Sometimes during the hot summer evenings of 1892, George would pop his head around the swinging glass door of the saloon bar and ask his sister, ‘Coming for a walk? It’s too nice to be shut up in here all day.’
Lizzie, standing stiff behind the bar in her starched white apron, would turn her head and look at him almost longingly before she asked, ‘Where are you going?’
‘Johnny and I are taking a turn on the Magdalen Green.’ She always shook her head, and after a few refusals he stopped asking. She was acting very strange, he reckoned. There were plenty of workers in the bar, she could go out for an hour to take the air but she seemed afraid to leave the place. Yet she hated bar work.
George shrugged his shoulders and went off with Johnny to kick a football around on the vast expanse of grass beside the river. Lizzie wished she could explain her feelings to him but she was unable even to sort them out for herself. All she knew was that since young Davie’s close shave with death, her old fear of the river had returned with terrible force. The dreams were worse than ever and if, by accident, she caught a glimpse of the shining surface of the Tay, her legs trembled uncontrollably. She was very afraid that her family had some strange, doomed link with water, that the demons of the deep were only waiting to claim them, one by one.
Those thoughts were always most terrible in the small hours of the morning. During the day she managed to keep them at bay by hard work. Even Jessie was impressed by the girl’s dedication. She spent almost her entire time in the saloon bar, and if not serving customers was polishing brass and shining glasses. She did not enjoy the work but it was a way of diverting her mind.
From time to time she would gaze through the open door to the street and see the figures of men and women passing by together. Then the vision of the man with the golden eyes who’d held her waist so tightly came back into her mind and she shivered with an emotion she could not name. How strange that she, who was so terrified of the sea, should be obsessed with the memory of a sailor.
When the summer was at its height and tar bubbled up between the causeway stones of the roads, cholera appeared in the close-packed slums at the top of Hawkhill. The weak and the undernourished were its first victims but the more people it killed, the more it grew in strength.
Maggy came into the Castle Bar one morning with a set face and told Lizzie, ‘I’m stopping work. Vickie’s got the fever.’
‘Poor wee Vickie. Has your mother called a doctor?’
‘We cannae afford the doctor. We’re taking care of her ourselves. There’s a lot of fever in the Vaults. I’m feared that I’ll carry it back here to the wee lads so I’ll stay away till it’s past.’
Lizzie did not argue. She had no fear of catching cholera herself but she was afraid for her family and especially for George who she still watched carefully, scanning his face for signs of illness. Though he had been much better recently, she was not convinced that he had grown out of his childhood weakness.
Her face became thunderous that night when George came round the back of the bar to tell her, ‘I’ve been over to the Davidsons’. Wee Vickie’s dying. I wish there was something we could do to help.’
She turned on him in fury. ‘What are you doing going over there? Those slums are full of infection. You’ll catch fever.’
‘Don’t be silly. They need help. I’ll be all right. Anyway, what’s the difference between the Vaults and the Perth Road at a time like this? I’ve just met a man from the mill and he says Mrs Adams has the fever too.’
Lizzie stared at him in shock. ‘Not Mrs Adams! I went to see her yesterday and she was all right then.’
George gave a brief nod. ‘Fever doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, Lizzie.’
When he went out his sister stood with a confused expression for a few minutes. Then, taking off her apron, she said to the head barman, ‘I’m going out. I won’t be long.’ In great haste she ran to the kitchen and, not caring if Jessie, who was lying in bed next door, could hear her, she began ransacking the larder. Soon, with a full basket, she was running over the courtyard in the middle of the Vaults, up the stairs and into the Davidsons’ room.
It smelt foul although the door and window were open to allow in a breeze from the river. Maggy was bustling about at the fireside and Bertha sat at the side of the box bed, slowly sponging the face of her youngest child.
She looked up with a blank, stunned expression and said, ‘Oh, Lizzie, she’s dying, poor wee soul. I wish to God it was me and not her.’
Though Lizzie attempted to reassure Bertha, she knew it was hopeless. The child’s lips were blue. She would soon be dead. Lizzie stayed with them for a little while until the others began arriving home. Then, respecting their need to be alone at such a terrible time, she returned home.
Vickie died that night. Pennies saved by Bertha Davidson from her small wage and paid into a burial fund, provided for a coffin, and the rest of the family scraped together the money for a proper funeral. It was a matter of pride to them that their wee Vic be sent off with proper respect even though they would have to live for weeks on bread and dripping.
Lizzie and George accompanied the Davidsons to see Vickie buried and walked behind as the children supported their mother home after the little ceremony.
Bertha was more cough ridden than ever, hawking away after almost every word she spoke. ‘It’s the fibre in my lungs. You can’t work in a mill for thirty years without getting a cough,’ she explained shamefacedly after a particularly bad outburst stopped her in the middle of the pavement.
Lizzie could see deep anxiety in Johnny’s eyes. In the past few months he had become a man, and was an almost unknown quantity to her now. There was a guarded look on his set face and his eyes were hard and angry. She remembered that people said he was doing so well at work that the Courier’s editor had made him a junior reporter, for he had the power of words and was particularly good at writing reports of the rallies which were frequent in Dundee. The city was a very political place indeed because the Liberals were continually locking horns with the Conservatives there.
When the party reached the Davidsons’ room, Johnny paced the floor like a caged lion before his emotions burst out. ‘I wanted to make things better for Vickie. Why didn’t she live until I could? I’ll be rich one day.’
‘You’re doing well. I’m proud of you,’ said Bertha.
‘I want to be able to help you most of all. You’re ill, you shouldn’t be working. You shouldn’t have to send our clothes to the pawnshop every week. But I need time. I need time!’
Concerned for him, Lizzie rose from her chair and touched his arm. ‘You’re doing everything you can. Don’t be so angry. You’re on your way to great things.’
For a moment the boy looked down at her hand on his arm. Then his hungry heart reached out and he fell helplessly in love.
Every afternoon, Lizzie went to visit Mrs Adams. At first the old lady appeared to have only a mild attack of fever but in spite of the ministrations of three doctors, the symptoms refused to improve. On the third day Lizzie was hushed at the door by a nurse holding her fingers to her lips.
‘Is she asleep?’ asked the girl.
The nurse shook her head. ‘No, she’s worse, I’m afraid. Her husband is with her.’
‘Can I see her?’
The woman looked doubtful before she nodded. ‘Only for a minute then.’
Mrs Adams lay in her vast curtained bed, her fragile body hardly making a mark beneath the sheet. Her sweet little face looked like a skull against the lace-trimmed pillows and even the liberal application of lavender water had not taken away the stench of the sickness. As she tiptoed across the turkey carpet Lizzie was struck by how the room smelt the same as Vickie’s in the Vaults. The old lady was unconscious but Mr Adams was sitting beside the bed holding her hand. When he heard Lizzie, he turned his head and tears glittered in his eyes. She knelt at his side and took his other hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, for she knew that he would not appreciate mollifying assurances.
He clasped her hand tightly and whispered, ‘Lizzie, the first time we met, you said you were sorry. It helped me then and it’s helping me now.’
Mrs Adams died next day and her husband sent a note to the Castle Bar asking the Mudie family to attend the interment and also the funeral tea at Tay Lodge. When the small group were gathered in the big drawing room after the service, Mr Adams took Lizzie and George aside and said, ‘I’d like you to stay with me after everyone else leaves. The lawyer’s coming to read my wife’s will.’
The lawyer wore pince-nez on the end of his nose as he read out the short document. Mrs Adams had left £200 to George and to Lizzie she bequeathed all her clothes, furs and jewellery.
‘I want Lizzie to have the things that would have passed to my dear Dorothy,’ read the lawyer in his dry-as-dust voice.
When she heard this, Lizzie started to cry, weeping the tears that had been pent up in her for a very long time. It took all the efforts of George to calm her but she was very emotional and clung to Mr Adams as if she wanted to protect him.
‘I’ll come and visit you every week, I promise,’ she told him.
The first Lizzie knew of Johnny Davidson’s attachment to her was when Georgie started teasing her about it.
‘Your lad’s out there waiting for you,’ he sometimes said in the evening if he spied Johnny hanging about on the corner opposite the Castle Bar.
Sure enough, if she ventured forth, dressed in the silks and lace bequeathed to her by Mrs Adams, he would appear and walk along at her side. She did not want to be cruel and tell him to go away for she respected Johnny and was fond of him, but there were several reasons why she found his surreptitious courting an embarrassment.
The first was because of her brother’s teasing.
The second was because of the fantasies she sent herself to sleep with every night about the sailor who had rescued Davie from the dock. ‘I’ll come to see you,’ he’d said and she was waiting impatiently for the day of his return. In her memory he grew taller, more dashing and heroic as each week passed.
The third reason why she shied away from Johnny’s courting was ambition. She had to admit it. Just as she hated having to work as a barmaid because she felt destined for better things, she did not see herself married to Maggy the maid’s brother. She knew too much about the poverty-stricken lives of the Davidsons for that. She’d seen Johnny when he didn’t have a pair of shoes to his feet, and, worst of all, he still spoke with the broad Dundee accent that made her cringe. She could never introduce him to the smart people in whose circles she longed to move. ‘This is my husband,’ she would have to say and she could hear Johnny’s voice adding, ‘Eh’m pleased to meet you.’
September brought a golden tinge to the trees in the valley of the Tay. The breeze that blew from the sea up the narrow streets and alleys that led down to the docks carried a crispness of frost on its morning breath. When people woke to a silvering like sugar icing on their garden walls, they felt easier in their minds. Fever could not flourish in the cold.
In mid-month the customers of the Castle Bar discussed the news of the whalers’ catch. It had been a good year, they said, and the city looked forward to the arrival of the first ships.
She listened avidly to everything that was said and hardly dared leave the bar in case she missed news of the returning whalers. They came straggling in over two weeks – first the Fearnought and then the Lady Diana, both carrying large catches. Their arrival was a more muted affair than their departure for the stench that filled the town as their cargoes of blubber were discharged made the fastidious walk around with handkerchiefs soaked in toilet water held to their noses. Throughout day and night, half stripped men worked on the huge wooden ships, heaving the viscous, stinking yellow blubber down into barrows and carts which trundled from the dockside to the oil refineries of Baffin Lane and Whale Alley.
Lizzie dressed herself with care every day, pinning the neck of her blouse with one of Mrs Adams’ brooches and even daringly hanging pretty earrings – not knowing they were diamonds – from the lobes of her ears.
The customers complimented her on her appearance but she hardly heard them for she was scanning the face of each stranger who came through the door and could barely conceal her disappointment when it was not Sam Kinge.
It was impossible for her to ask outright about his ship because she dreaded the reply. What if it was lost? She heard returned whalers in the bar saying one ship had been crushed to bits in the pack ice but it was reputedly North American. What if the Pegasus had come in already and paid off its men? She could not bear the thought of her six months’ dream coming to such an anticlimactic end. So she did not ask but waited, avid for any scrap of information. Then one night her ears pricked up like a wary animal’s when she heard: ‘The Pegasus was sighted off Broughty Ferry this morning. It’s the last in and it’s got the biggest catch. The captain’s a great whale hunter.’
She turned towards the speaker and asked casually, ‘Who’s the captain?’
‘A chap called Jacobs and he’s a hand-picked crew, the best in the business. He won’t have any others. They’ll have plenty of money in their pockets this winter. They’ll no’ have to push barrows in the street for their bread.’
That night she did not sleep, arguing with herself: You’ve been a fool about this, you’ve imagined the whole thing, you’re just a silly lassie… He’ll not come. Anyway how do you know he’s not married already?
Thoughts like these ran round and round in her head and when morning came she felt she could not pass another day waiting for news.
‘It’s my day for visiting Mr Adams,’ she told Jessie, ‘but I’ll be back by teatime and I’ll work then.’
Tay Lodge soothed her as it always did. She sat with the old man on the terrace in the autumn sunshine, forcing herself to gaze out across the silvery expanse of river because that was his favourite view. The peace, the unostentatious comfort, the softly ticking clock in the room behind her, the scent of flowers made her taut muscles uncoil.
Mr Adams was failing in his health and was content to sit with his eyes closed, speaking only now and then and listening while Lizzie read him passages out of the newspaper. Some of the news reports had been written by John Davidson and she was astonished at the cleverness of Maggy’s brother.
When the sun was setting she turned her back on a river that shone like shot silk and walked home along the Perth Road. The town was calm, the streets wide and empty because the reeling figures of over-indulging whalers which had filled them for the past week were beginning to disappear. When she pushed open the door of the Castle Bar the place smelt of hops and ale but it was quiet and there were no customers in the saloon so she headed for the stairs. When she reached the top landing, an excited Maggy was waiting for her.
‘There’s a man been looking for you. He’s been in three times since this morning,’ she whispered.
Lizzie tried to act unconcerned. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’
‘No, but it was yon loon that saved wee Davie in the dock, ye mind the one, the big one…’
Words were tumbling out of Maggy like water from a faucet but Lizzie hardly heard them because her heart was, a song that filled her whole being and obliterated everything else.