Abigail continued to stare glumly over the side of the motorcar door, as though she hadn’t heard me, but Jack himself shook his head. He also recrossed his legs and wiped his hands one against the other and in all could hardly have done any more to shake my words away from him.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Not so far as I know.’
His tone did not invite further questioning and so I was quiet for a while. We were taking a most senseless route to the High Street, setting off in quite the wrong direction, and I had already toured Dunfermline once today. Still, it gave me some thinking time and this tour had been planned by one who knew the town’s best side; the low, looping road which meandered past portions of ruined palace or cloister was extremely scenic, even with the Abbey glowering down from our other side as we skirted it, much to be preferred to the narrow streets of hat shops and cigar merchants I had found. All too soon, though, we turned and began to make our way hat-shop-ward once more. I tried again with Jack Aitken.
‘The objections to his family must be weighty ones indeed, then,’ I said. ‘If it’s not the boy himself.’ I could not imagine the objections, truth be told. The hints at luncheon had been lurid but unhelpful and the couple seemed beautifully matched to me: the son of a merchant and the daughter of a merchant, of the same class, from the same town.
‘Ha ha ha,’ said Jack, although I had said nothing very clever or witty. ‘My mother and aunt are pretty fierce about Aitkens’. Well, I mean, look at all this.’ He flicked at a piece of the mauve and gold ribbon and shook his head again. ‘Comes from being left to run it on their own, I suppose you’d say.’
We were turning into the High Street now and I could see that there were people collected along the pavement’s edge. More of the mauve and gold flags had been handed out and the onlookers were waving them and cheering us as we swept by.
‘And here we are,’ I said, spying once more the frolicking mannequins in the shop window. ‘Those tableaux are quite something, I must say. Your mother and aunt have excelled themselves.’ I had gathered myself to alight but the motorcar slid past the last of the windows without stopping.
‘That’s Hepburns’,’ Jack Aitken said.
‘Gosh,’ I replied, craning back to look at the sand and hampers. ‘Sorry.’
‘Talk about upstaging,’ he went on. ‘Aunt Mary must be spitting if she noticed them, but no doubt she was looking the other way.’
‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘Very provoking. So, is it professional rivalry that’s the trouble?’ I hoped that he would not suddenly shut like a clam under my probing. A bad liar who thinks he is a good one is treasure trove to an investigator and Jack Aitken had more baseless belief in the misleading power of his own charm than anyone I had met in recent memory.
‘For my part, I just don’t want my little girl to grow up so fast,’ he said. He was wiping his hands on his trouser legs now. ‘She’s not ready for marriage. And marriage to a boy of just twenty who’s no more ready for it than she…’ He shook his head again, more slowly, and made a fond sort of laughing noise by breathing down his nose in short bursts. ‘I was twenty-two and that was young enough.’
‘When she comes home, then,’ I said, ‘when I find her, perhaps you could persuade them into a long engagement. A twenty-year-old boy is far too young, I agree.’
‘No.’ Abigail had spoken without turning, but she turned now. ‘Mirren doesn’t want to marry Dugald Hepburn any more. She changed her mind.’
‘She told you that?’ I said. Jack Aitken had craned forward to look past me at his wife.
‘She doesn’t want to marry him,’ Abigail said again. ‘She wouldn’t marry him for a king’s fortune. She’d rather-’ She bit off her words, turned away and shifted even further round in her seat so that her husband and I could not see so much as the curve of her cheek.
Matters took on a positively surreal tinge halfway up the High Street (and, incidentally, about two minutes’ drive from Abbey Park) when we pulled up at Aitkens’. The flag-wavers were four and five deep here and were held back by more gold rope, of which the Emporium seemed to have an endless supply. A pair of… one can only call them nymphs… in mauve togas with gold leaves in their hair were handing out sweets to children and paper tickets to adults, and a doorman whose finery would not have shamed the Dorchester stood ready to open the motorcar doors and help us down.
‘God in heaven,’ said Jack Aitken and, although I did not answer, privately I agreed.
Mary and Bella stood waiting on a piece of carpet which had been laid down beside the revolving door, Mary looking around the gathered crowd with fierce triumph in her eyes and Bella dealing with the horror of it all by gazing into the middle distance and pretending she was not really there. I stood watching the crowds clamouring for the paper tickets, waving them in triumph once they had secured one.
‘They are fifty-shilling notes, Mrs Gilver,’ Mary said, drawing up to me. I glanced sharply at the nearer of the two nymphs. ‘Let Mrs Gilver see, Lynne.’ The girl handed me one of the slips, on which had been embossed a large gilt 50 over a ground of the inevitable mauve feathers and little fish.
‘And these are…?’ I said, turning the ticket over in my hands. ‘These are currency?’
‘Just for the day,’ said Mary.
‘Two pounds and ten shillings?’ I said. ‘That’s extremely generous of you.’
Bella at my side gave a snort of laughter. ‘Not currency exactly, Mrs Gilver. More like tokens. Redeemable against a-’
‘-select range of specially chosen jubilee notions,’ Mary finished in a hissing whisper. There was a very impressive closed motorcar drawing up now. Perhaps the Provost, I thought, or Lady Whatsername; in any case, Mary Aitken glided forward to offer a greeting. Bella leaned towards me.
‘-job lot of pre-war overstock we’d never shift any other way,’ she said. ‘Some of it might be fifty years old, I daresay. Lord, here’s the Provost too! Let’s go in now and dodge them. Mary won’t want me diluting her, anyway.’
Aitkens’ Emporium had an inside to match its parade of windows and all the more so for being still and empty, poised for the show about to begin. The floor of the foyer was marble, or at any rate good enough linoleum well-laid over stone to look and feel like marble as one crossed it; the counters when we reached them were mahogany – or oak perhaps, stained with something treacly – and, as well as the vastness and splendour of the Haberdashery Department where we were standing with its scores and hundreds of little drawers and slides everywhere, there were archways leading away in three directions hinting at even more. In one back corner there was a staircase of some width and grandeur and in the other was what I came to understand as Aitkens’ pride and joy, Aitkens’ unanswerable poke in the eye to Hepburns’: the lift.
It was a very impressive one. The metalwork of the shaft doors was as richly decorated and as glittering as a birdcage from a lady’s boudoir and the way the shining polished lift carriage itself could just be glimpsed, nestled inside, put me in mind for some reason of an eye twinkling behind lowered lashes, especially when the light shifted, as it was doing now.
I glanced upwards to discover how the light could shift inside a building and saw that there was no upper floor above us, here at the centre of the store; only galleries around an atrium. Over our heads, at least three floors up, glass panes formed a roof, but a cat’s cradle of ribbons and banners had been slung from gallery to gallery below, cutting out the sun which otherwise would have drenched us in warmth and light. It was, I supposed, these banners stirring in a draught which had sent shadows flitting and scattered the light.