by George Friel
He felt her hips and back with wandering hands and she squirmed in a movement ambiguously encouraging and disapproving.
‘Yes, but there’s not many girls with hair like me, or my complexion,’ she suggested. ‘Then there’s my eyes. Did you never think of writing about my eyes, for instance?’
‘No, it wasn’t so much your eyes,’ he answered, a crease in his brow as if he were thinking.
‘Well, what was it then?’ she persisted. ‘What was it first attracted you to me?’
‘It was the way you walked, you know, the way you go round the tables,’ he said. He didn’t want to say it was her legs. He talked around it.
She made a low humming sound of acknowledgement, staring over his shoulder at the scribbling on the opposite wall as if she was trying to read what was there.
‘Did you ever hear of Shelley?’ he asked. He felt he had a duty to educate her. ‘He was a great poet if you like, a rebel. That’s what I am. I don’t agree with the world as it is today. I mean to say. I’ve read all his works. Do you know him?’
‘No, I can’t say I do,’ she conceded. His hands were at rest now he was going to teach her all about Shelley, and she wasn’t sure if she would have preferred his tongue to be at rest instead.
‘There’s a smashing wee pome of his I learned off by heart,’ he said relentlessly. ‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘I don’t mind I’m sure,’ she said patiently. She had been out with all kinds of boys in her short sweet life. She had learnt to be accommodating.
‘See!’ he declared abruptly, and she was reminded of a Scots comic she had once heard say, ‘See? See me! I don’t like fish!’
He gulped and went on in a canting voice.
The mountains kiss the heavens
And the waves clasp one another.
And the moonbeams kiss the sea.
What is all this kissing worth
If you don’t kiss me?
‘That’s nice, I like that,’ she breathed, and they kissed. He wasn’t very good at it and she felt he needed practice.
‘That’s Shelley, that is,’ he broke off. He couldn’t kiss and talk and he had to talk. He was getting scared at his own state. He was there on the brink, afraid the dip would be too cold. Talking would put off the embarrassing need for action. ‘It’s called love’s philosophy.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she answered intelligently.
‘It goes on,’ he said.
And he went on, his hands onher hips inside her open coat while hers dangled daintily over his narrow shoulders.
The fountains mingle with the river
And the river with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a rare emotion.
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle,
So why not you with mine?
He ended throatily, appealingly.
‘I don’t like that,’ she said severely, staring beyond him again. ‘I don’t think it’s very nice.’
She wriggled. He was pressing too hard against her. She squirmed loose and stepped past him, right shoulder forward, her body very straight and her head up as if she was doing the side-stepping movement in a reel.
He managed to grab the tail of her coat just as she reached the bend in the close under the gaslight. She was halted. Percy tugged and she pulled and they wrestled. They finished up panting in the back-close again, only this time they were against the opposite wall. So Percy won. Or Sophy let him win, for who would dare argue that the parallelogram of forces represents the resultant of a lovers’ scuffle?
‘Don’t be daft,’ he complained, standing over her with his long arms on either side of her drooping shoulders so that she was barred from escape. ‘What did you want to run away like that for?’
‘Cause I didn’t like what you were insinuating,’ she said firmly.
‘I wasn’t insinuating nothing,’ he answered, all hurt. ‘It was Shelley I was saying.’
‘I still don’t like it,’ she tossed her head.
‘But there’s nothing wrong in it,’ he argued. ‘It’s perfectly natural. That’s what Shelley was saying. If two people love each other like you and me—’
His arms came closer in his eagerness to confine her.
‘I wish you’d lay off the subject,’ she muttered, scowling darkly in the dimness.
‘Why?’ he demanded, and his arms went round her like the coils of a boa-constrictor. Inspired by a confused recollection of a novel by Lawrence he had tried to read he was proud of his wholesome maturity and maleness and he longed to reach the dark roots of her being and quicken her. ‘We should act according to our impulses, it’s the only natural thing to do, if a man’s to be a man.’
‘I thought you was a nice boy,’ she complained, struggling again.
He was worse than he had been. The wrestling-match at the bend of the close had raised his temperature to boiling point and he was in a state again.
‘Oh, Sophy, please,’ he groaned, an asthmatic bull in a grassless meadow. ‘I think you’re wonderful. I love you. I want you.’
She didn’t even pretend to be impressed. She sent a little signal of scepticism through her nose, a maidenly snort of disbelief, but he blundered on. He felt he was face to face with death, the death of his hopes for an initiation with Sophy. He didn’t want to die, ever, and he was panic- stricken in case he died wondering.
‘Come on, be a sport, let me!’ he pleaded, as hoarse as an NCO after his first day taking a squad in the square.
He wound round her to crush her squirming body in a heroic hug, but she ducked, side-stepped, and stood free of him. He was bang up against the scarred brown paintwork on the wall while Sophy stood at his side with one hand on her hip and the other caressing her pony-tail. But he still wasn’t beaten. He was only provoked. He went on blundering.
‘I can make it worth your while,’ he declared, staggering from the unwelcoming wall. He delved into the pocket inside his new sports jacket (best Harris tweed, heather mixture pattern, fourteen guineas in Carswell’s), fumbled with his pocket book, opened it trembling, and brought out a five-pound note, another five-pound note, waved them before her astounded young eyes.
‘You can have them! You can have them both! I don’t care, there’s plenty more where they came from!’
He was teetering there, certain he was going to gain her, and then her little hand darted. First in a vertical flash it scattered his precious wallet and then it came back on the horizontal plane and slapped him hard across the face. (Mrs Maguire on the ground floor stood with the teapot over her cup and breathed nervously, ‘What was that?’)
Percy put his hand to his cheek as if to make sure it was really his face she had smacked.
‘Well, I like that!’ Sophy flared. ‘So that’s the kind of girl you think I am! Just right here and now, eh? Just like that? Do you think I’m mad? And if you’ve got that kind of money to throw away what the hell are you bothering about me at all for, tell me that! You don’t need to come slobbering round me if you want to buy it. You know where to go or it’s high bloody time you did. Well, I like that! You and your po’try. And I don’t know what you’re doing with all that money anyway, a fella that’s no’ working. I’ve a good mind to tell my brother about you.’
Her inflated little bosom heaved, she flared and sputtered at him. Then she picked up her handbag and marched off. No side-slip this time, but a military quickstep, and Percy was left alone with his smarting face. He stood bleak and frozen in the twilight of the back-close, heard Sophy’s high heels tattoo upstairs, heard her knock at her door on the second storey of the three, heard the door open and the door bang. She was gone, gone for ever. He nearly wept. But perhaps her brother was in. There was no time to waste in tears. He picked up his wallet in a flurry, put the fivers back inside as he hurried through the front-close and ran to the nearest bus-stop.
It
was all very well for Shelley. He could say it and get it printed in his immortal works and even in the Golden Treasury. But Shelley didn’t have to deal with these narrow-minded waitresses who had no appreciation of love’s philosophy. He worked hard on a grudge against Sophy as he waited splay-footed and nervous for a bus to come, one hand inside his jacket fondling his wallet as a talisman. He didn’t care which bus he got so long as it took him away from the scene of his Waterloo. He suddenly felt hungry, and a shattering thought lashed his already turbulent mind.
‘I’ll have to find somewhere else to eat now!’ he lamented to the bus-stop standard, and tutted to the night air at the nuisance of it. He felt himself wronged and humiliated. After the way she had mentioned her brother he would have to disappear for good so far as Sophy was concerned. He had made a mistake.
‘Ach, maybe she was right,’ he thought generously arguing against his fabricated grudge, for he took a pride in always seeing at least two sides to any question. ‘Maybe it was a mistake to offer her money. But I was desperate. I should have kept it till after.’
By the time he was speeding home on the bus his brain was empty. It was tired of fretting about Sophy and the absurd failure to seduce her. The stranger drifted in to fill the vacuum.
‘Oh, dear! There’s him to worry about!’ he remembered in misery. ‘He’s a menace, he is! I wonder where he’s got to.’
Stumbling on a rhyme he brooded about a poem in which a stranger was a danger. He thought out the first two lines.
Within life’s vale of tears I face one danger
That makes my blood run cold, a questioning stranger—
But he couldn’t go on. His headache began to bother him again, his stomach quivered, turned, tied itself in painful knots. He was frightened again. Sophy’s brother and the stranger merged into one cloud darkening his future, disturbing his peace of mind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mrs Phinn’s daily duties as a school-cleaner were in two spells. She went in at six in the morning before the school opened and worked till a quarter to nine, and she went back at four o’clock in the afternoon when the school was dismissed and worked till six in the evening. She did it with a grudge. She hated being a poor widow who had to do a menial job for a few shillings to pay her way, and a hardup way it was. She resented being under the eye of the janitor for clocking in in the morning and clocking out at tea-time, because she despised him as an interloper. He would never have got the job if her husband hadn’t been found dead in the cellar the day after his brother was killed in a car-crash on the Glasgow–Edinburgh road, the notorious A8. And he didn’t strike her as being a janitor in the true tradition. He wasn’t like her husband, serious, clever and experienced. He was a flippant, scruffy, inexpert little man, always calling in a plumber or a joiner for jobs her man would have done himself as a matter of course. And he knew next to nothing about janitor’s stock or janitor’s requisitions. He could never say, as her husband had said in all truth, that although he was only the janitor he was just as important to the school as any headmaster. Her husband knew his job. This fellow didn’t. He didn’t even know his place. He was chatty with the headmaster and familiar with the cleaners.
‘Well, with some of them,’ she complained to Percy, not that he was listening. ‘That Mrs Winters in particular is never out of his room. I don’t see how she can be doing her job right, the time she spends sitting in there drinking tea. They think I don’t know. She’s some widow, that one Made up to kill. Out at six in the morning with her powder on thick and her lipstick on like a chorus girl. I don’t know what he thinks he’s up to. She’s no’ as young as she makes out to be. Her hair’s dyed for one thing. And he’s got a wife of his own anyway. She calls him by his first name. Imagine that! None of the cleaners ever dared call your father by his first name when he was on duty. But this little upstart never wears a hat. Your father used to polish the badge in his hat every night. He looked the part. He knew how to hold himself. He knew how to speak to cleaners. But all these things is dying out now. Everybody’s equal. It’s all wrong.’
She crossed to the main gate at six o’clock the morning after her son had kept his chastity and her body trembled with longing for the sleep the alarm had broken. Yet it was a fine summer morning, the sky above the tall tenements was blue and unclouded, and the pigeons were already talking to each other in the high roof of the sandstone school. She grudged feeling it was good to be alive after all, but she felt it, and her awakening senses granted to her weary body that it was better to be up and doing on such a lovely morning than lying in a lazy bed. She was just coming really awake, approaching the gate, when a man at the corner of Bethel Street and Tulip Place whistled to her. She was affronted. She was wearing old stockings, her bare head showed her greying hair, and anyway six o’clock in the morning, even if it was a lovely morning, was no time for a man to be accosting a woman. Her head reared and her small thin body stiffened, dignity and alarm fighting for control of her. She glanced obliquely at the whistler, just to see what kind of man he was. He came quickly towards her, beckoning her over anxiously. She stood still and waited. She wasn’t going to walk to any man. Let him come to her. The janitor would hear her if she screamed.
‘Mrs Phinn?’ he asked civilly.
She didn’t deny it.
‘I’m the man that drove the car,’ he said. ‘You know, Sammy’s car.’
She looked at him hard. She didn’t believe in ghosts at any time, certainly not at six o’clock on a summer morning.
‘He was killed,’ she said. ‘They both were killed, Sammy and the man that was driving him.’
‘Aye, on the Friday, but I mean on the Thursday. It was me that drove the car on the Thursday, that’s what I mean, on the Thursday night.’
He smiled wisely to her, showing two yellow fangs, but she was more taken by a pink line from his nose to his jawbone, the scar of a razor-slash.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sorry,’ she answered, her head up and back from him as if he was a bad egg she had just cracked.
‘Who are ye kidding, missis?’ he complained, not so civil now. ‘You know damn fine what Sammy was up to the Thursday night afore he was killed.’
‘He was up to no good if I know him,’ she snapped. ‘He always was up to no good.’
‘He was up to a lot of good that night,’ the stranger smiled again. ‘And he saw your man on the Friday morning afore he went to Edinburgh. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ she snubbed him. ‘I can assure you my man wanted as little to do as possible with his brother even if they was twins.’
‘Did Hamish no’ tell you what he did with it all?’ he kept at her.
‘All what?’ she asked impatiently. ‘I’ve got my work to go to, I can’t stand here wasting time talking to you, when I don’t even know who you are anyway.’
‘I’ve told you who I am,’ he said, his hands out with the palms up. ‘I’m one of Sammy’s crowd. It was me drove the car, and I got nothing for it. No, he tells me to wait, just wait. It’ll be all right in a month or two. Then he goes and gets killed and here’s me still waiting. Somebody must know. You must know. Because Sammy saw your man right after it.’
‘I assure you I don’t know,’ she insisted, very dignified with him, talking with a bogus accent to let him know she was a respectable woman who knew nothing of her criminal brother-in-law. ‘I can assure you I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
She looked towards the gate and wondered if she could run that far and get into the school before this strange man assaulted her.
‘Don’t give us that,’ he said roughly, his palm lightly under her elbow, ready to clutch her if she moved. ‘Youmust know. Look, Sammy was coming back from Edinburgh when he had that smash, wasn’t he? And he’d been to see the jelly-man, hadn’t he? Don’t argue. I know. And he gave him fifty quid on account, but that was in fivers from another from another bank. So he’s still waiting
too. The bloke with him that was killed, he went inside with Sammy, but he had nothing on him when he was killed. There’s nobody had nothing. So where is it? It’s a hell of a lot of money to be lying about.’
‘If you’re trying to insinuate that my brother-in-law stole some money and gave it to my husband to keep for him, you’re mistaken,’ Mrs Phinn locuted at him. ‘And I can assure you I know nothing about any money. Do I look as if I had anything to do with money? Do you think I’d be out here at this time in the morning going to sweep floors if I had any money?’
‘That’s no’ the point,’ he countered. ‘You couldny use the kind of money I’m talking about. It would only scare folk like you. You wouldny know whit to do wi’ it. All you’ve got to do is tell me what Sammy fixed up wi’ Hamish and I can take it off your hands and give you plenty o’ money you’d be glad to use.’
‘Money, money, money!’ she cried. ‘I’ve told you. If you’re trying to tell me Sammy Phinn passed a lot of money to my man you’re up the wrong close. As a matter of fact many’s the time my Hamish lent his brother money, money he never got back.’
‘Oh aye, they were thick,’ the stranger granted. ‘Your man was good to his twin. Sammy told me that himself.’
‘Aye, they were twins but quite different,’ Mrs Phinn said proudly. ‘My Hamish was a good man. He was never the gambler and the drinker and the thief his brother was. It was Sammy broke old Granny Phinn’s heart. In and out of jail, in and out of jail.’
‘Look, missis,’ said the stranger aggrievedly. ‘Stop kidding me. You know fine it was Sammy did the Finnieston bank that Thursday.’
Mrs Phinn let out a little scream and her rough hand went to her flat chest and then fluttered to her mouth in alarm. ‘Sammy Phinn never did a bank in his life,’ she cried. ‘He wouldn’t dare. Wee sweetie-shops and pubs was his level. A bank! He could no more have did a bank than fly in the air.’
