The Wax Fruit Trilogy Page 3

  “Your loving daughter,

  “BEL.”

  Mrs. Barrowfield had had every intention of going to her daughter this morning, but the letter pleased her. It was affectionate and, from its tone, she judged that Bel would be amenable to reason.

  And it said nothing about her husband’s little half-sister, Phœbe Moorhouse, who was the cause of all the trouble. Perhaps Bel was now taking a less emotional view of the child’s situation. After all, children had been left orphans often before. And in much less pleasant circumstances.

  Mrs. Barrowfield hurried into her clothes, intent upon walking across the town to Ure Place where her daughter lived.

  At ten o’clock she was out on the pavement in front of Monteith Row, wondering which way she would take. There was bright winter sunshine now. The Green was white with hoar-frost. Windows here and there glittered in the sunlight. Mrs. Barrowfield stood for a moment looking up and down the Row itself—that handsome block of flats and front-door houses—that had, when she was yet a growing girl, been built to be the most exclusive terrace of Regency Glasgow, overlooking Glasgow’s Hyde Park. But now the prestige of the Row was sinking. The industrial princes had forsaken it twenty years ago, escaping into the prevailing west wind from the smoke of these, their own factory chimneys. And the famous Green itself, that had played so great a part in Glasgow’s story, was sinking too. Covered with smuts, it was fast turning into a mere lung in the centre of an ever-growing mid-Victorian city.

  But Monteith Row had not yet fallen to nothing. For middle-class people who liked a well-built place and were not too snobbish—for people like old Mrs. Barrowfield, in short, who put comfort and convenience before an exclusive address, it was, at this stage of its history, just the right place.

  On this bright morning, however, many uglier corners of the town had taken on a glamour. The frost and the sunshine had, for the time, obliterated all suggestion of smoke and squalor. In spite of her preoccupation, Mrs. Barrowfield’s spirits rose. She set off briskly. She was a big woman who had, as yet, lost none of her vigour. Iron-grey curls and a bonnet tied with broad flying ribbons. Rather too pronounced, masculine features. Large hands thrust into a small, tight muff. Swaying crinolines, for she refused to be new-fashioned. A sealskin jacket, elastic-sided boots. She moved along the pavement, a galleon in full sail.

  At the end of the Row she wondered if she should continue along London Road and thus go direct, but sunshine like this was rare in winter, so, deciding to remain in it longer, she turned along Greendyke Street.

  No. She had made up her mind to talk to her daughter straightly. Why should Bel rush to take little Phœbe Moorhouse into her home? She wasn’t even her husband’s full sister. Indeed, Arthur hardly knew her. It was after he had left the farm to come to Glasgow that his father’s second marriage had taken place. And, so far as she knew, none of the Moorhouse family had ever liked their stepmother. Arthur had told Mrs. Barrowfield what he knew of her. She had been a wild Highland woman of forty—handsome, lithe and silent—who had come to the farm as a housekeeper. In a year she had married old Moorhouse and in a year more had borne him this daughter.

  And now, only on Wednesday, driving home from a neighbouring farm late in the night, old Moorhouse’s pony had bolted and hurled the couple to disaster. The old man was killed at once. The woman had lived until Thursday.

  And Bel hearing of the disaster in her mother’s presence—and what to Mrs. Barrowfield was much more serious, in the presence of her brother-and sisters-in-law—had exclaimed: “This is terrible! And poor wee Phœbe! Listen, Arthur, I won’t hear of anything else. Phœbe’s to be sent up here to me. I won’t allow the child to be without a mother.”

  Mrs. Barrowfield had known it was no use talking at the time—indeed, it would have been unseemly—but she considered that Bel’s heroics had been simply ridiculous. Moreover, she had seen the momentary glint in Sophia Butter’s eye. As though to say: “Bel, dear, that’s the kind of high falutin that takes a lot of getting out of!” And Bel’s mother knew that Bel hated climbing down, just as Bel’s father had done.

  IV

  Old Mrs. Barrowfield stamped furiously along Greendyke Street. Why should Bel take the child? The farm would go to Mungo, the oldest brother, of course. The child could go on living there. What was to stop her? He was thirty-five and a bachelor, but probably he would marry now, and his wife would have to look after the child. Why should her handsome daughter Bel, for whom she had every ambition, be worried by a gawky farm-child? It was all very well being sympathetic. But there were limits. She preferred to think of her daughter sitting fragrant and Madonna-like, awaiting the advent of her firstborn. Not fagging round after what might turn out to be a very troublesome girl of ten.

  She had left the Greendyke now and had come into the Salt-market. So intent was she upon her thoughts that she was quite unaware that a barefoot urchin had emerged from a vennel and was following her, begging.

  “Gie’s a ha’penny, lady. Gie’s a ha’penny.”

  At last she noticed him. Barefoot on this cold winter morning and filthy. The people in this neighbourhood were almost beasts! Drunken, brutish and undersized. It was, indeed, only on bright mornings such as this that she would venture up the Saltmarket. On rare occasions when she spent the evening at Bel’s or elsewhere, she took care to come home in a cab—or at all events accompanied by a man. Ladies always avoided the wynds and vennels, of course. It was not genteel to know much about them. But this old woman’s husband had told her. A doctor must go where others did not.

  “Gie’s a ha’penny, lady.”

  She walked on.

  Suddenly a memory flared up vividly in the mind of this rather smug, not very imaginative woman.

  She saw her husband sitting exhausted and beaten after a long and indescribably squalid midnight confinement in one of these terrible places. It was not his custom, as an established doctor, to take such work, but this time—to help an overworked younger colleague—he had gone.

  “I tell ye, ma dear, it’s an abominable blot on the honour of the town. It’s a wonder the Lord God doesn’t strike all the well-to-do folks of Glasgow with His thunderbolts of wrath!”

  “Gie’s a ha’penny, lady.”

  Well, it was Christmas. And, when you came to think of it, this child beside her must be human too. She took her purse from her muff and gave him a sixpence. Without a word, he snatched at it, thrust it into a filthy little waistcoat pocket, turned a cartwheel with the agility of an ape and disappeared.

  Mrs. Barrowfield walked on, indignant for a moment at the conditions that should bring such a gruesome little creature into existence, only to become a danger to more worthy people. Why did they allow these places? Glasgow was rich!

  But the conscience of this comfortable Victorian city was stirring. The City Improvements Trust had come into being and was taking thought. And more potent still than conscience, perhaps, vested interest, in the shape of a railway company, had thrown a bridge across the Clyde and was continuing its arches over the Briggate and through the very worst of these dens, forcing much to be pulled down that should long since have gone. The Royal Hand that signed away the old College of Lister, Watt and Kelvin to make a drab goods station, was also signing the death-warrant of scores of these earthly hells. And now there was talk of a great terminal station on the north side of the Clyde, with an hotel of a luxury unparalleled in Scotland, facing St. Enoch’s Square. That would inevitably demolish a great many more of these places.

  At the Cross the old lady halted, looking about her. The clock in the Tolbooth Steeple stood at the quarter past. People were lounging about in the sunlight. As there was but little traffic, she crossed over to look at the Christmas display in the windows of Millar’s warehouse on the corner of the Gallowgate and High Street. Presently she turned and looked up, wondering if, on her way to Ure Place, she should go on up the hill past the doomed College, or along past the Tontine and up Candleriggs. She took the latter cour
se. There were shops in the Trongate she might have a look at. As she passed the equestrian statue of King William III, she smiled to herself, remembering that her son-in-law’s brother David Moorhouse—who thought himself a wag—had told her that the King’s horse was a wise beast, that, bronze though it might be, it knew to wag its tail at every Irishman.

  But presently her thoughts were on Bel once more. No, it was preposterous. The child might have a very bad influence over the grandchild who was coming. Country children were so coarse and uncontrolled.

  “Guid-day, Mum.”

  She was in the Candleriggs now, passing the business premises of her son-in-law.

  “Oh, good morning.” She cast an appraising eye through the open door. Everything very neat, she must say. The stock was carefully arranged and tidy.

  “Mr. Moorhouse would not be here this morning?” she said, to make a moment’s conversation with Arthur’s man.

  “No, Mum. It’s terrible aboot his faither.”

  “Yes, terrible. The funeral’s today, of course. Good morning.”

  “Guid-day.”

  At first she hadn’t much liked the idea of Bel, a doctor’s daughter, marrying a wholesale cheese merchant. But Bel had been twenty-four and it was time she was marrying someone. She, her mother, had had to suffer all the disgrace of spinsterhood until she was thirty-nine (she still regarded it as an intervention from heaven that she had emerged triumphant in the end), and she had had a horror at the thought of her daughter being among the unwanted. She herself had known everything there was to know of patronage from the securely wedded and copiously fecund.

  Besides, the Moorhouse boys, although they were farmer’s sons, had a strange air of breeding. As though a lacing of blue blood flowed in their honest Ayrshire veins. Perhaps a young aristocrat a generation or two back. But if there was a story Mrs. Barrowfield had never heard it. Victorian propriety forbade.

  V

  At the head of the Candleriggs she crossed over to the pavement in front of the Ramshorn Kirk, reflecting for an instant that her own parents were buried over there in the churchyard. In a second or two more she was in Montrose Street and making her way up the hill.

  She was breathless as she rang her daughter’s door-bell. For the upper part of Montrose Street was very steep and Ure Place was almost at the top of it. It had once come into her mind that her son-in-law had fixed his house in a place that was difficult of access to an elderly woman so that he need not see too much of her, but her common sense told her that Arthur’s mind could not jump to such subtleties. He was much too straightforward.

  Five minutes more found her sitting by the fire in her daughter’s pleasant plush parlour, sipping a glass of sherry wine and eating a piece of black bun. Her bonnet, with its dangling ribbons, was laid aside with her sealskin jacket and muff and she was looking pleasantly about her.

  “Well, dear, it’s nice to have ye to myself for a day. What a terrible hill that is! I’m all peching.”

  “Yes, Mama. But it’s convenient for Arthur up here. He can drop straight down to his work. The steepness is nothing to him.”

  Mrs. Barrowfield smiled at the bride’s pride in her husband’s vigour.

  Bel was looking wonderful. Her tall fairness was enhanced by the unrelieved black of her mourning. In her wide, unrevealing dress she was still elegant. Admiration and ambition for her prompted her mother’s next words.

  “I hope before long you’ll can move out to the West.”

  Bel, though she was fully at one with her mother, merely said: “It’s very far away for Arthur.”

  “Nonsense. I hear Menzies is running his Tartan Buses to the Kirklee now. I’m not suggesting as far out as that, of course. But you could go out to the Great Western Road somebit near the Kelvin Bridge. You could even go up the hill into the Hillheed. And with the new University being nearly finished out there, it’s bound to turn out a very nice district.”

  A vision of polite calls and pleasant, intellectual converse in professors’ drawing-rooms rose for a moment in Bel’s mind.

  But “We’ll have to make more money first,” was all she said as she settled down on the opposite side of the fire from her mother. “Besides,” she went on as she took up her sewing, “the people out there would be much too grand and brainy for Arthur and me.” She did not say this because she believed it for one moment. For Bel had a fine conceit of herself. It was merely to fish from her mother a little comforting praise.

  But all she got was a complacent “Not them.”

  Mrs. Barrowfield had no fears for her daughter’s social abilities when they should be put to the test. Had not Bel been sent for years to a very reputable establishment for young ladies in St. Andrew’s Square? If she herself still held in part to the speech and homely manners of earlier days, she had seen to it that her child should speak pure English and observe the modern elegances.

  She noticed that Bel was making something for her baby. A good moment to appeal to her, perhaps. But she approached the topic warily.

  “So the funeral is today?”

  “Yes.”

  They spoke of this for some moments. How the accident had happened. How the pony had stumbled, then, frightened, had dashed ahead, out of control, along the ice-bound road. Arthur’s stepmother had been able to explain before she died.

  Mrs. Barrowfield listened to these things with perfunctory interest. Old Moorhouse and his wife were nothing to her. At length, at what she deemed to be the right moment, she said:

  “You didn’t mean to take Phœbe, did you, Bel?”

  “Yes, Mama, I think so.”

  “What way, can she not stay at the farm?”

  “I can’t allow Arthur’s sister to grow up like a farm-servant.”

  Her mother’s inward comment was fiddle-de-dee, but she said:

  “She’s got her brother, Mungo.”

  “He’s a single man. Besides, although he’s the oldest, Arthur and I are really at the head of the family.”

  There was Bel at it again, giving herself airs. Her mother looked across at her severely. “Bel, mind, you’ve got yourselves to think of. And what’s more, you’ve got your own bairns to think of. For all you know, Phœbe Moorhouse may be a thrawn wee besom. Have you thought what you’re doing?”

  “Yes, Mama. I’ve thought. And besides, the old man made Arthur her guardian because he was a businessman and knew about money.”

  The old woman pricked her ears. “Money? But the bairn has no money.”

  “Well, of course, it would make no difference if she hadn’t, Mama, but as it happens she has. It won’t be much, but enough to educate her, we expect. The old man had little outside his farm stock, but what there was goes to her.”

  Mrs. Barrowfield was deeply interested. Perhaps Bel was nearer her house out West than it might appear. All her worry had, perhaps, been over nothing! With the girl’s money—

  “And you see how it is, Mama. Arthur has the responsibility for her anyway. It would be much better if we had her here under our eye.”

  A benign smile suffused Mrs. Barrowfield’s features.

  “You’re your father’s bairn, my dear. Aye thinking about doing good to somebody else,” she said.

  “Actually, it’s to be settled this evening when they all come back,” Bel said.

  Chapter Four

  IT was all strange and very unnatural. Yet little Phœbe Moorhouse was by no means struck down by her double bereavement. As was the custom, her elders thought it right that the child should be taken to look upon her dead. The first time, her oldest brother Mungo had taken her by the hand and led her into the eerie, familiar room where her parents lay. Her father’s face frightened her at first. He looked so old, so pinched, so yellow. But her mother lay like serene marble, with her white, well-shaped face and her raven-black hair parted in the middle as she had always worn it in life.

  Phœbe had clung to Mungo’s hand.

  But soon she had gone back into the room with her friends,
the women servants, Gracie and Jean, who had wept a great deal, and, Phœbe could not help thinking, with a contemptible lack of control. And presently she found herself taking those who came to pay their respects into the chamber of death without any emotion other than a feeling of importance.

  The physical aspect, the appearance of her parents as they lay there, quickly came to have no effect upon her, for already, at the age of ten, this country child had seen the death of so many animals, just as she had seen their birth, and she had long since accepted both phenomena without being unduly stirred.

  In life, her father and mother had been so remote, so for each other, that the pulsing existence of the farm, with its friendships and quarrels, had, for the great part, gone on without them. Even their daughter had not broken through the invisible ring that seemed to be about them.

  Phœbe had grieved more bitterly when the beloved servant into whose charge she was given as a baby, who had tended her in her first years, had finally married and gone away.

  Now, in the darkened farmhouse in her new black dress, she tiptoed about, feeling her consequence as the chief mourner, and accepted all the abnormal petting and notice she was receiving with pleasure and complacency.

  Then Mungo told her that these other half-brothers and sisters that she scarcely knew were coming to the funeral.

  She had only had fleeting looks at them, and that, not for a year or two. What each looked like was half-imagined, half-remembered. It would be exciting to see them again. She had caught herself wondering recently why they did not come often. Indeed, she had gone the length of asking her mother, but the Highland woman had merely laughed, a remote, wry laugh, the meaning of which this child of ten could not guess. But now she was to see them and she was all agog.

  II

  They arrived. Some with Mungo in the trap, some in the only cab that served the village station. She had pushed back a lowered blind and watched the two vehicles coming in the winter sunshine up the ice-bound road. By the time they had gained the top of the hill and were rounding the farm buildings to come into the more convenient yard, Phœbe, if she had dared do anything so unseemly, would have danced with excitement.