1
Glasgow, June 1912
At the taxi rank on Gordon Street there was a small queue: three old ladies who fussed over a cat in a basket, a man with a wooden cane that he tapped on the curb to some music he alone could hear, and a woman and a young girl with a trolley stacked high with bags and suitcases.
“Won’t be too long now,” a porter told the woman as a taxi drew up and the three old ladies with the cat climbed inside.
The man with the cane turned and gave them a curious look. The woman closed her eyes, hoping to avert any attempt at conversation. London the night before had been dark, rain-soaked, and chaotic. They had almost missed their connection, and the memory of their hands clutched tight as she pulled her daughter through crowds of people all pushing in the opposite direction still filled her with a sense of swallowed panic. On the journey north in their compartment in the first-class sleeping car, the feeling didn’t subside: She had the overwhelming sense that something had been forgotten and had to resist the urge to check, for what could she do if it had?
The train from London had arrived in Glasgow after seeming to meander around northern Britain, skirting small mountains, chugging across sluggish black rivers, and stopping at remote stations where no one climbed on or off. As they stood on the empty platform, Cicely Pick looked around for assistance. What on earth was one to do, where should one start, who was there to ask? All she had was an address with no idea how far away their destination was or how they should get there. And then she noticed the conductor, collecting his belongings from the mail van.
“Excuse me,” she called out. “We are in need of a little advice.”
After he had frowned at her piece of paper, the conductor blew his whistle, summoned a porter, and instructed him to take them to the taxi rank. Now the porter stood staring into the middle distance, his watch frequently checked. How much did one tip?
A fine rain began to fall, beading their hair, their faces, their coats with tiny droplets. The umbrella had been left on the train, of course. She turned her face skyward. Travel made one feel so dirty, so squalid. Her clothes were stiff with coal smoke and crumpled with sleep, the skin on her ankles itching with bites from fleas or mosquitoes or maybe both. She hoped they had not picked anything up, she prayed they would not be sick, she wished she had not fought with her husband the day before they left.
The man with the cane was squinting to read the shipping address on their luggage tag. She had written it herself in blue ink, which was beginning to run in the rain: “Mrs. George Pick Esquire, Darjeeling, India.”
“Nice weather for ducks,” he said.
She cocked her head. Was he talking to her?
“I said, Nice weather for ducks,” the man said louder and more slowly. “Speak English?”
“I do indeed,” Cicely Pick replied with a smile. “And I’m not hard of hearing either, in case you were wondering.”
He opened his mouth as if to reply and then closed it again. Thankfully at just that moment another cab drew up. He climbed in without a backward glance. Even without the luggage tag it was obvious that they were not local. She was sure he could tell from a single glance at their clothes, their manner, their skin. Almost every single person she had seen since they arrived in Britain had been pale, so pale their skin looked almost blue. It was probably the light. There was barely any of it. She checked her watch. Despite the gloom it was already 11:15 a.m.
The city smelled of coffee grounds underlined by the faint whiff of drains. An omnibus passed on the road in front, a horse and cart close behind. From somewhere nearby a church bell struck a single note. Finally another taxi drew up. The porter gave the destination, and the driver quoted a price. At least she guessed he did. His words were incomprehensible. Maybe the man with the cane had asked her the right question, maybe the English she spoke wasn’t the right kind of English. The driver glanced at the porter and repeated the price louder this time, his voice raised above the noise of the traffic. She gave a decisive nod of agreement even though she did not know what she was actually agreeing to. The driver looked pleased and helped the porter stack their luggage in the taxi’s boot. Cicely handed the latter a coin—more than enough, judging by the upturn of his mouth—and climbed in after her daughter. Once they had both settled into the sagging leather, the doors were slammed, the engine cranked, and with a puff of gray smoke and a grind of the gears, they were off.
Almost immediately Kitty yawned and rubbed her eyes.
“Tired?” Cicely asked.
“Not really,” the child replied.
She blinked several times and sat up straight, as she had been taught. Within moments, however, her head nodded forward and she had fallen asleep. A folded blanket lay on a rack for cold days and drafty journeys. Cicely removed her daughter’s straw hat, undid the buttons of her coat, and tucked the blanket carefully around her lap. But even while sleeping Kitty threw it off.
“Leave me be, Mother,” she murmured.
Cicely’s eyes burned. If only she could doze as easily as her daughter, if only she could throw off complications as easily as a rug. It seemed as if she hadn’t slept for days, lying wide awake all night in her bunk on the train and in her cabin on the boat before that, her blood thickening, her mind a tangle of what-ifs and how-coulds and should-nots. And even now her ears roared with the rumble and grind of the steamship and the rhythm and clang of the train, and she longed to be still, to be quiet, to be clean again, but most of all finally to sink into the careless oblivion of sleep.
They passed along a canyon of masonry, deep red, pale gray, and charry black, the left side of the street lit by the morning sun, the right still in shadow. In India, she calculated, it would already be late afternoon. She pictured their house on the side of the mountain, the empty rooms, the furniture swathed in dust sheets, and the daylight falling in stripes through the locked shutters. It would all be the same when she returned, she told herself, nothing changed but the season. And yet she imagined cracks in the plasterwork and doors banging in the wind, an absence, a shift, that manifested itself in fallen slates and cracked tiles, a profusion of weeds and the blocking of sinks, the house punishing her for leaving.
She hoped she had labeled their trunks correctly; she willed that the railway company’s delivery system was efficient but not overly so. It would be embarrassing if the trunks arrived before they did, but even worse if they were lost on the way.
By the time they reached the outskirts of the city the air seemed cleaner, the smog and coal dust blown away. The taxi crested a hill and a view unrolled before them, water surrounding the hills as if the world had flooded and remained that way—the mountains and moors, the forests and the rocky shores all reflected back at the sky in the rippled mirror of the river Clyde.
Kitty opened her eyes and gazed out at the view in silence.
“So I’m Scottish too?” she asked after a moment.
“Half, if it’s just the father.”
“And you’re not?”
Copyright © 2020 by Beatrice Colin
