Fergus Lamont Page 15

  I was often teased about my attitude of high-minded caution as regards women, but if McCrae had winked his eyelid black and blue I still would have known that though he wasn’t entirely serious he wasn’t entirely humorous either. He showed me later a photograph of his wife. She looked pleasant and amiable enough, but then there would have been no need for her to assert dominance over the photographer. That was what I really feared most, being married to a woman who dominated me.

  FIVE

  I first heard of Betty T. Shields when I was at Stank Castle. Lying open on the adjutant’s desk was a book in which he was so engrossed that he kept on reading it while speaking to me. Being interested in literature, though I did not read many books, having neither the time nor the inclination, I asked him what it was called. Its title, he replied warmly, was The Heirs of Crailzie, and its authoress was Betty T. Shields. It was one of the noblest and most inspiring books he had ever read. If the Army Council took his advice they would disseminate thousands of copies among the troops. Indeed, it ought to be translated into German and dropped on the German lines, where it would weaken their resolution to resist more than bombs or shells, for it would let them know what kind of people they were up against.

  When I came to read The Heirs of Crailzie some weeks later I saw what Captain McHolm had meant, but I also felt a little uneasy and suspicious. Somehow it all seemed too good to be true.

  Set in Midlothian, during the Boer War, the story portrays people, including the villain, as fundamentally good, unselfish, and well-intentioned. The Ures of Crailzie, noble-hearted but impecunious landowners, go without wine for a year so that their tenants can have water in their cottages. Jack Ure, a Guards officer on active service in South Africa, writes home saying that the Boers were really splendid chaps at heart: once they were defeated they would see that to be part of the great British family was the best thing on earth. Jack is later blinded, and returns home to Crailzie House to break everybody’s heart with his gay, dauntless laughter. Madeleine, the heroine, after the villain, a neighbouring baronet, has taken liberties—this part isn’t clear, but he appears to have placed his hand on her foot as she climbs over a stile—rebukes him so sweetly that, exalted, he goes off to India and spends his great wealth on chapattis for the poor.

  (Years afterwards Campbell Aird, most sardonic of critics, summed up Betty as a novelist.

  ‘She’s no simpleton, your Betty. She looks at humanity as boldly as Balzac. When she has carefully noted its selfishness and greed, its prurience and lust, its vindictiveness and spite, she turns all this inside out, so skilfully as to make us think, consciously in the case of the subtle among us, unconsciously in the case of the simple-minded, that it is the vice and not the virtue which is being celebrated. When she depicts a scene of innocent dalliance, look how she always brings in goats; consider The Heirs of Crailzie; or sparrows; consider Airlie Place. Lust is always lurking. This is the reason why her books are so widely read in manses, ladies’ colleges, and nunneries. Have you noticed how fond she is of scenes of forgiveness? Yet if you listen hard you will hear black-winged nemesis hovering overhead, like a vulture.’)

  Since The Heirs of Crailzie Miss Shields had published three more novels, and become famous. It was said the King and Queen, and members of the Cabinet, were among her admirers. It was, indeed, her latest, Airlie Place, that Lieutenant Johnstone was reading in the dug-out the evening I received Mary’s news about Cathie.

  Like most of her readers, I imagined that the successful authoress was a white-haired old lady, perhaps the wife or widow of a clergyman. In the magazine she edited, The People’s Companion, there appeared every week on the page where advice and comfort were dispensed the picture of such a sweet old lady, called Aunt Martha. It was never stated that this was Miss Shields herself, but most people assumed it. I certainly did. Many soldiers had The People’s Companion sent them regularly by their mothers or wives. My batman was one. Sometimes he passed his copy on to me.

  It was the page of poems that interested me. Some were by soldiers at the front. Miss Shields, in very small print, claimed the right to ‘edit’ contributions. It was obvious she did not mean by this simply correcting grammar and spelling. She meant the substituting of gay laughter for howls of protest, flowers for lumps of flesh, and nightingales for rats. I did not know of course at that time of the principle of opposites in her books. I regarded her prettifying of poems of carnage as an insult to all soldiers, dead or alive. So I sent her a poem I had written, The Burning of the Boots’, and challenged her to print it without altering a word.

  This poem, it may be remembered, tells how a night patrol stumbles into a field littered with scraps of decomposed bodies and dollops of human excrement. Evidently a mass grave and a huge latrine had been blown up together. Such freaks happened. Afterwards they could not get the stench of mortality off their boots, which had to be burnt. But, to their horror their new boots, no matter how frenziedly dubbined, gave off the same sad stink.

  Sooner than I expected a reply came from Miss Shields. She thanked me for my ‘powerful and tragic poem’, which was, she was afraid, unsuitable for the Companion. She had passed it on to a friend of hers, Mr Campbell Aird, who edited a literary magazine. He liked it so much that he intended to publish it in the next issue of the Caledonian, even if it meant running the risk of a prosecution for obscenity. She ended by saying that if I should happen to be in Edinburgh on my next leave she hoped I would call in at the office of the Companion, where she would be delighted to see me.

  I could not help wondering at the casual way she mentioned obscenity.

  I wrote, rather stiffly, thanking her and giving permission to Mr Aird to publish my poem, provided he made no changes.

  Thus began my correspondence with Betty. With her third letter she enclosed a photograph of herself. I looked in astonishment upon a tall, strapping woman of no more than thirty: like a farmer’s daughter accustomed to mucking out byres; or, more imaginatively, like a Viking princess capable of strangling, with one of her thick plaits of hair, any lover who failed her. Her smile was so keen it made me feel I was running over stubble with bare feet.

  I thought at first it was a mistake, or a trick: she had sent a photograph of her daughter instead.

  The autograph at the foot, Betty T. Shields, looked as if it had been dashed off with the point of a dirk.

  She had asked me to send her a photograph of myself. Looking through my small store, I came upon the one taken with my four friends at Stank Castle. They were all dead. Hamish Dunloskin would never again shoot pheasants in Argyll, Archie Dungavel would never again pity the poor; Charlie Brack would never again imitate a hard-hearted grocer; and Andrew Dalgleish would never again blush like a girl. I thought of sending this photograph to Miss Shields, with a ring drawn round my head, and on the back a debonair scribble to the effect that I was the only one of the quintet left alive. I drew the ring, I scribbled the remark, but I did not send the photograph. Miss Shields, I suspected, was a lot less sentimental than her books made her out to be.

  I sent the photograph of myself, in full-dress uniform, taken after I had been presented with my Military Cross.

  Not long afterwards the colonel sent for me and told me I was wanted at divisional headquarters. He wouldn’t say why, but he looked impressed.

  The brigadier’s headquarters were in a fine chateau about twenty miles from the front. I made sure, as I entered the big handsome house, that no staff officer got a chance to regard me with disdain. I was as good at putting hauteur into a salute as any man in the army.

  Brigadier Sir Ronald Lockerbie-Smith was a man of about sixty, with a white moustache stained with tobacco. He was said to do crochet work to pacify his nerves.

  ‘Relax, man,’ he said. ‘Sit down. This is a friendly chat.’

  I sat down, still at attention. If he liked discipline slackened, I did not.

  ‘I’m sending you home,’ he said. Our masters there think they have a job for you more
important than the one you’re doing here, and doing very well too.’

  I was astonished. I even wondered if the Earl of Darndaff had been pulling strings on my behalf.

  ‘What kind of job, sir?’

  ‘Is this news to you? Hasn’t Miss Betty T. Shields mentioned it to you?’

  ‘I do not understand, sir. Mentioned what?’

  ‘You’re acquainted with the lady, aren’t you?’

  ‘I correspond with Miss Shields, sir.’

  ‘She hasn’t said anything in her letters about your accompanying her on a morale-boosting tour of industrial areas in Scotland?’

  ‘Not a word, sir.’

  ‘Odd. Well, she’s asked especially for you, and it seems she’s got her way. I expect you know there’s a lot of unrest at home. They’re a bit tired of the War. Then this bloody business in Russia has given agitators a chance to stir up trouble. Miss Shields apparently believes that if she were to go round factories and shipyards and that sort of place she’d inspire the workers to produce more and grumble less. I can’t stand her books myself—sugary saps—but I’m told working people, particularly women, put more faith in them than they do in the Bible. She wants some handsome young fellow to accompany her, and she’s asked for you. To be frank, Colonel Knox and I would have suspected you’d put her up to it if you hadn’t shown any number of times you’re too damned stiff-necked to be devious. In any case you deserve a jaunt home as much as any man. So you go with our blessings and congratulations.’

  Was it premonition that made me hesitate?

  ‘Must I go, sir? Is it an order?’

  ‘More like a benefaction, if you ask me. I understand Miss Shields is a very handsome woman.’

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, I don’t relish having to flatter or humour scrimshankers.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t. But I wouldn’t think you’d have much talking to do. From what I gather Miss Shields intends to do most of it herself. All you’ll have to do, I suppose, is look brave and handsome. Don’t look so glum, man. It could be jolly interesting, and—you never know, it could be useful too.’

  There is a public library about half a mile from where I live. The reading-room is warm and airy. Thanks to the kindness of the librarian I am allowed, or have been allowed, the use of a small table and a chair in a corner, away from the draughts caused by the opening of the door. This is done mainly by decrepit pensioners, some of whom peer in at what must seem to them as uninviting as a church, and then creep away to a street corner where talking or coughing up phlegm is not forbidden. Others, interested in the world’s depravities or the day’s racing, come stealthily in and creep over to the upright boards on to which the newspapers are firmly clamped. There they take their places, as in a urinal, among others as palsy-fingered and weak-eyed as themselves.

  Through snotty handkerchiefs they squint at my pencil as it fills line after line, and page after page. They shake their heads at what appears to them an unprofitable obsession: a man clever enough to write all that ought to be studying form and backing winners. Perhaps it is as well talking is illegal, otherwise they would pester me with questions. They discuss me in slavery, illicit whispers. There is a belief among them that I am a renegade lord.

  Recently there has been a change of management. The new librarian is a woman. It is obvious that she objects to smelly, arthritic, half-blind old men who slaver all over her newspapers. She has been awaiting an opportunity to apply a senility or dotage test; it came three days ago. A regular attender, no more than sixty-five, was gloating over a picture of a half-naked young woman with big breasts, when he collapsed. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. I heard one of his mates mutter: ‘Juist like Tam, tae gang afore his turn.’

  After that those likely to die on the premises were politely discouraged.

  Yesterday, as I was warming my hands on the radiator before beginning my morning’s stint, the librarian appeared.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, sternly. ‘I’m Miss Braidlaw, the librarian in charge.’

  ‘How do you do, Miss Braidlaw?’ I replied. ‘Chilly again this morning.’

  I used an educated Scots accent, with only a trace left of my old landed-gentry haughtiness.

  ‘I understand you have been using this table and chair for months.’

  ‘That is so. I come here as often as I can. Coal is so expensive nowadays. I am writing my memoirs.’

  She glanced with impatience at the twopenny jotter on the table. Certainly it was crumpled, certainly it was stained with tea and jam and other spillable comestibles, and certainly it did not look part of a masterpiece; but, as an expert on books, she ought to have known it was not the outside that mattered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but it is my duty to inform you that the facilities of a public library are for the use of the whole community, and not of a few who monopolise them. The reading-room must not be used as an office or a writing-room or a refectory. There are regulations in print.’

  The dig about the refectory was because of my habit of bringing sandwiches.

  ‘You must give up this practice,’ she said, and marched off, thank God, before I could start whining about my MC, my kinship with the Earl of Darndaff, my wife, the once famous Betty T. Shields, my nephew Samuel Lamont QC, my friend Mary Holmscroft MP, recently deceased, and my two volumes of poetry.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was an old fellow with bleary eyes and nervous snorts.

  ‘She telt me aff tae, mister,’ he wheezed. ‘Me, that’s been a Glesca ratepayer a’ my maiirit days. I’m gaun tae complain tae Wullie Erskine, the councillor for this ward.’

  There was a smell off him. Was there one off me too? Sometimes food got lost in my beard. There is no bath in my room-and-kitchen. In winter I follow the Eskimo practice of not removing my clothes, especially those next to my skin. Do I therefore smell? The old chap did not seem to mind, but then no Eskimo finds other Eskimos rancid.

  ‘I stay wi’ my dochter, you see,’ he muttered. ‘She likes me to get oot o’ the hoose for a while every day. My wife’s deid, you see. You’re a stranger, but I’m telling you I still miss her.’

  ‘My wife,’ I said, ‘is at this moment sitting on the terrace of her villa, in the province of Alicante, overlooking the Mediterranean.’

  He shrank back. He thought I was mad.

  ‘But the woman I miss, my friend, is dead, like your wife. She lies buried in the Hebrides, in a place where seals can be heard barking.’

  ‘Jessie’s in janefield. It’s only dugs that bark there.’

  He crept away then, out of the reading-room. I do not think he will complain to his councillor. If your pride as a man has been hurt, what compensation is it to assert your puny rights as a voter?

  As for me, I have no intention of being driven away. If the police are summoned I shall knock off a helmet or two.

  Part Three

  ONE

  I arrived by train in Edinburgh, in late afternoon, in mid January, with snow falling. I did not know the city, having visited it only a few times before, with Archie Dungavel and Charlie Brack; and it did not know me. Gantock, no more than seventy snowy miles away, felt further than the Arctic.

  There would be no one on the platform to welcome me home. That was the risk I had deliberately run. Freed from all impeding associations, I could become the kind of man I wanted to be.

  I was wrong, though, in thinking there would be no one to meet me. Conspicuous on the platform, in a long white fur coat with hat and gloves to match, was a tall woman. Even from fifty yards away I recognised her as Miss Shields. As she hurried towards me, waving her hand and calling my name, I felt more apprehensive than flattered. Under her hat her hair was Viking yellow, and her eyes were as blue as the seas the longboats had foraged. Other men, officers and porters alike, watched us, admiring her and envying me. They thought she and I were old friends or even sweethearts, reunited after long separation by the brutal war.

  ‘You look tired, Capta
in,’ she murmured. ‘Please come. I have a car outside.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as she drove us through the dim white streets.

  ‘To my house. I hope you don’t mind. It seemed to me the most convenient arrangement. In any case, Edinburgh is full-up.’

  ‘But, Miss Shields, I have to report to my superiors.’

  ‘You can do that tomorrow, or the next day. Besides, Colonel McKenzie has said you are in my hands.’

  One of those hands kept dropping on to my knee, with curious inadvertence.

  I kept reminding myself that my companion was revered throughout Scotland, from single-end to castle, for her virtuous and wholesome books. In her house I should be as safe as in a convent. Yet, as she turned to smile at me, I felt, as I had done the first time I had looked at her photograph, as if I was running over stubble with bare feet.

  Her house was in a handsome Georgian terrace. I learned later that on one side her neighbour was a High Court judge, and on the other an expensive physician.

  An old manservant tottered out into the snow. As an officer I could not carry my bags myself, as a considerate young man I could hardly let someone almost three times my age carry them for me. Miss Shields resolved the dilemma by telling him to carry them one at a time.

  In the hall we were met by two grey-haired white-capped women servants, eager to help us off with our outdoor garments. I caught them exchanging glances of prim lubricity. Evidently I was not the first young officer their mistress had brought home.

  With her coat removed, Miss Shields was seen to be wearing a tweed skirt and a cashmere cardigan. She was boldly bosomed. My childhood fear of mammality stirred in my subconscious.