by George Friel
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ said Gerald. ‘I aim to get a car of my own. You’ve got to have a car nowadays to be anybody.’
He loved the smell of petrol and oil, the motorodour of a garage, the sights of jacks and pumps and wrenches and spanners, he loved lolling in the van and grinning at the panic-stricken pedestrians who had to scamper back or scurry across when the van came breezing through at the changing of the lights.
He bought magazines about motorcycles and cars and kept them stacked under his bed. He read them through over and over again, hoarding an enormous specialist knowledge. He could identify any vehicle at a hundred yards, make, model and year. But when he saw the price of a good secondhand car he lowered his sights to getting a motorbike first. The visceral image of the speed he could get on a motorbike excited him. It was like the way Jennifer and Wilma excited him when they leaned back crosslegged in Ianello’s wearing a miniskirt. He felt an urge to get on and on. Faster and faster. Onwards and ever upwards. He was growing up.
‘They won’t keep you on once you’re older,’ his mother warned him. ‘Once a vanboy wants a man’s wage they just sack him and get another boy. There’s never any shortage of boys.’
‘I wonder why that is,’ said Gerald.
He winked at Senga behind his mother’s back. Senga gave him a crosseyed snub. She was against him. She was loyal to Rose Weipers. She loved Rose Weipers. And she knew Mr Alfred was always getting Rose to go errands for him. She didn’t mind. There was no envy in her. She knew Rose had the prettier face. She was ready to like any teacher who liked Rose. But Gerald and her mother still kept on about Mr Alfred. They told her to stand up to him. She never found any occasion to, and kept her opinion to herself. Once in a month or so she had her childhood dream again, that she was sitting on her father’s knee, or some man’s knee. She couldn’t remember the face. Before he kissed her she wakened up. The only person she ever told was Rose.
Gerald wasn’t bothered about her. She was only his sister. He had a lot more on his mind than her silences. In the yard where the fleet of factory vehicles was parked he was learning starting and stopping, gear-changing, reversing and three-point turns. Hill-starting and stopping he learnt on Tordoch Brae on Saturday afternoons by plenary indulgence of the driver at the end of the week’s deliveries. He found it difficult at first. But he was interested, he concentrated, determined to learn. He was full of himself and nobody ever said he wasn’t intelligent. He was never nervous sitting in charge of a powerful, throbbing vehicle. He knew it was under his control. He was the lord of an engine that slavishly obeyed the touch of his hand and foot. He was the triumph of mind over metal. But apart from the lessons on hill-starting the driver wouldn’t let him take over outside the factory.
His mother was passing across the yard once when she saw him getting a lesson. A smile thawed her frozen face. To see him sitting up there in the cabin driving the van pleased her.
‘You know,’ she said to her foreman, ‘it’s an awful pity his teachers took a spite at him. They taught him nothing. Gerald could have been an engineer if he’d got the education.’
She was a patient woman, crafty, for ever planning ahead. Well in advance of the time when Gerald would be too old to stay on as a vanboy she was on to the maintenance men in the firm’s garage. She deaved them how good her Gerald was, what a smart boy, quick to learn, a willing worker. She got him started as an apprentice motor mechanic. Poggy and Smudge went into the same line. Poggy found a job in a bus company’s garage and Smudge scraped a place in a local petrol and repair station. They were all happy. It kept them sharing a way of life.
In the evenings when it was boring sitting any longer in Ianello’s talking shop, they swaggered out for diversion. They finished up on the prowl after midnight. They kicked over the wire litter bins on the arc-lamp standards, lifted the empty milk bottles outside a sleeping house and smashed them on the road. They chucked stones at the crossing beacons. When they passed a bus-shelter with any panes still unbroken they broke them.
Tired mooching around like that, Gerald was the first to get a bike. Always at his heels, Poggy and Smudge got one as well. Gerald’s was on monthly payments. It was new. Poggy and Smudge got second-hand ones cheap. The three of them overworked their bikes. Parts had to be replaced. But they couldn’t go on buying them. It cost too much. There wasn’t much they could lift where they worked that was any use to them. So at one and two in the morning they raided any motor-bikes parked in the street. Sometimes they stripped a bike for the fun of it. When they had more spares than they needed Smudge sold the surplus to any motor-cyclist who used his repair shop and asked no questions about a bargain.
Smudge was the first to steal a bike. His own was past it. After all, it was in its second childhood when he bought it. He swopped the numberplates and ditched his own in the quarry behind the brickwork. They moved on to cars. Many a man in the housing-schemes had a car but no garage. He had to leave his car in the street all night. Gerald took Poggy and Smudge with him ambling round side-streets after midnight looking for vulnerable vehicles. They had a good collection of car keys. They stripped a car of its radio, its battery, raided the boot. Anything left in the back seat they lifted.
‘Bugger doesn’t deserve to get keeping it,’ Smudge used to say when he fished out a briefcase, an A. A. handbook, a mascot, a paperback or magazine. Any trifle at all, he took it.
They had a good night in a quiet crescent of semidetached villas far from their own territory. There were a dozen cars parked along it. They smashed the windows, forced open any door they couldn’t unlock, and stole the car-seats and travelling rugs. They tossed the car-seats into somebody’s front garden well away from where they got them. Poggy and Smudge shared the travelling rugs between them. Gerald didn’t want one. He never took home anything that was stolen.
It was nearly two in the morning when he got home from that raid. He had been getting later and later, but this was the worst ever. His mother was angry.
‘Where have you been till this time?’ she shouted. ‘You’ve had me worried stiff!’
‘Ach, shut your face, you old nag,’ said Gerald.
He was tired, and that made him a bit short with her. He stared hard at the bare table.
‘What’ve you got?’ he asked. ‘You don’t mean to say there’s nothing ready for me.’
Mrs Provan was distressed. She couldn’t think what to say for a moment.
‘I can fry you a sausage and an egg if you like,’ she said humbly.
‘That’ll do fine,’ said Gerald agreeably. He never kept up a bad mood.
Senga, conscripted to sit up with her anxious mother, made a face unseen and slipped off silent and unnoticed to bed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Graeme Roy went to the university. He was excited but confident, a young hawk eager to swoop on a new field. Martha stayed on at school for another year to add to her leaving-certificate subjects. She liked French and German. She thought she would get a cosmopolitan job with a good degree in modern languages. They looked forward to being students together. He saw himself as the trail blazer, preparing the way for his soul mate. With a year’s experience in hand he would be able to guide and advise her, take her round the scattered buildings of the university, lead her to the French and German departments and the women’s union, tell her what clubs and societies she ought to join.
But he had no one to show him around. He enrolled in engineering and missed lectures in the opening weeks because he didn’t know where they were being given. When he settled to the work of his classes he discovered he was a country yokel in a mob of city slickers, a flounder in a shoal of smart students. He wanted to be a technocrat. That was how he saw it, that was how he said it. But he wasn’t up to it. He had poor results in the first term exams at Christmas, the Christmas Mr Alfred and Rose Weipers were holding hands. When it came to summer and the degree exams he was in a panic. He lost the place in all his subjects. He couldn’t decide which on
e to worry about most. He worried about them all and couldn’t concentrate on one in particular. When the results went up on the board he saw he had failed in them all.
It wasn’t Martha’s fault. Much as she liked to be with him she wouldn’t meet him oftener than once a week. She encouraged him to study. She wanted to be proud of being his girlfriend. She wanted to find him established at the university when she arrived there. She wanted him to be a student who had passed all his first year exams without any bother and who would pass all his exams the same way every year until he graduated with an honours b.s. c degree in Engineering.
His total failure made her miserable. She wept in the loneliness of her bed. He was sullen after he told her he had nothing to tell her. He blamed the system. He said there had always to be so much percent of a plough, and he had fallen below an arbitrary line. He was sure he hadn’t done all that badly, he surely deserved a pass in at least one of the subjects. She blamed his father for persuading him to take a degree in engineering. But only to herself. She never came out with it to him. And amid her sorrow she wasn’t surprised at his failure. She had felt all along he had picked the wrong course.
His old teachers, always informed of university results, were as little surprised as Martha.
‘I don’t know what comes over these fellows,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘I advised him to take an Arts degree.’
‘He should have gone in for English Honours,’ said Mr Brown. ‘He had a talent for English. He wrote a very good poem for last year’s magazine.’
‘An engineering degree is just about the hardest degree there is,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘There’s a heavy plough every year. And Graeme Roy and engineering maths, well, I ask you! He’s a nice lad all right but no head for maths. I saw that when I had him in my last class. What makes them do it?’
‘They put a glamour round it,’ said Mr Brown. ‘An Arts degree is too common for them, thank you.’
‘That’s true,’ said Mr Dale. ‘They get this science bug. They want to be back-room boys.’
‘They think the ambition proves the capacity,’ said Mr Campbell.
‘His whole bent was for languages,’ said Mr Kerr.
‘He showed me a translation he had made of a poem by Rimbaud, “le Formeur du Val”. I’d never ask a schoolboy to translate Rimbaud.’
‘But wasn’t Rimbaud only a schoolboy when he wrote it?’ said Mr Dale.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘But he was Rimbaud. I would never take Rimbaud’s poems with any class here. But Roy had been reading French poetry on his own, God bless him. He wanted my opinion of his translation. I said it was quite good. So it was.’
‘That poem he wrote for me,’ said Mr Brown. ‘For the magazine I mean. It was a case of Dylan Thomas out of Swinburne. Very good as I said. But I couldn’t print it.’
‘Why not?’ Mr Alfred enquired sharply from his corner.
Anything concerning poetry concerned him. He had never seen the poem Mr Brown was talking about nor had he ever heard before of the translation from Rimbaud. He was annoyed. He thought he should have been consulted.
‘Well, in a school magazine!’ said Mr Brown. ‘There are limits, you know. He was only a boy of seventeen at the time. He shouldn’t have been thinking the way he was, not at his age. Kind of sexy it was.’
‘I see,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘And at what age if not seventeen should he be thinking of sex? Folk like you would have us either too young or too old.’
‘You mean you still—’ Mr Brown began.
‘A man’s never too old,’ Mr Dale tactfully interrupted. ‘Look at that old bloke of sixty-four in the papers yesterday married a wench of nineteen. His granddaughter’s chum.’
Mr Alfred had seen it but didn’t like to mention it.
‘That’s all very well,’ said Mr Brown. ‘But there was one bit I remember. Something about, I dream in these satyric moods of nymphs’ wan thighs in summer woods. I could never have printed that. What would old Briggs have said? Not to mention the parents.’
‘Or our beloved Monica the All-Seeing,’ said Mr Dale.
‘I had him some years back,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘He seemed quite intelligent, but I should never have thought there was a poet in him.’
He sat back and said no more. He was no longer interested in the conversation. It had made him think of Rose Weipers. Everything made him think of Rose Weipers. He had never seen her thighs. He tried to imagine them. He couldn’t. She was always sedate, sat down like a lady, knees and feet together. Even in the playground, any time he passed and took a quick look, she managed to jump the rope in her turn without the swirling skirt and swift show of thigh that other girls flaunted. She never showed off. He had seen without interest the legs and underwear of other girls as they lolled in his room, but Rose never showed an inch above the hemline. She was a modest girl. His autumnal longing to kiss a child goodnight and tuck her into bed moved through him again. He had a passionless wish, a neutral and almost clinical curiosity, to see Rose as she was, from head to toe, whole and entire.
‘He had an unusual Sprachgefühl,’ said an assistant German teacher. ‘I told him he ought to—’
‘He had a good French accent,’ said an assistant French teacher. ‘Before he left I said to him—’
‘I warned him,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘I said to him you might be good at English but as far as maths are concerned you’re—’
‘I advised him,’ said Mr Brown. ‘What you should do I said is—’
‘They get this craze about science,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘They want to be with it. But where’s the culture in all these technical subjects?’
The bell rang. Nobody answered.
They went to their classes. They dropped Graeme Roy. But I can’t. Not yet, anyway.
Having failed to satisfy the examiners he wanted to satisfy Martha. There at least he would prove he wasn’t an impotent failure. He tried to arouse her. She wasn’t aroused. She was only offended. The nearer he tried to get the further away she moved. When he sulked and withdrew she warmed to bring him back. Her temperature seemed to vary inversely with his own.
In the summer vacation he took her out one day in his car. The parents had guessed they were meeting again but didn’t want to make a new fuss about an old issue. They were prepared to tolerate though not to encourage an affair which had persisted in spite of them. They were willing to concede the young couple were getting old enough to know their own mind. It might be a case of true love after all.
They went to Helensburgh and up by Garelochhead, then followed Loch Long north to Arrochar and lunch. They were lucky in the weather. The sky was an unbroken blue and the cloudless windless heat made them feel they had wandered into a day from the legendary summers of the past. On a lonely stretch they saw the opposite bank reflected in the motionless water of the mirroring loch. It was an inverted world of tall timeless trees and unpeopled hills. Nothing moved anywhere. They got out.
‘Listen!’ she cried suddenly.
He smiled, she was so happy.
Obeying her he listened. He clasped her hand and looked up at the immense sky because she was looking there. A birdsong rose higher and higher and faded to heavenly silence. But he could see nothing.
‘The lark in the clear air,’ he said.
They sat in the car a little while before going on. He wanted to find release in her, to lean on her, to be comforted and encouraged. Not this time as the times he offended her, not the male determined to conquer his woman by force, but the defeated manchild turning to the female for motherly solace. She gave him none. Her breast wasn’t going to be his pillow. Her retreat made him impatient. He pulled her tight against him and kissed her harder than he had ever kissed her before. And longer. She was so close, his alert body was aware of her heartbeat. It was going at a terrific rate. He thought he had only to keep at her a moment more and she would give in. But the racing throb of that necessary engine frightened him. So fast her heart was going it seemed it could only end in a cra
shing stop. Let it beat for ever, he prayed, let me not disturb it further. There was plenty of time. He slackened his grip. A wave of tenderness drowned him. He let her sit away from him.
She turned suddenly and kissed him gently on the cheek. Her hand was stroking the back of his neck. He felt it was a medal awarded for devotion to duty in face of the enemy.
They went from Arrochar to Tarbet. She saw the Cobbler on her left hand. It was all new to her. She was dumb with delight. Her eyes were excited, but he knew it was only by the countryside in fine summer weather, not by anything he had done to her. He grudged her taking pleasure in nature and not in him. But he put a face on it and drove chatting up Loch Lomond to Ardlui, on to Crianlarich and through Glen Dochart. He turned south into Glen Ogle and took her home by Callander, Loch Vennacher and Aberfoyle. She had never seen so much of the country outside her city. She was exhausted at the end of the long day, dazed with strange sights. The bens and glens and lochs, the sheep and highland cattle, the remote cottage and the blue sky over all, the lonely miles where there were no streets and no shops and no tenements or housing schemes, still lingered in her town- reared brain. When she closed her eyes that night in bed alone she saw them again. Without him she would never have seen them at all. She told him so. He was pleased to have pleased her, even if it wasn’t the way he had meant. It was another knot in the string that tied them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Granny Lyons used Ianello’s cafe nearly every day. She bought her cigarettes there. She didn’t smoke a lot, but she was never without a packet. Once in a while, if Mr Alfred hadn’t come when she expected him and she was short of money, Enrico let her have a packet on tick. She was fond of sweets too, and got them in the same shop. Usually it was only a half-pound of liquorice-all-sorts, a mixture she particularly liked, almost to the point of addiction. Whenever she tried to do without them for more than a week Enrico slipped her a box with her cigarettes. Then he would turn away from her, his elbow on the counter, and look up and down and all along his shelves as if he was surveying his stock and hadn’t given her anything, didn’t even know she was there.
