Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  I was disappointed but not surprised. Experience had not shown me that women as a sex were particularly tender. As a foster-mother, Bessie Lamont had been fair-minded and dutiful; as a sweetheart Meg Jeffries had been cheerfully affectionate; as a friend Mary Holmscroft had been staunchly truthful: none had been tender. Even in the way Cathie Calderwood had rubbed noses with me had been a certain roughness. No woman teacher had ever treated me tenderly, and no woman neighbour: not even Mrs Grier, when she had seized my testicles, an act crying out for tenderness.

  The only exception had been soft-witted Jessie McFadyen. As a child she had been kind even to snarling dogs; as a girl in her teens, if rumour spoke truth, she had let all manner of males, some old enough to be her grandfather and some scarcely pubescent, abuse her. Those cynical rapes, which was what they amounted to, carried out amidst dustbins or in coal cellars, would have been unspeakably sordid but for the gentle, unselfish loving-kindness Jessie was sure to have shown those abusing her. That was true tenderness. No wonder I had found it rarer than four-leaved clovers.

  (How heroic and good a man had my friend Smout been! By taking Jessie as his sweetheart he had strengthened her wits. All that marvellous tenderness would have been his. Even in a single-end, he would have been the happiest of men. If only he had not been killed!)

  It is not the goodness of saints that makes us feel there is hope for humanity: it is the goodness of obscure men, like Smout McTavish, and Hugh Sinclair, best man at my wedding.

  When I look again at this picture of my bride (though she has been cut out I can imagine her well enough) and me outside St Giles, under the swords of the guard of honour, I am able to forgive myself for my contumelious smile when I see, past my right shoulder, Hugh’s jolly grin. I am able indeed to forgive all blundering humanity. Though it would have been possible for him, who loved his wife to dangerous excess, to find some sufficiently honourable reason for staying safe at home, he returned to France and was killed at Cambrai, two months before the armistice.

  The ceremony was conducted by an ex-Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and attended by three other ex-Moderators, one of whom gave Betty away. I wondered what they would have said if I had told them that the bride, shimmering in virginal white, had not waited for their Lord’s permission to drag the bridegroom into bed with her, but had done it months ago.

  Our honeymoon was spent in Argyll, beside a sea-loch, in a shooting-lodge lent by a friend of Betty’s. (Gradually I was finding out that she had numerous such friends, well-placed wealthy men eager to do her favours.) Since the purpose of a honeymoon is to make love I ought not perhaps to have felt peeved at having to make it so frequently, in and out of doors. Readiness was all, according to Betty. Discomfort did not deter her. Once, in a cave, we were both dyed bright green with slippery slime: it took hours of scrubbing to get it off. Nor did she mind being seen, by rabbits, seagulls, stonechats, or lurking peasants. We were, she said, god and goddess celebrating love in a time of war, and demonstrating how the world could be replenished.

  In contact so often with such beautiful and combustible flesh, my own sometimes caught fire. Betty would whisper into my ear afterwards: ‘Seventy-five per cent, my love;’ or, on one occasion, in a glade of tall foxgloves, ‘Ninety.’

  Though I discovered a great deal about her not to her credit during those ten days of rut, at the end of them I was fonder of her, more grateful, more dependent, and more understanding. If all that did not quite amount to love, it came close. Certainly it enabled me to catch glimpses of the terrors in her mind.

  Once, as we were climbing the hills hand-in-hand, on a sunny day with blue sky above and blue loch below, she suddenly let out a groan, and her nails dug painfully into my palm. I thought she had been stung by a cleg or even bitten by an adder. But she gazed at me with horror in her blue eyes as she whispered: ‘Don’t ask me why, Fergus, but I just thought of your friend, Miss Calderwood.’

  It was not the fear of growing fat that was terrifying her. Fatness could be avoided by eating less. It was the fear of going mad.

  Campbell Aird was to tell me later that Betty, like Shakespeare, had moments of melancholy insight when she saw all human existence as a pervasive madness. Therefore her determined portrayal of it as an oversweet sanity must be an enormous burden. If she let go God knew what chaos would descend.

  I was, he pointed out delicately, in the best position to know. Did she not hope to find in love, or at any rate in its physical expression, a great deal more than pleasure for the body and illumination for the mind? Did she not also hope to find obliteration of those glimpses of hell?

  Though I did not much approve of my bedmate’s being analysed by a shilpit grey-haired man of fifty-five whose own venereal partner at the time was a plump young barman, I had to admit that his analysis was acute.

  FIVE

  For many years now Campbell Aird has been soliciting among the cherubim: with more success, it is to be hoped, than he enjoyed in his later years among the catamitic youths of Edinburgh, who found his lank grey hair, vast brow, soiled velvet collars, and slouching walk too off-putting. But if there are no books in heaven the sweetest of cherubic bottoms will not compensate. No man loved books so much, or could tell, so quickly, almost from sniffing, whether one was true or false.

  In the Sunday newspapers and literary weeklies books were often acclaimed in terms that would have been hyperbolical applied to King Lear or War and Peace. ‘Kach,’ Campbell Aird would say, with a snort, and sure enough, a year or two later, those masterpieces were everywhere recognised to be kach and flushed away for ever. On the other hand, if a book was good, if it really was the life-blood of a master spirit, he would cry ‘Manna!’ In any one generation there are no more than a dozen such books. Among these Campbell Aird included my two volumes of poems, the one dealing with my childhood in Gantock, and the other with my experiences during the War.

  As well as editing the literary magazine The Caledonian, and writing articles for various journals, including Betty’s People’s Companion, he was employed by Betty’s publisher, Pettigrew and Strang, as a reader. Despising public taste, he could tell at a glance what would gratify it. Two other readers, and Pettigrew himself, had wanted to reject Betty’s first novel The Heirs of Crailzie as too foolishly romantic, but Campbell had called it the first shovelful of nuggets out of a goldmine. Very soon he was proved right.

  During that last year of the War, and the years following it, our house in Traquair Row was a meeting-place for Scottish authors. Prominent among them was Hamish Sievewright. Today, nearly sixty years after its publication, it is incredible that his two hundred and fifty page-long philosophical poem, ‘A Prey to Dede’, a dialogue, in archaic Scots, between Mary, Queen of Scots, in her prison in England, and her husband the Earl of Both well, in his dungeon in Denmark, or rather between their disembodied spirits that meet like sea-mews over the North Sea—or so it seems, for much is unintelligible—was ever taken seriously, and indeed proclaimed as the profoundest exploration of the Scottish soul ever undertaken in literature. The first time I read it, or to be honest tried to read it, for as with so many so-called masterpieces, contemporary and classical alike, I found the going unendurably dreary. Trying again later, I thought it turgid, stilted, and inert. This last was really some sort of achievement, considering the exciting lives and tragic deaths of the two protagonists. ‘Kach or manna?’ I challenged Campbell Aird. He was reluctant to answer, for he liked old Sievewright, who certainly looked like a poet, with his silvery hair and beard. Pressed, Campbell answered, with a scowl: ‘First-class kach, of course. But don’t tell him I said so. He’s a nice old man.’ I remonstrated, insisting that for the sake of maintaining standards the perpetrators of bad writing ought to be told it was bad, plainly and conclusively. He agreed, with a groan.

  Years later, in an article on Scottish poetry, he wrote: ‘It is a melancholy fact of literary life that the nicest of men do not write the best poetry. In order to be able to wr
ite good poetry it is necessary to have what the poet himself will call god-like confidence, but what seems to the rest of us to be infernal conceit. The great poet offers us his work as if it had been handed to him by the Lord on top of a mountain. Mr Sievewright’s, we feel, was composed in a pleasant library, with the sun shining through tall windows on to books of reference piled up on the leather-topped desk, and a decanter of choice companionable Glenfiddich. We have the impression that his poems were not hindered but rather were helped along by interruptions from congenial friends, whose talk flowed as golden as the whisky. We think of Mr Sievewright as a gracious host, not as a poet with a daemon in him. We love to be in his company, but we would rather not read his poetry. With Mr Fergus Lamont it is precisely the opposite: we feel we must heed his poetry because it has on it all the authentic signs of the divine scorching; but we have no urgent desire to seek his company. In mundane circumstances that god-like confidence without which admittedly great or even good poetry cannot be written becomes insufferable. Robert Burns, in Poosey Nancy’s tavern, and on the stony fields of Mossgiel, could set it down for the time being and become a convivial imbiber in the one case and a farmer with a sore back in the other. Mr Lamont, it seems, cannot set it down…’ Astute though he was, he was unable, like everybody else, to see that my perennial stiffness and aloofness which he castigated so humorously were simply the hard, necessary husk, inside which a true humility was slowly growing to ripeness.

  I am obliged to say something about Alisdair Donaldson, though he is a novelist, and I have never had any interest in novels. Though in uniform, he never served abroad because of knock-knees, and for the same reason seldom wore a kilt. When I first met him he was a corporal clerk in the Castle, and smelled of carbolic soap, because of the primitive ablutionary arrangements in his quarters. At that time he had published only one novel, a gloomy tale of the killing of gannets in his native Lewis, in the 18th century, written in a sing-song prose supposed to represent the surge of the sea and certainly inducing some sort of squeamishness. Most of his subsequent thirty or so novels, however, were set furth of Scotland, with Englishmen for heroes. He believed that as a people the Scots had long ago lost their individual flavour, and were now as wersh as stale baps: consequently it was unprofitable, artistically and financially, to write about them. I agreed, but only as far as the money-loving, hypocritical bourgeois Scots were concerned. There was, I assured him, plenty of pungent flavour left in the proletarian Scot and the aristocratic Scot. In illustration of the latter claim I mentioned Lady Grizel Dungavel’s poulticing of her horse’s genitals. He listened with a pout of incredulity, but in a later novel purloined the incident.

  Today, living in the South of France on the proceeds from his best-sellers (now dismissed as mostly kach) he probably maintains that Fergus Lamont was a minor poet, with some robustness of language; but it is jealousy speaking. Even when he was having ecstatic reviews and I either none or frivolous ones, when his books were making pounds and mine maiks, when his marriage, to the younger daughter of an English baronet, was solid and mine disintegrated, when his children were proud of him and mine ashamed of me, even then he was jealous. Many years afterwards, when he sought me out in the Hebrides where I had exiled myself, he came, so he said, to pity my hardships and obscurity, but it was really to rejoice over them.

  In front of the shops in Buccleuch Street, round the corner from Lomond Street, were iron gratings in which the spaces were small enough to keep heels from getting stuck in them, but big enough to let coins fall through. The gratings were intended to give light to basements under the shops, but most of those basements were shut up and disused. Women out shopping with cold fingers, children running too fast with precious but slippery pennies clutched in their fists, and drunk men reeling home with their change rattling in their pockets, passed over the gratings every day. Therefore coins, keys, rings, brooches, etc, were always being dropped among the litter of fag-ends, sweetie papers, tram tickets, and withered leaves, where they glinted tantalisingly.

  We had a method of recovering them. A piece of clay, about the size of a man’s nose, would be kneaded so that it could be pushed through one of the spaces. Its flattened end would be wetted with spittle, to make it more adhesive. It would be lowered, with much care, on a length of string until it was suspended directly over the lost treasure. Then it would be let drop with a hopeful thud. After a few seconds of prayer it would be brought up, inch by inch, usually with the coin or whatever it was adhering. Sometimes this would fall off and the whole thing would have to be done again, with still greater caution. Sometimes the clay would disintegrate and have to be renewed. Sometimes some too eager coadjutor would step on the manipulator of the string, who lay flat on his stomach; or the shopkeeper would dash out and chase everybody away. Sometimes the object being salvaged, when falling back, would be lost to sight amongst the rubbish: but only after many attempts, spread out over months, would it be abandoned.

  Our trade was recognisable from the clay on our hands and the tips of our noses, the rust on our knees, and the temporary crossness of our eyes.

  My imagination was those dauds of clay, bringing up, out of my Gantock childhood, poems like ‘Gathering Dung’ and ‘Stairhead Lavatories’.

  It is amazing that I wrote those poems, so rich in sympathy for the poor, during the three years after the War when I still looked on myself as an aristocrat. One incident will be enough to indicate the kind of person I was at that time.

  One evening Betty and I were guests at a dinner party in Heddleston House, home of Sir James Mutt-Simpson, one of her admirers, and later her lover. When the ladies had withdrawn, we drank port, smoked cigars, and discussed, with indignation, the miners then on strike, who spent their days playing cards and their nights poaching. Our host owned three coal mines. We were all agreed that whatever the War had been fought for it hadn’t been to make life easy for fellows unwilling, in the country’s interests, to work a bit harder for a bit less pay.

  As gentry, we took for granted that we were owed the best of everything, not just because we were personally worthy of it, but also because that was how the Almighty had arranged things. It seemed to us a sacred and sensible arrangement, and any attempt to alter it would be impious and foolish.

  Dressed like a Highland chief in a Raeburn painting, I was the most scathing in my criticism of the Scottish working man. My companions were impressed. They supposed that I had acquired my knowledge and insight during the War. One of them suggested that I should stand as a Tory mp: men like me were needed to counteract the dangerous nonsense spouted by the Clydeside revolutionaries, including ‘that abominable woman Holmscroft’. What, asked another, did I think ought to be done about the thousands of demobilised soldiers going about the country grumbling that promises given them of well-paid jobs and good houses weren’t being kept: not having the honesty to admit that such promises would never have been necessary if they had been prepared to do their duty for duty’s sake alone.

  ‘They’re all right at heart,’ I replied. They need discipline, and a purpose, that’s all. Winston Churchill’s right. They should be put back in uniform and sent against the Bolsheviks.’

  While they were chorusing ‘Heah, heah’, the butler came in with a message from McCulloch, Sir James’s head gamekeeper. A poacher had been caught. McCulloch wanted to know if he should be handed straight over to the police, or did Sir James want to see him first.

  Instead of pleased, Sir James looked sheepish. I was not surprised. A tall round-shouldered baronet with gold-rimmed spectacles and a melancholy neighing voice, he liked to think of himself as a humanitarian. He had not fought in the War because of bad eyesight. When out shooting he was more of a danger to the beaters than to grouse or roe-deer. Left to himself, he would have given his colliers what they were asking. In some ways he reminded me of Archie Dungavel.

  Ashamed, perhaps, of appearing disloyal to his class, he ordered the fellow to be brought in.

  We ap
proved heartily.

  ‘Quite right, old man.’

  ‘Should be fun.’

  ‘Good to hear what these fellows have to say for themselves.’

  ‘Let Corse-Lamont have a word with him.’

  ‘Pity is he’ll get off with a paltry fine,’ said Sir Hubert Cuthbertson, a magistrate. ‘It’s all wrong. In my view, the severer a punishment is the kinder. What I mean is, in Muslim countries, you know, the penalty for stealing is to have the right hand chopped off. Pretty drastic but damned effective, I should think.’

  We agreed. We looked round to make sure that everyone of us showed that agreement. Gentlemen had to stick together, particularly when they were obliged to adopt attitudes or support views not quite gentlemanly.

  Two gamekeepers came in, holding their prisoner. All three had their caps in their hands. Their clothes were wet and their boots muddy. Sir James looked anxious about his carpets.

  The poacher had a red coarse face, sly downcast eyes, and a pimply nose. He had allowed bad housing, cheap food, and worry about money, to degrade him. Mary Holmscroft would not have been pleased. She was always exhorting the poor to hold up their heads and look their exploiters in the eye. This one looked us in the foot.

  ‘Would you like to speak to him, Corse-Lamont?’ muttered Sir James. ‘You know how.’

  ‘Certainly.’ I addressed the poacher. ‘Stand to attention in the presence of gentlemen.’

  He stood to attention.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Muir, sir. Donald Muir.’

  For a second I was taken aback, but there could be no connection between this whimperer and Donald of Sutherland, that brave and unselfish patriot.

  Meanwhile Muir had taken out of his pocket a bronze medal. It wasn’t the kind given for valour, but it did show he had served in the War: that was to say, if it had really been awarded to him. I had heard of similar medals being swopped in pubs for glasses of beer.