CHAPTER ONE

The House on the Hill

At one time the Franklins had all lived together in her grandfather’s house on Harper’s Hill, but wives, babies and that process which Lindsay did not yet understand – growing old rather than growing up – had changed everything. Two by two, like Noah’s creatures, Owen Franklin’s sons and daughters had left the rambling mansion close to the heart of Glasgow to follow the fashionable trail out of town; not far out of town, however: only a mile or so along the valley of the Clyde to the elegant terraces of Brunswick Park.

The park itself was small and unremarkable. It contained no boating loch or curling pond, no bandstand or bowling green, only three or four drooping shrubs, a flower bed as mysterious as a burial mound and a solitary rustic bench. Above it lay Brunswick Crescent, a handsome piece of architecture with hood-moulds over the first-floor windows, square mullions and pediments that somehow humanised an otherwise austere design. The Franklin brothers had taken to it at once. They were intrigued by the fact that the crescent’s apparent curve was made up of subtly angled straight frontages. They were also attracted by the more obvious fact that from the second-floor windows you could look out over the river and observe not only docks and shipyards but a great brooding welter of chimney pots, factory gables and steeples stretching off to the gaunt line of the Renfrewshire hills.

In the last house in Brunswick Crescent Anna Lindsay Franklin had been born and raised. At one time Uncle Donald and Aunt Lilias had resided nearby. And just across the park in a sandstone tenement that even now seemed new, Aunts Kay and Helen had courageously set up residence together.

In the same year that Lindsay’s mother had died, though, Aunt Helen had fallen sick and died too. Grieving Aunt Kay had moved across the park to keep house for her widowed brother and care for the newborn infant. Then Kay had found a husband of her own and decamped to Dublin where – so Uncle Donald claimed – she had become more Irish than a field full of leprechauns and more fertile than Macgillicuddy’s goat. Ten of Lindsay’s cousins, the McCullochs, dwelled near Dublin. But her six Scottish cousins all lived in Grandfather’s house where Donald and Lilias had returned after Grandmother had passed away and the big four-storey mansion had proved too forlorn for Owen to occupy on his own.

The Franklins were a close and affectionate family. Lindsay had schooled with the girls, romped at parties and picnics with the boys, and spent almost as much time at Harper’s Hill as she had done at home. On that sober Sunday afternoon, however, she felt oddly uneasy as she accompanied her father to her grandfather’s house, as if she sensed that some change was about to take place and, whether she liked it or not, she was bound to be affected by it.

She had turned eighteen in February and had shed the Park School’s whale-boned bodice, voluminously bunched skirts and the hideous crock-combs that had kept her unruly blonde hair in order. Even cousin Martin, three years her senior and a dreadful tease, treated her with a modicum of respect now. The boys had seen her in more becoming togs, of course, summer dresses and tennis blouses. But it was not until she blossomed into close-fitting skirts and narrow-waisted jackets that Martin, Johnny and young Ross really began to appreciate that Lindsay was not a rough-and-tumble tomboy and could not be flung about like a rugby football.

She was as tall as she would ever be, which was not very tall, alas. She had had her hair coiffed in a style that did not make her seem too coquettish in spite of its coils and carefully nurtured side curls. Papa had also treated her to a halo-brimmed hat and a pair of doeskin shoes with round toes and half heels that Aunt Lilias said added inches to her height, which was just as well, given that she was as small-boned and dainty as her mother had been.

It was a cool, dry April afternoon. Everyone who was anyone was strolling Dumbarton Road or along the paths of the Kelvingrove. Labourers, artisans, wives, sweethearts and children rubbed shoulders with draughtsmen and managers, even with the masters of the factories and shipyards. Those tall-hatted, frock-coated gentlemen and their ornamental wives did not regard it as beneath their dignity to share the Sabbath air and a few hours of leisure with their employees.

Lindsay’s father was no exception. He was as brisk and dapper as a redbreast and dressed like ‘Sunday’ most days of the week. It was not unusual to find him still wearing his morning coat come supper time. He claimed that he did so because he believed in traditional values. Lindsay suspected that he was embarrassed by boyish features upon which, at one time, he had tried to force maturity in the shape of a gigantic moustache until Nanny Cheadle had told him that it made him look like a wanted felon and he had quickly shaved it off.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Franklin. Fine day, is it not?’

‘Indeed it is.’ Hat off, a bow, not too effusive: ‘Would this be your good lady wife, by any chance?’

‘Well, if it isn’t, sur,’ the man said, ‘Ah’m in trouble.’

‘Not a word out of turn then.’ Arthur Franklin touched a finger to the side of his nose and winked at the matronly woman whose astonishment at being addressed by such an august person was palpable in her weary brown eyes. ‘Good afternoon to you, ma’am.’

‘Guid a-a-afternoon, Mr Fr-Fr-Franklin.’

Lindsay smiled too; she could not evade the responsibility of being a Franklin even if she was merely a female. Then her father took her by the arm and with a breeziness that suggested urgency rather than impatience, drew her on towards the fountain and the climb up Harper’s Hill.

‘Who was that?’ Lindsay asked.

‘His name’s McGregor, I think.’

‘One of your employees?’ Lindsay said.

‘One of our contractors.’

‘I’m surprised you remember them.’

‘Now, now, Lindsay.’

‘I don’t mean that they all look the same,’ Lindsay explained, ‘rather that they all look quite different when they’re dressed up.’

They walked rapidly up the sloping gravel path towards the gate. Behind them the university tower soared into a pale grey sky. Ahead, curiously foreshortened, were the mansions of Park Circus and Harper’s Hill. Grandfather’s house was not visible from the Kelvingrove. It was tucked away on the lee side, a few hundred yards from Lynedoch Street where Lindsay’s school was situated. She was so well acquainted with Glasgow’s west end that she could have found her way blindfold around the quadrants and terraces that crowned the hills above the leafy banks of the River Kelvin.

‘Afternoon, Mr Franklin.’

‘Afternoon, afternoon.’ Arthur checked his step. ‘Calder? Didn’t notice you sitting there. Sorry, old chap, can’t stop for a chat. Late as it is.’

‘Quite all right, sir.’ The tall man removed his hat and managed to give Lindsay a little bow – ‘Miss Franklin’ – before she was whisked away.

‘That was very rude, Papa,’ Lindsay said. ‘Couldn’t you have spared him a minute or two?’

‘No time.’

‘If,’ she said, ‘we’re in such an all-fired hurry to reach Pappy’s by three o’clock, why didn’t you find us a cab?’

‘Soon be there, dear, soon be there.’

‘Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘You mean you won’t.’

‘I can’t because I don’t know. It’s your grandfather’s surprise.’

‘It’s not his birthday, is it?’

‘No, that’s not until next month.’

Papa helped her up the high kerb that separated the cobbles from the pavement. He paused to dab a bead of perspiration from his brow with one of several linen handkerchiefs that Miss Runciman had placed in his pockets. He put the handkerchief away and checked the time on his watch. Then, adopting an air of leisurely decorum that befitted the younger son of a shipbuilding tycoon, he escorted his pretty daughter around the corner and up the steps to the big, brass-handled front door.

*   *   *

Owen Franklin had no middle name and none of the ancestral debris that perpetuated itself in jaw-breaking monikers. He was lucky to have any sort of name at all, in fact, for he had been abandoned as an infant on the coal-tip at Franklin in the shadow of Penarth Head.

He was by no means ashamed of his humble origins, however. He liked to brag to his grandchildren in the Welsh accent that he had never managed to shake that his father had been a miner, his mother a fishwife and that he had been suckled on salt water in lieu of breast milk and weaned on coal-dust instead of saps. The sad truth was that he had no clue who his parents were. He had been reared in a foundlings’ house overlooking the mudflats at the mouth of the Ely until, aged ten, he was put out to work. If you believe in the awkward forces of destiny, which Owen undoubtedly did, it was at this point that fate stepped in and saved him from an undistinguished life of drudgery on the deck of a coastal collier or fishing smack.

He was apprenticed to one Hugh Pemberton who, in a smoky little forge on the banks of the Glamorganshire canal, was engaged in improving the efficiency of steam valves. In this aspect of mechanics young Owen demonstrated a talent so precocious that it amounted almost to genius. In the course of the next fifteen years he also acquired an aptitude for the management of money. When Cardiff eventually became too small for a man of his talents, he journeyed north to Scotland. He had just enough capital to set up on his own and ensure that his ‘bright ideas’ earned profits not for some new master but for himself.

It was not until 1874 that Owen plucked up the courage to purchase the sequestrated firm of Patrick Hagen & Hall, a near-derelict little shipyard tucked between Scotstoun and Whiteinch where, aided by a loan from the Bank of Scotland, he set about building river craft, ferries and small, fast steam launches.

Although labouring with metal and money occupied most of his attention, Owen also found time to fall in love. He met Katherine Forbes at a concert given jointly by the Perthshire Choral Union and the Glasgow Tonic Sol Fa Society. Halfway through a composition based on Haydn’s ‘God is Our Emperor’ Owen realised that he had found his soul-mate. He remained smitten with Kath throughout twenty-eight years of married life, rejoiced in the births of five children and mourned one poor little one, Mary, who died when she was eight months old. He was still in love with his dear wife when she fell ill and was finally taken from him early in the morning of a bright and beautiful May day, a tragedy that robbed him, at least for a while, of ambition in all its fiery forms.

‘Pappy?’

Lindsay did not have to reach up to kiss her grandfather’s cheek; he was hardly much taller than she was now. In the past decade it seemed that age had squeezed him down sinew on sinew so that his grandchildren could look him square in the eye and his sons, Donald and Arthur, appeared at long last like full grown men in his presence.

‘Pappy, what is it? What’s this surprise you have for us?’

‘Patience, child, patience,’ Owen Franklin said as Lizzie, the front-hall maid, removed Lindsay’s coat and carried it and her father’s hat off into the cloakroom beneath the massive staircase. ‘What did you tell her, Arthur?’

‘How could I tell her anything when you’ve kept me in the dark too?’

‘You don’t have to be so peevish,’ Owen said. ‘It’s no more than a bit of indulgence towards an old man that I’m asking for.’

‘What old man? You’re not an old man.’

‘Perhaps not by your lights, Arthur, but I’m rapidly steering that way.’

They were in the great hallway of the mansion, on the huge Indian rug that had been the gift of some foreign shipping agent or other. The rug added cohesion to the oak-floored entrance’s job-lots of armour and broadswords and the array of military muskets that Owen had purchased umpteen years ago when he still thought that the best way to please Kath was to turn himself into a duplicate of a Highland laird. In other rooms the decor was more acceptably maritime, with several fine Dutch sea-paintings on the walls, old chronometers, quadrants and sextants laid out in glass cases, and scale models of craft designed and built at the Franklins’ yard in Aydon Road.

There was no daylight, save a dusty shaft from the stained-glass window at the bend of the staircase. Lindsay had often wondered if this was what it had felt like to be incarcerated in the hold of an old wooden-walled slaving ship or the engine-room of one of the ironclads that had plied the Atlantic routes thirty years ago, for her grandfather’s house reminded her of some sort of vessel beached on the summit of Harper’s Hill.

The door to the drawing-room on the right of the hall was closed. She wondered where her aunt, uncle and cousins were, and the manservant, Giles, who as a rule was never very far away.

She studied her grandfather with a degree of apprehension. His wrinkled features and watery blue eyes were not threatening and, indeed, his wispy little smile seemed to hint that the surprise would not be unpleasant or turn out to be some trade matter that didn’t concern her.

‘Are you ready?’ he said.

‘Oh, get on with it, Pappy, for heaven’s sake,’ his son said. ‘Open the blessed door, let’s see what you’re hiding in there.’

Grandfather Franklin allowed himself one more chuckle, then, like a mischievous child, pushed the door open inch by inch.

‘What the devil!’ Lindsay’s father exclaimed. ‘It’s Kay. Our Kay.’

‘Didn’t expect that, now did you, Arthur?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me she was coming home?’ Arthur hissed. ‘If this is your idea of a joke, Pappy, I must say it’s in damned bad taste.’

It had not occurred to Lindsay that there had ever been animosity between her emigrant aunt and her father. She could not recall having heard him say anything detrimental about his sister. Now that she thought of it, though, he had made no effort to visit the McCullochs when business took him to Ireland. Donald had visited Dublin once or twice over the years and kept in touch with Kay by regular exchange of letters, but her father received the Irish news only at second hand. At that moment Lindsay realised that perhaps she didn’t know all there was to know about the Franklins’ chequered past and that there might be more to this family reunion than first met the eye.

Her father adopted the haughty air that he usually reserved for naval inspectors or agents from foreign governments, a chilly sort of arrogance that Lindsay did not care for. ‘Katherine.’ He weaved towards his sister. He obviously had no intention of falling into her arms and certainly felt no obligation to kiss her. ‘How nice to see you again.’

Allotted pride of place in this pride of Franklins, the woman was seated in a walnut armchair in the centre of the room. The massive gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece falsely enlarged the size of the gathering so that the room seemed crowded. In the mirror Lindsay could see the back of her aunt’s head and the dark hair of the young man at her aunt’s side. His hand was pressed to her shoulder as if to dissuade her from rising too hurriedly or, for that matter, from rising at all.

Aunt Kay remained steadfastly seated. She crossed an arm over her bony bosom, extended her right hand and permitted her brother to take it across his palm like an offering of fish. He dipped his head as if to sniff rather than kiss her ungloved fingers.

‘Still no manners, I see,’ Kay said.

Lindsay’s father stepped back.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Late as usual,’ Aunt Kay answered.

‘Minutes,’ Arthur Franklin said. ‘Mere minutes. If a certain party had thought fit to inform me that we were being honoured with your presence I’d have made a point of being on time.’

‘Well, you’re here now, I suppose,’ Kay said.

‘I suppose I am,’ said Arthur.

He moved away to seek protection from his brother or comfort from Aunt Lilias who, to judge from her expression, was amused by the display of sibling rivalry. Left in the firing line, Lindsay took a deep breath and with all the warmth she could muster presented herself to the lean, untidy woman who, just eighteen years ago, had been – albeit briefly – a mother to her.

‘Aunt Kay,’ she said. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you at last.’

The woman looked up. In her eyes, the pale blue unspeckled eyes common to all Owen Franklin’s offspring, Lindsay thought she detected an ember of affection. ‘Anna?’ her aunt said.

‘I prefer to be called Lindsay.’

‘So I’ve been told,’ her aunt said. ‘By jingo, you’ve changed. You were such an ugly baby. I thought you were one of Mr Darwin’s monkeys when the midwife first brought you out.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t remember it,’ Lindsay said, not seriously.

‘I remember it as if it were yesterday,’ Kay said. ‘You squawking in my arms while she was upstairs breathing her last.’

Lindsay felt her cheeks redden. An embarrassed silence came over her cousins. Uncle Donald cleared his throat. Then the young man said, ‘Time enough for reminiscences, Mam. Meanwhile, why don’t you introduce me?’

He had a smooth Irish accent, soft but distinct.

The haggard lines vanished from Kay’s face when she addressed her son.

‘Tell her yourself who you are, Forbes. Give her a hug if that’s what you fancy.’ She fashioned a scooping gesture to shoo her son out from behind the chair and drive him into the open. ‘She’s Anna’s daughter, her that died along about the same time as my sister Helen. Her father’s my second brother.’

Lindsay assumed that he would have heard of her. She had certainly heard of him: Owen Forbes McCulloch: Welsh, Scottish and Irish rolled into one. He had dark hair, brown eyes and the sort of long lashes that a girl might envy. There was nothing remotely feminine about him, however. He was the handsomest man Lindsay had ever met, and he certainly wasn’t bashful. In fact, he was possessed of an easy self-assurance that made it difficult to believe that he was younger than she was. When he spoke in that soft lilting accent she could almost smell the lush green meadows of County Meath.

Behind her, cousins Cissie and Mercy giggled, but their mirth seemed faded, almost remote. He did not hug her. He was not so bold, so modern as all that. He leaned across his mother and took Lindsay’s hand.

She felt a little shiver go through her, a ripple of awe and something so novel that she did not recognise it as desire, a longing to have him touch her again or, more like the thing, never to let her go.

‘Cousin Lindsay,’ he said quietly.

And equally quietly, she answered, ‘Cousin Forbes.’

*   *   *

For twenty minutes after his employer had passed, Tom Calder remained seated on a bench near the Memorial Fountain. The sun had not broken through and soon after three o’clock the air took on a chilly edge. Courting couples abandoned the daffodil slopes and families began to drift away towards the tenements that flanked Finnieston and Dumbarton Road or to catch the halfpenny omnibus that would carry them two or three miles to Whiteinch and Scotstoun. Forearms on knees, Tom observed the gradual exodus.

He was not sly or threatening. He had no designs upon the girls, which was probably just as well, for there was something about the tall man with the weathered complexion that made the lassies who toured the park in search of romance a wee bit wary. At thirty-four, he was probably too old for most of them. His hair was thinning and he had the sort of lean, underfed features that only a desperate spinster would find attractive. His eyes were disconcertingly alert and at the same time unseeing, as if the best you had to offer might not be good enough for him. The impression he gave was not one of moodiness or melancholy but of indifference, and indifference was the one thing with which no girl, young or otherwise, could cope.

Tom Calder, like his employer, was a widower. He had a daughter, Sylvie, who out of necessity he had relinquished into the care of his wife’s sister and her husband some years ago. He saw her by arrangement only once or twice a month unless he contrived to encounter her ‘by accident’ when Florence or Albert brought her to the park between Sabbath school and evening service. He knew that he had lost her and that it would be better to let her go. But some deep paternal instinct prevented it. At eight Sylvie had been ‘his little sweetheart’. At ten, after he had returned from Africa, she had still shown him some affection. Now twelve, she was his sweetheart no longer. She wasn’t even polite to him and would cling truculently to Florence or Albert whenever their paths crossed.

Motionless as marble, Tom surveyed the Radnor Street gate and the circular path around the fountain basin. If Albert was Sylvie’s escort then the chance of a meeting was remote. Albert was too crafty to follow the same route week after week. If Florence was the guardian of the hour, however, the opportunity was much improved, for Florence, out of habit or lack of imagination, followed an identical path every Sunday.

He heard the university bell call the half-hour. Several clocks in the old burgh steeples lightly answered it.

They were late, or possibly did not intend to come at all. Perhaps his brother-in-law Albert Hartnell had spotted him and had whisked little Sylvie, not unwilling, up the hill to lead her home by the high back ways. He glanced bleakly along the gravel path – and there they were: Florence tall and spare in a costume of smooth-faced Venetian serge with hardly a frill to relieve its severity; Sylvie in the daft countrified style that Florence had foisted on her, in a kilted skirt, a jacket of fawn cloth with a sailor collar, a bonnet with velveteen tassels. Sylvie bore no resemblance to her mother except perhaps in the fine complexion, so pale and silken that it seemed less like flesh than an expensive Eastern fabric.

Tom rose. He could not feign casualness. He was useless at pretence. He stalked towards them, arms swinging. Sylvie deliberately turned her back and surveyed the crenellated rooftops that overlooked the Clyde.

‘What are you doing here?’ Florence asked.

‘Taking the air, just taking the air.’

‘Have you nothing better to do with yourself?’

‘No, nothing. How are you, Sylvie? Are you over your cold?’

In spite of her apparent fragility Sylvie had so far shown no disposition towards the asthmatic condition to which her mother had eventually succumbed. Even so, Tom fretted over every little sniffle and cough and, in years past, had gone almost mad with worry when some epidemic or other swept through the city, scything down children like weeds. These days he was more sanguine about his daughter’s ability to survive.

‘Sylvie, answer your father.’

‘I am very well, thank you.’

‘Your cold?’

‘That’s gone,’ said Florence.

‘Has it really?’ said Tom. ‘I mean, really and truly?’

‘Yes.’

‘No after-effects?’

‘Do you think I’d have brought her out if she was ailing?’

‘No, Florence, of course you wouldn’t.’ Tom eyed his daughter in the vain hope that she had found it in her heart to forgive him whatever transgressions had turned her against him. ‘Is all well at school, dearest?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

No ‘Papa’, no ‘Father’, no intimacies graced her reply. He wondered at what point along the way he had lost her.

He had handed her over to Florence and Albert not long after Dorothy had passed on. His sister-in-law had understood the necessity not just of earning a living but of grinding on with a career. He in turn had convinced himself that Sylvie needed a woman’s care and a stable home and that all he would be able to provide would be servants and nannies. Florence and Albert had been only too willing to take Sylvie off his hands, for they were childless and Sylvie had seemed like a gift from God. He had no right to feel slighted that she was more attached to Florence and Albert than she was to him.

Florence said, ‘I don’t know why you do this, Tom.’

‘Do what?’ he said, still trying vainly to attract Sylvie’s attention.

‘You are welcome to call at the house at any time, you know.’

‘I do not feel welcome,’ Tom said. ‘Besides, you are out so much these days that I can never be sure…’ He let the complaint trail off.

‘We’re never far away,’ Florence said. ‘Are we, dear?’

Sylvie shook her head.

‘Out and about on the Lord’s business,’ Florence said. ‘I take it you haven’t sunk so far, Tom, that you would regard that as neglect?’ With a certain firmness, his sister-in-law manoeuvred Sylvie round to face him. ‘Now you’re here, however, there’s a certain matter I feel I must mention.’

‘Regarding money?’ Tom said. ‘School fees, by any chance?’

The cost of child-rearing seemed to escalate year by year. At Florence’s insistence Sylvie had been put to the Park School and Tom paid the fees, along with everything else on Florence’s carefully itemised account.

‘I have no intention of conducting monetary business in a public park on the Sabbath,’ Florence said. ‘I would be obliged if you would call at our house not later than Thursday. We will be at home, I believe, on Tuesday after nine o’clock, and from eight o’clock on Wednesday.’

‘I have a choir meeting on Wednesday,’ Tom said.

Sylvie gave a huffy little grunt, her first unprompted utterance.

Florence said, ‘Is a choir meeting more important than your daughter’s welfare?’

‘We’re joining in a special performance,’ Tom interrupted, ‘in the cathedral.’

‘Oh! That will be The Messiah?’

‘No, an Easter Cantata. Massed choirs with soloists.’ He risked touching his daughter’s shoulder. ‘Why don’t you ask Aunt Florence to bring you along, sweetheart?’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.’

Again the grunt, a dainty snort; a flinching, flouncing away.

He looked down at her and, startled, recognised that she was spoiled, a ruined child still capable of cutting through his indifference like a hot knife through butter. It riled him that she should have so much power over him. For a moment he was linked to Sylvie not by love or guilt but by annoyance.

Without quite knowing what he was doing, he bent his long shanks and crouched before her. She tried to sidle off but he would have none of it. He gripped her firmly by the shoulders. His hands looked huge against the rounded velveteen. He squared her, steadied her and peered into her grey petulant eyes.

‘Do you not know who I am?’ he asked.

She said nothing.

‘Do you know who I am?’

She nodded.

He felt cruel, but unrepentant. ‘Tell me who I am, Sylvie.’

‘You’re my – you’re my – my father.’

‘And whether you like it or not I always will be.’

‘Tom, please don’t chastise…’

He ignored Florence. ‘I will not be treated like a fool, not by you – especially not by you – or by anyone else. You may not like me, Sylvie, but at least you will do me the honour of being courteous. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes.’

She pursed her small, sweet, rosebud lips and scowled defiantly. She sensed that she had been exposed, her power diminished, but she would not surrender everything to him, not all at once.

‘Yes, what?’ he said.

‘Yes, Papa.’

Tom grinned a crooked grin, like a crack whispering across ice. It was a small triumph, petty in every respect, but decisiveness gave him a strange thrill, eliminating, if only for a little while, the hollowness within.

He got nimbly to his feet.

‘That’s better,’ he said, then to Florence, ‘I’ll drop my cheque for the summer term round to the house on Tuesday.’

‘After nine o’clock, please,’ said Florence.

‘After nine o’clock,’ said Tom. ‘Is there anything else I have to pay for?’

‘I think that’s all in the meantime.’ Florence hesitated. ‘Do you wish me to bring her to the cathedral on Wednesday? If it means so much to you…’

‘It means nothing to me,’ Tom said. ‘I just thought she might enjoy it.’

‘Unfortunately she has no affinity for music,’ Florence said.

‘And I have a Mission class on Wednesday,’ Sylvie said, ‘Papa.’

He nodded. ‘It would never do to miss a Mission class.’

She was looking up at him, not hiding now. She had adapted quickly to his changed attitude. She had replaced truculence with coyness, a niceness that was entirely self-serving. Perhaps she was not so very different from her mother after all.

‘I will come to hear you sing very soon, Papa,’ she said, then, to his astonishment, lifted herself on tiptoe and presented her gossamer cheek for a kiss. ‘I promise.’

He paused, then brushed his lips against her cold little brow.

‘Goodbye, Papa.’

‘Goodbye, sweetheart,’ he said and, with more relief than regret, watched Florence lead Sylvie away towards the Radnor gate.

*   *   *

Dining in the grand style had never been her grandfather’s forte: dining well was quite another matter. Owen Franklin, his sons, daughter and grandchildren were blessed with healthy appetites and a fondness for good food that kept cooks and kitchen hands thoroughly on their mettle. It was not uncommon for a dozen folk to settle around the long table in the dining-room and the entire domestic staff, including the latest fumble-fingered little parlour-maid, to be marshalled to lug tureens, trays and steaming casseroles up from the kitchens.

The dining-table was the family’s meeting place. It was also the place where the Franklins’ wealth was most obviously displayed in silverware, tableware and fancy linens. Those who fancied themselves in the know – stockbrokers, accountants and lawyers – claimed that the Franklins devoured more in a week than the shipyard earned in a month. That if it hadn’t been for its appetite the family would have achieved a higher place on the social scale and that Owen, or possibly Donald, would have been elected to positions of civic responsibility. Although the slander contained more than a grain of truth, it took no account of the fact that Owen and his sons cared less about power than they did about pleasure and devoted themselves to good food and good music with a panache that, in some quarters, was regarded as vulgar.

What the snobs would have made of Kay, who ate scallops with a spoon and chicken breasts with her fingers, was anyone’s guess. Safe to say that even the most high and mighty would have been impressed by soft-spoken Forbes whose combination of charm, rapacity and impeccable table manners few aristocratic heirs could match. Lindsay’s cousins, Cissie, Mercy and Pansy, were so impressed by Forbes that they neglected their own nutritional requirements and passed him salt cellars, pepper mills and mustard dishes at such a rate of knots that Grandfather Owen eventually had to tap his plate with a steak knife and wag a warning finger just to give the poor lad respite.

Lindsay, too, was impressed by her Irish cousin. She was delighted by his attentions, attentions too discreet to draw sarcastic comment from Martin or Johnny but just obvious enough to confirm that he, Forbes, had also experienced an instantaneous rapport and that of all the girls at table she was the one he found most appealing. They were seated together at the end of the long table, separated from the girl cousins by Uncle Donald and Aunt Lilias. By mischievous coincidence Kay and Lindsay’s father had been placed side by side and, with slightly less tact than their offspring, soon fell to bickering and recrimination which, Lindsay guessed, echoed old rivalries between them.

She was unsure just how serious the display of mutual animosity was until Forbes leaned towards her and murmured, ‘Mam’s bark is a lot worse than her bite, you know. She has a sharp tongue but a kind heart.’

‘I have never seen my father so heated,’ Lindsay whispered.

‘Is it not that he’s just enjoying himself?’ Forbes said.

‘No. I really don’t think they’re very fond of each other.’

‘Oh, now, and I’m sure that they are,’ said Forbes. ‘It would be a fine thing if they were still enemies after all these years, especially now I’m going to be one of you.’

‘What do you mean,’ Lindsay said, ‘one of us?’

‘I’m coming to stay in Glasgow while I study.’

‘Are you?’ Lindsay tried to hide her excitement. ‘What will you study?’

‘Engineering.’

‘Marine engineering?’

‘Well, that will be a part of the course,’ he said. ‘But it’s not on my mind to be going to sea as a regular thing. I’m aiming higher than ship’s engineer.’

‘What do you aim to be?’ said Lindsay.

He eased himself away from her, not impolitely.

He speared a final piece of beef from his plate and put it into his mouth. He did not appear to chew, merely to swallow.

Lindsay watched his throat move, a soft undulation.

Everything about him suggested precocious self-assurance, a physicality that she could not equate with a man – a lad – who was twelve or fourteen months younger than she was. She wondered if all young Dubliners were like this or if being the eldest in a family of ten had forced maturity upon him.

He glanced at her, placed knife and fork evenly on his plate, and smiled.

The smile was in lieu of an answer.

She might have put the question again if Cissie, all broad cheeks and freckles, hadn’t leaned forward and told her excitedly, ‘He’s coming to stay here with us. Aren’t you, Forbes?’

‘I am; for a time at least.’

‘Here?’ Lindsay’s excitement diminished at the prospect of Forbes McCulloch lodging under the same roof as her predatory cousin. ‘I mean, here in Pappy’s house?’

‘In the boys’ room,’ Cissie said. ‘He’ll sleep in the boys’ room.’

Martin laughed and informed his new-found cousin that he would have to sleep head to toe with Ross since there was no room for another bed. Ross protested. Johnny supported him. Aunt Lilias joined in the teasing. Lindsay stared down at her meat plate, watched the manservant’s gloved hand remove it and replace it with a small dish of iced sherbet.

She could feel a tingle in the room, the family’s vibrant energy beginning to revolve like one of the new steam turbines that Donald had taken them to see at Spithead last summer. She could feel the energy beginning to flow about her and wondered why she no longer revelled in it, why she felt so cut off and apart. For the first time she felt obliged to acknowledge that Martin was not her brother, Cissie not her sister and that she stood a half-step apart from the others.

She ate the sherbet ice, three small silver spoonfuls, cold and fizzy on her tongue; heard the laughter all about her.

He did not laugh: Forbes did not laugh.

He too had brothers, four of them, five sisters. He knew what to do, what to say, how to take care of himself in the maul. But he didn’t laugh, didn’t roar, didn’t clamour for attention. He smiled and watched, and swallowed the cold confection, his throat undulating as the sherbet slid smoothly down.

He leaned lightly against Lindsay once more.

‘I would rather sleep with you,’ he said, so quietly that Lindsay could not be sure that he had spoken at all.

‘What?’ Lindsay said. ‘What did you say?’

‘In your house. I would rather stay in your house,’ Forbes said.

‘No, that’s not what you—’

‘Hush now. Hush,’ he told her. ‘I think our dear old grandpappy is about to make a speech.’

*   *   *

The manservant, Giles, was last to leave the dining-room. He took with him the empty sherbet dishes, decanters and those glasses that did not contain wine. Before lifting the laden tray he carefully swept crumbs from the tablecloth and collected them in a little brass-handled pan. He balanced the pan beneath the tray and used his elbow to open the dining-room door.

Outside, the April sky was tinted brown, not pretty or pastel but flat and sombre and, just before the servant left and Grandfather Owen rose to speak, a few speckles of rain laid themselves against the window panes. At a signal from the old man Donald and Arthur lit the candles and sat down again. Silence in that uproarious room seemed oppressive, almost uncanny, so much so that Pansy, the youngest, turned her face away and clung to brother Johnny as if she feared that she might need protection.

Lindsay too was tense. She might have sought her Irish cousin’s arm except that she was no longer sure of him, no longer sure at all.

‘First,’ Owen began, ‘may I bid a special welcome to Kay, who we haven’t seen for far too long, and to my grandson Forbes.’ He paused, cleared his throat and went on: ‘I must say it’s grand to have all my children and so many of their children gathered together at last. I wish’ – another hesitation – ‘I just wish that Helen had been spared to bear children too. That, however, was not the Lord’s intention, and we can’t go questioning the ways of the Lord.’

With an unusual twinge of resentment Lindsay wondered why her grandfather hadn’t mentioned her mother, hadn’t mourned for the children that she had never borne.

‘I’m no longer as young as I was,’ Owen continued. ‘It has been in my mind for some time to clear the decks for the next generation; not a bad generation either, in my biased opinion. Be that as it may, I have decided to retire from—’

‘What’s this you’re saying, Pappy?’ Donald blurted out. ‘You can’t retire. What’ll we do without you?’

‘Are you ill?’ said Kay in that piercing voice of hers. ‘Are you a-dying, Daddy, is that why you’ve brought us from Dublin?’

‘No, damn it,’ Owen said. ‘Don’t go getting your hopes up. I am not a-dying. You don’t get rid of me as easily as all that. I am, however, just a bit too rusty for many more repairs. I’ve got to face the fact that my next voyage or the one after might take me to the breaker’s yard.’

‘Are you giving up the chairmanship?’ Lindsay’s father asked.

‘Yes.’

Out of the corner of her eye Lindsay noticed Aunt Lilias cover Uncle Donald’s hand with her own, a gesture not of commiseration but of excitement. Apparently no hint of her grandfather’s intentions had reached the Franklins. She suspected that the McCullochs might have guessed what was in the wind, though; that Kay, her husband and possibly Forbes had discussed its implications and made plans in advance.

Grandfather Owen held up his hand. ‘Be easy now, be easy. I’m not selling the yard. I’m not leaving you stranded. I’ve gathered you all together to hear what I’ve got in mind for the future. First,’ he said, ‘let me tell you that Forbes will be joining the firm to train as a manager. He will follow the same route of learning as both of you did. Do you remember what that was like, Donald, Arthur?’

‘Only too well,’ said Lindsay’s father.

‘Hard, very hard,’ said Donald.

‘Forbes will start out with a year in Beardmore’s, at the Parkhead Forge. I’ve already arranged it with Mr Peterson. He’ll be waged by Franklin’s during that period. After he’s learned something of forging and casting we’ll bring him into the engine shop at Aydon Road while he undertakes a course of night classes at the Maritime Institute.’

‘Do you approve of this programme, Kay?’ Lindsay’s father enquired.

‘Indeed, and I do,’ Kay replied.

‘Was it your idea or the boy’s?’

‘It was my idea, Uncle Arthur,’ Forbes McCulloch said. ‘I may be Irish born but I think I’ve always been a Scot at heart. It wasn’t my mother but my father who opposed the notion of my coming across the sea for a career.’

‘It may not be so easy as you imagine,’ Lindsay’s father said. ‘We carry no passengers at Franklin’s’

‘Forbes will be no passenger, rest assured,’ Kay put in. ‘He’s been taught the value of hard work. Aye, he’ll put in more than he takes out.’

‘Stop it.’ Owen shook his head. ‘I won’t have this bickering. Forbes is as much your flesh and blood as Martin, say, or Ross. You’ve nothing against them, Arthur, have you?’

Lindsay watched her father’s chest swell. She knew what that lungful of oxygen indicated, how he would hold his breath as if to prepare for singing a long phrase of music or striking out, pure and clear, at a top note in the register. Perhaps, she thought, he’s just envious of Kay because he doesn’t have a son to put into the business.

‘Nothing against any of them,’ her father said. ‘I’m just a trifle concerned about how many more – ah – apprentices from Dublin we can accommodate?’

‘My brothers,’ Forbes answered before his mother could open her mouth, ‘my brothers, Uncle Arthur, have no interest in shipbuilding. They’re all lined up to enter the brewing trade.’

‘I see,’ said Arthur. ‘But you prefer salt water to black stout?’

‘I do.’

‘Lilias has already agreed to let the lad lodge here,’ said Owen.

‘Oh, has she?’ said Arthur.

‘Where are you going, Pappy?’ said Martin.

‘Strathmore, in Perthshire,’ Owen answered. ‘I’ve leased a house in that neck of the woods, near Kelkemmit.’

‘Perthshire!’ Johnny said. ‘What the heck will you do in Perthshire?’

‘Fish,’ said Owen, curtly.

‘What about Franklin’s?’ said Lindsay’s father.

‘Don’t fret, Arthur,’ Owen Franklin said. ‘You won’t starve. When it comes to ship design you know more than I ever did, and Donald is better at securing contracts than I ever was.’ He pointed at one son and then the other. ‘What’s wrong with the pair of you? Don’t tell me you’re too timid to take over. Good God, you’re twice the age I was when I struck out on my own.’

‘Yes, but things were different in those days,’ Donald said.

‘Don’t blather, son,’ Owen Franklin told him. ‘You’re delighted to have your chance at last. And if you aren’t, you should be. I’m stepping down, fading out of the picture. I’m going away into the Perthshire hills to threaten the salmon and that’s an end of that part of it.’

‘What’s the other part, Pappy?’ Aunt Lilias asked.

Reaching down by his chair Owen Franklin brought out five manila envelopes, each sealed with the firm’s stamp, each with a name handwritten upon it. He held them in a little fan against his waistcoat while he looked around the table, his eyes travelling from face to face quite deliberately and without a trace of sentiment.

‘This,’ said Pappy Owen, and with a decisive little flick of the wrist began tossing envelopes down the length of the table to Donald, to Arthur, to Martin and to Forbes.

And finally, astonishingly, to Lindsay, who caught it in both hands.