When she had gone he littered his desk with requisitions, class lists, publishers’ catalogues, and the unfinished draft of a report on a probationer. He wanted to look busy if anyone came in.
Miss Ancill disturbed him with a cup of tea and a buttered scone. He told her what Mrs Duthie had been saying to him and what he said to her. He was on about the cares and loneliness of office when the bell rang. He hurried out to his car.
Miss Ancill watched him go. She knew all the little jobs that had kept him busy since nine o’clock. She counted them off to the janitor.
‘A day in the life of,’ she said. ‘And the way he blethers to me! It’s not a secretary that man wants, it’s an audience.’
In the staffroom Mr Alfred raised his voice about the headmaster’s bad habit of dealing with parents behind a teacher’s back. His colleagues were too eager to get out to listen, and he finished up talking to the soap as he washed his hands.
He was the last to leave. Miss Ancill saw him from her window.
‘That poor man,’ she said. ‘I felt sorry for him today. Briggs had him on the carpet. I think he’s getting past it. But still. It’s not right. A man like Briggs bossing a man like that. He’s so kind and gentle.’
‘I think he drinks too much,’ said the janitor.
‘He needs a woman to take care of him,’ said Miss Ancill. ‘Did you see the shirt he’d on this morning? Wasn’t even fit for a jumble sale.’
‘You can’t spend your money on drink and buy clothes too,’ said the janitor.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leaving school on a fine spring evening Mr Briggs had to go home by public transport. His car was laid up. There was something wrong with the clutch. He felt devalued. It was a long time since he last stood in a bus queue with ordinary people, some of whom in this case would be merely assistant teachers on his own staff. He was in a mood to find fault with the universe. Opportunity to let off steam was waiting ahead of him. En route to the bus stop he passed the Weavers Lane. A fankle of weedy boys loitered there in a state of manifest excitement. Mr Briggs was quick to appreciate the situation. There was something in the wind, and it wasn’t the smell of roses. Obviously a fight had been arranged and was due to begin as soon as the coast was clear. The guilt in the shifty eyes of his pupils showed they hadn’t expected him to come along. He stopped and scowled. He knew them all. His habit of checking against his index-cards whenever a boy came to his notice had made him familiar with their names, their intelligence quotient, their father’s occupation if any, and their address. He knew the good boys from the bad boys, though sometimes he believed the former category was an anomaly, as if one should speak of a square circle.
There they were. All the rascals. A dingy mob in jeans and donkey-jackets. Black, Brown, Gray, Green, White. With McColl, McKay, McKenzie, McPherson. He recognised Taylor, Slater, Wright and Barbour, Baker [and Bourne], Hall [and Knight], Latta [and MacBeath], Lid- del [and Scott], Ogilvie [and Albert], Gibson, Holmes, MacDougall and Blackie. A nightmare of classroom names. And lounging blondly, somehow the centre of the shapeless crowd, was Gerald Provan. He grinned, hands in the pockets of his tightarsed jeans, kicking the kerb, radiant with the insolence of an antimath idling out his last term at school.
Sure of his power, speaking in loco parentis, since after all they were barely outside the limits of his bailiwick and the bell releasing them from his jurisdiction had barely ceased vibrating across the gasworks, he demanded the why and wherefore of their hanging about. He waited for an answer. None was offered. Sternly he ordered them to disperse.
‘Get home! All of you! At once!’
Curt. Staccato.
Slowly, grudgingly, they went. He stood till they were all on the move.
He went for his bus, pleased with himself. Perhaps the universe wasn’t so unjust after all. He wished some of his teachers would learn to put into their voice the same ring of authority as he had done there. The bus was prompt, he got a seat at once, and within half-an-hour he was safe and sound at home. He had a sandstone villa, with garden and garage, outside the city. Over dinner he told Mrs Briggs all the events of his day and what he had done about them.
But no sooner was he round the corner from the Weavers Lane than the scattered boys reassembled. Like birds chased from a kitchen garden they hadn’t flown far.
Last to leave the school, Mr Alfred took the same route to the bus stop as Mr Briggs. He had lingered longer than usual in the staffroom to give Mr Briggs plenty of time to get away. He always found it a bore having to make conversation on the bus, especially with someone who talked shop as loudly as his headmaster.
When he came to the Weavers Lane he heard a lot of shouting. He stopped and listened. He wasn’t even tempted to walk away. He was oldfashioned, and he believed without doubting it was his duty to break up any riotous assembly of schoolboys, whether in school or out of school, during hours or after hours. And anyway he was in no hurry. If he put off time he would be in the city centre when the pubs were opening. Then he could have one or maybe two before going on to his digs. For the evening he had already planned a route that would take him round some pubs he hadn’t been in for a month or so.
He put on a grim face and went deep into the lane. What he saw wasn’t a storybook fight with bare fists. It was a battle with studded belts that had once been part of what the army called webbing equipment. His belly fluttered at the madness of it. He was as scared as if he was in there taking part. So excited were the spectators, encouraging Cowan and Turnbull with a good imitation of the Hampden Roar, that Mr Alfred was left standing behind them in the same situation as the three old ladies locked in the lavatory. Nobody knew he was there.
Besides swinging the heavy belt in a highly dangerous manner Cowan used an unpredictable skill, not without its own vicious grace, in getting inside the range of Turnbull’s equally heavy belt and endeavouring to kick his opponent in the testicles.
In one of those attempts he lost his balance, the belt arched from his hand, and he fell unarmed to the ground. The recoil of evasive action brought Turnbull over his prostrate foe. Naturally he kicked him. Then things happened so quickly Mr Alfred was never quite sure what he saw.
It appeared that Gerald Provan moved out of the mob behind Turnbull, raised his knee swiftly in a politic nudge, sent Turnbull sprawling beside Cowan. The two fighters scrambled up clinching. They wrestled into the crowd, and the crowd pushed them back into the ring. In that surge and sway Gerald Provan thrust a knife into Cowan’s hand and then shoved him off to continue the duel.
At that point Mr Alfred broke out of his paralysis. Partly he had been curious to see just what the two boys would do, partly he was afraid of raising his voice too soon and not being heard above the howling of the fans. But when it was seen that Cowan had a knife there was a breathless hush in the lane that night and Mr Alfred knew his moment was come. Cowan lunged, Turnbull dodged, and Mr Alfred spoke out loud and clear.
‘Stop that!’
His voice scattered most of the onlookers. They had no wish to be involved. Turnbull froze. Cowan threw the knife away and with coincident speed dissolved into the melting crowd. Provan tried to make a quick getaway by diving behind Mr Alfred. It was a blunder. Mr Alfred caught him on the turn and held him by the collar. Gerald wriggled.
‘Hey, mind ma jacket, you! Ma clothes cost good money, no’ like yours.’
Mr Alfred shook him and threw him away.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said.
He saw the knife lying on top of a docken on the margin of the arena. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. He thought it was evidence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It must not be supposed that the boys and girls gathered in the Weavers Lane that night were a fair representation of the pupils attending Collinsburn Comprehensive, the only school in Tordoch for post-primary education. Collinsburn was a local place-name, derived from the legend that a stream once ran through that part of Tordoch formerly owned by a C
ollins family whose members, like the vanished burn, had long gone underground. As a comprehensive school Collinsburn harboured all kinds and ages (mental and chronological). So while Mr Alfred was shaking Gerald Provan, Graeme Roy was sitting with Martha Weipers in Ianello’s cafe round the corner from the main road. It was a roomy, almost barnlike place, that sold cigarettes and sweets and ices and offered half-a- dozen stalls where the young ones could sit with a coffee or a coke and criticise the world.
Graeme Roy was eighteen, in his last year at school. Martha was a year younger and not as clever as he was. At least, that’s what she thought. She even found pleasure in believing it. They should have gone straight home, but they had got into the habit of using Ianello’s for half-an-hour.
They were under parental orders to stop meeting. Their daily sessions in the cafe after school gave them the satisfaction of at once obeying and ignoring the order. They no longer met in the evenings, so they were obedient. But they still managed to meet for a little while on the way home, so they evaded the full severity of the law.
She was the poor one, the eldest of seven, a bricklayer’s daughter. He was an only son and well-off, a handsome youth. He had a driving licence and a car of his own. He used to take Martha out for a run in the summer evenings after the exams were over. When the quartet of parents found out what was going on they slammed down hard on the pair of them. Graeme’s folks had never thought he was taking a girl out when he used his car, and Martha’s had no idea she had a rich boyfriend. Nasty suspicions were aroused, some accusations were made that hurt and even shocked them, and then the forthright veto was proclaimed. Without collusion, without ever meeting, the two sets of parents reacted in the same way and came to the same conclusion. His parents said only a girl with no self-respect would accept an invitation to go out alone with a boy in his car. Her parents said no decent right-thinking boy would ask a girl to come out alone with him in his car. Unless of course, both sides conceded independently, the boy and girl were engaged. Which would be absurd at their age. Further meetings, with or without the car, were bilaterally banned. It was for their own good their parents said.
‘They try to tell us we’re too young,’ he said.
‘That’s how they see it,’ she said. She was a fairminded girl. ‘They’re so old. My dad’s nearly forty.’
‘But that’s not the real reason,’ he said. ‘It’s my mother. I hate to say it. But she’s an awful snob. She thinks because your father works with his hands I shouldn’t talk to you. I told her a surgeon works with his hands, but she wouldn’t listen.’
‘My dad’s the same,’ she said. ‘He won’t listen. He thinks if folks are well-off they must be on the fiddle. Because your father’s got a car and could buy you one too my dad’s sure he’s a crook.’
‘Oh, my father’s honest enough,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t cheat anybody.’
‘My dad would cheat anybody for five bob,’ she said. ‘For all his supposed principles. That’s the funny thing.’
‘My dad wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But then five bob’s nothing to him. It’s my mother’s the trouble. She’s hard. A lot harder than my father. It’s my mother I blame.’
‘My mother doesn’t count in our house,’ she said, and added with a young laugh, ‘and she doesn’t read either.’
He smiled. He was happy. He liked to see her laugh when she was with him. He didn’t like it when he saw her laugh in any other company.
They got on well. They never had any difficulty talking.
There were never any silences. They tore their parents to bits, and put the bits together again with the quick adhesive of filial tolerance. They were two earnest adolescents, able to vary their solemn dialogue with a private joke. They had the same liking for the depreciatory aside, the same bias on current affairs, the same cynical tone when they talked about their teachers. Never before, in all their long experience, had they felt such affinity with anyone else.
The first time she met him he liked her. It was at the inaugural meeting of the Debating Society. Mr Briggs had started it with a view to entering a team in an annual inter- schools debate. There was a big silver cup for the winning school and a plaque for the runners-up, and he thought either would look rather well beside the football trophies in the display cabinet at the Main Entrance. Maisie Munro, a beaming jumbo of a girl with glasses, who lived near Graeme, introduced them. She was a prefect in Martha’s class.
‘This is Graeme,’ she said. ‘You know, the famous Roy.’
He was famous at that time because he had scored a goal that put Collinsburn into the semi-final of the City Cup, but Martha didn’t know that. She had no interest in football.
‘Tell me,’ she said when Maisie left them stuck alone together in a corner, ‘is your name Graham Roy or Roy Graham?’
‘Not Graham,’ he said. ‘Graeme.’
He made one syllable where she made two. Her speech was looser than his. She was more Scotch, he was more anglified. She was apt to say fillim for film, to make no distinction between hire and higher. She could even insert a neutral vowel between the two consonants at the end of warm and learn and such words. It was the way she trilled the r made her do it. Sometimes it offended his ear, but his heart didn’t mind.
‘Graeme,’ he repeated to her stare. ‘Not Graham.’
‘However you say it,’ she retorted, ‘you still haven’t said if it’s your first name or your second.’
She wasn’t put out by his correction. Far from it. She was amused. He was so tidy, trim, well-dressed and superior, and spoke so correctly.
Her levity pleased him. He explained. His father’s name was John Barbour Roy, his mother’s name was Alison McKenzie Graeme. They had the egalitarian idea of calling him Graeme Roy, so that each would contribute their share to his name as they had already done to his existence. Later on, when he knew her better, he confessed that his mother’s name was really Graham but she thought Graeme was a more stylish version.
From the night they met at the Debating Society he began to look out for her and she looked out for him looking out for her. They grew in affection with the growing season. He had to tell her everything. He wasn’t boasting. He just had to tell her. He didn’t want to hide anything. He told her his father was a director in an engineering firm, he told her his mother was the graduate daughter of a defunct Conservative m.p. He described the big house where he lived. It was in an old-world residential outpost, an Edwardian if not Victorian survival from the days when Tordoch was still rural. His parents weren’t happy to have him attending Collinsburn. They regretted not moving him to a fee-paying school in the west end when Collinsburn changed from a local Academy to a regional Comprehensive. But he was so near his exams for university entrance it seemed best to leave him where he was.
He mentioned one of his mother’s complaints. She was brought up in a house with a maid that lived in, and now she couldn’t get anything better in her own house than an unreliable daily-help, a dismal widow who scamped the work.
In class-conscious retaliation Martha gave him an account of her domestic troubles. She had to do it all herself.
‘It’s worst in the winter. I’m up at six in the morning. Oh my, oh my, it’s that cold! And it’s that dark! I’ve to get the fire lit and start making my dad’s porridge and give him a shout but he won’t get up till I’ve got the fire going. Then when I’ve got rid of him I get my three young sisters up and make their breakfast and while they’re taking their cornflakes I get my two wee brothers up and after I’ve got them dressed and fed and got them ready for school I get Jean up and wash her and dress her. Jean’s only three. And by that time I’ve got to get myself ready for school.’
‘But what’s your mother doing?’ he asked.
‘She stays in bed till I take her a cup of tea before I go out,’ said Martha. ‘She’s a poor soul really. She doesn’t keep well. She gets up when we’re all away and looks after Jean.’
He brimmed with pity and fell in love.
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But let’s have no misunderstanding. Although she was Martha and not Mary she never felt sorry for herself. She never saw herself as Martha in Beth-ania, the House of Care. She was no spiritless drudge, no pallid, thinlegged, flatchested, dullfaced little skivvy, but a lively, chatty, slim, brighteyed, clearskinned young blonde, promising at seventeen to be what blondes are vulgarly supposed to be anyway, that is, lushus – if she lived long enough.
‘It must be interesting,’ he said, not quite insincerely. ‘Being one of a big family.’
‘It’s a bit of a bind at times,’ she said. ‘You never get any peace. You’re never alone. I’d love to be alone once in a while.’
They were sitting there in Ianello’s, quite content, with a coffee in front of them. Sometimes their hands touched across the table as they spoke, but they never actually held hands. He made no show of affection in public, nor did she. They despised teenagers that did. They considered themselves older, more mature.
Their conversation was disturbed by the loud entrance of Gerald Provan and his company.
‘See me in the morning, says he,’ Gerald was shouting as he came in. ‘I’ll fix him, the auld grey bastard! I’ll get ma maw on to him again. She sorted him last time all right.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Martha.
‘What are you laughing at, Poggy?’ said Gerald. ‘Think I’m feart for him?’
‘Ach, him!’ Poggy shouted, shoulder to shoulder with him at the counter. ‘Who’s feart for him? It’s a kick on the balls he needs.’
He was a big lad, Gerald’s loyal bondman.
Enrico Ianello came flustered from the backshop, fluttered at them, wanting peace and quiet, good business with decorum. His parents had left Naples with similar ambitions for the unattainable. He was a smallish man, plump, darkeyed, darkskinned, a bit of a singer when he was in the mood. He had a good moustache and a double chin. Mr Alfred said he looked like Balzac. Granny Lyons had never seen Balzac, but she liked Enrico and hoped her nephew was being kind.
Mr Alfred, MA Page 4
