The Back of Beyond Page 11

  A delighted smile lit up Gwen’s pale face. ‘So I’ve Lexie Fraser to thank for having you as my husband?’

  ‘I suppose you could put it like that. One thing’s for sure. I would never have married her, whatever she thinks … thought.’

  ‘You believe she might still be hoping?’

  ‘No, of course not. I hope you don’t think … I’d never look at another woman, ever!’

  ‘I know that, my dear. I’m only teasing. But getting back to Alice’s letter, we’ll have to think of a name for our little man.’

  ‘I used to think I’d like to call my son after Dougal,’ Alistair began, but Gwen’s last two words had given him a new idea. ‘Back home, young mothers often spoke about a baby boy as ‘my wee mannie’ – it was an affectionate term, you know? – and though I know you wouldn’t want to call him Emanuel, that’s Manny’s real name, his sign says E.D. Isaacson, so what if I ask him what the D stands for?’

  The pawnbroker was so overwhelmed with emotion when he learned why he was asked his middle name that his assistant feared he might have a heart attack, but he didn’t take long to pull himself more or less together. ‘This is truly a great honour for me,’ he murmured after a brief pause. ‘No one has ever …’ He stopped again to regain his still wavering composure, filling the awkward moments by opening his safe and taking out a gold wrist watch. ‘I bought this as soon as Dougal told me that your Gwen had given birth to a son, but I wish now that it had been something more suitable for an infant.’

  Alistair, too, now had difficulty in remaining calm, and his voice trembled a little as he said, ‘Manny, that watch is something he can cherish for the rest of his life. You couldn’t have bought him anything more fitting … though you shouldn’t have.’

  The elderly man wiped a tear from the corner of his eye with his thumb. ‘You do not understand. As you know, my Anna and I were not blessed with children, and it is so long since I lost her … I have had no one, except you. You are the son I never had, Alistair, your Gwen is my daughter-in-law and your children are my grandchildren. You have made my life complete, so please do not be angry with me for buying gifts.’

  ‘I’m not angry, Manny, please don’t think that. I just felt it wasn’t right for you to spend your money on us when you had your mind set on buying bigger premises. You’ll never get your antique shop at this rate.’

  ‘Antique shop?’ Manny snapped his fingers. ‘Poof! What is a shop full of the most expensive antiques in the world compared with the happiness I feel at being able to do something for your two precious little cherubs.’

  And so David (Manny’s middle name) William (after Alistair’s late father) Trevor (after Tiny) was christened, and Manny having declined to act as godfather because of the difference in religion, Alistair paid tribute to Ivy and Len Crocker by asking them to be godparents. Both vowed to take their duty seriously, but during the meal, Ivy had them all laughing by keeping up a teasing conversation with Tiny who gave as good as he got.

  At four o’clock, when Rosie, Peggy and Marge were downstairs in the kitchen tidying up, and Tiny, Dougal, Manny and Len were engaged in a discussion on politics, Gwen said, ‘Shall I fetch the baby down, Ivy, so you can see him properly?’

  ‘Ooh, yes please! I’d love to see both the little lambs.’ She waited until the younger woman had left the room and then leaned over towards Alistair. ‘You haven’t half done well, Al, but I knew you had it in you, when you were lodging with me.’ She covered her mouth momentarily to suppress a giggle. ‘Oh, my Gawd! I nearly said when we were living together! Now that would have been something, wouldn’t it?’

  He could only respond in the same vein. ‘Aye, it would that, though you were so randy you’d have exhausted me.’ It was easy to laugh with her now. She couldn’t help herself and she probably didn’t mean half of what she said. ‘I wouldn’t have had enough stamina left to make any babies with Gwen.’

  A wistfulness crept momentarily into her eyes, then, in a quick change of mood, she said, ‘I’m really glad for you, Al, love. You deserve the best.’

  ‘And I’ve got it,’ he assured her, looking up as his family entered the room – his darling wife, looking radiant in a London tan woollen costume and carrying a bundle swaddled in a lacy shawl, with their beautiful daughter hanging on to her skirt. Leila was obviously newly awake, her eyes still hazy with sleep, but she soon perked up.

  ‘She’s so lovely,’ cooed Ivy, who had seen her regularly since she was born. Diving into her hand bag now, she extracted a small parcel which she handed to the little girl. ‘I can’t give your brother a present without giving you something, too, can I?’

  The fifteen-month-old shook her head gravely and tore off the paper to see what was inside, then without saying anything she toddled into the hall and they could hear her feet slowly negotiating the stairs to the kitchen. ‘It was only a rag doll,’ Ivy said in concerned apology. ‘Didn’t she like it?’

  ‘She loved it,’ Gwen smiled. ‘She’s taken it down to let her Grandma see it.’

  Ivy was reassured in a few moments when Rosie came in carrying the little girl, followed by Marge and Peggy, and for the next half hour or so, attention centred on Leila, who was adept at playing to an audience. Needing only little encouragement, she recited several nursery rhymes, missing some words and getting others wrong, sang ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ – which came out as ‘Tinka, tinka, icka tah’ – three times and ‘Umpy Dumpy satta wo’, twice. To follow this, making it a mammoth production, she executed little dances her Auntie Peggy had taught her and then proved that the show was over by saying, as she climbed on to Rosie’s knee, ‘Aw done, Gamma.’

  Baby David, as though aware that his sister was stealing the limelight although this should have been his day, slept through all her antics cradled against Ivy Crocker’s ample bosom, and the party, as it had become, broke up just after five o’clock.

  ‘Thank God that’s all over!’ said Marge, a little testily, after the guests had gone.

  ‘Yes, it’s been some day,’ Tiny agreed.

  Gwen looked keenly at her sister but said nothing until she and Alistair were in bed. ‘I think Marge’s jealous,’ she told him. ‘She’s desperate for a baby.’

  ‘So Dougal’s been saying, but it’s something you can’t arrange to order.’

  ‘I don’t like to ask, but would he be …?’ She paused. ‘Could he have lost interest in … that side of things?’

  Alistair had to laugh at this. ‘Not Dougal, I can assure you of that.’

  1935 had just begun when Tiny collapsed. The hotel had been closed on Christmas Day, but he had prepared an impressive dinner for his extended family, and despite Rosie’s warnings not to overdo it at his age – ‘You’re sixty-seven, for goodness’ sake, and would be retired if you’d been working for a boss’ – he wouldn’t let anyone help him. He produced another feast for New Year’s Day but the upset of him being rushed to hospital as they were about to sit down to the meal banished everyone’s appetite.

  He hovered on the brink of death for twenty-one hours, and just when his wife and daughters thought that having survived the heart attack for so long he would pull through, he slipped effortlessly away.

  Both Alistair and Dougal had their work cut out trying to comfort the three sisters, but Rosie, who had lost her partner of thirty-five years, was the calmest of them all. She told her sons-in-law to register the death and contact the undertakers so that the funeral could be arranged, then she sat dry-eyed and holding herself as erect as she had always done, seemingly impervious to her husband’s demise, or more probably, unable to take it in.

  The birth of Alistair’s second child had made Lexie Fraser take stock of her situation. There didn’t seem to be any chance of him leaving his wife, not now they had two children, and it had begun to be very painful to think of him, excruciating even to try to picture him with his expanding family. Alice had shown her a studio portrait he’d sent of his wife cuddling an infant in a
christening robe, Alistair standing behind her chair with a fair-haired little girl in his arms, which had haunted her waking hours and disrupted her nights for weeks.

  The pain was easing a little, but something else had reared up in her mind, something she had pushed resolutely away over the years since her father’s disappearance. At the time, having been so angry and upset by the lack of interest shown by the police, she had been unable to think of anything else, yet there had always been this feeling of … She couldn’t remember if it had been fear, or pain, or what, and she had filed it away during the years she’d had her mind on Alistair, but there was no one now to help her.

  The doctor – Dr Birnie, it was, or Dr Tom as he’d affectionately been known – had done his best to comfort both her and her mother, but he had left Forvit a few months afterwards. He hadn’t wanted to go, but his mother-in-law had had a slight heart attack, and his wife, the elder daughter – the younger had been working in America – had gone to Stirling to look after her. After a few days, she had told Dr Tom on the phone that she wanted them to move there permanently. He’d had to find a replacement before he could go, of course, and had been most apologetic to all his patients, more so, perhaps, to her mother and her, Lexie mused.

  Because she was so young at the time he left, and hadn’t yet recovered from the shock of losing her father and the stories that still circulated about him, she had fastened on Alistair with such intensity that she had scared him off, and she had blamed her heartache on his desertion of her. Just once, while she was struggling to cope with that agony, had a picture flashed through her mind.

  It had been gone in an instant, and she hadn’t been really sure if it was of something that had actually happened or if it had been a dream, a nightmarish dream. She didn’t want to think about it. She had the feeling that it was something horrible, something so nasty it would change her life for ever, so it was probably a good thing that she couldn’t recall exactly what had taken place, or when. She could remember the bobby being there, and the doctor giving her mother sleeping pills with the caution, ‘They’re pretty potent, so wait until you are in bed before taking them.’

  She had been given two, as well, and it was just as well she’d heard that caution, because she must have gone out like a light seconds after swallowing them.

  Lexie gave a shivery sigh. She didn’t like dwelling on that awful time, it was too disturbing for her, so she turned her mind once again to her present circumstances. She desperately needed someone to depend on, to gather comfort from, and with there being no chance of Alistair ever coming back to her now, she had better look elsewhere. Most of the boys she had been at school with were either married or had found work in some of the big industrial cities in the south. Only two were still bachelors and still living at home – Gibby Mearns and Freddie McBain, neither particularly good-looking, but both with steady jobs in Aberdeen. Gibby, the postie’s oldest son, drove a long-distance lorry for a large haulage company, and Freddie worked in the office of one of the shipyards.

  Yes, one of them would be her best bet. She wasn’t cut out to be an old maid.

  Chapter 8

  The hotel had been closed for exactly ten days when Rosie, matriarch now, the unrelieved black of her apparel emphasizing her pallor, called her family together.

  ‘I want you to listen and weigh up everything carefully before you say anything,’ she instructed them, looking at her three daughters in turn because it was from them that the inevitable arguments would come. ‘I know your father only did the cooking …’ She waved away what Marge was trying to say, and went on, ‘… but it was the meals he produced that brought people back, the kind of meals that only the top hotels could offer, and at half the price. That was why we’d a clientele of company reps and businessmen, and I can’t hope to continue that. Your father was a Regimental Cook Sergeant when he married me, so he wouldn’t let me do anything except serve, and even if I could probably manage to provide good plain fare, that’s not what the hotel was famed for.’

  The alarmed glance which passed between Gwen and Marge made her add, a little sadly, ‘I see you can guess what’s coming. I’m going to sell the hotel and buy a decent-sized house so we can still all be together.’

  Marge could hold her concern at bay no longer. ‘But, Mum, all you have to do is engage a good chef, and we’ll all help you to carry on, Gwen and Peg and me. I know it won’t be the same for you, but we’ll manage, I’m sure we will.’

  With a shake of her head, Rosie said, firmly, ‘Just managing isn’t enough. In any case, I couldn’t afford even a mediocre chef, so it would fall to me, and if I’m tied up all day in the kitchen who’ll keep account of things – what each guest is due, what we owe the tradesmen at the end of each month, order the provisions, make the guests feel at home? Who’ll listen to their troubles, comfort them if their wives have been unfaithful, or left them, or died? That was a big part of what I did over the years.’

  ‘We could do that,’ persisted Marge, ‘and you could show us how to do the rest.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have time, and there’s something else to consider. You and Peggy will eventually have children, too, and a hotel isn’t a place to bring up families …’ She broke off, pausing long enough to compose herself, but such was the impact of what she had told them that none of them said a word.

  After only a few seconds, she continued, ‘What we get for it should buy a fairly big house with a garden for the little ones to play in.’ She looked at her middle daughter again, waiting for further objections, but she had lapsed into silence, and Rosie hoped that she hadn’t upset her by speaking about gardens for the little ones. She had thought that Marge and Dougal were purposely waiting a few years before they had children, but maybe they had been trying. Poor Marge! A change of home, and not having to work so hard every day, might do the trick.

  Rosie felt better now. ‘I think it would cheer us all up. A more modern house, with a good-sized garden, away from all the traffic and bustle. We’d need six bedrooms at least – one for Gwen and Alistair, one for Marge and Dougal, one for …’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about Marge and me, Rosie,’ Dougal put in, as if he knew what she’d been thinking a moment or so earlier. ‘I’ve enough laid by to put down a deposit for a nice wee place of our own. I’ve been thinking about it for a good while, but I didn’t like to say anything in case you thought I wasn’t happy here.’

  ‘But don’t you want us to stay together?’ Rosie was bewildered now. She had never imagined that her attempt to keep the family round her would result in splitting it up.

  ‘We don’t need to be living in each other’s pockets to be close,’ Dougal persisted. ‘We can still see you regularly, and you wouldn’t have to buy such a big house.’

  Alistair shot a silent question at Gwen and got a nodding reply. ‘We were thinking of renting a place,’ he told his mother-in-law, hesitantly, ‘to be on our own, you know?’

  This double blow left Rosie nonplussed, so it fell to Peggy to pour oil on the troubled waters. ‘I think it’s a good idea for us all to live our own lives. I used to get tired of you two bossing me about …’ She gave a faint smile to show that she bore no grudge. ‘Mum and I’ll still be together and I can take a job somewhere to help out with expenses.’

  Rosie heaved a sigh of resignation. ‘I suppose … if that’s what everybody wants?’

  A sharp wail from upstairs made Alistair jump up. ‘That’ll be David, likely.’ As he passed his mother-in-law to attend to his son, he gripped her shoulder reassuringly. ‘It’ll work out fine, Rosie. Dougal and I’ll be masters in our own homes, and if you want us to do something for you at any time, you’ll only have to let us know.’

  ‘I feel awful,’ Alistair admitted to Manny the following day after telling him what had transpired. ‘Are we being selfish?’ Is Rosie right? Are we splitting up her family?’

  As usual, Manny gave his manager’s troubles his full consideration. ‘It is difficult to say,
my boy. From her point of view, you probably are, but you can prove it otherwise if you visit her frequently and issue an open invitation for her to visit you. From what I have seen of your mother-in-law, she is not an unreasonable woman, and she will realize that you and Dougal need to have time alone with your wives, and as long as you let her see her grandchildren as often as she wants, she should be satisfied. In any case, things may change. Tiny’s death, coming when there was hope of him pulling through, was bound to have unsettled all of you, and when Rosie is able to think rationally, she may not want to give up the hotel at all.’

  Alistair shook his head. ‘No, her mind’s definitely made up about that, and she’s quite right, you know. I don’t think it would be the same without Tiny in the kitchen and her at the helm, but you’d better not let Gwen or Marge know I’ve said that.’

  The next three months were extremely busy for the Jenkins family, especially Rosie. She took to visiting estate agents with Peggy, asking to view any houses they had for sale, but found nothing that attracted her. They were all too small to her mind, although Peggy said they were big enough for the two of them.

  It was Dougal who first found what he was looking for. ‘One of the despatch clerks says his parents have booked one of the houses going up in Lee Green,’ he told Alistair. ‘It’s a bit out, but I’m going to have a look at them on Sunday. Fancy coming?’

  He hadn’t wanted Rosie to know but Marge let it slip, and so the whole ‘shebang of them’, as Dougal put it, made the journey to SE 12. The neat semi-detached villas made a deep impression, each with a small patch in front for a garden, and a much larger piece at the rear. Going into the show house, completely fitted out so that prospective buyers would have a clearer picture of the possibilities, they discovered that the ground floor consisted of a square lounge at the front, a smaller living room behind it, and alongside that, a scullery with a door into the ‘garden’. Upstairs were two decent-sized bedrooms, and, reminding Dougal and Alistair of the Crockers’ house in Hackney, a separate tiny lavatory and a narrow bathroom.