by George Friel
The ray he found was Rose Weipers. She sat down quietly on the front seat beside Senga Provan. They were conspicuously chums. But Gerald was gone. It was a new session. And Mr Alfred never believed in visiting the sins of the brother on the sister, far less on the sister’s friend. When he was a political-minded young man he disliked the totalitarian countries where they proved guilt by association. He would take Senga as he found her, a person in her own right. He found her rather unattractive. Her scared strabismic face, her freckles and her ginger hair somehow embarrassed him. He avoided looking at her.
But Rose was different. She was clean and tidy. She looked human, even intelligent. Before the week was out he was thinking she looked pretty as well.
He flicked through the progress-cards to find her iq. It wasn’t very high, just comfortably over the hundred. Senga’s was higher. That irked him a little. He had prepared the comment that her very name showed she was backward. The rest, like the horses in the same race as Eclipse, were nowhere. He saw he had been given a giggle of the less academic girls just as last session he had been given a huddle of the less academic boys.
His only interest was Rose. He had a teacher’s snobbery about iqs, a teacher’s predilection for a welldressed child, a male weakness for a pretty face. When Rose came to him as a graceful trinity of good intelligence, good clothes and good looks, he had no choice. He made her his routine messenger. Whenever he had to pass on a circular from Mr Briggs it was always Rose Weipers he sent next door with the ‘please initial’ document.
It didn’t take him long to make her an errand girl at lunchtime too. He sent her out for a morning paper, pretending he hadn’t time to get one on his way in. In fact he never bothered much about seeing a morning- paper. But it gave him an excuse to have her come back to him when the class was gone. Then he stopped going to the school dinners. He sent Rose to the local shops for rolls and cheese, rolls and gammon, a couple of hot mutton pies, anything he could take with a cup of tea in the staffroom. He didn’t care what. He was never interested in food.
At first it was only when he had her in his class at the end of morning school that he sent her on an errand. But within the month she was coming along uninvited on other days to ask if there was anything he wanted. He always thought of something, because when she came back it meant he had her alone for a few minutes.
Halfway through the term they had got into the habit of meeting every day at lunchtime. He would wait in his classroom. When she came to him he didn’t touch her. He told the critic at the back of his mind he wasn’t getting the girl to come to his empty room so that he could cuddle her. It was her simple presence, with no one watching, gave him pleasure. Just to be alone with her. That’s what he thought.
Coming back after her first voluntary shopping for him she knocked some test-papers off his desk. She was parking a poke with two rolls and gammon and counting out his change. The papers glided under the poke and slipped to the floor.
‘That’s a good start,’ she said.
She picked up the papers, tutting at herself but not flustered. He noticed the way she stooped, a girl’s way, bending the knees to keep her thighs from being exposed, not straddled and straightlegged like a boy. There was a certain elegant modesty about the movement that pleased him. And he loved the way she said ‘start’. As if they were beginning a new life together. He believed they were.
She had a talent for making conversation. She would talk to him the way she would talk to a friend her own age. But not always. She puzzled him. She was as unpredictable as the grown women he had tried to love when he was young. One day she was chatty, the next day she hadn’t a word to say for herself. It was her confiding moods made him fall in love, as when she told him about her aunt.
‘I cried myself to sleep last night,’ she said, alone with him at his desk.
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
He bent to listen. He forgot he had said he would never touch her. He was only trying to show sympathy. He put an arm round her shoulder as he inclined an ear. She moved in close, telling him.
Her Aunt Beth had been staying with them for three months and left yesterday to go to Corby and get married.
‘I’ll miss her,’ said Rose. ‘She was so good to me. I was awful fond of her.’
He was no Alfred Lord Tennyson to object to her ‘awful’. He squeezed her shoulder.
‘But you’ll see her again,’ he said. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’
His hand wandered down her shoulder and stroked her arm.
He was sure she had an affectionate nature. Her talk was always about people she was fond of.
‘My dad’s been promising for weeks to take me to The Sound of Music,’ she said. ‘We were to go last night. But I didn’t get.’
‘You’ll learn that’s how life is,’ he said, instructing her in banalities by occupational habit. ‘You look forward to something and then it doesn’t come off. I hope you weren’t too disappointed.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I was more concerned about my dad. He wasn’t well. That’s why. He was sent home from his work. He’s in bed. My mum got the doctor in.’
He liked the solemn way she said ‘concerned’. He liked the word itself since it came from her young lips. He thought the sick man was lucky to have Rose concerned about him.
She told him of Martha’s high marks in exams. She was proud of her big sister.
‘Martha’s clever,’ she said. ‘Not like me.’
He didn’t know Martha, didn’t want to. It was enough knowing Rose. He would have preferred her to be without a family, existing only for him. To think of her having a sister diminished her uniqueness.
Her innocent conversation made him think she liked him. He was a happy man. He teased her sometimes.
‘That’s a fine face you’ve got today! What’s the matter with you? You look fed up.’
‘I’m fed up,’ she said, fed up. She gave him his poke and his change. ‘This weather. Put years on an elephant, so it would.’
Nonstop rain and low graphite skies for a fortnight. A damp dismal world they lived in.
‘Season of mists,’ he said.
Rose sniffed, not hearing or not caring.
‘I’ve got a cold,’ she said.
‘You stay in your bed tomorrow,’ he said. It gave him a warm feeling of intimacy to mention bed to her, to think of her there.
‘Dear me, look at your hair!’ he cried. ‘It doesn’t know which way it’s going.’
Emolliated with affection he stroked her hair from crown to nape, smoothed it back from her ear. Fingertip on an auricle. So tender.
‘Can’t do a thing with it,’ she said. ‘Washed it last night.’
She slanted her head away. He felt his hand rejected.
Then she made him jealous. He was waiting at his classroom door for her return from the shops. The sight of her coming along always made him love her. She looked so young, so remote from the world’s slow stain, so trim and brave, so lonely and devoted, coming back to him and him alone, he was soothed to tenderness, his vanity gratified. She always seemed so much smaller outside the classroom, more of a child, he felt quite paternal.
He saw her meet the gym-teacher in the corridor. Cantering along, lightfooted in plimsolls, the gym-teacher grabbed her by the arm, birled her. Mr Simmons. A eupeptic, bigchested, broadshouldered young man.
‘Hiya, Rose!’ he greeted her.
He plunged his hand into her thick brown hair and ruffled it. Rose stopped, head down, accommodating the exploring hand, laughed. Mr Simmons weaved, boxing at her, clipped her lightly on the chin.
‘I’ll bang you,’ said Rose.
She raised a miniature fist. She was pink and delighted.
Mr Simmons danced round her on his toes. Rose shaped up to him, leading with her right but handicapped by holding in it the poke with Mr Alfred’s lunch. They made a palaestra of the deserted corridor. Still sparring even as they parted they both seemed pleased with
the brief encounter.
‘You don’t get Mr Simmons for PT, do you?’ said Mr Alfred dourly. He took the poke and change. He had a grudge against her for being so pretty that another man liked her. ‘How does he know you?’
‘Everybody knows me,’ said Rose.
‘Indeed?’ he said, still sulky.
‘I get him sometimes,’ Rose explained. ‘He takes the netball team for practice after four when Miss Avis can’t stay.’
‘But you’re not in the netball team,’ he challenged her. Very suspicious he was. ‘At your age.’
‘Not the school team, that’s sixth year,’ she said. She clicked her tongue at his absurd quizzing. ‘The class team I mean, for the class league.’
He didn’t know anything about class teams and a class league. She was helpless at his huff and left at once. So he got no conversation that day. It troubled him. He had been afraid he was in love. Now he was sure. Given the choice, he would rather have an hour with Rose than a night with Stella.
He couldn’t stop thinking of Mr Simmons wrestling with Rose in the corridor. It was so natural, so harmless. Nobody could say there was anything improper in it. Rose had taken it laughing. Obviously she liked Mr Simmons.
Her threat to bang him was an example of the free and easy relations between a modern pupil and a modern teacher. She would never have said it to him. But then he could never have done what Mr Simmons did. He wished he could.
He knew the trouble lay in his own bad mind. He wanted to fondle Rose. But his bad mind inhibited him.
He was afraid if anyone saw him he would get the name of a lecherous old man. Even if nobody saw him Rose might be offended or frightened. She might know what evil creatures men could be. But she could let Simmons ruffle her hair and wrestle with her because she trusted Sim¬ mons. Of course Simmons was a married man with two little girls. Simmons was a man used to showing affection. Simmons had the right touch.
His bad mind kept annoying him. There was no use saying he could no more assault Rose than fly in the air, it would be against the gravity of his nature. He could imagine many things he would never do. He could imagine himself committing suicide though he knew he never would. He had come near it the day he knew his poems would never be published, and given up the idea for good. It wasn’t in his nature. He could imagine himself attacking Rose to feel her breasts and lift her skirt. He knew he never would. But he knew such things were done by men his age to girls her age. His fear was that by some misconstrued telepathy Rose might suppose he intended the enormities he sadly knew were practised if he tried to play with her the way Simmons had done.
Whenever he read in the papers the story of a schoolgirl raped and murdered he was horrified at what a man could do. But it wasn’t incomprehensible, it wasn’t unthinkable. He could think it easily enough. He could imagine the damnable deed in all its details. But he was certain he could never do it himself. Any more than he could stick a knife into somebody, though he could imagine doing it. An indecent assault on Rose was one of the sins he knew he could never commit. Yet he longed to kiss her goodnight, to see her into bed. He longed to say he loved her. But never to love her by force. It was the lack of affection in rape that shocked him.
He was interested when he saw a story in the papers about a man of sixty marrying a girl of twenty. He worked out the difference between his own age and Rose’s. It was less than that. So marrying her, however improbable, wasn’t impossible. There were precedents. But at the same time as he thought of marrying Rose in a daydream future he kept thinking of her as his daughter in the waking life of his present.
The sodden autumn drained into a freezing winter. She came back carrying the quotidian poke, her hands blue with cold.
He took one. He was upset to feel it so chilled on his errand.
‘Che gelida manina,’ he said.
She looked up and said nothing. Puzzled. Wondering what he said.
He put the poke aside and chafed her hands. She let him do it without a word for or against, watching the operation with silent catatropia, and he was content.
After that he got into the habit of taking her hands when they were alone. He would pretend they looked cold and rub them. Then he stopped pretending. He held out his hand for hers while she was talking to him. The first time, she didn’t understand what he meant. When he put his hand out she thought he was pointing to something on the floor at her feet and she looked down for something to be picked up. But the second time she saw what he wanted and gave him her hands with a kind of motherly patience.
It became a daily ritual, this holding of hands as they chatted alone at lunchtime, and he gave her half-a-crown every Friday. He called it her pocket money.
Christmas was coming. He thought he would give her a money present in recognition of the season and her services. He was all set for a tender donation when she came back with his rolls and beat him to the love scene he planned.
‘I’ve got a wee present for you,’ she said.
She smiled up at him with a child’s excitement at the time of gifts and peace on earth, the holy tide of Christmas, brimming over with good-will.
She gave him a box of ten small cigars. Holly and a robin and From and To on the cardboard wrapping.
‘They’ll be a change for you,’ she said. ‘From those cigarettes you’re aye smoking. I buy these for my dad at Christmas.’
He felt numbered among her clan.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.
He blushed as he took the nuzzer. Rose smiled.
‘I was going to give you something,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t know what to get you. You buy yourself something.’
He slipped a pound note into her drooping hand. It was a new one kept specially for her.
Rose palmed the note with a discretion equal to his. She looked up at him brighteyed and happy but didn’t say thanks.
‘If you were an orphan I’d adopt you,’ he blurted.
He wanted to kiss her. But he was so tall he couldn’t get his mouth to hers without an awkward swoop that would spoil the spontaneity of the action, and she didn’t hold her face up to help him. He settled for squeezing her hand as it closed on the money.
When she went away he found he was tumescent. He argued with the man inside that it was only a desire to give her all the love he had. Not a stupid lust, but an erotic urge to an impossible act of gratitude.
He was drunk that night. He always got drunk in the euphoria of starting a holiday from school. Recognising the face in the mirror of a public-house gents he made a face at it, questioned it.
‘Well, wotta ya gotta say for yourself, eh?’ he asked, swaying to the glass. ‘Sennimennal old fool. Wanting to kiss Rose. Rose upon the rood of time. Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days. Rose of the world, Rose of Peace. Far off, most secret and inviolate Rose. You want to frighten her? Stick your ugly mug into her lovely face and what would she get? A child’s sense of smell. The reek of tobacco and the smell of whisky. A fine Christmas that for Rose. A merry kiss-miss. Be your age, mac!’
He had never been at parties when he was a boy. He had never played at kissing games. He had only heard of them.
He thought a kiss was too serious for games. It wouldn’t be right to kiss Rose. He loved her too much to snatch an old man’s peck at her. He should leave her to get her first kiss from someone she loved when she was older.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mrs Provan got Gerald a job beside her in the biscuit factory. She was never backward in asking. She kept on at the man in charge of deliveries till he started Gerald as a vanboy. There was no future in it, but it was a job. She would find him something better in due course. Gerald liked it. The work wasn’t hard and the money was good. It was a carefree life, sitting in the van beside the driver, whistling and singing. He learnt his way round his native city, stopping here and there, kidding and kissing the shopgirls and getting known as Gerry. He was growing up, a handsome lad, and at the weekend he had money in his
pocket. His mother let him keep most of his pay.
‘He’s not going to have the hard life I had,’ she said to her foreman. ‘I got on for years without a penny from him. I can still manage, please God. It’ll do him good to have money to spend. He’ll learn to look after himself.’
But she looked after him just the same as before, and Gerald’s money went without either of them knowing exactly where. He never bought a suit or a pair of shoes, never a shirt or a tie, and when he had to get a haircut he asked his mother for the money. When he started shaving she bought his razorblades and shavingsoap until she got him an electric razor for his birthday. At his summer holidays he expected a bonus from her. He always got it.
He spent most of his nights in Ianello’s, but time was all he spent. He never paid for his soft drinks or ices or sweets or cigarettes. He told Enrico he would see him later. He was a big, stronglooking boy, intimidating, largehanded, bold-eyed, insolent, armed. He had a knife he let people get a glimpse of when it suited him. Not the one Mr Alfred had seen. A new one, a bigger one. He challenged opposi¬ tion with the glint of it to see what would happen. Nothing happened. He never used his knife. He got his own way with the show of it. Poggy and Smudge were what he called his handers. They admired him. Enrico suffered him for the sake of peace and quiet.
It was worse for Enrico when Jennifer and Wilma came in. It led to competition. The young males kept chancing their arm to prove who was the hard man. They peacocked, disputatious. The young hens egged them on, squawking and screeching. In the upshot Gerald stayed boss of the cafe. He had this knife. Enrico sighed, and settled for peace, though there wasn’t much quiet with it. The jukebox he had hoped would bring in a jolly company of regular guys and dolls was mono-polised by a dissident sect that kept other communicants away.
Gerald’s mother never asked him where he went at night but she was always worrying about his future.
‘You learn to drive that van, son,’ she said. ‘Never mind what your pals do. If you can drive you’ll always find a job.’
