Fergus Lamont Read online

  Cathie was alone all right, and welcomed me in the little girl’s voice she put on sometimes. This time, too, the little girl’s dress she was wearing, blue with lots of little white bows, was short. Her stockings were white.

  She took me by the hand, crying that if I was a good boy she would let me play with her. The game, though, turned out to be dressing and undressing a doll with real hair and one leg. Tiny dresses were scattered over the carpet in the sitting-room.

  I had seen Cathie being childish before, and it had charmed me; but this was different, there were moments that afternoon, indeed there were minutes, when she didn’t seem to be aware that she was pretending.

  Her attitude to the doll was so unlike what Aunt Bella’s had been. Aunt Bella had wanted her doll to be a real baby, but Cathie, like all the little girls I had ever seen playing with dolls, made it clear that she knew, in the midst of the caresses and endearments, that it wasn’t made of flesh and blood, and could be laid aside, thankfully, when play was over. Her imitation couldn’t have been more exact.

  She got up from her seat on the carpet and carried the doll—she called it Lucy—round the room, letting it peep at the little fish and sing to the canaries. She prattled in the way mothers did to their babies, but I had heard many such mothers and knew that though they spoke nonsense their purpose was serious, they were showing their babies they loved them, and at the same time were encouraging their babies’ intelligence to grow. Therefore their prattling made sense, and was delightful to hear. Cathie’s was weird. The canaries did not like it: they sulked and would not whistle. I remembered how Rob Roy had died so soon after my mother.

  Dropping the doll, she ran over to me where I sat on the sofa and jumped up on to my lap, with her arms round my neck and her head on my shoulder, as if I was a harmless uncle of seventy or so.

  Things then happened fast. The sofa was covered with a slippery pink satin stuff. We began to slide off. My hand discovered naked skin at the top of her stocking. I kissed her warm neck. In my nostrils there was an assault of fragrance.

  We were on the floor. She lay under me. Her eyes were bright blue; they were blanker than death. She had often teased me about my puritanic restraint; now she said not a word about it. She said nothing at all about anything. My hand, with no experience, knew where to go, what to do. She let her legs fall apart.

  Close to us was a table on which was a bowl of goldfish. Perhaps my foot struck one of its legs, making the water in the bowl vibrate; perhaps it was past the fishes’ feeding-time; perhaps, conceivably, they were fond of Cathie and wanted, like bull-dogs, to go to her rescue. Whatever the reason, the small fish began to leap out of the water making splashes that, though less noisy and menacing than the hissing of swans or the panting of peeping-toms, were just as arresting to illicit lovers. As I paused, two of the fish jumped clean out of the bowl and bounced, one off Cathie’s face and the other off the back of my neck, on to the floor, where they wriggled in what looked like an admonitory parody of myself.

  We disentangled ourselves in a hurry, for it had become a matter of life and death. Not waiting to pull up her knickers, Cathie, on her knees, gathered up the fish and cried to me to hand her down the bowl. Though her bottom was bare she was her own self again. I handed down the bowl. She dropped the fish in. One immediately darted about in joy at being alive or at having saved her, but the other floated upside-down for a minute, as if the effort had been too much for it. However, as we watched, it righted itself, and swam about happily.

  While I looked away Cathie put her dress to rights and ran to the door, crying in her own voice that she would make the tea: there were cream cookies for it.

  She looked round, with her finger to her lips. ‘Fish keep secrets,’ she whispered, and then laughed gaily.

  I wasn’t surprised at the quickness of her recovery. Like our western skies, her moods were always brief and swift to change. Indeed, I felt a little vexed at being left to carry the whole burden of remorse myself. Something deep in me warned that even if I lived till I was a hundred I would never be able to forgive myself for having so nearly violated that charming and, though I didn’t really know it at the time, afflicted woman.

  EIGHTEEN

  Meg Jeffries was the most beautiful girl I have ever known. She was also virtuous; and she had a way of laughing that was merry without being vulgar or spiteful. She could have had her choice of fifty sweethearts. Because she chose me I was considered in the East End more fortunate than Mark Antony or Priam of Troy. It should really have been the other way round, she being thought fortunate because I showed her favour, but it was not, I was the one congratulated, envied, and above all warned.

  Mrs Grier’s warning was jocular. I was still at the Academy at the time.

  They tell me,’ she cried, from her closemouth, ‘that Rab Jeffries, Meg’s brither, wha’s a plumber, can lift a lavatory pan wi’ yin hand.’

  Still small and solemn, Smout McTavish stopped his bicycle laden with groceries beside me.

  ‘I was asked to pass a message on to you, Fergus. Frae Archie Jeffries. Big Archie. Meg’s cousin. Tak care. That was the message.’

  Bessie Lamont warned me a few days before she and her family left Siloam to live in a five-apartment flat in a red sandstone tenement with tiled closes, in Arran Street, at the edge of the West End.

  John Lamont was now a foreman. Bessie herself had been left a little money by an old uncle. She felt able at last to stop being beholden to me. She had never really felt settled in Siloam, though John Lamont, with the help of some workmates, had added to it a proper bathroom and two bedrooms. Arran Street was much nearer the Academy, where the precocious Sammy was now a pupil. Agnes would be able to go to Arran Street Primary, where the children were well-dressed and mannerly.

  Bessie wanted very much her family to rise in the world. That was why she did not approve of my ambitions. They made her own more ordinary and more sensible ones seem foolish.

  ‘What about Meg Jeffries?’ she asked. ‘When you have this big house to yourself her family will expect you to make her an offer.’

  I didn’t need anyone to remind me that the Jeffries were the most formidable clan in Gantock. They would not hesitate to break the bones of any man who let their Meg down. They were fanatical Orangemen, taking part in every walk, wearing sashes, carrying banners, and playing flutes. They had statuettes of King Billy on his white horse on their window-sills. Their skins turned itchy whenever a priest passed. They were convinced that any Protestant girl who married a Catholic and ‘turned’ acquired thereby a loathsome cancer of the soul: if she had any children they too would be blighted.

  As the grandson of the late Donald McGilvray, well-known anti-Papist, I always felt safe from the Jeffries, provided I didn’t get Meg pregnant or give her any promises I had no intention of keeping.

  In any case, Bessie’s warning was unnecessary. It came a few weeks after Meg had told me she had met someone else, a schoolteacher from Paisley. I had been more relieved than hurt. The woman I married would be aristocratic, gracious, refined, and probably wealthy, Meg had none of these qualities. Besides, she laughed too heartily when I tried out on her my landed-gentry accent.

  One wet night at the end of July 1914, when I had been living in Siloam by myself for a month or so, Meg arrived at the door, soaked and shivering.

  ‘Can I come in, Fergus?’ she asked, humbly.

  Though suspicious as to her purpose in visiting me so late in such weather, I took her in, helped her off with her hat and shoes, and gave her a pair of my slippers to put on.

  As she sat close to the fire, still shivering, I could not help imagining her there as my wife. Never had she looked more desirable. Under her red woollen dress her breasts inspired the same old terror, but also a new tenderness.

  For a minute I wondered whether, in return for the joy of having her as my wife, I ought to give up my aristocratic pretensions and be content to stay in Gantock, and be a poet.

  Sudd
enly she murmured: ‘I’m going to have a wean, Fergus.’

  I was shocked: remember at that time I was a prude. I was indignant: remember she had repulsed my advances. I was apprehensive: had she come to beg me to take the blame? I was interested: who was this intrepid fellow that had defied the wild Jeffries? Her tears seemed to indicate that he wasn’t willing to marry her.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘The schoolteacher from Paisley?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Better not let the school board know, I thought, or he’d be out of a job.

  There were times, too many of them, when I found myself thinking like my grandfather.

  ‘Is he refusing to marry you?’

  ‘No, he is not. He wants to marry me mair than anything in the world.’

  ‘What’s the problem then? Don’t tell me he’s married already.’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  ‘You don’t want to marry him, is that it?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Fergus. Of course I want to marry him. I love him.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand, Meg.’

  Understanding came quick as lightning.

  ‘He’s a Catholic. His name’s John McHaffie, and he’s a teacher of geography at St Philomena’s School.’

  My first thought, so engrained a Scot was I, was that if she married a schoolteacher she would be doing pretty well for herself. My second thought, still more characteristically Scotch, was: Christ help them. However well-hidden and distant their dovecote, hawks would seek it out and harry it.

  ‘I don’t suppose your family knows,’ I said, feebly.

  ‘I’m feart to tell them.’

  So craven is selfishness, it occurred to me that, though telling them would bring disaster on her head, she ought to do it quickly, lest they put the blame on me and come to Siloam with lifted fists.

  ‘I’m no’ feart for myself. I’m feart for John.’

  Civilisation did advance, even in Scotland. In the old days the Jeffries would have burnt the presumptuous heretic to cinders, with the blessing of the Kirk. Nowadays, if they beat him up, they would be charged with assault and fined. But for destroying his happiness they would receive no punishment.

  ‘I’d dee rather than bring harm to him.’

  Walking in the street, McHaffie would never be taken for a miracle-worker. Yet this girl’s love for him was miraculous.

  ‘If he gave up his religion, Meg, would your family accept him?’

  ‘I would never ask him to do that.’

  ‘But you’d have to give up yours. You’d have to be married in a chapel, by a priest.’

  She was silent. I saw her shudder.

  ‘Why should it be you to make the sacrifice?’

  ‘It’s well seen you’ve never been in love, Fergus, really in love.’

  When she left Siloam that night, alas, not much cheered up, she banged the gate, but without spite or anger. She was deeply anxious, but she did not blame me any more than she did the gate for being stiff. She was too brave and honest ever to think that fate was against her. Dogs’ dirt on her new shoes, a speck of dust in her eye, her hat blown off by a gust, her finger stung by a bee, at such misfortunes she had laughed. She was never sorry for herself. She was young, beautiful, and merry-hearted, and she deserved to be happy.

  I wish I was able to report that Meg married her McHaffie and after two or three years of anguished separation was united with her family again. Nothing so Christian happened. She was married, in a Catholic chapel, by a priest. None of her family was present. The marks of blows discoloured her face. So brave an optimist, she must have hoped to the last minute that her mother at least, or one of her sisters, would come to the wedding. Not even when McHaffie was killed at Paschendaele in 1917, leaving her with three children, did any of her family come to comfort and help her.

  NINETEEN

  During those years at Gantock Academy, when my acquaintances were mostly the sons and daughters of middle-class professional men, I did my best to keep in touch with Lomond Street and friends like Smout and Jim Blanie. Cycling home from school, I would sometimes go along my native street, though it was well out of my way. To the women at the closemouths I would give cheerful waves. They would wave back and shriek, ‘How’s your faither?’ They did not mean John Lamont. Without intending to, they were publicly acknowledging my aristocratic parentage. In return, I loved them with a poet’s compassion, and understood them with a poet’s insight.

  If a drunkard known to beat and terrorise his wife had staggered past them, they would have eyed him sternly and their ‘guid evenings’ would have had more admonition in them than cordiality, but they would also have admitted among themselves that he deserved some sympathy, because his wife was fushionless, his home ill-organised, and his children fractious, so that the pub was a haven.

  If a rent collector had passed they would have disapproved of him heartily, but they would also have noticed how his hat was stained at the crown or the elbow of his coat darned, indications that his pay was little more than their husbands’, and just as precarious.

  They were displeased with me because they thought that, like my mother, I was a traitor. She had chosen Henry Corse as her lover, and I had chosen him as my father, instead of John Lamont, a joiner, whose parents they had known, who spoke with the same accent as themselves, who played quoits with their men, and who worked in the shipyard. Henry Corse to them was a creature as remote as an orang-utang, and as ridiculous.

  I felt in my bones that these women had had, and were still having, an influence on me that would last all my life.

  On the evening of the day that war was declared a feeling of homefelt patriotism caused me to walk home from work by way of Lomond Street.

  When I turned the corner, there in Boag’s shop window the notice ‘No Credit’ still appeared, yellow with age but still valid. I was immensely pleased to see, in the sunshine, my native street bedecked with Union Jacks, Lion Rampants, tartan tablecloths, Orange banners, and various improvised flags of honour and defiance. Other streets I had passed through had shown only a flag or two. Here there was dancing. Jock Dempster’s brother Sid was playing a concertina. Other youths I knew were scratching their groins and leering at girls. Three small boys were strutting about with sticks for swords and dented chamber-pots for helmets; another sat on the cross-bar of a lamppost.

  In its own vigorous, endearingly crude way, Lomond Street was celebrating the challenge flung by the nation to the Huns.

  There had always been in my native street this exceptional spirit of camaraderie. The relief of Mafeking had been celebrated here by a party that had gone on well after midnight. Two men had ended up in jail, and a policeman had lost his cap. (It stood on the mantelpiece in the Dempsters’ kitchen for years, first as a trophy and then as Mrs Dempster’s sewing-box.) Eight at the time, I had shouted as loudly as anybody, and was hoarse for days, to Aunt Bella’s indignation. Then, when Morag McFadyen, Jessie’s sister, had died suddenly, from meningitis, the whole street had gone into mourning, with strips of black cloth hanging from every window-sill. The white coffin had been smothered in flowers, most of them bought from florists, but some purloined from public or private gardens. Jim Blanie and I had picked from the railway embankment a big bunch of gowans. Their yellow heads had swarmed with hundreds of minute black insects, but they had not been rejected.

  I was seen. A woman shrieked; ‘Christ, there’s big Fergie.’

  All the women stopped dancing, wiped sweat off their brows, pushed back their hair, hitched up their skirts, and rushed at me, with howls of welcome.

  In the van were: Mrs Grier, now white-haired; Mrs Lorimer, still fat; Mrs Blanie, with the huge red boozy face Jim was so ashamed of; Mrs Dempster, the strongest woman in Gantock, able to carry a hundredweight of coal up her three flights of stairs faster than the coalman could; and Mrs McTavish, who had given me many ‘jelly pieces’ smelling of turpentine.

 
These, and others, overwhelmed me. For a second or so I was tempted to flee, through a close; but I reminded myself that these women were the mothers of my boyhood friends and therefore in a sense my mothers too. If they inflicted indignities on me, it would be in good humour, and for my own good. They knew that I was in need of re-initiation.

  In Lomond Street forgiveness and conciliation were always as turbulent and robust as feud and squabble. In less dynamic streets my back would have been pounded, my hand squeezed black and blue, my stomach playfully punched, and the badger’s head on my sporran given a tweak or two. Such half-hearted gestures could never have satisfied Lomond Street. I was not surprised therefore when those female hands, hacked, calloused, and chilblained, pulled down my stockings, snatched off my balmoral with its silver badge, tore the birch wood buttons off my tweed jacket, and, inevitably, lifted my kilt. However, what I could not help thinking excessive even for Lomond Street was when, in the mêlée, a fist (I suspected Mrs Grier, though my only evidence was the peculiar salute she gave me afterwards) grabbed my testicles and gave them a squeeze which, no matter how conciliatory, was still very painful.

  The ordeal lasted no more than a minute. During it Mrs McTavish complained that they were going too far. She was a kindly little woman with ill-fitting false teeth.

  ‘Will you jine up, Fergus? Oor Wullie says he’s going to. But they’ll never tak him, will they? He’s too wee, thank God.’

  ‘They’ll never tak my Jim,’ yelled Mrs Blanie.

  She was applauded. To celebrate a declaration of war was one thing, to send out your sons and husbands to be killed was another.

  It was then that Mrs Grier stood in front of me and gave that peculiar salute.

  She was pushed aside by a small grey-haired dark-faced woman, called Yuill. She lived at the poorer end of the street, outside my territory. I had not known her well.