The Piper's Tune (16 page)

‘Are you a Socialist?' Sylvie said.

‘What makes you think I'm a Socialist?'

‘All Socialists are Godless.'

‘Well, I'm no Socialist. I'm only asking you to tell me where this place is. I'll make you a deal, sweetheart. Give me the latitude and longitude of the Coral Strand and I'll put a guinea straight into your basket.'

‘For God's sake, Forbes, stop teasing her. She's only a wee kiddie.'

‘I'm not teasing her,' the young man said. ‘I'm deadly serious.'

Sylvie felt giddy with responsibility or something so akin to responsibility that she could not separate it from the other emotions that fizzed within her. She felt as if her bodice laces had had been tugged so tight that she could breathe only from the top of her lungs.

She said, ‘A guinea?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you promise?'

‘Yes.'

‘I cannot give you the navigational lines,' Sylvie said, ‘but I can tell you that the Coral Strand is generally taken to refer to the white sand beaches of the remote islands of the Pacific, which include the New Hebrides, New Guinea and the Solomons. Exports trading is fair in some quarters but there is much disease because of the horrid climate and heavy rainfall. And there are pagan tribes all over the place, tribes who kill and eat each other and know nothing of Christ's salvation. The population of the Solomon Islands is forty-seven thousand souls, eighty of whom are white, twenty of whom are Christians financed by the Foreign Mission Fund. In New Guinea, that part for which Britain is answerable, there are—'

‘Enough,' the young man said, laughing. ‘Enough, enough, enough.'

‘Do I get my guinea?'

‘G'an, Irish, give the lass her moolah.'

‘Put it in her basket, McCulloch, there's a good boy.'

‘Ay-hay, but ain't she a clever little thing,' said Mr Moscrop. ‘Near as clever as she is pretty, what!' Leaning, he dropped a florin into the basket. ‘What else does she know, I wonder?'

‘Does she know what the natives of Dublin do, Forbes? Ask her that.'

‘They,' said Sylvie, ‘are Papes and beyond redemption.'

‘Oh-hoh! Oh-hoh!'

‘They aren't all Papes in Dublin,' Forbes said.

‘Are you?'

‘No.'

‘What are you then?' said Sylvie.

‘I'm an engineer.'

‘That isn't a religion,' Sylvie said.

‘Wrong on that score, sweetheart. Wrong on that score.'

‘Heathens we are, but we don't eat people,' Charley said.

‘Unless we're very hungry,' said Forbes McCulloch.

‘I hope you are not hungry now,' said Sylvie and, rather to her chagrin, heard everyone within earshot, even Dada, burst out laughing. ‘I want my guinea. I've earned my guinea. You promised.'

‘Promise you the moon if you're not careful,' Charley said.

‘And get it for you, too,' said Forbes.

‘I just want my guinea.'

‘And you shall have it, my love,' the dark-haired young man said. ‘I promise you shall have it. Bertie, why don't we all go upstairs?'

*   *   *

Lindsay's birthday celebrations had been strangely subdued. Reaching one's majority did not have the same significance for a young woman as it did for a chap; eighteen had meant something but twenty-one was just another milestone on the road to marriage.

Forbes had taken her to dinner at the Barbary. Papa had organised a lavish party at Brunswick Crescent. All the relatives had been present, together with some of her father's friends from the choir, four or five former school chums – from whom she now felt totally detached – and, at her request, Mr Tom Calder. Grandpappy had been there too. He had abandoned the notion of wintering in Strathmore and spent more than half the year at home with Donald and Lilias, returning to the dismal old house in Perthshire mainly in summer months when, like a Highland laird, he would entertain bits and pieces of the family and certain favoured friends who had a taste for fishing.

Aunt Kay had journeyed over from Dublin. She came alone to Glasgow once every year, usually in the February, and stayed no more than a week. She came, so she claimed, to keep an eye on Forbes and make sure he was behaving himself. Of Forbes's father, Daniel McCulloch, the Franklins saw and heard nothing. The brewer evinced no apparent interest in his son and Forbes showed no inclination to return to Dublin, not even for a visit.

To Lindsay, even in their most confidential moments, he did not speak of his father or the sisters and brothers he had left behind. He was waiting, he told her, just waiting until he was old enough to marry and set up house with her. That was all he wanted out of life, a good steady job, a home of his own and Lindsay to share it with him; after that was accomplished the whole damned lot of them could go hang themselves.

For the best part of thirty months Forbes had behaved like a perfect gentleman, a suitor rather than a lover. He would kiss her, hold her in his arms, tell her he loved her and longed to be her husband. But he did not attempt to caress her intimately or hold her so close that she could feel his heart beat.

On those few occasions when Lindsay had got carried away he had disentangled himself and, with a bit of huffing and puffing, had apologised and explained that he respected her far too much to risk letting her jump the gun. He had it all drafted and documented, you see: a model future together, designed to scale. It was, he said, just a question of being patient, of waiting for the day when he would turn twenty-one, come in for his share of Franklin's profits, complete his courses at the Maritime Institute, and graduate to being a deputy manager. Then they would marry, settle down, have children. Then he would be able to call her his own, his very own. Then nobody would be able to point the finger and accuse him of being an opportunist.

Lindsay both admired and detested his conservatism. She did not know what had changed him from a brash and bragging boy into a man so stolid and constrained that at times he seemed almost dull. When it occurred to her that perhaps love had robbed him of his spark she cast the thought far to one side. He had lost something, something that she could not put her finger on. It wasn't his looks: he was more handsome than ever. He had not grown taller nor had he filled out and become coarse, like Martin and Johnny. He was just as slim and sinewy as he had ever been; heart-achingly handsome but, without conceit, somehow synthetic, like an artefact that one can do nothing with, except admire. She was still in love with him, still desired him – but in little fits and starts, in a spluttering, uncertain way that often left her headachy and depressed.

Forbes was busy, of course, occupied with making his way in the world, in proving himself worthy. Aunt Lilias – Papa too – had to admit that they had misjudged his determination. Once he was out of Beardmore's and into Franklin's he applied himself with a vengeance. He worked long hours in the drawing office, talked a great deal with George Crush about relations between labour and management, absorbed all that Tom Calder deigned to impart about design, everything that Peter Holt could tell him about engines. Dinner-time conversations at Harper's Hill were dominated by technical matters too important to encourage much gaiety.

Martin had become engaged to Aurora Swann, elder sister of the romantically inclined Gordon. They planned to marry in September. Mercy had been married for over a year, swept to the altar by a grandson of the McDades of Greenock who specialised in fitting out cargo boats and had branches all down the east coast. Mercy and Campbell McDade lived in a trim sandstone villa on the seafront at Langbank and were anticipating ‘a happy event' in December. Pansy, no longer a schoolgirl, remained at home, dancing and skating and playing tennis, doing all the things that Lindsay had once done, before Owen Forbes McCulloch came along.

Cissie had become the Franklins' problem child. She was rebellious and recalcitrant, loud and silent by turns, moody and desperately unhappy as one squalid, short-lived courtship followed another. In the autumn of 1900 she had even entertained the notion of becoming the wife of Professor Duval, an ageing widower who held the Chair of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University and whose obsession with music was so much in excess of Cissie's own that their brief, un-torrid affair had swiftly foundered and the old boy's engagement ring had been returned along with the ninety-six letters of love and musical analysis with which he had bombarded her.

There were times when Lilias feared that her daughter was turning into a hysteric. She would have taken her for examination by a medical specialist if Cissie had been willing. Cissie was not willing. Cissie saw nothing odd in her behaviour. Cissie would not discuss her behaviour or the course her life was taking, not with her mother, father, sisters or brothers; certainly not with Lindsay with whom she could hardly bring herself to exchange a civil word. She spoke to no one, confided in no one, kept her misery bottled up. She grew fatter. Her complexion suffered. Her dressing-table was littered with creams, astringent lotions, cosmetic preparations and enough pills to sink a small corvette.

Only Forbes knew what was wrong with his plump cousin, what would cure her but he, with uncharacteristic tact, chose to say nothing. Now and then, though, just for devilment, he would let her catch sight of him in the corridor on his way to the bath and, with a little wriggle of his backside, would let the towel flirt and once, albeit unintentionally, fall away completely so that she had at least one fleeting glimpse of his private parts to remind her just what she was missing.

*   *   *

‘Do you know what this is, sweetheart?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you know what you do with it?'

‘Put the dice in it and roll them out on to the table.'

‘Co-rrect,' Forbes said. ‘Do you want to try?'

‘Hold on,' Dada Hartnell said. ‘She's too young for this.'

‘Nonsense,' Forbes said. ‘You're not too young, Sylvie, are you? It's just a game. You've played games before, haven't you?'

‘If you think…' Dada said.

‘I don't think anything,' Forbes answered. ‘The mischief's all in your own head, Bertie.
Honi soit qui mal y pense,
and all that.'

‘That means “Shame to him who thinks evil,” Dada.'

‘I know what it means,' Dada Hartnell snapped.

He had brought her here. Now he did not want her to be here. She had never considered him fickle before. She was not surprised that he did not want her to be here, though. It was all too much to take in. She felt greedy with the sheer pleasure of being in this grand room with its ornate gas chandeliers, big green billiards tables and an ornamental bar with brass rails and a brassware hood. The gaslight was low but the bar beamed brightly, illuminating the tiled mural behind it: ‘Agriculture and Horticulture'. It resembled several paintings she had seen in art galleries except that neither of the ladies was wearing clothes and even the boy who accompanied them was as naked as the day he was born. She stared at the boy's tiny diddle and tried not to giggle.

Dada was saying, ‘Look here, Forbes, if you think for one moment I'm going to roll for that guinea you owe us then you've another think coming.'

‘I'm not going to roll against you, Bertie, not with the run of luck you've been having lately,' the young man said. ‘Heaven forfend!'

‘What, are you going to roll against her?'

‘Irish, for God's sake, man, she is only a kiddie,' Charley said, without any weight of conviction.

Charley was the only one of the students who had accompanied them through a door at the back of the public house and up a narrow wooden staircase to the upper room. There had been a locked door at the top of the stairs but Forbes had a key to open it. Sylvie had followed him eagerly into the low-beamed, gleaming room. Dada had followed her.

There were fewer men present than she'd imagined there might be, given the number she had noticed darting into the entrance in the lane. Six or eight of them were playing billiards. Three by the bar. Eight seated round a long table in a quiet corner, enjoying a game of cards. She did not know where the others had got to, unless they had slipped through the curtain left of the bar, past the couch where four or five young ladies took their ease.

‘Sure and I'm going to roll against her,' Forbes said. ‘Come along, Bertie. I'm not going to swipe her on the odds. We'll make it high pair on three with three in the cup. First triple takes all. That way you don't need to be a veteran to scoop the pool. What say?'

‘Are we going to gamble?' Sylvie said.

‘We're thinking about it,' Forbes told her.

‘No,' Dada Hartnell said. ‘I know what's going on here.'

‘Nothing's going on that'll harm her. What do you take me for? I've got sisters her age at home. Look, it's just a bit of fun, Bertie. She'll never be out of your sight.'

The ladies on the couch were watching. They seemed a long way off. Thick carpets and drapes muffled their voices but she sensed that they were talking about her. She heard one of them yell out but the greeting was distorted by a guttural accent. Forbes glanced up and smiled, waved. Then the girl on the couch did something that Sylvie had never seen done before, something you could not possibly do if your dress was tightly laced. Dada Hartnell seemed quite shocked but her new friend Forbes just laughed.

Sylvie pressed herself against the edge of the table. It was curved top and bottom like a baby's bath, longer than it was broad and surprisingly deep. The cloth lining was the same colour as mown grass. She looked down into it and automatically stretched a hand to the worn horn cup that snuggled in one corner. Two sets of dice, four dice in each set. One set was made of ivory, the numerals spotted in black. The other was ebony with white numbers. She gathered in the black.