‘That poem he wrote for me,’ said Mr Brown. ‘For the magazine I mean. It was a case of Dylan Thomas out of Swinburne. Very good as I said. But I couldn’t print it.’
‘Why not?’ Mr Alfred enquired sharply from his corner.
Anything concerning poetry concerned him. He had never seen the poem Mr Brown was talking about nor had he ever heard before of the translation from Rimbaud. He was annoyed. He thought he should have been consulted.
‘Well, in a school magazine!’ said Mr Brown. ‘There are limits, you know. He was only a boy of seventeen at the time. He shouldn’t have been thinking the way he was, not at his age. Kind of sexy it was.’
‘I see,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘And at what age if not seventeen should he be thinking of sex? Folk like you would have us either too young or too old.’
‘You mean you still—’ Mr Brown began.
‘A man’s never too old,’ Mr Dale tactfully interrupted. ‘Look at that old bloke of sixty-four in the papers yesterday married a wench of nineteen. His granddaughter’s chum.’
Mr Alfred had seen it but didn’t like to mention it.
‘That’s all very well,’ said Mr Brown. ‘But there was one bit I remember. Something about, I dream in these satyric moods of nymphs’ wan thighs in summer woods. I could never have printed that. What would old Briggs have said? Not to mention the parents.’
‘Or our beloved Monica the All-Seeing,’ said Mr Dale.
‘I had him some years back,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘He seemed quite intelligent, but I should never have thought there was a poet in him.’
He sat back and said no more. He was no longer interested in the conversation. It had made him think of Rose Weipers. Everything made him think of Rose Weipers. He had never seen her thighs. He tried to imagine them. He couldn’t. She was always sedate, sat down like a lady, knees and feet together. Even in the playground, any time he passed and took a quick look, she managed to jump the rope in her turn without the swirling skirt and swift show of thigh that other girls flaunted. She never showed off. He had seen without interest the legs and underwear of other girls as they lolled in his room, but Rose never showed an inch above the hemline. She was a modest girl. His autumnal longing to kiss a child goodnight and tuck her into bed moved through him again. He had a passionless wish, a neutral and almost clinical curiosity, to see Rose as she was, from head to toe, whole and entire.
‘He had an unusual Sprachgefühl,’ said an assistant German teacher. ‘I told him he ought to—’
‘He had a good French accent,’ said an assistant French teacher. ‘Before he left I said to him—’
‘I warned him,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘I said to him you might be good at English but as far as maths are concerned you’re—’
‘I advised him,’ said Mr Brown. ‘What you should do I said is—’
‘They get this craze about science,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘They want to be with it. But where’s the culture in all these technical subjects?’
The bell rang. Nobody answered.
They went to their classes. They dropped Graeme Roy. But I can’t. Not yet, anyway.
Having failed to satisfy the examiners he wanted to satisfy Martha. There at least he would prove he wasn’t an impotent failure. He tried to arouse her. She wasn’t aroused. She was only offended. The nearer he tried to get the further away she moved. When he sulked and withdrew she warmed to bring him back. Her temperature seemed to vary inversely with his own.
In the summer vacation he took her out one day in his car. The parents had guessed they were meeting again but didn’t want to make a new fuss about an old issue. They were prepared to tolerate though not to encourage an affair which had persisted in spite of them. They were willing to concede the young couple were getting old enough to know their own mind. It might be a case of true love after all.
They went to Helensburgh and up by Garelochhead, then followed Loch Long north to Arrochar and lunch. They were lucky in the weather. The sky was an unbroken blue and the cloudless windless heat made them feel they had wandered into a day from the legendary summers of the past. On a lonely stretch they saw the opposite bank reflected in the motionless water of the mirroring loch. It was an inverted world of tall timeless trees and unpeopled hills. Nothing moved anywhere. They got out.
‘Listen!’ she cried suddenly.
He smiled, she was so happy.
Obeying her he listened. He clasped her hand and looked up at the immense sky because she was looking there. A birdsong rose higher and higher and faded to heavenly silence. But he could see nothing.
‘The lark in the clear air,’ he said.
They sat in the car a little while before going on. He wanted to find release in her, to lean on her, to be comforted and encouraged. Not this time as the times he offended her, not the male determined to conquer his woman by force, but the defeated manchild turning to the female for motherly solace. She gave him none. Her breast wasn’t going to be his pillow. Her retreat made him impatient. He pulled her tight against him and kissed her harder than he had ever kissed her before. And longer. She was so close, his alert body was aware of her heartbeat. It was going at a terrific rate. He thought he had only to keep at her a moment more and she would give in. But the racing throb of that necessary engine frightened him. So fast her heart was going it seemed it could only end in a crashing stop. Let it beat for ever, he prayed, let me not disturb it further. There was plenty of time. He slackened his grip. A wave of tenderness drowned him. He let her sit away from him.
She turned suddenly and kissed him gently on the cheek. Her hand was stroking the back of his neck. He felt it was a medal awarded for devotion to duty in face of the enemy.
They went from Arrochar to Tarbet. She saw the Cobbler on her left hand. It was all new to her. She was dumb with delight. Her eyes were excited, but he knew it was only by the countryside in fine summer weather, not by anything he had done to her. He grudged her taking pleasure in nature and not in him. But he put a face on it and drove chatting up Loch Lomond to Ardlui, on to Crianlarich and through Glen Dochart. He turned south into Glen Ogle and took her home by Callander, Loch Vennacher and Aberfoyle. She had never seen so much of the country outside her city. She was exhausted at the end of the long day, dazed with strange sights. The bens and glens and lochs, the sheep and highland cattle, the remote cottage and the blue sky over all, the lonely miles where there were no streets and no shops and no tenements or housing schemes, still lingered in her town- reared brain. When she closed her eyes that night in bed alone she saw them again. Without him she would never have seen them at all. She told him so. He was pleased to have pleased her, even if it wasn’t the way he had meant. It was another knot in the string that tied them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Granny Lyons used Ianello’s cafe nearly every day. She bought her cigarettes there. She didn’t smoke a lot, but she was never without a packet. Once in a while, if Mr Alfred hadn’t come when she expected him and she was short of money, Enrico let her have a packet on tick. She was fond of sweets too, and got them in the same shop. Usually it was only a half-pound of liquorice-all-sorts, a mixture she particularly liked, almost to the point of addiction. Whenever she tried to do without them for more than a week Enrico slipped her a box with her cigarettes. Then he would turn away from her, his elbow on the counter, and look up and down and all along his shelves as if he was surveying his stock and hadn’t given her anything, didn’t even know she was there.
They were friends. They shared the sorrow of having blundered into Tordoch when they had set sail for a different port altogether. They were bewildered and frustrated, the way Columbus was when he tripped over the West Indies instead of making landfall in Asia. They couldn’t understand what had gone wrong with their navigation. Granny Lyons saw no escape. She knew it was a life sentence, at her age. Enrico was younger and so more optimistic. He said he would move to a better area soon and get a good-going shop.
She liked to hear him talk about
his plans. His accent charmed her. His voice was more lively and his tone more varied than anything the natives could manage with their flat utterance of half-swallowed syllables. She was fascinated by the energetic movement of his lips and the expressive assistance of his hands and shoulders. She preferred the vigorous activity of his mouth under the drooping moustache to the slack-jawed speech of his customers who mumbled at him with their hands in their pockets.
His vocabulary too amused her. He knew all the dialect words and the local slang. He came out with the standard obscenities as fluently as anyone else in Tordoch, but he used them with an earnest innocence that made them sound decent. How was he to know they weren’t? He was no student of semantics, any more than that foreign girl, the wife of some literary gent, who typed a draft of that thing Lawrence wrote. Like Enrico, she assumed the gamekeeper’s tetragrams were normal usage in polite society. Naturally enough, like Enrico, she brought them into her conversation to show her command of English idiom. And naturally enough she was puzzled when her husband and his cultured friends said she must never use those words again.
Not that Enrico was limited to four-letter words. Suddenly, in the same sentence, he would get his tongue round some polysyllable as if it too was a commonplace of intercourse between a man and a woman. He often misapplied and mispronounced the big word, showing he had never heard it used, but had merely met it in print somewhere.
When that happened Granny Lyons didn’t hesitate to tell him. She knew him too well and he knew her too well for any offence to be given or taken. She saw no use trying to stop him using the monosyllables he heard the natives use every time they opened their mouth. But if he was going to use big words she wanted him to get them right. He was grateful to her.
One day he spoke to her about Gerald Provan. His hands tried to help his tongue and his big brown eyes were sad.
‘He’s a perpernicious youth,’ he ended.
‘That’s very good,’ she commended him. ‘But just say pernicious. Imust tell my nephew what you said. He’ll like it. He had the same opinion when he taught that boy. Aye, and there’s a lot more like him he’s still teaching, poor man.’
‘Your nephew not happy in that school?’ he lilted. Eyebrows up. Eyes popping. Polite surprise. He shrugged and answered himself. ‘No, I suppose no. Who could be?’
He shook his head slowly to indicate defeat, exhaled wearily through pursed lips, and murmured inoffensively, ‘Shower of fucking bastards, that’s all they are. I know them.’
He was not without self-esteem. He believed he was superior to the autochthonous tribes he served.
‘They come in here and they look down on Enrico,’ he complained to her. ‘They call me a tally. They say, hey, tally-wally! Hey, you, Nello!’
He snapped his fingers, acting customers calling him.
‘Like you call a dog. I leave Naples with my father. Me? Just a baby. We come to Scotland. Then the war. My father? Taken away. His own kind, his own kind mind you, frightened him. He had to join something. I don’t know what. I know politics never his care. But the police have his name. So. Internment they say. He goes down in the Andorra Star. My mother? She live. Somehow. She work hard. Brings me up. I never much go to the school. But I work. I learn by ear. My mother and me, we speak our father’s language at home. I marry. I have family. I come out here. Open my own shop. Me. Enrico Ianello from Naples. I have no boss. Ianello’s boss is Enrico. Poor boy makes it good. I speak their language. Can they speak mine? Speak mine? They can’t even speak their own fucking language.’
‘That’s very true,’ said Granny Lyons.
‘But yet still they look down on Enrico. I ask you. Tell me. The other night I say to that Poggy one, don’t be so obstreperous. Says he to me, what the fucking hell you mean, mac. Says I to him, you mac not me. All you Scotch fucking macs. Not clever there, me. He put a great big bloody brick through my window that night. That’s three times in four months my window in.’
‘They’re getting worse,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘I’ve had mine in twice since Christmas.’
‘A shop, well,’ he granted. His hands moved to say there were some things you had to put up with in this world. ‘But not a house.’
‘But I’m on the ground floor, you know,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘At a bad corner too. I wouldn’t mind getting a room right at the top of one of those thirty-two storey flats they’re building now. Away from it all, well above them.’
‘You well above them all right,’ said Enrico.
He told her about his new juke-box.
‘Biggest mistake of my life,’ he wailed. ‘Pay for itself in a month says the man. Will bring in the young ones. Oh, big deal! Yes, brings them in too damn true. And in one night they drink what? One coffee, one coke. And what do I get? The sound of noise all night. I like hear singing. I sing myself. My father too. My mother tells me. Fine voice. You know, Italian. Not what these ignorant bastards go for.’
And indeed she knew he loved the bel canto. Often in an afternoon when the shop was quiet because the boys and girls were at school, she would go in to hear him singing in the back scullery as he prepared ice-lollies for the fridge. He was Manrico singing farewell to his Leonora, the Duke singing about the nobility of women, or Cavaradossi singing that the stars were shining.
When she heard him enjoying himself like that with his untrained tenor, she was moved to affection for him and made no sound till he finished his aria. Then she would sing out and he would come and chat with her. She would put her old-fashioned handbag on the counter and rest her forearms across the straps, hardly holding them. She was at peace in a calm oasis somewhere between the desert of three and four p. m., and Enrico too was carefree.
On one such afternoon their pleasant counter-talk was interrupted by the entrance of three lanky hairy youths in donkey-jackets and tight trousers. They came in hipswaying as if Enrico’s cafe was a saloon in a Western and they were tough hombres on the trail who had just hitched their horses to the rail outside.
‘Lucky strike,’ said the first.
His mates loitered behind Granny Lyons.
‘Excusa-me,’ said Enrico to Granny Lyons.
He attended to his strange customers. Eyebrows raised, eyes questioning.
‘Lucky strike,’ repeated the gunless cowboy.
Enrico’s eyebrows came down to a puzzled frown.
The cowboy tried again.
‘Day ye sell Lucky Strike?’
‘Ah!’ said Enrico. ‘American cigarettes. Some I have.’
He turned to the shelves.
‘But not Lucky Strike. Chesterfield, Stuyvesant. And I have—’
Even as he began naming the brands he had in stock he had a dim feeling he was being silly. But he was that bit slow. One of the cowboys behind Granny Lyons charged at her like a football-player giving away a penalty. She tottered and teetered, lost her balance and fell. Her handbag remained on the counter. The other cowboy snatched it. The one that had asked for Lucky Strike knocked over a jar of hardboiled sweets and threw a tray of Wrigley’s pk at Enrico’s face. In a split second the three bandits ran out together.
Granny Lyons clawed at the counter and got back on her feet. Enrico raced out of his shop like a whippet. Granny Lyons wept and trembled.
‘Oh, not again,’ she whimpered. ‘Not again.’
Enrico came back, a lot slower than he had gone out.
‘Hopeless,’ he lamented, pulling his hair. ‘They dive in a close round the corner. I see them. By the time I get there, gone. Up the stairs, across the back-court, through another close? Who knows?’
‘Oh well, it might have been worse,’ said Granny Lyons.
Her hands quivered as she tidied her grey hairs and smoothed her coat and skirt. She felt handless without her handbag. The loss diminished her.
Enrico saw how she felt. He wept in vexation.
‘It’s as well I was here,’ she comforted him. ‘Or it might have been the till they tried. And God knows what they might hav
e done to you if you’d been alone. Lucky it was only me. They didn’t get much. My God. Let them ask for it if they’re that hard up and I’ll give them it.’
‘I give in,’ said Enrico.
He wiped his brimming brown eyes with the cuff of his white jacket.
It may have been the saying of it made him think of surrender, or he may only have been saying what he wouldn’t admit before. But from that day he lost heart. He was ashamed of his shop. He hadn’t the spirit to fight its invaders any longer. He was sick of non-paying customers, bullies and rioters. The booths where he had hoped to encourage a cafe society of young people discussing politics and literature and foreign affairs were an offence to the eye. The woodwork was hacked and scratched, the walls were defaced with the sprawling initials of his patrons, the floor was fouled with discarded wads of chewing-gum. The local lads and lasses had annexed his shop as a colony for revelry and disorder. They quarrelled at the drop of a joke and fights over nothing happened every night in the week. Enrico was always expecting to see blood shed but it never quite came to that.
In an attempt to get some peace and quiet he put the juke-box out of commission. Too often it caused a fight between rival fans of different singers. But without it the boys and girls made their own noise, and that was worse.
He made a last effort to get control. One wild night some laughing youths tested the solidity of the table in the back booth by kicking it from underneath and then jumping on it from the bench. They threw crisps across the cafe and poured coke into the coffees of the mixed company in the next booth. There was a lot of recrimination, and a threat and a challenge were heard. The uproar led to some punching and wrestling and somebody got up from the floor with a knife in his hand and a nasty look in his eyes. The girls screamed, some in terror, some in delight. Enrico phoned for the police.
By the time two policemen arrived the cafe was empty except for Gerald Provan sitting in the middle booth with Poggy, having a quiet conversation with Wilma and Jennifer. Gerald wasn’t intimidated by a phone call. He knew Enrico knew what would happen if he named anybody.
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