He was different to the man I thought I’d met, who I’d had a sneaking suspicion might have been a bit of a cad. He was quiet. Thoughtful. He took things to heart. When I told him on the train about my least favourite grandmother lamenting how a boy had never brought me flowers, he’d remembered and turned up to meet me for our first date with a corsage of pink flowers on a ribbon that he tied to my wrist.
We walked around Glasgow Green, side by side but never touching. When we got to the McLennan Arch, he told me that his mother always made him and his brother Thomas make a wish when they walked under it. And so we walked under the arch and we made a wish and I wondered if his was the same as mine. It might have been, because the next week he telephoned and asked me out to dinner on Saturday. He would pick me up at my house at eight o’clock.
With the words ‘books, music, Christmas’ pinned to the mirror on my wardrobe door as conversation starters I felt I might need, I did my best to put on my mother’s burgundy lipstick.
My mother was hovering in the doorway of my room, watching. ‘Will you want a jacket?’ she asked. ‘It’s cold.’
I blotted my lips on a piece of tissue as I’d seen my least favourite grandmother do, and shook my head.
‘Should I have met his parents?’ my mother asked. ‘Should I have invited them to tea? Will you be safe with him, unaccompanied?’
‘Ma, stop it!’
Her nerves ignited my own, and I found that I was shaking as I opened the front door.
Johnny was standing there, but something was different. His smile seemed strange. His shoes were untied and he had a big ink stain on his shirt.
I knew my mother was appraising him. But I was too, and something was making me feel like I was in a dream. Behind him, Johnny came running down the path to our front door.
‘Margot!’ He was breathless. ‘I’m sorry.’
The boy on the doorstep grinned, and he was Johnny but he wasn’t. His not-quiteness was alarming. They had the same eyes, the same nose, the same hair, but the boy on the doorstep’s smile was crooked.
‘This is my brother, Thomas,’ Johnny said and, catching him up at the doorstep, he punched Thomas hard in the arm. My mother gasped but Thomas cackled. Now Johnny and Thomas were side by side, I could see that Johnny was taller by at least a foot, maybe more.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Johnny said, ‘I told Thomas I was picking you up and he thought he’d be funny and get here first.’
Johnny caught sight of my mother and smiled, but he said nothing and neither did she.
‘Nice to meet you,’ Thomas said, his grin still illuminating his face, as he held out his hand for me to shake. ‘You’re very pretty,’ he said.
‘Get away!’ Johnny hissed. Thomas ducked past Johnny’s attempt to bat at his head and ran down our road with his hands in his pockets, laughing.
‘I’m sorry,’ Johnny said again.
And then, with my mother standing behind us in the hall, Johnny leant forward and kissed me. It was brief, but I felt the strange sensation of his warm lips against mine and the taste of what might have been Dutch courage.
‘Shall we go?’ he asked, and I nodded because I couldn’t speak. He took my hand and I closed the door without looking at my mother, because I was far, far too embarrassed.
Margot’s Getting Married
‘WERE YOUR PARENTS married?’ Margot asked.
‘Yes, I attended the ceremony in utero.’
‘And … where are they now?’
‘Would you like a gummy worm?’
‘Sorry?’
‘New Nurse bought them for me at the gift shop.’ I held out the packet, but she shook her head.
‘Those would pull my dentures right out.’ She laughed and, adding some light patches to the gold wedding ring she had painted, she asked if I would like her to tell me a story.
Cromdale Street, Glasgow, February 1951
Margot Macrae is Twenty Years Old
‘Margot’s getting married.’
My mother whispered the words to herself as we sat at the kitchen table – Johnny and I on one side and she on the other. In between tears, she told us she was happy. She told us there was so, so much to look forward to.
She offered us a plate of biscuits, arranged in a semi-circle. As we crunched with dry mouths, she asked Johnny to invite his mother to tea so they could meet. She asked Johnny whether his younger brother Thomas might be serving as best man and what church he thought his family would be most happy with. She asked us if we wanted a summer or an autumn wedding and whether she should make sandwiches for the wedding breakfast.
When Johnny had answered as best he could, she offered me her mother’s wedding dress. It would need cleaning, but it would fit me quite well, she said. I would have said yes to getting married in a paper bag if it had got her to smile.
‘I could make you some lace gloves.’ She took my hand in hers. I’d forgotten what it felt like to have my mother’s hand in mine. How soft her skin was and how cool her touch.
She turned her hand in mine and ran her finger across the gold band of my engagement ring. It had a small square emerald set in the centre. It felt odd on my finger.
‘Such a pretty ring,’ she said. I looked down at my hand and tried to imagine a second ring there. A permanent one.
‘It’s my mother’s,’ Johnny said. Then, as though he’d made a mistake, he said, ‘Well. I mean, it was my mother’s. It’s Margot’s now.’
‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘how kind of your mother to give it to Margot.’
Johnny smiled at me. Sometimes, my breath would catch at
