Authors: Esther Freud
Mr Mac and Me (28 page)
‘They threw me a line, I remember that. But it was all the strength I had to untangle myself from the boom. They heaved me in, and gave me brandy, and I was taken away to a hospital where they stitched up my face.’ Jimmy puts his hand up to the scar which is pale as he is now, a rough seam of white.
‘It was later they told me about the chaplain. I have no memory of it. They say he must have been taken by the swell. I didn’t know that till later. And then for a long time I didn’t know anything at all.’
‘He was looked after at Lyme Regis by a family called Blunt,’ Ann says. ‘They think it might have been the propeller that struck him on the head. He couldn’t remember anything. Not where he came from. Or who he was. And there was nothing left on him but the gold sovereign.’
‘Not any more.’ He smiles at Ann, and she blushes fiercely and raises her fingers to her throat.
‘So when did you get back?’ Mother asks.
‘A few days ago. But I wasn’t coming by without a gift. So when I saw the sign for the sale . . .’ He looks over at me then, and his face breaks into a smile.
‘What the . . . ???’ Father rocks back on his heels. And I step away from my piece of wreck and stare at it with the others.
‘What have you got there?’ Mother frowns.
‘What is it anyway?’ Ann looks disgusted. She has one hand on her pearls, as if she daren’t let go of them, and with the other she holds tight to Jimmy Kerridge.
‘I . . . it’s . . .’ I look at it with new eyes. A charred, scarred wreck of metal. ‘It’s something that is needed, I was collecting, for a friend.’ I turn and I rattle it out before they can ask another question.
My arms are aching. I don’t have the strength to walk another yard, but all the same I drag the Zeppelin down the street, fast as I can, until I’ve reached the Lea House gate. I hoist it over and climb in after it, and then, lying it across my arms, I heave it up the path.
‘Hello!’ I don’t see her until she’s opened the door, blinded as I am by metal. ‘What have you got there?’ Mrs Mackintosh puts out a hand.
‘I . . . I . . .’ I have no words to tell her. All I want to do is set it down and leave.
‘What a marvellous thing!’ Mac is beside her. ‘Where on earth did you get it?’
‘Did you find it?’
‘It’s the wreck. There’s nothing else it could be.’
‘Come in, come in.’
‘Thank you,’ I manage, and then, with no warning, tears are pouring from my eyes, blinding me, stopping my breath.
‘It’s all right.’ Old Mac eases the Zeppelin from my arms, and Mrs Mac draws out a handkerchief and presses it into my hands.
‘My sister, Ann . . .’ now my tears are falling freely I don’t want them to stop. ‘I carried it from Westleton, and I thought . . . I thought she’d be . . .’ I gasp for one more sob.
‘Westleton? That’s not so easy.’ Mac lifts it and brings it to stand beside the fireplace, and we all look at it, just as we once looked at the gesso. ‘But it is beautiful. I’m proud to think we shot it down.’ He goes close and inspects each strut and hinge, and for a long time no one speaks as he lets the imprint of its surface show him how it is made.
‘It’s for you,’ I swallow. I was a fool to think there was anyone else who would admire it more. Mac stays still, his back to me. ‘Thank you.’ He doesn’t turn around.
‘It’s very kind,’ Mrs Mac tells me. ‘Thank you from us both.’ And Mac keeps his face turned away from me as he stoops over the singed frame.
It’s night when I leave. I look behind me and see that there’s a chink of light running above the window ledge. I step back and rap on the glass.
‘Hello?’ Mrs Mac mouths at me.
‘Tape up the window,’ I tell her.
‘What’s that?’ she asks.
‘Blackout paper,’ I shout. ‘You need more.’
She nods, serious, and waves goodbye and as I walk away down the garden I’m followed by the flickers of the lamp as she does her best to tug down the blind.
I’ve a letter in my hand. I’m to post it first thing in the morning, Mac says. Or before if I can manage. And in payment he gives me a penny and a new German word.
Bild
. He says it means picture. And I’m so pleased with it that Mrs Mac gives me another.
Bunt
. It is the name for colours all together. It’s a word that we don’t have.
The envelope is addressed to a Mr William Davidson, of Glasgow. I don’t show it to Ann. It hurts me not to, but I can’t bring myself to take it out until she’s gone to bed. She’s an engaged woman now. Father will say yes to anything. And she walks about with her head held high. ‘Night then, Tommy,’ she climbs the ladder, and I want to follow her and bite my teeth against the pearls to show her they’re not real.
Dear William Davidson,
I wonder how you are and how this war is affecting you? It has nearly finished me off completely. I have been down here for ten months now and nothing seems to get any forwarder. I am sending you some watercolour drawings of mine and I shall be glad to know whether you would like to or can buy one or more of these. They are quite straightforward frank work and have been much thought of by the few people who have seen them. I have done some much larger work (that is, in size) but of course to buy these is a larger consideration. These I am sending you I would catalogue at £10 10s and I would be glad to let you have one or more at £7 7s each.
If you can see your way to take even one you would be doing me a great service. And if you don’t want any of them please don’t hesitate to return them.
With kind regards to you,
Yours sincerely
C R Mackintosh
Pressed tight inside the envelope and wrapped in fine layers of paper are three pictures.
Larkspur
,
Witch Hazel
and
Gorse
. I take a clean strip of linen and lay it down before I spread them out. I smile to see my birds amidst the larkspur, crowing and comfortable, and I find a nut-brown finch, and then another, kissing, among the stems of gorse. Soon they will be speeding by mail train to Glasgow, and as I pack them up again I consider these small pieces of our village travelling out into the world and wonder how long it will be before I set off too.
Father’s not had a drink since Ann got well. And he doesn’t have one now. Not even with the news that Ann and Jimmy are to marry at the end of the month. Jimmy has an official letter. Discharged. Medically unfit for naval service. He holds it out, and as we huddle round he nods and smiles but he doesn’t say a word. Ann takes it from him and reads the words herself.
I shoot her a sharp look, but she doesn’t meet my eye.
‘They’ll be giving Jimmy a certificate too,’ she says proudly, ‘signed by His Majesty the King.’ And she hands Jimmy back his letter and he takes it, as he must have taken so many of her own, unread.
‘What will you do now?’ Mother asks him and he says that next week he’ll be starting with the greengrocer, hauling sacks, delivering orders. Mr Steley. Opposite the pier.
‘Mrs Kerridge says we must make our home with her, to be closer to Jim’s work,’ and she looks over at Jimmy and she bites her lip to stop her whole self smiling. ‘I’ve put in for nursing training, so I can help out at the hospital at Henham with Mary. I can go in by bicycle. It’s not far. The boys from the brigade do it – taking and carrying messages, back and forth from Southwold, as much as six times a day.’
‘And what’ll we do here?’ Mother’s voice is hollow. ‘How will we manage losing you again?’ And although I can see she’s trying not to show it, her face creases with the pain.
‘Thomas,’ Father puts a hand on her arm. ‘He’ll be going nowhere.’
Mother turns to me. ‘Thomas,’ she says. And I hear the echo of those other names. William, William, James. William, James, Thomas. ‘Thomas,’ she says again, and she catches hold of my hand.
I watch Mac over the days that follow to see if he’s a man with money. I inspect his face for a trace of £7 7s, or even of £10 10s, and when I don’t find it, I scan the walls and ledges of his house to catch a glimpse of the watercolours returned. But I learn nothing. Instead I come across him, wandering through the lanes, standing on the beach, using his banned binoculars to watch the naval flying boats searching the sea for signs of enemy ships. They fly so close to the water that they have to hop over the pier at Southwold, and as they leap, Mac raises his binoculars as if he daren’t lose sight of them for a moment. I say nothing. Instead I walk past the Lea House late at night, and I’m glad to see that there is a new layer of blackout paper sealing up the window. But one evening, as I’m passing, the door opens and the flare of a lamp flashes out into the dark. I spin around to see if anyone else is watching, and when I turn back, the tall black shadow of Mr Mackintosh is walking down the path towards the gate. I stand still against the bridge and hope he doesn’t see me, but, the lamp snuffed out, he turns inland, and moves off in his dark cloak. I follow him. Careful not to drag my foot too heavily against the ground.
Mac cuts over the green and walks down towards the river. He stops by the ferry and peers across, and then turning, he hurries off along the path. I run from hut to hut, keeping to the shadows, Danky’s with its nets tucked messily below, Shrimp’s and Watson’s and May’s, and when he gets to Thorogood’s, Mac crouches down and lights the wick of the lantern. ‘Come in if you’re coming,’ he says, as it flickers into life, and I hobble out from my hiding place and, glad of the dark to cover my blushing, I step into the shed, pulling the door closed, hard as it will go.
Mac says nothing. He lifts a sheet of Whatman from a shelf and lays it on the table beside two stems of flowers. Anemones they are. One dark purple, upright as a tulip, the other lighter, furrier, a shade closer to blue. Without taking off his coat he begins mixing his colours. He holds them to the lamp and goes on stirring, shaking his head as he does so, and muttering, ‘Stupid, selfish, stubborn . . .’ the words turned around to pierce only himself.
I keep quiet. He’s forgotten I am here. And still cursing, he starts on a leaf. It is the colour of seaweed, with the same forked edges and frills. ‘There you are then . . .’ he’s talking to the anemones now, and as he works, the paint darkening and lightening from tip to stem, he begins, slowly, to calm.
‘Will Mrs Mackintosh be starting her gesso of the May Queen soon?’ I ask after some long time.
Mac wipes his brush and dips it into green. ‘My wife can’t work unless she has tranquillity,’ he says. ‘And that it seems I’m unable to provide. All day she’s been trying and failing to make a start on a new panel. She’s been asked, we both have, to enter a work for next year’s Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London. She’d like to make a set of panels . . .’
‘Panels?’ I’ve still not had a chance to show her the pellets of my rabbit-skin glue.
‘
The Voices of the Wood
, she wants to call it.’
‘My wood? The Hoist?’ And Mac looks up, amused.
‘Her own wood, I expect,’ he says kindly as he bends back over his work. And I see he means the wood of her imagination. That grey, green dripping world she invented with her sister, with its women, and its flowers, and the long weeping strands of their hair. ‘The truth about Margaret Macdonald,’ Mac says slowly, frilling the edges of a leaf, ‘is that she has genius. Where I have only talent. And now through this . . . merry dance I’ve led her, her genius is being sapped away.’
I wait for him to darken the wine-stained stem of the first anemone but he looks so forlorn that I offer up, ‘But it was you who made the Glasgow School of Art.’
‘That is true,’ he frowns as if he’d half forgotten. ‘But Margaret was half if not three-quarters in all my architectural efforts.’ He stops then and looks up. ‘When I made the Willow Tea Rooms for Miss Cranston, it was my wife that determined the colour scheme. She designed the cutlery, the carpets, curtains, metalwork, lighting. She even designed the waitresses’ uniforms. And arranged the flowers. You know Miss Cranston had flowers sent fresh from her house in Nitshill three times a week. And the waitresses had to look just so. Miss Cranston interviewed each one, and if she liked a girl and had thoughts of hiring her, she’d go and pay a call and meet her parents. See what kind of home she came from.’
I think of Sir Bly calling round to see where Mary had been raised, but in a village as small as ours everything is known.
‘Margaret and her sister Frances came to the art school together.’ Mac is bent over his brush. ‘That was before we moved to the new building. By then they’d set up in a studio of their own. Poster design, leaded glass and metalwork. They put on exhibitions, caused quite a stir, especially after the editor of the
Studio
magazine paid them a visit and wrote glowingly of their talents. And lucky that he did, for there were enough others who were ready to tear apart their work. “Ghoulish,” people said it was. “Hideous.” One review even asked the authorities not to halt until such offences should be brought within the scope of the Further Powers.’
‘Further Powers?’ I ask, for he’d said it with such menace.
‘A branch of the police introduced to curb drunken and unruly behaviour on the streets.’ He laughs. ‘And all for a poster.’ There is green on his brush again and he’s filling in the tips at the top of the stem of the second anemone. I watch from over his shoulder. There are no birds here. I’ve already searched, unless there is one hiding in the bowl of the flower. And I think of my own starlings, grown to half their size, chattering and scrapping in a gang. Who are your birds for? I want to ask him. And I wonder if, like mine, they are the ghosts of his brothers, the ones he lost and the one that ran away to sea. And that’s when I see the eye, and I laugh, and my hand flies to my mouth. The eye is black, and now that I’ve caught it, the rest of the body is clear as day. The bird is upside down, that’s all. The stalk a beak, the fluff of down – the ruff around its neck. I’m grinning so hard I’m sure he’ll notice. And I know who the bird is then. It’s him.