Mr Mac and Me (31 page)

I’ll be your own true guiding star when I return again.’

They’re at the river, and they’re bending to untie the knots that tether Danky’s boat.

‘My thoughts shall be of you, of you, when I return again.’

I creep forward. The tide is high, and Father, swaying, stands not a foot from the river’s edge. ‘Are we ready to depart?’ George Allard swings his arm, and Danky holds the rope tight, waiting for them to get in.

‘Father?’ Alarm pushes me forward. ‘What are you doing on the water?’

The boat rocks as Gory steps into it and laughs.

‘What am I doing?’ Father gives me his old offended look. ‘My duty, that’s what.’ And his head jerks as if for a fraction of a second he’s fallen asleep.

‘Father, if you’re going out on the water, let me come too.’

He pauses for a moment then he seizes hold of my collar. ‘You,’ he draws me close, ‘you’ll be staying here. That’s how I planned it. That’s how it will be. You’ll stay here on dry land, where you’ll be safe.’ He pushes me away, and turning, he lunges down into the boat.

‘But where are you going?’ I need to know.

‘Where d’you think?’ he looks at the far shore. ‘Now get on home. This is men’s business and I’ll not have you dragged into it.’

Danky unloops the rope and flings it down, and taking hold of the oars he leans back to make the first stroke.

‘The spyglasses,’ I call after them. ‘You have nothing to fear. They’re for looking at flowers. I’ve seen him do it. I know.’

Danky’s voice drifts back towards me.
‘Farewell, my love, remember me . . .’

And I hear Father muttering, ‘Flowers. I should say so. The boy has nothing but cloth between his ears.’

The laughter of the other men ripples out over the water.

There’s no one in Thorogood’s shed, so I race back down the lane towards Lea House. It is dark as before. But all the same I rush up through the garden and I thunder at the door. ‘Mr Mackintosh? Mrs Mackintosh, do you hear me?’ And when there is no answer I walk round the side of the house and bang on the window. ‘Hello!’ I call. But it seems there’s no one here.

I stumble home and climb into my bed, and certain as I am I’ll never sleep, soon I’m dreaming of Betty, winding me tight into her shawl, and then later, once I’ve woken and kicked the sheet from round me, I’m sure I hear the tall lady emptying her barrel. It’s the early hours and dawn is creeping in, but there’s the rumble of apples, pouring through my window, and then later still, the sigh of Allard’s wheel, wheezing as it catches the wind, the creak of the pulley as the twine is spun. A fox is screaming. Or is it a peacock escaped from Blyfield House? And then it is morning, for all I can hear are the wood pigeons burbling, the sound as round as pebbles, so soothing I drift back to sleep.

It is late when I wake and Mother is sitting at the table. ‘Morning,’ I say. The stove is out. The chickens are still in. I heave the water bucket in from the garden, and unbolt the hutch. The hens come out aggrieved, their feathers ruffling, the cock high-stepping, eyes darting left and right.

‘Will you have breakfast?’ I ask Mother. She lifts her head and gives me a weak smile. I make tea, careful not to watch the pot, feeding the stove with sticks left out for last night’s fire. ‘Did Father not come home?’ I ask, and she says nothing while I pour leaves into the teapot and picture him, passed out with Danky, sleeping off the night’s adventures on the common.

I stay with Mother for as long as I can. ‘Ann’s only across the river,’ I say. ‘And Mary will be back to visit soon.’ I kiss the top of her head where the parting has pulled her hair to white. And when her back is turned, I run.

The door to Thorogood’s hut is still closed. But it’s not locked and when I push it, I find Mr Mac inside sitting in a fog of pipe smoke. By the look of him he’s been here half the night. He is still working on the snake’s-head fritillary. Sketching with the fine tip of a pencil, a fretwork of squares against the side of the initialled box.

‘She’s back in Glasgow,’ he tells me, before I can say anything. ‘Her sister’s in trouble again.’ And he shakes his head.

‘MacNair?’ I guess.

‘Aye.’ Mac’s soaked his paper in a wash of green. ‘He’s no money, that’s the problem. Although, too often there seems to be enough for him to have a drink.’ He paints in the fine stems of the grasses that make up the leaves.

My breathing slows. I’ve run the length of the harbour to give him my news, but what do I have to tell him? That there are people in the village who don’t know where he’s from? That whisper he’s a foreigner? That consider it their duty to go and tell the police?

He knocks out his pipe. There’s nothing to say. And I take up a sheet of paper and I sketch the stray ears of corn that edge the lane and the thicker, darker reed grass that brought Betty to me when I whistled.

‘Are you not thinking of visiting Glasgow yourself?’ I ask then, hopeful.

‘They don’t want
me
,’ Mac laughs. ‘I’m hardly better than MacNair to them. Now that my business is sunk. No. There’s no one in Glasgow hankering for my return.’ And he stares down at his work. The stems of his leaves lean sharply one way and another. The heaviest bell head droops. ‘You know when John Keppie said goodbye to me, I’d just completed drawings for a training college?’

I didn’t know.

‘Jordanhill. I’d worked long hours at it, sitting up some nights so late that the cleaners found me in the morning, sleeping beneath the desk.’ He pauses and packs his pipe with long trails of tobacco. ‘It was on one of those mornings that John Keppie called me into his office. “We have standards to uphold,” he told me. He didn’t like the empty bottle of whisky lying beside me on the floor. And I wanted to say: “And who has set those standards? Who?” Whisky or not, the drawings for Jordanhill were good. I knew they were. But what did Keppie say when I presented them? “Where are the hand basins? You’ve left no room for a hot and a cold tap.” ’

Mac’s staring at me, but it’s not to me that he’s talking. ‘ “I’ve made places for poets,” I told him, “and now I’m being reprimanded for misplacing the toilet facilities.” But Keppie came closer. He was pale. Business was falling off, he told me, the city was struggling, and his job was to please the client. “While mine”, I shouted, I could feel the whole office listening at the door, “is to make them gasp in wonder.” That was when he asked me to go. And I was glad to. How much longer could we continue anyway, with the shadow of Jessie hovering, unhappily, between us?’

I stare at my boots. I’m wretched for him. That anyone should ever ask Mac to go.

‘It was not long after,’ his pipe is out again, ‘that I set up on my own. I put out my script. C R Mackintosh. FRIBA. Yes. I’d become a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. I sent out letters.
I assure you of my best professional attention . . .
All I needed was a commission. And I waited. And waited. But nothing happened. Not a thing.’ He sighs. ‘I had all day long to think about my woes then. The fight it had been to get the art school finished. Three years of work. Every day. Most of the night too. I had time to think about my father, dying just as I was to start the second stage, and how furiously I’d worked, completing it on time. And within its budget. As I’d promised. At least this time the architects were named as Honeyman, Keppie and Mackintosh. Although that year in
Who’s Who
the Glasgow School of Art was described as having been designed by John Keppie, with
assistance
from C R Mackintosh.’ Mac laughs. A bitter, worn-out laugh. He’s forgotten about the snake’s-head. He’s forgotten about me.

‘There was praise. Of a kind.’ I look up, hopeful. ‘ “This is not the plain building we commissioned,” the governors accepted, “but it is at least a place that makes one think.” But that was not the worst thing that was said. People asked why the authorities had allowed a house of correction to be built on such a site in the centre of the city. That’s how it looked to them. And others recommended that I should be horsewhipped for showing my bare arse to the face of Glasgow.’

Blood flushes to my face. But Mac is pale and fierce.

‘There was a party, thanks to my dear friend Newbery. He even wrote a symbolic masque and got the students to perform it.

‘Fall! Good St Mungo’s blessings on this school,

its work make prosper and its fame let spread.’

Mac laughs. This verse has cheered him. ‘And when the masque was finished, and the speeches done, the curtain that divided the two parts of the building was thrown aside and the art school became one.’ Mac sits back, exhausted. He looks down at the
fritillaria
and frowns.

‘The thing is, I’d not stopped working for three years. And now all I wanted was to go on. To do bigger, better things. But all that came along was a commission for a dwelling house at Auchinibert. With the owners interfering with their small ideas, and Keppie too, and soon I was in the doghouse for letting the lunch hour at the nearby inn last into the afternoon. I knew what I was doing. Drink or no drink. All the same Keppie picked me up on small errors. “Small errors can be corrected . . .” I told him.’ But the fight has gone out of him, then, and now, and Mac drifts off.

‘So there I was, in my own office, waiting. Some said I should go to Europe, others suggested America. But I wanted to work in Glasgow. I wanted to work
for
Glasgow. Miss Cranston still needed me. You know her vision for the tea rooms was to make a place where no drink would be taken? Somewhere enticing. To save the city from itself. She’d seen too much suffering. Too many wages drunk on Friday night. Too many children hungry. Now instead, men would flock to the tea rooms to refresh themselves with non-alcoholic beverages! Well, as you can imagine, there was only so much work she had for me. A commission for a hairdressing salon came in.’ Mac hangs his head. There is green on his cheek. And he sets down his brush. ‘And it was then I heard that Honeyman and Keppie had won the contract for Jordanhill, despite the missing hand basins. And the taps. Despite the fact I’d not be there to oversee it. That news laid me low, I’ll not deny it. I was sitting there, head in hands, when my old friend Mr Walter Blackie came in. I’d built Hill House for him. One of my first commissions. He was a man who had faith in me. And when he asked after my health, I told him how desolate I was. The Jordanhill place would be built without my superintendence, be built by others who might not understand what I had intended in my plans. I told him how hard I found it to have so little work. To receive no general recognition. And you know what Blackie said to me?’ Mac puffs on his pipe and stares out through the window. ‘ “You were born too late, that’s all it is. Some centuries too late. Your place was among the fifteenth-century lot with Leonardo and the others.” That’s what he told me, and wretched as I was I did feel a little cheered. Although how that helped I wasn’t sure. With us living off my wife’s inheritance. And that already running low.’

I want to ask who Leonardo is. But I stay quiet.

‘Then I came down with pneumonia, and Margaret closed the office. She put the house into her name. For safekeeping. I’m not proud to say it. But I was in no condition to take care of such things. Nor had I a mind to. She brought me here. It’s a good place. And I’m grateful. I’m back to my beginnings. Painting flowers, just as I once did in my father’s garden, my mother waiting for me at home.’ He smiles and turns back to his work. ‘I’m thinking we might stay. Settle here. Yes.’ And I see that in the centre of the first flower is a golden bird, not screaming as I’d first thought with its open mouth, but calling out in song.

Chapter 53

Mother needs my help to open up the inn, and soon I’m running to the cellar, fetching pints of ale and stout for those that need to soothe the pain of last night’s drinking. I’m coming up when I kick against the hinge of the trapdoor, and dribbling beer, I kneel and listen for a moment, wondering if he’s down there. Father. For he’s still not home.

‘On the run, is he?’ There is much laughter from the men that straggle in. And I promise myself that later I will take the cart up to the common and, if needs be, find him passed out there, and load him on.

I give him till evening before going out. It’s been a warm day, and the sun slants bright and low across the grass. Our field is thick with dandelions, and the brambles in the hedgerow sizzle with the sound of bees. There is a clearing on the common, scorched to sand, scarred with the hooves of horses brought up here for drills. I stand in the centre of it. ‘Father?’ I shout, and hearing nothing, I run around the edge of it, from one dense patch of scrub and bracken to the next, sure each one must be the shoulder of his coat, the weave of his cap, an old log, scorched with weather, the length of him, asleep.

I try old Snowling’s cottage next. Look into the outhouse, scour the woodshed, even peer into the crater in the garden where the Zeppelin dropped its bomb. Finding no sign of him, I follow the path along the estuary to where Danky lives. I stand by his door. The sun is sinking, the moon has risen pale over the sea.
Father, where are you?
A streak of fear cuts through me. And I knock.

‘Yes?’ Danky steps away from me, as he never used to do. But when I tell him about Father he comes close. ‘I’ve not seen the man since we parted, in the early hours it was. Not sure of the time. But it was late. I knows that because I saw your old boy Mac, striding by with his pipe alight, swinging his arms as if he’d not a trouble in the world. Someone should have mentioned that to the constable. Or maybe they did.’ And shaking his head, he moves back into his house.