to the breakfast queue and the realization that this was Monday; tomatoes on toast was always Monday.
Jane glared at her plate. ‘When this war is over, I will never, ever, eat another tinned tomato.’
‘Nor me. It’d do a whole lot more for the war effort,’ Fenny Cole sighed, ‘if they were to leave them in their tins and drop them on Berlin!’
‘If there is anything more revolting than tinned tomatoes on toast,’ Lucinda fervently agreed, ‘it is tinned tomatoes on toast gone cold and soggy. What a way to start the day. Ah, well, it can only get better, can’t it?’
So they had called a goodbye to Vi, who was scraping the uneaten breakfasts into the pig-swill-for-victory bucket, and hurried down the jetty, as they always did, to the launch that always waited there.
‘It’s going to be hot again.’ Lucinda lifted her face to the sun. Indeed, there had never, the locals said, been a June like it. For the entire month the sun had shone from a near-cloudless sky. The good weather had come with the new moon and would last, they predicted, until the next one.
Jane eased a finger round the neck of her shirt. This was not a day for the wearing of starched collars and ties and itchy wool stockings, and she thought with envy of the off-duty Wrens who would roll bathing costumes in towels and make for the head of the loch and the cool, shallow water that lapped the shore.
‘We’re in for another scorcher,’ she said to Jock. That was all she had said, but it had been the start of something wonderful, something unbelievable, almost; the day on which despair vanished and the pain and hopelessness that had wrapped her round since that May night dropped from her in the speaking of a word.
‘You could be right, lassie. I was talking to an old body in the pub last night and he told me it was the hottest summer in his remembering; in eighty-three years, he said.’
‘I’d agree with every word.’ Jane used a signal pad as a fan. ‘But don’t you think the old ones remember only what they want to remember? My mother does it all the time. The summers were different when she was a girl. They could always be sure of a good haytime and corn harvest, and summer began on the first day of June and ended when the apples were picked and stored safely in the loft and not one day before. Or so she said.’
‘I mind fine just what your mother means. I do it myself all the time. Nostalgia, I suppose.’ Jock smiled. ‘Now when Flora and I were married there was nothing so certain but that we were on our way up in the world. The Glasgow tenements we’d both been reared in weren’t half good enough and we found ourselves a little house in a better district and thought we were doing just fine.
‘Yet now we often think back to our courting days. Happy days, Jane, spent mostly in the picture house. All red plush seats and red silk curtains, it was. It seemed like a palace, though, to us. And I think fondly of the room and kitchen I was brought up in and the street-corner gangs, yet I suppose that tenement is a slum now, and the old Pavilion little better than a flea-pit. I –’
‘Jock! The Pavilion, you said?’
‘Aye. The local picture house. Flora and me saw our first talkie there. Now, that was something to remember.’
‘And are there many Pavilions in Glasgow?’ Her heart thudded dully, her mouth was suddenly dry.
‘Aye. It’s a popular name for picture houses and dance halls. But why d’you ask?’
‘Oh, it’s just that someone I knew – I know – had a Pavilion near where he lived. You see’ – she took a deep, steadying breath – ‘it was someone I was close to, but I never knew where he lived – well, not his actual address.’
‘But he mentioned the Pavilion?’
‘Yes, Jock, and he lived in a tenement, too.’
‘So do a lot of bodies in Glasgow. If there’s one thing that place is no’ short of, it’s tenements.’
‘I know,’ Jane shrugged. ‘It was just a thought. I do so want to find where he lives, though. I want desperately to see his mother.’
‘Sounds important, lassie.’
‘It is. He flew from the aerodrome near our village and he went missing, you see, and it’ll be his mother they write to when there’s news of him.’
‘And was he special, this young man?’
‘Is, Jock. Very special. I’d give anything to know he was safe.’
‘But shouldn’t you have heard something by now? A letter, maybe?’
‘I don’t think so. My parents didn’t approve of him. Sometimes I think they’d even hold back a letter if they thought it had come from him. It’s terrible of me to think my own mother and father would do such a thing, but I’m an only child and we’ve never seen eye to eye over Rob.
‘Oh, I don’t mean there was something wrong with him. They didn’t really have anything against him. But he was a pilot, you see, and they thought no good would come of my seeing him. Aircrews don’t have an easy time. So many of them get killed or go missing. They were only thinking of me, I suppose.’
‘Poor wee Jane.’ Jock thought with sadness of his own daughter, very little younger, and wondered for how much longer they could protect her from the taint of war. ‘Did this laddie no’ mention anything at all that might have helped? His school, or his church, perhaps?’
‘No, Jock. I’ve thought and thought but there’s only one other thing, though you’ll not have heard of it. Glasgow’s a big place, after all …’
‘Try me.’
‘If I said Jimmy McFadden’s, would it mean anything to you?’
‘The bakery on the corner?’
‘Oh, Jock! It does! You know where it is!’
‘Whisht now, will ye?’ Jock had whispered as heads turned. ‘Don’t let Chiefie hear ye! Try to look busy, hen, even if we aren’t.’
‘But I can’t believe it,’ Jane hissed, picking up a pad and writing in the date. ‘The Pavilion and Jimmy McFadden’s bakery. It’s got to be where Rob lived. You don’t know him, or his mother? Rob MacDonald? His mother is a widow and he’s got two brothers in the army.’
‘No, I don’t know the family, but there’s an awful lot o’ they MacDonalds about, remember.’
‘I suppose there must be, but it seems you might well have grown up in the same tenement.’
‘I doubt it. That area is all tenement blocks. Finding someone among that lot is like looking for a needle in a haystack, though some of the buildings have been knocked about in the bombing and there’s bound to be a lot of them boarded up now. That might narrow down the field a wee bit, but you’d still have one hell of a job finding where he lived. I’ll give you that for nothing.’
‘I’ll find it.’ She was light-headed with joy. One minute they had been talking about the weather, the next she had discovered the picture house and the bakery, the only places Rob had ever mentioned. ‘It all seemed so hopeless, but now –
