Prized Possessions (50 page)

On her daughter's behalf, she shed a few sentimental tears.

Champagne in fluted glasses, a reticent toast; then the door opened and two young maids brought in the soup in a huge silver tureen.

It was only then that Lizzie realised what was wrong, what was missing.

‘Where's your uncle?' she asked. ‘I thought he'd be here.'

‘Guido had business to attend to,' Dominic said. ‘He sends his regrets.'

‘An' your auntie?' Lizzie said, glancing up.

‘In the kitchen. She may join us later – if she's not too tired.'

Lizzie nodded, and let it go.

She was piqued at the absence of Dominic's family, though, just a wee bit insulted, more for Polly's sake than her own. Then it occurred to her that perhaps Dominic's relatives were not at the table because Dominic wanted to present himself just as he was, his own man, without Guido and the shadows of the immigrant generation lowering over him.

Polly said, ‘Dominic's aunt and uncle are thinking of going back to Italy.'

‘Retiring,' Dominic said. ‘After the wedding, of course.'

‘What'll you do then?' said Lizzie. ‘Who'll take care of your house?'

‘I will,' said Polly, firmly.

And at that moment Lizzie knew that Polly too had gone.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The spring season brought Lizzie no relief from harassment, though she had little to do with organising the first of the three weddings or the celebratory supper that took place in the Co-operative Society Halls after Jackie and Babs had said their piece before the registrar. Although he had politely declined an invitation to attend, Dominic had sent the bride a gift of twenty-five pounds which, given the circumstances, Babs saw no reason to refuse and which more than covered the cost of the reception.

Jackie had displayed more responsibility than Lizzie had anticipated. In the closing weeks of April he pitched himself into a frenzy of wheeling, dealing and motorcycle repair that kept Dennis and he busy at the garage far into the night; so much so that Babs, growing stealthily larger day by day, saw little of him and whined and swore a lot in a manner most unbecoming to a blushing bride. She remained employed at the warehouse, of course, and would continue to work there until June, for however casual Jackie's attitude to income might be a wage was still a wage and Mammy still had to pay the household bills during those last disintegrating days in Lavender Court.

Babs and Jackie Hallop were married on a Friday afternoon in May. The bride, in a mauve costume, looked radiant if just a tiny bit on the plump side, but the groom in a brand-new electric-blue suit stole much of her thunder. He was manic, gleeful and tearful by turns, and Lizzie was thankful that her new son-in-law wasn't fond of strong drink or God knows what sort of a fool he would have made of himself.

As it was, the wedding supper was a loud and strenuous affair, with ribald speeches, dancing to an accordion band, the serving of hot meat pies, sausage rolls and vast quantities of beer. There were even a few scuffles among the Hallop boys before the ritual departure of groom and bride for a two-day honeymoon in a boarding-house down the coast.

The happy couple rode off in a taxi-cab to the railway station festooned in paper ribbons and peppered with rice and confetti. Lizzie cried. Bernard comforted her by reminding her that their own wedding was only weeks away and assured her that it would be a much quieter affair.

On their return from their brief honeymoon Babs and Jackie took up temporary residence with the Hallops. They were constantly in and out of the Conways' flat, however, popping up and down stairs like squirrels in a cage, until Lizzie hardly knew whether she was coming or going and felt that she had lost not only her daughter but her home as well.

The patience and strength that had sustained her for so many years seemed to drain away as May crept into June and dispossession gave way to depression. She saw less of Polly, more and more of Babs and Jackie who were already planning how they would ‘gut' the house, what they would keep by way of furnishings and what they would gaily discard, until Lizzie began to wonder if she was doing the right thing in marrying Bernard Peabody at all and wish that she'd never stepped out on the road to matrimony.

The only fixed constants at this time were work, obligatory visits to attend her mother – and Bernard. Naturally, poor Bernard bore the brunt of Lizzie's uncertainty and was called upon to supply even more hugs, kisses and reassurances than usual.

Janet refused to attend Babs's wedding. She claimed that she didn't approve of the Hallops, whom she had never in fact met. She also refused point blank to be a witness at Lizzie's wedding or take any part in it at all. When Lizzie appealed to her mother to intercede with Janet on her behalf she met with implacable hostility and a stream of insults which if they had not been so banal might have wounded her even more deeply.

‘Aunt Janet's only jealous,' Rosie assured her mother. ‘And Gran is annoyed because we are going to live in Knightswood and you will not be able to dance attendance on her three times a week.'

‘Do
you
think I'm lettin' them down, dear?'

‘You are not letting anyone down, Mammy.'

‘What about you?'

‘Me?' said Rosie. ‘I am going with you and Bernard, am I not?'

‘Aye, of course you are. You'll have to sleep in a cabinet bed, though. You won't have a room of your own.'

‘I do not mind that,' said Rosie, cheerfully. ‘I have never had a room of my own. I will not miss what I have never had. And it is not much further from Knightswood into the shop on the tramcar.'

Shelby's bookshop had become the focus of Rosie's life. It was all she could do to disguise how much it meant to her to sit secure in the quiet, faintly dusty depths of the shop listening to booksellers' talk and handling rare old volumes as affectionately as Babs would cradle her baby, as tenderly as Polly would kiss her husband-to-be. Everything about Shelby's appealed to Rosie, from its eccentric clientele to the sheaves of catalogue copy that she helped prepare and the rackety old Oliver upon which she typed out quotations.

Most of all she liked the men she worked with, Mr Albert and Mr Robert, especially Mr Robert, who treated her with more consideration than she probably deserved. She confided in no one how happy she was, no one except Mr Feldman, who popped into the shop now and then. Only he could understand how an ordered life could be so satisfying and how, at last, she had finally left the silence of the streets behind.

Sometimes, though, she wondered if Alex O'Hara still loitered outside the Rowing Club on Saturday evenings, a ciggie in his mouth, pint glass in hand, his eyes turned towards Paisley Road and if, in that violent heart of his, he nurtured any regrets at the realisation that he would probably never see her again.

Somehow she doubted it.

*   *   *

There were no such lingering sentiments in Polly. She was Dominic's fiancée and, come September, would be Dominic's wife. The past was a closed book, a door she did not intend to reopen. She had no regrets whatsoever at the direction her life had taken. Even if she had not been captivated by love she would have felt nothing but faint scorn when the postcard from Paris flipped into the letterbox; a cheap postcard showing a view of the gardens of the Tuileries upon the back of which Patsy had printed in pencil,
‘Wish you were here,'
a prosaic little greeting that made Polly glad that she was not.

There was no romance in poverty, no poetry in aimlessness. Patsy in Paris would be the same as Patsy anywhere, an adventurer struggling to find adventure, a rebel in search of something to rebel against, a lover who did not know where to look for love. For all that, she did not tear the card in half and toss it on to the coals. She stuck it into the cardboard carton in which she had already begun to assemble her trousseau or, rather, that collection of bits and pieces that she did not wish to discard.

Polly did not know why she kept that first and only communication from a man who had never been her lover and whom she had never loved: perhaps, she thought, because arrogance demanded it, the qualities of patronage, forgiveness and self-assurance that she had already begun to learn from Dominic and that, in the years ahead, would surely become their bond.

Then waiting was over and it was their last night together in Lavender Court. Tomorrow Lizzie would step up before the altar in Knightswood New Church – Mrs Peabody had insisted on a church wedding – and marry Bernard Peabody. She had already given up her job at the laundry. She had been accorded a rousing send-off by her workmates and presented with a painted vase by which to remember them. Most of her clothes – Rosie's too – had been transported across town in brown-paper bags and Babs and Jackie had already assumed possession of the wardrobe and closets.

The lady-lamp was still in place in the lobby, all the furniture, cushions, curtains, crockery and cutlery, even the wireless set, were just where they had always been, except that, caught in a limbo of transition, they no longer seemed to belong to anyone at all. It was still ‘her' house but it was no longer her house. Next time she entered it Lizzie would be her daughter's guest. Everything would be different, even the smells, and it would be Babs and Jackie Hallop who were shaping a life for themselves within these four walls.

It would have been more practical for Polly to marry before her mother but Dominic preferred to wait until September when Aunt Teresa and Uncle Guido would depart for Italy and Polly and he would be free to choose a new cook and a new housekeeper to look after them. Meanwhile, Polly would lodge in the house in Manor Park Avenue, an arrangement much less scandalous than it seemed. Although they would share the table and the parlour and Polly would learn from Teresa what would be required of her, they would not share a bedroom. On this point Dominic was adamant.

It was not, he said, that he did not wish to make love to her but simply that some stripe of traditional morality remained within him, stemming from he knew not where. Mainly, though, he did not wish to offend Aunt Teresa's Catholic sensibilities by jumping the gun and creating more awkwardness in a situation that was already awkward enough.

There was more to it than politeness and morality, however, and Polly reckoned that Dominic still nursed a faint, fond hope that his father would bring the family across the Atlantic to bless and be with him on his wedding day.

It was not to be. For whatever reason, vain or valid, Carlo Manone stubbornly refused to return to Scotland no matter how often Dominic wrote and begged him to change his mind.

An odd but not uncomfortable arrangement would pertain tomorrow in Knightswood New Church: Bernard had asked Dominic to be his best man and Dominic had agreed. Polly would be her mother's maid. There were, it seemed, no others suitable, only family and family-to-be; a strange alliance, Polly realised, a necessary compromise that linked them all, sisters and strangers, into a unity, however temporary. There would only be a dozen of them, all told, plus a nosy little audience in the back pews, Mrs Peabody's friends from the Guild.

Afterwards the family would dine together in the room in the Ca'doro that Dominic had booked and that Dominic would pay for, then they would all go their separate ways: she to Dominic's house, Babs back to the Gorbals, Rosie to Knightswood, Mammy and Bernard off for a three-day honeymoon on the Isle of Arran. And the Conways would no longer be the Conways. They would belong to some larger clan that, in due time, would spread and expand until all that was left of the girls that they had been were memories clouded by a host of new experiences too unpredictable to name.

On wire hangers in the rumpled bedroom wafted the afternoon dress and tunic overdress that Mammy would wear tomorrow, the silk dress with the cowl neckline that she, Polly, would wear, Rosie's summer dress with a skirt flared from the knee; all new, all fine and fashionable, a line of fabrics that had cost more than any of them would have believed possible just half a year ago. And more to come at the time of her wedding, her quiet, elegant September wedding to the Italian, to the
bête noire
of her childish dreams.

Rosie lay asleep beside her, her breath purling softly.

Propped against the pillows, Polly watched the filmy garments float like ghosts in the half-dark and felt for the first time a little tremor of apprehension at the irony of what she had committed herself to and what she had done. She sat up suddenly, and because she could not bear to be alone padded barefoot through to the kitchen.

*   *   *

‘Polly, is that you?' Lizzie asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Can you not sleep, dearest?'

‘No.'

‘Me neither,' Mammy said. ‘Come on, slip in beside me an' give me a cuddle. You're not too old for that, are you?'

‘No,' Polly said. ‘I'll never be too old for that.'

She could just make out her mother's nightgowned figure in the pale pre-dawn light that filtered through the curtained window above the sink. She felt her way towards the niche bed and slid beneath the covers.

When she felt her mother's arm about her, tucking her in, she recalled those winter nights not so long ago when they had all slept together on one mattress on the floor, all gathered in together, shivering at first, until Mammy, by some trick that she, Polly, had yet to learn, had made them all warm.

‘Is Rosie…'

‘Fast asleep,' said Polly.

‘Do you want t' talk?' Lizzie said.

‘I don't mind,' said Polly. ‘I'm wide awake.'

‘I want you t' tell me somethin',' Lizzie said. ‘Since it's just you an' me, Polly, an' we won't be like this again, I want you to tell me the truth.'

Polly felt a prickle of doubt in her stomach, a tiny stab of the guilt that she'd lived with since before she'd had a memory, a premonition that Mammy knew everything about her, every thought, every feeling that she'd tried to keep to herself. Secrets were adult things, though, things that had to be earned and cultivated and she had recently come to realise that her mother had acquired some secrets that could not be shared, even with a daughter.