Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘Well done, Miss Shields,’ cried the chairwoman, standing up and clapping vigorously.

  Everybody in the hall got up and clapped too.

  I remembered how, in the Rector’s room at Gantock Academy years ago, I had witnessed, in the persons of Mr Beaton and Mr Birkmyre, a conflict between the humane scholar and the vindictive Calvinist. The scholar, wonderfully, had prevailed. Here was another similar conflict between two aspects of the Scottish soul: in the one corner, represented by Betty, mendacious sentimentality, and in the other, represented by Mary, ironic truthfulness. Victory had gone, in the very first round, to the former.

  THREE

  To our Glasgow hotel came my former employer, Mr Kelso of the Gantock Herald, eager to write an article about me in his newspaper, and also to invite Betty and me to Gantock.

  Luckily Betty had gone out to buy a new hat for our visit to the asylum that afternoon.

  In the huge black and gilt hotel lounge I received him as the Emperor Napoleon might have some princeling who in his early days had slighted him.

  Four years and millions of deaths ago, when I had told this fat white-haired bourgeois gentleman that I had been accepted for the Officers’ Training Centre he had congratulated me and then had deducted from my pay for the days I had had to take off for the interviews. Surely, he had urged, no man of honour would want to be paid for work he had not done. It was most commendable that I was going off to fight for king and country, but so were thousands, many thousands he hoped, of other men. If all of them demanded to be paid for days of absence before setting forth to join up many employers would be ruined and the country brought to its knees economically. Patriotism consisted in other things besides jaunting off to kill enemies.

  Since then I had advanced a lot further in my tenets than either the Allies or the Germans had on the battlefields. One of the positions I had reached was this: any man, no matter his age, rank, wealth, or reputation, who had made a profit out of the War, whether financial, political, or social, I considered myself bound to treat with less respect than any soldier, colonel or private, who had served in the trenches. That the keeping of this resolution might oblige me to offend various influential people I realised very well. Another of my forward positions was: since I knew myself to be a Corse of Darndaff, it would be craven not to comport myself as one, in all circumstances.

  Therefore I quickly made it clear to fat and prosperous Mr Kelso that in the meantime I had nothing to say to him or his readers, and also that Gantock was not yet ready for (it was obvious I meant worthy of) my return.

  He departed in a rage, mumbling that I was a disgrace to my medals and too big for my breeches. No satirical wit was intended by the latter remark: he was a man who always used clichés for their own sakes.

  Before setting out for the asylum, Betty spent some minutes in reading a page or two of one of her own books, as devoutly as a nun. This was her way of sustaining faith in her own God-given abilities. I was to learn later that most authors did the same, including some whose writing, God help them, was feebler and falser than hers.

  She spent rather longer in front of a mirror, trying on her new hat. This, it seemed to me, was unsuitable for our purpose: of yellow velvet, adorned with artificial hyacinths and primroses, it represented the freshness and gaiety of Spring. When I suggested that black or dark purple would be more appropriate she replied that if I wore a black or dark purple kilt she would wear a black or dark purple hat. It was then that I became aware, though not yet fully, that this visit to the asylum, which she insisted on making, was frightening her, in a private part of her mind. She was putting herself to some painful, abstruse test.

  I should have sympathised, because I too was eager to go and see Cathie, and at the same time I shrank from the ordeal. Many times as an adolescent I had thought that the secret of happiness for the human race was not to be found in the dull worthy books John Calderwood and Mary Holmscroft read and discussed, but in Cathie’s laughter. Listening to it, I had always felt happier and more hopeful. Like every soldier come from years in the trenches, I needed reassurance as to what was really mad and what really sane. The Cathie of old would have given it in a minute; the Cathie I was going to see might leave me benighted and insecure for years.

  Situated about twelve miles out of Glasgow, the asylum called itself Hazelside Private Nursing Home for Ladies, in gold letters on a board at the gate. The relatives of its unfortunate inmates were evidently willing to pay a substantial amount for the avoidance of any mention of mental derangement, and also for, as we soon discovered, luxurious comfort. A large, handsome red-stone building with extensive well-kept grounds, it had once been the home of a Lord Provost of Glasgow.

  We were received by the doctor in charge and the matron. They addressed themselves to Betty, as if it was she who was Miss Calderwood’s friend; and when they were searching their minds for discreet words to describe Cathie’s condition, it was Betty who stopped them, with a regal lifting of her yellow-gloved hand. We would prefer, she murmured, to judge for ourselves: sometimes surprise sharpened insight. She hoped Miss Calderwood had not been too carefully prepared for our visit.

  Impressed and charmed, they assured us that even if Miss Calderwood had been, she would have forgotten: her memory, alas, was not good.

  With a heavy sigh that reminded me of many I had heard from men waiting at dawn for the signal to attack, Betty said meekly that, if there was no objection, she would like first to meet a few of the other patients. Some of these, perhaps, had heard of her; if she could bring a little joy into their lives she would be grateful.

  Her face was pale and anxious. Again I was reminded of the trenches, where, as the whistle sounded, many men suddenly felt a need to empty their bowels.

  The matron, a big muscular woman, inured surely to every known eccentricity of the female mind, nevertheless had tears in her eyes as she listened to Betty. She had a copy, under her oxter, of The Heirs of Crailzie, which she had asked Betty to sign.

  As squeamish as a general venturing among the dead, Betty went into the sitting-room. Like an attentive aide-de-camp, the matron kept close, whispering that there was no need to be alarmed, none of the ladies was violent, or incontinent, or unpleasant to look at. The delusions they suffered from were harmless. One, for instance, imagined that she was Mary, Queen of Scots. If we found her kneeling on a cushion, waiting for her head to be chopped off, we were to pay no heed. She would kneel like that for hours: she had been given pads for her knees.

  The drawing-room, large and comfortably furnished, reminded me of the one in the living quarters of Gilbertfield Castle. I remembered Lady Gilbertfield’s habit of staring at people as if their heads had changed places with their feet, and Grizel’s obsession with horses.

  I remembered too Betty in the throes of love. It was difficult to reconcile that nocturnal creature of talons and manic grunts with this pale, anxious, woman holding a flaccid hand here, patting a bowed head there, murmuring consolingly, and listening compassionately.

  Knowing that she was, as it were, under shell-fire, I had to admire her calmness. I thought that marriage to her might after all be a challenge, and not a tribulation.

  One of the women, with chalky-white face and long grey hair, crept over to me, reached up, and took hold of my moustache. Another came and stroked my kilt. Both had sad lost eyes. They were no older than my mother would have been. Yet it was not the sorrowing son, or the pitiful poet, who tholed their attentions; it was the courteous officer. I stood to attention as the matron removed their hands from me.

  Sudden as a pain, a feeling of inadequacy overcame me such as I had never experienced in the trenches. War, as Mary had said, was simpler. There, if a man had courage, he would do. Here, in this quiet room, not only courage was needed, but all the power and versatility of love. That was why I fell far short. Upstairs, too, there waited an even severer test.

  The staircase was of marble, softened by red carpet. We passed eyeless busts. On the
walls were paintings of scenery. I could not help wondering what it cost to keep a patient here. Cathie’s fortune must be dwindling at the rate of hundreds of pounds a year. She was not yet forty either. Some of the ladies, the matron had told us, lived to a ripe old age. Within these walls they were safe from the pressures of the world. Most of them didn’t know there was a war on. In a way, were they not lucky?

  ‘How long has Miss Calderwood been here?’ I asked.

  ‘About six months.’

  ‘Has there been any improvement? What is being done to help her?’

  ‘A great deal, sir, I assure you. Dr McCallum, you know, has a world-wide reputation as a mind specialist.’

  ‘Do many of the ladies go home cured?’

  ‘Quite a few.’

  She said it too snappishly for it to be true. No doubt quite a few of the ladies were sent home, not because they were cured, but because their relatives could no longer afford to keep them here.

  An attendant passed us. Like all the others I had seen she was as burly as a jailor. Did any of those sad-eyed ladies ever try to escape from this depressing luxury?

  The matron stopped at Cathie’s door, her knuckles raised to chap. ‘When did you last see Miss Calderwood?’ she asked.

  ‘I have never met the lady,’ said Betty. ‘She is Captain Corse-Lamont’s friend.’

  ‘Four years ago,’ I said.

  ‘You will find her much changed. Still, she enjoys her food.’

  With that cryptic remark she knocked and entered. An attendant who had been sitting knitting got up and went out.

  ‘Does she always have to have someone with her?’ murmured Betty.

  ‘No, no. She gets herself into a mess, you see. Ordinarily it doesn’t matter. But visitors prefer to see her—well, tidy.’

  I had not yet dared to look at Cathie. ‘Does she get visitors often?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say often. A Miss Holmscroft comes regularly once a week. They tell me she’s a notorious socialist, but I must give her this credit, she’s the kind of visitor we like, no tears, no hysterical scenes, no upsetting the patients.’

  ‘What about Miss Calderwood’s brother?’ I asked. ‘Does he come?’

  ‘The gentleman with the bad leg? Yes, about once a month. It used to be about once a week. It is difficult for him.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Sometimes ladies from Gantock call in when they’re in Glasgow shopping.’

  During this conversation Betty and I whispered as if in the presence of someone dying, but the matron spoke normally and cheerfully.

  Then at last I looked at Cathie.

  She was seated on the carpet playing with painted wooden blocks. But it wasn’t the infantilism of what she was doing that appalled me, it was her appearance. She was enormously fat, and she was busily chewing, with brown slavers running down her chins.

  ‘She lives in a world of her own,’ said the matron. She bent over Cathie and clapped her hands. ‘Miss Calderwood, people to see you.’

  Cathie looked up, with the bland, friendly, brief interest that children under five are so good at.

  Was it put on, I wondered, was she teasing us all, behind that pasty pudgy face was the old slim, playful, womanly Cathie watching us in amusement?

  ‘I had no idea that she was so old,’ whispered Betty.

  Only cruel malice or profound sympathy or a mixture of both could have produced so startling a remark.

  I remembered peeping through the slit in the bathroom door, in happy Ravenscraig, and Mary asking me if I had lost anything.

  ‘Courage is largely callousness.’ Archie had said that once to rebuke me, because it had seemed to him that I had got too easily used to the bloody deaths of men I had known and admired. I had merely answered that we were trying to win a war.

  That necessary callousness of the soldier was not possible here. Without it I was not brave. I could not bear to look and had to hurry out of the room.

  Betty did not come with me. She stayed a few minutes more. When she did make up on me, on the stairs, beside a bust of Plato, she was not smirking in any kind of triumph; on the contrary, she looked stricken and was in tears.

  She had caught a glimpse of hell. The matron, beaming, thought that this was Miss Shields of the noble heart moved to pity.

  As we drove back into Glasgow, after a long silence Betty said: ‘Let’s not talk about her. Not now anyway.’

  I could not have talked to Christ Himself about Cathie then.

  FOUR

  Even before we were married, Betty began what she called our Eve and Adam sessions. These were conversations or consultations about personal matters, conducted in her bedroom, before a fire if the night was chilly, she seated on the floor on a soft plush cushion, I on a straight-backed chair with a cane seat, and both of us stark naked. It meant, she explained, that we had to be absolutely truthful with each other, for in her view other parts of the body were more tell-tale than the face or hands.

  It took me some time to feel at ease with her breasts, which always seemed more naked than the rest of her. Often I wondered why they intimidated me while other parts with more obvious menace did not. The reason, I thought, must lie in my childhood. Then I had been scolded for tearing pieces out of soft, white new loaves, or picking the cherries off cakes. Once I had come upon a huge toadstool and had lain down to sniff it, to find out if it was a mushroom. These, though, and others similar, did not seem adequate explanations.

  Then, one morning, as I was striding up the Royal Mile on my way to the Castle, with my kilt swinging, I saw a young woman in a shawl suckling her baby. At that moment it came back to me. When Smout McTavish and I were five, we were invited by Jim Blanie into his house to see his new little sister. Mrs Blanie was sitting on a stool feeding the baby. As we came close to peep at the baby she took the teat out of its mouth and, squeezing her breast, squirted milk all over our faces. If it had been vitriol we could not have been more shocked.

  Among the matters discussed in these circumstances, so inhibiting to me, so stimulating to Betty, was the form of our engagement announcement. We decided, or rather Betty did, with my hesitant concurrence, that I should be styled thus: ‘Captain Fergus Corse-Lamont, MC, only son of the late Hon. Henry Corse, of Corse Castle, and of the late Agnes McGilvray.’ If the Corses objected whether privately or publicly, it would be seen as an acknowledgment of my claim to kinship; if they did not, it would amount to an acceptance. (I myself thought that in the latter case it would simply mean that the Corses read newspapers with aristocratic inattention.)

  Later we discussed the arrangements for our wedding in St Giles. The Army had agreed to supply a piper, a guard of honour, and some senior officers as guests. The occasion was to be used as a means of uplifting home morale, at that time depressed by German advances on the war front. There would be pictures in newspapers. With luck none would appear in the Gantock Herald. My snubbing of Mr Kelso had probably ensured me a dearth of publicity in my home town. Snubs of equal efficacity were ready for other editors and reporters.

  Providing a bridesmaid was easy for Betty, who had many women friends available, but all the men I would have preferred as my best man were either dead or in the limbo of Gantock. Among the writers I had so far met was none whose appearance would suit an august ceremony. I decided that if I could not have a man devoted to me at least I could have one grateful: so I nominated Captain Hugh Sinclair, of my own battalion of the Perthshires, then in France. Uxorious to a distressing degree, he would be overjoyed at the chance of an unexpected leave.

  Betty showed no surprise, and scratched no part of her anatomy irritably when I insisted that there was no one from my home town I wished to invite. ‘Not even Miss Holmscroft? Or Mr Calderwood, with the bad leg? Or the provost, with his chain? Or one of your old school friends?’ ‘None, Betty.’ ‘As you please, my dear.’

  Her mother did not take it so calmly. She was shocked. ‘Guid God. Even a murderer has freen’s and ki
n. Are you worse than a murderer?’

  At that period in my life I was stiff, cold, and aloof. (To use a Lomond Street word I was a puke; a puke with style certainly, but a puke nonetheless.) Yet my situation was the most enviable in all human experience: a soldier back from the war garlanded with praise, and honourably free from any obligation to return. In addition I was young, unscathed, handsome in a kilt, and engaged to a beautiful, talented woman with money.

  In the course of my duties as an inspirational adviser on trench warfare, I had to address companies of soldiers about to set off for France. Among them were many men who would have been more useful in building tanks and ships but who had been snatched from their factories and yards. Some no doubt were from Gantock, but none of these dared to present himself to me. My instructions were to minimise the miseries and dangers of the trenches, and emphasise the fellowship and fun. Naturally I obeyed: not, however, without some inward amazement at how different were my encouraging addresses to my poem The Burning of the Boots’, fortunately not yet published. Only private individuals, I realised, could afford to tell the truth; and of all individuals poets had to be the most private.

  I sometimes wondered, if Mary too, in her public speeches, knowingly dishonoured truth.

  What I really needed most from Betty, and what she never gave me, was tenderness. She gave me concupiscent love, more than enough, respect (she would kiss my medal as if it was a crucifix), encouragement, support, and sympathy, but not tenderness. She did not withhold it, she simply did not have any to give. Later, when we moved into the country and kept dogs, these used to brace themselves, with whimpers like prayers, for her pats and strokings, which were more like buffets. Even with our children, whom she ruined with indulgence, she found it difficult to be soft-handed in her caresses.