Towards a Dark Horizon Read online

  I dedicate this book to my grandchildren –

  Stephanie, Bernadette, Natalie, Samantha,

  Gordon, Andrew and James

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  1

  King George V and Dad Ryan were dead.

  The early morning papers carried the sad news of the royal demise – ‘At 11.55 p.m. on the 20th of January, King George V died peacefully.’ There was no mention of Dad Ryan.

  I was busy in the newspaper shop early that morning when my cousin Danny rushed in.

  ‘Ann, my nephew Patty came to tell us that Grandad Ryan died last night. He got up from his bed just before midnight, complained about a pain in his chest then died right in front of Granny.’

  I was shocked and I looked at him with sympathy. I knew he was so fond of his late father’s family who all lived in Lochee.

  I showed him the newspaper headline. ‘He must have died about the same time as the King.’ I was struck by the coincidence. After a lifetime of poverty and obscurity, Dad Ryan had departed his earthly life in royal company.

  Danny’s pale face had dark circles under his eyes and I saw them glisten with unshed tears. In the dim gloom of that winter morning, the only bright spot was his auburn hair which stood out like a fiery halo around his head.

  He wiped a hand over his eyes. ‘I’ve got to get to work at Lipton’s but I’m going over to Lochee tonight. Will you come with me Ann?’

  I thought about his mother – my Aunt Hattie. ‘What about your mum? Will she be going?’

  He gave a deep sigh. ‘Well you know how she feels about the Ryan clan. I don’t think she’s visited them in years. I’ve no idea why there is this feud because they are all so tight-lipped about it but I’m sure she’ll not want to visit them.’ He gave me a pleading look. ‘I would really like you to come. Maddie won’t manage because she’s on duty at the infirmary.’

  I wondered if Maddie knew about Danny’s grandad.

  As if reading my thoughts, he said, ‘I went round to the porter’s lodge before coming here and I left her a message.’

  I knew Maddie would be upset at not being with her fiancé at this sad time. The Ryan family were all so pleased to hear of his engagement to her and she would feel that her place was by his side but being a humble student nurse meant she had so little free time from her nursing duties.

  I made up my mind. ‘I’ll come then Danny but I don’t want to be in the way. There will be loads of people there. You know what it’s like – all the neighbours as well as the family. Will Ma Ryan cope with us all?’

  He nodded. ‘You know what she’s like – she’s almost indestructible.’

  Then he was gone. I knew Dad had already left for his work at the fruit and vegetable warehouse in Dock Street so this sad news would have to wait until early evening.

  As was normal, Lily, my sister, was staying with our grandparents in their flat in the Overgate. A sudden thought struck me. Had Danny told them? But there was nothing I could do till I finished work in the early afternoon.

  I still couldn’t believe my good luck at getting this job as vacancies were as scarce as gold dust in these poverty-stricken and jobless times. I had been unemployed for almost a year after the sudden and tragic death of my late employer, the dear Mrs Barrie, who hired me as a housemaid in her large house in Broughty Ferry and who had been so good to me – even remembering me in her will with a legacy of six hundred pounds and all her leather-bound books. In spite of my legacy I still needed to work and help keep Lily as I wanted to preserve my nest egg for her upbringing. Since Mum’s death just after her birth, I pledged to dedicate my life to my sister.

  The shop, filling up with the early-morning workers made me forget Danny’s sad news for a short time. The shop’s owner, Miss Boyd, or Connie to her friends, deftly handed out papers, cigarettes and sweets. Connie was woman with a soft angelic look. I put her age around sixty but I could have been wrong by a margin of ten years on either side. She had inherited the shop from her late father so it must have been a long-established business. She had the reputation as being a bit of a dragon but, after working with the awful housekeeper Miss Hood at the Ferry, everyone else seemed like sweet-natured angels.

  As I stacked the papers in bundles for the paper-boy, my thoughts returned to Danny’s family. The Ryans all lived within spitting distance of each other. His aunts, Kit, Lizzie and Belle, were all trying to live on a pittance because their husbands hadn’t worked in donkey’s years – just like thousands of other families in these hard times who had little or no work. Then there was the matriarch of the family, Ma Ryan – an indomitable figure reputed to have the second sight. I knew she would take this latest death in her stride just as she had done with all the other sadnesses in her life. She had lost six children in infancy and her one remaining son Pat, Danny’s father, had died in a tragic accident not long after being invalided out of the Great War with a bad foot injury, the result of shrapnel from an exploding shell.

  At teatime I told Dad the news. He remarked with his own wry sense of humour, ‘Well, Hattie will be pleased that her father-in-law died in such good company as the King. You wait and see, Ann, it’ll be her main topic of conversation.’ He put on a falsetto voice. ‘“Oh, yes, my father-in-law died at the same time as King George V.”’ He gave a lopsided grin. ‘As if anyone cares about such trivialities. If you give me a minute, I’ll come with you both to Lochee.’

  I put my coat on. ‘We’d better get a move on to the Overgate because I promised Danny I would meet him there. He wasn’t sure if Hattie would go with him.’ I turned to Dad. ‘What is the true story about the feud between Hattie and the Ryan family?’

  Dad shook his head. ‘God only knows but it’s lasted since Pat’s funeral. She did visit them for a few weeks after his death but, for some reason, she got the impression they didn’t like her so she just stopped going. I know Hattie can be a pain in the backside with her snobby, hoity-toity nature but, on the other hand, the Ryans didn’t treat her well either.’

  I was amazed. I always thought of them as a family with lots of warmth and affection for one another and they were all devoted to Danny.

  We made our way down the steep slope of the Hilltown. The street was quiet. A few brave souls had disregarded the cold sleety showers and had gathered in dark doorways. The topic of conversation was the King’s death. ‘Aye, the young Prince of Wales is now on the throne and him not married yet.’

  A muffled voice answered. ‘Well he’ll have to find himself a wife now because we can’t have a king without a queen.’

  Personally, I couldn’t see why not but I had another death on my mind.

  When we arrived at my grandparents’ house at the Overgate, it was packed with people. My grandparents, Hattie, Danny and Lily were surrounded by neighbours, all offering their condolences. Alice and her daughter Rosie, my Granny’s next-door neighbours, were there and I then noticed to my dismay that Granny’s sister Bella was sitting in the midst of the throng.

  Dad groaned out loud – Bella wasn’t his favourite person. I thought she must have heard his reaction but she gave no sign as she patted her knee with an impat
ient hand and looked at us.

  ‘Come over here, Ann, and talk to a lonely old woman who’s not feeling very good.’

  Dad rolled his eyes in disgust and made straight for Rosie who beamed and went red with pleasure at the sight of him – a look that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Bella. She snorted. ‘When is your father going to propose to that woman? After all, your poor mother has been dead now for nearly five years.’

  This remark, so typical of Bella, stopped me in my tracks. It may have been nearly five years as she said but Mum’s death a few hours after Lily’s birth was still a raw spot with me – a long and painful memory. There was a lump in my throat and I almost burst into tears but Danny appeared at my side.

  He whispered as he led me away, ‘Never heed Bella – she’s aye putting her foot in her mouth.’

  Hattie was standing beside Granny. She had a furious look on her face. Fate had been kind to Hattie. Apart from a few lines around her eyes, her skin was still smooth while her short hair was glossy and black – a very handsome woman. Still, at that moment, she looked annoyed. Her eyes were dark with fury and, although her lips were moving, no sound reached our ears. In fact, we were almost touching her before we heard the whispered words, ‘I’m telling you, Mum, I’m not going to Lochee – not for all the tea in China.’

  Granny was shocked. ‘You must pay your respects to them Hattie. After all, he was your father-in-law and, if Pat was still alive, then he would be with the family at this sad time so I think you should be in Pat’s place.’

  Hattie snarled, ‘Well, I’m not going and that’s final.’ Then, realising that Danny had overheard, her tone softened. ‘You don’t want me to come to Lochee with you, do you? You’ve got Ann for company and they won’t miss me.’ She gave him a pleading look but he wasn’t pleased.

  ‘Well, I can’t make you go, Mum, but I think, out of respect to Dad, you should be there.’

  Like a fish in some dried-out pool, Hattie opened her mouth then quickly closed it again. She had no answer – no escape. Even so, she gave in with bad grace. ‘Oh, all right,’ she snapped, her dark-brown eyes glittering with ill humour. ‘Let’s go and meet up with the Ryan clan.’

  Dad joined us and we made our way towards the door. Then Bella called out in a petulant tone, ‘Tell them all at Lochee I’m asking for them but don’t mention that I might be the next one to go – especially the way I feel tonight.’

  With this dire warning ringing in our ears, we made our way to the tram stop. The evening had turned much colder but the rain had stopped. A bitter wind wrapped itself around our legs and we were grateful when the tramcar, looking like a golden oasis in the darkness, ambled along the steel tracks towards us. It was packed with passengers but we all managed to get a seat.

  Hattie was squashed in beside an old woman. Fat and shabbily dressed with thin strands of grey hair escaping from a checked woollen headsquare, she was the exact opposite of my smartly dressed aunt.

  Although I couldn’t see Dad’s face, I knew he would be chuckling over Hattie’s predicament – especially as the old woman kept looking at her and trying to strike up a conversation.

  Danny and I had managed to get seats together but I was worried about him. He looked so unhappy.

  ‘I just wish Maddie could be here instead of me,’ I told him. ‘Have you heard from her yet?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll probably hear from her tomorrow.’ Then he turned to face me, anguish written all over his face. ‘I just wish Mum would get on with the Ryan family, Ann.’

  I remembered Dad’s words. ‘Well, maybe it’s not all her fault Danny. Maybe something happened years and years ago that caused this feud. Maybe you’ll never know the reason.’

  Meanwhile a few passengers were having a noisy discussion on the merits of the new King Edward. ‘Well, let’s hope the new king can get us back into work,’ said one thin-looking man with a lean hungry expression and a jacket that was three times too big for him. He had either bought it second-hand or else he had lost a great deal of weight.

  His slightly plumper companion piped up, ‘I mind fine when he was the Prince of Wales and he visited the unemployed miners in the Rhondda Valley in Wales. He was really sympathetic to their plight so let’s hope he puts a ruddy big fire under the fat arses of this government and gets us back to work.’

  My head began to ache with the noise and the stuffy cigarette smoke so I was thankful when we reached our stop and we stepped out on to the wet pavement.

  Hattie brushed her coat with her immaculate leather-gloved hands, almost as if brushing away her close contact with the old woman.

  We made our way along the wet street which was poorly lit with gas lamps, the grimy glass barely letting any glow escape.

  Dad whispered to me that the woman beside Hattie had chatted non-stop for most of the journey but, because he was seated in front of her, Hattie’s expression was hidden from his view – much to his annoyance. ‘She really needs taking down a peg or two,’ he said.

  It was a family joke, this snobbishness, no doubt made worse by her jobs with ‘the gentry’, as Bella succinctly put it, first of all with her late employer in Glamis Road and latterly with Maddie’s parents, the Pringle family, who lived in a big house in Perth Road. Her job there was to look after Joy who had been born on the same day as Lily.

  Atholl Street – or Tipperary as it was better known – was quiet. Even the nearby pub was almost empty but it was a Tuesday and there was little money in Tipperary on weekdays. In fact, there was precious little money on any day.

  The streetlights with their grubby cracked glass windows and broken gas mantles tried to cast their light over the pavements, leaving the crumbling tenements in a dark, shadowy and sinister-looking mass.

  ‘Where are we going, Danny?’ asked Hattie in a querulous voice. ‘Are we meeting at Ma’s house or one of the daughters’ houses?’

  ‘Patty said to meet up in Kit’s place. It’s over there.’

  ‘I know where it is, thank you very much,’ said Hattie sotto voce.

  When we reached the outside staircase, it was in total darkness.

  ‘Oh, great,’ she growled.

  Danny ran ahead. ‘I’ll go up and get Kit to open the door and you’ll be able to see where you’re going.’ He raced up the stair like a young deer.

  Hattie was in no mood for such tactics. Her voice was bitter with sarcasm. ‘No doubt, when Kit opens her door, we’ll all be overwhelmed by the light. Better shade your eyes, Ann.’

  We remained silent. When she was in one of her moods, we knew there was nothing we could say that hadn’t been said a hundred times before.

  As it was, Kit’s house was too far along the lobby to be of any great help in shedding light on the worn stairs but Danny soon reappeared. He had a tiny torch and he shone it in front of his mother’s ascending feet and up she went like some queen climbing an unknown flight of steps.

  I had a sudden mental image of Queen Mary. Was she also climbing stairs in her huge palace? Of course, unlike the grotty old torch which was Hattie’s lot, her passage would be brightly lit by many grand lamps.

  Kit’s tiny kitchen was full of people – far more than had been in the Overgate. When Hattie entered, the chatter died away.

  A cheery fire burned in the grate. This was in sharp contrast to my previous visits and I wondered at what cost Kit had managed to put on this display of warmth.

  An empty chair was placed right beside this blaze, next to the bulky frame of Ma Ryan. It was obviously intended for Hattie.

  Ma Ryan was inscrutable, like some fleshy, wrinkled Buddha. If she had been crying over the sudden demise of her husband, then it wasn’t evident.

  On the opposite side of the small room, Kit stood with her two sisters, Lizzie and Belle. They were all pale faced with red-rimmed eyes. Kit was thin and weary looking. Her dress was faded and worn, no doubt from too many washes, and it hung from her thin shoulders. Even her auburn hair seemed more subdued now and thin grey wi
sps were visible.

  Her sisters were twins and neither had her colouring or her looks. Their square gaunt-looking faces were topped by short grey hair and, although they were only a couple of years older than Kit, they looked older and more matronly. I had seen photographs of them as young women and they hadn’t aged as well as Kit but, like hers, their dresses had seen better days. And just like Kit’s husband, their men had also been out of work for many years. Obviously all these years of having to make do on little money and not enough to eat some days had left its toll on them all.

  Still, Kit had put on the best spread she could afford – from the warm glow of the fire on this chilly January night to the plate of meat paste sandwiches and the small tin of biscuits on the well scrubbed wooden table.

  A large teapot sat on the gas cooker and Kathleen, Kit’s daughter, was doing the rounds and filling up all the cups. Kathleen had the same radiant red hair as Danny. Her fine boned face had a creamy pallor that contrasted well with the brilliant hair. She was dressed in an ancient-looking jumper and a cheap black skirt but at fifteen she was as slender as a willow and had a flawless radiance that hinted at future beauty. Tonight, however, her eyes were also red rimmed and I knew she was very close to her late departed grandad.

  Hattie sat beside Ma who turned towards her daughter-in-law and took her hand. Hattie, tongue-tied for once, managed to stammer out a few phrases of sympathy. Ma’s face was like a blank page, her emotions firmly under control.

  I looked over to where Danny stood with Dad. Danny was visibly upset and Kit had a thin arm around his shoulders. He was very fond of the Ryan family, more so because his father had died when he was a baby. He had never known him but the family had made up for that. He was their ‘laddie’ as Ma kept calling him.

  Although my subconscious had registered it, it wasn’t until that moment that I realised there were no children in the room and, more importantly, apart from Dad and Danny, there were no men.

  Then, as if in answer to my unspoken thoughts, the door to the tiny back bedroom opened and Kit’s husband George emerged. George was a tall man of six feet one inch – a trait that wasn’t shared by the majority of Irishmen in the neighbourhood who were nearly all of medium height. They were all thin hungry men who had been out of work so long that they had forgotten what a wage packet looked like. For years, their lives had revolved around the dole office, the parish relief committee or, if they were lucky, a couple of pints of beer on a Saturday night.