1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  I was not sympathetic, I was just interested in them. Only I was not sympathetic, I was just interested in them. Only Helen seemed ashamed of talking without restraint. She said afterward, “I was silly to go on like that. I’m sorry, I find it hard to be reasonable.”

  Only Diana was interested in me. She once interrupted her babble about Brian and Helen to say, “How is your own love life? You have one, haven’t you?”

  I told her I did not like talking about it. She said, “No wonder I feel safe with you.”

  I stared thoughtfully into my glass to avoid looking at her speculatively. I did not know if her remark was an insult or a compliment but it excited me. I wondered if she would tire of the director at the same time as Helen did. I wanted Helen, I had no intention of giving up Denny, and if a selfish noisy childish man like Brian could enjoy two women simultaneously why should not a kindly discreet intelligent man like myself enjoy three?

  For I did not neglect Denny in those days, I did not, I did not. I liked her more than ever. The actors fascinated me but it was good to go home to supper with someone who did not feel that all the world was a stage and everyone else a good or bad audience. I became nicer to Denny because I was plotting to be unfaithful to her. I stopped being unpunctual. I bought her presents of chocolate, and cartoon-strip love-stories which she read with great concentration. So when I remarked casually one Friday night that I was going to Edinburgh next day and might have to stay till Sunday she looked worried, but not more worried than if I had told her I was going to visit Alan. That was before we went to bed. I was woken later on by a queer muffled squeaking noise. We were not entwined as usual. She had slid down under the bedclothes as far as she could and pressed her face into the mattress to hide her sobbing from me. Her head was beside my hip. I stroked it and said, “What’s wrong?”

  I could not hear her words till I had crawled down beside her. She was saying, “You’re goantae leave me you’re goantae leave me and you won’t come back, won’t ever come back.”

  218 LOVIG DENNY

  I tried to cuddle her. I said, “Don’t worry, I love you! You’re all right because I love you!”

  I had never spoken the word love seriously before and have never used it since, but when I heard it leave my lips I knew I meant it. Yet she still said, “No no no never, you’ll never you’ll never come back”, and I noticed that apart from me she had nothing much to hold on to, nothing but a wage which could not support her, relations she distrusted and a forbidding public charity. Beside such weakness I felt gigantically strong, as strong as the whole world put together and I was delighted to discover my strength, because now that I loved her she had no cause to weep. No matter how many other women I loved (a man as big as the world cannot be confined to one woman) she would always be perfectly safe because I loved her first and best. I said, “Listen, Denny, you’ve nothing to worry about because one day I’ll probably marry you, Denny, yes, I’ll probably marry you because I like, no, I really love you, Denny!”

  Words meant nothing to Denny when she got depressed. Eventually she let me cuddle her but the sobs shook her body like incurable hiccoughs till they no longer distressed but bored me, then I got sick and tired of them and fell asleep.

  She was very quiet over breakfast next morning though I had made scrambled eggs on toast, which she greatly liked. I said to her, almost pleadingly, “Don’t worry, Denny! I’m not angry with you.”

  She said nothing. I said, “No couple should expect to sleep together every single night of their lives. And Edinburgh isnae at the other end of Scotland, it’s less than an hour away by train. And you’re perfectly safe here, the landlord likes you.”

  “Well I don’t like him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He looks at me in a funny way when you’re no’ here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She said nothing. I said, “As if he fancies you?”

  “Mhm.”

  219 LEAVING DENNY

  “I’m not surprised. I fancy you myself.”

  She looked at me with an expression I could not read. I said patiently, “That was meant to be a joke, Denny.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  She was silent, then said violently, “I’ve no right to be here when you’re no’ here! People think I’m your hoor.”

  I prickled with lust at the word but said sternly, “I am shocked to hear you employ the language of the gutter, Denny. And I’m appalled to hear what a low opinion you have of yourself. If that’s what you think of yourself, no wonder other folk think it too.”

  She looked astounded and said, “Did I say that? I’m sorry, I didnae mean to say that.”

  She really believed, because I had told her so, that she had called herself a whore. Yes, people with a confident tongue can tie up people like Denny in all kinds of knots. This is supposed to show our superior intelligence, but since it has nothing to do with truth or decency it merely demonstrates a special sort of skill, the skill of the jujitzu fighter who can knock someone down with a simple handshake. Having knocked Denny down I tried to pick her up. I said patiently, “The thing to remember is, that our landlord is a law-abiding, sober, respectable citizen. And a generous one. He let this room to me as a single man, you and I both use it now and he hasnae raised the rent. Which is a good thing. If he did that we could hardly afford to pay him. And a funny look won’t hurt you. He can’t help being attracted by someone as, as, as nice as you are, Denny. But he is not a danger. He’s a mother’s boy. He’s five or six years older than us, he’s never had a girlfriend in his life, and he still spends Sunday in Helensburgh with his mother. But I see my words are having no influence on you, Denny. All right. I will not go to Edinburgh today. Here and now – at this present moment in time – I cut all connection with that stupid company. They will fall apart without an electrician. They will detest me, and rightly so, for I detest myself, I am clearly a man whose word cannot be trusted. My reputation, my career will be damaged by this, but don’t worry, Denny. You and I will live happily ever after. Mibby.”

  So I got her begging and weeping and pleading with me to go to Edinburgh until at last I gave in to her and went. Are you still listening to me, God? This is terrible stuff. Very ordinary and very terrible.

  220 POSTWAR GLASGOW

  So that morning Roddy, Rory and I packed the lighting equipment into the back of a Ford van, then Roddy and Rory drove to Edinburgh and I went to Queen Street station to meet the others. Why? I had charge of that equipment, I had borrowed the van from a friend of Alan, why did I not drive it? Because I could not drive. I could draw blueprints of internal combustion engines but had no driving licence. This was common in forties-fifties Britain. Few lecturers had cars and even fewer students. In the recent war, because of fuel shortage, the only civilians allowed to drive cars had been doctors, and most professional people found this no hardship because they used public transport anyway. So the growth of the British car industry, the coming of the motorways, the dismantling of the rail system, the ringroads slicing up the cities, the spaghetti junctions, the multi-storey car parks, the streets subdivided by yellow lines and rented for parking to the people living there, the euphoria of the North Sea oil boom, the depression of the British coal industry, the depression of the British car industry, the depression of the British steel industry, the discovery that North Sea oil benefited hardly anyone in Britain but the shareholders – all this, though partly conceivable, had not been conceived. So because Roddy could drive and Rory was his closest friend and the van had only room for two I met the director and the girls and the writer at Queen Street station and we travelled to Edinburgh by steam rail way train. I am not telling you lies, children. Piston-driven steam locomotives did not disappear with Queen Victoria; until the sixties of this century they were built in Springburn and shipped to Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, they were built with parts forged in local foundries like Parkhead, Blochairn, Dixons, the Saracen, all gone now like the
shipyards they also served. Yes, Glasgow was still the centre of British shipbuilding. In the recent war Clydeside had built and repaired more ships than the whole of the U.S.A. Attlee had recently signed a treaty with Truman (or was it Eisenhower?) leasing parts of Britain to America for use as missile bases, but the Polaris submarine was still a design on a drawingboard and a few years would pass before it entered the Holy Loch. A few years would pass before the big men in the employers’ federations pulled their industries out of Scotland so the future looked bright when we left the train at Waverley station and I was astonished to see the Edinburgh tramcars were all a funereal chocolate colour. In Glasgow each tramcar had a 2½-feet-wide band of colour going round it between the upper and lower decks, blue or yellow or red or white or green according to the route it ran, and the rest was painted orange and green with cream and gold borders, and the city coat-of-arms on the sides in green, white, gold and silver. And there were no advertisements on these trams or on the buses either, why? Did the city fathers believe that adverts would spoil the appearance of a public carriage? Perhaps. The Glaswegians were proud of their tramcars, God knows why. Why should folk be proud of anything in a place which exists just to make money for those who can get it and make poverty for those who can’t? Perhaps there were no adverts on the trams because advertising was not then an industry employing most of the country’s artists, entertainers and newsmen. We had no commercial radio or television, no shopping centres, leisure centres, arts centres; nothing but the B.B.C. and shops and public baths and theatres. Oh, Britain was a primitive country in those days, primitive but in working order. We had come through a war, built a welfare state, had full employment and were still the richest country in the world after the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R. and Switzerland. We did not feel smug about this. The loud haw-haw voices kept telling us how drab and colourless we had become. The Tories had just won, or were about to win, an election in which they said that the British working man deserved more good red meat on his table. A team of British trade unionists had devised a democratic constitution for the unions of West Germany, a constitution which ensured that the German workers were not divided against each other and could bargain realistically for a share in the bosses’ spoils; but the part this would play in making Germany the industrial capital of Europe had still to be demonstrated. I am very sorry God, I would like to ignore politics but POLITICS WILL NOT LET ME ALONE. Everything I know, everything I am has been permitted or buggered up by some sort of political arrangement. So we left Waverley station and climbed one of the steep closes which tunnel through the high buildings of the old town, and found our premises were locked because Roddy had the key and had not yet arrived. So the director seized Helen’s hand, Diana seized mine, and we went to see the sights with the writer trudging glumly behind.

  221 POSTWAR BRITAIN

  222 EDINBURGH

  The day was fresh and bright, windy and sunny. We went up to the castle, then down past the cathedral to the palace, then round and on to the Calton hill. The director climbed upon the pedestal of the national monument and strode senatorially between the big pillars declaiming verses from Julius Caesar. He was in an exalted state and so, I think, were the girls and myself, for we climbed up beside him. Newcomers to most cities feel buried in them because the nearest buildings hide all the others, which hide the surrounding country. Edinburgh is different. The director said to me, “One day, my boy, all this shall be yours,” and swung an arm round the whole horizon indicating: the queer lunar-looking mountain of Arthur’s Seat then the rock with the old town on it linked by bridges to the squares and crescents of the new town which sloped downhill through several parks to smoky ports around the broad firth with ships on the glittering surface and the railway bridge crawling across like a steel Loch Ness monster into the distinctly hedged and wooded fields and hills of Fife with the dim Ochils and dimmer Grampians on the left and on the right a long grey line of North Sea supporting more ships with the Bass Rock like an ornament on a shelf close to the cliff and cone of Arthur’s Seat again. The director shook his fist at the urban part of this scenery and told it loudly, “At last we come to grips, you and I.”

  “A sham: An empty, pretentious sham,” said the writer just as loudly. He was leaning against the pedestal with folded arms, his head a yard beneath the soles of our shoes.

  “How can this splendid capital be a sham?” said the director.

  “Easily,” said the writer. “If you ignore the natural geography all that catches your eye here are ruins and remains and monuments – nostalgia made solid.”

  223 EDINBURGH

  “Beautifully solid!” cried the director. “This is a truly beautiful setting.”

  “A setting for an opera nobody performs nowadays,” said the writer, “an opera called Scottish History. You love it because your approach to life is just amateur theatrical. I hate it because the only parts of the scenery that really work here are the factories and shops, which might as well be in Glasgow. Look at that litter bin!” – the writer pointed to an ugly metal container on four short legs – “A label on the side says THE AMENITY OF THIS CITY IS RECOMMENDED TO YOUR CARE. The signs on the bins where we live say KEEP GLASGOW TIDY. That demonstrates the only essential difference between the two cities.”

  “Envy!” shouted the director triumphantly. “This man hates Edinburgh because it is grander than Glasgow. Forget about him, darlings. He’ll warm to the place when our production makes him famous here.”

  We returned to the performance place and found it open.

  It was a set of rooms near the castle which had been taken by radical Glaswegians who originally wanted to put on a political cabaret. They got the place cheap, partly because it was going to be replaced by a police station, partly because the lawyer acting for the landlords did not realise money could be made in the fringe of the festival, which hardly existed at that time. The rent was paid in advance by a practical radical who could cook and who had agreed to run the restaurant to which the cabaret would perform. After ordering an oven, fridge, cups, plates, cutlery, chairs, tables etcetera he discovered that his friends disagreed violently about what a political cabaret was. None of them had seen one, though they all believed it flourished on the continent, particularly in 1930s Berlin. He also discovered that several hundred people could be housed and entertained in the space he had rented. A dusty Victorian office was entered from a pavement on top of the shops on the north side of the West Bow. Irregular stairs went down to a vaulted cellar with two levels of floor and many alcoves. The stairs had an arch on one landing which was sealed by a partition of rough planks. When the partition was pushed down it uncovered a windowless hall from which other stairways, some stone and some wooden, went up to more rooms and to rooms above those. Most rooms had dusty windows and fireplaces, one with a carved stone chimney-piece showing a coat-of-arms and a sixteenth-century date. Doors were painted with names indicating forgotten functions: molasses room, sugar room, candy room, accounts. A chamber sealed by another inadequate partition contained a long ornate table, two wooden thrones carved with trowels and compasses, and two tall gloomy portraits of tall gloomy men, much larger than lifesize, who seemed to be clan chieftains wearing a mixture of highland and masonic regalia. This district of rooms, beside the door to the walkway above the shops, had double doors from the cellar into the West Bow, a door which opened through Deacon Brodie’s close into the High Street, and an emergency exit through a public house facing the Scottish National Library on George IV Bridge. So the practical radical applied for a licence to run the place as a nightclub and sublet other areas to dancebands, folksingers and our theatre company. He promised these groups (hardly any of whom were radical) a proportion of the nightly takings which would yield him a big profit if the venture succeeded, and he offered free food and bed room for the duration of the festival to whoever would help decorate and run the place. A couple of his friends denounced him as an exploiter, while refusing to share his expenses or
the work of management. Since their only practical proposal was that he abandon the place and leave to the landlords the rent he had paid, he thanked them but preferred his own practical proposal.

  224 THE PRACTICAL RADICAL

  Practical. The foregoing story may not be practically true. I pieced it together from bits of gossip overheard in the practical days which followed us all standing in a cold bare dirty draughty windowless hall lit by a feeble but practical light bulb. Why is practical running in my head? Because the director said, “You see the problem, darlings. We have five days to convert this into a pleasant little theatre with a stage and auditorium etcetera. I wish they had given us at least a platform. I’m sure we were promised a platform, but you just can’t trust these radicals. Jock. Roddy. You are our practical men. Work out what we need, will you? It’s quarter to eleven. Give me a list of what we need in thirty minutes at the most, because we have to move fast. Yes, and give me a list of the local firms who can supply what we need. Now come away with me, petals, let us leave the practical people to their deliberations. I feel that I deserve a very strong black coffee.”

  225 THE PRACTICAL DIRECTOR

  The girls and Rory and the writer went off with the director leaving Roddy and me staring aghast at each other. We spent five minutes denouncing the director and lamenting the impossibility of the task he had set, we spent ten minutes considering the problem in order to demonstrate to him how insoluble it was, and we discovered that we needed scaffolding, planks, more lighting equipment and many gallons of paint. We spent ten more minutes measuring the place to find just how much we needed, then went over to the Scottish National Library to get the addresses of suppliers from a local trades directory. The Scottish National Library did not have a local trades directory, so we consulted one which belonged to the public house facing it, and handed the director his list in not much more than thirty minutes. He read it and said, “Are you sure this is all you need? Should you not add a little extra to allow for a margin of error? It’s a mistake to stint yourself at the formative stage.”