The Wax Fruit Trilogy Read online

  Then, suddenly, she felt shy.

  “Here, they’re comin’. Come on.”

  Jean had come to look for her. Phœbe was glad to take the dairymaid’s large red hand as they both went together to the door opening on the yard.

  Arthur and David were in the trap with Mungo. They were all jumping down. A farm-hand was holding the pony’s head. How pale and distinguished these brothers from the city looked, with their shining top-hats, their long black overcoats and black gloves!

  Arthur looked like a white-faced, fine-boned Mungo, with his prominent, well-cut features and his mutton-chop whiskers. Mungo’s muscles were lusty and developed from a life of labouring in the open air. His body was burly and strong, with no claims to elegance. Sun and wind had given his face a dark enduring tan. Yet his likeness to this brother, two years younger than himself, was very definite.

  David was quite different. At twenty-three he still looked boyish. Phœbe noticed that his light hair curled pleasantly beneath his black hat, and when he took this off and bent down to kiss his little sister, she saw how clear his skin was and how attractive his eyes.

  Arthur kissed her too and said: “Well, Phœbe, how are you?” Then seemed to think of nothing else to say. But the awkwardness could not last, for all three brothers must turn to help the ladies from the cab.

  Her half-sisters were very grand ladies indeed. Far grander, say, than Miss Smith, the retired schoolmistress in the village where Phœbe, along with a dozen other well-to-do children, was sent for morning lessons in preference to the rough-and-tumble of the village school. Far grander than the banker’s daughters, who helped with the singing in church. Grander, even, than the minister’s wife, who was old and—for a little girl—intensely uninteresting.

  Sophia got out first and came straight across to her.

  “And is this wee Phœbe? How are you keeping, dear? You know, the last time I saw you, you were only half the height. About the height that Wil and Margy are now.” Sophia bent down too and kissed her little sister. It took Phœbe a moment to remember who Wil and Margy were.

  Mary pushed back her black veil and bent down too, putting her arms round her. How calm and blue her eyes seemed! And she smelt of lavender. “Well, deary? Here are your big sisters to look after you.”

  Mary was so elegant in her well-made black clothes and her furs. And indeed—by what Phœbe knew of elegance—Sophia did not come so far behind her.

  She suddenly became acutely conscious of her black serge dress, hastily put together by the village dressmaker, her home-knitted black woollen stockings and her sturdy country boots.

  But the child’s steady little mind was not long in summing up her sisters. Sophia was big and fussy and chattered without ceasing about her own children. But somehow she seemed more spontaneously kind than Mary, whose more ostentatious goodness appeared to be so consciously controlled.

  Of their husbands, Phœbe took little note. They were just stolid male things in black that you shook hands with, then dismissed from your mind.

  There was hot soup for all the travellers and a “dram” for the men, for the midday meal would take place late, after the funeral. But before they had this, the brothers and sisters requested to see the last of their father.

  The child, lynx-eyed and curious, followed them into the room. Mary and Sophia were weeping dutifully, bending over his face as he lay ready in his coffin. Arthur and David stood solemnly by, with set faces. Mungo, accustomed, stood behind merely waiting.

  Suddenly a flame of resentment flared inside Phœbe. They were all looking at her father. Not one of them was thinking of her mother as she lay there so quiet, calm as she had always been, and, to her thinking, beautiful. On the woman’s breast lay a posy of very pearl snowdrops, grown under a frame in a sunny corner of the minister’s garden. The minister’s wife had sent them to Phœbe, who had tied them up together with some ivy leaves and put them where they lay. It seemed an affront to herself that they should appear to take no thought for her mother. She was still too young to understand their embarrassment.

  Tears sprang into Phœbe’s eyes—tears of pride and resentment. For a moment she stood alone beside her mother’s coffin, weeping.

  It was Arthur who noticed first. He took her tears for uncomplicated childish sorrow. But he came to her, put his hand in her own, and thus remained beside her until the others were ready to go.

  From this time on, it was to be Arthur Moorhouse who was to be first of all the family in his half-sister’s strange affections. Even before Mungo, whom she had known all her life.

  III

  People were coming for the service now, and presently the minister and the laird, Sir Charles Ruanthorpe, were there.

  The service took place in the Room. This was the sitting-room of the farm—a room of tassels, horsehair stiff chairs, antimacassars and Cupid ornaments. Unlike the other rooms of this prosperous farmhouse, the Room did not pulse with life. It was merely a dead ceremonial chamber where, in the days before their father’s remarriage, the two sisters had given occasional formal tea-parties for such friends as were too genteel to eat in the much more welcoming kitchen. Where, if the laird or his lady called, they were thrust to sit uncomfortably looking about them, while the farmer’s wife went to tidy herself and to look hastily into her supplies of cake and wine. For years it had given Phœbe much quiet rapture to tiptoe into the darkened Room—the blinds were always down to keep things from fading—and to stand solemnly admiring its aloof splendour.

  But now the Room was full to overflowing with black-coated, white-tied men—most of them neighbouring farmers and known to her.

  She felt herself wanting to run about to see everything that was happening, but Sophia and Mary sat by the kitchen fire and seemed to expect her to do the same.

  At last, when all were there, they rose and, each taking one of her hands, led her into the Room, where places had been kept for them. But Phœbe did not want to sit between her sisters. She wanted to sit between Jean and Gracie, who were wiping red eyes with the backs of their great hands. So, ignoring the chair that was set for her, she wedged herself between her two friends, and, as this was no time nor place for remonstrance, succeeded in remaining.

  Except that the minister kept talking about “these, our dear brother and sister” or addressed the Divinity concerning “these, Thy son and daughter,” Phœbe decided that the whole thing was rather like church, only at home.

  Yet, when the service was over and the child, watching once more from a window, saw the coffins borne out, the procession of mourners forming up and the whole beginning solemnly to move away she ran to her room, threw herself down on her bed and wept bitterly.

  Chapter Five

  BEL had sent her mother home in a cab as it began to get dark, which at Christmas-time in Glasgow is before four o’clock in the afternoon. In these days there was no question of an elderly or, indeed, any lady walking alone at night in any of the streets that converge at Glasgow Cross. The wretched creatures from the wynds and vennels poured themselves forth from their dens, and, as something like every third shop in such streets as the Briggate and the Saltmarket was a drinking-shop, most of them were drunk. Some of them roaring, some fighting, some of them collapsed in huddled masses in the gutter—men and women.

  The better people tried not to think of them. And succeeded on the whole very well. You did not go near a sewer. Why be contaminated? It was the passionate, imaginative few who tried to effect changes for the better. It was those afflicted with highly uncomfortable consciences who could not but see these poor victims of a too hastily improvised industrial era as the possessors of bodies and intellects that nature had once intended to be sound and wholesome like their own. These conscience-ridden people, pointing the way back to the most elementary common sense, have since done away with the worst of Glasgow’s slums and raised the descendants of these human vermin to something nearer decency and normality.

  Bel was quite aware that her mother was
not too anxious for her to take her brother’s little half-sister into her house. But she had been careful not to say a word that would tie her in one way or another. Her mother and her sisters-in-law had heard her first, quite unconsidered outburst of pity for the little orphan. And she was determined to leave it at that meantime.

  On the doorstep, the old lady, remembering that Phœbe’s future was to be discussed by the Moorhouse family that evening at Bel’s, and tortured to know whether the amount of money coming to the child would make it worthwhile Bel taking her or not, had kissed her daughter and said: “Now don’t do anything in haste, Bel.”

  “Do you mean about Phœbe?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do whatever’s right, Mother. Goodbye, dear. Arthur and I will come down in the morning and bring you your Christmas present before we go to church. Don’t keep the poor cabman waiting. It’s so cold.”

  When people—especially high falutin people like her own daughter—said they were going to do whatever was right, there was no use talking to them, old Mrs. Barrowfield reflected, beaten. Whatever was right left a vast margin for doing what you, personally, wanted to do. You could, she reflected further, call almost anything right, if you argued hard enough.

  But Bel was quite determined not to be dominated any more by her old and domineering mother. It was much pleasanter to be dominated by a husband. She had had twenty-four years of the first kind of domination, and was determined to have no more of it. She was still recently enough married to feel a pleasant feminine thrill—a subtle flattery of her womanhood—when Arthur laid down the law to her. It was, she felt, as though she were fulfilling a wifely function.

  She stood at her open door now, looking after her mother’s cab. In a few seconds it turned back up into the Rotten Row, for the driver could not trust his horse to go down the steep, slippery cobbles of Montrose Street, and had determined to choose one of the streets further west, where the incline was less abrupt. She took a few paces along the pavement and looked down Montrose Street itself. The hum and lights of the City came up to her. The noise and traffic of George Street. The view of endless roofs. The roofs of the Athenæum. Hutcheson’s Hospital. The roof of the hotel on George’s Square where the law lords lived when they came to Glasgow. The spires of the Ramshorn Church and Free St. Matthew’s, and, further over, the Tolbooth Steeple. Yet further the spire of the Old Merchants’ Hall. It was getting dark, and there was some fog. She hoped the train from Ayrshire would not be held up by it. With a little shiver she turned back and shut her front door. The house was cosy and pleasant. It still gave the eight-month bride a little thrill to feel it was her own—its decoration, its arrangement, everything—for Arthur was a busy man and had left things in her hands.

  She must go and see what the maids had done about the tea-table, for in these days—as indeed still, for the greater part of middle-class Glasgow, though its social status keeps ever sinking—high tea, elaborate and triumphantly lavish, is the focal point of the day.

  The table was groaning with bread, several kinds of scones, cakes, large and small, fancy and plain, a variety of jams, and much else, all of which were to follow two sumptuously rich cooked dishes.

  Bel cast an appraising eye about her. Well, it would be as good a tea as ever Mary produced out West at Albany Place, and certainly more lavish than Sophia’s efforts across at Grafton Square. She had no intention of being outdone by her sisters-in-law.

  She felt very pleased with herself. It was nice to remember that she was a doctor’s daughter, and that Sophia and Mary were the daughters of a mere farmer. It was nice for her to think that Arthur had certainly taken no step down by marrying her. What if her mother was a little downright? You didn’t expect your parents to have the polish they had been able to give you. And when it came to the education of her own children, she would see to it that their advantages would well exceed what her own had been.

  Like all middle-class Glasgow at this time, Bel—like a thousand other Bels and Arthurs in the City—was on the up-grade.

  II

  Mary and George arrived first with Arthur. They came direct from the station, since the McNairns had decided that it would take too long to go out to their house at Albany Place and then come back again into town. But, on the platform, Sophia announced that she would be quite unable to touch her evening meal, until she knew her children were back home from their visit to the McNairn cousins and safe. There had, she said, been so many cases lately of children being waylaid and robbed of their clothing. So, in spite of protests from Arthur that nothing could befall them in that quarter of the town, and escorted as they would be, and that there was no possible reason for keeping waiting several people fatigued by cold and hunger and the emotional trials of a long day, she went, taking her inarticulate husband with her.

  “I won’t really be any time at all, dears,” she had clucked. “And it would be a comfort to you too, wouldn’t it, Mary dear, to know that Wil and Margy had left your children well and happy?”

  Mary felt that, somewhere, there was the sting of a reproof hidden in these words—a hint that she was showing a lack of interest in her own children, but though she was exhausted like the others, and a little out of temper, she controlled herself, merely smiled with that saintly smile of hers, and said with a voice that was all kindness: “Of course. But don’t be any longer than you possibly need to be, dear. The boys are hungry. Besides, I don’t think we should keep Bel waiting,” and thus, having re-established herself as the soul of consideration for everybody, she preceded two impatient brothers and her own large, portly boy into the cab that was to take them to Ure Place.

  “We might have taken Sophia and William part of the way,” she said, when once the four were fairly started.

  Her own husband said nothing. But Arthur snapped: “Not at all. It’ll do the Butters no harm to pay for themselves once in a while. Besides, it serves Sophia right for being a fool.”

  So, apart from drawing David’s attention to the reflection of the moon on the river as they crossed Glasgow Bridge, Mary said no more. If the poor boys were tired, she, the most understanding of women, would certainly be the last one to worry them with talk.

  Bel, all concern for their comfort, received the four of them with roaring fires, and, what was better still, she had mixed a bowl of toddy which was fragrant and hot, and which did wonders in soothing everybody’s bad temper. Even Mary was persuaded to have a sip or two, and as the colour came back into her beautiful calm face, she was pleased to find herself thinking how, in spite of minor defects, perhaps her new sister-in-law was just the very wife for Arthur, and was turning out splendidly.

  Her husband, George McNairn, taking rather more than his share, actually revived enough to joke ponderously with his sister-in-law, and determined that Bel was a damned fine looking young woman, full of life and mettle. He regretted himself a little that his own wife—while flinching in no way from her duty—should always be so passive and saintly in their more conjugal moments.

  David put his arm round Bel’s shoulder, kissed her and said she was a dear, and Arthur glowed with pride and satisfaction.

  In other words, Bel’s toddy quite dissipated the exasperation these tired and hungry people were beginning to feel at the prospect of being kept waiting by Sophia’s over-developed feelings of maternity. Indeed, its success was such that Sophia and William—themselves exhausted and breathless—were finally shown into a room where, though all, of course, was decorum, a distinct atmosphere of conviviality reigned round an empty bowl. And their annoyance was not lessened by the fact that no sooner had they arrived than the starched housemaid, Sarah, rang the tea-bell in the hall, and Arthur said: “Come on, everybody, there’s tea,” giving Bel no opening whatever to make amends for the toddy being finished.

  “Wil and Margy enjoyed themselves very much, Mary.” Sophia looked at her sister coldly as she took her place at the table.

  “I’m glad, dear.” Mary was positively benign.


  Sophia waited in a condition of extreme self-righteousness to see if Mary would really not bother to ask after her own children and, finding that she did not, she said triumphantly: “Jessie, my new girl, who went with them, said that your children were looking splendid, Mary.”

  “They were looking very healthy this morning, Sophia—vulgarly healthy,” George McNairn said, wolfing his food with relish.

  But Bel, detecting wisps of venom floating in the air, called upon Sophia to decide upon the relative merits of tappit hen and steak pie—and if she cared for neither of these, then the cold ham was on the sideboard—and thus succeeded in clearing the atmosphere for the time being.

  III

  “Do you know, it’s funny to think,” she began presently, when her guests had emerged from their meal a little, the first hunger sated, “but I’ve only seen Mungo once, and that was at my wedding, when I wasn’t in a fit state to notice anybody very much. And little Phœbe was ill then, and didn’t come. It’s queer that I should know you all so well, and yet that you should have a brother and sister I don’t know at all.”

  “Mungo’s coming up in the first week of the New Year. He’s bringing Phœbe with him. They’re coming here,” Arthur said.

  “I’ll be delighted to see them,” Bel said, knowing well that two pairs of feminine Moorhouse eyes were upon her.

  “We would have been delighted to have them, Bel dear. Are you sure—situated as you are? Arthur hasn’t said anything to me about this,” Mary interposed.

  “No, of course they’ll come here. I expect you’ve family business to discuss with Mungo, haven’t you, Arthur?”