The Piper's Tune (25 page)

‘There will be a settlement, though. Bound to be a settlement. If Calder hasn't the brain to work it out for himself then Martin will have told him.'

‘Not everyone's as calculating as you are, Forbes.'

‘Do you think I'm calculating, dearest?'

‘Candidly, yes.'

‘Well, it's just as well one of us is, otherwise we'd both die virgins.'

She was conscious of his hand upon her waist, his forearm against the swell of her dress. His touch was discreet, not impolite. She was almost betrothed to him and no one would think him forward for holding on to her.

‘It always comes down to that with you, doesn't it?' Lindsay said. ‘To – to what happens in the bedroom.'

She had imagined that she would want him less as she liked him less, but the illogical desires she had suffered in the first months of courtship had not diminished. Forbes had taught her to think of marriage as something detached from the setting up of a home, from the bearing and raising of children. He had found weaknesses within her that she had not even suspected, moist little hungers that shame and innocence had kept hidden.

‘Sure and it does,' Forbes said. ‘If Cissie wants him and Calder wants her money then who am I to complain? Not jealous are you?'

No, Lindsay thought, not jealous, just regretful that Cissie and she had somehow exchanged tracks.

‘Oh, look,' Forbes said, ‘she's going to play for him. How sweet!'

Tom wore a suit of navy-blue worsted with a high collar. He had put on a string tie. A watch-chain draped his waistcoat and his hair, greying slightly over the ears, was swept back with a lick of brilliantine. He looked, Lindsay thought, perfectly in place and competent in this company. He glanced down at Cissie who had taken her sister's place on the piano bench. Smiling up, she gave him a key. There was something so dignified about them as a couple that Lindsay realised how sad her father must feel at the passing of the age of innocent communion and companionship.

‘God!' Forbes hissed. ‘It's the bloody “Kerry Dance”.'

‘What's wrong?' Lindsay whispered. ‘Does it bring back memories?'

‘Does it hell!' said Forbes.

And Tom, one hand on Cissie's shoulder, began his song.

*   *   *

It was close to midnight before the evening's entertainment concluded. The last song was a stirring male-voice rendition of ‘Hearts of Oak' which, though English in origin, seemed highly appropriate to a room full of shipbuilders and sent everyone off content.

On tables in the hallway, urns, jugs and teapots had appeared, together with trays of orange sponge cakes to provide Owen's guests with ‘a chittering bite' to sustain them on their journeys, short or long. They stood about the hall in topcoats, cloaks and long-fitting pelisses drinking tea or hot chocolate, chatting, reluctant to bring such a jolly evening to an end.

Coat over his arm and music case by his side, Tom sipped tea. He had seldom sung so loudly or so heartily and his larynx was just a little raw; a minor discomfort, he reckoned, a small price to pay for the pleasure he had received and – he was not so modest as all that – the manner in which he had been accepted into the company.

‘Tom!' Owen Franklin slapped him on the back, almost causing him to spill his tea. ‘Tom! What can I say? How can I thank you for coming this evening? Your contribution was amazing, quite amazing.'

Tom could not recall the old man ever having been so fulsome during his years in management. But Owen Franklin in retirement, Owen Franklin at home, Tom had come to realise, was quite a different fish from the fellow who had ruled the workforce at Aydon Road.

‘Well, thank you, sir, but I wouldn't call it amazing.'

‘Ah! You don't know the half of it, lad,' said Owen. ‘That song you sang, “The Kerry Dancing”, beautiful, just beautiful. Why did you pick that one, may I ask? Been a favourite of mine since first I heard it – what? – fifteen or twenty years ago in the old halls in Mint Street. My dear wife and I both loved it. Devereux – yes, that was his name, Robert Devereux – he sang it. He wasn't Irish either. Canadian, I think, a fine, light tenor, very smooth. Before your time, of course. Before your time.' The hand remained on Tom's shoulder. ‘You'll come again, Tom, will you not, now you've found the way?'

‘I'd be del—'

‘Ah-hah, here she is,' Owen declared, stretching out an arm. ‘Our little Cissie, the belle of the ball.' He brought his granddaughter into the circle of his arms and, while Tom juggled teacup and saucer, incorporated Tom too, all three awkwardly linked. ‘What do you think of our Cissie then, Tom?'

‘She's…'

‘She's a grand lass, isn't she?' Owen said. ‘A grand lass in every way.'

Tom felt a tickle of amusement in his chest. It occurred to him that if Owen Franklin had been
this
obvious in merchandising the products of the shipyard the firm would have gone into liquidation years ago.

‘Pap-paaay,' Cissie protested.

‘It's true, though. Isn't it, Tom?'

Tom answered obediently, ‘Indeed, it is.'

‘I see you have your shawl on, dearest,' Owen said. ‘It seems that you are going to have an escort as far as the pavement's edge, Tom. I've sent Giles to the rank so there will be cabs along presently. Cissie, don't catch cold.'

‘No, Pappy, I won't.'

Tom put down the cup and saucer, slipped into his overcoat and picked up his music case. Cissie took his arm. The loose silk-tasselled shawl draped about her shoulders lent her, Tom thought, a Romany touch that suited her high colour. He shook hands with Owen Franklin, shook hands with Mr Donald and with Martin who was at that moment just about to escort his fiancée, Aurora Swann, down the steps to a waiting carriage.

‘Are you travelling in my direction, Mr Calder?' the young woman asked. ‘I am going out to Kessington.'

She was very tall and handsome, smothered in furs, as if winter had not yet given way to spring in Glasgow's suburbs.

‘Thank you,' he said, ‘but I do believe I'll walk home. It's not far.'

‘I hope we will meet again,' Aurora said.

‘I'm sure you will,' said Martin, just as Cissie drew Tom away.

*   *   *

As soon as they were alone, Cissie relaxed. She did not, however, release her hold on his arm. Several hackney cabs came clopping up from the stand at Woodlands Road, one after the other like a parade. The Franklins' neighbours were probably used to occasional late-night disturbances and in five or ten minutes it would be over, the Hill grave and quiet again. Tom glanced round but saw no sign of Lindsay or of Forbes McCulloch who, in a manner not quite studied, had managed to avoid him all evening long.

Obeying his own little ritual of propriety, he was reluctant to let Cissie walk him further than the corner of Harper's Hill or to pass out of sight of the mansion's wide-open door.

She said, ‘I want to see what's happening in the Kelvingrove.'

‘What there is left of it,' Tom said.

‘Have you seen it?'

‘How can I not have seen it?' Tom said. ‘Building's been going on for months. There are those who think that Dumbarton Road is beginning to look rather too much like Cairo or Bombay.'

Cissie had gained sufficient confidence to disagree. ‘Nonsense,' she said. ‘It's an international exhibition, after all, and I for one like all those minarets and domes. Pansy and I have been sneaking out for weeks now to watch them being erected. It's very exciting, don't you think, to have such a thing right on your own doorstep? Come along, let me show you.'

It was a harmless concession to let her lead him across the curve of Park Circus to look down on the almost-completed site of the Great Exhibition whose ornate halls and international pavilions would, so it was said, put Crystal Palace in the shade. Tom was not sure he agreed with the optimistic view, or the principle behind it. He was as proud of his city as the next man but with war still raging in South Africa he regarded the exhibition not as a jewel in the crown of the municipality but rather as a means of stiffening the sinews of empire.

‘There,' Cissie said, nudging him towards the railings. ‘Don't tell me you're not impressed.'

In spite of himself, he was; the glint of moonlight on the vast area of parkland and the buildings rising spectrally out of leafless trees reminded him of the last great exhibition on this site, thirteen years ago.

As if reading his mind, Cissie said, ‘I remember the last one, do you?'

‘Yes,' Tom said.

‘I remember the orchestral hall…'

‘Which had terrible acoustics and a whining echo.'

Enthusiasm undampened, Cissie went on, ‘And the sweet manufactory rolling out comfits and peppermint rock. And,' a breath, ‘the gondolas on the river and the little steamer that my pappy built. We sailed up and down the Kelvin on that steamer under fairy lights and lanterns in the trees – oh, I don't know how many times.'

Tom remembered the steamer only too well, a tiny craft, hardly more than a launch with a miniature coal-fired engine, and how he had worked on its design with Mr Owen and what he had learned in the process. The steamer had been Franklin's contribution to the municipal commonweal, but this year the firm had not been invited to contribute.

Tom remembered other things about the 1888 exhibition too, things that he would not reveal to Cissie: a week before it had opened his wife had admitted her adultery, one of them, and a week before it had closed she had died.

He had taken Sylvie, aged two, to the Groveries several times, just his tiny, doll-like, vacant-eyed daughter and he queuing for a ride on the switchback and, like Cissie, riding down river on Franklin's steamer amid the gondolas and electric launches. He still remembered how uninterested Sylvie had been, how nothing had seemed to excite her attention, nothing except the captive balloon advertising Waterbury's Watches that floated high overhead, swaying and waltzing on the end of its cable. How Sylvie had loved that balloon. Roused from her infant trance, she had pointed at the sky and cried out to possess it, to have him bring it down and place it in her hand like an orb. He also remembered how three days after Dorothy's death he had allowed Albert Hartnell to wheedle him into the Bodega Bar in the main building and how, for the first and last time in his life, he had got raging drunk; how all the bitterness, all the venom in his soul had spewed out and it had taken Hartnell and three of Franklin's employees all their strength to drag him outside into the rain.

Shawl around her shoulders, Cissie leaned her forearms on the painted railing and looked down into the park. She was smiling, her memories not his memories, her past not his past, not blighted. He had a sudden urge to put his arm about her, not to give but to receive comfort.

She said, ‘The Duke and Duchess of Fife are performing the opening ceremony on the second of May. Will you take me, Tom? I mean, will you take me to the concerts and exhibitions, to sail on the river? Will you take me to see all the sights?'

‘Aren't your family…'

‘I don't want to go with my family. I want to go with you.'

‘I'll take you, Cissie.'

‘As often as you can?'

‘Yes, as often as I can,' he promised.

Then, putting propriety aside, he kissed her.

Something told him that they would cherish that moment just as poor Joseph Grant had cherished the memory of a blackbird's song in the winter of his dying and Owen Franklin, widowed now and old, still remembered the ring of the piper's tune.

‘Goodnight, Miss Franklin,' Tom said.

‘Goodnight, Mr Calder,' Cissie answered, and before he could see the tears in her eyes again, turned and ran pell-mell for home.

CHAPTER TEN

The Great Exhibition

If they had been acquainted, which naturally they were not, shy Princess Louise, wife of the Duke of Fife and King Edward's eldest daughter, might have taken time off from her royal duties to offer young Sylvie Calder a quiet word of advice. She, the Princess, had seen it all before, every act of deception and betrayal you could possibly imagine, for, although she was a woman of impeccable moral character, she knew only too well what went on in the Court of St James and the hurt that acts of adultery could cause to all parties involved. In the spring of 1901, Sylvie Calder was in no frame of mind to listen to advice from anyone, however, not even a daughter of the new King of England, and any lesson that the Princess might generously have passed along to the young commoner would almost certainly have been ignored.

As it was, Sylvie, like a hundred and forty thousand others, got no nearer to the beautiful Princess Louise than the crowd that flanked the avenue to the Industrial Hall. She saw nothing of the golden key with which the Princess opened the exhibition's gates, very little of the lady herself, nothing, in fact, except the feather in her hat and, Sylvie later claimed, a long-fingered, white-gloved hand waving in her direction; an omission that Sylvie speedily rectified by the invention of a little white lie: ‘She looked at
me,
I tell you. She looked straight at
me
and smiled.'

‘I'm sure and she did.' Forbes already regarded Sylvie's war with reality as one of her most endearing traits. ‘She probably thought you were a princess too.'

‘Do you think so? Do you really think so?' The excitement of a royal occasion had added a frenetic element to Sylvie's effervescence. ‘Perhaps I should have gone to the opening of the new art gallery where she could have seen me better.'

‘Well, it's too late now,' said Forbes. ‘Maybe she'll come back with old Teddie when he visits later in the year.'

‘Is
he
coming? Oh, is the King coming? I didn't know that.'

‘Once he's out of half-mourning, or whatever it is that kept him away,' said Forbes, ‘he's promised to come up and see us. I mean, if the Princess tells him what pretty girls there are in Glasgow he'll be on the train like a shot.'