A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  He walked round the town, a slim torch in his hip- pocket, loitered in the Central Station, felt himself superior to the humanity oozing around him there, and when it was getting dark he went back to Bethel Street. He slouched up and down Tulip Place for quarter of an hour till he was sure there were no watching eyes in the blind- alley and slipped into the cellar.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Earlier that night Helen Garson was waiting across the street from the garage where her man worked. She was there before five o’clock, still wearing her uniform. But she was on an early shift, and finished for the day. She preferred to watch and wait till her man came out rather than go home and change and call at his house. She had long persuaded herself she would never go back there. He came out fifteen minutes late.

  ‘That’s him all right,’ she recognized disapprovingly. ‘Never could stop sharp. Many a good meal he wasted. Unpaid overtime, that’s what he does, but you can’t tell him anything.’

  She beckoned discreetly with one arm up and a slight side-to-side movement of her hand, a royal admission that she was there to be seen and welcomed. Bob Garson was aware at once of the green uniform across the street. Every time he saw a bus conductress he was reminded of his wife, and he would have kept his head down and passed on, burying the memory as he always did when he saw one, but the little wave of the hand halted him in a twilight of two minds at the graveside. He looked, he saw, he recognized. You would never have believed a man could be so embarrassed at being stopped in the street by his own wife. After all, he had courted her, he had married her, he had slept with her, he had begotten a child on her, he had seen her in her underwear and less, and now he was blushing and awkward at the sight of her on the Queen’s highway in the hardly glamorous coat and skirt of a female employee of Glasgow Corporation Transport. But she was that kind of woman. It didn’t matter what she wore. She was always herself, a rare womanly presence. He stood on one side of the street and she stood on the other. It was where they had left off: a test of wills. She waited and he waited. She beckoned again, with the index finger of her right hand crooked and signalling. For all the silence of her summons it might as well have been the song the sirens sang. She won. He crossed over. Yes, he was scowling, he was quite unamiable, he hadn’t a word to throw at her in greeting, his heart was black and his face was red, but though he was no Caesar he had crossed his Rubicon. But he didn’t know that when he made a brewer’s lorry stop at the pedestrian crossing to let him over.

  ‘What’s Frank been up to?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he answered, iceberg to iceberg, but of course we are told by those who know that kind of thing that two-thirds of an iceberg lie below the surface.

  ‘That’s a fine one!’ she cried indignantly. ‘You ask me to come home because of Frank and then you try to tell me you don’t know what he’s been doing. Well, I’m telling you straight, I’m not coming back home. I mean I’m not coming back to your house, till I know what it’s all about.’

  ‘What what’s all about?’ he looked at her strong wilful face withwn. That was no better. Even in that thick coat and gracele a grudge. But he couldn’t hold her eyes, and he looked doss skirt she looked well. He knew she had a good figure, and he resented that too.

  ‘You tell me,’ she said boldly. ‘It was you that started it.’

  ‘It was you that started it,’ he echoed her. ‘You left me of your own free will and as far as I’m concerned you can stay away.’

  ‘So that’s your story now, is it?’ she nodded wisely. ‘You want me to crawl, do you? I’ll see you in hell first. You think because you put a bit in the paper I’m going to come running back to you? Aye! Come back, all is forgiven! Who do you think you are to start forgiving anybody? You’re going to forgive me, are you? So I’ve to admit I was in the wrong! Oh no, Bob! Oh, no!’

  Her thoughtless use of his name tingled him, puzzled him, confused him.

  ‘What are you trying to do?’ he asked, bewildered. ‘What are you talking about, a bit in the paper? You think you can kid me, do you? You think I’m still—’

  He stopped and scowled at her. He had come too near saying part of their trouble, that she had ruled him because he so much wanted her that he always had to have her. It was his way of solving all differences. But it wasn’t hers. She wanted to win arguments by withholding herself. At that point, hating her for playing on his weakness and even despising his weakness, he denied himself, denied her, and told her to come into the house for good or leave it for good.

  ‘You’d cut off your nose to spite your face,’ she told him when he took that position. ‘You’d rather do without me altogether than let me go out to work.’

  ‘It’s not a question of my nose and my face,’ he had shouted at her that last night. ‘It’s a question of who’s boss in this house. If you think because I—’

  He stopped then as he stopped now. He wouldn’t say it, he wouldn’t admit it. She was taking what he called an unfair advantage, standing there so straight and confident, so well-made and womanly even in that uniform he hated.

  ‘It’s you that’s trying to kid me,’ she threw back at him in anger. She always was a spitfire. ‘If you didn’t want me back why did you go to all that trouble of putting it in the paper?’

  His healthy honest face, almost stupid in its bewilderment, made her throw out an explosive sigh of exasperation. She fumbled inside her tunic at her right breast while he watched her hand with sad memoried eyes, and shoved the newspaper cutting across to him. He took it and read it. He read it twice, and he was still out of his depth.

  ‘I never put that in,’ he frowned. ‘I don’t know anything about it. Frank was in a fight a couple of days ago and I thought that’s what you were talking about. He was all kicks and bruises. Because of you.’

  ‘How because of me?’ she demanded, straighter than ever. ‘I haven’t even seen the kid for four years.’

  ‘Well, you know whose fault that is,’ he charged her.

  ‘Yes, yours,’ she countered immediately.

  He preferred not to answer that.

  ‘One of the boys in his class said you ran away with a darkie,’ he chose to answer instead. ‘And he thought he had to stand up for you. But he got the worst of it. That was all.’

  She laughed and cried all at once.

  ‘A darkie!’ she said, nearly hysterical. ‘Oh God! I wish that was all that was to it. I’ve lived without a man for four years.’

  ‘I wish I could believe that,’ he muttered sourly.

  ‘That’s your trouble,’ she spat fire at him again. ‘You’ve got a bad mind. You liked to kid on you just had to be head of the house and I should stay at home, but there was more than that to it. You didn’t trust me. You were jealous. You liked to think that every man I worked with was making love to me. Why can’t you grow up? The world’s not like that at all. The men I worked with had their wives and family and they were perfectly happy. They liked me and I liked them and that’s all there was to it. But not for you, oh no! You had to make more of it because you’ve got a bad mind. You wouldn’t trust me, that was your real trouble. Oh, I saw through you all right!’

  ‘You should have said that long ago,’ he defended himself weakly. ‘I would have trusted you if you had only told me you didn’t want another man.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have needed to tell you if you had sense at all,’ she answered impatiently. ‘I married you, didn’t I? Who else would I want? I’m not a filmstar, I’m a girl from Fife. When I marry, I’m stuck with the man I married. I know all your faults and I’ve no doubt you know mine. You told me them often enough. But I never looked for a man since the day I left you. I never left you because I was bothered about a man. That’s got nothing to do with it and you know it. But you like to kid yourself.’

  ‘Oh, but Helen!’ he muttered, so embarrassed by her bluntness that he evaded it. ‘That boy took a terrible beating. I saw his side. He was kicked, Helen, he wa
s kicked something shocking. Standing up for you.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ she brought him back to the issue. She jabbed her finger on the cutting he was still holding. ‘That’s got your name.’

  ‘Aye, but it’s not mine,’ he said, quite firm with her on that point. ‘I never asked you to come home. I never put that in the paper.’

  ‘Then it was Frank,’ she said quickly. ‘What does he mean? He’s got loads. Is that a disease, or has he won the pools?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he retorted impulsively. ‘A boy of ten wouldn’t know how to fill in a coupon.’

  ‘Well, what does it mean?’ she insisted.

  ‘How should I know?’ he countered in the traditional Scots way, answering one question by another.

  They stood in the broad evening sun, arguing like any husband and wife where the wife has a perfectly good point that the man can’t answer, and the woman keeps at it and the man tells her she is talking nonsense, and they didn’t see till later that they were on speaking terms again. So long as you keep quarrelling you’re still speaking. Their argument brought them together on the normal terms of married life, and it was a long time since either of them had been so worked up about anything.

  ‘It’s Frank,’ said Mrs Garson. ‘I’m sure it’s Frank. It was Frank I’m telling you. It was him put it in the paper.’

  ‘Don’t talk soft,’ said Mr Garson superiorly. ‘How could it be Frank? Where would he get the money to pay for putting adverts in a paper? Damn it, he couldn’t even write an advert, he’s only ten.’

  ‘Aye, but he’s a clever boy,’ his mother claimed. ‘At least he was, unless you’ve knocked him stupid. He took after the Grahams, no’ the Garsons.’

  ‘The Grahams!’ Mr Garson despised them with his tone. ‘Like your big sister Nessie that could hardly read or write. The postcard she sent us from Saltcoats. We’ve had no rain. Kay-enn-oh-double-you. Oh aye, she was a rare scholar!’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t spell so good,’ Mrs Garson admitted. ‘But she made a damn good job of that wee paper shop she got out of the compensation-money when her man was killed at his work.’

  ‘Aye, she did all right. And she never thought of coming to see her nephew, not once. She couldn’t even send him a Christmas card.’

  ‘What do you expect? And since when were you ever bothered about Christmas?’

  ‘She could have sent him some wee thing, the boy’s got nothing.’

  ‘You put me out the house and then you think my big sister’s going to run after you and your boy! You’ve got some rare ideas you have. You’d make a cat laugh you would!’

  ‘Your boy,’ Mr Garson cut in before she finished.

  ‘He’s yours too,’ said Mrs Garson. ‘Or is that something else you don’t trust me for?’

  ‘I never said that,’ he answered, shocked at her. ‘But if you’re going to suggest things—’

  ‘There, see what I mean?’ she appealed to him against himself. ‘A wee bit sarcasm and you canny take it. You start thinking things. You must have an awful life with a mind like yours!’

  ‘With a wife like you,’ he answered dourly.

  ‘I’ve told you all I’m going to tell you,’ she said sharply. ‘I told you I married you and that’s enough for me. If you can’t make sense of that and see what I’m telling you then you’re even thicker than I thought you were.’

  ‘Well, would you come back?’ he asked. He knew quite well what she was telling him, but he liked making himself sour and suspecting her of all kinds of duplicities.

  ‘Would I come back?’ she echoed him in a voice of overacted astonishment. ‘You’re after arguing you never asked me. You’re after telling me to stay away for good.’

  ‘Because of the way you approached me,’ he said defensively.

  ‘You’re getting away from the point,’ she stalled. ‘There’s that thing I tore out of the paper. If that wasn’t Frank, who was it? I want to see him. You’ve kept him from me long enough. I want to see him.’

  ‘Now?’ he nearly shouted, as if the idea was outrageous.

  ‘Well, I don’t mean next Christmas,’ she snapped at him.

  They moved off together, hardly hand in hand, but both at peace, quite reconciled. After all, they were both Scots. There is nothing puzzles the Scot more than the Englishman’s claim not to wear his heart on his sleeve. To a Scotsman, the Englishman wears his heart like a breast- pocket handkerchief, stuck in front of him for show, and flaunts it in public too. To the Garsons, their crabbit conversation had been a warming bout of making love, and their final snarl at each other had given them all the confidence of the final kiss that knows it isn’t final because the best is yet to be.

  The only thing that still bothered them was the small ad in the Citizen. They were straining at the leash to get home and see Frank and sort the whole thing out.

  ‘Damn cheek, putting our names in the papers,’ muttered Mr Garson. ‘Anybody might have seen it.’

  ‘He was doing it for the best,’ said Mrs Garson. ‘He was always a sensitive boy.’

  ‘You never thought of that when you left him without a mother’s care,’ said Mr Garson.

  ‘You never thought of that when you wouldn’t let me see him unless I gave in to you.’

  ‘You didn’t make much of an effort.’

  ‘Ach, my mother died when I was eight, and I lived,’ Mrs Garson remembered callously.

  And chatting in that way, with true Scots friendliness, they walked the short distance from the garage in Bethel Street to the tenement where Frank was making tea, twenty-seven Ossian Street, three-up the far-away.

  The boy was frying sliced sausages and eggs for his father’s tea, and he was hot-headed with anxiety as he stood at the gas-cooker in a corner of the kitchen. He had begun his evening routine at the usual time, right after he finished his paper-rake, but his father was late. He didn’t know what to do for the best. If he took the frying-pan off the gas his father would walk in when the sausages were cold and the eggs sloppy. And if he kept the frying-pan on the gas the sausages would get charred and hard and the eggs would get all brown and burnt round the edges, and that would be when his father would walk in. It was the way of the world. You couldn’t win.

  He tried a compromise. He held the pan above the blue flames of the gas-ring and kept moving the sausages and eggs round and round in the pan so that at least they wouldn’t stick to the bottom. He was doing all right, quite engrossed in his compromise as an end in itself, a task with its own interest, watching the sizzling fat and the changing colour of the sausages, when the kettle on the other ring came to the boil. The lid moved in the angry, turbulent way that attracted the attention of James Watt as early as 1759, though it isn’t generally known that he had been anticipated by Robert Hooke, but Frank Garson was no Watt. He was only a ten-year- old schoolboy in a panic, trying to prepare the evening meal for his father in a motherless, wifeless house. He slapped the frying-pan down on the gas-ring again and lowered the gas under the kettle. Another problem reared its ugly head. If he brewed the tea at once it would probably be too strong by the time his father came in. If he didn’t brew it the water would inevitably be off the boil altogether before his father came in. The real trouble was his father didn’t like to be kept waiting. He was a just man according to himself, but an impatient one according to those who knew him. The sweat on the boy’s brow glided down his nose and down behind his ears. It wasn’t just his anxiety nor even the heat from the cooker. The summer evening was still hot, and the kitchens in the tall tenements were all stifling airless boxes of irritating heat.

  He was coping with a simmering kettle and a sizzling frying-pan, willing to be happy enough with either if only the other weren’t there, when his father and mother walked in on him. His father never knocked or rang. He always had his key. That was what seemed to make his entrances so abrupt.

  ‘Oh my godfather! Are you still using that thing?’ the boy’s mother cried at once.
She deliberately ignored her son and crossed to the old gas-cooker, tutting at it as she took charge. She wouldn’t let any man see that the sight of her only child moved her at all. But the cooking facilities were a subject of comment and attention.

  ‘It was you that bought it,’ her husband reminded her dourly.

  ‘Aye, eleven years ago,’ she retorted. ‘Things has changed a bit since then or haven’t you heard? Holy Christmas, even my landlady’s all-electric.’

  She brewed the tea deftly, soothed the misunderstood sausages and eggs, elevated them with a flip of a fish-lifter, served them skilfully on a couple of plates, and kept nagging her man.

  ‘You’ve no idea, Bob! You’re content to live like your grandfather. You’ve never heard of the wind of change blowing through the kitchens of Britain. I was always surprised that a man like you, so clever with cars and bang-up-to-date on models, and you just never bothered your backside what women can get nowadays.’

  ‘Frank, here’s your mother come to see you,’ Mr Garson answered, very stiff, annoyed at his wife’s reference to cars. He had no car, nor was like to have one, but he could tell the make and model of any car a hundred yards away, and it was hardly a thing to be sneered at if he could take a motor-engine apart and reassemble it. He knew his job, that was all. But fridges and tellies were a piece of nonsense.

  The boy hovered a little distance from the conquered gas-cooker. If this was his mother then that grimy contraption was no longer his concern. He had no wish to defend his claim to it. But he was shy when his father spoke to him. This woman in the green uniform of a Corporation bus-conductress wasn’t so much his mother as a person like someone he remembered, a long long time ago.

  As if to introduce herself his mother ruffled his thick waving crop of chestnut-brown hair, a gesture of affection not unlike the spasm that had seized Noddy’s mother when she came home with the two ten-shilling notes she had wheedled out of old Daunders. Like Noddy, Frank Garson jerked his head away, distressed. Yet his scalp tingled, and he wondered what to do to reach her.