After You've Gone Read online

Would you care to take a little turn with me?

  She returned the letter to its envelope. He’d put SWALK on the back flap again but somehow it didn’t seem to offer much comfort. She got up.

  ‘I’m going to the library.’

  ‘You’re never away from the place.’

  ‘I read fast.’

  The library was her main source of pleasure, always had been, but especially now, with Tommy away – apart from the baby, though he, whilst she loved him dearly and intensely, was not an undiluted pleasure. At times, when he wouldn’t settle and she was sitting nursing him in her room, looking out at the rain, she felt so frustrated she thought she could burst. She longed to go to the pictures or the dancing with Pauline, not that she’d ever think of doing that. Tommy wouldn’t like her to go to the Palace or the Palais de Danse without him and his mother would be scandalised. There was only one name for married women who went to dancehalls without their husbands.

  ‘You can leave Malkie if you like.’

  ‘All right.’ Willa nodded. When she took the pram she had to leave it at the library door and lift Malcolm out and then sometimes he’d wake up and girn or occasionally burp up a gobbet of sour milk and the librarian she didn’t like would give her a look and she’d have to be quick and choose the first two books that came to hand.

  ‘You could go to the fishmonger’s on your way back. Get a couple of herring. Make sure they’re fresh, mind! Don’t let him palm you off on yesterday’s.’

  Willa went through to her room at the front where Malcolm lay asleep in his cot, tightly swaddled in his shawl. He needed to be well wrapped up for the room was high-ceilinged and warmed only by a small paraffin stove that took the chill off, but not much more. Willa leant over the cot, studying her child’s face. She spent hours gazing at him. He was a bonny baby; others thought so, not just herself. His granny said he was the image of his daddy when he was a baby. He had strong features, a thatch of dark hair and very long dark eyelashes. Streetsweepers, his Great-aunt Bunty called them. And his eyes were large and darkening rapidly from the blue they’d been at birth. ‘He’ll break a few hearts, that one,’ Bunty had said when she’d seen him the first time. ‘Funny how you can tell straightaway.’ Then she’d winked at Willa where she’d sat bolt upright against the pillows in her bed. Tommy’s family seemed prone to winking, which disconcerted her. Not his mother, though. Tommy hadn’t been home for the birth but he’d got leave and come a week later. He’d stayed five days before going back to rejoin his ship and prepare for their world cruise.

  Willa straightened herself up and went to the window to check if it was still raining. It was. They’d had snow, too, recently. It was proving to be a hard winter and already there was a coal shortage. There was also talk of strikes. Unlike Tommy’s mother, Willa liked living at Tollcross. From up here, she could look down on the intersection, the meeting of the ways, and the traffic coming from four directions. It was a hub, maybe not of the world, but of the city. She enjoyed seeing the motor cars going by and the horses clopping along in their cart-shafts and the trams as they came rattling round the clock, the overhead cables sparking as the pole clicked on a point. She didn’t mind the banging of their wheels as they passed over the rail joints or the clanging of the warning bells as they slowed on approach to a stop. At times the trams might get stuck in a jam but they’d soon be on the move again, going somewhere, even if it was only down to Princes Street or Leith Walk or up to Morningside Station. She wasn’t so keen on watching the men coming up from the underground toilet on the clock island, often still buttoning themselves up. But none of the noises of the street bothered her. At the rear of the house, in the kitchen, when Ina was out, it was dead quiet except for the tick of the big wall clock. You looked out, if you looked out at all, on the backs of other tenements and back greens where washing hung on sagging lines.

  She’d brightened her room with yellow curtains and two brilliant-blue velvet cushions that glowed when the lamps were lit. She’d bought them with some of their wedding- present money. She hadn’t been able to afford new wallpaper so must live with the autumn leaves. Ina had sniffed and said she didn’t know why Willa was throwing good money away when there’d been perfectly good curtains at the windows already, chenille, colour of putty, colour that would go with anything, didn’t show the dirt. Being on the main street, surrounded by chimneys spewing out dark smoke, there was no lack of that. All the rooms in the flat were decorated in shades of beige, brown and russet. Autumn colours were nice, said Ina. But these were dying autumnal colours, at the back end of November, when all life has gone out of them.

  Willa took her library books from the bedside table, John Galsworthy’s A Man of Property and The Crimson Circle by Edgar Wallace, and put them in her shopping bag. She’d enjoyed each in its own way. They’d taken her into different worlds, far removed from her own. They’d allowed her to dream a little. She lifted her mackintosh and umbrella and checked again on the baby before going into the hall and calling out, ‘I’m away now. Malcolm’s sleeping. I’ll leave the door open so that you can hear him.’ She knew his grandmother would have him up, whether he wakened or not, the minute she was out of the house.

  As she tugged the flat door shut behind her, their neighbour across the landing came up the stairs. Mr MacNab was a printer but currently jobless. He’d been out of work for over a year and felt bitter about it for he’d fought in the war and been gassed, which had left him with a racking cough. Nobody seemed to care, he said. They were having to live on the ‘parish’, he and his family, for the national insurance had stopped after six weeks. They had been means-tested and given vouchers for essentials such as bread, margarine, cheese, tea and sugar. One day Willa had landed up in the Co-op when Mrs MacNab was at the counter paying for her few groceries with the vouchers. She’d looked embarrassed to be seen with them. Walking back up the road with Willa, she’d told her that a ‘visitor’ had called to see them and had poked into every corner of their flat, looking to see if they had any money stashed away or any valuable items they could have pawned. He had even looked under the lino!

  Mr MacNab’s shoulders were slumped and failure was written all over his face so Willa knew she needn’t bother asking him if he’d managed to find any work. He’d gone on the hunger strike to London in December, 1922. The men, gathered in their hundreds in Princes Street at the bottom of the Mound, waiting to set off, had been quite a sight. Willa had cheered them on, along with many others. But, as Bunty said, what good did it all do?

  ‘How’re you doing?’ asked Willa.

  Mr MacNab shrugged. ‘I went to see if there was anything going at the rubber factory over in Fountainbridge.’

  ‘The North British?’

  ‘Aye. I heard they were taking on men, but they only wanted half a dozen and there was a queue a mile long when I got there.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  That was another thing Pauline said Willa should thank her lucky stars for: Tommy’s job was secure and she got money paid direct to her, and regularly. Willa suspected the MacNabs often couldn’t buy enough food. They had five children to feed and their faces looked pinched. Sometimes Tommy’s mother, if she’d been baking, would pass in a cake or a pie to them. That was the kind side of her mother-in-law; Willa acknowledged that.

  ‘Oh well, better luck next time, Mr MacNab,’ said Willa limply. The sight of him or his wife always deflated her. Mrs MacNab, in her mid-thirties, looked fifty. ‘Be warned,’ Pauline had said to Willa. ‘You’re not wanting five weans. Though I suppose with Tommy away so much it limits the chances. If you fall again let me know. I heard of a woman in Morrison Street.’

  Mr MacNab went into his house and Willa ran down the stairs, her mood lifting as she headed for the open air and freedom, even if it was only for an hour or two. She didn’t even mind that it was raining. It was refreshing after the stuffiness of the kitchen.

  She rounded the clock and went up Lauriston Place, passing George Heriot’s school o
n her left and the Infirmary on her right, and turned into Forrest Road. As a child she used to run as she got near the library and her mother would say, ‘Hold on a minute!’ It was her mother who had taken her to the library in the first place. She’d been a great reader too. Once Willa reached George IV Bridge, she quickened her step, even now, in anticipation.

  The inscription above the library door never failed to make her smile. LET THERE BE LIGHT. That’s what she had always felt: that the library brought light into her life. Pauline couldn’t understand her excitement, although she enjoyed a Marie Corelli from time to time and had loved Florence Barclay’s The Rosary, in which a painter falls in love with an unbearably ugly woman, the dilemma being resolved by him going blind. ‘A bit of luck that,’ Pauline had commented. ‘Depends on your point of view,’ Willa had responded. ‘There’s often two ways of looking at things.’ She’d been thinking of herself looking at Tommy out in the big wide world, whilst there he was looking back at them, cooped up in their small flat, with drying nappies over their heads and the smell of cat piss on the stair.

  The cinema and the dancehall excited Pauline more than books, but the latter depended too much on chance, on who asked her up and if anyone offered to see her home. It was possible to come out of the dancing dejected, on a bad night. She said, too, that it wasn’t the same without Willa. She went now with another girl from her work but she was a regular wallflower and that tended to spill over onto Pauline. Willa, like Pauline, enjoyed going to the pictures, but books meant even more to her, for with them she could curl up in her chair and lose herself completely, whereas picture houses were anything but peaceful. She wished the audience would shut up! They read out the captions, cheered and catcalled, hissed and jeered at the villain; and the women pretended to go into a swoon whenever Rudolph Valentino or Douglas Fairbanks made an appearance.

  Willa preferred the quietness of the library’s rooms, lined and smelling of books. Both readers and librarians moved around slowly; there was no click-clack of hurrying feet to disturb the peace and she understood why babies were not welcome.

  She laid her books on the counter. The librarian she liked was on duty today.

  ‘Did you enjoy those, Mrs Costello?’

  Willa still found it odd to be addressed Mrs Costello. When she was, she instinctively wanted to look round to see if Tommy’s mother was behind her.

  ‘They were great.’

  ‘Are you wanting to read the sequel to The Man of Property? I have it here.’ The librarian reached underneath the desk and brought up In Chancery.

  ‘Thanks a lot. I’d love to.’ Willa took the book into her hands. She was about to ask if the woman could recommend anything about South Africa when she remembered that Tommy might not be there any more, he most likely would have moved on. There could be no keeping up with him.

  ‘Your man still away?’

  ‘He’s touring the world.’

  ‘Lucky him! Will he be going to America?’

  ‘I think so. Eventually.’

  ‘Here’s a novel by an American called Sinclair Lewis. It’s just been brought back, only been out the once. Main Street. You might find it interesting.’

  Willa thanked her again. This librarian was helpful and often put new books her way. Willa moved off to have a wander round the shelves. All the possibilities were tempting but she thought she would just stick with these two. She took a copy of the National Geographic Magazine and went to find a seat at a table.

  When she looked up, after she’d been reading for a bit, she saw that a young man was sitting at the other end of the table, also reading a copy of the National Geographic. He looked up at the same time and, nodding at her magazine, smiled at her. She gave him a little smile in return and went back to the dangers lurking in the jungles of Peru, which she hoped would not be on Tommy’s list of entertainments when his ship reached the shores of South America, but she was no longer so absorbed now. The man had intruded into the cloak of privacy that she felt encircled her whenever she came into the library, out of the orbit of Tommy’s family.

  She heard the young man’s chair move and saw his shadow as he walked away. It was not unusual to find men sitting reading magazines and newspapers during the day. If they were out of work they had to do something to fill in the time, and the library was free, and warm. She read a little longer, then got up, put the magazine back in its rack and went to have her books stamped.

  The rain had eased off. She shook the raindrops from her umbrella and fastened the strap round it. As she did, the door opened behind her and out came the young man who’d been reading the National Geographic.

  ‘Rain stopped?’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘That’s good.’

  She began to walk; he fell into step beside her.

  ‘We seem to be going the same way. I live in Lauriston Place.’

  She didn’t offer any information in return.

  He said, ‘I’ve seen you in the library before. You come a lot.’

  She felt it would be churlish to maintain a silence. She said, ‘I like reading.’

  ‘So do I. I saw you were taking out Main Street. I’d just brought it back.’

  ‘So it was you?’ She half turned to him.

  ‘I enjoyed it. It’s about a small town in America.’

  They began to talk about books they’d read and before Willa knew it they were approaching the foot of Lauriston Place and he was making no effort to detach himself. She was uncomfortable, worried that she might be seen by one of Tommy’s family. Not that she was doing anything wrong, simply walking along the street talking to a man about books, but they might not see it like that.

  ‘I’d better be on my way,’ she said. ‘I’ve to go to the fishmonger’s. Cheerio then!’

  ‘Oh righto!’ he said. ‘See you another time? You can tell me how you liked Main Street.’

  In the fishmonger’s, she bumped into Mrs Cant, Pauline’s mother.

  ‘Oh, hello there, Willa. Did I not see you coming down Lauriston Place a wee minute ago?’

  ‘I’d been at the library.’

  ‘Oh, is that where you were?’

  ‘I was getting books.’ Willa held up her shopping bag, not that she needed to offer proof to Mrs Cant.

  The woman didn’t ask any more questions but she’d no doubt tell Pauline that she’d seen Willa walking down the road with a strange man. She paid for her fish and left.

  When Willa asked for herring she was told there was none left. It made a cheap meal and sold out quickly.

  ‘You should have been in earlier, hen.’

  ‘I’ll take a haddie then. A fat one, enough for two.’

  The fish was wrapped in newspaper and passed into Willa’s hand. On her way home she passed Bunty’s newsagent’s and tobacconist’s. When Bunty saw her through the window she came to the door. She had a cigarette in her hand.

  ‘Mrs Cant was just in.’

  ‘She was quick off her mark,’ said Willa sharply.

  ‘What have you been up to then, eh?’

  ‘Nothing, Bunty. Absolutely nothing. I went to the library, that’s all.’

  ‘She said you were with a man?’

  ‘I wasn’t with him. He’d been in the library too and we just happened to be walking the same way.’

  ‘It’s difficult for a young woman like you, with her man away so much. It’s no life.’

  ‘It is not difficult at all. And I do not even know what the man’s name is. He is a total stranger.’

  ‘All right, keep your hair on!’ Bunty took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘But if you ever do get up to anything just be careful. I dinne think Tommy’d be the forgiving type.’

  ~ 3 ~

  Durban, Natal,

  South Africa

  4th January, 1924

  Dear Willa,

  Durban is a seaside resort with a fine wide beach which is always thronged and another suitable for surfing. You can surf even at night as the water is illuminated by searchlights
set on high poles. One is tempted never to go to bed, the evenings are so balmy and so beautiful.

  You would find much to admire in this town, which is well laid out and beautifully kept. The people we have met all love their lives here! No complaints, they say. I should think not! Some of them seem to spend most of the day on the beach.

  Mother would like it too, for I know she is fond of suburbs.

  ‘That’s true,’ acknowledged Ina Costello. In late spring she liked to ride out to Colinton on the tram so that she could see the flowers blooming in the gardens. She sat on the top deck, front seat, if she could get it. ‘I used to take Tommy with me when he was a wee lad. He’ll mind that. We had rare times together, the two of us.’

  The suburbs, as in Cape Town, are most attractive, especially in the Claremont district, with their sloping green lawns, which require constant watering in this warm climate. The black servants in their white singlets and shorts, embroidered with a red edging, look very smart. They are well trained and exceedingly civil. The rickshaw boys, who appear to be a fine type of men, are picturesque in their native head-dress. The most notable entertainment has been an exhibition of war dances given by the Zulus.

  ‘We could do with one of those servants to redd the place up for us,’ said Tommy’s mother. ‘I wouldn’t care what colour their shorts were. As long as they were clean,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘I wonder if they wash stairs. Seems it’s our turn for it.’ The notice had been hanging on their door handle when she’d opened the door to the postie. ‘It was the MacNabs’ shot last week. That means it’ll be manky in the corners. She’s got no more strength than a canary in those skinny wrists of hers.’

  ‘I’ll do it in a minute,’ said Willa. She always did. She couldn’t very well allow her mother-in-law to hump a bucket of water up and down the stairs and get down on her arthritic knees. They’d not long finished the clothes wash; it was Monday. The scrubbing board had left Willa’s hands red and raw, her shoulders ached from turning the mangle and the kitchen was full of steam from the copper boiler. Over their heads, on the pulley, hung the heavy wet washing, giving off the odd drip. It had been too damp outside to take it down to the back green.