Chapter Four

As Polly was for ever reminding her sister it was more than their lives were worth to be caught fraternising with the Hallops. For this reason Babs continued to treat Jackie and his brothers with disdain whenever she encountered them in Lavender Court, though she would nod to Jackie’s mother now or bestow a haughty little smile on his small sisters just to show them that she wasn’t entirely two-faced. What Polly said was true, of course: Mammy would have a purple fit if she suspected that one of her darling daughters and scruffy Jackie Hallop were on the way to becoming sweethearts or that Babs and Polly were frequent visitors to the Hallops’ yard in Kingston Lane.

It was not exactly Polly’s wish to spend two or three evenings a week consorting with Jackie Hallop and his friends but, as eldest, she felt a certain responsibility to her sister and at first she tagged along just to make sure that Babs did not get into trouble.

From the outside the Hallops’ yard was unremarkable. Even the sign above the padlocked gate – Sunbeam Garage & Repair Works – was nothing more than a sheet of corrugated iron painted in faded letters.

Kingston Lane was one of those sneaky little alleys that linked nowhere to nowhere, a remnant of the days long gone when the Gorbals had been a village of cottages and market gardens. Back of the so-called ‘repair shop’ – another monument to corrugated iron – brambles still ripened in autumn, dog-roses still blossomed and a country-lover might have found evidence of the herbal beds that had flourished here a hundred years ago, a tiny clump of mint, a sprig of thyme or fennel clinging to the ashy soil below the disused railway tunnel.

The yard was strewn with bits and pieces of metal – Jackie got quite upset if you referred to it as ‘junk’ – most of it stripped from motorcars and motorcycles; an L-shaped necropolis of dented fenders and fretted wings, of bent axles, rusting sub-frames and side-cars eroded almost beyond redemption. There was no sign of sophisticated machinery, only one ancient wooden structure rather like a gibbet, topped by a pulley wheel that clicked and revolved all by itself even when the air was still.

When Mrs Hallop’s boys were called upon to work, they worked hard. Jackie and his older brother Dennis could be busy little bees when it suited them. An expert mechanic, Jackie had a particular fondness for motorcycles. He could strip a machine in a matter of hours and, if there was urgency about it, reconstruct the damned thing and have it off the premises before the dawn patrol appeared on the horizon. In fact, three constables and one divisional sergeant were roaring around the county on bikes that had Jackie Hallop’s fingerprints all over them – and nobody any the wiser.

Jackie believed that it paid to have friends in high places and was never less than civil when it came to dealing with coppers. Which was more than could be said for his honest, quite-above-board father whose fondness for a dram often had him struggling in the arms of the law on Friday nights and had come close to costing him his job as a railway porter.

If old Sandy Hallop had lost his job, however, it would hardly have mattered. His sons would see him right, for the Hallop lads were coining in more in a month than a railway porter earned in a year.

For Babs, however, money was not the main attraction.

Every Saturday night young Jackie Hallop shed his greasy overalls, donned a beautiful pale blue double-breasted lounge suit and turned up at the Calcutta Road Palais de Danse looking like a million dollars. It would take more than a length of lined flannel to transform Jackie into Prince Charming, of course, but the Calcutta Palais, though glittery, was hardly a royal palace and most of the girls there were impressed by gorgeous feathers.

Jackie had one or two other things going for him, too. He had escaped the plague of acne that affected so many of his peers and his complexion, though pale, was passing smooth. And he wasn’t much of a one for the booze. Beer made him sick and spirits made his head spin so he was usually sober when most of those around him were falling down drunk, which was a big advantage when it came to getting off with girls.

Next to motorcycles, girls were Jackie Hallop’s passion in life. He liked them even more than he liked money. If the ladies generally preferred money to Jackie then that was just dandy, for Jackie had acquired the knack of making the two things – Jackie and cash – seem indissoluble.

Pale blue suit, silk tie, wristlet watch, plump buffalo-hide wallet with its edging of fivers were advertising pure and simple, bait to sucker unwary victims into believing that Jackie Hallop was a gentleman in the making.

Even Babs Conway wasn’t that daft.

She lived just three floors up from the Hallops and saw Jackie for what he really was, slight, scrofulous and almost indistinguishable from the Neds who lolled about the street corners. She knew that he slept four to a bed with his brothers and, when it suited him, wouldn’t get up until noon.

Babs was also aware, however, that Jackie had money to burn and that he fancied her and that when he chatted her up there was a delicious undercurrent of opportunity running through the conversation. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the Hallops’ repair shop in Kingston Lane offered sanctuary when the prospect of another evening wasted at home became just too tedious for words.

The group that gathered round the stove in Hallops’ repair shed were not all mercenaries. Occasionally – though not often – they talked of things other than money and the fun it could purchase.

Polly and Babs had escaped the poverty trap thanks to Mammy’s efforts and the Hallop boys through their connection with Mr Manone. But others in the company hadn’t shaken off their birthright and remained moral outcasts from the system and blamed capitalism for their descent into lawlessness. Such a one was Patsy Walsh. His aim was not to escape into the middle class but to overthrow that class, to destroy an exploitative kultur that deliberately robbed the workers of their will to fight.

Polly found this aspect of Patsy Walsh both interesting and, in its way, rather attractive. She was not in favour of what he did but she had been reared in a tough neighbourhood and some of that toughness had affected her too. How could it be otherwise? She was not put off by what Patsy did for a living and, if she had been more open about it, might even have confessed that she found the anomalies and paradoxes in his character intriguing.

Patsy was a house-breaker, a negotiator, a salesman, a voice in the wilderness; a wheedling, gentle honeycomb of a voice who, given the chance, could have argued intelligently with Baldwin or Beaverbrook. He was also a fellow traveller, a disciple of Marx and had confided in Polly that he’d been in Berlin that jolly day in May when the Communists had attacked the police stations and nine comrades had been martyred. He had seen things in Germany, he said, that made Glasgow’s hunger marches look like a Christmas pantomime.

If Patsy had been less adept at breaking into houses and offices he might have been treated as a buffoon by the young men who met around the stove to share tea, toast and margarine, and talk of movie stars, football heroes, dancing – and money. As it was, they all held him just a little in awe and even Polly was not immune to his rough charms.

She crouched on a bench by the stove with Babs and Patsy beside her.

Jackie straddled a motorcycle, his narrow thighs embracing the saddle, arms folded on the handlebars while Patsy discoursed on international injustice and the national disgrace of having in power a Labour Party that was too scared to do anything original or effective.

Polly listened intently, nodding now and then in agreement.

She had removed her Scotch tammy to expose her chestnut hair. She had a neat haircut now and the sort of look that she knew bothered Comrade Walsh, for he had already told her that she was close to becoming middle class; a comment that Polly thought rather flattering in a back-handed way.

Tommy Bonnar had also turned up at the yard that evening.

Polly wasn’t sure why he had come and he did not explain his reason. She didn’t like or trust wee Tommy, with his skeletal features, graveyard cough and those dead, zinc-coloured eyes that seemed to see nothing yet missed nothing.

‘If I had money, real money, big money,’ Patsy said, ‘I’d be puttin’ it into building, so I would.’

‘What sorta buildin’?’ said Dennis Hallop, who was out in the shadows under the beams filing something in a vice. ‘A bank, like?’

‘Hell no, man,’ said Patsy. ‘Construction. The fathers of this fair city of ours will soon have no choice but to be knockin’ most of it down. Then the ones who’ll make money, real money, will be those who can lay drains an’ pile bricks an’ slate roofs.’

‘Tradesmen!’ said Babs, not quite critically.

‘If this government stays in power long enough, the municipal borrowin’ rate will be allowed to rise to six quid in twenty’, Patsy went on. ‘Then the steam hammers’ll cut a swathe through Glasgow like you wouldn’t believe. Everythin’ from the Carlton to the Calcutta Road will be swept away.’

‘I hope they give us some warnin’,’ Babs said. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t want to get tossed out on t’ the street in my nightie-nite.’

Jackie grinned and massaged the rubber grips of the motorcycle as if he were kneading flesh. ‘I’ll be there t’ save you, darlin’. ’Specially if you’re only wearin’ your nightie-nite.’

‘Look what they’ve done already.’ Patsy ignored Jackie’s attempt to sabotage a serious conversation. ‘Three thousand suburban cottages in Knightswood. Three thousand’s a flea-bite. We need sixty thousand, seventy thousand new homes to rehouse the Clydeside wards. Where’s that money gonna come from, these days?’

‘And where’s it going to go?’ said Polly.

Patsy gave her a brusque nod.

‘Have a guess, sweetheart,’ he said.

‘The building trades, like you say,’ Polly answered. ‘They’ve started developments already in Mosspark and Anniesland.’

‘How do you know?’ said Babs.

‘I’ve seen the plans,’ said Polly.

‘What plans?’

‘In the burgh council offices. Where I work.’

‘They let you see the plans?’ Dennis was impressed.

‘Aye, sure.’

‘What’re you then, an archy-tect?’

‘I’ve access to architectural files when I need them,’ said Polly.

‘Do you now?’ said Tommy Bonnar, and coughed.

‘What’s our burgh council got to do with buildin’ programmes in Mosspark?’ said Jackie.

‘Transportation,’ said Polly. ‘Tramcar routes, that sort of thing.’

‘Never thought o’ that,’ Jackie admitted.

‘Other people have,’ said Patsy.

‘Like who?’ said Babs.

‘Like the landlords an’ factors who’re already buyin’ up every strip of private land they can get their grubby paws on,’ Patsy declared. ‘When the purchase orders start tricklin’ in, they’re the ones who’ll make a killin’.’

‘So long as they don’t knock down the Palais,’ Babs said, with a shrug.

‘Aye, the Palais.’ Jackie swung himself from the motorbike, executed a not inelegant glide and hopped up on to the bench by Polly’s side. ‘That’s what I’d do if I had the real big money. I’d buy the Palais. I’d buy the Palais an’ let you all in for free.’

‘The Paragon, an’ all?’ said Babs.

‘Yeah, why not?’ said Jackie. ‘Show any picture I liked, any time.’ He spread his arms, balanced on one thin leg. ‘How about you, Den? What’ll you buy when we make our pile?’

‘Brady’s,’ said Dennis, grinning. ‘Brady’s an’ maybe the Parkhead brewery to make sure we never run out.’ He gave a little rat-a-tat with the file on the top of the vice. ‘An’ a car, a big Italian car like Mr Manone’s.’

‘What sort is that, Tommy?’ said Babs.

‘Alfa.’

‘Buy a bettah Alfa,’ said Jackie. ‘Yeah!’

With a surge, Patsy Walsh flung himself to his feet. ‘You’re all – all…’

Even articulate Patsy could find no words to express his disgust at their cheapness. He had attempted to open them to the future but they had refused to see anything except the gains it would bring them. It wasn’t the first time their indifference had infuriated him, their inability to realise that decent housing and the right to work were far more important than what they could buy.

Polly sympathised with his frustration. She too was tempted to despise her peers more than she despised the red-necked hordes who fought each other with knives and bottles and razors: the Tongs and the Norman Conks, the San Toy, the Redskins and the Bully Boys, the street gangsters with their comical names and childish pride. When she heard the yapping of the new breed, however, she doubted that no matter how the world changed there would never be equality.

She watched Patsy grab his cap and stalk out into the yard.

‘Hoi, Patsy, don’t take the huff,’ Jackie called after him.

‘Where you goin’ then?’ Dennis shouted.

‘Work to do,’ said Patsy, and kicked the door behind him with his heel.

*   *   *

Patsy let the night air soothe him. He loved the night. In the night you couldn’t see the city’s appalling squalor. He had no illusions. He knew what was out there. He had lived all his life in the sink-holes of despair that hid behind the old Victorian façades. He had visited the new suburban villas too, however, and had flitted stealthily through the drawing-rooms of the well-to-do, had peeped into bedrooms at clean, sleeping heads and had suffered not only anger but shame, shame that the city he loved was content to remain divided.

He had no job lined up for tonight. He’d wanted to stay inside, to talk to them, to try to make them see sense, but they had offended him and insulted his intelligence. What did Jackie Hallop and Dennis and the Conway girls really know about pride? They were hopeless cases, hopeless.

Hands shaking slightly, Patsy lit a cigarette and climbed the ash ramp towards the tunnel mouth.

The sky was coated with cloud, like a huge dirty blanket. Away below was the silver of the river, like a polished piece of metal, a spanner or chisel, say, or the blade of a cut-throat razor. Hands in pockets, he hunched his shoulders against the snivelling little wind that escaped from the empty tunnel and let his anger drift away.

‘Penny for them, Patsy Walsh,’ Polly said.

He started.

She had come upon him as lightly as a wisp of smoke, as silently as a shadow. He couldn’t have done better himself.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘My sister just doesn’t understand what politics means to you.’

‘She isn’t the only one.’

Polly had put the Scotch tammy back on her head, had buttoned her overcoat to the very top button. She was slim and tall, almost military-looking in the high-buttoned coat. To Patsy the reeking haze that lay above the Gorbals seemed suddenly brighter.

‘I shouldn’t take things so seriously, should I?’ he said.

‘Oh, yes, you should,’ Polly told him. ‘Somebody’s got to.’

He paused. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘No.’

‘You want a puff?’

‘Please.’

He took the cigarette from his mouth and gave it to her.

He watched her take the Woodbine between finger and thumb and place it lightly against her lips. He knew that when she gave it back to him it would taste of lipstick. He waited patiently, happily, while she inhaled.

She gave him back the cigarette and blew out smoke.

She looked away across the rooftops to the silver river while he, watching her, tasted her lipstick on his lips.

‘Nice,’ Polly said. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘Would you care to walk me home?’

‘Okay,’ said Patsy Walsh and, just as he had seen the lovers do on the quays of Paris, took her hand in his.

*   *   *

‘Oh, so it’s yourself, is it?’ Janet McKerlie stepped back into the hall. ‘What time o’ the night do you call this?’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Lizzie, humbly. ‘Somethin’ happened to the dash wheel an’ we all had to wait while they drained the tank.’

‘We didn’t expect you anyway.’

‘I always come on Tuesdays.’

‘When you can spare the time, aye,’ said Janet.

She went into the kitchen.

Lizzie followed.

There was no place else to go.

For over forty years the McKerlies had lived in this same one-room flat – a single-end – in the backlands behind Ballingall Street.

If Gran McKerlie and Janet had been less obsessed with their own little fifth-floor island, they might have noticed that the tenement had gone sliding downhill and was now shored up by four massive oak beams that braced the bulbous gable against the back of a sandstone tenement. They might also have noticed that the comparatively spacious and respectable little room in the comparatively spacious and respectable old building that Charlie and Helen McKerlie had moved into directly after marriage had deteriorated to the point where not even the grisly statistics of the Office of Health took account of it.

When the long-promised regeneration of southside slums finally came to pass, the first sunless tower with its sweating damp-courses, turnpike stairs and iron ventilation grids to fall to the ball-crane and sledge hammers would be this one and Laurieston, Ballingall Street, Number 21, Backland, Stairs, 1st left, 5 up, right lobby, 7th door, facing would be reduced to nothing but rubble and an uncherished memory.

Lizzie knew it, and worried about it.

Janet knew it, but chose not to acknowledge it.

Gran McKerlie didn’t know much about anything. She seemed oblivious to the stench on the stairs, the influx of fleas in warm weather, the gargle of water from broken eaves or the noisy squabbles that took place in the dark passageways that folk still called ‘the greens’.

Gran had a lot more to interest her than a Labour council’s stuttering plans for a glorious Utopian future.

High in her eyrie – which she never left – Gran dwelled with her pains.

Everything else, except the power she wielded over Janet, was subsumed by her pains. Her pains were terrible. Her pains were constant. Her pains had more shades and hues than sunset over Arran and Gran had more words in her vocabulary to report the weathers of her pains than she had for anything else, except possibly the daily deviations of her bladder and bowels.

‘And how are you tonight, Mother?’ Lizzie said.

‘Terrible, just terrible.’

Lizzie removed her coat, unpinned her scarf and hung them on the solitary hook behind the kitchen door.

‘Is that a fact?’ Lizzie said.

‘It is, it is – a sad fact, but a true one,’ said Gran McKerlie who, though she’d never heard of Socrates let alone Zeno, had grasped the principles of Stoicism by brute instinct. ‘It’s been a terrible day, terrible.’

‘Is it your legs,’ said Lizzie, washing her hands at the sink by the window, ‘or is it your you-know-what again?’

‘It’s my you-know-what.’

‘Since it rained she’s had a lot of trouble with her you-know-what,’ Janet explained.

Lizzie raised her head and stared – puzzled – into the window glass.

To the best of her recollection there had been no rain to speak of for the past ten days, an occurrence so rare in the west of Scotland in November that even the Glasgow Herald had been moved to remark upon it. But then her mother didn’t read the Glasgow Herald, or the Bulletin, or the Evening Times or anything, not even the disingenuous little booklets about true love and matrimony that Janet sneaked in from the shop from time to time.

All day long her mother did nothing but ruminate in the broad, wooden-armed chair by the fire that Janet lighted first thing or, if the sun shone, by the sink at the window.

Lizzie could not have endured such inactivity and couldn’t enter her mother’s head and share the scant thoughts that occupied the old woman hour after empty hour, day after empty day.

There had never been much there to begin with, Lizzie suspected, but after twenty years of widowhood, crippled by peevishness and illness, there was nothing left to muse upon and nothing, of course, to plan for except another day, another year exactly the same as all those that had gone before. Her mother’s mind now was as spartan as the kitchen.

The kitchen was furnished with three wooden chairs, a small table, a bed, a stove, a sink, a few pieces of crockery and a cupboard in which clothes were kept. There were four solitary ornaments upon the high mantelshelf above the range: a moon-faced clock, a pair of tiny boots fashioned out of polished brass, an empty letter rack and a pewter pot with two charred clay pipes in it – her father’s pipes, the only mementoes of the time they’d shared with him.

No tinted photographs, no sentimental cards, no corks or ribbons or flowers, not even – as Babs had once remarked – the pickled egg that Grandpa had been about to bite into when the reaper cut him down.

Lizzie could no longer engage with her mother.

There was nothing left to engage with, nothing save a self that revelled in suffering and, Lizzie supposed, constantly pondered the mysteries of its own, quite bearable existence.

She dried her hands briskly, folded the towel and draped it on the wooden rack by the side of the sink. She was always tidy in Mam’s kitchen, excessively tidy, otherwise Janet would berate her with pernickety little gestures and patient little sighs that screamed disapproval of her, Lizzie’s, sluttish ways.

‘Have you been takin’ the bottle the doctor gave you?’ Lizzie asked.

‘No use,’ Gran said.

‘No use,’ said Janet.

‘Bound me up.’

‘Bound her up.’

‘Did you tell him that?’ said Lizzie, rolling up her sleeves.

‘He’s not interested.’

‘Not in the slightest interested,’ said Janet.

‘Takes his money. Does me no good,’ Gran said.

‘Doesn’t know what it is to suffer,’ said Janet.

‘Be old himself some day,’ Gran said.

‘Then he’ll know all about it,’ said Janet.

Lizzie advanced upon her mother. Without apprehension, the old woman watched her daughter’s approach. Inactivity had laid great slabs of fat upon Helen McKerlie, ballooning out her face and swelling her hands and feet, so that whatever minor disorder had once affected her had blown up into genuine ill-health. Her flesh was tender and bruised easily. Her joints were locked, her organs swollen and sore.

None of this did Lizzie doubt or mock. She knew that her mother was an invalid but, like the town in which she lived, like the Scottish nation itself, Lizzie reckoned that the woman had brought the condition upon herself by indolent self-pity and a sense of persecution that had no basis in fact.

‘I’ll lift,’ said Lizzie, patiently, ‘an’ you take off her clothes.’

The ritual was as familiar as breathing. Janet did not even need to nod.

‘Ready?’ Lizzie asked.

Gran answered, ‘Aye.’

She grimaced as Lizzie slid her arms under her armpits and – face to face, cheek against cheek – with a powerful heave detached her from the wafer-thin cushions upon which she had been seated since Janet had got her up that morning. Gran came away reluctantly, like something large and recalcitrant – a mule, say – being dragged out of mud.

Though she was used to the stinks and stenches of the laundry, Lizzie pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth to shut out the smell that rose from her mother’s chair, an odour of decay, of unpardonable neglect which, if it had not been self-inflicted, would have been quite shocking and quite heart-breaking.

‘Okay?’ Lizzie asked.

‘If he hadn’t of bound me with his new medicine, I’d be all right.’

‘He’s a good doctor, but,’ said Janet, as she worked on ties and buttons behind her mother’s back. ‘It’s just his manner. He only charges ten shillin’s if we let him come in the daytime. He’s a good doctor, Mam, say what you like.’

‘He’s got me bound.’

‘I thought,’ Lizzie grunted, ‘it was your bladder, not your bowels.’

‘It’s everythin’,’ the old woman answered.

‘Everything, aye,’ said Janet and, with a motion so swift that it might have been part of a conjuring trick, peeled off her mother’s skirt, underskirt and big, back-tying drawers and swept them away, leaving the old woman clad only in a lambswool bodice, wrinkled lisle stockings and a pair of flannel shoes.

‘Mam,’ said Lizzie, ‘lift your arms.’

‘Oooooh!’

‘Please. Try an’ lift your arms.’

Janet approached. She held out a baking bowl filled with warm soapy water and a big perforated sponge, while Lizzie, one-handed, wrestled to remove her mother’s winter vest.

The garments were clean, for Janet would not allow them to be otherwise, but the veined and bloated flesh beneath was not, or did not seem so. Though she had seen it so often before, Lizzie tried to look elsewhere.

At this moment she was grateful to her sister Janet; she couldn’t possibly have borne the sight of that body two or three times a day or, worst of all, to have slept with it, smelling it, feeling it against her flesh, its odours and essences, the contamination of age, seeping into her day after day, night after night. Now, with her fortieth year in sight, it was all Lizzie could do not to fling her mother from her and bolt from the stagnation that Gran and Janet represented, that effortless poverty of mind and body that once the girls were gone might grip and draw her down too.

She had to do something about it soon, very soon. She had to find five hundred pounds for a husband, any sort of a husband who would take her far away from this and give her, if not love, protection.

Mr Bernard Peabody? Perhaps.

‘Mother, lift your arms again – will you, please?’

Lizzie felt the whorls and rolls of her mother’s flesh stiffen against her palms, not with pain or indignation but in the unimpeachable knowledge that her daughter’s indifference had been whittled away and that she, old and crippled though she might be, had gained the upper hand at last.

‘Sorry,’ Lizzie said. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m tired, that’s all. I’ve had a long day of it.’

‘Haven’t I?’ said Gran McKerlie.

‘Hasn’t she?’ said Janet. ‘Haven’t we all?’

‘Your turn will come,’ Gran prophesied.

‘Your turn will come, Lizzie,’ Janet added.

Staring bleakly over her mother’s shoulder, Lizzie thought: Not if I can help it. Not if I can just lay hands on five hundred pounds and a husband to go with them.

‘Janet,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Sponge.’

*   *   *

Bernard peered at the spot on the table where as a rule he placed his rent books.

‘What’s all this then, Mrs Conway?’ he said.

‘A bite to eat,’ Lizzie said. ‘Ham, egg, sausage. I’m sure you’ll manage a mouthful before you scamper away. Haven’t had your tea yet, have you?’

‘As a matter of fact…’

Bernard checked himself. He recognised a bribe when he saw one. But this sort of bribe was hard to resist. In fact he might be doing Lizzie Conway an injustice. It might not be a bribe at all. It might be hospitality, good old Scottish hospitality which it would be churlish to refuse.

He swithered, wondering if she had spotted his weakness, if he was that transparent. He caught the aroma that drifted up from the plate. The eggs were fresh, sunny side up, the ham crisp, and the sausage had a plump bursting sheen to it that suggested it came from a tray in one of the better butcher’s shops.

Saliva gathered in the corners of Bernard’s mouth. He swallowed, hastily.

‘No, I – I’d better not stop.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Lizzie Conway. ‘Miserable night like this, a man needs something hot to keep him going. Give me your coat. Come on, Mr Peabody, give me your coat. You’re drookit.’

Drookit he was indeed, drenched by the rain that had brought the dry spell to an end. Although he had splurged on a tramcar fare instead of walking across the bridge from Shannon, Peters & Dean’s, he’d hoofed it from Eglinton Street and his feet were wet, his shoulders damp and his bowler felt as if it were floating on his hair.

He took off the bowler, held it by his side, let it drip discreetly.

Stooping, Lizzie detached the hat from his chilled fingers and placed it on the metal shelf above the range where, not surprisingly, it immediately began to steam like a small black pudding.

Bernard was sunk, and knew it.

He gave her his scarf and overcoat, accepted a towel and rubbed his face, hair and hands with it. He folded the towel meticulously and placed it across the little wooden rack.

‘Fried tomato?’ Lizzie said.

‘If – if there’s one going.’

‘Toast?’

‘Please.’

He felt as if he were embroiled in one of those pleasant dreams that you have on a Sunday morning when you’re having a long lie in or, more often, when you drift off in an armchair in front of the fire after a hard day. It wasn’t just the fry-up that he found impossible to resist but also the kitchen’s comfortable atmosphere and, yes, the woman’s companionship.

He was too wet, too chilled to be nervous tonight and it wasn’t until he had taken his third or fourth mouthful that it occurred to him why that might be. He blinked, glanced round the room, then asked, ‘Where are the girls?’

‘Out somewhere,’ said Lizzie.

She had served him, had even put slices of buttered toast into a nice wire rack, had poured his tea. Now she was seated at the table with him, her back to the rain-splattered window, a cup held in both hands as if she were about to read his fortune in the leaves.

She had shed her apron and wore a striped cotton blouse with a woolly jumper over it, a wide black skirt. She looked, he thought, like an expanded version of his mother who, though tiny, emanated the same sort of joie-de-vivre. His mother, though, was less passive, less comfortable to be with, and far too nippy for a sixty-five-year-old widow.

Mouth full of sausage and egg, Bernard studied Lizzie Conway with a shade more intensity than was strictly prudent. No, he decided, she wasn’t really like his old mum after all. It was just something in the eyes, a sort of tenderness, that had given him a false impression.

‘All of them?’ he said.

‘Aye.’

Bernard didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved that he would not be treated to a leg show from Babs. Relieved, probably. He wondered vaguely if the Conways talked about him after he left and if so what they said.

He chewed, swallowed, helped himself to toast.

‘I don’t think I’ve met all your daughters?’ he said.

‘No, not yet,’ said Lizzie.

‘Three, isn’t it?’

‘Aye. Three.’ She paused, reading the tea leaves. ‘What about yourself, Mr Peabody, have you got sisters?’

‘’Fraid not,’ Bernard said. ‘I lost both my brothers in the war.’

‘Both!’ said Lizzie. ‘God, that’s awful.’

‘Not much fun,’ Bernard admitted. ‘One was drowned when the Hampshire went down. Kitchener was on that ship – not that it did our Charlie a lot of good. Mines don’t have much respect for anybody’s reputation.’

‘My father’s name was Charlie,’ Lizzie put in, then, lowering her eyes, said, ‘What about the other one, your other brother?’

‘Nothing special,’ Bernard said with a matter-of-fact lift of the left shoulder. ‘The Somme.’

‘An’ you?’

‘Nothing special,’ said Bernard again.

‘Heroes,’ Lizzie said. ‘Heroes all.’

‘Did your husband…?’

Lizzie nodded. ‘March 1918. Near Baupaume.’

‘Who was he with, what outfit?’

She raised herself a little, put down her cup, spread her skirt under her thighs, not meeting his eye.

Bernard had encountered far too much grief and embarrassment in the past dozen years not to recognise a warning signal. He was not in the least surprised when she changed the subject abruptly.

‘Is it true you live in Knightswood?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a long way from the Gorbals.’

‘We used to live in Finnieston until we wangled a transfer.’

‘Being in the trade, I suppose…’

‘Oh, no. It wasn’t because I worked in a factor’s office that we got a new house,’ Bernard said, with just a touch of indignation. ‘It’s a council property.’

‘Really!’

‘Terraced cottage. Garden, and everything.’

‘That must be nice.’

‘It is. Very nice,’ Bernard agreed.

‘I’d like to see it.’

‘Well…’

‘Some day,’ said Lizzie, smiling.

‘It’s just me an’ my mother, you see,’ Bernard said.

‘How many rooms?’

‘Two bedrooms. Living room. Separate kitchen. Gas throughout. Outside appointments,’ Bernard said. ‘Not very large but quite, quite…’

‘Luxurious?’

‘It suits us, Mrs Conway. It suits us just fine.’

‘How did you – I mean, how does one get such a house?’

‘The Housing Committee’s very selective.’

He tried to keep his voice even, not to allow smugness to creep in.

The acquisition of a brand-new terraced cottage out in the suburbs had given a strange boost to his confidence. He was a council tenant now, a suburbanite, a citizen of good standing. In spite of his shyness, he had to admit that he did feel rather elevated, particularly when he made his calls in places like Lavender Court and saw how the other half lived.

He said, ‘They won’t take you if you have children.’

‘Children of what age?’ said Lizzie Conway.

‘I really don’t know. Any age, I suppose.’

She gave a wee grimace, as if the paucity of information disappointed her, then she grinned. ‘I suppose you’re a child.’

‘Pardon.’

‘Mother an’ son.’

Bernard wiped a smear of egg yolk from the plate with a crust of toast and popped it in his mouth. He suspected that he was being quizzed about housing and that the free meal was her way of paying for his expertise. He was relieved that it didn’t have to do with rent money, or the absence of it.

‘I reckon that’s true,’ he said. ‘The house is in my mother’s name, though it’s me that pays the rent.’

‘So a widow could apply?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Bernard said. ‘Though I’ve a feelin’ all the cottages have already been allocated.’

‘Here, you don’t have to tell Shannon, Peters an’ Whatsit that I’ve been askin’ questions about council properties, do you?’

Bernard laughed and shook his head. ‘Of course not.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Lizzie. ‘It’s just somethin’ in the back of my mind. Nothin’ fixed or definite. A daydream, you might say.’

‘How would your daughters feel about bein’ dragged away from here?’ Bernard said. ‘I mean, it’s very pleasant in Knightswood but it isn’t as – as lively, shall we say, as the Gorbals.’

‘My girls will do as they’re told,’ said Lizzie, not sternly.

‘At that age…’

‘What age?’

‘Their age. Young. Youthful…’ Bernard didn’t know what had prompted him to express such a patronising sentiment. ‘Awkward,’ he concluded, limply. ‘Awkward’s what I mean.’

‘Don’t you like them?’

‘Well, yes, they seem like very nice, very well-brought-up young – I don’t know them. I mean, I’ve only met them once or twice.’

‘I’ve made you blush, Mr Peabody.’

‘No. No. I’m just – just warm. It’s the tea, I think.’

‘More?’

He glanced ostentatiously at the metal clock that tick-ticked on the mantelshelf, then he fished a cheap Ingersoll from his breast pocket and checked the time on it too.

He got to his feet. ‘No, really. I must be…’

‘One more cup?’ Lizzie tempted him.

‘I’d love to, but I’ll have to be on…’ He fought to remember his manners. ‘Thank you for the meal. I appreciate it.’

She fetched his coat and scarf and gave them to him, then she lifted down his bowler, still steaming, from the shelf above the range. But when he reached out for it, Lizzie smiled and refused to hand it over.

‘I used to do this for my husband,’ she said. ‘Stand still, Mr Peabody.’

Short of rudeness, he had no option but to comply. He put his hand down between his legs, hoisted up the money pouch, buttoned his coat over it and then stood erect, a proper little trooper, while Mrs Lizzie Conway placed the hat upon his head and gave it a tiny wee squeeze to settle it over his hair.

She inspected him critically, adjusted his tie, picked a loose thread from the edge of a buttonhole and, with her forefinger, delicately wiped a little yellow smudge of egg yolk from his upper lip.

It was all Mr Peabody could do not to quiver.

He half expected Mrs Conway to round off the ritual with a little kiss.

‘There,’ Lizzie said. ‘That’s better. All smart. All ready for the fray.’

‘Thank you,’ Bernard said. ‘Thank you very much.’

He stuck his case under his arm, patted the money pouch, turned towards the door, as dazed and detached as if this really were a fireside reverie.

‘Mr Peabody,’ Lizzie said. ‘Bernard?’

‘Yes.’

‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The rent money,’ said Lizzie, laughing.