Mr Alfred, MA

by James Kennaway

  Granny Lyons had a room-and-kitchen near the prison. It was on the ground floor of the Black Building. She sat knitting by the fire and waited for Mr Alfred. The little clock on the mantelpiece ticked away between Rabbie Burns and Highland Mary. Often he just posted the money, not always with a letter. But once the dark nights came in he called about once a month.

  ‘It’s only a couple of days now till Christmas,’ she remarked to her needles. ‘He’ll come tonight.’

  He did. In his oldest clothes. A wilted hat on his head, a muffler round his neck, a stained raincoat hiding a jacket that didn’t match his trousers, shoes needing to be reheeled.

  ‘You should wear dark glasses too,’ she cut at him, ‘and finish it.’

  He smiled. Her he would always conciliate. He spoke flippantly of his appearance.

  ‘So! You don’t like my disguise? But then you never do.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s a fact. I never do.’

  He saw the china-poet look at his sweetheart. He imagined they were avoiding his eyes in case they let him see they didn’t like the way he was dressed.

  ‘You think your boys won’t recognise you?’ she asked him. ‘Sure they’d know you a mile away.’

  ‘Not in the dark,’ he answered. ‘And I slip round the corner quick.’

  ‘I don’t know why you bother at all if you’re that ashamed,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not a nice thing to say. You know perfectly well I’m not ashamed.’

  ‘You should get a transfer to another school. Then nobody here would know you.’

  ‘It’s too late for that. It’s you should never have come here.’

  ‘I was here before you. It was the only place I could get when I lost the shop. You know that.’

  They were both silent then, remembering many things. He spoke first.

  ‘It’s quite mild outside tonight.’

  ‘Aye, it’s not been bad at all today. For the time of year.’

  ‘The street’s very quiet for once.’

  ‘You mean nobody saw you? I think your trouble is you get frightened coming here.’

  ‘I suppose I do. But you know what they’d do if they saw me. Hide in a close and yell after me. Something obscene probably.’

  ‘I had a feeling you’d be round tonight.’

  ‘Well, I thought, seeing it’s Christmas. I’ve brought you something.’

  He gave her a bottle of whisky as well as the usual money.

  ‘I know you like your dram,’ he said.

  ‘Not any more than yourself.’

  She poured him a drink. The quantity showed she wasn’t a mean woman.

  ‘You have one too,’ he said.

  ‘Well, seeing it’s Christmas.’

  ‘To my favourite aunt,’ he said.

  ‘The only auntie you’ve got now,’ she replied to his toast, unflattered.

  ‘The only one I ever really knew. My mother’s favourite sister you were. And it was you helped me when I was a student. Don’t think I forget.’

  ‘I had money then I haven’t got now.’

  ‘If you need any more you’ve only to tell me.’

  ‘No, you give me plenty. You shouldn’t bother.’

  ‘I promised my mother. Anyway, I owe you it. For the time you paid my fees if nothing else.’

  ‘Well, as I say, I had it then. It was a good shop I had before all that trouble. And there was nobody else to give it to.’

  ‘Is your clock slow?’

  ‘No, it’s right. Are you in a hurry?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Not particularly? You mean you want to get away round the pubs?’

  ‘I’m not desperate. I was just thinking. It was you gave me my first glass of whisky.’

  ‘I always did my best for you.’

  They laughed together.

  ‘I suppose it will be a lot of low dives tonight, in that coat,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose so. I like to mix with the common people sometimes. You know, go around incognito.’

  He laughed alone.

  ‘You still never think of getting married?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘If a man thinks about it he won’t,’ he said. ‘I mean, you either do or you don’t. You don’t think about it.’

  ‘You think too much. You should let yourself go. Get a good woman and marry her and get out of those digs you’re in.’

  ‘I’m too old for that now.’

  ‘A man’s never too old for that.’

  ‘I’m happier away from women,’ he said.

  He elevated his glass sacramentally and plainchanted.

  ‘The happiest hours that e’er I spent were spent among the glasses-O!’

  They communicated in silence after she poured another drink. The little clock went on ticking patiently because there was nothing else it could do. Mr Alfred said into himself the first line of a poem he had lately read, ‘The house was quiet and the world was calm’. It called up the small hours when he used to read poetry alone in his room and write little poems for himself. He was taken back, at peace with a glass in his hand and a verse in his head.

  From a distance a merry cry rocked in the street. It rode above an advancing babble and rolled under the window.

  ‘Haw, Granny Lyons!’

  Repeated.

  Chanted loudly, chanted slowly.

  ‘Et ô ces voix d’enfants,’ said Mr Alfred, ‘chantant dans…’

  But he was frightened.

  ‘I’ve been expecting them,’ said Granny Lyons.

  She was calm. Mr Alfred was shaking. He forgot his whisky. There was an edge on the antiphonal voices now.

  ‘Granny Lyons, ye auld hoor!’

  ‘Sounds like Wilma,’ said Granny Lyons.

  ‘Why do they call you granny?’ said Mr Alfred, fretting. ‘I’ve never understood that.’

  ‘No idea,’ said his aunt, shrugging. ‘They always have. Since the day I came here. I’ve been old witch and old bitch and old granny. Doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘Here!’ yelled a girl outside. ‘Here’s your Christmas coming up!’

  ‘Jennifer!’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Quick!’

  She stepped smartly to one side of the window and signalled Mr Alfred to get to the other.

  First, a hail of stones against the glass. Next, a long rude ring at the doorbell. Mr Alfred turned to answer it.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Granny Lyons whispered.

  The window imploded. A half-brick landed in the centre of the room bringing glass with it. Then the gallop away of the colts and fillies. The whinnying faded.

  Mr Alfred stared dumfouttered at the inexplicable half- brick lying mutely on his aunt’s old carpet.

  ‘They’re getting worse,’ said Granny Lyons.

  ‘Anarchy,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Things fall apart.’

  He was pale with fright.

  ‘I chased a crowd of them out the back-close last night,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Boys and girls. And still at school most of them.’

  ‘You know who they are?’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Tell me their names and I’ll go to the police.’

  ‘Don’t talk soft,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Do you think the police would welcome you? What could you prove?’

  ‘But you said you were expecting them. Have they been threatening you?’

  ‘They told me they’d be back. If you can call that a threat. I’m as broadminded as the next person but I’m not putting up with houghmagandy in my back-close.’

  ‘I wish you’d get out of this district,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘Where could I go? Anyway, it’s the same everywhere now.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘It’s my own fault,’ she said. ‘I ask for it. I should mind my own business. Let them take over. It’s their world now. But I never learn. That fight I stopped this afternoon. I should have walked on.’

  ‘What fight?’ he asked.

  She told him
about it while they tacked double sheets of newspaper across the frame of the broken window.

  ‘Some of them were your boys,’ she said. ‘That big lump Provan was there. One of Wilma’s boyfriends.’

  ‘He’s kind of young to be anybody’s boyfriend,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘He’s her age,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘She’s at your school. Don’t you know her? Wilma Beattie.’

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘But then I don’t take girls’ classes.’

  ‘I’ve chased the pair of them out that back-close more than once,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Ah well! As God made them he matched them!’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mrs Provan put on her Sunday coat and went to the school. She saw the headmaster at nine o’clock.

  ‘I’m very angry about this, Mr Briggs,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind anyone chastising my boy if he deserves it. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.’

  A ruffled hen laying a complaint and making a song about it.

  Mr Briggs listened carefully. He was a judicious little man, not long promoted. His brother had recently married a widow on the town council. He was perfectly happy signing the janitor’s requisitions and sending instructions round his staff in civil-service English and a neat hand. Other clerical activities were used to keep him from working and allow him to claim he had a lot to do every day. He liked talking to parents because that too occupied his time to the exclusion of less sedentary duties.

  Mrs Provan ended her aria on a high note of horror.

  ‘But to slap a boy across the face for nothing! That’s something I won’t have. No!’

  ‘Ah now come, it couldn’t have been for nothing, surely it must have been for something.’

  The tenor responded to the soprano, and continued piano.

  ‘I don’t mean I condone striking a pupil. Oh no, on the contrary. But on the other hand, I can’t believe a man walked up to a boy and suddenly hit him for nothing right out of the blue. I mean to say, it doesn’t sound a very likely story. Now does it, Mrs Provan?’

  His forearms on the desk, his stainless fingers laced, he leaned forward on his magisterial swivelchair as if he was the Solomon of David’s royal blood who had to decide how far maternal affection could influence veracity.

  ‘Surely the boy must have given some provocation,’ he coaxed her.

  ‘No, none, I assure you,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I have Gerald’s word for it. And Gerald never tells lies. He’s a good boy.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Mr Briggs.

  ‘And even if he did that’s not the point,’ said Mrs Provan.

  ‘Even if he did?’ Mr Briggs looked at her in shocked reproach. ‘Did tell lies?’

  ‘Give provocation,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘A teacher’s not supposed to lift his hand to a boy. And to call him a rat, well! As a matter of fact it was worse than that.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Mr Briggs.

  ‘He used a bad word. He called Gerald a so-and-so rat, not just a rat. Poor Gerald wouldn’t even repeat the word. But you and me can guess what he said. I ask you! What kind of language is that for a man supposed to be educated?’

  ‘The question is, what did he say exactly?’ said Mr Briggs.

  Always discreet he used initials only.

  ‘Did he say a bee rat or an effing rat?’

  ‘An effing rat,’ Mrs Provan sent word down from remote control.

  ‘I find it hard to believe,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘Still, if that’s what you say. Leave it with me and I’ll speak to the teacher.’

  ‘No, I want to see him myself,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘I want an apology.’

  Mr Briggs tried a weak inoculation of sarcasm.

  ‘In writing?’

  It was a mistake. It didn’t take.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘But I insist on seeing him for myself.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘I think it would only make things worse. You’re too much upset for me to let you see anybody.’

  ‘Of course I’m upset,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘So would you be upset in my place. I’ve had to take the morning off my work to come here. It’s costing me half a day’s wages. Just because of a big bully that’s not fit for to be a teacher.’

  ‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘It could land you in trouble. He’s fully qualified and very experienced.’

  ‘Aye, so’s ma granny,’ said Mrs Provan.

  Mr Briggs unlaced his fingers and leaned back. He saw no use discussing Mrs Provan’s grandmother.

  ‘It broke my heart to come to Tordoch at all,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘But I couldn’t get a house anywhere else. Everybody knows it’s the lowest dregs of the city lives down there. But don’t you go thinking I’m from a slum like the rest of them because I’m not.’

  ‘Nobody ever said you were,’ said Mr Briggs.

  He was tired of hearing parents tell him they weren’t like the rest of the folk in Tordoch. He was tired of Tordoch and all its inhabitants. Once it was a lovers’ walk on the rural margin of the city. Then it became a waste land of bracken and nettles surrounded by a chemical factory, gasworks, a railway workshop and slaghills. At that point the town council took it over for a slum- clearance scheme. They built a barrack of tenements with the best of plumbing and all mod cons and expected a new and higher form of civilisation to flare up by spontaneous combustion.

  But the concentration of former slum-tenants in such a bleak site led in a few years to the reappearance of the slum they had left. The first native generation grew up indistinguishable from the first settlers and produced their likeness in large numbers. The fathers had no trade or profession. The mothers were bad managers, and worn out by childbearing they looked fifty when they were barely thirty. The untended children lived a life of petty feuding and thieving, nourished by free milk and free dinners at school when they weren’t truanting.

  There was a constant shift of population. But there too Gresham’s Law operated. The scheme became a pool where sediment settled.

  Further out, on the country road, there were half a dozen big houses owned by professional and retired men, and between them and Tordoch proper there were some streets of tidy new villas. Since they had never been part of any housing-scheme these people objected if anyone accused them of living in Tordoch. Regretting the present, they turned to the past. A local historian claimed to have found the name Tordoch in a twelfth-century register of bishopric rents. An amateur etymologist said the name came from the Gaelic torran, a hill or knoll, and dubh or dugh, signifying dark or gloomy, implicitly ascribing a touch of the Gaelic second-sight to those who had first named the place. For now indeed it was a black spot. The police knew it as a nexus of thieves and resettlers.

  Mrs Provan wasn’t bothered about these matters. She had her own grievance.

  ‘It’s the way that man treats Gerald,’ she said. ‘Like he was dirt. He’s got the boy frightened for him, so he has.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Mr Briggs.

  ‘I come from a good family,’ said Mrs Provan. ‘And I rear a good family. And that’s without a husband at my back. I’m a hardworking widow I am. Not one of your Tordoch types, neither work nor want.’

  ‘Oh no, I can see that,’ said Mr Briggs.

  ‘I’m very angry about this,’ said Mrs Provan.

  Duet da capo.

  He got rid of her after the third time round without letting her see Mr Alfred. He never let a parent see a teacher. He knew it would only end in a slanging match. No teacher could soothe angry mothers the way he could.

  By that time it was morning break. His secretary brought in coffee and a biscuit.

  ‘My goodness, Miss Ancill, is it that time already?’ he greeted her.

  Over his frugal refreshment, for he never stopped working, he told Miss Ancill what Mrs Provan had said to him and what he had said to Mrs Provan, and while he spoke and drank and nibbled he sorted an accumulation of forms intended f
or transmission to the Director. Amongst them he saw an application signed A. Ramsay for free meals for his family, six girls and four boys. Against Occupation the applicant had written ‘unemployed’.

  ‘They’re all unemployed round here,’ he muttered through his biscuit. ‘Unemployed and unemployable.’

  ‘Well, what with the family allowance and benefit it’s hardly worth their while,’ said Miss Ancill.

  ‘Should be occupation father,’ said Mr Briggs, and sipped.

  He read the financial statement aloud. Weekly total, twenty-one pounds seventeen shillings.

  ‘And they talk about unearned income,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not the upper ten today have unearned income. It’s the layabouts. That’s your welfare state for you.’

  ‘Some folk play on it,’ said Miss Ancill. ‘But you can’t just do away with it.’

  ‘Aye, the poor we have always with us,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘Do you know, there’s a child born every two seconds. I read that somewhere the other day.’

  ‘Quite a thought,’ said Miss Ancill.

  ‘The trouble here,’ he said, ‘it’s the men of course. They never get a trade. Or even a steady job. They work as vanboys when they leave school, then they’re casual labourers. They earn just enough to start courting. Then they marry young and the children come and keep on coming. So the man sits back and stops working. They’re not working-class, these people. They’re just lumps.’

  ‘You can’t stop them marrying,’ said Miss Ancill.

  Mr Briggs changed the subject.

  ‘Phone the police and tell them I want a policeman for the Ballochmyle Road crossing. The trafficwarden’s absent.’

  After lunch he reprimanded Mr Alfred for striking a pupil and advised him to be careful what he said in class. Mr Alfred denied he had used bad language, but Mr Briggs had never expected him to admit it. He smiled and nodded and let it pass.

  In the afternoon Mrs Duthie came and complained that a boy called Provan had forced her son into a fight and then kicked him when he was down. She had taken the boy to the doctor. The doctor would certify the boy’s ribs were all bruises. Mr Briggs said he would speak to Provan about it. He said it was a pity she hadn’t called at nine o’clock. He would have found that information about Provan useful if he had known it earlier. She said she couldn’t have called at nine o’clock because she had a part-time job, mornings only, in the Caballero Restaurant. That led her to tell him about her husband, who hadn’t worked for ten years. He was under the doctor on account of his heart. Mr Briggs gave her his sympathy and they parted on excellent terms.