Prized Possessions (28 page)

‘I've heard better. The baritones were off key all night long,' his mother said. ‘What happened to your arm?'

‘Hand,' Bernard said, not looking up. ‘Caught it in the paper cutter at the office. It's not serious.'

‘Does it hurt?'

‘No, hardly at all.'

He waited for her to come to him, to display a little concern, a little peek of interest, to take his hand and lift it, roll back his sleeve, see what sort of a job he'd made of the dressing. He waited vainly for sympathy, her touch, a quick fond peck upon the cheek to comfort him and help with healing. He knew, of course, that it wouldn't come, that she would do as she always did – nothing; that she would scurry off into the kitchen to make herself cocoa and toast a bread roll, or prance off into her bedroom to the left of the narrow wood-panelled hall to take off and brush her best tweed coat or ease off her shoes, that her routine comforts would take precedence over his.

He did not hate her, did not resent her, did not even dislike her. He was just disappointed in her, tinged by the feeling that somehow she had let him down. The feeling was far from novel. It had lain stale within him since the war; until he had met Lizzie Conway, in fact, Lizzie and her pretty daughters, until he had touched and been touched by a loving woman, and the heavens hadn't opened and judgement hadn't come zigzagging down from the clouds.

He listened to his mother singing in the kitchenette, energetic, bustling, utterly self-absorbed. He knew that she would not ask about his wound again.

He went on writing left-handed, practising left-hand disciplines.

‘I don't know what's wrong with young men these days,' he heard her call out. ‘It's the same all over. Mrs Tennyson's daughter nearly got married to a baritone. Did I tell you that?'

‘No.'

‘Clydebank male-voice choir. Big chap. Plater in Brown's.'

‘No!' Bernard murmured, as his mother's cheerful little voice continued to echo from the kitchenette, brittle and shallow as the tiles themselves.

‘No!' he said. ‘No, no, no!'

‘Bernard? Are you listening to me?'

‘Yes, Mother,' Bernard said, and went on writing quietly, quietly dreaming of Lizzie Conway and what life might be like for him in Lavender Court, taking care of Lizzie and her pretty, wayward girls.

Chapter Thirteen

Three Saturdays in four Polly was obliged to work until one o'clock. She did not complain about the schedule. Being well indoctrinated in the conditions of public service she tended to regard a Saturday off not as an entitlement but as a favour conferred upon the clerking staff out of the goodness of the councillors' hearts. Besides, Saturday was a busy day for local councillors. They were mostly ordinary working men, and a couple of women, who had been elected to protect the interests of what had been – but was no longer – a small independent unit within the dominion of the City of Glasgow.

Passing of the Local Government (Scotland) Act eighteen months ago had thrown things into a state of confusion. Even Mr Laughton, the Clerk Principal, was no longer absolutely clear how power devolved downward through the reconstituted county councils or who was expected to do what for whom. The ten good men and true – plus two women – who had been elected to serve the community for a three-year term carried on much as before, for policy in the higher realms of administration seemed to be directed not at preserving the
status quo
but mainly at appointing convenient scapegoats to take the blame for financial mismanagement further up the monkey-puzzle tree.

By the end of 1930, therefore, there was no such thing as a burgh council operating in the Gorbals. Officially it had become a nominated local council working within the remit of a county council who – this being Glasgow – had been brought within or were certainly answerable to the City Corporation.

Polly, then, was an agent employed by the Corporation to carry out functions excisable within a district and, as far as she could make out, to do more or less what she had been doing before. This, alas, still involved working three Saturdays in any given month, not galloping out of the archway at the side door of the old Burgh Hall building until five minutes after the hour of one o'clock, and not displaying too much youthful elation that might indicate that she was damned glad to quit the place and that if it burned to the ground before Monday she would shed not one solitary tear.

Polly was a model of decorum, of course, brisk but ladylike. At twenty she was no silly wee lassie. She no longer consorted with riffraff from the dole queues or those girls who, like her sister Babs, had escaped the factory floor more by good fortune than merit. Accountants from the Assessor's Office or the Department of Finance, not to mention visiting architects and engineers from Transport or Road Works, thought her very superior and would have been surprised to learn that her mother worked in the slops of a laundry and that Polly skiddled home not to a nice little villa in Giffnock or Cathcart but to a tenement flat in the sump of the Calcutta Road.

They would also have been surprised to learn that the haughty object of their desire was halfway to falling in love with a professional thief and that the man behind the wheel of the sleek black motorcar that was moored almost out of sight behind the iron railings of Morton Street United Free Church was none other than Dominic Manone.

Polly did not notice the Alfa Romeo at first.

She was in a hurry, eager to be home, to fry up a mutton chop and a few potatoes for a hasty dinner, to change out of her dark jacket and skirt into something less business-like and be off round to Patsy Walsh's house in the hope of catching him at home.

She had news to impart, bad news.

She was desperate to learn how Patsy would react to this latest development and to assure him that
she
hadn't betrayed him to O'Hara. She didn't really understand why she was so anxious to keep Patsy sweet, not to have him think ill of her. Was it only because of what had happened between them on the bed or was there more to it? Was she more like Patsy Walsh, beneath the skin, than she cared to admit?

She crossed the corner of Morton Street, walking fast.

Behind her the other girls from the burgh offices dispersed, heading towards Eglinton Street or around the broad corner into the bottom of the Pollokshaws Road. The morning drizzle had eased into one of those damp nondescript December afternoons when tenements and sky seemed to merge into each other and even the passers-by had a blurry look as if they had been cut from coarse brown cardboard.

Polly was far too impatient to hang about for a tramcar.

She darted across the roadway between cars, carts and buses and turned into Farmhead Loan, a narrow pub-less street of quiet tenements that would bring her out into the nether end of the Calcutta Road. She did not even see the Alfa until it was almost upon her.

It came prowling up behind her on the wrong side of the loan. It slid to a halt ten yards or so in front of her, tyres bumping over the kerb and on to the pavement. Before it had come to a proper halt the passenger door opened wide enough to block Polly's progress. She stopped. She hesitated, turned and might even have run back the way she had come if the man – Dominic Manone – had not told her to get in.

She went forward, stooping, handbag held tightly against her breasts as if she suspected that he might try to do what his lackey, O'Hara, had failed to do and wound her with a blade.

‘Do you know who I am, Miss Conway?'

‘You're Mr Manone – Dominic Manone.'

He was alone in the car, at the wheel. He wore a soft, dark blue wool overcoat and a turkey-red scarf. No hat or cap. His hair was jet black, wavy but not sleek. If he had worn a hat then he would have looked older, she thought, older and more sinister. The absence of a hat lent him a certain candour, a frankness that took the edge off her apprehension.

‘Now you know who I am, will you get into the motorcar, please.'

‘What for?'

‘I have something to say to you.'

He was still leaning to the side, holding the door open.

She could smell leather upholstery, a faint whiff of cigar smoke, not too heavy, not overpowering. His eyes were dark brown, not teasing, not mocking but with a trace of anxiety in them, or possibly polite concern.

‘Get in, Miss Conway.'

‘If you've something to say to me, just say it.'

‘I don't think it is right for you to be seen talking to me on the street.'

He did not grab, did not beckon. If he had done, Polly told herself later, she would have turned on her heel and left.

‘Please,' he said.

Polly got into the Alfa, and Dominic closed the door.

*   *   *

In the course of Saturday morning Dennis put the Norton together again.

Jackie and he had been up early and had startled their father by passing him in the close as he had come in from night shift. He had peered at them and had tentatively repeated their names – ‘Dennis? Jackie?' – as if they were half-forgotten acquaintances. Then, shaking his head in disbelief, he had gone on into the house to roll into bed, and the boys had gone trudging off downhill.

It was not the urge to earn an honest crust that had driven Sandy Hallop's lads out into the drizzle at the ungodly hour of half past seven o'clock but a peculiar restlessness whose source neither Dennis nor Jackie could identify.
Guilty consciences? Us? Never! Jeeze, man, what do you take us for?
Nevertheless, the cluttered apartment at No. 10 had somehow lost the sense of inviolable security that even occasional late-night visits from coppers had failed to dent and without which both the Hallop boys felt decidedly shaky.

As soon as they had reached the repair shop, however, they had felt just a little less vulnerable. Dennis had started work on the Norton while Jackie, carefully picking kindling from the bucket with his gloved paws, had lighted a fire in the stove. He needed cheering up. Thinking of Babs Conway made him depressed. Thinking how gay and glittery the Calcutta ballroom would be in Christmas week depressed him further, for, although he couldn't dance, he'd still have to pay a call on the Grimsdykes just to make sure they paid Stuart Royce his dues. Such matters lurked in the back of his mind. What he really craved was comfort, comfort and warmth and a sense of being somewhere that lay beyond every threat that had ever crept into his consciousness – a collection of fears that did not include appearances in court, short spells in jail or purling over the handlebars of a motorcycle travelling at high speed.

In fact, if his hands hadn't been so tender he might have fed petrol into the tank of the big Ariel Hunter that was racked under canvas at the rear of the shed, have pointed the wheel at Eaglesham and have ridden out into the rain. Crouched on the saddle in padded oilskins he would have tackled the twisting moorland tracks that snaked across Corse Hill to Darvel, Drumclog and Caldermill and have blown all his fears away. But he couldn't ride yet, couldn't dance yet, couldn't do a soddin' thing yet except sulk and hurt and worry.

He squandered the morning seated in front of the stove drinking mug after mug of Camp coffee and smoking cigarettes while his brother checked the Norton's crank bearings and rockers, steering head and fork links, and generally made sure that the machine was fit to advertise in the
Motor Cycle
and worth twenty-five quid of some sucker's money.

It was going to be one of those days, Jackie decided, one of those dead, nothing-to-look-forward-to days that had marred his childhood and lured him into the streets at an early age in search not of pleasure but simply relief from the monotony of being a small, powerless boy in the dreary acres of the Gorbals in the gloom of mid-winter afternoons.

Shortly after noon young Billy turned up. Jackie sent him down to the Co-op to buy a tin of bully beef and half a dozen bread rolls, and the brothers, Billy included, lunched
al fresco
on the bench before the stove.

Halfway through the meal Billy lifted his head.

Corned beef and bread roll dripped raggedly from his mouth. For an instant, he had the furtive mien of a small animal caught tearing at a lion's kill.

‘Somebody's comin',' he said as the door of the shed creaked open.

‘Only me,' Tommy Bonnar announced.

‘What d' you want?' said Dennis.

‘Lookin' for Patsy. Thought he might be here.'

‘Well, he ain't,' said Jackie. ‘Haven't seen him since you know when an' I don't care if I never see the bugger again.'

‘O'Hara's on to him.' Tommy wiped his nose on his coat sleeve and coughed. ‘The word is we got away wi' five or six thousand quid.'

‘Well, we bloody didn't,' Dennis said, as if that were an end of the matter.

‘Manone's offerin' blood money,' Tommy said.

Billy chewed with a grinding motion of the jaws, the meat in his mouth already reduced to pap. Tommy glanced at the boy and frowned.

‘Brother,' Jackie explained. ‘What d' you mean – O'Hara's on to him?'

‘Sniffed him out straight off,' said Tommy. ‘Was round there last night.'

‘Who told you?' said Dennis.

‘Patsy's old man.'

‘How much is Manone offerin'?' Dennis said.

‘A lot,' said Tommy. ‘Enough t' get O'Hara's interest.'

‘Think he knows about us?' said Jackie.

‘Naw, only Patsy. Only suspicions.'

‘What d'you do, Jackie?' Billy said. ‘What d'you get off wi'?'

‘Shut your mouth, kid,' Dennis told him.

‘Patsy won't crack,' said Jackie.

‘But
she
might,' said Dennis.

‘Babs?' Jackie said. ‘Nah, nah.'

‘I mean the other one – Polly.'

Jackie set down the enamel coffee mug and rubbed a hand over his jaw, the grubby fabric grating on two-day stubble. He pondered for a second, then said, ‘She's Patsy's problem.'