by A. J. Cronin
“No, mine.”
“No, Robie, really it was mine. I was jealous that you had another friend. I don’t want you to have a single friend in the world but me.”
“You are my only friend, Gavin. And you always will be. I swear it. And I swear I was to blame. All my silly fault.”
“No, mine.”
“Mine.”
He let me have the last word, a sublime sacrifice, since I know I am the weaker of the two. The poster had lost its attraction. We dared to look at each other. I read in his eyes that he had been as desolate as I. This moment of reunion, so poigantly desired, broke down the barriers of our restraint, evoked from us a demonstration greater even than our crushing handclasp. I took his arm in mine closely, closely, and thus linked, smiling blindly, and beyond speech, we moved off, merged with and lost ourselves in the multitude.
The brass of the roundabouts began to play, the steam whistles of the Bostons shrilly tooted. Cymbals clashed for the Animated Cakewalk; a fanfare for Cleo, the Fattest Woman upon Earth. Loud-talking gentlemen in high collars and bow ties began to swing little canes on the platforms outside the tents: “Walk up, Ladies and Gentlemen. Walk up for Leo the Leopard Man! Walk up for the Peruvian Pigmies! The one and only Talking Horse! Walk up! Walk up!” The Shows had come to life for us. We pushed our way giddily forward. Jamie had given me a florin for spending money. Gavin was equally well supplied. He had come by train from Levenford; but now he could return with me. We need not be separated. The thought gave us added joy.
We tried the coconut shies and soon had three fine milky nuts apiece; Gavin bored one with his penknife and in turn we let the clear sweet juice trickle down our throats. We visited the molly-dolly stalls, the lab-in-the-tub, the shooting gallery. We were decked with trophies, with pins, buttons, spangles and feather favours. Darkness fell and the naphtha lamps flared out. The crowd increased, the music brayed and quickened. Whoop! Whoop! Whoooop! went the Bostons. Once I caught sight of Kate and Jamie, close together, laughing, as they braved the Animated Cakewalk. And again there was a vision of Grandpa, Sam, and Murdoch, bestriding three wooden chargers, whirling giddily abreast, plunging and rearing under the lights, to the bombilation of the band. Murdoch had his bowler hat askew, a cigar braced between his teeth, a glassy jubilation in his eye. He rose in his stirrups from time to time, and yelled inhumanly.
It grows late, very late. And at last, worn out but happy, we are all gathered at the car. Kate especially seems happy, she glances frequently at Jamie and there is a bright tenderness in her eyes. Murdoch glares owlishly at Gavin, declares: “ I don’t care, I tell you, I simply don’t care, the whole thing is a matter of complete indifference to a man of my intelligence.” Then shakes him warmly by the hand. While Sam, the indispensable Sam, is beneath the bonnet, starting the car, Murdoch and Grandpa stand by with a melodious duet. “Genevieve … Gen … e … vieve.” Halfway through, Murdoch departs hastily to the outer darkness, whence I hear sounds of prolonged and dreadful nausea.
Now we are on our way home, moving through the cool night air away from the glare, the pandemonium. In the tonneau behind, Grandpa is asleep with Murdoch lolling pallidly upon his shoulder. On the other cushion Kate and Jamie sit close together. His arm is round her waist and they are looking at the new moon.
In front I am with Gavin. Our friendship is restored, we will never again be separated.… At least, not until …
But we do not know of that, thank God. We are happy, confident. There is no sound but the steady beat of our engine, the brave hiss of our acetylene lamps. Sam, our impenetrable driver, is silent and apart. On, on, into the night. Two boys conquering the darkness, the unknown, together, under the unconquerable stars.
“This is what I like,” Gavin whispers.
I know exactly what he means.
Chapter Sixteen
Grandpa’s philosophy, based no doubt on sad experience, was that we must pay for all our pleasures: he would warn me when I was unduly elated: “Man, ye’ll suffer for this the morn.” After our expedition to the Fair we suffered dreadfully upon the morn. A fateful calm hung upon the house when, later than usual, I got up. Murdoch still lay abed, Papa had gone to work, Mama was working in the scullery. Grandpa, smoking irritably, his nose redder than usual, seemed not to want me. Then, as I came downstairs, the front door opened and Grandma entered. She had returned, unknown to me, on the previous afternoon; and already, in her good bonnet and beaded cape, had been out to the Boilerworks office to draw her pension.
“Oh, Grandma,” I cried. “ I didn’t know you were back.”
She gave no answer to my pleased and excited greeting, but advanced with a strange, strained expression on her face. Opposite me, she paused, and under the dark concern of her eyes a sense of uneasiness, of anxiety descended upon me.
“Robert, Robert,” she said in a quiet yet unnatural voice, “ I wouldn’t have believed it of you.”
I shrank against the wall. I saw that she had learned, no doubt from Miss Minns, of my apostasy from all her fervent hours. Vaguely, I had been prepared for her discomfiture. But this bitter grief, that greenish look spread across her cheeks, the distracted drawing back of her lips from her teeth, startled and frightened me.
“One of these days you may be glad enough to turn to your grandma again.” She said no more than that, but her tone, both pained and sad, made me tremble. Open-mouthed, I watched her continue on her way upstairs. Having knocked on his door, she firmly entered Grandpa’s room.
I ran into the parlour. Why did this religion, into which I had been born, raise in Grandma such dark and savage gall? The answer defeated me. Worthy and exemplary woman, she had spoken to perhaps three members of that faith in all her life, her ignorance and misconceptions regarding it were quite ludicrous. Yet it remained her abomination. She would not lightly forgive Grandpa his connivance at my First Communion.
Indeed, at that moment, I heard voices loudly raised above me and presently, while my knees still shook, there came the sound of Grandpa’s footsteps in the lobby. I peeped out—he was putting on his hat with a hasty and uneasy air.
“Come along, boy,” he said to me abruptly. “It’s time you and I removed ourselves.”
Outside, I could see that he was troubled. No doubt she had charged him heavily with my defection, but there was stronger cause for anxiety than that. Sitting up late, at her bedroom window, Grandma had plainly observed Murdoch’s “condition” on the night before, and had felt it her duty to tell Papa at breakfast.
Now Grandpa made it a practice to keep out of Papa’s way, at all times, for he knew that his son-in-law detested him. Only on one occasion, in my recollection, were they together for any length of time—when Papa, in a fit of magnanimity, skilfully fostered by Mama, showed Grandpa and me over the new Levenford sewage farm—and then the event had terminated disastrously. Papa, full of pride, had talked us round the various oxidization and filtration beds, explaining with hygienic ardour that, irrespective of its beginning, the end product of the system was pure drinking water. He filled a glass and offered it to me.
“Try it and see.”
I hesitated over the cloudy fluid.
“I’m afraid I’m not thirsty,” I stammered.
Papa then offered the glass to Grandpa, whose well-known smile had flickered all the afternoon.
“I never was addicted to water.” Grandpa spoke mildly. “And that beverage appeals to me still less.”
“Don’t you believe me?” Papa cried.
“I will,” Grandpa smiled, “if you drink it yourself.”
Papa flung down the glass and walked away.
Ordinarily, the two men rarely met; their paths did not intersect; and if Grandpa saw the Inspector in the town he would at once make a strategic detour. But now a collision was imminent. Viewed in the cold light of morning, though it had seemed fitting at the time, Murdoch’s escapade took on a more sinister complexion. Papa was violently teetotal: “drink” was anathema to him—an
d such a wicked waste of money! Enraged by Murdoch’s failure, there was no knowing to what lengths he might go to punish the reprobate who had led his son astray.
When we were well clear of the house, Grandpa slowed his rapid strides and turned to me, rather loftily. “Fortunately we have our own resources, Robie. And friends who’ll give us a bite if we ask them. We’ll go and call on the Antonellis.”
I stopped in great embarrassment. “ Oh, no, Grandpa, we can’t do that.”
“And why not?”
“Because …” I paused. Yet I had to tell him. I could not bear that he should suffer the ignominy of a door slammed in his face.
He said nothing, not a word—for all his perorations, he had, at least, the gift of suffering an injury in silence. But this was a sad blow; his face turned a queer mottled colour. I thought he might go back to Drumbuck to foregather with the Saddler and Peter Dickie. But no, he continued down the High Street and over Knoxhill, marching me into unfamiliar territory on the south side of the town.
“Where are we going, Grandpa?”
“To wash in the waters of bitterness,” he answered shortly.
Whether he meant what he said, whether the salt breezes of Ardfillan had awakened in him a desire for the beaches, or whether simply he wished to put the greatest distance possible between himself and all that was distressing him, I do not know. But presently we came out through the end of the Knoxhill green and found ourselves on the shore of the estuary just below the harbour. This was no idyllic strand, but a reach of drab, ribbed silt, broken by tufts of green seaweed and flat rocks, greyly crusted with young limpets. The tide was out, such water as we saw was leaden grey; the tall chimneys of the Boilerworks, still visible, the rattle of hammers from the Shipyard, the rushing of an effluent conduit from a laundry—these raw reminders of industry increased, rather than diminished, the desolations of the scene.
Yet there was a tang in the breeze, a brackish tang. And immediately around us was that solitude which Grandpa craved. He sat down, took off his boots and socks, rolled up his trousers to the knee and, having splashed across the damp sand, began to paddle in the shallows. I watched, while the grey wavelets caressed his bony ankles; then I peeled off my own shoes and stockings, followed the wet imprints of his feet, and waded in beside him.
Presently he removed his hat: that marvellous hat which I identify, inseparably, with Grandpa—large, square, and faded, ventilated by three metal-edged holes punched on either side, hardened by age to an iron indestructibility; that hat which had contained so many rarities, from Grandpa’s head to a pound of pilfered raspberries, which had served, and was still to serve, so many diverse purposes, and into which now, stooping, he began to place cockles and mussels retrieved from this sad seashore …
The cockles were pure white and fluted, only a wavering spot the size of a sixpence revealed their presence beneath the flooding sand. The mussels, of a purple nacreous sheen, grew toughly in bunches in the fissures of the rocks. When we had gathered an assorted hatful, Grandpa straightened himself. “ Boy,” he remarked—though addressing the melancholy waters—“I may be bad … but not that bad.”
On the dry part of the beach, covered with wrack and driftwood, with staved-in coops and a bunk straw mattress cast off from a ship, we made a crackling fire. While he roasted the mussels Grandpa showed me how to eat the cockles. You held the cockle over the flame until it opened, then quickly gulped the saline contents down. He judged them delicious, far better than oysters, he said, and he swallowed a great many, sadly, as though their salt astringency suited his present mood. I could not care for them, but I found the mussels exactly to my taste. The shells opened wide, wide, exposing upon pearly plates the frizzled contents, tough as meat, and nut-sweet.
“No dishes to wash,” Grandpa commented with a grim smile when we had done. He lit his pipe and lay on his elbow, letting his eyes roam across the scene, still indulging his reverie; he added, to himself, as though the salt fare had given him a thirst: “I could do with a dram.”
Here, in the light of what ensues, I must try to establish an important aspect of Grandpa’s character. He had a fondness, a weakness, for “ the drink”; there were evenings when I heard his uneven footsteps on the stairs, accompanied by fumblings, and the jovial exclamations of a man undisturbed by colliding with objects in the dark; but he was not a drunkard. To dismiss him, in Adam’s curt phrase, as “an old soak” was to do the man a grave injustice—he had gone on wild sprees, yet there were long sober spells between, and he never took part in Levenford’s Saturday night saturnalia, which thronged the streets with reeling figures. All his life he had wanted to do brave and wonderful things—with an intensity which in his later days made him believe he had actually done them—yet in reality his career had been humdrum. His forebears had at one time been extremely well off—in partnership with two uncles, his father had once owned the well-known distillery of Glen Nevis. In a family album I had come across the yellowish photograph of a youth standing with a gun and two setter dogs on the steps of an imposing country mansion. Imagine my stupefaction when Mama told me it was Grandpa, outside his boyhood home—she had added with a faint smile and a sigh, “The Gows were gey important folks in their day, Robie.” It was the malt tax which had destroyed the family fortune; and I now know that as a young man, after the “smash,” Grandpa had been forced to begin, in the humble Levenford manner, as an apprentice engineer. Yet he had not “learned his trade.” He was too impatient, and an enforced marriage, which he never bemoaned, with a simple girl of the people who idolized him, sent him into the hardware business. When he failed here, in high-spirited fashion, he was in turn clerk, farm hand, cabinetmaker, Scots draper, purser on a Clyde steamboat; until finally, through his Glen Nevis connections, he became, like the poet he so greatly admired, an exciseman in the Bonded Service.
Disappointment with himself and a talent for friendship, together with the fact that he “worked amongst the stuff,” made him a drinker; yet he was never a graceless one; his craving was spasmodic, rather than inveterate, and sprang from the peculiarities of his temperament, that strange entanglement of opposites, which would cause him one minute to defend my innocence like a lion and the next—but we shall hear of that much later.
At present, in his dejection, there was reason to believe that his craving was coming to the surface, evoked by a bitter sense of his betrayal by Grandma.
“A certain person,” he declared suddenly, “has been at my throat from the moment she put foot inside the house. I owe her something for all she’s done to me. ‘Leading Murdoch to ruin’!” He broke off to point moodily with the moist stem of his pipe. “There’s the Lord of the Isles coming … on her ‘Round the Kyles’ trip … She’s a braw boat.”
We watched while the crowded pleasure steamer raced down the river with flashing paddles and flying bunting, her two red funnels at a jaunty angle, trailing a plume of smoke, the soft sweet music of the “German band” aboard her drifting towards us and still lingering sadly as the rush of waves came in. Poor beachcombers, downcast and penniless, how we longed to be aboard her!
“At first,” Grandpa resumed, bitterly, “ when I came to live at Lomond View, after the death of my wife, she pretended to be friendly with me. She mended my socks and laid out my slippers by the fire. Then she asked me to give up smoking—she objected to the smell of it. When I refused, that started it. She’s worked against me ever since.
“Of course she has the best end of it. She’s independent. She goes downstairs to her meals. She gets the Levenford Herald before me. She has the hot water on Saturday night and first use of the bathroom in the morning. I tell you, boy, it’s enough to turn milk sour.”
Other ships went past: some laden scows, a rusty coastal tramp, the river ferry plying on a chain cable between the harbour and Sandbank, the crack white-funnelled Inveraray steamer, the Queen Alexandra. Then came a liner, immeasurably huge, a “ beef boat” built by Marshall Brothers for the Argentine
trade. She passed slowly, impenetrably, behind a noisy tug, a pilot, Grandpa said, upon her bridge, and I followed her with watering eyes until she was only a dark smudge on the far rim of the widening estuary, behind which the sun was now setting, in purple smoke.
Grandpa meditated darkly. There was nothing like a Marshall boat, the Clyde was the noblest river in the world, Robert Burns the greatest poet … one Scot could beat three Englishmen … even with a hand tied behind his back … but it was hard for any man to get the better of a woman. A longer silence. Suddenly Grandpa sat up and with sombre decision slapped his thigh hard with his hand.
“By God! I’ll do it.”
Startled, my mind still filled with gentle meditations, with slow and stately images of departure, I turned to Grandpa, whose thoughts I had imagined to be similarly attuned. He was no longer brooding and dejected. A grim determination illuminated all his features, radiated even from his nose. He stood up.
“Come on, boy,” he repeated, several times, under his breath, as with a kind of awe at his own invention. “By God, what a bawr!”
While he hurried me back through the town, pausing to check the time on the church steeple, I must impose another explanation. The word “bawr,” in the local patois—which, for reasons of intelligibility, I have used sparingly—is expressive, in essence, of a peculiar act of vengeance, a vengeance flavoured with devilish humour. Dismiss from your minds anything so paltry as a practical joke. True, the bawr brings satisfaction to its perpetrator and confusion to its victim. But there the faint resemblance ends. The bawr is dire, traditional, the just explosion of a hatred. Where, in Corsica, in like circumstances, they take to the maquis with a gun, in Levenford they sit on solitary beaches, devise, then execute, a bawr.
“Where are you going, Grandpa?”
“First I am going to call on these fine Antonellis.” He tempered the shock by adding, in an indescribable tone, “By the back door.”
I remained, in fear, at the corner of the alley while he went round to the Antonelli back yard. He was absent only for a few minutes, yet I could not repress my relief when he reappeared, apparently unscathed, even grimly smiling. We set off into the gathering dusk and Grandpa took the unfrequented “Common way.”
