by George Friel
He was wrong about her of course, quite wrong. He thought she had forgotten Grace and was concerned only with her own way out of a sinful world. But Grace was never out of her mind. It was herself was out of her mind. When she spoke to him of the world as an evil place where no sane person would willingly linger he thought she was thinking of herself. That’s where he was wrong. She was still thinking it was Grace had to be liberated, deserved to be, ought to be.
‘What’s the state of the world got to do with you?’ he tried to laugh her out of her black moods, basting the eggs because she liked them fried unturned. ‘You take life so serious so you do. Some folk let it prey on their mind till they get that low they do themselves in. What use is that? Things are as they are, you won’t alter them. If it’s got to be it’s got to be. Why worry? Worrying’ll not get you anywhere. Cheer up, Anna dear. Enjoy yourself. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘I haven’t the slightest intention of doing myself in,’ she answered him primly, quoting his phrase in a tone that disowned its vulgarity. Her nose wrinkled at the very smell of it.
He took the denial as a poor attempt to hide the truth.
‘It’s not myself I’m worried about,’ she spoke on to herself, sitting back in her little chair in front of the winter fire and letting him make her a mixed grill as usual because he was always the handy one, the practical one, and she was the clever one, the one who had read a lot in her time, the thinker. ‘There’s a greater love than selflove.’
‘Come on and have a bite,’ said he.
She slipped from her chair like a gnome from a toadstool and went to the table, small but straight, her voice big.
‘For what we are about to receive O Lord make us truly thankful.’
‘Aye, all right, that’s fine,’ Tommy responded, sitting quickly, hungry. ‘Come on now, eat up, you’re at your auntie’s.’
He fought the liver and sausages and bacon and eggs and fried tomatoes and black pudding and potato scone with a rapidly flanking knife and fork, winning all the way, talking through his eating.
‘Remember Auntie Kate? That was her saying. She used to give us a rare tuck-in remember. We took the bus all the way to her big house on a Sunday. The bus journey was half the fun. Those good old Scotch Sunday dinners. You can’t beat them. She fed us well. She fairly looked after us when Papa and Mama died. You can’t deny it, Anna.’
‘Yes, we’ve a lot to be grateful to Auntie Kate for,’ she agreed, bowing to him like a judge on the bench bowing to counsel. ‘But not to her family.’
‘Aye, some cousins they turned out to be. They showed that when she died. We were just the poor relations, that’s all we were. You know, we’ve been awful unlucky you and me I often think. First Papa and Mama and then Auntie Kate, the only aunt we had.’
‘Mama died of a broken heart. You’ll never persuade me otherwise. She loved him so much. Of course there was nobody like Papa. A woman could respect a man like Papa, so manly, so kind, so good.’
‘You could have gone to the University if Papa had lived. You were clever enough. Remember he used to give you riddles and you always solved them and he called you his pretty little witch. You could easy have been a teacher. You were always fond of children.’
He misforked a piece of liver, so flustered by his clumsy tongue his hands were clumsy too. But she saw no offence. He hurried on.
‘Even Auntie Kate if she had lived, she would have seen you through.’
‘It’s as God wishes. We had our happiness as children together when Papa and Mama were alive. Nothing can take that away. It was a good home we came from.’
‘It was that all right! Papa had a good job all his days, a better job than ever I had. The pity was when he died the money died. He had nothing to leave us and we’ve had nothing since.’
‘We’ve always managed,’ she scolded him, kniving to one side the crumby remnants of her black pudding. ‘We’ve nothing to complain about.’
‘Maybe not. But I was always sorry you had to leave the school when Papa died and just another year and you could have got your Highers. You were that good at English. I used to marvel the way you and Papa could read poetry to each other. Was over my head. I remember there was that poet you were fond of with a kind of French name, de la mer or something.’
Anna bowed silently. Tommy was too old to save.
‘But you were wise to go to that Commercial College and get your diploma in book-keeping and shorthand. It gives you a living.’
‘That was Auntie Kate’s kindness, she paid for that,’ she always admitted the debt.
‘It’s as well Cousin Rab never found out, he’d have wanted the money back,’ Tommy muttered through his chewing.
‘I was sorrier for you,’ she spoke nicely to him.
‘Ach, I was never clever at the school. I just wanted to leave. Took whatever job came, jack of all trades that’s me. Then I finish up as public-house waiter. Still even at that I’m in charge now as you know. I’ve done not bad for myself.’
‘If Papa had lived he would have found you a good job. He had influence.’
‘Oh aye, he had influence all right had Papa. Him working in the City Chambers he met them all. It was Councillor McFearson was one of Papa’s best friends that got you your first job. Yes, Papa was respected, even after he was dead, people remembered him.’
‘But I couldn’t stay in it. That bad man. And I was only seventeen at the time. Luckily Papa never knew. Then I made my own mistakes. Led astray by the weakness of the flesh. Well, I learned my lesson.’
‘Ach well, you can always say you’ve been to America, you’ve travelled a bit in your time,’ he made a joke of it.
And that, or something like it every Sunday, was all they ever said of her marriage. But they were happy eating together, recalling old times, sharing each other’s sorrows, sharing each other’s joys, comrades.
‘It was good of you to take me in when I got out after I came back,’ she said.
That’s how she always thanked him, never saying where she got out from or why she had been in, and he never made it any more precise.
‘Specially when you had your own troubles,’ she went on thanking him. ‘I often wish I had met your Ella. It’s sad to think she died just when I went in. If I had only got in touch with you when I first came back I would at least have seen her. Everyone we had is dead.’
‘Ah well, that’s life,’ said Tommy, unwilling to put even a toe in such chilling waters.
‘To think you lost Ella and the baby too. It would make you believe there’s a curse on our family. We’ve been made to pay for the happy childhood Papa and Mama gave us. Still, it was good of you to give me a roof over my head.’
‘It was only for a couple of months till you found a job,’ he shrugged it off. ‘After all, I’m your wee brother. Remember me?’
‘But I hope you weren’t offended,’ she nagged at it as she always did, ‘when I didn’t take your offer to stay on with you. I just wanted to be alone once I found work. Best for both of us.’
‘Oh, I know you were biting your nails to get away. I could see it. You wanted your own corner. You always had your own corner from you were a wee girl with a white frock every Sunday. That reminds me, tell me how’s the laundry doing.’
‘Doing fine,’ said she. ‘We’ve a lot of contracts for schools and hospitals and we’re growing. Do you know, I’m drawing over five hundred pounds every week in wages now? They’re well paid and they’re well looked after. They’ve got their own Welfare and they’ve even got a Social Club.’
‘You can’t beat these old family firms,’ said Tommy. ‘I worked in an old family pub for years once. It made all the difference.’
‘Oh yes,’ said she. ‘They’ve a touch about them, a decency. The old man himself doesn’t come in very often now but his son Mr Alan, he’s in every day and anybody can speak to him and he doesn’t think it cheeky. That’s the kind of man he is.’
‘That’s a good thin
g,’ said he. ‘I like a man that can take a wee bit kidding even if he is the boss. I see you’re needing a new bottle of sauce.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said she. ‘The funny thing is he’s quite young really and yet he’s quite bald on top. You always did cover your food with sauce from you were a wee boy.’
‘Clever men are usually bald,’ said he. ‘Look at Shake¬ speare’s photo. You need a drop sauce with this kinda meal.’
‘Yes, I know, but there’s rumours,’ said she. ‘They say the Lavanta Company’s going to take us over. The day’s past for the wee family business I suppose. But what’ll happen to me if that’s true I don’t know. They’re so big they must have an enormous office staff, not just one poor soul on her own like me. I’ll probably be what they call redundant. They mean I’ll get the sack.’
‘Oh no,’ he checked her stoutly. ‘Don’t kid yourself, Anna! They can always use a person of your experience with your qualifications.’
‘Remains to be seen,’ she sniffed. ‘But I think Mr Alan will see me all right. He knows I’ve been a good servant. Never grudged working late.’
He was pleased with himself that winter Sunday was Tommy Partridge. He had got her talking calmly and rationally on everyday matters. He swithered again.
Maybe there wasn’t much wrong with her after all, nothing that company and conversation couldn’t put right.
But after the meal, while he stood at the sink with one of her pinnies tied round him to protect the trousers of his Sunday suit, she got into her pulpit again.
She preached against the Bomb that afternoon, cornering him as if he was in favour of it. A present from the Devil she called it. His gift to mankind for inviting Him to return and have dominion over them.
‘It was God’s mercy for a time that Hitler and his brother Stalin never had it,’ she said, hands clasped, eyes up.
He was surprised to hear her harp back so far, though he knew she had taken a fanatical interest in politics when she was worrying her way out of her teens into womanhood. Himself, he never had any time for politics, even then.
‘You think they might have used it?’ he asked, but only to say something, to interrupt her before she got steamed up as she used to about the twin vampires of her springtime.
‘There’s a special Providence in the fall of the Bomb,’ she instructed him. ‘Some will be saved yet so as by fire. If it wasn’t then it will be later. But it will come. The madness is all. There’s a good madness and a bad madness. They are all, all mad, and wicked as well. So their madness is a bad madness. So it will fall. And they that escape shall escape and be on the mountains like doves of the valley. And their hands shall be feeble and their knees weak as water and baldness on all their heads, and every island fled away and mountains will not be found. It’s all in the holy bible what the Bomb will do. They will build shelters but the waters shall overflow their hiding place.’
‘I never thought of that before,’ he said, going back over his question, partly because he suddenly found it interesting, partly because he wanted to distract her from her sermon. ‘Suppose those two crooks had the bomb before we dropped it. Now there’s a thought! I think Hitler might have used it. Old Adolf was stark raving mad. They say he used to chew carpets when we were young. I remember seeing that in a Reader’s Digest. And then Old Joe used to murder anybody that stood up to him. They musta been both mad.’
‘Two men and a third to come,’ she replied to him. ‘Behold a great Red Dragon and the Beast like a flying Eagle. The evil that they did lives after them. Six and six, Hitler and Stalin, and a six to come, who he is I do not know, to make six six six, the Mark of the Beast, before the Devil Himself appears on a cloud of fire. Men were bad before, only the saints were good in the sight of the Lord, but the Red Dragon and the Beast like an Eagle were a new evil, preparing the way in the wilderness for worse to come, Cain accusing Abel, the Chosen of the Lord made dross in the furnace of affliction, there was never anything like it, no sins so big nor so many not even in Babylon. And it came to pass that men preached the word of the Devil as a new God. It must have been then the Devil came down upon us with a cloven tongue like as of fire. And power was given unto Him to scorch men with His fire. So it will come to pass. The Bomb will fall.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he wouldn’t have it, rinsing out the sink with hot water, the last of the greasy plates washed and dried. ‘I think you’re wrong there, Anna. I must bring a washer next Sunday. This tap’s like a grocer’s shop, it keeps dripping. I mean to say, after all, if they can do it to us we can do it to them, so what’s the point? It wouldn’t get them anywhere.’
‘It would get the Devil where He plans to be,’ she told him curtly.
They played an innocent game of cards in the evening, and when he went away she settled at the table he had cleared and wrote in her diary. Underneath it, in case she got ink on the tablecloth, she spread out the Sunday paper Tommy had left behind him. She was at peace writing in her diary. It was in fact a cash ledger she had lifted from the laundry (she lifted one a year from the office stock), and she wrote across the vertical red lines for pounds, shillings and pence in her oldfashioned thin up and thick down script, a hand that seemed to ornament as well as fill the page. Deaf to the noise in the street and all the petty traffic of the tenement, the banging of doors and the bawling of children, she wrote flowingly and clearly.
‘A wintry afternoon. Long conversation with my beloved brother. In the summer he comes on Sunday evenings because I always go to the Botanic Gardens in the afternoon then, but today he came at one and stayed till nearly nine. Sleet and a gale outside but we were quite happy beside the fire. We recalled old times together and I thought of my dear Papa again with tears in my heart for he was the only good man I have ever known. But I must correct that at once. I must learn not to be so extreme in my judgements. My beloved brother is a good man too in his own simple way though he is blind to the unseen world and I think Mr Main is good at heart. I have thought so ever since the day he carried my pail downstairs for me as I remember I recorded here at the time…. I stopped there to turn back and find out when that was. My goodness it was over a year ago. How time flies. I have now six of these books in which I have faithfully written down my private thoughts and all the little things that have happened to me since I escaped from that horrible Home and came here to a house of my own, humble though it is, it will probably be my last dwelling place on earth. Who will ever read them? It doesn’t matter. I write them for myself, and for God to read. It soothes my poor nerves to read over what I have written in the past because it takes my mind off the future for a time anyway. But I must try to remember what my beloved brother said to me and what I said to him because it will bring it all to life for me again later on if I can write down now the most important things we discussed while they are still fresh in my mind.’
Midnight crept up on her like a silent cat and the tenement fell asleep around her as she struggled to get straight who said what and in what order. The voluntary exercise in memory led her to repeat in writing what she had said about the evil in the world and the evils to come, and she became more and more agitated. Her writing flowed faster, eddying round obstructions in parentheses, till it was almost a scribble and she had to stop and hobble round the room to take hold of herself. She was frightened. She had frightened herself. She waited, her hearing alert, fidgeting, half fearing half desiring that the spectres who sometimes came to speak to her at midnight would come tonight. She listened for the least little sound, she kept an eye on the door and kept glancing at the corners. But she knew it was silly of her. They never knocked before they came in. Indeed they never came in. They were just there if they came at all.
She had been hostess off and on to four of them for a long time, though in the beginning there was only one, an occasional angel and after that her dear glorified Papa. Then two came together, free and easy, twins but different from each other though they were both the same as Papa, and so for a t
ime she had three spectres to listen to. But now a fourth had got into the habit of turning up sooner or later in the session, and him she didn’t like. He was too cynical, a vulgar knowall. They debated her problems in her lofty single-end as if they were debating in the infinite void of space throughout an endless night where earthly clocks were of no more use than a sundial on the dark side of the moon. So deep they probed, questioning her sharply in the course of their debate, she sometimes saw them not as four wise spectres patiently torturing her, cruel only to be kind, but as four tax inspectors examining her books before accusing her of fraud. The confusion in her mind about their status was shown by the fact that although her spelling was normally good she twice referred in her diary to ‘the four inspectres’. Yet for all her alarm she waited for them, she put her trust in them, she looked to them to guide her, and she was in each of them and each of them was in her.
She straightened from poking the choked strength of the big fire her brother had built and three of them sat at the table where her diary lay open at the last page she had written. Papa turned the pages and gracefully read aloud extracts from earlier entries. The clock she hadn’t heard all evening began to tick loudly on the mantelpiece be¬ tween Rabbie Burns and Highland Mary till Papa spoke out soothingly and silenced it again.
—So you love this child?
Yet it was less a question than a statement of fact from which all the rest would proceed in due course, and from the mild tone of it she knew they weren’t going to put difficult questions to her at this meeting. They weren’t going to debate her reality, consider her as a candidate and decide her election or rejection, they weren’t come to determine her punishment, they were just going to chat with her in one of their kinder moods, help her, advise her. Even encourage her as they had done once already, before they traced her to her single-end.
One of the twin-inspectors whose name was a secret she wouldn’t write, and who wasn’t Papa, chipped in just to show he was the equal of Papa, sitting at his right hand.
