The Good Provider by Jessica Stirling Page A

of being, for one day, a special and distinctive person, loved and admired by all. But there was no romance in Craig Nicholson. He was too gauche to guess at Kirsty’s needs. He did not suggest a wedding feast in a smart restaurant, did not even lead her to some shady and secluded spot in one of the parks, to make a ceremony of it. He stopped her by a shop-front under the spidery bridge that spanned Argyle Street and carried trains into Caledonian Central.
    The moment, however perfunctory, would remain vivid in all its details until Kirsty’s dying day. Pigeons swooped and crooned among the girders overhead. Horse-drawn trams clashed past on their lines and carters’ voices echoed raucously, accompanied by the grumble of the big, iron-rimmed wheels on the cobbles. All about them were the real folk of Glasgow, not the west-enders, all moving, moving like a sluggish tide along the pavements of Argyle Street in the gusty March morning.
    A contretemps with beer barrels and two burly draymen had drawn a crowd. Kirsty could see a policeman’s hat among it and, yards along the road, cowered down by the stinking wet wall of a fishmonger’s shop, a raddled female clad in a cape of cracked brown tarpaulin, barefoot and filthy, sucked on a bottle. The thunder of a train overhead bore down oppressively and droplets of brown water flicked across her cheek.
    ‘Take it,’ Craig shouted. ‘Here, take the damned thing.’
    He gripped her wrist and turned it, turned her hand palm uppermost and put the little box upon it.
    ‘Put it on, Kirsty,’ he cried.
    The yell of steam from high above was heathen and barbaric and the hiss of brakes jolting the carriages to a halt at the platform within the station echoed in her head. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to cry, holding the little box of purple velvet in her fist.
    ‘Put it on,’ he shouted, ‘then we can start.’
    Jostled by a gang of four men in aprons and flat hats who marched line abreast along the pavement, Kirsty stepped back and away from Craig, separated from him.
    She found a refuge of sorts by a broken pipe which splashed into a drain in a niche between a flesher’s and a grain-store. She opened the miniature box with her thumbnail and picked out the hammered gold ring. She glanced up at Craig on the pavement’s edge, separated from him by the strutting apprentices. Across the street she saw a dray-horse making water, a young girl in a bulging shawl, an infant knotted against her breast, and the vagrant by the fishmonger’s step suck from her bottle once more.
    Kirsty shoved the ring on to her third finger. She held up her hand, fingers spread, to show Craig that she had done what he expected of her.
    ‘There,’ she mouthed.
    Craig nodded, elbowed his way to her.
    ‘It looks fine,’ he shouted.
    ‘Aye, it does.’
    Taking her firmly by the arm he pulled her after him. The little velvet box dropped from her grasp and was lost, whisked and kicked into the gutter by passing feet. Kirsty checked, dismayed, then yielded. Empty, the box meant nothing. The ring itself was tight and snug against her knuckle.
    They struggled out of knots of pedestrians and paused at the corner.
    Kirsty hoisted herself on tiptoe and shouted into Craig’s ear, ‘Are we married now?’
    ‘Near enough, Mrs Nicholson,’ he said, gave her a kiss upon the brow, and groping for her hand, led her on into Union Street without further ceremony or delay.
     
    Eighteen carats of hammered gold conferred no immediate blessing on Craig and Kirsty Nicholson.
    Housing was at a premium in Glasgow. The city was grossly overpopulated and various schemes by the city fathers, the City Improvement Trust for instance, to stimulate the private market had foundered on high interest rates and a chronic shortage of social conscience. Programmes of municipal improvement had swept away many of the stinking vennels and closes, slums that had grown cheek by jowl with the elegant eighteenth-century façades, but