Fergus Lamont Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  In Fergus Lamont Robin Jenkins is at his sharpest on themes that have long absorbed him: ambition, delusion, mission, fraudulence, snobbery, goodness and cruelty. His great creative stroke in this novel, first published in 1979, is to filter these themes through the vision of a central character and narrator who is generally preposterous, often repellent and probably crazed. The cruelties, divisions and absurdities of the wider social and moral landscape are ironically heightened by being seen through Fergus Lamont’s reflections and his mad redemptive mission. The result is an extraordinary novel, comic and serious, teasing and painful.

  Since the narrator is, to an extent, an unreliable oddball, it would be as well to bear in mind one of Robin Jenkins’s central purposes as a writer. In 1955 Jenkins wrote an essay called ‘Novelist in Scotland’ in which he said this about the Scots and the writer’s task: ‘We have been a long time in acquiring our peculiarities: in spite of ourselves, they are profound, vigorous, and important; and it is the duty of the Scottish novelist to portray them.’

  There is a strong, even stern sense of that duty to be clear-eyed throughout Jenkins’s work. It is all the more striking, therefore, that Jenkins chooses to register so many of our ‘peculiarities’ by way of Fergus’s squint gaze: a very odd viewpoint indeed. But that central purpose which Jenkins declared in 1955 has remained constant. Indeed, he achieves it to a masterful degree in Fergus Lamont by drawing on other qualities which he called for in that same essay. We should, he said, admit the superficial greyness of Scotland and put it boldly in the picture. We should then bring to that setting ‘comic bravado’, ‘bursts of devastating self-criticism’, ‘sardonic’ and ‘irreverent’ humour, and ‘a resolute sadness that harks back to our old incomparable ballads’. Fergus Lamont’s strange, futile life and reflections provide us with these qualities abundantly.

  Readers familiar with Jenkins’s work will recognise some settings and characters akin to others which have featured in his novels before and since Fergus Lamont. But perhaps never before had he hit upon such a startling and comprehensive permutation of these elements.

  The principal settings of the novel contrast with each other most strikingly. They highlight the worlds of difference which separate a people forced to share Scotland’s none too generous space. These are the working-class districts of Gantock, a town near Glasgow. Within these districts there are keenly appreciated gradations from the squalid to the precariously respectable. A great social gulf separates the poor areas from the douce homes of the burghers of the West End. It is a gulf bridged only shakily, and in the end unsuccessfully, by Fergus’s socialist teacher, Limpy Calderwood, and by his protégée, Mary Holmscroft. She is Fergus’s early schoolmate whose political crusade on behalf of the people haunts him as he pursues his quest for his own and the people’s spiritual salvation.

  The working-class and middle-class worlds defy rapprochement, but at least they are locked together by the force of mutual mistrust. The world of the gentry, to which Fergus aspires, seems by comparison almost an extra-planetary zone from which rarefied representatives occasionally condescend to make inspirational appearances on earth. The lands and houses of the gentry, not very distant geographically from the Gantocks of this world, conceal lives more mysterious and remote from the rest of Scotland than the Outer Hebrides.

  It is exactly appropriate that the deeply fraudulent Betty T. Shields, whom Fergus marries for status rather than money, should have conned her way into upper-class circles as a hugely popular writer of inspirational fiction for the masses. In this way she is a great asset to the ruling class, especially in wartime, just as she serves individual members of it in bed.

  Even Betty’s repeated infidelities fail to disabuse Fergus of his pathetic, idealised vision of a patrician class released from material concerns into a kind of state of grace: free to dispense angelic goodwill and benevolence. Jenkins deploys the noted Scottish art of reduction here, for Fergus’s imagined noble spirits are at best dimly good-natured and craven, and callous at worst. But Fergus’s messianic fever demands that there must be some higher plane on to which he can be elevated and from which he can dispense effortless peace and wisdom for the benefit of the working-class people from whom he has risen. Other-worldliness in some form or other is to Fergus an essential guarantee of both superiority and purity. So, to complete his transformation into a spiritual luminary, Fergus turns to a second kind of remote realm, Oronsay in the Hebrides, there to purge himself like a prophet of old. By the end of a ten-year exile there he fondly imagines that he has cleansed himself of selfishness and learned to love his child-like Kirstie, who dies having failed in every attempt to get through to him that she wants to have his child.

  Much of the success of the novel lies in its power to make us wonder how this strange creature, Fergus, will make out in his succession of environments: working-class Gantock, fee-paying school, the trenches and officers’ mess during the First World War, the country house, the croft.

  He is strange precisely in the sense that from the age of seven he has set out to re-create himself by developing a dual persona: the aristocratic gentleman poet, and the redeeming example of courage low-born but triumphant over poverty, trial by battle, female treachery and the struggle for humility. If there is something in him akin to the ‘holy fool’, it is oddly dressed up in an officer’s tunic or tweeds. His concept of his quest is in itself comically incongruous and in his own account of how it unfolds he reveals, unconsciously as it were, many an absurdity. That is part of the delight of the book.

  But the story is driven along by other factors as well which condition Fergus’s life and our view of him. Two of these are arrestingly bleak. The first is the death of Fergus’s mother when he is seven years old and the lasting significance of that death. The second develops more gradually. As Fergus the narrator, in his seventies, looks back over a period spanning two world wars, he partially comes to recognise his failure to inspire hope, courage and reconciliation. Indeed he begins to see that his quest has separated him from others. More, it has led to him rejecting others as much as his mother was once rejected. Yet he is still a snob (repelled by the sight of a once beautiful girlfriend), and his reported attempt to reconcile himself with Gantock is deeply equivocal. This failure to come to terms with himself is poignant.

  Fergus’s fate, and the flawed self-consciousness which goes with it, turns on the nature of his mother’s death. Only twenty-six when she drowned herself, she was beautiful and wayward, having lived with a sick old man for four years before returning briefly to John Lamont. After her death Fergus discovers that he may be the bastard son of an earl’s son. John Lamont had been willing enough to accept her back as he has been happy to treat Fergus as his own. But these two key reconciliations are not to be. Fergus’s mother finds it hard to be caged in Gantock. When her judgmental father rejects a gesture of reconciliation from her, she makes her conclusive escape.

  The bewildered and appalled little boy pledges himself to fulfil the destiny which his mother has dared to leave him as his inheritance. He adopts as his dress the only other thing she bequeaths him: a kilt, agonisingly out of place in Lomond Street. It declares his distinctiveness defiantly: he begins to set himself apart, just like his mother before him.

  With Isobel Murray, I have argued elsewhere that the story can be compared fairly with Dickens’s Great Expectations. A complementary Scottish comparison can be made with
recurring stories on the theme of the ‘lad o’ pairts’: in which some brilliant boy from an impoverished background is encouraged by his teachers and others to rise to some kind of eminence. Variations on this theme are to be found elsewhere in Jenkins’s own work, including the relatively early Happy For The Child (1953) in which we already find that the price of such intellectually powered ambition is liable to be alienation from family and friends. Another not uncommon feature of this theme is that the ‘lad o’ pairts’ should fulfil quasi-religiously an obligation to do good in the world: as befitting one marked out by grace to be one of the Elect. This serves to account in part for Fergus’s almost religious espousal of his mission.

  But Jenkins’s surpassing ploy here, surely, is to enliven the old theme with such a rich set of twists. Fergus has the apparent grace, i.e. the sheer good luck, to have an aristocratic father as well as brains. Or, at least, and this is enough, he supposes this to be so. The combination inspires him to try to elevate himself and then others by the dazzling power of his example, his reflected glory and noble sentiments. As to proof of his superiority, his modest but sufficiently respected talents as a poet are suitable signs of great worth; but they are not essential. Any mark of distinction, however acquired, will do the trick. For a person so convinced of inner merit, it doesn’t matter if he is unscrupulous in achieving heights for the sake of the common good.

  So it is that in his efforts to transcend the confines of working-class and middle-class life in Gantock, Fergus Lamont achieves a heartlessness equivalent to the small-mindedness and dogmatism which brought about his mother’s death. In one of those moments of partial recognition, right at the beginning, he says: ‘Puritanic and parochial Scots, you murdered my young and beautiful mother. As one of you, I must share the blame.’ Quite. He transforms but fails to transcend the puritanism and parochialism of the tribe. It infects what he imagines is the antidote.

  Jenkins has created a subtly powerful portrait of a man dedicated to potty, ill-conceived objectives. In A Would-Be Saint (1978), the central character, Gavin Hamilton, is dedicated to the conversion of others by an exemplary Christian life and by being as little beholden to others as possible. Jenkins pursues the logic of Gavin Hamilton’s mission relentlessly, leaving room for little else to fill the character out. In Fergus Lamont, by contrast, what we are able to see, beyond the complex and cracked figure of Fergus himself, is an even more intricately flawed culture. Look hard. Enjoy.

  Bob Tait

  Part One

  ONE

  Half Scotland sniggered, and the other half scowled, when in letters to the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, I put forward my suggestion that prisoners in Scottish jails be allowed to wear kilts, as their national birthright, if such was their wish. Those sniggerers and scowlers may well snigger more moronically and scowl more impatiently when I now confess that I donned my own first kilt, at the age of seven and a half, not with pride and joy, but with reluctance and anguish; and also that for the rest of my life I never buckled one on without feeling something of the grief and shame with which James IV, unhappy parricide, must have put on his penitential shirt of iron.

  Puritanic and parochial Scots, you murdered my young and beautiful mother. As one of you, I must share the blame.

  My mother bought the kilt from a second-hand clothes ad once belonged to a boy whose father was a director of Stewart’s of Gantock, the shipbuilding company for which my ‘father’ (the honourable good-hearted champion quoiter John Lamont, whose name is on my birth certificate) worked as a joiner, and my maternal grandfather, Donald McGilvray, as chief pay-clerk. The tartan was the dress McLeod.

  She had seen the kilt in the window, beside the tile hat; but she had not gone into the shop to buy it, she had gone in to avoid Mrs Maitland and Mrs Blanie who were coming along the street. She had been so agitated when asking Lumhat to show us the kilt that I was too worried to object.

  In the house, with this yellow and black kilt spread out over her lilac lap, my mother, twenty-six years old, pale-cheeked and red-haired, urged me, with a passion I thought extravagant and unfair, to put it on.

  I kept muttering dourly: They’d a‘ca’ me a Jessie.’

  I had seen boys in kilts before, toffs from the villa’d West End, as remote from us in tenemented Lomond Street as the whites in South Africa are from the blacks.

  Her delicate hand gripped the cameo brooch at her breast, so tightly that I could see her knuckles turn white.

  More than sixty years later that brooch lies before me on the table, yellowish with age. I think of the peaty water of Puddock Loch, and shudder.

  ‘You’d look like a prince, Fergie,’ she whispered. ‘As you should.’

  I considered the consequences of obliging her. My eyes went skelly with apprehension.

  ‘Jock Dempster wad lift it up,’ I groaned.

  Suddenly she was in tears again. I could do or say nothing to comfort her. I didn’t know her well. She had been away too long; and, as I had tried to hint, ever so tactfully, she was a bit too beautiful, too perfumed, and too haughty for Lomond Street, and for me.

  She had come too unexpectedly. I needed longer than three days to fit her into my life.

  ‘And if he did you would give him a right good kick on the shin, wouldn’t you? Have you got my red hair for nothing?’

  Too embarrassed to compare our hair, I studied my boots. As weapons they were formidable, with their tackets. I had the courage too to use them. But it wouldn’t do any good. Anybody I kicked for laughing would howl with pain all right, but then everybody else would laugh all the more. Fergie Lamont in a kilt would be funny, Fergie Lamont in a kilt in a fury would be funnier still.

  The trouble was, though I found her contempt for other people’s opinions of her exciting, I also found it alarming. That walk with her had been a pleasure and an agony.

  Through in the kitchen our canary Rob Roy burst into song, but only very briefly.

  It was my mother who had bought him years ago, and when she had gone away he had missed her. So my father had told me; but when I had mentioned it to Miss Montgomery, my penny-buff teacher, she had been shocked. ‘No, Fergus. Canaries only miss other canaries. If that. Besides.’ She too disapproved of what my mother had done, and like all the rest wasn’t going to tell what it was.

  My mother’s tears frightened me. I had seen women weeping before, but for reasons easily understood; when someone had died, if the rent couldn’t be paid, if a husband had been brutal. These tears of my mother’s had some cause more terrible and desolating than death or poverty or cruelty.

  ‘Whit was it you did?’ I whispered, once again. ‘Why did you go away? Why is everybody so angry?’

  Her scent reminded me of the roses in my grandfather’s garden. Other boys’ mothers smelled of pipeclay, scrubbing brushes, baby’s milk, parozone, and black lead. She spoke too in a more ladylike way than any of my teachers. I would have liked very much to be able to brag about her to my friends, but I couldn’t, there were too many things to be settled first; and I just couldn’t see who was going to settle them.

  ‘Oh, something terrible,’ she murmured.

  I wasn’t sure whether or not she was joking.

  ‘But whit?’

  ‘Some day they’ll tell you. But do you know what I want you to do now? I want you to put on this braw kilt and go up the brae with me to see your grandfather.’

  I blew out my cheeks in the loudest, most incredulous gasp I could manage.

  Once, seated on his knee, I had boldly asked my grandfather where she was and when she was coming back. A tall stern man with a black beard, he had replied in the same calm voice he always used, whether reading bits out of the Bible or discussing his roses. ‘She is in hell, Fergus, and no one ever comes back from there.’

  I had had a hard job not to grin, because just a few days before one of my best friends, Smout McTavish, had shouted to Miss Cochrane to go to hell. She had already given him two of the tawse for getting his s
ums wrong, and he had thought that was enough. She had dragged him to the headmaster who had given him two more for swearing. The joke was, Smout was one of the few boys in our district who seldom swore.

  Inside his beard my grandfather’s mouth had gone as hard as railway lines. ‘When he’s no’ pleased,’ Jim Blanie had once whispered, ‘your grandfather looks like Goad.’

  ‘I don’t think he wants to see you,’ I said, cautiously.

  ‘But if you come with me, Fergus, and ask him for me, maybe he will.’

  I was sure he wouldn’t, but I felt I ought to oblige her.

  ‘Whit will I wear under it?’ I asked.

  Few of us in Lomond Street wore underpants.

  ‘Soldiers don’t wear anything under their kilts.’

  I wondered how she knew. But even if it was true, soldiers just had Boers shooting at them, they didn’t have Jock Dempster or Rab McIntyre come whooping out of a close to snatch up their kilts and show their bums to lassies.

  ‘I could take my barrow and get her dung.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Weel, he said I should. He needs it for his roses.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Fergie. You gether dung if you want to.’

  ‘It’s my grandfather wants it, no’ me. I’ve got nae roses.’

  She hugged me then, laughing and weeping at the same time.

  ‘Whatever happens, Fergie, wherever I go, I’ll always remember my wee kiltie gathering dung for his grandfather’s roses.’

  ‘You said you wouldnae go away again.’

  ‘Ah, but you see, Fergie, I thought I could stand it here, as long as I had you. It’s only you I’ve missed. But I don’t think I can stand it.’

  I knew it was really my father she couldn’t stand. (Let me in the meantime call John Lamont that.) Since she had come back, three days ago, she had hardly spoken to him. He had been very quiet too, though once he had shouted at her. In our room-and-kitchen with the lavatory outside on the stairs privacy was never easy. She had slept with me in the room. My father had stood outside the door for a long time, sighing. She had sighed too.