Prized Possessions (10 page)

‘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.

Chapter Five

In many companies the keeping of two sets of accounts was regarded as almost mandatory. The Manones, however, maintained not just two sets of accounts but several, for old Carlo and brother Guido knew that it was not the
polizia
who represented the biggest threat to the smooth running of a family business but court servants and inquisitive tax inspectors, and that Scots law, unlike the laws of Italy, was applied with Presbyterian rigour.

It was by no means impossible to bribe officials and make hand-outs to unscrupulous coppers but graft within the municipal administration was too expensive for even Guido and his nephew, Dominic, to invest in.

The Manones were not bookmakers; they merely financed bookmakers. The Manones were not house-breakers or bank robbers; they just happened to be able to make the loot from such enterprises vanish without trace. The Manones did not personally operate the loan sharking and protection rackets that flourished on the southside, though they were not opposed to arranging by proxy a little arson here or a beating-up there.

After all, in the wake of a stock-market crash, in the middle of a slump, who could blame you for protecting your interests.

Mr Shadwell, the Manones' chief accountant, was instructed to keep immaculate records but he was paid a substantial sum not only for on-page arithmetic but also to keep his mouth shut about all the off-page arithmetic that occurred upstairs in Central Warehouse Company's offices or on the deal table in the house in Manor Park Avenue.

The typewriter, adding machine and telephone – especially the telephone – were the tools with which Dominic controlled his urban empire and his time was taken up not with instilling fear or dispensing rough justice but with managing the men who managed the men who did.

Dominic was not discomfited by bloodshed but he was remote from it.

He spent much time lunching with bankers, lawyers and shipping agents and, in spite of his foreign origins, was accepted as part of the old boys' network that controlled much of the city's commerce: a caucus of well-heeled, well-educated Scotsmen whose greed far outstripped his own.

It was a man's world, of course, a world of private rooms, fine tweed and wool worsted, of beefsteaks, brandy and cigars, all salted with the faint, earthy streak of proletarianism that even the most exalted Scottish blue-blood, let alone a jumped-up member of the middle class, could not quite shake out of his system, not in dear, dark, dusty Glasgow at any rate.

Of late, though, Dominic had experienced a strange hankering to leave the grim Scottish city in which he'd been born, to mingle with people who knew him not, to stroll in the sunshine, perhaps, and dance with sweet
signorinas
under a hot Ligurian moon.

Dominic was not permitted to visit Italy or travel to America to visit his mama, sisters and his father, who was no longer young. Old Carlo was for ever reminding him by letter that some things are stronger than blood ties and that he was a Scotsman born and bred and had no right to desire more than had already been given him.

Uncle Guido was sympathetic, Aunt Teresa too. They were of the old school, however, steeped in traditions that seemed vain to Dominic. No matter how much they loved him, they could not understand him.

Aunt Teresa did all the cooking and bossed the local girls who came to the mansion every day to dust and polish and assist with the laundry. She was not by nature a compliant woman but she had learned to pretend to be obedient.

To her shame she had never given Guido a child, not even a daughter, and Uncle Guido still sought consolation in the arms of lively young things whom he encountered in the cafés and factories over which he, through Dominic, held sway. He would take off for two or three days at a stretch to tour the Manones' properties in the Alfa Romeo or, if discretion was called for, in a more modest Singer Senior Six. He would return from these trips sleepy-eyed and smug but with the work always done, the money collected and accounted for. Dominic didn't know precisely what his uncle got up to with the girls in the resort towns but he heard rumours now and then and he wasn't naïve enough to suppose that the friendships were innocent.

Given his position as head of the family he might have challenged the old man and demanded to be told what was going on – but that he would not do. It was enough that Guido returned with two black leather portmanteaux stuffed with cash and that, late in the evening after the maids had gone home and Aunt Teresa had retired to bed, his uncle and he, and Mr Shadwell too, would pour coins and banknotes on to the table, spread out ledgers, stock-books and great bundles of receipts and invoices and begin work, real work, making tallies and deductions and filling the plain brown envelopes by way of which the runners and scouts of the Manones' dark little army were paid.

Once in a blue moon Dominic would slip off by himself. He'd drive unaccompanied down the coast to inspect the ice-cream factory or drop in unannounced at one of the cafés. He'd chat with managers and staff, would inspect the books, nod, and drive home again, just to keep Uncle Guido on his toes and prove that he trusted no one, not even his nearest and dearest. He didn't take up on Uncle Guido's advice, though, to find a nice piece of skirt who liked a good time and who would be amenable to spending the night in bed with a handsome Italian, if only as a favour to the family.

Dominic would have none of that. He might have been raised without any religious beliefs worth talking about but he couldn't discard the ethics that had been dinned into him at high school. That odd, inimically Scottish system of values that made a virtue out of self-denial, that emphasised the meaning of respect without servility and honour, even among thieves.

Dominic's life was constrained by duty to his family. He quietly paid his dues to the
comunardo,
made sure he never short-changed his employees, transferred his father's slice of the profits to a bank in Philadelphia, USA, and, out of necessity, put in an occasional appearance at some of the Italian community's less public events. He refused to stoop to exploiting the position of power that had been thrust upon him, however; a position that, as he had grown from boyhood into manhood, had become such a millstone round his neck that he felt bowed down by it, reduced, as Uncle Carlo had been, to someone who existed only to serve the family and whose worth beyond that was questionable.

In the winter of 1930, a bleak season of strikes, riots and rising unemployment, Dominic Manone reached the ripe old age of twenty-eight.

Apart from attending another testimonial dinner hosted for him by members of the Rowing Club, he refused to celebrate the occasion, for he felt that he was going nowhere, that his life, like the nation's order books, was empty.

‘What is wrong with that boy?' Aunt Teresa asked in the thudding dialect of the Genoese docklands by which she and her husband communicated when no one else was around. ‘He eats nothing I cook for him. All he does is read the newspapers, drink coffee and smoke his little cigars. He is becoming more like you every day, Guido. He should go out more.'

‘He has his businesses to attend to,' Guido answered. ‘He has no time to be frivolous.'

‘Frivolous,' Teresa Manone said. ‘You are the frivolous one.'

‘Shut your mouth,' said Guido, politely.

Reluctantly Aunt Teresa did as she was told.

She was three years younger than her husband and bore a distinct resemblance to a plump Atlantic seal. In a last defiant act of vanity, though, she still plucked her eyebrows, a habit that had reduced them to two thin startled crescents. When she scowled the fringe of soft grey down that adorned her upper lip darkened and she looked, so Guido thought, not just plain but ugly.

He often told her so.

She said nothing to contradict him.

She sat at the kitchen table – that long table where her husband, her nephew and the Jew counted out cash – and gave Guido a penetrating stare that amply substituted for criticism.

‘What is it you would have me do?' Guido said. ‘About Dominic, I mean.'

‘Take him dancing?'

‘Dancing?'

‘Take him with you when you go away.'

‘When I go – what? – when I go
dancing
?' Guido might have laughed off the woman's suggestion but he wasn't given to showing weakness of any kind. ‘Do you want
me
to dance with him? Do you want
me
to teach him the steps?'