Chapter 1

“Daddy, why do other children only have one Mummy? Other children in nursery school have one Daddy, but most have only one Mummy, not like me. Why is that?”

I was willing enough to explain. Right from the start, Sandy and I had decided to talk to our children as we would to adults, except for explaining everything in simpler terms. My other wives had adopted the same tactic.

This precocious three-year-old, coming up four, soaked up knowledge and absorbed it without a hint of confusion. If there was any matter that was not clear, she knew to ask questions, and ask she did. How I answered was equally important.

“Fenella, the real question is, why are you so lucky? Most girls have only one Mummy they can depend on for all sorts of things, from getting a cuddle to helping you to dress yourself. You have more than one, so you are very special.

But to get back to your ‘Why?’, the idea of being different, it all depends on what you mean by certain words. Language is a funny thing. You can have two words that mean almost the same thing, like stream and burn for running water; and you can have one word that has more than one meaning as a doing word, again like burn as to set on fire, and burn meaning to overcook something in a pot or frying pan.”

I continued, “Being called Mummy is using a special word for the lady who gave birth to you – like a dog has dog babies which we call puppies – but it can also mean the lady who looks after you all the time and who acts towards you just like your Mummy does. We are fortunate in that you have a birth Mummy and also several ‘looking after’ Mummies. We are all part of one family; they are all your Mummies. That makes you a very special and fortunate person, a girl who has several Mummies to look after her; not just one.

Now, just because you are so special and important, you also shouldn’t talk about it much, as the other children at the nursery might feel bad for only having one Mummy, or upset because you have something more than them. I am sure your Mummies have told you not to brag about what you have that is important to you, as it can make others think they have less than you and so make them feel jealous, the word for feeling bad in comparison.

We don’t want to upset other children, do we?”

“No, Daddy. Upset mostly ends up with somebody being nasty. So all us children in our family are special?”

“Fenella, I can tell you that everybody in this family is special, in their own way. Each of your brothers and sisters is special like you, and each one of your mothers is special just like your birth Mummy; and you are all very important to me.”

“Are you not special, Daddy?”

“Well, let me put it this way: I am special as I have your Mummies and your brothers and sisters to love me. Being loved makes you special indeed, so in that way I am special. In other ways I am just a normal Daddy.”

“You mean, like other children’s Daddies?”

“Just like them, Fenella. Don’t you think I am a normal Daddy?”

“Umm ... I don’t know. You are just my own Daddy; and I love you. You are always nice to me.”

“There you are: You love me, so that makes me a special Daddy.”

I was interrupted.

“Bob? What are you telling my Fenella?”

It was her mother, Janet.

“Just talking to her about love, Janet. She was asking about why other kids only have one Mummy, poor souls.”

“Daddy is right, Fenella. Having extra Mummies is an advantage that you have over other kids, but you mustn’t let them know you have an advantage. If they mention it, just tell them that having other Mummies is fun; isn’t it, dear?”

I responded with a grin, “Hmm, yes. Fun in so many ways, I agree.”

“I meant as Mummies, Bob, and you very well know that. Don’t make the word more complicated than it has to be for Fenella.”

Our daughter chipped in, “Daddy was saying that words can be complicated. Does that mean every word, or just some words?”

Janet told her, “It depends on how they are used, Fenella. Mummy Sandy uses big words that have to do with her complicated work, but most grown-ups have unusual words that have special meanings for their work. I have to know special words at the restaurant that mean fancy meals from a country called Italy; things like ratatouille, tagliatelle or tortellini. The last two are pasta dishes. Pasta is a dough made from wheat flour and eggs. Think of it as a change from potatoes or rice.”

“That sounds nice, Mummy. Can we make some pasta and try it?”

“Yes, we can do that some time, but not today. I have Tom and Martha to look after today, until I go to work this evening. Work helps earn money, so that you can have nice new clothes to wear.”

“I know about work, Mummy. The ladies at the nursery told us about work.”

I added my bit, “Well, work is another word with more than one meaning, Fenella. It can be paid work, like most grown-ups do, or it can be unpaid work, where someone does things to be helpful to other people around them, like running a coffee morning for the church, or digging a neighbour’s garden for them if they can’t do it for themselves. It is almost always a case of doing something to help others, and that can make other people feel nice towards you. It still means you have to use effort of some kind to get the job done, and that is work, see?”

“You mean if I help to look after my little brother, it is work?”

I was impressed by her grasp of logic.

“Yes. That kind of work is the ‘helping’ work, and you should feel good about doing it, because it helps Mummy. She will feel good about you helping, as well, so there are lots of good results.”

Fenella smiled happily.

I left Fenella to Janet to deal with, as I was now tired. I had been traipsing around Gourock and Greenock in my car most of the day, showing prospective buyers selected houses that might suit their budget and their size specifications.

The one did not often equate to the other, unless they were willing to take on a house that needed considerable work on it, or a garden that was overgrown through a lapse of time since the property went on the market. That garden neglect was usually a sign of how long the property had been on the market, and the combination could mean that a lower offer than the asking price might possibly result in a sale.

It was all the same to me, as I was only interested in getting to the sale agreement, and if asked, I might suggest an offer slightly below asking price. The buyer would probably want it off his hands, as he or she was still having to pay all the basic costs: local rates, electricity or gas daily charge; essential external repairs for keeping the house looking salable (window cleaning, weeding of paths, that sort of thing). Waiting for an upturn in the house market could be a long and expensive wait!

Gaining one client willing to put in an offer to the agency was a success for me, and if even one property per day went that way, I was pleased. I would get my modest sale fee if the offer was accepted. That pressured me to selling more than one per day.

I seldom visited the solicitor’s office these days, as the business of selling houses was taking up most of my time; and paying better. My father-in-law, the solicitor Mr Thompson, was not too bothered as my apparent employment was not costing him anything. The supposed job with him was fine for tax purposes and when I needed to show myself as an upright citizen of Gourock, but I financed my job with his office from my own funds. That amount had decreased over the last few years as my income from house marketing increased and my ‘employment’ hours reduced at his office. This year he was specially active in his profession and wanted to influence the newly formed Scottish Law Commission.

Sandy, my first and only legal wife, was now in employment as a business adviser, working for companies that either wanted to reduce their tax burden, make better use of resources including financial ones, or were looking to diversify into new markets. Her new business degree had combined with earlier part-time business employment to give her adequate experience, along with managing our personal financial portfolio of direct business assets, government securities, and share ownership in international companies, so she had a sound basis for a private business advice agency.

Her older sister Georgina, or Georgie as we called her in private, was doing well as manager of our string of property agencies. We had first bought her Gourock branch from the group it was part of, after an agreement with the boss of the group that she would continue to work with them. Then we expanded to buy out other small agencies in Greenock and wider afield, to build up our own group. Sandy told me these purchases made it tax efficient for our family, but what do I know?

I was now Marketing Adviser for all our agency shops, mostly taking clients to view properties, and was training two bright young ladies to fill in for me when I was busy elsewhere or taking a holiday break. Eventually they would take on most of my duties and I would spend more of my time with my growing family.

Georgie had two children, Janet had two, and Sandy had one. Carol had one, with another on the way, and Phyllis, who was still not quite regarded by the others as a wife to me but acted as if she was, had one boy, was expecting again and seemed to be happy enough. Seven children in four years, an interesting job selling houses and other property and five women to keep happy. I was busy!

But perhaps not as busy as I could have been. Sandy was the powerhouse of the family, making decisions left, right and centre, long before I would have needed to make them once they impinged on my radar. She had an ability to spot needs and problems in advance. That was probably why she was so good at her own job and gained more clients all the time. Her reputation was the source of more business opportunities. The others recognised this as a family asset and granted Sandy the leadership role she so spectacularly filled. God, I love that woman!

My father was last year made redundant from his job as a fitter, but found another similar one with an animal feed production company at Renfrew. Once again he was maintaining machinery, and this was a vital task in keeping the factory working. A breakdown in the processing would close the whole system until it was fixed, so he and his colleagues worked into the night until it was functional again and the processing could restart in the morning. It was not my idea of fun, but he was paid overtime rate for the night hours, and someone would run him home to Greenock in a company vehicle if it was too late for public transport; quite rightly so. He liked to earn his wages, and not depend on me to support him and my mother; though occasional help from me was never refused. My young brother got a job in the Civil Service and got moved to whichever branch of that organisation needed help.

Janet was satisfied with her present comfortable life, but remained circumspect when communicating with her extremely religious parents, keeping them in the dark as to her location. She did send them a letter telling them she was now married, but saying nothing about her husband’s forename or her current surname. Last year she sent them a photograph of her lovely daughter, their grand-daughter, without mentioning the child’s name; merely saying how happy she was with her life and how precocious her daughter was becoming. I bet they were furious at how well she was getting on with her life beyond their control.

I should have said that Janet ran away from home because the family belonged to an extreme Christian sect and who wanted to marry her to another member, as that was the policy within the sect. She was not supposed to have her own options. Thus the secrecy about where she was and who she was married to. Of course, any search they tried on the registration system would not tell them anything, for her marriage to me was unofficial as I was already legally married to Sandy.

Sandy as usual was the instigator of having her marry me, just as she had got me to marry her own sister, Georgie, earlier. Georgie had been dumped for a younger girl years back by her suitor, and Georgie took it badly, treating all men as suspicious characters. When I bumped into Sandy, and we clicked, Sandy was my forever love from that moment. Not long afterwards, when Georgina finally noticed that my behaviour towards Sandy was not that of a dangerous man, she mellowed, and eventually Sandy decided that Georgie was due some happiness in her life. That led to her persuading me and Georgie to get friendly towards each other, to the point that Sandy reckoned her sister should also marry me and get the benefits that Sandy had.

The resulting ‘marriage’ was conducted by Sandy during our own honeymoon in Edinburgh, and so Georgie became wife number two and a happy woman as well. She had sex with me on our honeymoon far more that I did with Sandy, as Sandy did not want to get pregnant while she was studying at Glasgow University. Thus Sandy had to make sure I wore a condom with her, while Georgie had no cares that way. Frequent was fine for her, and pregnancy was a good outcome as far as she was concerned.

The first meeting with Janet occurred at the restaurant where Janet worked as a waitress under an assumed surname. While Janet was friendly with everyone at work, she had no social life to speak of as she was trying to be a nobody and not be recorded under her real name in official records of any kind. Her assumed surname was her disguise. To cut a long story short, she became close friends with Georgie and Sandy and was soon afterwards invited to join our family and become a McIntyre (my surname), thus confusing her back trail even more. We paid off her debt to a friend who had financed her disappearance to another part of the country, and that bit of return charity persuaded her that we were worth trusting to the point of becoming my third wife.

Carol was suggested by Janet as a ‘possible’ extra, but I was cautious about the idea. Carol had been raped at fourteen by a girlfriend’s father, and when she told her parents about it they accused her of ‘leading the nice man on’ and didn’t believe the rape story. Fortunately she didn’t get pregnant from the rape. She kept the crime quiet to avoid upsetting her friend, then left home and school, seeking work as and when she could; remaining fearful of most men being possible rapists. With a stroke of luck, she got a job in a women’s beauty salon where she didn’t have to deal with men at all.

Slowly she was introduced to us and Sandy got her used to me being a man she could trust, and I became a man she could learn from and become familiar with in a sexual sense. She at last decided she wanted what the other girls in our family had: a chance at happiness with a man and an opportunity to be part of a family again, including children later. So after a bit more serious thinking time, Carol joined us as another wife.

Phyllis was the spouse of a council electrician who was secretly a wife abuser, and once we expanded our home to have many more bedrooms, we had a local ‘come and visit’ opening ceremony. Her mother was one of the attendees and when we suggested that we might act like a refuge for battered women, confided to us that her daughter might appreciate a refuge from Jimmy, the beating husband. We were able to offer her a place where he could not find her, and arranged a vanishing act one evening at the restaurant.

At our new house she had her own room and remained out of sight for some weeks. After she vanished, neighbours who had some inkling of his abuse began to suspect him of murdering her and hiding her body, and with that rumour going around the local police started to regard him as a suspect but he was not arrested, through lack of evidence to back up the rumour. They did make a point of ‘bumping’ into him quite often, and asking after his wife.

Whether that had a bearing or not, he began drinking heavily, and one dark night he walked out of a popular pub onto the road and into the path of a passing lorry. He was killed instantly, unfortunately. Phyllis then had to reveal herself in order to register his death and be the legal inheritor of his goods and property, and thus reappeared, alive and now well.

She looked at her life with him and compared that to us. I had been asked by Sandy to take Phyllis to bed and comfort her when she suddenly found she was a widow, to help her cope with the shock. It turned out her late husband was never really interested in her needs as a woman, so being treated lovingly was a revelation. She then suggested that she might be interested in joining our family, but we were not sure of her motives and deterred her for now. She asked for sex on a regular basis, and was allowed a once a week opportunity, but had to dispense with her birth control as part of the deal. We wanted her to realise that sex came with consequences. Hesitant, she at last accepted this limitation, and was currently the mother of a son and pregnant again, but still not formally accepted by us as a wife; just regarded as being on probation until the other ladies decided she could be made a permanent member of the family. That was likely to be soon, as she had slowly become one of us. She reverted to her maiden surname for a while, but called herself by her dead husband’s surname once she was pregnant. The birth of her baby was registered under her married name as a widow with the father noted as ‘unknown’.

We had found our neighbours gradually accepting us as an unusual but friendly family, and by now we were treated as a normal part of the community. Everyone pretended to accept the fiction that all the Mrs McIntyres were each married to a different McIntyre, and just happened to be all living together.

It was on the face of it a ridiculously unwarranted presumption, but if all those living near us were comfortable that way with the apparent situation, that suited us. If at any time someone queried our household’s predominantly female structure, they could be advised to check with the Registrars office and find that I was only married to Sandy. Any suggestion otherwise was brushed off as nothing to do with me, and legally this was accurate. I had learned a few things at the lawyer’s office.

Of course, we did not discourage the other assumption that we might be running a battered women’s refuge, and that rumour was offered locally as a partial explanation of the massive size of our enlarged house. There was nothing formal in that line, though we had provided Phyllis a hiding place from her abusive husband while he was still around.

Since then we had not done anything much in that sphere, other than my wives offering a room to a victim for a short while until the police and social helpers threatened the abusive husband with criminal proceedings if he did not behave more responsibly. Mostly, it worked. Where it didn’t, we provided the woman with financial aid to relocate to a safe place where she could start over again. Usually this was a place where she had relatives who could provide emotional help and support; and who were not known to her husband.