Prized Possessions (5 page)

She heard a key scratch in the Chubb lock, and opened one eye.

She waited for the babble that would signal that Polly and Babs had returned from window-shopping in town; or – Lizzie opened both eyes – it could be Rosie back from Molliston Street.

Rosie was never clumsy, never noisy. She could slip into the house quiet as a mouse when she wanted to.

She might not even enter the kitchen at all but go straight into the bedroom to peel off her Institute skirt and jacket, brush them, hang them up on the wire and, if she wasn't in a mood for conversation, would lie on the floor, switch on the wireless and, with her better ear – the left – pressed tightly against the set, scan the dial for dance-band music.

‘Mammy?'

‘Yes, dear.'

In spite of the daft hat and blazer Rosie no longer resembled a child.

She had the same air of precocity that Polly had developed soon after she went to work as an office junior in the Burgh Hall, a job that she had secured through the intervention of the Italian whose influence, it seemed, was everywhere. He had got Babs her job too, clerking with Central Warehouse Company. But Lizzie doubted if even Mr Manone would be able to find work for Rosie, not with her disability.

‘Mammy?'

‘What? What's wrong?'

She resisted an urge to lunge from the armchair and demand to be told what her youngest had been up to and why she was so flushed. She remained where she was, head against the cushion, and squeezed her knees together to relieve the cramp that had suddenly affected her stomach.

Rosie shook her head. ‘Nothing.'

Lizzie raised herself on an elbow, faced her daughter squarely and said loudly, ‘You did not lose the money, did you?'

‘I gave Alex the money,' Rosie answered.

‘Did he say somethin' to upset you?'

Rosie shook her head again.

At that moment Lizzie realised that her youngest wasn't going to tell her the truth, no matter what.

Cramp tightened its grip. She didn't dare thrust herself out of the armchair. If she did she would surely grab Rosie by the shoulders and shake her like an old doormat. She had seldom struck any of the girls in temper, not even when things were at their worst.

Rosie's eyes widened.

Feigned innocence, Lizzie thought.

Something
had
happened. Something to do with O'Hara. By God, she promised herself, if that wee bastard has laid a finger on my Rosie I'll cut his damned ears off, aye, and not just his damned ears either.

Rosie said, ‘What's for tea?'

Automatically Lizzie made a swimming motion.

‘Fish,' said Rosie. ‘Lovely. What kind of fish, Mammy?'

Never mind the bloody fish, Lizzie thought. Tell me what's brought that flush to your cheek. Tell me what's upset you. Don't shut me out, Rosie. Please, don't shut me out.

‘Cod,' she said aloud. ‘Just cod.'

*   *   *

The baked cod had been devoured and, since it was Saturday, one slice of pineapple cake each. Then the girls had whipped through the washing-up. As soon as the last plate had been racked and the tablecloth brushed and put away, though, there had been the usual free-for-all with Babs and Polly squabbling over make-up and fighting to be first to grab the curling tongs from the gas ring.

Then they were off, breezing away, chirruping to Rosie and blowing kisses to Mammy as they dived for the door, leaving behind a clean kitchen, a breathless silence and the cloying odour of face powder.

Lizzie was always surprised to find herself alone; not quite alone, of course, for Rosie was still with her, lying low in the bedroom.

It had been twenty years, near enough, since Lizzie had gone on the randan on a Saturday night. Back in the old days it had been dances at the Orange Halls. Concerts. Variety shows. Plays and pantomimes under the spluttering carbon-arc lamps of the Princess Theatre. Great days. Wonderful times.

Her mother had girned at her precocity, her father had grumbled that she was never at home. Her sister Janet, who'd never had any sort of life, had put on a prim, acid-drop expression and warned her that if she didn't mend her ways she would be damned and go to hell.

Janet had been dead right. She had gone to hell. They'd all gone to hell one way or another soon after the war got under way.

Now, in just eighteen months she would be forty years old. She was still presentable in appearance but the years had laid their mark on her in subtle ways and, like many ‘busy' people, she was afraid of being left alone.

She slumped in the chair by the fire, listening to the
tick-tock-tick
of the little metal clock on the mantelshelf, and to the silence within the house. She had no inclination to lift a newspaper or read a book or go into the bedroom and listen to the wireless. She had never acquired the habit of leisure. And she wouldn't be at ease for long.

On Saturday nights she was committed to trudging a half-mile to the backlands tenement in Laurieston where her mother and sister lived; to help Janet lift the old woman from her chair, untangle her from her clothes, sponge her, dry her, put on her nightgown and heave her up into the wall-bed, while her mother moaned at their clumsiness and Janet apologised, endlessly.

Lizzie got to her feet, gave herself a shake and, telling herself not to be daft, went into the lobby to find her coat and hat.

God, what was happening to her? Now she had nothing much to worry about she worried about every little thing.

Forcing on a cheery smile, she pushed open the door of the bedroom.

The room was lit by the glow of the gas fire that Rosie, without permission, had turned on.

The drab curtain that screened the street had not been closed and a faint, wan glow from a lamp outside penetrated the glass. The broad bed in which the girls slept together filled the alcove, its heavy cotton bedspread unruffled. A battered old wardrobe with broken hinges almost barred access and the room seemed so compressed that Rosie, on the floor, was almost invisible.

She lay with legs drawn up, an arm folded across her breast.

The Mullard wireless set, the family's pride and joy, stood mute upon the chest of drawers but the second-hand gramophone that Polly had bought last Christmas was placed on the floor by Rosie's head.

Music played softly, so softly that Lizzie could barely hear it.

She stepped forward and peered down at her youngest who, chin cradled on her fist, was suspended over the turntable, her left ear a half-inch from the sound-box on the end of the gramophone's metallic arm.

Rosie's eyes were closed. Caught up in the sentimental ballad, she was oblivious to her mother's presence.

‘One Alone,' Lizzie murmured. ‘Dear God!' then, shaking her head, left Rosie to her love songs and slipped out of the house to go up to Laurieston and tuck her arthritic old bitch of a mother into bed for the night.

Chapter Three

Whatever faith Lizzie Conway had once possessed had been lost long ago. She couldn't say for sure just when she'd grown disillusioned with the platitudes dispensed by old Mr Wylie, minister of St Margaret's Church in the Calcutta Road, or when his weary promises of a better day tomorrow had grown stale.

One thing was for sure: she no longer subscribed to a gospel of exalted poverty or the retribution that the Socialist preachers called down upon the heads of the unworthy – by which they meant the capitalist swine who had industry and commerce sewn into their pockets and who cared not a fig for the plight of the common man provided their annual dividends kept rolling in.

For Lizzie, as for many Glaswegians, religion had become a matter of racial and social divisions too deep to fathom yet too shallow to explain. Slogans painted on walls and hoardings, the public communiqués of the city's twisted zealots, were a constant reminder that not all wars were economic and that historical differences were just as enduring as the class struggle itself. Orangemen marched, Catholics trotted off to mass, Jews got on with business and bothered no one. Out in the streets young men formed gangs. Bully Boys fought with Tongs and Tongs with Neds and they all, or nearly all, queued up together at the Labour Exchange when Fairfield's shipyard, Dixon's Blazes or the Kingston Iron Works paid off another two or three hundred men.

She lived, did Lizzie, in a neighbourhood where rage, ignorance and fear bubbled just beneath the surface, and a hunger march or a Jewish picnic or one of the great sprawling gang fights that happened after football matches all began to seem like part of the same event, an event, as far as Lizzie could make out, that had no relevance to pulpit preaching or priestly consolations. She was a Protestant. She was in work. She kept her nose and her house clean. She loved her children and tended to the welfare of her elderly mother. She planned for the future, and paid for the past. That was all that really mattered. That was life in the here-and-now. The hereafter could take care of itself.

Once in a blue moon, though, she would put on her Sunday best and catch a tram along the Paisley Road to visit a man who some folk south of the river regarded as a sort of a god.

His name was Dominic Manone. He was the second son of an immigrant who had come to Glasgow thirty years ago from a village near Genoa. The first son, Carlo, had died, along with one hundred and thirty thousand of his countrymen, fighting the Austrians at a place called Monfalcone in the early summer of 1917. The other boys, Dominic included, had been young enough to be spared the war. Soon after the Armistice old Carlo Manone had taken most of the family away, God knew where, leaving only Dominic in residence in the tall house in Manor Park Avenue with an aunt and uncle to look after him.

Little more than a boy then, young Dominic had been round-faced, smooth-skinned and sallow and looked as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. He had the uncle behind him, though, Uncle Guido, and eight or ten henchmen of various persuasions, mainly Scots and Irish, to handle the business, legal and otherwise. Over the next few years young Dominic had learned how to run the family's affairs and had brought a strange sort of order to the untameable fraternity of hooligans and thugs who ran wild about his territory.

His territory, and his influence, seemed boundless, though few honest, hard-working citizens had ever heard of him. He put in an appearance now and then at
Comunità
meetings but did not show face at any of the religious ceremonies that graced the Italian calendar. Not only did he come from the north, he was, by all accounts, anti-clerical in his views, more Communist than Catholic and, worst of all, he refused to favour Italians when it came to dishing out employment and preferred to take on an Irishman or Scot to some solemn, big-eyed
contadino
from back in the old country.

In whole or in part, the Manones owned two restaurants, four cafés, an ice-cream factory, a warehouse, a firm that imported religious statuary and another that manufactured crockery.

Dominic Manone's other sources of income were less obvious and even more lucrative. Through agents he ran much of the off-course bookmaking south of the river. Purchased and resold certain pieces of jewellery, plus antiques and occasional
objets d'art.
Financed speculative excursions into the acquisition of large quantities of booze or hard currency or, indeed, anything that could be sold on before the coppers could trace it. He was also in a position to guarantee that this public house or that corner shop would remain unmolested by the Neds or the Bully Boys or some other pack of vandals to whom destruction was an end in itself. For this service he charged modest fees, collected on a regular basis by the likes of Alex O'Hara or little Tommy Bonnar.

If you wanted anything from Dominic you didn't approach him directly and you most certainly did not send him a letter. You ‘had a word' with Alex O'Hara or Tony Lombard who were usually to be found hanging around the Ferryhead Rowing Club. There were other go-betweens too, including mean little Tommy Bonnar with his pinched bone-white face and graveyard cough.

Lizzie did not have to pass messages down the line and wait for an answer to return by the same unreliable route. She had Dominic Manone's ear whenever she wanted it, though she was careful not to abuse the privilege. However affable Dominic might appear if and when you encountered him, he was a force, a quite deadly force, to be reckoned with.

Lizzie was nervous as she walked along Belville Road and turned into the top of Manor Park Avenue. She felt like a fish out of water in the select neighbourhood, though it was no longer the apogee of upper-crust ambition to own one of the villas in the leafy streets off Belville Road. Progress and the passage of time had moved the frontier south and west, and for all their stateliness there was already a faintly neglected air to the houses about the park.

Lizzie was the brightest object on the horizon. She wasn't wilfully gaudy. She just preferred bright colours and loose-fitting clothes. Nothing expensive, not even the ‘vagabond' hat. She was adept and imaginative with needle and thread, however, and could conjure something almost fashionable out of cast-offs by adding a half belt or trimming down on buttons.

She turned into the gate of Elvanfoot; the villas here still had names, not postal numbers. Stone posts, an unlocked wrought-iron gate, crunchy red gravel, borders of newly turned black earth, no flowers.

Lizzie approached the front door and, glancing surreptitiously into the window, saw a standard lamp lit in the big front parlour, a fire in the grate and Dominic Manone himself propped in a leather chair reading a newspaper.

She sucked in a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

Uncle Guido opened the door. He knew Lizzie by sight and did not have to enquire what she wanted at that hour of a Sunday morning.

Guido Manone was as different from his nephew as chalk is from cheese. He was tall, so tall that he had developed a little carpenter's stoop that served to press his long, horsey chin into his chest. He seemed to be all face and hands, features that were disproportionately large compared with his dainty feet and stick-like build. He did not smile but he did bow. In his heyday he had been quite a ladies' man and, even in his sixties, much of this courtliness remained.