‘That’s true.’
She had seen Charlton Heston in a disaster film recently and he had looked so much older. She had resented Gus asking if Charlton was the disaster. But he was looking his best in this one.
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘Ah saw auld Sammy Pryce on Tuesday. Or was it Monday? No, it was Tuesday. For Ah remember Ah had just come oot the butcher’s. And his face looks that sad these days. It’s the saddest face Ah’ve ever seen.’
‘That’s just tired facial muscles. That’s all it is. Makes everythin’ sag. Sammy looks like a bloodhound.’
Jeanie said nothing. She had little patience with the way Gus turned everything into a theory. She wasn’t the only one who had noted that tendency. In ‘The Akimbo Arms’, where he drank, Gus McPhater was paid court to in a way that was only half-jocular. He had more than once declared himself to be in the tradition of the Scottish autodidacts. Even the word was typical. It was natural that he would prefer it to ‘self-taught’. He would seldom say ‘giraffe’ when he could say ‘camelopard’. It was that preference for fancy words that sometimes made people defensively try to outmanoeuvre him. But that wasn’t an easy thing to do, for besides being well-read he could think fast on his feet or sitting down, which was the more usual posture. (He sometimes said he was a founder member of the perisedentary school of philosophy.)
Once in ‘The Akimbo Arms’ a group of students had turned up with what was obviously a prearranged plan to disconcert him. He had been handling himself well when the subject of Oscar Wilde was raised. One of the students had been studying him intensively at university. He noticed a certain vagueness pass across Gus’s features.
‘You know his stuff?’ the student asked.
‘Oscar Wilde?’ Gus winked at the regulars in the bar.
‘I’ll bet you a pint you can’t tell me one thing he said.’
Gus gazed at the ceiling.
‘One thing Oscar Wilde said?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Set up the pint,’ Gus said to Harry the barman. ‘If Ah win, you pay. If Ah lose, Ah pay. All right?’
The student agreed. Gus stared at the pint thoughtfully. He turned to the student.
‘Good evening,’ he said, and was drinking deep before the student realised that Gus was quoting.
That occasional hint of charlatanism was effectively offset by the things Gus genuinely knew. If somebody mentioned Esperanto, Gus could tell him that it had been invented by Zamenhof and that he was a Pole. He could describe the flag of Zimbabwe. It was as if his early career as a merchant seaman had developed an imaginative extension. Once Jeanie’s protestations had put him in dry-dock, as he expressed it, he had sent his mind travelling to exotic facts and imaginary landscapes. His theories were his rough maps of those inner territories. They were travellers’ tales of the intellect and, as in most travellers’ tales, truth was usually in there somewhere, though not always immediately recognisable.
Jeanie had long ago ceased to look for it. She simply waited for the theory of the moment to pass, like static on a radio. She had decided that Gus’s theories never changed anything. They were something to be put up with. If you married somebody you knew liked garlic, you couldn’t spend the rest of your life complaining about bad breath.
‘But as Sammy is,’ Gus said. ‘So shall we be.’
On the television Cornel Wilde was talking in a funny accent to a woman. In this film he was always comparing women to drink. To this woman he was talking about ‘shompanye’. Jeanie assumed he meant champagne.
‘Time’s runnin’ out for us, too, Jeanie,’ Gus was saying.
‘We’re only fifty-eight. Sammy’s in his seventies.’
‘Fifty-eight. Fifty-eight.’ Gus said it with sonorous melancholy, like the tolling of a bell.
‘You’ll be fifty-nine in August,’ Jeanie said.
‘That’s why we should do what we want to do while we can, Jeanie. Life’s for livin’. Ye don’t know what could happen to Sadie. Ye’ve never even been over there. You should go. What’s to stop ye? The lassies are married. Ye’ve seen them settled. Enjoy yerself, wumman. Go to Canada.’
‘How could Ah afford that?’
‘Ye’ve yer wee bit money. Yer nest egg.’
At the mention of the money, Jeanie listened more carefully to him. Since she had won three-and-a-half thousand pounds on the football pools a year ago and put it in the bank, Gus had been referring to it in a variety of ways, as like someone looking for a password.
‘And what would you be doin’?’
‘Well, Ah could come along.’ He paused. ‘Ah miss the travel.’ He paused. ‘And maybe take in some other places while you’re at Sadie’s.’
Jeanie’s head swivelled round from the television. She looked at him and nodded. It wasn’t a friendly nod. She wasn’t agreeing with him but with herself.
‘Huh!’ she said. ‘A train through the Rockies.’
‘Sorry?’
She was watching the television again.
‘Ah think Ah’ve lost the thread o’ this conversation,’ Gus said.
‘A train through the Rockies,’ Jeanie said.
Gus knew what Jeanie meant. Jeanie knew that Gus knew what Jeanie meant. Gus knew that Jeanie knew that Gus knew what Jeanie meant.
‘Ah don’t know what ye’re talkin’ about,’ Gus said.
Jeanie smiled. It was a smile it had taken years to temper, steely and impregnable. It was a fortress of a smile. Gus philosophically regretted, not for the first time, that law of diminishing returns in human relationships whereby what was given in intimacy came back malice. When they were younger, Gus’s ambition to take a train through the Rockies, from Calgary to Vancouver, was a dream they had jocularly shared. Out of all the travelling he had done, that was the one thing he had quite wilfully decided he had missed. It had become somehow climactically important for him. If he had been Moses, a train through the Rockies would have been Canaan. ‘When we’re older,’ Jeanie had often said. ‘An’ the weans are oot from oor feet.’ He regretted his big mouth. If people didn’t know your dreams, how could they thwart them?
‘No train through the Rockies for you, ma lad,’ Jeanie said. ‘My Goad. You’ve wanted yer hands on that money since Ah won it. The one time in ma life Ah’ve had a few pounds by me. An’ ye’re slevering at the chops tae get yer hands on it.’
Gus glanced down at ‘On Human Nature’ as if he couldn’t believe in it. He watched Jeanie watching television.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is a contemptible remark. You should see about yerself, missus. Yer mind’s poisoned. It’s maybe all the radiation off that telly.’
Jeanie sat smugly saying nothing.
‘But here the envious man finds himself in an unfortunate position; for all his blows fall powerless as soon as it is known that they come from him,’ Schopenhauer said.
Gus’s mind circled Jeanie’s silence cautiously.
‘What’s the point of havin’ money and doin’ nothin’ with it?’
‘Ye never know what’s round the corner.’
‘Another bloody corner. Ye could go on like that till they bury it with ye.’
‘We’ve one grandchild an’ another on the way. There’s always a place for money tae go.’
‘Ah’ll see them right. Ah’m earnin’.’
‘A bookie’s clerk!’
‘Ah’m a marker. Ah mark up the prices.’
‘That’s the nearest you’ll get tae money. Seein’ other folk collect it. An’ how long will ye be there?’
‘How d’ye mean?’
‘How many jobs have you had since ye came out the Merchant Navy?’
The question settled between them in the silence, as awesome in its unanswerability as the riddle of the universe. Gus half-heartedly started to count back and gave up. You might as well ask Casanova for a quick count of his ladies.
‘Ah like to try different things,’ he said.
‘Ye should try work sometime.’
‘Ah’ve always worked. And you’ve always had yer money.’
It was true, so Jeanie didn’t answer. But a lot of other things were true as well, such as that he had always worked on his own terms, taking to every job he had ever had an intractable pride that he obeyed, regardless of the circumstances in which they were living. There was the time she had been pregnant with Donna, her second, and they were very short of money and he had walked into the house early in the afternoon. He had only just got the job as a storeman in a printer’s warehouse. Once she had found out why he was home, her disbelief had lasted for four wordless days until he found another job. He had argued with the foreman about the number of islands in the Japanese archipelago and, impassioned beyond common sense, had finished up shouting that control of words should never be left in the hands of an ignoramus and that he couldn’t work for a moron.
Jeanie had never known where the next bout of unemployment was coming from. The calendar had always been a financial minefield for her. She had sometimes suspected that Gus arranged his industrial crises in order to have more time to read. He had once developed a mysteriously painful back that was just as mysteriously cured when he had finished reading War and Peace.
When the money came, it was like an insurance policy being realised. All those times of worry when Gus had come home to say that was him finished with that job, all the nights lying in bed doing accounts in her head, a pound here and two pounds there, had eventually amounted to £3,500. She felt the justice of it. It didn’t seem like an accident. It was the security she had surely earned. But it was only security as long as it was there. While it lay in the bank, she was safe from the daily irritations, the fraying of the nerves that thirty-five years of marriage to Gus had represented. He complained that she didn’t use it. She was using it all the time. It lightened her housework. It sweetened every cup of coffee, sugared every doughnut. At night she could bathe her mind in it like a Radox bath before she went to sleep.
‘What would be wrong wi’ usin’ some of it to go to Canada? Ye won it at the football, anyway. Though how ye did, Ah don’t know. Ye wouldny know a right half from a wee half.’
‘No, you would, though. You would be drinkin’ a lot of wee halfs if you could get your hands on it.’
He was right about her knowing nothing about football but that didn’t diminish her belief in the justice of her win. She had a dim image of a lot of young men running about a lot of parks that fateful Saturday afternoon, doing the strange things people do with a football, and she thought there was a kind of fairness in the way they had conspired to repay her for what she had suffered in the cause of the game. For the importance of football to the Scots was yet another of Gus’s theories, one for which he seemed to feel the need to do a lot of fieldwork. Every time Scotland and England played at Hampden or Wembley, he was there, as well as having been in Cardiff and Belfast. The way back from such places always seemed to be fraught with hazard. She was used to getting phone calls from Preston or Carlisle or Dumfries two days after an international match had finished to learn that a car had broken down without warning or a freak thunderstorm had flooded roads or one of the men he was with had been taken to hospital with acute something-or-other. Her exasperation had come to a climax the last time he had done it. When he announced himself, she had said, ‘Gus who?’ and put the phone down. When he got home, she said she had thought it was one of those funny phone calls.
‘It wouldn’t take that much,’ Gus said.
‘Listen! You want to go tae the Rockies. Go. Ye’ve got ma blessing.’ The film was obviously coming to an interesting part. ‘Ah’ll maybe get watchin’ the television in peace. But ye don’t get a penny from me.’
‘Ah would’ve done it for you.’
‘The money’s mine!’
‘On the other side, it may be said that Avarice is the quintessence of all vices,’ Schopenhauer said.
‘You really want me to go?’
‘Go.’
She knew she was safe enough. He had always been struggling to get as far as London for a game. It looked as if the train was heading for a terrible accident. It was a good thing they had Charlton Heston there.
‘All right –’
‘Sh!’
There was an ear-shattering crash. The train buckled and slewed terrifyingly. Carriages came off the rails, rolled over, burst open. More circus animals than you would have thought the train could hold broke free from the wreckage – elephants, lions, horses and others Jeanie wasn’t sure she could identify – and ran in various directions over the countryside. Steam hissed from the broken engine. People were injured and bleeding. They found Charlton Heston almost crushed to death, a huge girder that nobody could move lying across his chest.
‘The thing is, Jeanie –’
‘Sh!’
The small sound was like a whiplash to Gus’s dignity. He was trying to talk about something of major importance and his wife had no time for him. He felt as if he was being cuckolded by the television. Just on cue, like the other man entering at exactly the wrong moment, Charlton spoke.
‘We may miss the matinee,’ he said from under his girder, ‘but we’ll make the evening show.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Gus was on his feet. ‘How can you sit there an’ watch that shite? Ah resent ma hoose gettin’ used as a sewer for Hollywood. Look at that! Look at it!’ He was over beside Jeanie, pointing towards the screen. ‘He was lyin’ under enough metal there tae rebuild the Tirpitz. There couldn’t be a bone in his body that wasn’t broken. There’s wild animals miles away by this time. There must be folk all over the neighbourhood gettin’ chewed alive and trampled to daith. Evenin’ show? Who’s gonny be the audience? How can you sit there an’ watch that? An’ that daft Cornel Wilde. He talks about women as if they were an off-licence. An’ that Betty Hutton! Singin’ and dancin’ on a trampoline at the same time. Do you believe that tripe? See that Cecil B. De Mille. He must’ve had a heid like a corporation coup.’
Jeanie hadn’t taken her eyes off the television.
‘Ach, away an’ get yer train through the Rockies,’ she said.
‘You’ve said it!’ Gus was pointing at her, imposing as a figure in a Victorian print–The Outraged Husband. ‘That’s exactly where Ah’m goin’. And no comebacks from you. Don’t start moanin’ when Ah do. Because you think Ah can’t do it. Without your money. You and yer money! The Bloody Heiress. Well, Ah’m goin’, Missus. Just watch me go. Ah’m Rockies bound.’
‘Cheerio,’ Jeanie said.
Gus took Schopenhauer, who was still in his hand, and threw him viciously across the room. He grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair and put it on. He stood in the middle of the floor. He looked at Jeanie.
‘The only way tae get your attention,’ he said, ‘is tae appear on the telly. As long as it’s a bad programme. If it’s no’ shite, ye’ll still no’ be noticed. Missus, yer brains are mince. When Ah married you, Ah volunteered for a lobotomy.’
He went out. Jeanie tried to go on watching the television but the film had turned to farce before her eyes. She heard Gus’s voice as a mocking commentary over it, as a mocking commentary over her life. She felt silly watching it. She felt silly being her.
She rose and crossed to the window. She watched him reach the end of the street with his sailor’s walk. ‘On ye go,’ she muttered. ‘But ye’ll not go far.’
She crossed to where the book lay. She picked it up and looked at the cover. The face on the front was that of a peppery old man with flyaway hair. He looked like a troublemaker. She sneered at the face. ‘Worse than fancy women,’ she muttered.
She went through to the kitchen and opened the bin. Taking out the plastic shopping-bag that was full of rubbish, she checked that it contained suitably messy materials. There were egg shells and greasy paper and pieces of fat and the remains of some custard. As she opened the book, she noticed places where Gus had underlined parts and marked them with a biro star. These were the places she was most careful to
smear with custard and grease.
She pushed the book to the bottom of the rubbish and tied the handles of the shopping-bag in a knot. She went outside. Standing with the dustbin lid in her hand, she glanced up. The view was of dull back-gardens hemmed in by scabrously weathered council houses. It was the terminal vista of her life. But it would also be his. She painstakingly took out all the other plastic bags, put the one she had brought out at the bottom and covered it with the replaced bags. She put the lid back on the dustbin. ‘We’ll see what he does now,’ she muttered.
She came back in and closed the door and started to wash her hands in preparation for making his supper, which she would leave out for him when she went to bed.
17
Hullo again
Recognition came to him between dessert and coffee. He had noticed her earlier, sitting opposite another woman and talking with a slightly actressy animation, given to ingénue gestures that belied her age, as if life hadn’t discovered her yet. He had seen a woman in her forties with hair that still looked naturally dark, eyes that were still interested and a body that was nicely substantial. When he realised that he knew her, that he owned, as it were, a small part of her past, his glances had become less cursory, more proprietary. She’s weathered well, he thought. I wonder.
Recognising her was a moment of small adventure for him, a pulse of adolescence in a middle-aged day. The pretentious restaurant, chosen by his client, briefly seemed a place where something might happen and the deadness of occasion animate to an event. Even the proprietor’s manner seemed less obtrusive. He was a small, numbingly bright man who had fixed an expression of jollity to his face like a Hallowe’en mask. He mistook interference for attentiveness and flippancy for wit. His blandishments had threatened the meal, for eating in his presence was like having everything drenched in syrup.
He appeared to know the client well and perhaps they deserved each other. The client was a self-made man who had long ago ceased to notice that most of the parts were missing. ‘What I always say is’ was what he always said. He had started out ‘as a silly boy with nothing’ and after years of unremitting effort and deals of legendary deviousness had successfully transformed himself into a silly man with nothing, except an awful lot of money. He had spent most of the lunch expressing his modestly oblique astonishment at why other people couldn’t be more like him. ‘What I always say is whiners create their own difficulties.’ If everybody would get out and do as he had done, they could be in the same position as he was. The thought of a nation of near-millionaires seemed to present him with no logistical problems. He disarmed any suggestion of egotism with frequent references to how much he owed to God. He referred to God as if He might be a senior partner with a particularly astute sense of the market.
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