The Piper's Tune (6 page)

‘Absolutely not.'

The flat cobbles of the thoroughfare changed to the round cobbles of Old Farm Road. Lindsay could see the wall that marked the boundary of the shipyard, with a light crane and a couple of sheer-legs peeping over it. Even before the hack drew to a halt in front of the office block she could hear the thump of a punch and, rather eerily, two or three men crying out to each other in the aggressive drawl that was the
lingua franca
of workmen everywhere. When she stepped from the cab – her father helped her alight – she noticed a fresh pile of horse manure close to the kerb and surmised that Uncle Donald's four-wheeler was already tucked away in the yard's stables.

She wondered why she felt so out of place. Perhaps because she was no longer a little girl but had become an interloper in a world hostile to females, no matter how much of the company they owned. She could almost imagine the apprentices' snorts of derision when they learned that a girl had turned up in the boardroom: ‘
Two sixty-fourths, two sixty-fourths, for God's sake, and she thinks she owns the world.
' She did not feel as if she owned the world. She felt as if she owned nothing and had left her true self back home in the nursery.

Her father ushered her into the office building. Stout wooden pillars, a glass-front cubby, two stout wooden doors, a broad uncarpeted staircase leading upward: it was very quiet. Then Sergeant Corbett, the commissionaire, flung his newspaper aside, leaped out of his cubby and snapped a smart salute.

‘G'mornin', Mr Franklin.'

‘Good morning, good morning. Has my brother arrived yet?'

‘Aye, sir, him an' Master – Mister Martin.'

‘And my father?'

‘Been upstairs for a good hour, sir, along with Mr Harrington.'

Mr Harrington, a moist little whelk of a man, was the senior partner in the law firm that handled all the Franklins' business, personal and professional.

Sergeant Corbett was scarlet-cheeked and cheery. He wore a dark green uniform, a broad leather belt and sported a huge pair of mutton-chop whiskers. He had been doorman for as long as Lindsay could remember. She had no notion what regiment had afforded him his rank or what battles he had fought in. Inkerman, perhaps, or Balaclava? Surely he wasn't old enough to be a veteran of the Crimea. Tel-el-Kebir, Egypt, or the campaigns in the Sudan were more like the thing.

‘P'rhaps it's not my place, Miss Franklin,' the commissioner said, ‘but I'd like to welcome you to our office. Nice to have a lady on board.'

‘Thank you, Sergeant,' she said, then added, ‘I'll do my best.'

Her father whisked her upstairs.

*   *   *

The boardroom windows provided a panorama of sheds and berths and a ribbon of the Clyde up which cargo traffic nosed and down which the products of the shipyards were tugged away to the open sea. The narrow strand of water did not look impressive. Sometimes it was brown, sometimes green; only on the flood with the wind against, crisp and silvery and smacking, did it bear a faint resemblance to a mighty waterway. On that April forenoon it lay calm and shrunken. Cows and sheep peppered the patches of grass between docks and railway tracks, and cheek by jowl with the Linthouse quays were trees, birch, lime and flowering cherry and the oaks of the old estates.

The Clyde ran eighteen miles from Broomielaw to Port Glasgow. It had a range of thirteen feet on ordinary spring tides and, since the rocks at Elderslie had been blasted away, a channel that allowed twenty feet of draught at low water. Lindsay recalled the figures effortlessly: they had been dinned into her like prayers. She might be ignorant of industrial processes but like every Glaswegian she lived with the smell of the river in her nostrils and its pride in her heart.

‘Well, well,' Martin said, ‘if it isn't my dear wee cousin.'

He wore tweeds, fine in texture but loud in pattern. He detached himself from Pappy and Mr Harrington and came around the oblong table to greet her. He had been a year on management staff. Lindsay was glad of a familiar hand on her arm.

‘Ah, Lindsay.' Pappy did not offer his cheek for a kiss. ‘I believe you know Mr Harrington.'

‘She does, indeed,' said Mr Harrington. ‘My, my, lassie, but you're growing like a weed.'

She knew him well enough to say, ‘Like a weed, Mr Harrington?'

‘A flower then, is that better?'

‘Much better,' Lindsay said. ‘I didn't notice you in the cathedral for the Easter Cantata. Didn't you attend?'

‘Throat.' Mr Harrington tapped his collar stud. ‘Quinsy throat.'

He was not quite so old as her grandfather. He was very small with a hunch to his shoulders that suggested not so much deformity as defensiveness. His skin was white and moist, always moist, which was why Martin had coined the nickname ‘the whelk' for him. By contrast Martin was tall, broad-shouldered and open-featured. He continued to hold Lindsay's hand as if he felt she might be intimidated by men whom she had known most of her life.

He winked. ‘Don't be frightened.'

‘Why should I be frightened?'

‘I'll take you down to the yard afterwards, show you the ropes. We've a full order book at the moment and an interesting collection of—'

‘Martin,' her grandfather said, ‘don't pester the girl.'

‘I'm not pestering her. I just thought that if she's going to be a partner she should know
something
about what goes on here.'

At that juncture Donald ushered Aunt Kay into the room. She, it appeared, had been appointed to act for her son. After a few almost perfunctory introductions, Owen Franklin said, ‘I believe all the relative parties are present now, Harrington, so I reckon we might as well push on.'

*   *   *

The lines of demarcation that governed who did what among shipwrights did not apply to managers. On to their shoulders fell responsibility not only for their own departments but for many other departments as well. Each of the umpteen processes that led from first rough sketches to a vessel's trials was fraught with the possibility of error and every plate, rivet and pipe had to be checked and rechecked at every stage.

Tom Calder coped with this pressure by keeping himself to himself. Managers like George Crush or Peter Holt never knew what Calder was thinking, what moved him to vote for this procedure against that or to dig in his heels over a problem whose solution seemed obvious to everyone else. The fact that Calder was right more often than not did not endear him to his colleagues. He was regarded as a stubborn devil who seemed not so much transparent as completely opaque, a quality that bouncy, bumptious George Crush and pragmatic Peter Holt found incomprehensible.

Even the men who had accompanied Tom Calder to the Niger did not know what made him tick. He had thrived in the stifling heat of the mangrove swamps and, unlike the rest of the crew, had remained abundantly healthy throughout their term on the fever-ridden river. He had grown brown and lean and lively while the rest of Franklin's team had been washed out by sickness. He had even volunteered to accompany the
Mungo Park,
largest of the stern-wheelers that had been assembled amid the sandflies and mosquitoes at Burutu, to test her engines against the fierce currents below Jebba, four hundred miles upstream. What impression the Niger had made upon Tom Calder remained a mystery. He had delivered his reports within days of returning to Aydon Road and had been back in the drawing office in less than a week, as if the African trip had never taken place at all.

On Monday morning George Crush ran Calder to earth in the drawing office. Wasting no time on pleasantries, he said, ‘What's this I hear about a lassie taking over the management?'

‘I've no idea what you're blathering about, George.'

‘Come off it, man. The place is stiff with rumours.'

On Tom's board was a complete ‘as fitted' drawing of Torpedo-Boat No. 56, an Admiralty-commissioned vessel 125 feet in length, with a 12-foot beam and a triple expansion engine that, on paper at least, would give a top speed of 26.4 knots. Tom admired the craft's sleek, purposeful lines and hoped that he would be invited to accompany her on her trials.

‘Are you not going to tell me?' Crush insisted.

‘Nothing to tell.'

‘It's the old man's granddaughter, Mr Arthur's lass. Now you can't pretend you don't know her, since she's another music fiend. Is she the blonde who turns up at launches?'

‘I expect so,' Tom said.

George knew perfectly well who Anna Lindsay Franklin was. He had met her several times and had gossiped about her in the manager's office, predicting that once she grew up she would make a perfect mate for young Martin, since neither of them seemed over-endowed with brains.

‘They're up in the boardroom right now,' George went on, ‘with Mr Harrington. You know what that means.'

‘What does it mean?'

‘It means the rumours are true. The old man's retiring and we're going to have a lassie telling us what to do.'

‘If Mr Owen hands the reins to anyone it'll be Donald and Arthur.'

‘So you have heard something?'

On Monday morning the draughtsmen were slow getting into their stride. The long room was filled with the scrape of stools, the stealthy rustle of paper being unfurled and the clump of the polished flat-irons that kept the ends of the rolls from scuttling shut. Visions of sleek, high-powered torpedo-boats cleaving the waters of the Gareloch evaporated. Tom couldn't be bothered with George's questions. They were based on the fact that Arthur Franklin and he were both members of the Brunswick Park Choral Society, and Crush's assumption that singing in a choir entitled him to share the Franklins' family secrets which, of course, was far from the truth.

‘Come on, Tommy,' George Crush wheedled, ‘what have you heard? Is Yarrow finally moving north and buying us out?'

‘I don't know where you pick up these daft notions,' Tom said.

‘Well, there's no smoke without fire. It seems to me – Peter agrees – that we're in for either a sell-out or a shift in management.'

Tom could hardly believe that men so skilled in the art of building ships would fall prey to every panicky rumour that floated up from the boiler shop. Every so often the tale would go about that Alfred Yarrow or Thornycroft of Chiswick was bidding for property on the Clyde. Heads would hang in the managers' office and the apprentices would go around looking as if they expected the axe to fall at any moment; then the threat would disappear and another unfounded rumour would replace it.

‘George, George,' Tom said. ‘You can't seriously believe that old man Franklin would put a female in charge of us?'

‘Aye, well, you never know what rich folk will do when it suits them.'

‘A girl? In charge of shipbuilding?'

‘I suppose you're right,' Crush admitted reluctantly. ‘What's she doing here, though? I mean, you can't deny she's been brought here for a reason.'

Tom glanced at the moon-faced clock above the drawing-office door.

‘Tell you what, George.'

‘What?'

‘Why don't we walk over to the boardroom and find out?'

*   *   *

Lindsay had not expected fanfares to announce her entry into the partnership. She had also not anticipated that the proceedings would be so perfunctory and, to say the least of it, so very, very dry. Mr Harrington droned on about the new agreement for a good fifteen minutes before handing out typed copies of the document. Lindsay applied herself to reading but her attention soon slid away. Instead she found herself eyeing Aunt Kay who was scanning the agreement as if she understood every word of it. Perhaps, Lindsay thought, her Irish auntie was more of a businessman than anyone gave her credit for. After all, her husband operated a profitable brewery in Dublin and it was safe to assume that neither Kay nor her son had been entirely shut out.

‘Mistress McCulloch, are there any points you'd like clarified?'

‘No, it's all as clear as day, thank you.'

‘Good.' Mr Harrington seemed about to put the same question to Lindsay, then thought better of it. ‘Shall we move on?'

‘Please do,' said Pappy.

Lindsay listened to Mr Harrington with only half an ear. She observed her grandfather who, most uncharacteristically, lolled in the tall chair at the top of the table as if he could no longer be bothered with the proceedings that he had inaugurated.

‘Have you any questions?' Mr Harrington said.

‘When will the articles of partnership come into force?' Martin asked.

‘On the first day of May.'

‘When will you announce the board changes, Pappy?'

The old man stirred. ‘I'll inform the managers this morning and announce it to the men tomorrow. Rumours have already been flying so it's probably best to put a stop to them before the ship-owners begin inventing silly stories about us going to the wall. I want no fuss, you understand. I want the handover to be as smooth as possible. As far as the workforce is concerned nothing will change. Why should it?'

‘Because you won't be here to look out for them,' Martin said.

‘Daft beggar!' Pappy said, though he was pleased, Lindsay saw, by her cousin's remark.

Five minutes later the managers filed into the boardroom. Lindsay made no move to leave. Her father did not press her to do so. Aunt Kay also remained seated. Only Mr Harrington, who apparently had urgent matters to attend to elsewhere, took his leave and departed. Lindsay looked around the table. She recognised Mr Holt, Mr Crush, and Mr Tom Calder, the tall stony-faced draughtsman who sang with her father in the Brunswick choir. She smiled at him. Rather to her surprise, he smiled back.

Owen Franklin got to his feet. He plucked at his lip with finger and thumb then spread his coat tails and put his hands behind him to hide the trembling. ‘Gentleman,' he said, ‘before we buckle down to the business of the day, I've an important announcement to make.'