched he hardly cared to be alive, and he rode into town where he spent all day in the inn, and then, for nothing but the pleasure of seeing someone hurt, he picked a fight with a farmer returning from market. But he’d not reckoned on the farmer’s strength, and with the first punch he was knocked down. As he lay reeling, he thought how he might find someone to teach him how to box, and surprise the man on his next visit to town, but he was too sore to do it now, and so he climbed on to his horse. Before he’d got half home, his horse, a docile animal that knew its way, turned off the road and took him into a glade of trees. And it’s here the miracle happened. He heard music like a thousand distant trumpets. And as the sound increased, there came a blessed feeling of release. That’s how he explained it, this man, Wideawake, as he later came to be known, for the evil simply fell away, and he was changed.
I glance at Father. And I can’t but wonder what he has planned.
‘From that day he made it his life’s work to help others find peace.’ He looks thoughtful as if he’s pondered this story long and hard. ‘He had to let them know it was never too late. And from dawn to dusk he could be found wandering the rivers and the lanes, or standing at night on the beach below the cliffs at Dunwich by a guttering fire, or by the shelter he put up for the soldiers who patrolled there in defence against Napoleon’s army. It was those soldiers who gave him his nickname, Wideawake, because that’s what he was, always ready to raise up his small flag and let them know a sermon would commence.’
There is silence while Father and old Mac drain their drinks.
‘MacNair’s not a bad fellow.’ Old Mac’s voice is slurred. ‘But how can a man prosper when all doors are closed to him? When the life he is born for is made impossible.’
I look towards Father. You see? I want to say. But he is blind to me.
‘The life he is born for,’ he repeats instead. ‘What’s that then? What were you born for, eh, Mr Mackintosh? Or have you done it, with your buildings?’
Mackintosh frowns and pushes away his glass. ‘Me?’ he says. ‘I’ve hardly begun. Just watch me.’ And unsteadily he gets up and walks out into the night.
I’ve never sent a letter before, although we’ve practised writing them at school – the address at the top, and the date below, and the envelope pasted down with spit or glue. If you have wax, then you can stamp it shut with your own seal. Runnicles melted a stick of dark-red sealing wax right there in the classroom, turning the air bitter, letting the slippery melt of it drip across the fold. While the wax was still warm he took from his pocket a small brass stamp and pressed, and in an instant the wax had dried, and there in the centre was an encircled R. We all strained to see over our desks. ‘Sir,’ Ned Walpole called. And Runnicles, instead of reprimanding him, passed it along his row.