Mr Tait arrived at two o’clock on the dot. Sharp, just like he said. But that had left me with a good few hours to reflect on my misbehaviour and to dread his arrival when I’d have to confess. Miss Weatherbeaten and Rosie were not with him.
He had a basket in one hand and his fancy bedpost stick in the other.
‘Lenny!’ he smiled.
‘Hello, Mr Tait,’ I said, jumping off the wall I’d been perched on for ages and ages.
‘I brought you an orange,’ he said, bringing one out of his pocket and handing it to me. I was surprised, delighted and ashamed all at the same time.
‘Thank you,’ I said, drooling. ‘Thank you so much!’ But I knew he’d take it back once he knew what I’d done.
It was a blood orange. I hadn’t had one before. I peered at it and rolled it in my hand like a precious jewel that belonged to someone else.
‘What’s that?’ I pointed at its strange mottled peel. ‘Is it alright?’
‘Of course it’s alright,’ he said kindly. ‘I know it looks a bit funny. It’s funny inside too.’
It looked like a big bruise to me, a new one, the kind that isn’t blue, like the ones me and Rosie had, like my mum must have had too, with veins of red blood through it.
‘Thank you,’ I said, not sure.
‘Don’t forget it’s an orange, just an orange, and it tastes just the same as an ordinary one,’ he said. ‘Now, have you asked after your mum? What did they say?’
We sat down on the wall that I’d been on for so long that it felt like my very own wall, and I told him the whole sorry tale.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said.
‘Oh, dear,’ I said. It was cold. I was cold. I was waiting for him to stop being the nice Mr Tait with a golden red orange for a present and become the scary man with a big stick for naughty kids like me.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a bit. ‘I shouldn’t have let you come down here all by yourself. Whatever was I thinking?’ I was confused. He didn’t seem to be angry.
‘At least I saw her, and I saw . . . .’ I couldn’t say it. ‘You know . . . .’
‘You saw her leg?’
‘I saw it under the covers. I saw where it should have been.’
‘Oh, dear. What did you think?’
I didn’t know if it was alright to say my poor mum’s leg was horrible, especially when I hadn’t even seen it. I didn’t know if it was alright for my stomach to churn at the very thought, for me to imagine the foot I knew so well that I’d tickled and felt on my backside, for me to imagine it to be like the bits I’d seen when the bombs were falling. Things I didn’t want to see crowded back into my head. I closed my eyes to make them go away. They didn’t.
‘Lenny?’ he said. ‘Lenny!’
‘Did you find Mavis?’ I said, forcing the words out.
‘Miss Wetherspoon has gone to the town hall with Rosie. She’ll tell us about Mavis when she gets back to Carbeth.’
‘Oh,’ I said. It hurt to think about Mavis too. It didn’t feel like bombs in my stomach any more. It was like all the bits of me that were usually bendy were suddenly stiff and straight which made it hard to move. Too much grit.
‘Let’s stick with your mum just now, shall we?’
He had jammy pieces in his basket, and three daffodils. He handed me two jammy pieces so that my hands were full and he stuck one of the daffodils into a buttonhole in my coat.
‘Where’s your hat?’ he said, and when I told him, he promised to get it back.
‘Right then, young lady,’ he said. ‘Can you bear to sit here a while longer and I’ll go and see what’s what?’
I nodded and he disappeared through the big main door to the hospital and left me warmed with anticipation and reassurance. It was all going to be alright. I tucked into my jammy sandwiches and crossed my fingers that my mum would believe how kind he was.
The next hour felt more like a zillion hours.
At last Mr Tait came back out the same door he’d gone in and took off his cap to wipe the sweat from his brow with his handkerchief.
‘Good gracious me!’ he laughed. ‘Goodness. Gracious. Me! What a lassie!’
‘Who? What happened?’
‘Let me sit down a minute,’ he panted. ‘Let me sit! What a nest of she-cats!
‘Tell me! Tell me!’ I was laughing too, infected by his mirth. (That’s another of my dad’s special words. Mirth.)
So we sat back down on my wall and he pulled the pretty hat with the pink and yellow ribbon out of his basket. It was wet where some of the water from the glass had landed and it had been squashed flat so that a line ran from the front to the back where the straw had burst. I straightened it out and put it back on my head. He stuck a daffodil on one side under the ribbon.
I hadn’t eaten the blood orange. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
‘So, what happened?’ I said, unable to wait while he caught his breath.
‘Quite a stooshy you caused up there young lady! A stooshy indeed! And your mother’s good for a stooshy too.’
So after he’d rested his bad leg for a bit we walked the length of the great sweeping driveway and stood at the tram stop for a tram home, to Carbeth, the closest thing we had to home, and he told me all about it.
This is what happened.
Mr Tait went to the reception desk and he asked for ward twenty-seven. The unhappy receptionist looked at him as if he was a rat and she was a snake under a rock, and she asked him who he was intending visiting. When he told her it was Peggy Gillespie she stopped looking at him like a snake and started moving the papers about on her desk and slamming them down into even neater piles than they were already in.
Finally she told him that Mrs Gillespie was not allowed visitors today due to an ‘incident’ earlier on.
Mr Tait told her he was a very important person at Singer’s factory and that it was ‘vital’ that he see Mrs Gillespie that day.
The unhappy and prim receptionist snorted, something Mavis and I used to practise a lot, but not normally acceptable behaviour among adults.
Mr Tait produced a blood orange from his basket and tossed it nonchalantly into the air with one hand, watching it rise and fall as he did so.
‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘Now I have too many oranges.’
‘I’ll not be persuaded with that sort of brriberry,’ she said, just like Miss Weatherbeaten.
‘Shame,’ he said, and he stopped throwing the orange into the air and set it down on the desk in front of her. ‘Could you convey a message to Mrs Gillespie? Please tell her that while she is incapacitated, I will care for her lovely daughter, Lenny, at Carbeth.’
The unhappy receptionist eyed the orange then said, of course she could do that and reached out to take the fruit from where it sat on top of the counter.
‘Oh, no,’ said Mr Tait in his usual mild manner. ‘Oranges are only for visits.’ And he whipped away the orange from right under the receptionist’s greedy little nose and her sneaky little hand. Mr Tait cleared his throat and tossed the orange in the air again.
A nurse hurried by, giving the receptionist enough time to think over the price of her meanness.
Mr Tait replaced the orange on the counter.
The receptionist said the ward sister had been unclear in her instructions and thought the word ‘probably’ might have been said in relation to whether Mrs Gillespie was to be allowed visitors. Perhaps he’d like to take his chances with her. Ward twenty-seven was on the first floor, down the corridor past the (smelly) waiting room.
Mr Tait smiled sweetly and thanked her very much, leaving the orange on the counter.
Upstairs he found the door to the ward, cleared his throat, straightened his tie, straightened his back, removed his hat and flattened his hair.
‘Can I help you?’ said the nurse who was at the nurse’s station.
Mr Tait explained who he was and asked if he might be allowed to speak to Mrs Peggy Gillespie.
The nurse went to ask and returned with a smirk on her face. She said she was not able to repeat what Mrs Gillespie had said but the answer was ‘no’. This was not good news and I found my heart beating on my ribs once more when he told me this. Really, if they’d just let me in none of this would have happened.
‘Shame,’ said Mr Tait, who assures me that blood oranges would not have worked in this instance nor would they have worked with the ward sister, or with Matron who finally had to be summoned.
Mrs Gillespie, my mum, was refusing to see anyone, least of all Mr Tait, until she had been allowed to see me, yes, me, Leonora Gillespie.
Mr Tait was refusing to leave until he was allowed to see her, Mrs Peggy Gillespie, my mum.
The most almighty row followed because apparently someone, possibly the young nurse, didn’t agree that Mr Tait should have to leave. During this argument Mr Tait sneaked in his rumbling way down the ward, swept my fantastic straw hat with the ribbons and flowers and elastic from the floor under my mum’s bed, emptied his basket of goodies and daffodils onto the cabinet beside it, being careful not to knock over the glass of water, and told her very quickly about our plan.
My mum then lifted the daffodils and threw them at him saying, ‘Bring back my Lenny! Where’s Lenny? Where’s Mavis? You’ve done enough harm!’ The tears were rushing down her poor pale cheeks.
He reassured her, from a sensible distance, that I was safe and well, and that he and Miss Weatherbeaten were doing all they could to find Mavis, that I was outside eager for news, but Matron and everybody else were determined not to give me any.
And right on cue Matron, the grey-haired ward sister, the young nurse and two others discovered their loss at the door and arrived to ‘retrieve’ Mr Tait from my mum’s bedside. My mum was speechless by this time, but some of the other patients were not and were applauding him for his ‘audacity’, others booing the ward sister, and some were cheering the nurses for evicting him.
Mr Tait shouted over his shoulder to my mum, as he was guided swiftly to the door, that he would take very good care of me, she wasn’t to worry, she still had her job and soon she would have Mavis as well, but she didn’t seem to want to hear.
He was escorted to the front door (past the reception desk where a faint whiff of orange hung in the air) by the Matron who was explaining why no children were allowed into the hospital – germs and infections and all that, carried in on air and clothes and things. I don’t quite understand it but Mr Tait said the danger on me was dirt we couldn’t see but the doctors and nurses knew all about it. He told her that he agreed wholeheartedly with everything she said, but that he, himself, had important things to say to Mrs Gillespie and would be back again very soon.
I was barely breathing by the time he’d finished. I stared blindly out of the tram windows at all the shops passing by and all the people going about and thought about her all alone in that big ward of strangers and the ward sister who was being unkind to her.
‘No Mavis,’ I said.
‘No, no Mavis,’ said Mr Tait.
We got off the yellow and orange tram in the middle of Glasgow and onto a blue Alexander’s bus for Carbeth and I watched the streets of the north-west of the city flit past. Some of them looked just like Clydebank, with houses collapsed into heaps, but no smoke or fire, just everything black, the stones, the roads, the people all dressed in dark colours and nobody smiling. And as we passed the big houses on the outskirts, the daylight started to go and then the green fields of the country looked cold and the black unclothed trees were like the broken tramlines in Kilbowie Road.
Other people on the bus were travelling with bundles wrapped in blankets, suitcases, pots and pans, brown-paper parcels, kettles and buckets. I turned away and wrapped my coat around me and let the world drift by.
Then the rain came on, running in thick lines outside the window, and on the inside the mist clung to the glass, making my shoulder wet from lying against it. The bus rattled along and shoogled us from side to side, bumping my head off the window pane. Mr Tait had to hold the handle on the seat in front to keep from falling into the passageway.
The damp seemed to slither up my bare legs, and make my skin creep. I felt myself shrink, like the rain shrinks your jumper if you’re caught in a shower. I thought about Mavis and where I’d last seen her, down by the canal throwing dirt in a bad boy’s eyes, but I couldn’t see her face and I wondered if that meant she was dead. I wished Mr Tait would talk to me so that I didn’t have to think like that.
The blood orange that Mr Tait had given me was still in the pocket of my coat, warm and a bit squashed between me and him. When I pulled it out, he smiled and said we could have it later, that he had another one for Rosie.
‘Oh, an orange!’ said a lady who was going down the aisle to get off the bus. ‘This lucky wee lassie’s got an orange, no less!’ she announced to the rest of the bus.
‘Give us a bit of your orange then!’ said someone at the back of the bus.
Mr Tait put it in his basket on his knee. Then someone began to sing, ‘Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me!’ It was a woman with a scarf wound round her head, but someone else cut in, ‘I don’t like your peaches, they are full of stones,’ and then the whole bus joined in, ‘I LIKE BANANAS! Because they have no bones!’
Then everybody fell about laughing, which was funny enough in itself, if you’re in the mood, but I didn’t understand what they were saying, especially the ladies. Mr Tait, who had seemed quite delighted with the singing at first, became quite cross, I think, with his brow all furrowed and wrinkly, and I wondered if he was annoyed because I hadn’t eaten the orange outside the hospital. Perhaps he thought I wasn’t grateful, which I was.
‘Oh, what I wouldn’t do for a banana . . . ,’ and they screamed with laughter, and I couldn’t help agreeing.
But by then we had arrived at Carbeth.