CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The invitation from Queen Mary came out of the blue. Her Majesty wished Marion to come to the palace for tea. She hoped this would be convenient and would Marion please telephone at once to her lady-in-waiting, Lady Cynthia Colville?
Marion lifted the heavy black receiver with trepidation. She had met Lady Cynthia, a terrifying old dragon with a huge nose, fierce eyes and a mouth twisted in permanent disgust. When not waiting on the queen, she presided at the London Juvenile Court. The predicament of any felon up before her would be unenviable to say the least.
“Her Majesty means just me, and not the princess?” a puzzled Marion asked her.
“Her Majesty does. Kindly be on time. Her Majesty is never late for any engagement, public or private. She expects the same punctuality from others.” With that, Lady Cynthia rang off.
Marion went to consult the duchess, who chuckled. “My mother-in-law has strong views on education! Prepare to be instructed in thorough Teutonic fashion!”
But what business was it of Queen Mary’s? Marion wondered. Elizabeth was the duchess’s daughter. Any instructions should come from her, surely? She felt mildly offended, but also fascinated. Tea with the queen-empress would be extraordinary—and what would Buckingham Palace be like?
SHE SET OFF a good half hour earlier than necessary, as the walk from Piccadilly through Green Park to Buckingham Palace was ten minutes at the most. The buses roared by to nearby Hyde Park Corner, bells dinging, adverts plastered on the sides, passengers packed in their tops. There were cars to dodge too, heavy horses and carts, and still a number of boys on bicycles, even though morning deliveries were long over.
Green Park, lovely in summer, was sprinkled with flowers and tourists. They sat in deck chairs or lay on the warm grass. They were content, it seemed, to be near to the gold-topped black railings of Buckingham Palace, from whose pillared central portico the Royal Standard fluttered. The gilt figure atop the Victoria Memorial blazed against the blue sky. She could see the soldiers, magnificent in their bearskins, with the gold on their red jackets flashing in the sun. A sense of excitement gripped her. She was going where very few people ever went.
At 4:50 p.m. precisely she walked through the black gates of Buckingham Palace. Under the eyes of several observers, she approached the policeman, who seemed to expect her; he nodded her through and directed her to a black double-fronted door on the right-hand side of the facade. As she approached, the doors opened as if by magic; up a wide, shallow flight of steps and Marion was inside.
The palace interior was like the grandest of grand hotels. Great carpeted corridors flowed like red rivers between white-paneled walls scrolled with gold. Vast chandeliers blazed from the ceilings, dripping with faceted glass. It was all very quiet.
“Your coat, madam?”
“Thank you.” Marion handed the pale blue jacket over to a tall figure in black tails. His waistcoat was a brilliant scarlet and his collar stiff and white.
“This way, madam.” He set off along one of the corridors, walking well to the edge of the carpet. Hurrying alongside him, Marion walked in the middle. Passing several other black tailcoats, all of whom looked at her askance, she asked what she was doing wrong.
“Only royalty walk down the middle?” she gasped, torn between amusement and its opposite.
“A freshly brushed carpet is fit only for royal feet.”
She stared at him. Was he serious? His delivery was absolutely deadpan, but beneath his powdered hair, his black eyes sparkled. “This way, madam.”
Madam followed. The palace was almost fantastically ornate. One would never have imagined it from the austere outside. The rooms were massive, built on a giant scale; there seemed not an unfestooned square inch. Walls were of shimmering damask and ceilings blazed with gold. Layers of swagged curtains at colossal windows were restrained by thick silken ropes. There were enormous gold-framed mirrors, huge portraits and shining sofas whose bloated silk cushions threatened to burst from their carved gold frames. Everywhere Marion looked there were painted medallions, gilded moldings, blank-eyed statues striking attitudes in alcoves.
“Madam!” The footman claimed her attention. She saw that he had stopped dead and turned swiftly to the wall.
A short young woman in a white frock was walking down the dead center of the carpet. As she passed she swept Marion, who had not turned, a haughty glance with some familiar blue eyes. She turned the corner and was gone.
“Who was that?”
“Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal, miss.”
King George’s only daughter, Marion knew. The sister of the duke and the Prince of Wales. “Why did you turn to the wall?”
“We’re supposed to avert our gaze, miss.”
“What? But that’s ridiculous.”
Who did these people think they were? They may be king-emperor and queen-empress, but this was the twentieth century.
They had reached a wide, red-carpeted staircase where an elegant gentleman in an even more elaborate outfit awaited in the dead center of the carpet at the top. Behind him, two closed white doors heavy with gold decoration were set in a tall gold and white doorcase.
Marion’s thoughts flew back to Alice, only this time it was Through the Looking-Glass, with the Fish and Frog Footmen. Apart from the wet look conferred by his brilliantined hair, the first footman bore no resemblance to a fish. But there was certainly something of the frog about the bulge-eyed functionary she was now approaching, resplendent in his red tailcoat and patent pumps with silver buckles. “Her Majesty’s personal footman,” the first footman muttered under his breath, before turning away.
Emanating tremendous dignity, the frog footman smiled a courtly smile at the precise moment a series of silvery tinkles from unseen clocks announced that the hour was exactly five. As the last stroke died away he intoned, “Her Majesty is waiting.”
Turning his red-tailcoated back on her, the frog footman seized the round gold knobs of doors. As he pulled them open, the vista exposed was of an opulent sitting room. But this was mere hazy shining background. It was what stood in the foreground that occupied the attention.
Queen Mary stood proudly erect, her ankles touching, her feet at ten to two, her gaze drilling straight into Marion’s. The scene was completely silent but felt somehow full of noise, like a blare of trumpets. It was a tremendous coup de théâtre.
“Miss Marion Crawford, Your Majesty,” announced the footman, before ushering Marion into the room and withdrawing. On silent, oiled gold hinges, the doors behind her closed. There was no escape. A sense of panic swept through Marion.
Queen Mary had been imposing enough in the Royal Lodge gardens. But inside Buckingham Palace the effect was tremendous. She loomed above Marion like a vast statue topped with a face of frowning resolve. Her pale gray gown and the width of her bust suggested the palace frontage. As ever, her high collar and leg of mutton sleeves recalled the Victorian era, as did her hair, supplemented at the front with that strange little pelmet of false gray curls.
Awed and rather terrified, Marion dropped into the deepest curtsey her shaking knees allowed, then limply, without squeezing, shook the proffered hand, which bristled with diamonds. She had expected now to be offered a chair but the royal ankles remained welded together while the royal expression, frowning and expectant, suggested that something else was required. Marion wobbled carpetward in another curtsey.
The statue now moved. “Let us have tea first and then ve can haf a talk,” said the queen in her guttural voice.
Only now did Marion look about herself. The walls of the predominantly red room had a satin shimmer, and the great looping curtains at the colossal windows were restrained by silken ropes.
The queen was leading the way into another, smaller room furnished in gray-blue silk. A faint creak accompanied her, as of much whalebone corsetry. A fire glowed in the depths of a marble fireplace despite the sun outside the silk-draped window. A table stood by it, draped with a white cloth edged with lace. Arranged upon it were pink cups and saucers, a plate of muffins and scones and a large fruitcake. The queen was standing up and fiddling with a silver kettle hanging over a methylated spirit lamp. It bore the monogram VR.
“Zis kettle belonged to Queen Victoria,” Queen Mary remarked needlessly as the water boiled and was decanted into a silver teapot marked with the same royal monogram. “Zis teapot too. And you see zis bracelet?” She extended a glittering hand to Marion. The links of the bracelet seemed to be painted with eyes. It was rather horrible.
“Zey are the eyes of all Queen Victoria’s chiltren!” Queen Mary declared triumphantly.
Tea began. The queen ate with great relish, looking about her as she chewed and making approving little noises deep in her throat. Raisins and crumbs tumbled down the palatial frontage. Marion picked nervously at a scone and darted occasional looks at her hostess. Queen Mary had a bristly chin, she noticed. An ornate gold clock could be heard softly ticking on the mantelpiece.
Having demolished a muffin and a slice of cake, the queen dabbed her wide mouth with a linen napkin, gave a grunt of satisfaction and looked Marion squarely in the eye. “Now ve vill haf our discussion.”
She began fiddling in a basket on the floor. Her hand emerged, holding what looked like a heap of dirty string. “Vaste not vont not,” pronounced the old lady as she began to unravel the cord. “I never throw anything avay. Never! Packing string, post string, it is alvays useful. I keep it all. Also the paper and envelopes. We must not vaste money.”
Marion clenched her jaw. The risk was that it would drop open at the sight of a woman surrounded by gilded splendor, to whom she had been conducted by two footmen and curtseyed twice, untangling used parcel string and rolling it into neat little balls.
“You are enchoying teaching the bambino?”
The chance, Marion thought, would be a fine thing. “We haven’t had many lessons,” she admitted.
The queen did not seem to hear this. “Ja, she reminds me so much of myself! I vud read for six hours every day!”
Marion thought this sounded rather excessive. “I was aiming for an hour for Princess Elizabeth. Children need variety and exercise, especially at her age.”
Queen Mary looked up from an especially tricky knot. “My torter-in-law tells me that you haf some unusual ideas about education, Miss Crawfort.”
“Not unusual,” Marion corrected, smiling. “Just modern.”
The small eyes glinted. “I too haf ideas about education. You must teach Lilibet history. Children are very interested in genealogy. Royal genealogy in particular.”
Marion suppressed a gasp.
“History is by far the most important subject,” the queen proclaimed. “It is for instance far more faluable than arithmetic.” The bright eyes peered hard at her over the glasses. “You are teaching Lilibet arithmetic?”
“Yes.”
The wide old mouth twitched skeptically at the corner. “Lilibet does not need to study arithmetic. She vill never have to run a household budget!”
“But—”
“Chography, though, that is worth doing. Chorge’s empire covers a very large part of the globe. You must ask Mrs. Knight.”
“Mrs. Knight?” What did she know about geography?
Queen Mary went on to explain that among the toys in the nursery was a set of building blocks made of fifty different timbers grown in various parts of the king’s vast realm. It had been presented to Their Majesties during the 1911 Durbar.
“Vot an occasion!” The old queen was misty-eyed now. “Ve vere treated like gods! Ve rode on elephants and I vore the biggest diamond in ze vorld!” The old hands continued to wind the grubby little bits of string.
Marion shifted on her padded seat. It was time to stand up for herself. “Your Majesty,” she began, firmly. “It may be that for a truly rounded education, the princess might additionally benefit from an awareness of social conditions—the difficulties faced by a great many of Your Majesty’s people, the poor.”
A sort of whinnying harrumph came from the seat opposite. “Ze poor!” exclaimed Queen Mary.
Marion braced herself for a royal thunderstorm. The frog footman would be summoned to throw her out of the palace gates. If so, let him. She would have at least gone down fighting.
The queen stared at her indignantly. “But I too am very interested in how poor people lif and vork. I know a lot about the vorking classes as I have always been surrounded vith servants.”
As there seemed no answer to this, Marion did not attempt one. Nor, it seemed, was one required. “I haf taken tea vith miners’ vives,” Her Majesty went on, “and vonce when ve vere staying in Yorkshire there vos a terrible pit accident. Ve vent straight to the pit cottages and comforted ze veeping vidows.”
MARION EVENTUALLY STUMBLED out of the audience clutching a set of Happy Families playing cards where the families concerned were the Plantagenets, Tudors and Hanoverians. How happy had any of them actually been? Her brain teemed with Queen Mary’s reading recommendations: the classics and the Bible, as well as poetry by heart—“Vonderful memory-training! And you simply must read Harrison Ainsvorth.”
Marion had never heard of a novel called Harrison Ainsvorth. But she had barely been back at 145 Piccadilly before a car swept up from the palace containing a large box of books. The entire works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Jane Austen were topped by a small leather-bound volume whose gold-stamped spine read Windsor Castle, by Harrison Ainsworth.
Marion flicked through it. There were a lot of “thees” and “forsooths.” She groaned. Really, this was the most uphill of uphill struggles. However, it would soon be over.
Elizabeth keeps asking me to call her Lilibet, she wrote to her mother. She said that everyone else in the family does. But I can’t really encourage her to think of me as family when I’ll be gone soon.
But the weeks went by and the end of the month passed, and nothing was said.
Had the Yorks forgotten?
Should she say something herself? But her job was hardly finished yet. Elizabeth loved outside learning, her obsessive compulsion seemed much diminished and she now almost had fingernails. But the program of “normal” adventures, which had always been the point, hadn’t even gotten started.
Permission was hard to obtain; the duchess, especially in London, was always rushing off in a whirl of furs to a waiting car, and the duke was either out or shut in his office. Marion had asked herself many times why she was even trying. She should just leave, surely. Enlightened principles, modern ideas—they had no place here. The dancing class and, especially, the audience with Queen Mary had shown her what she was up against.
But now that she knew Elizabeth better, stepping away was harder. Besides being a joy to teach, she was a loving little girl it was impossible not to love in return. If she left now, Marion wondered, would the prison gates ever open? Or would the child be condemned, like some princess in a tower, to spend the rest of her days in lonely privilege? She thought of Buckingham Palace, heavy and hushed, with that feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world, even though the whole of London was going about its business just beyond the brocade-draped windows.
Had the princess been an insufferable prig, it might have been easier. But Elizabeth was softhearted and sensitive. Her compassion, especially for animals, was striking. Standing with the child at the window as she looked down on Piccadilly below, Marion listened to her concerns about the horses pulling the brewer’s dray that stopped every evening at the traffic lights. Her anxiety if the horses were late was touching, as was her concern for weary little ponies trotting home with their carts. Their owners would have been amazed to know the extent of royal concern and sympathy they roused from that upper window.
“Oh, Crawfie!” Elizabeth cried one day, watching with burning eyes a particularly sad little specimen staggering away from the traffic lights pulling a huge cart. “If I am ever queen, I will make a law against all this. Horses should have a rest too!”
“But you aren’t going to be queen,” Marion pointed out. “Your uncle is the heir to the throne.”
Elizabeth did not seem to be listening. “And I shan’t let anyone dock their pony’s tail!”
If she left, Marion wondered, who would play with Elizabeth as she did? She had encouraged the serious princess to be silly by being silly herself. Elizabeth could, at first, hardly believe that Marion would allow her to slip a pair of red reins with bells on over her shoulders and gallop her round the house. “Alah would never let me do this to her!” she whispered.
“Really?” A smile tugged at Marion’s lips. “You do surprise me.”
“Paw the ground, Crawfie! With your hoof! Like this!” She demonstrated with her small foot on the carpet.
Deliveries was the other favorite game. The bells on her reins jingling, Marion would allow herself to be driven round the garden to the rear of the Piccadilly house, “delivering groceries.” She would be patted, given her nosebag and jerked to a standstill as the princess stopped at imaginary houses, handed over imaginary goods and held long and intimate conversations with imaginary customers. She seemed to have an advanced understanding of customer service, and the importance of keeping clients happy. In a different life, Marion thought, she would make a great saleswoman. Or perhaps the head of a large business. But without her help, would Elizabeth ever know these other lives even existed?
And in this life, anyway, she needed sensible clothes to play in. Marion had tackled the duchess on the subject but was told to ask Mrs. Knight about it. Mrs. Knight had advised her to ask the duchess. And so it had gone on, even though the sooty bushes behind the Piccadilly house left streaks and smears all over the lace and chiffon.
Then there was Tom. He didn’t want her to leave either. He made a comic sad face. “I’ll miss you.”
“Aww!” She made a comic sad one in return, to hide the fact she would miss him too.
The first outing to the National Portrait Gallery had led to others. The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, walks across the parks and, today, tea in his flat. It was in a small, shabby apartment block near King’s Cross Station but, in an inversion of Valentine’s foul room in its magnificent university building, was pin-neat. The tiny rooms were immaculately clean, and the coverlet on Tom’s narrow bed was so straight and taut you could have bounced a penny on it.
“What’s that noise?” she asked. There was a thundering sound above, as of a jangling piano on a wooden floor, and people stamping and shouting. Tom’s windows were rattling with the force of it.
He rolled his eyes. “The upstairs neighbors.”
She stared. There was no noise like this in Piccadilly. “Can’t you tell them to stop?”
He gave her a wry grin. “Be my guest. But I wouldn’t recommend it. They’re not usually entirely sober this time of day.”
“But how do you sleep?”
He shrugged. “I’m used to it.”
“Can’t you move?”
“I could. If I had the money.”
Marion, reddening, wondered why she had assumed that everyone in London lived like the Yorks did, amid the carpeted peace of many-roomed mansions.
On a shelf near his bed was a photograph of a pretty young woman. Her insides clenched. “Who’s that?” she asked, attempting insouciance.
“My sister. Kate.”
“Does she live in London?”
He shook his head. “I’m from Cornwall.”
So that was the accent. “How romantic,” she said, thinking of craggy rocks dashed by turbulent seas, of picturesque villages in the folds of rolling hills.
“Not if you’re Kate,” Tom said shortly. “She’s got TB.”
Marion’s hands flew to her face. She stared back at him, aghast. “I’m so sorry. How absolutely dreadful of me.”
“You weren’t to know.” His eyes were on his sister’s face. “But you’re right, it is dreadful. Everything I earn here goes toward her treatment. That’s one reason I’m doing the photojournalism, to get some extra money for Kate.” He smiled at her. “Want to see my latest, by the way?”
The minuscule bathroom, in which two people could hardly stand together, doubled as a darkroom. It had a red bulb, and lines of drying photographs were strung up near the ceiling. He took them down and showed her some of the pictures he had taken recently: poor children in the East End of London, stick-thin, sunken-eyed and shoeless. She looked at him with brimming eyes; his face was right next to hers. “They’re very powerful.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her. She clung to him as if he were the answer to every conundrum and contradiction swirling within her. She allowed him to lead her into the little bedroom, gently undress her and make love to her. He was unhurried in all the ways Valentine had been abrupt. Generous as Valentine had been selfish. Desire thundered within her, drowning out even the piano music coming from above. When it was all over, she lay in his arms. She felt calm, and complete, as if something long searched for had finally been found.
Tenderly, he nuzzled her hair. “Don’t go,” he said.
MARION NOW FELT pulled in any number of different ways. To help her decide, she made a list of pros and cons. The best pros were Elizabeth, Tom and “Operation Normal,” as he called her program of outings. The worst cons were the continuing absence from college, from Grassmarket and from her mother. She added Queen Mary, Alah and the lack of direction from the duchess. Without support, what could she do?
She looked at the list when she had finished it. The pros and cons seemed fairly evenly balanced. Perhaps she should just leave things as they were. Let events take their course. They were drifting, but not unpleasantly.
Then she squared her shoulders and raised her chin. She was not here to drift. She had come here with a mission. But as she was not allowed to perform it, she should just go back.
That weekend, at Royal Lodge, she went to the duchess’s study. It was a charming, octagonal room with tables heaped with books and paneled walls hung with paintings. An air of comfort pervaded, along with the powerful scent of roses. Within a green marble fireplace, a fire flickered calmly.
At the back by a tall, pink-curtained window, a big mahogany writing desk was crowded with photographs and personal effects. “Crawfie!” The duchess looked up, her ivory skin glowing in the light of a fringed lamp. “Do you want to talk to me?”
Marion hesitated. The strong, clear words in strong, clear tones that she had rehearsed in her bedroom had deserted her. All the power in the room had shifted, or so it seemed, to the woman at the desk. But it was hers, surely, Marion thought. She was the one leaving. “It’s just . . .” she began.
The shining head behind the desk graciously tilted. “Just?”
Marion stared down at her hands, twisting together. “My trial period is over, ma’am.”
“Is it really?”
“Yes, ma’am. I . . .” But the words about returning to Scotland and her intended career path died in Marion’s mouth. The blue eyes fixed on her had a mesmerizing power.
“But of course you must stay,” the duchess said mildly, as if the whole affair had been settled long ago and couldn’t be more obvious or simple.
Marion made an effort to rally. “But, ma’am. I—”
The telephone on the duchess’s desk now shrilled. She picked it up and exclaimed, with delight, “Hello, you old fruit!”
The interview was clearly over. It was, Marion thought as she left the room, almost as if the duchess had a button under her desk to arrange convenient telephone interruptions.
She returned to Edinburgh, ostensibly to collect her things but really to think it all over again. “I’m really not sure,” she said to her mother. “I always meant to leave after a month.”
Here in Scotland, with almost the length of England between them, the duchess’s strange, blue-eyed power had no dominion. Tom, on the other hand, did. She desired him and admired him equally; his pioneering photography was fascinating and his devotion to his sister touching. She would have liked to inspire his devotion herself, but she had to be sensible. Attractive though he was, she hardly knew him. She could not base a decision this important on the strength of a few dates. Her previous romantic experience attested to that.
The worst pull was Elizabeth. But now, back in the city of Annie McGinty, there was no real contest. With so much misery and poverty, how could her work with the Yorks be justified? Even if she got permission for them, what difference would a few tube trips make? How could she return to London?
She would stay in Scotland, Marion decided, and do what she wanted, what she had always intended: go back to college, to the children in the Grassmarket. Take up where she had left off. Her mother, royalist as she was, had surely had enough of living alone now. She would be glad to have her only child return.
“You should go back to them,” Mrs. Crawford said, to Marion’s astonishment.
They were standing in the little stone-flagged galley kitchen. Mrs. Crawford was frying bacon and eggs for breakfast. On the scrubbed wooden table next to the green enamel cooker, two plain white plates stood ready. It was, admittedly, very different from the Meissen and footmen of life with the Yorks, not to mention food cooked by a professional chef. Marion pushed this reflection aside.
“Don’t you want me home, Mother?”
“Of course I do.” Her mother sighed, then knit her brows determinedly.
Marion was exasperated. “Mother, I’m not staying in London just so you can tell the butcher’s queue that I work for the royal family.”
“It’s not that. You said yourself that you haven’t finished the job with Elizabeth. You’ve hardly started, in fact.”
“You sound like Miss Golspie,” Marion said sulkily, regretting she had admitted these details.
Mrs. Crawford nodded. “As a matter of fact, Miss Golspie’s been to see me.”
“Has she?”
“She was just passing, she said, and dropped in for coffee.”
Marion raised an eyebrow. This seemed unlikely. Moray House College and the Crawfords’ little terrace were on opposite sides of the city.
“I mentioned that you were coming home. We had quite a chat.” Her mother’s eyes were bright with the remembered importance of being sought out by so great a person.
Marion folded her arms. “And?”
There was a hiss as Mrs. Crawford lifted the bacon from the pan. “They need you, the Yorks. The princess in particular needs you.” She picked up the plates and carried them into the tiny sitting room, where the folding table had been put up.
Marion followed with the teapot, which she set down next to a copy of The Times. Its presence was unexpected; her mother’s preferred reading matter was the picture papers.
The front page described how another hunger march, reaching London, had had the petition it carried, intended for Parliament, confiscated. Scuffles were reported. There was a photograph of police on horseback armed with long batons; another of a group of officers dragging a young man along the ground. She wondered if Tom had taken it. A powerful longing went through her.
“This is a dangerous situation,” said Mrs. Crawford, nodding at the paper. “The country’s becoming divided between the haves and the have-nots.”
Marion could hear Isabel Golspie’s voice in this. The principal had clearly been working on her mother. The newspaper was there on purpose, part of an argument. “But what can I do?” she asked, stubbornly. “I’ve tried my best.”
“So try again! Get that wee bairn out from behind those palace walls,” her mother instructed. “Like Miss Golspie told you to.”
“But they won’t let me!” Marion cried.
Her mother’s eyes flashed. “So make them let you! You’ve got to show her how ordinary people live. She’s the future of the royal family. But if they go on like this, they might not even have one.” She waved a reddened hand at The Times.
“You don’t seriously think there’ll be a revolution?” Remembering her mother’s contempt for Valentine, she almost wanted to laugh.
“Well, it happened to the czar! And he was the king’s own cousin!”
Marion’s insides froze. She thought of Elizabeth. She knew, from the romps, what shrieks in the Royal Lodge corridors sounded like.
She felt manipulated. Cornered. “But my vocation’s here,” she began, and stopped. She sounded unconvincing, even to herself. “I want to work in Grassmarket. Get that wee bairn out from behind those walls. Slum walls, not palace ones.”
Her mother gripped her hand. “It’s time to make your vocation somewhere else. Make a different sort of a difference.”
NEXT DAY, ON her way to Grassmarket, Marion mulled over this exchange. Her mother, obviously backed by Miss Golspie, had made a powerful case. Could she really do more good in London than here?
She was thinking so intently that she did not notice the figure approaching her in the street. And when it did, recognition was slow to come.
“Ethel?” Her old classmate was barely recognizable. Previously plump, glossy of hair and bossy of manner, she seemed like a balloon with the air gone. She was thinner, her shoulders were slumped and the formerly shiny bun was straggly and uncombed. The once-bright brown eyes were faded, and there hung about her an air of exhausted defeat. Had she been ill?
“How’s the family?” Marion asked.
“Jock’s minding Lizzie,” Ethel said.
“Good.” More men should share the childcare burden, Marion felt. But why was Ethel’s stare so hostile?
“It’s not good,” she blurted. “He’s lost his job. The shipyard cut back—he’s a ship riveter—and . . .” She bit her lip hard.
“Well, that’s hardly his fault,” Marion robustly assured her.
“No, it’s not,” Ethel agreed, heatedly. “But a lot of folk seem to think it is. Talking about lazy idle loafers on the dole.” She stopped, her eyes glistening.
Marion stared. The right thing to say seemed suddenly elusive. Ethel did not especially seem to expect it, however.
“We’ve had to throw my mother out.” Her voice was choked with anger. “That bloody Means Test.”
“What do you mean?” Marion knew the Means Test assessed household income by means of invasive, humiliating questioning. But why would Ethel have to eject her parent?
“They deducted money because they said she was a lodger. But she wasn’t paying anything. She doesn’t have anything. None of us do.” Ethel raised a reddened hand to her mouth.
Marion stared at the pavement. She had no idea what to say, except that on no account would she be revealing who she worked for.
But Ethel seemed to know. She felt her hand being seized, suddenly. The other woman’s defeated expression had changed to one of sudden, violent hope. “I’m sure the king would help us,” she said desperately. “Will you put in a good word? Please?”
MARION WENT ON to Grassmarket with a sinking heart. It was like living in a nightmare; other people’s nightmares, but nightmares all the same.
At the McGintys’, things were not only as bad as anticipated, but worse. McGinty had returned with his barrel organ, but brought no new prosperity. Rather, he drank away what little his daughter and her mother brought in. “He’s like a de’il when he’s been out smelling the cork,” Annie reported.
Thin before, she was skeletal now. Her cheeks sported the accumulated dirt of weeks and her rusty hair stuck out in all directions. Her thin cotton gown was all but worn out and her shawl was threadbare. When she walked she shuffled along in case her large men’s slippers, found on a rubbish heap, should slip off her feet. Mrs. McGinty, formerly an assiduous mother, was now clearly too ill to be one. She was almost blind and suffering from neuralgia. To help with the pain, she had tied a dirty scrap of flannel round her head, but clearly it made little difference.
BACK AT HOME, with her mother, Marion flung herself on the sofa in despair. “It’s so unfair! I want to do something about it!”
Perching on the sofa arm, Mrs. Crawford stroked her daughter’s troubled head. “But you can’t do anything. Not here.”
True, Marion knew. She could not get Jock his job back, and even teaching Annie was out of the question now given her charring obligations and the return of her obstructive father.
“I’ll visit them for you,” her mother promised. “I’ll keep an eye on Annie.”
Marion raised her head. “Really?” Her mother had never set foot in Grassmarket in her life. She was amazed and touched. “You’ll do that? For me?”
Her mother nodded. Her eyes were glistening. “For you, for little Elizabeth. So you can do what you meant to do. Marion, you have to go back.”