Saturday City by Webster Jan

Author:Webster, Jan [Webster, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-06-27T22:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Chapter Ten

Donald Balfour, son of Lachie and Tansy, was twenty-one that year, the year of the old Queen’s death and of The Groveries, the biggest and best international exhibition Glasgow had ever staged.

1901. Crowds half a mile deep had trampled the small railings flat in Hyde Park during the Queen’s London funeral procession, before the doughty old lady was finally laid to rest two days later at Frogmore.

The Boer War was still in progress, despite the victories at Ladysmith and Mafeking which had had those same crowds jigging for joy up and down Fleet Street and elsewhere, though there wasn’t quite the same enthusiasm for it now. Donald remembered the day it had started. Had there ever been such heroes as the first hundred picked men of the London-Scottish, feted and petted and bought drinks by strangers? Then in ‘Black Week’ two thousand British troops had been slaughtered and that had emptied the theatres and concert halls. Now everyone wanted it over, wondered how much longer it would go on. Those who spoke up for the Boers’ case, like his Uncle Duncan, no longer went in direct fear of their lives.

But sitting in the new electric tram, swaying towards his cousin Alisdair’s consulting rooms in the West End, Donald decided ironically that, war or no war, the Empire had not exactly crumbled away during his sojourn in the clinic in Switzerland. Perhaps the worst most people had suffered was the sugar tax, to pay for the war. It was as though his absence enabled him to see everything very clearly and objectively. Wasn’t there almost a smugness about the country, and Glasgow in particular? Or was it just his own heightened sensibility, his crushing wish to see his cousin Carlie again and the uncertainty about how she would react to his feelings for her?

Sometimes the concept of Empire overwhelmed him. Victoria, the papers pointed out, had acceded to one-sixth of the world’s surface. Her profligate Eddie would reign over one-fourth. He decided he still wasn’t strong enough to face up to the corollary to all that — the fact that someone, some day, was going to try and take it all away.

He’d been pretty ill when they’d decided to pack him off to Lucerne a year ago. He remembered the concern in Carlie’s face when he’d told her. Although since starting at Glasgow University he’d had digs in the city, he had tried to get home at weekends to see her. They’d been going for walks together, their talk getting deeper and more intimate. He’d been getting serious about her. She was so easy to talk to and that face, with its wide mouth and grey eyes and gentle animation, had been so easy to look at.

Lying in his neat, hard bed in the sanatorium, he had got wound up about that face. They said TB increased the sex urges, didn’t they? He’d wanted Carlie badly, but her letters had been friendly, informative and funny, in no way passionate like his.

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