The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  He said nothing for such a long time that she was afraid she had hurt him or that, as suddenly as he had asked her, he had changed his mind.

  “I understand that,” Sandy said. He could get up from the chair and he crossed the room with the aid of his leaning sticks, as he called them, and to the door. She wanted him out then. She couldn’t stand his being there another moment, the pressure of his being weighing on her; it was all too much for her to sort out. And she wanted him gone and out of there before her mother came back from the Pluck Me with the messages.

  “Well … thank you,” Sarah said.

  “Thank you.”

  She hung the singlet by the fire and went to empty the water.

  “For the whisky,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, yes, that. That was nothing.”

  Sarah colored slightly but he didn’t notice.

  “And for asking me to be your wife.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, that was something.”

  Please go now, her eyes said, but he didn’t seem to read them. He wanted to leave with something more than that, as if she had delivered a loaf of bread and not her body and heart.

  “When can I speak to your father?”

  “Father? You speak to Mother here.”

  “No, no. You always ask the father.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon.”

  He suddenly reached out and seized her, wrapping his arm around both of hers, and kissed her on the lips until she felt they were burning.

  “We’ve known each other long enough,” he said, and laughed, and then managed this time to get over the threshold with his sticks, unhampered now by the bottle of whisky, and get down on the Terrace and head up it for his home, at the end where all the Bones lived. He didn’t turn around, but he waved his stick just once and she knew.

  “How long was he here?” her mother said.

  Sarah had no idea at all. She tried to find the sun in the window to put herself back in time.

  “Who?” she finally said.

  “The man.”

  “My husband?” She felt her mother grip her arm.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Why, what is the matter with me?”

  “‘My husband?’” she mimicked.

  “I said that?” Her mother nodded. “I must have been dreaming.” Her mother looked at her carefully.

  “Aye, you must have been dreaming, because you remember this. We’re not going to bring any hippety-hincher into this family. The man who comes in it for you will be a man who can work and put some siller in the kist.”

  “Aye, Momma.”

  * * *

  They found out about the first-footer later, of course, the bottle on the dresser and whisky on her breath, and they were seriously upset. The blond man was an omen of trouble for a year at least to come.

  “He’s a nice man but how could you let him in?” Andrew demanded. Sarah merely smiled. “You could have talked to him at the door.”

  “He just came in.”

  “You don’t seem very upset about it.”

  “No.”

  “Is that all you can say? ‘No,’ like that,” Jemmie said. “Of course it’s not your head the roof is going to come down on.”

  “How can you be a first-footer with no feet?”

  And it worked with them the way it had worked with her. They were spared by a reasoning so simple and obvious that it made them laugh. They decided right then to end the first-foot nonsense. Sam trotted down to the Sportin Moor and came up with Black Willie Stuart, Pretty Wullie, short and chunky and considered by those with common taste to be the most handsome young man in Pitmungo. Sam led him over the threshold for a drink and, to the amazement of the family, Sarah kissed him.

  12

  Ian heard it first because in his uncanny way Ian always heard the bad news first. He caught Sam trotting up from the Sportin Moor where Pitmungo had just whipped Kinglassie.

  “How’d you do?” He knew.

  “Killed them,” Sam said. “Ran them off the turf.”

  “Aye, that’s good, because that might be the last time you ever do that,” Ian said. Very casual, very coolly. Sam finally decided to go for the bait.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What’s it worth to you if I tell you something that means a very great deal in your life?”

  “Nothing. You have such a big gob you’ll tell me sooner or later.”

  But later that night Sam took his brother by the arm and pulled him out of the house.

  “All right, what is it?” He threw a threepence on the stones of the Terrace.

  “I don’t mind stooping, but not for that.” Sam flipped a penny onto the ground. “It’ll take another one of those.”

  “How about one of these?” Sam showed him his fist.

  “Won’t do any good.”

  Sam threw a second penny onto the cobblestones. Ian drew a deep breath.

  “They’re going to shut down the Sportin Moor.” He seemed to delight in telling it. “They’re going to close it down; they’re going to take it away from us.”

  “They can’t,” Sam said. “It’s ours.”

  “They’re going to,” Ian said.

  Sam looked at Ian’s pinched face. “You’re a liar,” he shouted at him. “Tell me you’re a liar.” He reached out and seized Ian. “You tell me you’re a fuckin liar.”

  Ian made no move to escape or dodge, no move of any kind.

  “Fuckin LIAR!” Sam screamed. Doors opened down the lane.

  A man came out with a heavy gnarled walking stick. “You watch your mouth, you understand?” he said, and then put the stick down. “It’s Sam Cameron,” he called back into the house. “Can you imagine that? And I always thought he was a decent one.”

  Sam was ashamed of himself but he held on to Ian.

  “All right, where did you get it?”

  “Brothcock’s office. Letter to Mr. Brothcock from Lady Jane’s law agent.”

  It was believable enough. Brothcock hired pit boys to clean his office and it never occurred to him that a pit boy could read, especially after going to the Company school.

  They were going to put a fence around the moor, Ian said, and sink a new mine shaft in the middle of it. The slag pile for the refuse would be where the cricket pitch now stood and the breaker house where the rugby field was. The tipple would be on the football field, Sam’s personal field of glory, and the coal bing, where they stored the new-mined coal, where the quoiting was played. Sam let him go.

  “You know where you’re wrong?” He felt suddenly better about it. “That land is a common, and under English law the common land can’t be taken away from the people, not even by the great Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo, or Countess Fyffe, or whatever the hell she calls herself now.”

  Ian shrugged.

  “Don’t shrug at me. She feus that land and we’re the feuars, and just so we pay our fee—that’s the tub of coal we give her every year on Miners’ Freedom Day—she can’t do a thing about it.”

  Ian shrugged. He believed in nothing. Sam smiled. He believed in law.

  Sometimes at night after that, it bothered Sam, lying in bed thinking about it. He wouldn’t put it past Brothcock and the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company to try something like that. He would resolve then to go down and see Mr. Selkirk about the law, but in the morning, as he went down across the rich green moor grass on the way to the mine, the idea of taking the moor away from them grew ridiculous with the rising of the sun. Besides, he couldn’t stand Selkirk and his swollen red face, filling his father full of ideas that only made him restless and unhappy, Red ideas, and he couldn’t forgive him for taking Rob Roy away from them with his slick glib-gabbet. It would all come to nothing anyway, just like the Cameron name being on the Company’s victimization list—families and people to watch. If they were on the list the Company had an odd way of showing it, because the Cameron men were making more
money in the mines than in all their previous years. The coal bottoms were lined up along St. Andrew’s wharf so steadily and in such numbers that Maggie Cameron no longer ordered her children up on the High Moor to take the Cameron count.

  They must have been right about their first-footer. When the time neared for Miners’ Freedom Day, the real New Year in coal towns, and the yearly parade—the paraude, in Pitmungo—no roof had fallen in, no fires or explosions had taken place, not one miner’s body had been found sprawled in the pit dead from gas. And the siller kept chinking its way into the kist until the whelk loss had been made up and even Gillon’s memory of it eased with the growing heaviness of the money chest.

  From Maggie’s point of view there were three things troubling the family and only one of them was serious. Rob Roy had given up all pretense of contributing his share to the Cameron Pot, but that had not been unexpected. The fear was that his drinking would soon cost him his job, and even though he had left them she knew the family would not allow him to go hungry. Rob Roy would become a drain on the family.

  And then Sarah had several times been found behind the houses on the Terrace holding hands with Sandy Bone. Sarah was always remorseful about it.

  “Look, you,” Maggie had said. “He’s a nice lad from a good family but you must stay away from him. You only lead the man on. We’re not going to have any cripple-dick in this family and that is the final word on that.”

  Sarah always said aye and that she knew and understood; she always cried in remorse and she always got caught again, like a drinker and his temperance pledge and his bottle.

  And the trouble with Sam.

  A month before Freedom Day, when it came his turn to put his share in the Pot, he had nothing to put in it.

  “Where is it? What’s happened to it?” Maggie had said.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You’re committing a sin, you realize.” It never occurred to any Cameron that he might not be.

  “I know. All I can say is that the money will be made up.”

  There was shock in the room. Rob Roy at times had gone light with the kist but no one had ever flatly failed it.

  “It’s Rob Roy, isn’t it?” Gillon said, finally. “He’s gotten in trouble and you gave your pay packet to him.”

  Sam looked at the ground and only shook his head, and then Jemmie understood and crossed the room and put his arm around his brother.

  “Look, man,” Jem said. “Whoever it is, don’t marry her. It’s as much her fault as yours. She had as much fun doing it as you did; there’s no sense you got to pay for it.”

  Sam kept trying to break in on him.

  “Let her sit on the cutty stool a few weeks; that’s not going to kill her. Won’t be the first time that has happened; won’t be the first time some pit jock has himself a merry begotten.”

  “Jem. Jemmie,” Sam said. “There is no bairn, there is no merry begotten.”

  It took time for that to sink in, because the problem had been seen and solved.

  “What happened to the money, then?”

  “There is none.”

  “What kind of answer is that, man?”

  “The only one there is.”

  He had never failed her before. He was bringing in as much siller as Gillon now. In his way Jemmie had helped; at least there was something to be thankful for—there wouldn’t be a new baby in the house. She put a zero after Sam’s name and said, “Let’s get on with the rest,” bitterly, because she needed it all now, every bawbee of it. The kist had been committed to something bigger, but only Maggie knew that then.

  13

  For years, she had had her eyes on it, relishing every little sign of disrepair and decay.

  Douglas Ogilvie and Sons, Ltd.

  Dealers in Mining Equipment

  Back Street, Cowdenbeath

  Poorly managed, poorly run, going down. No one ever about the place as far as Maggie could make out. The company once had dominated the mining supply business around Cowdenbeath and it still had a certain amount of business, the residue of habit and inertia. But Mr. Ogilvie, who had inherited the business, had no real interest in it or aptitude for it. Stockpiles were always disorganized, orders got lost, bills went uncollected, and major pieces of equipment were allowed to stand out in the rain and snow and would finally have to be sold at cost or less in order to get sold at all.

  Then, when his son Malcom had died from drink or a fall from a horse or both, and his other son, Donald, decided he could no longer live in a place like Cowdenbeath and left Scotland for Canada, Maggie knew her moment had come. Within a month of Donald’s going she wrote the first of her letters to the aging Mr. Ogilvie, signed “M. D. Cameron” and written in as manly a hand as she could manage.

  No, he had written back, he had no interest in selling his business just because his sons were gone; he still had a living to make. Then she had written back that he must have misunderstood: the Cameron Group, as she called them, had no intention of trying to buy him out but merely to purchase an option to buy, at a price that was acceptable to both of them, in the highly unlikely event that anything happened to him. The option would be renewable each year at a fee that would be paid in cash to him. She was not surprised to be invited down to Cowdenbeath for a talk one Saturday with Mr. Ogilvie. He was very surprised to find that M. D. Cameron was a woman.

  “A woman,” he said. It struck him as enormously interesting, enormously odd, enormously amusing. “A woman in the mining equipment business.” He smiled at her, shaking his head. Not a tooth in his head, she was pleased to note. “As likely as a woman running a bull farm.”

  She was also pleased to see that Mr. Ogilvie had gone downhill as swiftly as his business was going. One close look at him was enough to convince anyone that something serious was going to happen to him soon. He studied her closely, although he could barely make her out in the gloom—filth would be more accurate—of his office.

  “Have you ever been down in a coal mine?”

  “No. Does Mr. Westwater know how to write books in order to sell them?” It made him laugh.

  “Clever,” he said. “Damn clever reply. That calls for a drink, I’d say. Will you join me in some sherry?”

  Ah, there it was, Maggie thought, the flaw, the fatal excess, drinking at noon on Saturday. Good. She had never had sherry but she agreed to have one, to encourage him onward. It was very nice. Mr. Ogilvie leaned back, his glass stirring dust on a pile of unopened orders or bills.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he sighed. He seemed very content with himself and his situation. “If Mrs. Ogilvie could see me now, sharing a drink with a woman, a quite beautiful woman, in the confines of my office. She’s keenly jealous.”

  Of what, Maggie thought, but she played the game.

  “I’ll say this much. If you do enter the mining equipment business you’ll be the prettiest person in it.”

  Another excess, Maggie noted. He probably took laudanum or drank morphine cough syrups as well.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” he said. “A man likes a cigar with his glass of sherry.” He poured another glass. He inhaled his cigar, she noted. The man is a mess, she thought. She was sure there was going to be some business about a little tanty-ranty in bed before any paper was signed and she found herself wondering just how far she was prepared to go.

  They fenced and parried their way through the better part of the bottle, most of it drunk by Mr. Ogilvie, before getting down to business. The plan was unusual. The Cameron Group would agree to make Mr. Ogilvie a present of twenty pounds a year for as long as he lived or for as long as he wished to go on running his business, merely in return for a first option to buy the business at a price of three hundred pounds, to be paid to his estate or to him if he retired.

  “You mean to sit there and tell me that if I continue to live another twenty years”—she knew he would pick that number—“you will have paid me the sum of four hundred pounds merely for the right to purchase my business for three
hundred pounds?”

  Maggie nodded and sipped her sherry. He would be lucky, she thought, to see the winter through. She poured him another glass.

  “I can see now why women don’t enter business,” Mr. Ogilvie said. “There are those who would say you are out of your pretty little head. I have always said that a woman’s place is in the bed—ah, home,” he said. He would have blushed, Maggie realized, if he had had sufficient blood in his system to do so. As it was, he shuffled some papers about.

  “I should like a little more time to think about it,” Mr. Ogilvie said. He didn’t need time, she knew, he wanted excuses to see her. It was the price she was going to have to pay, beyond the siller from the kist. It was certainly going to be easier than taking the money out.

  He led her out through the front way. A window in which pumps for sale were piled was so thick with dust it was impossible to see inside. Maggie felt her lips grow wet with apprehension, with lust, at the thought of bringing the dying shop back to life. Even while he was kissing her hand and applying just a little too much meaningful pressure on it, she thought of the store on Front Street that could serve as the window display, for the equipment in the storage yard, and the second office that they were in, where the bookwork could be done. Outside in the raw light of the street the man looked terrible, there was something that reminded her of oysters about him, the great drooping wet eyes, the pouches under them, the deep-grained wrinkles on his face like the back of a mollusk shell. It was a risk, she knew, but, when she looked at Mr. Ogilvie in that light, not much of a one.

  A few weeks after that he went too far, much too far, as she knew he must, his hands where they had no right to be, and she had him. Mr. Ogilvie signed the agreement and she gave him a payment of five pounds for the quarter of the year. His name was down with hers on the option and the paper was in the bosom of her dress. The kist was committed; the Camerons were committed, there was no going back now. However long it would take, the step up had been made. They were on their way out.

  It was the reason she behaved the way she did the next time Sam failed to put his money in the kist. They were committed, and while no deviation from the ritual of the kist had ever been tolerated, now there was no room even to consider tolerance. The money had to come. She nearly drove her son out of his home until she realized that her loss in the end would be the greater and she regained control of herself.