by George Friel
‘But it wouldn’t have been true,’ I argued. ‘Dross was her man and she knew it. Lawrence’s gypsy. But she thought the price too high, that was all. I’m sure she was stuck with him for all that, for a long time, in her mind. I couldn’t possibly have seen her pick up with another man within the scope of my narrative. As it says in Finnegans Wake, tough troth is stronger than fortuitous fiction.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve read Finnegans Wake!’ my mother cried, popeyed incredulous. ‘You like to impress folk, don’t you? Well, you needn’t bother trying to impress me. I’m only your mother.’
I sighed. She was a disputatious woman to talk to. She rolled my pages between her palms and shook her head.
‘No, you may be right,’ she said. ‘But I still think I knew them better than you.’
‘And you believe Main would have married Bobo?’
‘I’m not saying I believe that in particular. But tell me, all those nights in the Phoenix, that last night especially. How did you know about it?’
‘Tommy Partridge told me some of it. Dr Main told me bits.’
‘Miss Partridge and her Papa calling on her at midnight?’
‘It’s in her diaries, as you very well know.’
‘And how about the way poor Donald Duthie died? You were too young then to understand.’
‘There’s always talk. There’s gossip you hear, and you take it in, and when you’re older you make sense of it.’
‘So gossip is one of your sources for a history essay?’
‘Why not? You’re just being awkward.’
‘That long digression, what do they call it, a throwback? about Miss Partridge going to America and her troubles as a G. I. bride. You couldn’t know a thing about that. Him being Yankee-doodle-randy and her being a Scotch prude. It was kind of tedious.’
‘I could cut it out if you like,’ I offered willingly. ‘I don’t like it myself.’
‘Another thing, according to you, the holdup was all worked out in detail by Lillie and Arnott and Toby Owen. He broke his mother’s heart, that one. A good- living widow with four of a family, lost her man with T.B. when they were all weans. Worked hard all her life for them. What makes you say Dross put them on to it from a joke was made about giving Miss Partridge a fright?’
‘I got it from Tommy Partridge, and Dross told his probation officer, Mr Wylie, and Mr Wylie told me. I did some chasing on all this, you know.’
‘Firsthand evidence,’ my mother derided. ‘Somebody told somebody that told somebody that told you.’
‘Don’t let’s labour the point,’ I pleaded. ‘You pick any chapter you like and I’ll give you my authority for it.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ she shrugged. ‘You always were a devious little prig. A fly wee bugger as your father called you. Sitting in a corner with your nose in a book but aye listening to whatever was said, aye adding things up. But I don’t trust your answers. Oh, I admit you know a lot. You even know Grace had toothache the night she threw the sweets away after cleaning out the house.’
‘Naturally,’ I said. ‘Grace told me.’
‘Aye, she would. And how is she?’
‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘She sends her love.’
‘And how’s the baby?’
‘Bouncing. More like you than like Grace.’
‘I am the family face,’ said my mother. ‘I live on. And are you going to put that in too? A delicate echo of Jane Eyre. Reader, I married her.’
‘No, I’m not. That’s got nothing to do with it. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t.’
We sat silent awhile before I thawed enough to speak again.
‘There’s one thing still puzzles me. Those silly sweeties. Maybe the one she tampered with would only have made Grace sick. I don’t know. But she meant to poison her. It’s in the diary. What did she think when she came back and found Grace still living?’
‘Oh, I can tell you that,’ my mother answered gladly, pleased there was something I didn’t know and she did. ‘It’s in the last diary, the one I didn’t give you when Miss Partridge died.’
She rummaged in a drawer in the kitchendresser and read from a cash ledger.
‘I was a bad, selfish, proud woman, presuming to do the work of the Lord for the Lord Himself, but the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and salvation is only of the Lord, and He left Grace here on earth to light my way on my return from the valley of the shadow, and now I know my duty henceforth, to watch and pray and trust in the Lord to look after His own.’
‘Give me that!’ I cried snatching.
My mother held it behind her back.
‘I gave you the others because Miss Partridge asked me to give you them when she died. She knew you were afraid of her. You often hurt her, you know, the way you behaved to her. She thought you might learn to understand her.
But you’ve made such a dog’s breakfast of what you got, you’re getting no more. Not from me. When I’m dead you can have it.’
She planked it away in the drawer again, under a lot of other stuff, insurance policies, post-office savings, my father’s manuscript gagbooks, her marriage-lines and her teacher’s diploma.
‘Do you want a cup of tea before you go?’ she asked pleasantly.
‘Yes, please,’ I said with due filial respect. I knew when I was beaten.
And while she brewed the pot I stood at the window and looked down on the silent backcourt. Like Wee Annie I too had my ghosts. But they never came to me, glorified and articulate, in a gaslit kitchen at midnight. No, they wandered dumbly in and out my locked bedroom when I lay awake in the small hours with a bad conscience, or they came to me with frightened faces in unexpected nightmares, and every time I went to see my mother I remembered with sorrow a vanished culture of immemorial song and dance and ritual play, a culture whose children had all migrated in the endless shift of population to have children of their own, alien offspring in mushroom suburbs. Susan Greenwood and Angus Erskine had long since blasted off into strange orbits. Susan had a regular part in an STV kitchen-comedy series called Up Oor Close, and Angus was on the Town Council. Wee Annie was dead on a Sunday morning, four years after Tiger and his mates tried to rob her, found sprawled on her door-step clutching a halfpint bottle of milk. A heart attack when she bent to lift it. Dross went to England like all ambitious Scots- men, last heard of in Pentonville. Bobo? I don’t know. I just don’t know. The Bonnars moved out of the close and went to the Scheme facing the Park when I was in my middle teens, years after the Christies had gone, and I never heard of Bobo again. She still wasn’t married when she left, and she used to talk to me quite a lot, though never as much as she did to Main.
‘Forget it,’ said my mother, pouring the tea. ‘You make too much of it.’
‘It’s easy for you,’ I said. ‘But I can’t forget it. Not just like that. I still have nightmares. I’m still liable to be chased any night in my dreams by Wee Annie.’
‘Miss Partridge,’ said my mother. ‘You were jealous of her because she was so fond of Grace, and you were afraid Grace was going to get fond of her. But I expected you’d marry Grace one day. It used to amuse me after the Christies flitted, you couldn’t keep off them. You always dragged the conversation round to get on to Grace. And how is she, and what’s she doing, and when you were older, has she a boyfriend. You pestered me for gossip. You always did love gossip. And when you met her at the university you got such a thrill. You came home here looking as if you’d seen Venus rising from the sea.’
‘I knew she was clever,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t know she had stayed on at school. Your gossip-service broke down, remember? You couldn’t even tell me she had taken her Highers. You had some silly rumour she was working in Wood and Selby’s.’
‘So she was for a time, a holiday job,’ my mother defended her information. ‘I could see you were caught when you came in that day. Childhood sweethearts! The years rolled on and once again I met them, they stood before the alter hand in hand.’
She sang and laughed.
‘I could have done a lot worse,’ I said loyally.
‘I never said otherwise,’ my mother retorted, making the peace. ‘I’ve nothing against Grace. A lot better her than some of the other girls you picked up with. Do you want me to read all this again and see if it sounds any better the second time?’
‘Don’t bother, give me it back,’ I said dourly. ‘I’m sorry you don’t like it. But I still think that’s how it was. And with God’s grace I’ll write a story one day about the tenement where I was born.’
MR ALFRED M.A.
A NOVEL
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
She passed for a widow when she went to Tordoch. She flitted across the river thinking nobody there would know her husband had left her. He was a longdistance lorrydriver, always coming or going and never saying much the few hours he was at home. He went to Manchester one day with a load of castings and vanished, lost and gone for ever, as untraced and untraceable as those banal snows some folk keep asking about. Not that she bothered to ask. She was a working-woman with a good overtime in the biscuit factory. She could do without his wages. The manless planet of her life moved round her son Gerald. He was Gerry to his schoolmates, but never to her. She always gave him his name in full. She thought it sounded right out the top drawer that way. That was why she chose it, though neither she nor her husband had ever any Gerald among their kin. She loved her Gerald fiercely. She loved him a lot more than she loved his little sister Senga. He was a good boy to her, but too kind and gentle perhaps, too innocent. She had always to be protecting him from the malice of the world. But that’s what she was there for. He was tall for his age, blond and grinning. The girl was skinny, gin- gerhaired, crosseyed, freckled and nervous. She had loved her father because he used to cuddle her at bedtime. But after the row she got for asking where he was when they flitted she was afraid to mention his name again.
About a year later, say the week before Christmas, when she was turned eleven and Gerald was fourteen, he was thumping her hard because she wouldn’t fry sausages for him at teatime, even after he told her twice. The anapaests of his bawling were hammered out by his punches.
‘Aye, you’ll do what I say and jump up when I speak for you know I’m your boss and you’ve got to obey.’
Eight scapular blows.
She whimpered and crouched, but she still defied him, and her mother came home earlier than expected and caught her red-eyed in the act. Gerald was glad to have a witness of his sister’s disobedience and complained it wasn’t the first time.
Mrs Provan stared at Senga, frightening her.
‘You’d start a fight in an empty house you would,’ she said. ‘You bad little besom.’
She advanced speaking.
‘You know damn well it’s your place to make a meal for Gerald when I’m not in. I’m fed up telling you.’
Senga retreated silently.
Poised to jouk, right hand over right ear, left hand over left ear, her head sinistral, she borded the kitchensink in a defence of temporary kyphosis.
Mrs Provan halted.
Senga straightened.
‘It was me set the table and made the tea,’ she replied with spirit, confounding her mother and her brother in one strabismic glare. ‘If he wants any more he can make it himself.’
‘It’s not a boy’s place to go using a fryingpan,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘That’s a girl’s job. Your job.’
‘It’s him starts fights,’ said Senga. ‘Not me, It’s him. Always giving orders.’
Her guard was dropped.
Her mother swooped and slapped her twice across the face, left to right and then right to left.
Gerald grinned.
Senga wept.
‘I wish my daddy was here.’
Gerald chanted.
‘Ha-ha-ha! Look at her, see! She wants to sit on her daddy’s knee!’
‘She’ll wait a long time for that,’ said Mrs Provan.
She put her arm round Gerald, ratifying their secret treaty, and Gerald rubbed his hip against her thighs.
CHAPTER TWO
Mr Alfred sagged at the bar, sipped his whisky and quaffed his beer, smiled familiarly to the jokes exchanged across the counter, and lit his fifth cigarette in an hour. His hand wavered to put the flame to the fag and his lips wobbled to put the fag to the flame. The man at his elbow chatted to the barmaid. The barmaid chatted to the man at his elbow. Propinquity and alcohol made him anxious to be sociable. He waited for an opening to slip in a bright word. After all, he knew the man at his elbow and the man at his elbow knew him. They had seen each other often enough. But neither admitted knowing the other’s name, though he must have heard it countless times from Stella, who knew them all.
It grieved Mr Alfred. Sometimes he thought he was making a mistake frequenting a common pub with common customers and a common barmaid when he had nothing in common with them. In every pub he went to he recognised anonymous faces. For besides being a bachelor and a schoolmaster, a Master of Arts and the author of a volume of unpublished poems, the only child of poor but Presbyterian parents and now a middleaged orphan, he was a veteran pubcrawler. But it was his weakness to stand always on the fringe of company, smiling into the middle distance, happy only with a glass in his hand. He had been a wallflower since puberty. He wanted to love his fellow men. When he was young he even hoped to love women. Now every door seemed locked, and without a key he was afraid to knock.
Stella drew a pint. The beer was brisk. She brought the glass down slowly from the horizontal to the vertical. She was pleased with the creamy head on it, not too much, not too little. With pride she served her customer.
‘There! How’s that for a good top? See what I do for you!’
The man at Mr Alfred’s elbow put a big hand round the pint-measure. He grinned.
‘Nothing to what I could do for you.’
‘Ho-ho,’ said Stella. ‘I’m sure.’
Her frolic smile said enough for a book on sex without fear. Mr Alfred caught a reprint tossed to him free. He jerked and fumbled for something to say. Distracted to find nothing, he missed what they said next. When they stopped laughing Stella turned to him as if he had heard.
‘This man brings out the worst in me.’
Mr Alfred smiling tried again to find a mite to contribute. By the time he was ready to catch the speaker’s eye she was slanted from him, sharing another joke with the man at his elbow. She ended it laughing.
‘Aye, I know. The doctor says it’s good for you.’
Mr Alfred meditated. Alcohol always made him meditate. His cigarette smouldered at an angle of fortyfive. There was a glow in his middle and a halo round his head. He was getting what he came out to buy. An anaesthetic between the week’s drudgery behind and the week’s drudgery ahead. Stella was his world for the moment. Stella and what she said and the way she said it. His daily thoughts assured him he was the victim of a coarse and even foul mind. He accepted it, as a redhaired man accepts his red hair. He was willing to believe Stella was never guilty of an equivocation and to blame himself for thinking her conversation was loaded with a wrapped freight of allusions to sexual intercourse. He wondered how he would get on if he tried to make love to her. But he had a good idea what would happen.
Even if she ever gave him the chance he would muck it up somehow. He would be sitting an examination in a practical subject when all he had was a little book-learning. He drooped.
When he came out of his soulsearching the man at his elbow was turning to go.
‘Good night, sir,’ Stella called out, moving up from the other end of the bar to give him a wave.
‘You never call me sir,’ he said as she came level.
He thought his joking pretence of jealousy would amuse her.
Stella strolled down the bar again and threw him a vague smile over her shoulder. It said she heard him say some¬ thing but didn’t quite know what and didn’t think it mattered.
He staggered out on the bell to wintry streets and shivered. Between tall tenements and down dark lanes, his cigarette out, he talked to himself. He criticised the chaste loneliness of his habits. He muttered Milton’s question. He had a habit of thinking in quotations when he had a drink on him.
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles in Neaera’s hair?
When he recited the pleasant alternative suggested by the great puritan poet he remembered an old surmise that with should be withe, meaning bind or pleat. It seemed an idea worth lingering over. But at that point in his erotic meditation he was interrupted by a woman who had no resemblance to Amaryllis or any other nymph. She linked her arm in his.
‘Coming home, darling?’
He recognised her as the reason for his wandering, and he knew the trembling of his lean body when he left the cosy pub was due less to the chill of a sleety wind than to the hope of finding her. But the moment she opened her mouth and touched him he was as empty as all the glasses he had drained. Still, with his usual politeness he answered insincerely, or with his usual insincerity he answered politely.
‘Yes, of course.’
There was a public convenience, doublestaired, a dozen steps ahead. He disengaged his arm from hers with a gentlemanly apology.
‘You wait here. I’ll be right back.’
He descended, leaving her loitering at the top of the stairs. When he had emptied his bladder he returned to the street by the other staircase and weaved home to his single bed.
CHAPTER THREE
Two of Gerry’s classmates collided at playtime. There were about four hundred colts running wild in a small area. Collisions and spills were common. Most often they led to nothing more than a vindictive shove and a corresponding push. But this time Gerry intervened. When the boys began their ritual snarling he jostled them. They tangled. He persuaded one of them to challenge the other. A square-go was fixed for four o’clock in the Weavers Lane. The news of the engagement circulated with a speed only slightly less than the speed of light, which is of course the maximum velocity at which any signal can be communicated in our universe, and Gerry was sure of a big attendance. He sprawled in Mr Alfred’s class after playtime, dreamy with pride at being a fight-promoter. He put a pencil between his lips, took it out and exhaled.
