Glitter of Mica

by Jessie Kesson

  ‘I know. Grown-up women seem terrible gowkit when they’re all together,’ Fiona reflected, as they laughed together in the darkness, adding for good measure, in the great goodwill of their togetherness, ‘But you’re never like that, Mam.’

  ‘Fiona!’ The pressure of Sue’s hand indicated the urgency of her question. ‘The truth, now. Say you had never once set eyes on me or on Isa Riddel in all your life, and suddenly you met us both together on the road, which one of us would you say was the bonniest?’

  ‘You, Mam.’ The answer was unhesitating and sincere. ‘You are far younger looking and bonnier than Isa Riddel.’

  * * *

  On this night too, Isa Riddel, by some mischance or vagary of mood, forsook the local bus and took instead the ‘Scholars’ train’ home to Caldwell. On the Scholars’ train travelled the youngsters of Caldwell, who were completing their education in the Town.

  Not all were promising, though—some could simply afford the fees. These wore the colours of the Town’s Grammar Schools, elegantly, like casual afterthoughts, slung across their shoulders. The others, conscious that their places in the Secondary Schools were won in contest and held by merit, wore their school colours with little elegance, but with much bravado, as if to say, a thing not worth a damn, but all my own.

  Yet each of them and all of them had this in common: Caldwell was home, and sounding ground; the place wherein they exercised their hard-acquired, though never completely mastered, English accents, and gained a genuine—albeit grudging—admiration; the place where they could fall back into Scots, in moods and moments no other tongue could so convincingly convey, and all without any loss of face at all.

  That once in all their lifetimes when separate worlds—the town and country—waited with patience, offering them choice of ultimate domicile. In this, their stateless time, they recognised no fellow-country­men. And so it needed an adult without sensitivity, or with the heart of Bruce, to board the Scholars’ train.

  Isa Riddel was not without sensitivity. But neither was the Commercial Traveller, easing himself down into the seat across from her, without the heart of Bruce. She could have sworn that he winked to her, before pulling his hat down over his face and disappearing behind it, though what the joke was, she didn’t rightly know.

  She only knew a sense of isolation, as the Scholars’ train pulled itself out of the station, and a growing feeling of non-existence as it gathered speed and shot past small suburban stations, ignoring all the waiting travellers in the world not destined for Caldwell Via Lendrum Junction.

  Not even the Mother Tap of Soutar Hill seen from the new angle of a train eased Isa Riddel’s feeling of outwithness, or lessened her wordless protestation, a captive there amongst the teenagers of Caldwell, yet knowing each of them intimately, though not personally. Their new accents rising up all round her, battling with their old idioms, were enough to make you laugh, had you not realised its seriousness to themselves.

  Her daughter, Helen, used always to be on at her for her persistent use of old out-dated words and phrases. Words like ‘forfochen’ and ‘blae’—though what others could so well describe in sound body’s tiredness and weariness of spirit?

  Speech was so important, Helen had always maintained: The first thing to betray you, and the last to stand by you. It had been a long time now, since Helen had bothered to correct her speech. To her own wonder, Isa Riddel admitted to herself that she had missed her daughter’s corrections; she knew that one only stopped bothering about something when one had stopped caring about it.

  ‘I know what the Latin words on your blazers mean,’ she heard herself inform the faces round her. ‘Ad Altiora Tendo—We Aim For Higher Things. Though my Helen once told me that you all say it means “We’ll have a shot at our Highers”. Only in fun, and just amongst yourselves, of course,’ she added, lest they might take offence. ‘My Helen took her Highers.’ Isa Riddel rushed on, afraid of the silence that had fallen over the compartment, but terrified to stop, lest she should fall into it. ‘That was a while before your times, of course.’

  The Vet’s youngest daughter started to giggle in the corner; his eldest son put his head out of the carriage window and heaved silently.

  ‘I was reading somewhere that they are thinking of making the Highers easier to take, now,’ the Commercial Traveller said, suddenly appearing from behind his hat. ‘Your daughter must have taken hers when they really were something to take.’

  ‘Oh, but she did.’ Isa Riddel felt that somehow he had the right to know. ‘Helen got to the University on an Arts Bursary.’

  ‘But I thought they all went,’ the Commercial Traveller said. ‘You know, with their bolls of meal, their barrels of salt herring, then came out Doctors of Divinity at the end of it all.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ She had a feeling that he was teasing her, but perhaps not. ‘It was the crofters’ sons did that,’ she assured him seriously. There’s a big difference between a cottar’s child and a crofter’s child. You see’—she realised that he was but a townsman after all—‘you see, a crofter works his own little bit of land. A cottar works somebody else’s big bit of land.’

  ‘I see. So there is a difference then?’ The Commercial Traveller sounded as if this was indeed news to him. ‘And didn’t your daughter go to the University then?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, and no.’ Isa Riddel found herself having to explain, again. ‘She didn’t go for her M.A. And do you know something? I always thought that M.A.’s were what the University was really for. But Helen went to it for a Diploma in Social Science.’

  ‘It’s the thing now,’ the Commercial Traveller nodded his approval. ‘They’re all going in for that.’

  ‘Still and on,’ Isa Riddel regarded him doubtfully, ‘it wasn’t the thing we had set our hearts on for Helen. Her father was even more put out about it than I was myself. He said at the time Helen would have been as well leaving school at fifteen, putting on one of yon Salvation Army bonnets and selling the War Cry down in the pubs by the Docks, if she wanted to put the world to rights as badly as all that. Oh, but mind you, I was disappointed about it, too,’ she added urgently, emphatically, for she hadn’t spoken so freely to anyone in years—and the man a complete stranger to her at that. The very realisation brought her to a sudden silence. The wonder was the man was sitting there listening, as if all she said was sensible enough, and even waiting for her to go on.

  But that was impossible. Isa Riddel had never—not even for herself—taken the reasons for her disappointment out and looked upon them fair and square. Vast indefinable disappointment was easier to accept than any of its small ridiculous manifestations.

  . . . Helen gaining a Scholarship to a Secondary School. Her own rising prestige amongst her neighbour cottar wives. Nothing seemed so worth having from them, and there was nothing else she so needed from them. How well she had masked her pride, on the sunlit Thursday afternoon of that Summer, standing with them all at Ambroggan crossroads waiting for the grocer’s van.

  ‘We see you’ve gotten Helen home for the summer again, then, Mrs. Riddel,’ Lil, the Bottler, had remarked.

  ‘Aye,’ she had replied. ‘Just that.’ And not one amongst them could ever have accused her of being big on it, in that testing moment. Though, inside herself, she had felt big enough to burst. But ‘Aye,’ she said, calmly enough, ‘Helen’s home for a while. Not for long though. She’s going up to the University in October.’

  Credit where credit was due, Isa Riddel had to admit that to herself. Only her own like could have equalled her in understatement. And Lil had done that, right enough. ‘Oh, is she now?’ Lil had replied, as casually as if Helen had just been going up to Soutar Hill to pick blaeberries. ‘Well, the University will be a fine change for her.’

  But, even so, Helen’s glory had still reflected on her, through the University years, every Thursday at the grocer’s van. Once her neighbours realised that it had given her no side at all, their interest became genuinely appreciative; while
she herself managed to retain casualness. She could hear herself yet, in reply to Lil’s enquiries—

  ‘You’re quite right there, Lil. Helen does just look forward to her weekends at home here. What with all that studying, and all the different classes she’s got to attend, and that Town lodgings of hers. For you know yourselves that the feeding’s never the thing in the Town. And I can never get round her at all, to take back a bit of oatcake or fresh-baked scone. She says the students she shares with would never eat the like. As far as I can make out, they all seem to live on coffee and tinned beans.’

  ‘I never could look at yon things myself,’ Lil had condoled with her. ‘The smell of them’s enough for me. But never you mind, Mrs. Riddel. Helen will be taking her M.A. And one of these days, off you’ll be on the head of the road to see her Capped.’

  And there Isa Riddel’s difficulty had lain. How to explain to them all that Helen had no desire in the world for an M.A. It was hard to explain to others something you didn’t understand yourself. A Diploma in Social Science just seemed a come­down from an M.A. So Isa Riddel had kept her silence on the subject, and held on to her glory for as long as it lasted.

  It was Helen’s father who had given words to it all, when she left the University to take up an appointment with a Youth Centre in the Town. Hugh Riddel always did have the release of words.

  ‘Well, Helen! If your Youth Centre is anything like the set-up Charlie Anson has just started here in Caldwell, it’s Heaven preserve you! There he is yonder, clapping his hands as if he were the Almighty himself. Calling loons he has known from the cradle ‘Lads!’ Lord, but I can mind when he drove third pair at Ardgour. I was third Cattleman there at the time. And Anson was sent down the road for taking advantage of yon poor silly bitch, Bess Ainslie, that washed the cans in Ardgour’s dairy. He never could get a woman, unless she was some poor natural like Bess, with only her body normal in its function. And you needna put that superior face on either, Helen. There’s nothing sorer needed than a bonnie, whole man. But yon’s not one! Though, there he is, trying to worm his way into the County Council by taking up Voluntary Youth Work. You’d want to throw your porridge up, running into his like first thing in a morning. If your Youth folk turn out to be anything like Charlie Anson, it’s God help you, lassie.’

  There never had been a great deal of communication between Helen and her father. There was less after that. Helen had put on the defence of an even deeper reserve. Her man’s bitter dislike of Charlie Anson still puzzled Isa Riddel, for Anson aroused no such feelings in herself. On the contrary, he was always civil enough when he stepped across her door. Though what put Anson in her favour above all else was that he was the one person who could take Helen out of herself: for they spoke the same tongue, using the same kind of words. Oh, but Helen always had the best of it in the talking. All the words were really hers; though Charlie Anson would catch them as they fell, and be right and properly grateful for them. ‘You are right there, Miss Riddel. Quite right. For that is just how I am finding things myself. Only in a small way of course. For I would never compare my own small organisation here with the work you are doing there in the Town. Still, it’s expanding. Oh aye, it’s expanding. The Minister is beginning to sit up and take notice. But what I really want is to catch the eye of the Rural Council!’

  In times like these, Isa Riddel felt almost happy. Getting the tea ready, listening, but never adding a word, to the great talk going on around her. Yet feeling part of it, and quietly convinced that every word being uttered was correct, until Riddel himself came blustering in, confusing them all; for he had a way of sounding right by proving other people to be wrong.

  Darkness was beginning to close in on the country­side now. And though officially it was spring, the train rushed through a land that still lay lurking in its winter. For spring was that green something which took the southern places by surprise, but left this northern land unmoved; holding itself in grim reserve for summer’s fullness, and autumn’s onslaught. And when you were aware of spring at all, it was in some sudden thaw and in your hearing; when hillside burns broke off from mother peaks, and, in an anger of anonymity, roared down to swell the River Ruar, and share its name. So. In this sudden water rush of movement, the land itself would sometimes stir a little, but then sink back—as though even time itself had sounded false alarm, leaving you but the sky to measure seasons. And in the gradual, lengthening light, you would know that it was spring. Such a thaw had not yet broken the winter’s fastness. Not even here at Lendrum Junction, where all things happened earlier than in Caldwell.

  ‘Change here for Lendrum.’

  The porter’s cry roused the Commercial Traveller, and set him into the reluctant and contemptuous motions of one who had not yet resigned himself to representing his firm in an area which seemed to include all the ‘Change here for’ Junctions in the world.

  Oh, but there was a man knew how to face the world, Isa Riddel thought admiringly, as she watched him elbow the Lendrum scholars aside, while he took his suitcase down off the rack, dusted his hat, opened the window and peered out of it, as if querying the porter’s claim that this was Lendrum Junction at all.

  ‘It’s a nice little place is Lendrum,’ Isa Riddel assured his back, wondering why she did so. She herself had never set foot in Lendrum, for all her years beside it. And yet she knew that had she ever found herself at the world’s end, and met there one from Lendrum, although a stranger, she would acclaim him like some long-lost friend of the heart. For Lendrum was a sound as familiar to her as far-off Borneo, whose Wild Man threatened all of childhood’s misdemeanours.

  ‘Lendrum’s just about five miles to the other side of Soutar Hill,’ she added, realising that this was all she really knew of Lendrum.

  ‘Thanks.’ The Commercial Traveller smiled quickly towards her and leapt on to the platform. She kept him still within her sight as the train drew out, brushing his hat against his trouser leg, peering from side to side in search of the Way Out. It just showed you. There was a man you could have sworn was certain of his way about the world. Yet there he was, standing lost like in a little place like Lendrum Junction. The image bucked Isa Riddel somewhat. The train speeding under Soutar Hill was making good time. She would home a good hour earlier than Helen.

  * * *

  There was still an hour to go according to the clock in the cafeteria. Helen Riddel sat trying to discover its hands going round. Usually her glances clock­wards were furtive, for sometimes she felt that no one on the staff of St. Andrew’s Young Communal Centre ever watched the clock at all, except herself. There was a feeling of letting down the side about such an attitude to time, in such a vocation. For it was a vocation, as even a stranger would have immediately gathered from the conversation rising up from the staff tables.

  ‘We cannot always like the teenagers we deal with,’ Miss Booth, the Warden of the Centre was impressing upon Miss Rennie, the newest recruit to the staff.

  A lifetime’s acquaintance with her own creed had familiarised it into meaninglessness for Helen Riddel. ‘I believe in God the Father. Jesus Christ his only begotten son. The Holy Ghost. The Holy Catholic Church. The Communion of Saints. The forgiveness of sins. The resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.’ So it was small wonder that the words rising up around her in the cafeteria hit her awareness, like drops against a windowpane in a day of unceasing rain.

  ‘But we must always love them,’ the Warden was insisting.

  Helen Riddel didn’t even need her eyes to observe Miss Rennie’s reaction to this edict. Her own remembrance could do that for her—could recall the pondering assimilation, the sudden excited recognition.

  ‘I see what you mean, Miss Booth! I think I always realised that myself. But I just never managed to pin it down so exactly.’

  Miss Booth was right too. Helen Riddel was in entire agreement with Miss Rennie on this point. But then, Miss Booth always did sound right the first time she expressed a sentiment. It was simply rep
etition that robbed her words of original force.

  ‘Did you read that article in yesterday’s Telegraph, Miss Booth?’ The conversation was becoming more general now, its topics flung from table to table, the way the teenagers would fling empty orange squash cartons at each other later on. ‘That article about the Espresso Bar society?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I never find time to read.’

  Pride, not apology, sound our confessions. Those bold confessions which defy anybody to think less of you.—‘I’ve got a shocking temper when I’m roused.’ ‘I say exactly what I think.’ ‘I’ve got no time at all for sentiment. Practical—That’s Me!’ Those bold confessions; seldom their shabby weak antitheses. For self keeps silence and its secrets still, lending its other images and imitations voice.

  ‘I just happened to glance at the article in the train.’—Lack of time for reading, it now transpired, was general, and had assumed a kind of virtue.

  ‘It is simply that they don’t Know,’ Mr. Fleming of Senior Lads’ Group was emphasising to his assistant, ‘and that is where we take over. If we take it from there, Melville. From zero.’

  Mr. Fleming had suddenly discovered a new application for an old word, all by himself, and one to his liking. But soon it too would become current: soon it would punctuate all their speeches, just as ‘Good Show’, ‘Will Do’ and ‘Fantastic’ had done.

  Helen Riddel grinned wryly to herself. How down she used to be on the Doric tongue of her own people! And what a long, long time it had been since she had admitted to herself that they were her own people. And how contemptuous always of the outlandish words and phrases her mother had used! They had become more than balm to her hearing now; they could sound her soul so that it leapt to the recognition of meaning again.

  ‘So you’ve won home again, Helen?’ That was exactly how her mother would greet her tonight—the welcome extended when she had returned as a child from school; one which would remain unchanged, were she to return an old woman from a far country. You ‘won home’ either way; Won . . .Gained. Merited. Attained. On her people’s tongue the very sound of the verb ‘won’ implicitly acknowledged all the distractions, hazards and mischances you might well have to overcome, whether on the road home from school in the foolishness of childhood, or on the road across the world in the wisdom of age.