Charlie was slow in coming home. Almost as if to make up for his luck in avoiding the worst battles, Lizzie’s son was among the last to be demobilized, but that was only a minor annoyance. He was alive and, judging by his high spirits when he finally alighted from the train at Dundee, his old ebullience was restored to him. Lizzie clasped him to her on the platform and wept for joy. Maggy was there too in his reception committee, wiping tears from her eyes. In the background, though not of their party, was Lexie, grown up now and wearing a bright green hat that contrasted effectively with her flaming hair.
When Charlie saw her, he left his mother and ran across to hug Lexie too. ‘Thank God you’re safe,’ she said for he had always been one of her favourite people. Though she recognized his recklessness, she was beguiled by his charm and blamed his mother’s indulgent treatment for his faults. Charlie reminded her of her beloved father. He had the same bright blue eyes and silver tongue. More than that, he was the only man of her family to have survived the holocaust. Davie and Robert were long dead.
Charlie’s homecoming party was to be held in Tay Lodge. For days before, the domestic staff rushed to and fro preparing the most delicious dishes. Flowers filled the dining and drawing rooms and tiny shining Chinese paper lanterns were strung between the trees in the garden. A small band was engaged to play for dancing and a marquee with a wooden floor was set up on the expanse of lawn. There had not been such a social event at the gracious house in living memory.
Lizzie invited all her business contacts and senior employees. Goldie’s name was on the list, but between themselves they decided it would be best if he did not accept for they deluded themselves that their feeling for each other had not been noticed and commented on by many people. The returned soldier dictated the rest of the guest list. On it were several of his boyhood friends – the few who had survived the war. Lizzie used to disapprove of them but she made no objection now.
‘I’d like to ask Rosie, Bertha and Lexie-for-short to the party,’ he finally told his mother.
She grimaced. ‘Must you? I don’t mind asking Lexie but Rosie’s sure to make some sort of scene. She’ll think we’re being extravagant and depriving the poor, or something. She goes up and down the town talking at union meetings. What a terrible woman!’
‘I’ll invite them anyway,’ said Charlie, who had always respected Rosie for the robust way she stood up to him when he was a wild little rip playing in the Vaults.
On the day of the party, Maggy sought out Charlie and whispered, ‘Rosie asked me to say she’s sorry she can’t come tonight but she sends her love.’
‘Is Bertha coming?’
‘Not her either.’
He was disappointed but said, ‘I don’t blame them, I suppose. What about Lexie?’
Maggy raised her shoulders to express ignorance. ‘She hasn’t said one way or another. I don’t think she’ll come, though.’
Charlie sought out his mother to ask, ‘Is there any way we could persuade Lexie to come? I’d really like her to be here.’
‘She’s washed her hands of me,’ said Lizzie, ‘I haven’t seen her for months. It’s very unfair. I was kind to that girl.’
‘Did you see her at the station when I came off the train?’ asked Charlie.
‘I saw her but she didn’t speak.’
‘Why didn’t you speak to her first?’
Lizzie was genuinely surprised. ‘I’m the older sister. I’m the one who’s been hurt. It’s her place to come to me. I’m sorry about what’s happened because I’d high hopes for Lexie. How’s she going to meet a suitable husband when she’s working as a weaver? She’ll be like all the others and marry some out-of-work kettle boiler who’ll stay at home and drink her wages.’
Charlie was a connoisseur of women. He remembered the eye-catching girl in the green hat at the station and shook his head. ‘Don’t you believe it. She’s made for better things. Keep your eye on our little Lexie, Mother. I think she’ll surprise you yet.’
While the band was tuning up their instruments Alex and Alice arrived. Charlie was surprised to see that his mother’s old friend, the grocery tycoon, was totally white haired and very old looking. He had heard his mother talk of the mill girl Alex had married, and was curious to see her. Lizzie nudged her son and said, ‘Here’s Alex and that girl. She’s spending his money like water.’
Alice was long legged and as slim as a gazelle. Her walk was provocative and she shimmered up in silver gauze with a challenging smile on her painted face. Her blonde hair was coiled up and bound close with a diamond fillet that crossed her forehead. Diamond pendant earrings swung as she inclined her head to kiss her hostess.
‘You look lovely, Lizzie,’ she said in her now unaccented voice, the result of many elocution classes. ‘What a wonderful dress!’
‘I had it specially made,’ said Lizzie, lifting up the soft crepe of her skirt.
‘It’s so good to see you in a new colour,’ sighed Alice in a meaning tone, for Lizzie’s dress was a pale shade of cornflower blue. She had recently abandoned half mourning.
Then Alex’s wife turned her teasing glance to Charlie. There was a flash in her stare as she surveyed him, manly and upright in his tail suit and white tie. She was preparing to play games with him too but their eyes met and something stilled her tongue. Her coquettish smile wavered, she dropped her eyes and looked at Charlie from beneath her lashes. He looked back as if startled by recognition of a kindred spirit. When Alex led his wife away, Lizzie saw her son following Alice’s flexing hips with his eyes. A cold hand of premonition gripped her.
She had intended to whisper, ‘What do you think of her then?’ but the question died before it was spoken. She did not want to know his reaction to Alice.
In the first weeks of his return to Dundee, Charlie yearned for Canada. ‘The Government’s giving all returned soldiers a plot of land,’ he told his mother. ‘I’ve been offered one in Vancouver. All I’ve got to do is go back there and claim it.’
Lizzie protested violently because she could not face the prospect of losing him again. ‘You don’t need their land. You’re the heir to Green Tree Mill. Besides it’s your place to stay with me now. I’m not growing any younger and I need help at the mill. You’ll have to learn to take over.’
He tried to coax her round. ‘You’re far from decrepit, Mother. I saw the way people looked at you at the party. You’re still an attractive woman and you know it. You’ll not need me to lead you around for a few more years yet.’
At forty-six Lizzie was indeed a good-looking woman and her love for Goldie had enlivened her so that she glowed and sparkled as she had not done since she was first in love with Sam. Still slim and shapely, she had few grey hairs and her face was smooth and unlined.
‘Don’t flatter me. That’s not the point. Now you’re home again, you’ll have to start showing an interest in the mill. I don’t want to think that all my work’s been for nothing or that you’ll not value what I’ve built up when I’m gone,’ she scolded.
Charlie looked gloomy. ‘I’m not cut out for that sort of business. I’d rather have a farm in Canada.’
Lizzie knotted her hands together and pleaded, ‘Don’t go away again, Charlie. Don’t leave me. You’re my only child.’
She was blackmailing him but she loved him dearly and feared that if he left home again, they would be separated for ever. He recognized her distress and put an arm around her waist to reassure her. ‘All right, Ma. Don’t take on. I’ll try it for a little while anyway.’
Lizzie pressed her advantage by buying him the car she had promised him. It was one of the finest automobiles in Dundee, a huge Daimler with enormous headlamps and leather straps around the bonnet. It made a noise like an enraged dragon when he drove off every night on unspecified pursuits of pleasure.
Charlie knew Dundee well and was greeted as a friend in many different places. Like his grandfather he was an easy mixer with all classes and was just as likely to feel at home in the caravan of one of the travelling families in Duthie Park or in the drawing room of a rich family at Broughty Ferry.
The city he returned to was a place of ferment, where men who had survived the fighting were growing disillusioned. Instead of coming home to a land fit for heroes, they were plunged once more into the old round of poverty and unemployment. In grim-faced groups they stood on street corners while cold winds blew. When they presented themselves at mills, factories or workshops, they were turned away but now, with their memories of the trenches still fresh, they were no longer prepared to go uncomplaining. Their hearts burned with resentment and there was rage in their talk.
The problem was that there was little work for them. When the war ended, the jute trade began slipping into another depression and a few people began looking to other ways of making a profit. Machinery manufacturers, lacking orders from the Dundee mills, started exporting to India where a jute industry was struggling into life. They did not realize that by selling expertise to their city’s rivals, they were cutting the home-based industry’s own throat.
Lizzie was aghast when she realized that the volume of orders coming into Green Tree was rapidly dwindling. She was not the only manufacturer to be hit, and her rivals were making Draconian retrenchments. First of all they cut staff, and then it was decided to cut wages. The workers were powerless. If they did not accept the cuts, they lost their jobs. When she saw that she could not hold out against the downward drift, the mistress of Green Tree Mill adopted the same measures.
The town seethed with resentment and protest meetings were held in little halls and committee rooms all over the city. Strikes were called, but women with children to feed and no man’s wage coming in could not stay out of work indefinitely. Union newspapers and posters appeared with photographs of blacklegs but the drift back to work could not be stopped. The opposition caved in but the atmosphere in the mills was heavy with resentment. No one smiled when Lizzie paraded the pathway between her looms, no one spoke to her. The eyes of the women who looked at her were full of anger. As she left the sheds, a babble of jeering voices broke out at her back.
‘I hate this,’ Charlie told his mother one day when they stood together in the mill yard after touring the biggest weaving shed. He could see an anxious crowd of would-be workers outside the mill gate waiting to be picked out for the jobs of people who did not clock in on time.
‘I don’t enjoy it myself but we must keep up our profits,’ she told him.
He turned and looked at her. ‘Why?’
She was astounded. ‘What do you mean, why? If I don’t make a profit, who’s going to pay the wages of all the people who are working here? If I lose money none of them’ll have a job. Who’s going to pay the wages of the people at Tay Lodge? Who’s going to pay you?’ She was angry and her face flushed red as she spoke.
‘I don’t know how you can suffer the way they look at you in there. You’ve plenty of money. You could live on what’s in the bank for years,’ said Charlie bleakly.
‘I never heard such rubbish. I suppose you suggest I close Green Tree and put five hundred and seventeen people precisely out of work. Would that solve the problem?’
Charlie went into the office with his mother following close on his heels. He lifted his coat off the back of the chair where he had slung it and turned to her. ‘I don’t know what’s going to solve the problem but I hate being on one side of a huge gulf and seeing the poor devils on the other.’
Then he went home in his super-powered car that had cost more than the wages of ten weavers for a year.
That night he apologized and they made up. Next day Charlie went back to the mill and Lizzie knew he had little alternative. She told Goldie about the trouble with Charlie and he looked sympathetic.
‘It must be hard for him. Perhaps you should allow him a freer hand at the mill. Why don’t we go away for a little while and you leave Charlie in charge? Then he might realize your situation better. He’s not a stupid lad.’
‘But how can we go away?’ she asked in longing.
‘You can say you’ve business in London. Go down by train. I’ll go the day before and we’ll meet in the Ritz again, Lizzie. Then maybe we’ll go to Paris.’
Her eyes shone. To go to Paris with Goldie and leave behind all her problems about strikes and order books, mill output and angry workers seemed like a trip to Paradise. Goldie’s wife was now almost totally detached from reality but Lizzie was determined not to disrupt the peace and respectability of his family, though there were many times when she wished he and she could be acknowledged as a couple. She wanted them to go out openly together and show their happiness to the world.
She cast caution away and said, ‘I’ll do it. When can we go?’
Once having made the decision, they wasted no time. The following week saw them alighting from a train at the Gare du Nord.
‘Let’s not stay in one of the huge hotels. Let’s find a small place where we can pretend to be an ordinary couple having a second honeymoon,’ Lizzie said.
They were soon in a comfortable pension not far from the Rue de Rivoli where they were given an enormous bedroom with windows opening on to a balcony overlooking the street and a bathroom of white marble where the bath was large enough to accommodate them both.
‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we’re really here!’ Her assumption of the character of a hard-bitten businesswoman – the front she presented in Dundee – completely disappeared as she stood on their little iron balcony and gazed over the busy street with dazzled eyes.
Goldie slipped an arm round her waist. ‘Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you the sights.’
The simple pleasure of wandering through Paris together, feeling the warm pressure of each other’s arm as they strolled, made them supremely happy. All their concerns and worries were thrust away for a few magical days as they walked beneath the plane trees and stood gazing at the bridges over the Seine, watching how the reflection of the arches cut across the satin sheen of the water. The beauty of the city dazzled them.
They did not go out much at night, preferring to walk all day, pausing now and then at cafés where they sat close together and talked as they had never talked before. By the end of the week they knew everything about each other from their earliest childhood days.
Goldie began talking about his wife. ‘I don’t want you to think I fell out of love with Theodora when she became ill. It wasn’t like that at all. We’d been drifting apart for years. She was always difficult, temperamental, very jealous of me. She was obsessed with you from the first day I mentioned you after that dinner party in the club. She seized on your name and badgered me, always asking if I’d seen you again, if I’d spoken to you.’
Lizzie toyed with her coffee cup and did not look at him. ‘Was that why she wanted to see me? Was that why you asked me to go to Monte Bello?’
Goldie nodded. ‘That was why. Nothing else would satisfy her. Her doctor said anxiety was making her worse. He thought she needed to be put at ease about something. I knew what it was. She wanted to see you.’
She looked directly at him now. ‘Did she put the idea of loving me into your head? Would it not have happened but for her being so jealous?’
He took her hand and said earnestly, ‘Oh no, I’d been thinking about you for a long time. It was as if she could read my mind. I kept wondering how I might meet you properly. You really hit me like the haymaker you handed out to Sooty. Everything about you was fascinating.’
‘Was?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘Still is. You’ve my heart like no one else has ever done, Lizzie. You must know that by now, but Theodora’s my wife and she’s ill. I’ve a duty to her and to the girls. They’re devoted to their mother. But believe me when I tell you that I truly love you. I’ve never been so enraptured by anyone the way I am with you.’
She took his hand. ‘I wish we could be together all the time. It’s so marvellous being with you. I feel entirely different.’
‘We mustn’t worry about it, we should be happy and not think about anything else,’ he told her. Then he put his other hand over hers and said, ‘I want to buy you a present. I’ve been thinking about what it should be. Come on.’
First they went to a jewellery shop where the assistant displayed magnificent bracelets of diamonds and emeralds. She tried on one after the other, slowly turning her shapely arm for Goldie’s consideration until he announced, ‘It’s that one,’ pointing to a very unusual narrow gold bracelet in the shape of a snake with emerald eyes. It was worn pushed over her elbow on to the upper arm and the price staggered even the lavish-spending Lizzie but he swept her objections aside, saying, ‘We’ll take it and you must have a gown to wear it with.’
In the dressmaking establishment of the famous couturier Paul Poiret the women ran to and fro with silken gowns of the most brilliant colours. When they were held out Lizzie was reluctant to try any of them on.
‘They’re so bright, and I’m a widow, remember. It would look too bold if I wore one of those lovely things.’
‘But you are bold. You always looked like a banked fire in widow’s weeds. You ought to blaze with colour and show your true nature. I want you to parade like a princess,’ said Goldie.
When she was robed in a pink and purple gown edged with brilliants and swathed over her hips in soft folds, she hardly recognized herself in the mirror. The hem dipped and rose in jagged drops, coming so high in the front that it showed her knees.
When she stepped out of the dressing room and paraded before Goldie, he was enchanted and cried out, ‘That’s the one. You must have it.’
The girls clucked round and adorned her head with a sort of turban. Then they draped long strings of beads round her neck and found her a pair of high-heeled, pointed-toe slippers.
When they arrived back at their hotel with all her new finery in packages and boxes she said to him, ‘When will I ever wear all this?’
‘You’ll wear it tonight when we go out to dinner,’ he told her. ‘I’ll sit and look at you all evening and after that it doesn’t matter when you wear it again. I’ll have seen you in it for the first time.’
They dined by candlelight in a café by the river Seine and both of them felt that they had reached the high point of their lives. Their happiness affected everyone around them and the other diners smiled indulgently at the handsome middle-aged couple who were so obviously engrossed in each other.
‘They have to be lovers,’ said one waiter to another, ‘I’ve never seen a married couple look like that.’
During the journey back across the Channel they were quiet and subdued. In London while waiting at the station for Lizzie’s train to leave, they clung to each other as if they were parting for ever, and as her train rattled nearer and nearer to Dundee, a sense of foreboding filled her. She began worrying about what she would find at Green Tree and her worries overlaid the memories of happiness and pleasure in Paris. Instinct told her that problems lay ahead. What can they be? she wondered.