My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  I decided Eileen must still be asleep; most mornings she’d been sleeping, or at least not coming down, until after eight. I cut a slice from the loaf Beate had made the day before and found butter in a clay dish on a shelf. No cheese, though – maybe I was looking in the wrong place – and I didn’t want to risk trying to make porridge. I didn’t even fill a kettle to boil water on the range for tea. Instead, I poured milk into a cup and was making a glum, cold breakfast at the table when Eileen appeared.

  ‘You’re early,’ I told her. It wasn’t much of a greeting, but I was feeling sorry for myself.

  ‘I’m a lot better. Not entirely well, but able to travel.’ She lowered her voice, as if not wanting to be overheard. ‘I think we should leave this morning. I’ll say so to Beate.’

  ‘Beate isn’t here.’ She looked at me in surprise. ‘The two of them have gone off for a walk.’ I smiled, thinking she would find it as odd as I had.

  After a moment, she went to the window and looked out. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Towards the woods. It’s nice out. They went off hand in hand.’

  ‘They didn’t say where they were going? Or how long they’d be?’

  ‘I didn’t speak to them.’

  She stood looking at me, biting her lip in silence.

  ‘Can you make porridge?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  I didn’t think it was such a stupid question. For God’s sake, it was breakfast time.

  ‘Or tea? If you’ll make tea, I’ll have a proper look and see if I can find something to eat. Eggs or something.’

  ‘I packed my case last night,’ she said. ‘Go and bring it down.’

  Though she spoke quietly, I got up at once and didn’t walk but ran up the stairs. It was as if with the first movement my body remembered what I had suppressed: how uneasy I felt about the man of the house. Going in, I thought it would be the last time I saw that room. The skylight window was pushed up, held open by a thin metal bar. In the space between the window and the frame, a spider had hung the loose weave of its net. The clock chimed eight as I lifted the case from where it lay beside the bed. The little statuette bowed its head to avoid my glance. I had dreamed of it as more brazen.

  Going back down, the case bumped awkwardly against the wall of the narrow staircase.

  ‘Now?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not? We’ve nothing to stay for.’

  ‘They’ll think it’s funny if we just go. Shouldn’t we thank them?’

  ‘Can we just go, please?’

  Only perversity had made me argue. Of course I wanted to get out of there. Maybe I was trying to impress her, safe in the knowledge that she was determined to leave. I put on my jacket and automatically felt to make sure the handful of coins was still in the side pocket.

  Since that first night, I hadn’t tried to check the boot, afraid perhaps of finding it empty. Relief flooded through me when I saw the small case was still there. Going back into the world, it seemed that after all we would have money, unless it had all been a middle-of-the-night dream. Pushing it to the back of the boot, I laid the big case in front of it like a barrier. Time enough once we were well on our way to share the discovery with Eileen.

  The yard was hot and still. I stood with the boot lid in my hand, feeling vulnerable. When Eileen appeared, I slammed it shut, alarming myself with the noise.

  ‘I decided it might be better if we left a note,’ she explained, as if apologising.

  Her eyes were tired. I realised suddenly how much thinner she was.

  ‘I’ll drive if you want,’ I said. ‘You could rest.’

  She thought about it, then shook her head. ‘If it gets too much for me, we can change places.’

  I’d no argument with that. I’d no argument with anything. We were leaving!

  I got in on the passenger side. As Eileen was sliding behind the wheel, I said, ‘If those two come back, don’t stop. Just keep going.’

  She closed the door. We sat together, side by side again. I had an extraordinary feeling of peace and security. It was as if I had come home.

  When she turned the key, it made a clicking sound. She glanced at me and tried again. The engine didn’t roar into life. As she tried for the third time, there came the same dry click.

  I looked down as I felt Eileen’s hand grip my wrist. Before I could ask what was wrong, I saw for myself. In the shadow where the path emerged from the woods, a man and woman stood. They seemed to be holding hands and there was no way of telling how long they’d been there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  We were waiting for August to come back.

  There hadn’t been any fuss when they came out from under the trees and crossed to the car. He’d put up the bonnet and fiddled around and asked Eileen to start the engine again. When it wouldn’t, I got out and stood beside Beate watching him. I recognised the engine mounting and the rod for testing oil and the place where you put water in and the other place where you put liquid in for the windscreen wash. That was about it. Then August went and came back with a box of spanners and Beate asked about a wire hanging loose that I hadn’t even noticed. He frowned at her, and went to work without answering. After he’d taken the starting motor out, it didn’t matter what the wire might have been, so I didn’t ask.

  He’d gone into town, taking the motor with him, and the three of us were in the kitchen, waiting for him to come back. Beate was doing a washing at the sink by the back window. Eileen and I were sitting at the table.

  I leaned forward and said to her quietly, ‘Come for a walk.’

  Beate turned and frowned at me. ‘Leave your mother alone,’ she said. ‘She’s tired.’

  ‘We don’t have to go far.’

  Eileen shook her head.

  I was desperate for her to come. I needed to tell her about the money. As well, I wanted to tell her about that loose wire; wanted her to say it was nothing; that I was imagining things.

  ‘August won’t be long,’ Beate said.

  ‘We should be here when he gets back,’ Eileen said.

  She was gentle and reasonable and immovable. She kept repeating how good it was of August to take the motor to his friend – ‘A friend,’ he’d said, shrugging, when Eileen explained we might not have enough money.

  Beate wiped her hands on a towel, leaned back against the sink and didn’t even pretend not to be listening. In the end, I scowled at both of them and went out.

  I didn’t take the path to the pool. Needing to be free of the place, I went out on to the road and turned left, away from the junction with the sign that had directed us here. I assumed that the junction would be on the way to the nearest town with a garage. The last thing I wanted was to meet August returning.

  In the dimly lit kitchen, enclosed by its thick stone walls, I hadn’t realised how hot the day had turned. In half a mile, my shirt was sticking to my back. Mountains folded one behind the other in the distance. Fields, dipping and rising, spread on both sides of the narrow road. Trees lined against the sky on top of a rise, all leaning the same way. Gradually the landscape and silence imposed an unexpected peace. I had no names for the mountains. I didn’t know one tree from another. I knew nothing about farm beasts or about birds or the wild things in the grass. I had no idea of how people lived in such places, what was natural, what men had made, what any of it meant. I had only impressions: big curves of blue or green as if slashed on to a painting from a loaded brush. The wonderful thing was to be alone, no one looking at me, the world mine. I spun slowly till the empty world tilted about me.

  As the world wound down, from out of nowhere came the uproar of a big American voice, accompanied by a band – drums thumping, trumpets blaring – bawling from full lungs: ‘If ever the devil was born without a pair of horns, it was you, Jezebel, it was you. If ever an angel fell, Jezebel, it was you, Jezebel, it was you. If ever a pair of eyes promised paradise, deceiving me, grieving me, leavin’ me blue, Jezebel . . .’

  Round a turn in the road, I came o
n a man at the edge of the field, crouched over a sheep on its back with its legs waving in the air. At the instant I stopped to watch, with a heave he threw it on to its feet. It exploded out of his grip and bolted off, and he straightened up and studied me.

  ‘If ever the devil’s plan was made to torment man, it was you, Jezebel, it . . .’

  A thickset man, at a guess in his late fifties, though he could have been anything from fifty to eighty. Faded blue shirt without a collar. Square, weather-beaten face. One eye-socket blank flesh; out of the other a single small blue eye, flat and without depth, stared at me as if speculating which side I’d have been on at Culloden.

  ‘Like a demon, love possessed me, you obsessed me constantly. What an evil star is mine, that my fate’s design should be Je . . . ze . . . be . . . el!’

  ‘Isn’t that a hellish noise?’ I said.

  He considered, head to one side as if listening, then said, ‘It’s cheery when you’re working. And the wife likes it.’

  He nodded over his shoulder and I saw on the crown of the hill a low stone building not unlike the one I’d come from.

  ‘She’s all for the gramophone,’ he said. ‘In the navy I liked the wireless. Workers’ Playtime with Vic Oliver, yon was a great programme.’

  ‘He’s married to Churchill’s daughter.’

  ‘Do you tell me that?’ The single eye regarded me sceptically. ‘I thought he was a Jewboy.’

  ‘No idea. I read somewhere he’s married to the daughter.’

  ‘That’s remarkable. Good for her.’ He tucked his chin into his shoulder and sawed at an imaginary fiddle. ‘He used to say, “Do you know why I shut my eyes when I’m playing? It’s because I don’t like to watch folk suffering.”’ After a pause, he lowered his hands. ‘That always made me laugh.’

  It was too late even to smile. Another test failed.

  After I left him, the road swung left by a field with half a dozen cows, shaggy brown beasts with long horns which went back in a curving lilt. Past them, it inclined so steeply that I began to pant for every breath of warm air. To my surprise, at the top the narrow road disappeared into the yard of the house I’d seen from below. In the conviction that the farmer should have warned me about a dead end, a kind of indignation carried me forward. As I came to the other end of the farmyard, I looked down a grassy slope to where a rowing boat lay pulled up on the bank of an open stretch of water. It was so quiet that I could hear a lorry, maybe a mile distant, trundling along what had to be a road on the other side of the loch.

  I became conscious of a low, steady hissing, which I eventually recognised as the steady turning of a needle at the end of a gramophone record. It came from one of the open windows, and I realised that it was from here the American music had thundered across the countryside. No sign, though, of the farmer’s wife. Perhaps that music-lover was making beds; or in hiding under one of them from the intrusion of a stranger. At that last thought, I beat a retreat.

  On my way back, I saw the farmer making his way up the field towards the house, followed by an idle string of cows. At sight of me, he swerved and came across.

  ‘The road stops at your house,’ I said.

  ‘Nowhere else for it to go.’

  ‘I found that out.’

  ‘So where’s your car?’ The question seemed irrelevant. As I hesitated, he said. ‘You’re just taking a walk?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We don’t get many folk walking here.’

  ‘I’m staying with your neighbour.’

  ‘Neighbour?’

  ‘Down the road.’

  ‘What brought you there? You know MacLean?’

  I shook my head. ‘We stopped, looking for something to eat. My mother began to feel unwell, and they put us up.’ Then the name MacLean registered. ‘I’m talking about the first house down on the right-hand side.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘MacLean?’

  ‘Aye, Angus MacLean and his sister. What man would want that, eh? A man needs a bit of a cuddle now and again. You’ll not get that from a sister.’ He made a face, and went on before I could react. ‘The man’s in hiding down there. He’d to leave his own island because he was ashamed. He was one of they conchies – he wouldn’t fight for his King – and on that island a lot of the boys didn’t come home. Just a worthless kind of a man. He worked in the forestry in Argyll with the other conchies for a while. After the war, he went back to being a schoolmaster again, and then one day the two of them were gone. I was surprised when they turned up here. He must have thought he’d left his past behind him. But it’s a small world for a creature like that. I smile to think he has no idea that I know about him. They say the real reason he wouldn’t fight was that he favoured yon Hitler man.’

  At the beginning, I almost broke in to say, ‘It’s a mistake – he’s South African.’ By the end, what stopped me was that I could believe in August as a supporter of the Nazis. But that husband and wife might be brother and sister made no sense to me.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘If he doesn’t know you, how do you know him?’

  ‘I don’t,’ the man said. He jerked a thumb at the house on the hill above us. ‘But she does. Oh, she knows him. Any time our paths cross in the town, she dodges away so he’ll not see her.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Island girls make the best wives.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘Got a temper, though – goes with the red hair. If she heard me, she’d go her duster, call me a damned old gossip, but that’s just because he frightens her.’

  I offered, ‘He’s a big man,’ not able to keep the question out of my voice, still willing to settle for there being a mistake.

  ‘By Christ, he doesn’t frighten me.’ He poked with his stick at one of the cows that were gathering in a circle round us. ‘Anyway, you’d never be such a fool as to say anything to him, eh?’

  ‘I won’t say anything.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. But why give your money to somebody like that? Now you know the score, you should get out of there.’

  ‘Today if I can.’

  On the off chance he might help, I was ready to tell him about the starting motor, but he struck out again at the cow.

  ‘That’s the bitch that did it.’ He rubbed a finger in his empty eye-socket. ‘Hooked me in the face when I was on the milking stool. I cry her Jezebel.’

  ‘But she still has her horns.’ Even a town boy knew you could cut off their horns.

  ‘Aye,’ he said on a slow outgoing breath, ‘but I keep an eye on her now.’

  His laugh followed me back down the road.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Now I had two secrets from Eileen, but could find no chance to share either of them. The first thing I saw when I went in through the gate was August getting out of his car. It was a little battered Austin A30 and he unfolded from it like a man struggling out of a tight jacket.

  ‘It can’t be repaired,’ he said.

  ‘The starting motor?’ I asked stupidly.

  He frowned at me. ‘It’s a good garage. If they say it can’t be, it can’t be.’

  ‘Did you get a new one?’

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than it occurred to me that he’d been told we’d no money to pay for a repair, never mind a replacement. There might be a fortune in the case in the boot of Eileen’s car, but what use was that if I didn’t dare let on that it was there?

  ‘No. It’s only a small place,’ he said.

  Panic wiped thoughts of money out of my head. ‘But what’s going to happen? We can’t stay here.’

  ‘They phoned for one while I was there.’ He looked at me for a long moment: I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. At last, he said, ‘What more could they do?’

  I couldn’t find an answer. It came over me how much I distrusted him. It was too much of a coincidence that the car should have broken down just when we wanted to leave. For all I knew, he’d disabled it and there was nothing wrong with the
starting motor. If so, he wouldn’t have been near a garage. I couldn’t help glancing at the boot of his car. I’d seen him put the starting motor in it that morning. Was it still there?

  ‘Did they say how long it would take?’

  ‘Tell you what, next time I’m in I’ll ask them.’

  ‘Could I come with you?’

  He rubbed one hand down the length of his chin, studying me, then nodded as if making up his mind to something. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  I went to get into the car.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘You said I could come.’

  ‘Not now. I’m not going back now.’ He made it sound ridiculous.

  ‘What about tomorrow?’

  Waiting for him to answer, I understood it was a question to which there were a dozen ways of saying no.

  ‘Tomorrow it is.’

  ‘It’s not too soon? Do they get it from Inverness, or does it have to be Glasgow? It doesn’t have to be from the factory, does it?’ Somewhere in England, I meant.

  ‘It might even have come by tomorrow.’ When he bared his teeth in a smile, it was unexpected. ‘No harm in hoping.’

  He went off then to get on with the work of the day. The errand with the starting motor meant his day was starting late. I expected him to ask me to help, but he didn’t. I should have been relieved, but it made me more wary. Maybe he felt he didn’t need to keep an eye on me any more. After all, he knew I had been out walking, on my own, no one to stop me. He hadn’t asked where I’d been. What mattered was that he’d seen me come back: I had nowhere to go.

  Frustratingly, when I went into the kitchen Eileen was with Beate, one on either side of the table, talking over a cup of tea. I told them what August had said about the starting motor. When I’d finished, they drifted back to their conversation. I sipped the tea Beate poured for me, too busy with my thoughts to pay much attention. Eileen was doing most of the talking, and once something she said made Beate smile. It was like a glimpse of a younger and happier woman. As that happened, it occurred to me that we might turn to her for help. I was conscious of how much at ease with each other the two women appeared to be. Because of a man, Beate, too, it seemed to me, had been trapped in a poor kind of life. Sharing that experience with Eileen, it was just possible she might agree to help us. I looked at her as she talked, watched her lips moving, not following the words. Our situation was desperate, and we needed an ally. What made me hesitate was the mad idea that she might be August’s sister not his wife.