Mr Mac and Me (9 page)
Authors: Esther Freud
It’s then I allow myself to breathe. These words are in English. I put my fingers to them. And there is Mac’s full name spelt out. I flip over the page and find one side of the building is a fortress, with walls shooting up into the sky, windows as long and narrow as casements. And there’s another house, with a tower, tall and round as a keep. Mac’s not a danger. I can see that now. He may even have been sent here to keep us safe. Design us our own fortress, with battlements and arrow slits, and a drawbridge that drops down on to the beach. If he was allowed, I’m sure of it, he’d be starting on the plans right now. I nestle into the crook of my branch and turn another page. I am inside a house now, and there are roses, lamps, and for no clear reason, the long sweep of a woman leaning over in a kiss. Who is she? I trace my finger over the mass of her hair and down the long narrow body to the floor. But it is the photograph of the bedroom that brings blood to my face. The bed is white, as wide and deep as a hayrick, and the mirror at the foot of it has arms that curve out in an embrace. The curtains are white too, even the carpet on the floor is white, and I imagine Mrs Mac stepping across it in bare feet.
Is this the house they made together? The one that is waiting for their return? And I wonder what it ever could have been that forced them to desert it.
Surely it should be against Dora, wasting good men like Runnicles on the likes of us when he could be somewhere important helping to run the war office. I think this every day as he oversees our copying and our crossing out, listening, his mouth turned down, while we recite our poems and our sums. But it was Runnicles himself who insisted the school open again. Said there was no greater good to man than education. And when this war is over smart young men will be needed to put the country to rights. ‘But won’t we still have our king and our prime minister?’ the glazier’s son asks, and Runnicles looks at us all but he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t say what I’ve heard men saying in the inn: ‘How can they know what they’re doing, up there in London, if they allow the Suffolks to be slaughtered when they’d only been in France three weeks?’ That was one of the Tilson men, the beer turned to tears coursing down his face so that by the end of the night he was raging and cursing, his brother’s restraining arm around his neck. ‘Robbed,’ he wept, ‘sacrificed, and no one with the courage to come out and say it.’
There was shouting in the bar that night, with others protesting that before they fell, the Suffolks had won valuable ground, a square mile at least, and without them Paris might have been taken, but Tilson wouldn’t see it. ‘Picture the eight hundred – they’d fill the whole of the field behind this house, and all gunned down or blown to pieces, and the others, taken away injured.’
No one and nothing could quiet him and I thought of the stir we’d made when that same field had been stripped of clover by the gypsies who’d rented out the inn. We’d woken the policeman, forced him to help us get it back. But now, with all this talk of bad government and wasted men, a policeman was the last man we wanted near. I crept down to the cellar and put my ear to the trapdoor. What if someone had found a way up from the beach and was hiding, listening for what was being said? Did Tilson’s words come under the category of treason? Could anything he said be helping the enemy if the enemy was near? I screwed up my eyes and tried to see the printed words of Dora as if they were written there on the tiles, but all I could find were the old dust grooves of the hinges, and the splashes of beer lying stickily across the floor.
Runnicles is standing at the front of the room, marking up the most recent battles in chalk. Ground taken. Ground regained. Regiments in action. Regiments replaced. While he is busy I slide out Mackintosh’s pamphlet and stare at the photographs inside. There is a picture here by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. It is of two women side by side,
The White Rose and the Red Rose
, and it is spun around with flowers. On the following page are the same women, their faces turned towards each other, holding out a baby as if they are not sure what they should do. I turn the next page slowly, for I know what I will find, but even so, when I see the nakedness – right there in Runnicles’ own room – I jolt up so suddenly I knock my wrist against the desk.
‘Battle of Liège. Battle of Mulhouse. Battle of Haelen. Invasion of Lorraine.’ The voice is low, and I force my eyes away from the tilt of the girls’ breasts, and the bald bare bumps between their legs. ‘Battle of Stallupönen. Of Gumbinnen. Battle of the Ardennes. Of Charleroi.’
Runnicles turns back to the board, and I quickly flip over the page. Here the women are still naked, although they are unhappily naked now.
An Ill Omen
, one of the pictures is called. And I see it is not by Margaret, but by another Macdonald – Frances. I don’t want to keep looking but neither can I pull away. ’
Tis a long path which wanders to desire
. What does that mean? And there’s another, of four women, shrouded by nothing but their hair, their fingers to their lips.
Truth lies at the bottom of a well
.
‘Capture of Dinant. Siege of Maubeuge. Destruction of Louvain. Battle of Le Cateau.’ Runnicles speaks the names as if they are his second tongue, and I try and imagine what he’d make of old Mac’s pamphlets and whether all educated people speak another language as well as their own.
Hertz, Rose, Dekorative, Rundschau
, I mumble. And I wonder if it would be going against the rules of Dora if I were to recite these words for him and ask him to translate.
Mac is working on his drawing of the rock cress, scratching it out when it goes wrong, sinking it into a basin of water when he can’t stand the sight of it, and rubbing at the sodden paper till there is almost no colour left. I have his pamphlet in the pocket of my jacket. I’ve looked at every picture till my eyes are raw. But rather than return it, I sit and watch him paint. The paper he uses is thick. Whatman, he tells me it is. Named for an artist. But then he stops and seizing up a toothbrush he scrubs away at a raspberry-coloured blot until I’m sure he’ll wear through to the wooden board. I lean closer and stare at the faded flowers and the mottled marks of the grey leaves. I want to tell him to leave it, to stop rubbing it away. I’ve never seen anything that looks more like rock cress, not even rock cress itself. Not that I’d taken much care to look at it before.
His wife lets him be. She’s painting butterflies on a frieze. And she’s written words along the top, in clusters, uneven as music, hovering in the sky. ‘
The little hills will jump for joy and the valleys will be filled with corn
.’ It’s a decoration for a tea room, she tells me. Up in Glasgow. And there’s the baby again, repeated in a row, lifting its arms triumphantly above its head.
It’s peaceful here. Now that Mac has stopped destroying his painting and set his board out in the sun to dry. ‘How are you getting on with your boats?’ he asks and I wish I could slide the sketchbook out and show him, but I only have his book of photographs scorching a streak against my side.
‘All right,’ I say. And I think of the paintbox, the colours smooth as glass, unused, for fear I might disturb them.
Mac rips a sheet from his own large pad of paper, thick and grainy, good enough to eat. And without a word he hands me a board and a pencil, although I can see from the raise of his eyebrows he’s surprised that I don’t have one about me. ‘Make a start, that’s the thing,’ he says then, and he turns back to staring at his own whitened work.
I sit on my upturned crate and watch the river. Opposite is Mayhew’s jetty and further along, if I let my eyes drift, the straggle of the herring girls at work. I can hear their singing, the rise and fall of each verse, and I glance at Mac to see if he is listening, to check if he might even hum along. But Mac is smoking his pipe. Still staring at his paper. Although now he takes up his board again and without letting his eyes waver he makes a first new mark, and soon the only sound any of us can hear is the smooth strokes of his pencil.
‘What do you have there?’ It is Mrs Mackintosh, kneeling beside me, and I feel the blood rush over me as I move my hand away to reveal the small sketched face of a girl. Her eyes and mouth are crescents, her hair is covered by a scarf, but one small strand escapes and falls across her ear. ‘I like it,’ she smiles. ‘Toshie. Have you seen this? The boy has made a drawing of something other than a boat.’
Mac looks up, although I see it is an effort. ‘I started with flowers,’ he says as if it is only now occurring to him. ‘Then it was buildings, nothing but buildings, and now I have come back to flowers again.’ His wife lays a hand on his shoulder and keeps it there, and I expect her to remind him about the barricade he’s planning – the one that will stretch the length of the east coast, from Lowestoft to Aldeburgh, the one that will keep us safe.
‘Yes,’ she says instead, ‘but it’s not as if you ever left them behind. Nature is there in everything you’ve done.’
‘Art is the flower.’ He takes her hand. ‘Life is the green leaf.’ And he raises her fingers to his lips.
Mother sends me over to the Kipperdrome for fish. I walk down to the river, and find I don’t have to queue for the ferry, for there are so many herring boats jammed up in the harbour I can step from one to the next until I reach the other side.
The Kipperdrome is new. Newer even than the lighthouse, and inside its octagonal walls the stalls are heaped with every kind of fish. Sole and bass and whiting, mackerel, dogfish, cod. I look around for Betty and her sister but they are out on the river, gutting, and the herring that are here, gleaming shoals of them, are being sold by other, older women who have paid their dues.
It is cool inside the Kipperdrome with light that filters sideways through small high windows in the roof. If I close my eyes and breathe in deep I can imagine I am underwater, the shuffle and murmur of women, with hats tipped forward on their heads, making the same shimmery sound as the current. I squeeze my way between them and wait while they open their purses and close them again, while the fishmongers in their white aprons hold their knives ready to strip away the scales and slice open the bellies of whatever they might choose. I buy three skate. That is what my mother wants. She has a way of roasting them in the stove so that the meat falls lightly off the great sharp bone tasting of fennel and woodsmoke, and when I have my package wrapped and folded, I wander back along the beach, counting the longshore fishing boats dragged up on to the sand. The bathing huts have been rolled in, the boys offering goat rides have deserted, and the strip of high shingle is crowded with men at work, children climbing in and out of skiffs, dogs sniffing for a scrap of food.
I’m wanted back. I know it. But instead I walk along the harbour, one eye out for Danky. There is talk that he’s been night fishing, trudging home by moonlight to his house, and for certain I’ve not seen him any morning this last week.
‘And here’s your friend, walking forward, come to pay us a call.’ It’s the sharp laughing voice of Betty’s sister Meg, and I feel myself redden and I squeeze my package of fish until the squelch of it reminds me what it is.
‘This one here’s done,’ the tall girl calls as she lays a last fish in the barrel, and a cooper comes and rolls it away. I step forward. The sisters will surely stop and stretch, but they are paid by the barrel, and they must begin again.
‘Yes,’ I hold up my packet of fish, ‘I came out for my mother.’ And I see a smile curl over Betty’s face, a girl already three days’ journey from her home, and no older than me.
‘I’d best be getting back then.’ My face is blazing, and to save myself I pick up a pebble and skim it out across the river. Its blunt edge chips the surface and it skips three times before it sinks.
‘Bye then.’ I can speak again, and with their eyes on me, I turn and hurry back the way I’ve come.
I’ve had Mac’s pamphlet for so long I’ve almost forgotten it’s not mine. I have my favourites now. The library in the School of Art with its soaring windows and its lamps. The Willow Tea Rooms, dark wood and bright white tablecloths, lit up by a cauldron of white flowers. It’s on a street the name of which I can’t pronounce. Sauchiehall. And I add that to my list.
I study Mrs Mac’s work too. Her roses, which are Glasgow roses, wound about like balls of string. And her mysterious women, most of whom are clothed. But the picture that I look at till I have it off by heart is of a girl shrouded in a cloak so wide she could hide herself inside it.
The Mysterious Garden
, it is called. And along the top, as if they were trees, are the white faces of women. Are they ghosts? Or is the girl inside the cloak a ghost? And I have to turn over the page to keep from shuddering. But here, waiting, on the next page, are the tortured women Frances Macdonald paints. Naked or not, I fear them. Although the heat in my body rises if I look too long, and I calm myself by staring at
The Sleeping Princess
, a girl as beautiful as anything I’ve seen. As beautiful as Betty. She is lying in a silver frame, meshed around with spiderwebs and leaves, and moulded into it are the words,
Love, if thy tresses be so dark, how dark those hidden eyes must be
. I trace my fingers down the length of her hair, hanging far below her waist, and for all Frances Macdonald’s insistence that she is sleeping, it’s hard not to think she’s dead.
I wait till both Mac and Mrs Mac are in their studio, checking on them downriver of the ferry where I can’t be seen, and then, taking the muddy track that appears only at low tide, I cut past the Japanese bridge, until I’m in their lane. I don’t waste time unlatching the Lea House gate, but climb over it, and scattering the rabbits with the thump of my landing, I streak up through the garden.