by George Friel
‘But that’s just the question I want to raise, if you don’t mind an old railwayman rushing in where angels fear to tread,’ Mr Stockwell took him up, happy to have shunted the conversation on the right lines. ‘You take this idea of the elect. I mean them that thinks they’re saved whether they sin or no. But Saint Paul said, and I must say I’m inclined to agree with him, let us remember good works lest we fall into the hands of the living God.’
‘Did he now?’ said Donald, quite interested.
‘Och aye he did that. And my point is what’s the point of good works if it’s all sewn up before ye were ever born?’
‘Ah well, you must beware of the errors of Romanism,’ Donald shuffled. ‘Faith in Christ is sufficient for salvation. That’s one thing we do know.’
‘Och aye, that’s all very well, that’s true,’ Mr Stockwell granted vaguely. ‘But do ye no think there’s a possibility they might be deceiving themselves? Ye know, kidding themselves on I mean. That’s my point. I can assure you there’s naebody mair aware nor me about the dangers of Roming Catholic fallacies. But I must say I still canny agree with this idea of predestination. It’s no canny.’
Wee Annie heard about these talks because Mr Stockwell in his retirement was the kind of man that did the daily shopping and he boasted in the grocer’s, in the dairy, in the butcher’s and baker’s, and everywhere else he went.
‘I had a rare argument with my student,’ he used to say. ‘About some difficult points in the bible, ye know. Ach, but I gave him as good as I got, believe you me.’
She suffered, she really and truly suffered did little Miss Partridge, with a great longing to take part in talks with Donald, or at least to be present in humble silence. She yearned to let him know the bible was her book too. But Donald ignored her, and the Stockwells snubbed her like everybody else in the close except my mother. My mother was sorry for her, and that’s why I know so much now that I didn’t know then, for Miss Partridge confided in my mother and my mother confided in me when I was older.
But within a week of telling my mother she wished Mr Duthie would talk to her about the bible and not waste his time on an ignorant railwayman, Wee Annie saw Big Donald in a different light. She caught a glint in his eye when he looked on Bobo, and she had been through too much not to recognise it. She was one of those women who deny the infinite variety of our species and insist men are all the same. And what she saw only strengthened her conviction that Bobo was bad.
It all happened because of that lavatory on the half- landing. Bobo was coming out of it one evening just as Donald left his room to go down to it, and at that moment Wee Annie opened her door. Bobo had slipped out in her petticoat, and as she came up the stairs the rude sun came in at the staircase window, beamed through the flimsy skirt, and silhouetted her thighs and pants. Wee Annie saw her grin as she passed Donald, one hand up with the fingers splayed at her halfnaked breasts, saw what Donald saw, and then saw him turn round and look back. That’s when she caught what she called the light of lust in his eyes. She stood stock-still at her door and waited for Bobo to come up.
‘Daughter of Babylon,’ she whispered, and showed her teeth in hate.
Bobo gave her a smile and a nod.
‘Get lost, darling,’ she whispered back and passed on.
She couldn’t stand Wee Annie at all, but she didn’t mind Big Donald. He only made her laugh the way he goggled. She thought he was a silly big sumph to blush and stumble just because he saw a girl in her slip.
‘It’s his own bad mind,’ she said when she told Dross about it. ‘To the pure all things are meaningless. And I’m very particular about my underwear, as you know.’
‘Aye well all right,’ Dross growled. ‘I’m not jealous. But don’t you start giving him ideas, that’s all. Students is no like you and me. They’re different. They live a terrible life, so they do. Like the monks used to. Their nose aye in a book. Then the first time they see a woman’s leg they’re away wi’ it. That’s why they go daft when they’re let out for Charity. You give him the nod and you’ll be sorry, I’m telling you.’
‘Well, I like that! You’d think it was my fault,’ Bobo huffed. ‘You’re trying the mix. You want to start a fight, then it’s me that’s to make it up. On your gimmee or else. Oh, I know you, Duncan Alexander McIntosh Ross! No, thank you.’
But Wee Annie was right, and Dross was wise to give Bobo a warning. For Donald was caught, even before he saw her in her petticoat. She had been growing on him like a blind boil he fingered every day. She nudged his mind off his lecture-notes, she lay beside him in his dreams at night, and melted into air, into thin air, when he moved towards her. The attempt to act always wakened him, and he wriggled, in misery at the state he was in. The nuisance of guilt that he had to live with was only a pinprick compared to the longing that nagged him like toothache. He had to find help somewhere, somehow, and for all his Presbyterian independence he thought he might find it in confession. He wanted to talk about Bobo, to hear her name spoken and link his name with hers in a frank admission of his private thoughts. He had a confessor at hand, his cousin Hugh Main.
Main was a medical student, in lodgings over in Byres Road near the University. He came to see Donald about once a week, and everybody liked him. Like Father O’Flynn he had a wonderful way with him. He was short and rather fat, with a waddle in his walk and a smile in his talk, and the way he looked through his thick glasses made it seem he was observing the oddities of mankind through two windows that protected him from all worldly hurt and contamination, so that he had the cut of a superior good-hearted gnome. Even Wee Annie took to him. He met her for the first time on his way upstairs to Donald, when she was coming down with a pail of rubbish for the midden. He bowed, smiled, went all the way back downstairs carrying it for her, chucked the rubbish in the midden and carried the empty pail upstairs again, chatting easily about who he was and what he was, and about Donald and the weather and the Isle of Skye. When he gave her back her pail he patted her elbow.
‘I’ll see you again I’m sure,’ he beamed at her, though there too he managed to give the impression of being untouchably behind a window as he spoke.
‘That’s what I call a gentleman,’ she told my mother. ‘He knows how to treat a lady. Not one of them that do you an obligement for what they hope to get out of you.’
Bobo was another who got to know him well in his journeys up and down the stairs to Donald’s lodgings, and they flirted in passing, finding their pleasure in the equivocal use of the tongue and the eloquent use of the eyes. But of course, like two all-in wrestlers they were too crafty to get fatally tangled. She had a cold on her once when she met Main in the close.
‘Do you think I’ve got a fever?’ she asked.
She said it to tease him, but at the same time she had half an idea he could prescribe something for her. He was only starting his final year medicine, but to Bobo he was already a doctor.
He didn’t go all serious and say he wasn’t qualified. That was one of her reasons for liking him. Her teasing never put him out. He gave her a professional look, felt her forehead, took her pulse and examined her tongue. The doctor’s correctness of his touch was itself a thrill to her. He frowned, brooded for five seconds, and then told her she shouldn’t be going out. She ought to go back upstairs and go to bed for three days.
‘Och but it’s dull just lying in bed,’ she complained, and straightened his tie. ‘And I get so lonely there.’
‘Ah well, yes of course, I see,’ he said without the least glimmer of joking with her. ‘I know the prescription for that, but then so do you.’
That’s how they carried on, and Bobo loved it. Main’s pleasant accent and superior schooling, his style in fencing with her, and the harmless flattery of his tongue and eyes, all gave her a different excitement than she got from the deep caresses of Dross. Even the fact that a man who was practically a doctor could stop and speak to her, and spare time for what she called ‘a wee bit kidding on’, raised he
r in her own esteem. She believed she could have made something of him, or something out of him for herself, if she had been his equal in education. Yet she had no great wish to have things other than as they were. Her two feet, in their smart shoes, were firmly planted on the pavement of her native reality. I think in her feeling for Main she was like a provincial football team that plays one of the big city clubs away from home in a cup-tie. It was a rare experience. But she knew that when she coped with the familiar passes of Dross, with his kick-and-rush and bash on for the goal, she was on her home ground. She would put up a good show playing against Main, but she wouldn’t win. She didn’t expect to. She simply enjoyed the game.
This waddling fellow Main was an agnostic. It didn’t bother Bobo, who was one herself without knowing it, and Miss Partridge never found out. He was so kind to her, so tactful and understanding when she told him her trouble with the neighbours, she took it for granted he believed all she believed and lived by the bible. Donald knew the truth of course, for they had grown up together. In their adolescence they had argued and argued till the sun went down and came up again to see them still at it. Neither made any impression on the other. They had the same accent, but they didn’t speak the same language. You might have expected them to stop bothering about each other when they took different courses at the University, so clean and fixed were their differences. But a Scotch clannishness kept them close, facing an urban world together. I know Main visited Donald regularly, but I don’t know Donald ever took the trouble to go over to Byres Road and visit Main. So it would seem it was Main who gave their kinship life. Donald never evaded it, never denied it, but never went out of his way to keep it warm.
But now he needed Main. He knew his cousin had a way with women. Bobo wasn’t the only girl he had seen him get on with. There had been many a lass in Skye when they were only lads. What puzzled him was that Main never made any use of his talents. He spoke to girls, he listened to them, he laughed and joked with them, he could even go in for a bit of horseplay with them, and that was all. But when it came to Bobo Donald wasn’t just puzzled. He became really curious, because for the first time he was emotionally cogged with the girl concerned. He made himself jealous. Not so much of his cousin as a person, as of his cousin’s gift for pleasing Bobo, for making her shine, sparkle and glow. He put himself to the torture speculating how much Main knew about Bobo, how much he had done with her, things he himself would never know or do. He didn’t even know Bobo’s right name or her exact age. And when he saw her talk so long with Main at the close-mouth, or lean out the staircase window with him, blethering happily for half-an-hour on end, he was sure she would gladly give Main all he himself wanted. Maybe she had done so already.
It griped his stomach when he saw them clench hands together and wriggle and wrestle to test whose fingers and wrist were stronger. The twining that only was a game to them would have been Adam’s paradise to him if he had been allowed to play it. Whenever he was forced to believe their friendship was innocent he still wasn’t comforted. He simply felt a grudge against Main for not making use of his opportunities. If they had come his way he was sure he would have known Bobo biblically and then, still in biblical language, he could put her away. By long brooding, which he confused with deep reasoning, he became convinced that since his cousin wouldn’t use Bobo for her right true end his credit with her ought to be transferred to himself. He was the one was ready and willing to make proper use of it. He had more of the Old Testament authority a male should have than his frivolous cousin could ever show. He knew what the Book meant when it said the woman is subject to the man, but Main was only a pagan, treating Bobo as an equal, making use of her only for conversation.
In case after all there was more between them than he thought, and to give himself the satisfaction of talking familiarly about Bobo, he tried to quiz his cousin. They always had the Stockwells’ parlour to themselves when they met, and sat facing each other at a round table covered with a billiard-green tasselled cloth. He was a frantic ocean of questions that night, nearly drowning his cousin. But Main was buoyant enough for a while, until a bigger breaker than ever before stranded him.
‘My goodness, man!’ he laughed. ‘Whatever are you after at all? You’re talking like the heavy father in a Victorian mellowdrammer. You’ll be asking me next if my intentions is honourable.’
‘But they’re not, now are they?’ Donald looked down his big nose at the green cloth, avoiding the windowed eyes across the table. He trembled a little, hoping his cousin would confess he had sinned with Bobo, but owed her nothing because she was easy.
But Main wasn’t with him.
‘I’ve no intentions of any kind, honourable or dishonourable. You’re talking daft, Tonalt! What would I be doing with a girl like Bobo round my neck? At my age! In my career! Can you see Bobo living in the Highlands as a doctor’s wife? She’d be wanting to know where the shops were.’
In fact he never became a country doctor, though that’s all he had in mind at the time. He was assistant physician in a city hospital in his middle years.
‘So you’re a snob then, is that it?’ Donald raised his head and boomed across the table. ‘Is she not good enough for you? Because she says “I seen”. She has no class, she has only a body. So she wouldn’t do for your career. Aw naw! You wouldn’t marry her. But you make sure you—’
He flushed and pouted, and after a couple of turkey-like gobblings he tried again in prim disgust.
‘But you make sure you get a good feel every time you see her. Your hands are never off her.’
‘Well, that’s a load of tripe for a start,’ Main still laughed. ‘Me cuddling Bobo? Jesus, that’ll be the day!’
‘You see, you don’t even know you’re doing it you’re so used to it,’ Donald triumphed over the Philistine. ‘But I’ve seen you. I’ve watched you. Aye, and how much else goes on nobody sees? Tell me that now. I bet you’ve had her away from here. You get left alone a lot in your place, don’t you? Or just the back row at the pictures? You could get to know her breasts and thighs well there. Couldn’t you, eh?’
Main sat back from the round table and tangled the tassels on the fringe of the cloth.
‘You’re away out of your mind, Tonalt. Just because I pass a joke now and again with a sonsie young lass that’s full of the joy de veever and likes a wee blether you want to make a dirty old man out of me. Well, you’re wrong. I’m not all that old. Even if Bobo is only a kid to me.’
‘She’s not sonsie, she’s gallus,’ Donald corrected him. ‘A bad little besom.’
‘A bosom companion,’ Main flippantly retorted, sketching opulent curves in front of his manly chest with a pair of languid hands. ‘Fair and buxom. Whatever she is, don’t you go unloading you own bad mind on to me. You never could understand it, but I can enjoy a glass of whisky and a beer without being a drunkard. I can enjoy the sun without being a nudist. And I can enjoy the company of a pretty girl without aiming to put her on her back the first time I get a chance. But not you, you bloody old Calvinist! The minute a man likes anything you make a sin out of it and give him a free travel pass to Hell. Mind you, I don’t deny I’m a poor weak wicked sinner the same as anybody else. But there’s a limit. Especially when it’s a decent happy lass you’re having me on about.’
Donald sat bolt upright, piercing space with a fanatic eye. His cousin’s humble concession rocketed him from his trance.
‘I am a greater sinner,’ he announced in a vibrating, ominous, pulpit voice, his Sunday best.
Main stopped tying two tassels together and jerked forward in a spasm of delight.
‘You? Since when? Come on, tell Hughie and you’ll feel better. Has Bobo been seducing you in the back-close at midnight?’
Donald shook his head. He was away out on a limb, and he quoted with thundering solemnity the text that had been bothering him since he saw Bobo coming up the stairs with a shaft of sunlight between her thighs.
‘Whosoever looketh on a woman to
lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’
‘Jesus, is that all that’s bothering you?’ Main asked with a tut. ‘It happens to every man.’
Disappointed there was no confession of actual guilt forthcoming, he went on twining alternate tassels of the tablecloth.
‘Leave Jesus out of this if you don’t mind,’ Donald reprimanded him and waited for an apology before continuing his statement. He had lately been finding a strange peace in adopting the position Mr Stockwell had ascribed to him, and now he came out bluntly with it. ‘Saint Paul was a sinner but Saint Paul was saved. And I’m a sinner but I’m saved. I know. It’s the power of God and all the elect know it within themselves.’
‘Congratulations,’ Main bowed across the table. ‘It’s a good thing to know.’
‘No, don’t be funny,’ Donald waved a hand impatiently. ‘What I mean is, you know lots of girls. You’re a right ladies’ man. Though you’ve no appearance. I’m a much better looking man than you. Couldn’t you introduce me to a girl?’
‘I suppose I could,’ Main agreed. ‘If you think it would do you any good.’
Donald fingered triangles and circles on the green cloth.
‘I mean, I’ve been thinking. You know how my grandmother wants me to go on for the ministry when I get my degree. I don’t know that I will. But suppose I did, then would it not be advisable if ever I do get the call I should know for myself when Saint Paul speaks of those who are dead in sin what sin is?’
‘Would it not be what?’ Main frowned. ‘I lost you there. I thought you were trying to talk to me about Bobo.’
‘About that girl you call Bobo, yes. I don’t know her right name. Do you?’
He spoke as if Bobo was too vulgar and familiar a name for him to use and he would have to have something more dignified and formal before he could go on.
‘Robina Jemima. She hates it. I don’t wonder. She told me in confidence. So don’t you ever tell her I told you. She prefers Ina to Mima if it’s a question of either. Some of her pals call her Bona because of her surname. I sometimes call her Bona-Roba myself. She likes that. I told her it’s Italian for well dressed. But she prefers Bobo to anything else.’
