Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  The Earth’s interior moves more slowly than the zoo-sphere but is never still, currents in the molten rock under the solid crust always moving huge plates of crust apart on one side, and ramming them together on the other. Mountain ranges are raised when one plate is forced over another, then rain, wind, frost and lichen starts wearing the mountains down. Rocks and gravel fall into glens and valleys, rivers wash grit onto plains, spreading it and mixing it with dead plants and creatures, creating new soil. Meteor bombardments killed great sections of zoo-sphere through sudden global winters and ice ages, spreading seas have drowned them, the world’s shifting crust has covered them with new rock making underground layers of coal and metal, reservoirs of oil and gas. The world’s subterranean currents broke the earliest continent into smaller ones and drove them so far apart that they joined again on the other side of the world near the south pole. This again cracked into continents that drifted north and started roughly corresponding to those we know, though not in the order we know them at first. Some of the oceans between them widened, some narrowed or disappeared. The great plate of crust carrying India collided with Eurasia, elevating the Himalayas, our highest and youngest mountain range. The Alps are hardly middle-aged. The Wicklow Hills are all that remain of more ancient mountains.

  When the Atlantic was a much narrower sea, the North American and Baltic landmasses had offshore islands with the same geology: granite, the world’s oldest rock, and granite volcanically mixed with newer stuff, which is called metamorphic. The Eurasian landmass edged up from the south west, with offshore islands made of mainly sedimentary rock: chalk, clay and limestone. Slow convulsions jammed the north eastern islands together and rammed them onto a larger, more level coalition of the southern islands, creating an archipelago visited in the 4th century BC by Pytheas, a Greek explorer who gave it a Greek name. Nearly sixty years before Christ’s birth it was invaded by Romans who learned most of their science from the Greeks and Latinised the name into Britannia. This happened because an unusual beast had appeared half a million years earlier.

  Different thinkers have called Homo Sapiens a featherless biped, a tool-using animal, and “the glory, jest and riddle of the world”. We are the only creature who drink when not thirsty, eat when not hungry, and take twelve years or more to become adult. One year old humans totter on unsteady legs when horses of that age walk, gallop and feed themselves in open fields. One year old birds have hatched, learned to fly, mated, built nests and begun feeding their own children because birds, bees, ponies etcetera mostly act instinctively; human instincts are so weakened that our actions have to be learned through imitation of adults (starting with mum and dad) who act differently from each other. This forces self-conscious choice called learning upon us, hence our prolonged immaturity. Adults are usually compensated for this by being ready for sexual intercourse all year round. Conscious choice has made us capable of new inventions – lighting fires, shaping sharp-edged tools, and sewing needles – so since homo sapiens learned to stand upright and use our hands in Africa we have kept a common body pattern by changing our minds, habits and societies. The Arctic ice cap once expanded south until most of Britain and adjacent lands were under a mile-thick layer of it. This thawed, retreated and returned, altering climates and sea levels. Other species were killed off or survived by evolving different bodies and instincts. Our kind survived by killing other creatures, roasting their flesh, turning their bones and skin into tools and clothing. As we spread around the globe some details of our physique changed a little. Hunters in the frozen north grew paler and plumper, those in the south leaner and darker. Where food was abundant the average human height grew to six feet or more. Poor food supplies made us dwarfish, led to immigration, warfare and murder, for we lacked the instinct that stops other beasts killing helpless members of their own species. Settled farmers on Chinese plains grew extra inches of gut to draw more nourishment from their rice, yet they too are of the same species as Inuits in Alaska, Pigmies in the Congo, Cleopatra, Robert Burns, Mahatma Ghandi and Condoleezza Rice. The big differences between races, nations and tribes come from folk learning to live in very different landscapes. A vast plain watered by three rivers explains why China is the largest, most peopled and most ancient nation. A smaller, equally self-centred nation was made by layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris in the middle. The Baltic sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though a similar language.

  Like all efficient imperialists Romans divided lands they invaded along natural borders. They called the south mainland Albion, the north mainland Caledonia, the western island Hibernia. Albion was very woody and marshy but had few natural barriers impeding the march of Roman legions. The tribes of Albion that joined to fight those were defeated, then the level parts of the south British mainland (all Albion except Wales) were planted over by Roman camps. These were connected by well-built roads to each and to Londinium, Britain’s first big city. The camps were sited in fertile places and grew to be centres of still-thriving towns: Bath, York, Lincoln, Carlisle and other cities with names ending in chester or caster. The broad, fertile, generally level nature of Albion with its road network explains why it fell quickly to later invaders after Rome pulled out – first fell to Saxons and Angles who renamed it Angle-land or England, then to King Canute’s Danish empire, then in 1066 to the Norman French. It explains why London-on-Thames became the capital of the English state, and why the the Bishop of Canterbury has been the High Priest of England since 598, and why England had only two universities in market towns near London until 1828.

  Any map shows Scotland’s difference from England what it originally was – several different islands jammed together. They are so narrowly joined that the Romans found it convenient to wall Caledonia off. Scotland’s grotesquely irregular coastline shows the tip of the most southerly peninsula is only twelve miles from the Irish coast; the nearest neighbour on the European mainland is Norway, with the Orkney and Shetland islands like stepping stones between. Inside Scotland’s ragged coastline the glens and plains are so separated by highland sea-lochs and mountain ranges, by lowland moors and firths, that cultivation produced very little surplus wealth before the mid 18th century. The natural barriers made conquest of the whole impossible for invaders, and a united Scotland almost impossible for the natives. It was four kingdoms, each an unstable union of fiercely independent clans, each with a capital city on the rock of an extinct volcano. Dumbarton (meaning Fort of the Britons) was capital of Strathclyde, a mainly Welsh-speaking kingdom that included Galloway and the west coast down to Barrow in Furness. Edinburgh was capital of a nation in east Scotland, south of the Firth of Forth and partly English-speaking, for it had been part of Northumbria before Duke William conquered all England up to the Tyne. Fife and the north west, with much of the Highlands, belonged to a people called Picts whose language is unknown and whose capital was on Craig Phadraig, Inverness. The Scottish king’s nation, Dalriada, had its capital on Dunadd in Argyllshire, where the Scots tribes, Gaelic-speaking incomers, had arrived from Ireland. It is also pertinent that Shetland, Orkney, and Sutherland for centuries belonged to Norway and there were Scandinavian settlements all round the place, though that was also frequent in England.

  In days when kings were hardly anything but warlords, King Kenneth mac Alpin of Dalriada gave the Caledonian clanjamfrie the name of Scotland by conquest of some neighbours and alliances with others. That Scotland continued as a nation, however, is an English achievement, because ever since then the government of the bigger, richer nation tried and usually failed to make Scotland one of its counties – a kind of Cornwall or Yorkshire. Scotland’s people have never been more than a tenth of England’s, so why did England’s far greater military power fail to incorporate us before Oliver Cromwell’s brief success under the Commonwealth? Why did Scotland’s three centuries of being Scotlandshire never quite destroy her independent culture? Why is she at last
bound to win the same freedom as Portugal from Spain, Austria from Germany, Iceland from Denmark?41

  Robert Louis Stevenson gave the simplest answer when he noted that Gaelic-speaking Highlanders regard English-speaking Lowlanders with a suspicion the Lowlander is inclined to return unless both meet in English company where they at once feel like blood brothers. Why? There are many partial answers. One is the comparative poverty ensuring that for centuries the Scots gentry, whether Lowland lairds or Highland chiefs, did not speak wholly differently from their lowly employees, unlike England whose chief officials still speak a mandarin dialect learned in expensive private schools like Rugby, Marlborough etcetera. Around 1370 a French traveller visiting Scotland thought it remarkable that if a knight rode his horse over a Scot’s grain field an angry peasant ran up and cursed him. No peasant dared do that in rich lands where the nobility had hundreds of workers so could have one flogged or hung without loss of income. Scots aristocrats were mostly too poor to damage crops on which they and their peasants depended. In the late 19th century Robert Louis Stevenson was dismayed by how completely his English friends behaved as if their servants and other low-class folk did not exist. Such national differences may be thought obsolete relics, and should be forgotten. This book will explain otherwise, not by inflaming anti-English sentiment, but by showing how local conditions have created a unique culture, so a separate government has always been required by those who share this land, these conditions.

  The following chapters explain how Scottish people’s land, rocks, soil distribution, mineral resources, waters and those great potential dynamos the sea lochs, ensure that all who live and work here come to feel part of it like the Irish who came to found Dalriada and later fled here from the potato famine – the Anglo-Saxons who escaped across the border from Duke William and Margaret Thatcher into the Lothians – Jews driven here by Czarist and Nazi pogroms – Italians by the phylloxera epidemic that destroyed their vineyards – Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and other former subjects of the British empire, together with refugees from wars Britain has fought since then and who are now wickedly labelled asylum seekers. I believe that all who stay to live, work and vote here will invigorate this nation that has always been a colloquium of different people, as every sane nation must be.

  Highly perplexed. Around Saturday lunchtime yesterday life changed in a way that almost makes my entire past irrelevant, uninteresting. Shortly before noon I brought Niki her usual brunch in bed. She complained about amount of butter on toast. Told her she had a tenth part of what I put on my slice. She said that was why I was fat, then doorbell rang. Went down, opened it. Bustled in past me a person of my own height but sturdier, wearing a kind of battle dress with camouflage pattern designed for jungle warfare. She turned and facing me, hands on hips, said belligerently, “Where’s that Is?”

  “Who are you?” I said, astonished.

  “Where is that Is?” she demanded, fiercer still. Beginning to recognize her I said, “I don’t know! You led Isabel in here with two other girls three years ago. I had never seen them before and have never seen them since.”

  “Hm!” she said, frowning, and, “Are you telling me the truth?” “Why should I tell lies?” I cried, exasperated. “Who are you? What do you want here?”

  “Are you telling me there’s no woman in this house?”

  “Why should I tell you anything?” I demanded.

  “I’m the woman in this house,” said a voice and there was Niki on the stair landing, her coat slipped on over her nightgown and Moloch in her arms.

  “Then clear out!” said this total stranger. Niki, obviously as astonished as I was, said faintly “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Niki stood staring and shaking her head. She had been redder than usual but was now paler than usual. The invader said, “If you don’t know me, ask around. I know you Mrs Kate MacNulty! Your man knows me even better so go back hame and ask him who I am! You’ll find him a lot nicer after his wee spell in jail, so put on your claes and get out of here because your arnae needed. John’s had enough of you and that wean you carted here instead of chucking in the Clyde. Amn’t I right John?”

  That question was flung at me like a stone, and because I was indeed tired of Niki and Moloch I could not say no. Niki yelled, “Don’t worry! I’m sick of you John Tunnock and you’re welcome to that bitch whoever she is! I was going to clear out soon anyway ye fat, stupid, mean, TV-less wee bastard!”

  Moloch started wailing.

  When life grows too complicated for intelligent management, sit down till it simplifies. I did so in the dining-room, elbows on knees, head in hands. The invader stayed in the lobby until I heard Niki leave, muttering what were either ugly remarks to the stranger or soothing sounds to Mo. The front door slammed. The new presence entered the room and sat opposite me. Relief at departure of lodgers was blocked by dread of new burden. Without looking up I asked what she wanted. She said sullenly, “I wouldnae mind a whisky. A big one. No water. And I wouldnae mind chocolate biscuits or stuff like that, if you’ve got any.”

  I gave her what she asked and sat down again facing her, sipping a whisky I had poured for myself and wondering what to say. She said suddenly, “Put on some of that music.”

  “What kind?” I asked. She leaned toward me so that her hair fell forward and hid her face. She mumbled, “Something romantic.”

  I went, tingling a little, to the pianola and inserted the Siegfried Idyll with which Wagner greeted Cosima on the morning she gave birth to their son. I returned to where the intruder sat, her face still hidden behind her curtain of hair. I again sat opposite not knowing what to say until, “Are you Zoe?” occurred to me. She said, “Aye.”

  I said I had met her father a while ago. She said, “Where? How?”

  “In a pub,” I said. She said, “Aye. Give me another whisky.”

  I poured it saying, “Exactly what do you want? Is it money?”

  She said, “I don’t need money.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Is that not obvious?” she shouted, angrily glaring at me. I gaped at her. She said, “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Not,” I said firmly, “before I have another whisky.”

  Sounding disappointed she said she hadn’t known I was the kind that needed it.

  What followed was too quick to be perfectly satisfying, but the relief was wonderful.

  Post coitum omne animal triste est42 is attributed to Aristotle who never said it, because it is Latin and he Greek. It is not always true of me but is certainly true of every woman who has lain with me, so I was not surprized when Zoe, after bringing me to that rapid climax, started sobbing. Feeling happy and grateful I asked what was wrong, knowing from experience nothing I said would help. She said, “Now you’ll think I’m just a hoor, nothing but a hoor.”

  I pointed out that a whore was paid for being fucked; she had fucked me rather than vice versa and had refused my offer of money. She said, “I told you I don’t want your money.”

  “Then you aren’t a whore,” I said. She said, “Aye, alright, but I’m still a bad girl. I’ve done things, I do things that are utterly wrong, completely rotten. You see I –”

  Not wanting to be horrified I firmly interrupted saying, “Say no more. I hold myself to be indifferent honest, but know such things of me it were better my mother had never bore me.”

  She stopped sobbing and asked what the hell did that mean? I said I was quoting Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and in Shakespeare’s time “indifferent” meant “ordinary”, so Hamlet meant he was as honest as most folk, but had still done things that meant the world would be better if he had never existed. She said, “Does that mean everybody is as bad as me?”

  “That’s what Hamlet meant.”

  “Even you?”

  “Certainly,” I said, though doubting it. I was a fair kind of school teacher and never needed to use the belt in any class I had charge of, though until 1986 in Britain it
was legal to do so. Even in primary schools a well-dressed, confident male teacher could torture the hand of a little girl in districts where working class parents thought that commonplace. When headmaster I told my staff not to use it, but to send troublemakers they could not handle to me, and every week four or five came to my door, usually the same four or five. Most were very active kids incapable of sitting still, or had bad manners learned at home which teachers had no time to correct. I am now ashamed of having belted these kids, but had I not done so my staff would have felt unsupported, insecure, so I tortured small children at least four times a week. Too disgusted to work out how many times a year, how often in a lifetime of teaching I said in a firmer voice, “Yes, perhaps even worse than you, though not as bad as Eichman.”

  Zoe, highly interested, said, “Tell me about it.”

  I said, “No. I will not tell you how rotten I have been if you don’t tell me how bad you are. Let us please just be good to each other.” She said thoughtfully, “That’s an idea. Do you want us to do the other thing again?”

  I said yes, if we did it slowly this time. She said, “I thought men like it quick.”

  I said a lot of men learned about sex in ways that stopped them doing it slowly, but I was too old to be quick twice a night. We cuddled. She began weeping again in a different, less stormy way and at last I may or may not have ejaculated and we fell asleep with my male part comfortable inside her.

  Which I hope often happens. This morning I awoke greatly refreshed, kissed her awake, said “Breakfast!” and rushed downstairs to make it, dressing as I went. She followed soon after, not realising I would have brought it to her in bed. Facing this bossy, confident woman across the kitchen table, drinking coffee with her and eating poached eggs on toast with grilled tomatoes felt familiar because the last time I had felt that way was with Aunt Nan before illness confined her to bed. Well, if Zoe stays long enough I’ll die long before she does, hooray hooray. And it’s wonderful that she doesn’t expect me to serve her hand and foot. After the meal she said, “Mind if I smoke?” and rolled and smoked a thin cigarette, watching while I washed, dried and put away breakfast things. She said, “You’re a very queer kind of man.”