Fergus Lamont Read online

  If a deputation of clergymen’s wives, say, visiting Pennvalla, that shrine of chastity and married purity as they thought it, had looked in and seen Betty and Mutt-Simpson naked from the waist except possibly for their shoes, coupling so nefariously, they would have smiled, apologised for intruding, and tiptoed away. Because what they had just seen was so different from what they had come to see, and from what they had wanted to see, and from what they ought to have seen, they would have had no difficulty in convincing themselves that they had not seen it at all.

  I offer this excuse for Betty. That feat of transubstanti-ation which she performed in her books, of turning evil into mush, must have imposed so great a strain that to relieve it she was driven in her own person to commit every so often deeds of deliberate vileness.

  I felt no hatred for Mutt-Simpson. He would be sufficiently punished by finding himself in the role of contrite cad.

  EIGHT

  Torquil was born in mid-February when the ground was iron-hard with frost.

  During her lying-in Betty liked me to sit at one side of her bed and Mutt-Simpson at the other. She held my left hand, his right.

  I overheard one of the nurses whispering to the other: ‘You’d think Sir James was the father, to see him!’ Her older colleague replied: ‘You’re no’ feart the Lord will strike you down, Whitehouse, for hinting such a thing about Betty T. Shields.’

  In the drawing-room, when the birth was imminent, Mutt-Simpson was maudlin. The most precious, the most sincere, the most beautiful lady in the land, Fergus. God give her safe and easy delivery.’

  In came Dorcas wearing a new dress. I held out my arms but she made for Mutt-Simpson. She did not ask how her mother was, she asked if he liked her new dress.

  Though only four she was already so conceited that she would stare at herself in a mirror for an hour at a time, practising curtseys; so snobbish that she would sulk if some farm labourer’s child of her own age offered to play with her; and so imperious that she had to have her way in everything: up to the age of three she had insisted on sitting on her chamber-pot in the drawing-room, like a seventeenth-century princess.

  It breaks my heart to have to write so censoriously of my little red-haired daughter, who was so like my mother.

  Mrs Shields came in and made for the drinks tray.

  ‘You can relax,’ she said. ‘A boy. Baith weel.’

  It was to Mutt-Simpson that she raised her glass.

  He put his hand on Dorcas’s head. ‘You have a little brother, my dear.’

  ‘I don’t want a little brother.’

  She did not say it wistfully, as if afraid she would no longer be loved so much. She said it spitefully, and scowled at me as if I was to blame.

  ‘She wants to see you,’ said Mrs Shields.

  Naturally I assumed she meant me. Impudently he assumed she meant him. We both made for the door.

  Dorcas refused to come with us. We left her kicking the leg of the table on which the drinks tray stood. Her grandmother would soon stop that.

  Betty looked tired but not confused. She gave me her hand to kiss, Mutt-Simpson her cheek.

  A nurse was holding the baby in a shawl. She let us peep at it. We babbled greetings. As usual, they sounded ridiculous. Mutt-Simpson’s, it seemed to me, sounded triumphant too.

  All new-born babies look alike, being as yet only the raw material of humanity and not individual humanity itself. Friends who cry how like the father or mother or this uncle or that aunt the child is are simply welcoming the new creature into the human race.

  What of course ought never to be said is that the newcomer resembles some man not a blood relation and known to have been on close terms with the mother. Therefore no one in the room, not Betty nor the doctor nor the nurses nor I nor Mutt-Simpson himself cried how very like Sir James my son looked. All of us, however, showed it on our faces.

  True, Mutt-Simpson with his scanty hair and his habit of grimacing in aimless goodwill resembled every new-born child; but in this case there was something extra.

  Among civilised people what can a husband do on discovering that the child just born to his wife is probably not his, but a wealthy rival’s? There must be primitive tribes somewhere in the world where in such circumstances the wronged husband would dash the babe’s brains out against the nearest banyan tree; then, while his sanctified rage was still hot, he would chop off his wife’s head and his betrayer’s genitals. All this to the applause of onlookers, pleased at seeing justice done according to ancient tribal custom.

  As a civilised man I had no such relief for my feelings. I had to suffer the child being put in my arms while I simpered paternally. I had also to suffer Mutt-Simpson’s congratulations. Worst of all, I had to tell Betty our son was beautiful, that I was proud of him and her, that I was the happiest man in Scotland, and that we would all toast her health and the child’s with the champagne that kind Sir James had brought.

  I must add in fairness that the older Torquil grew the less he looked like Mutt-Simpson and the more like my grandfather, Donald McGilvray. He had the same grave pious air. Only it wasn’t a retributive God that Torquil worshipped: it was the beauty of artistic creation. At five his favourite painter was Botticelli. All my attempts to interest him in girrs and quoits failed. In his favour, however, it has to be said that he never looked down on me in the way his sister did.

  NINE

  A bizarre situation developed in Pennvalla. Mutt-Simpson was often a guest, if the term could be applied to one who at bed-time always went upstairs with his hostess after bidding his host a cordial goodnight. As for Betty, she gave me either a waggle of her fingers or a feather-light kiss on the brow. Any stranger present would have been a little surprised, but it would probably never have occurred to him that once upstairs and out of sight they would slip into the same bedroom. It did not occur to me until it had been going on for months.

  On the night of discovery I felt a desire as I passed Betty’s door to go in and talk to her. She and I had been sleeping in different rooms for some time, but now and then before I was safely asleep she would appear in mine and, as she put it with a chuckle, claim her connubial rights. Rather less frequently I would go into hers, not for amorous reasons, but out of a fear that if I did not show willing once in a while I might lose suzerainty.

  That night my wish was just to talk. I felt lonely. So, after the least lustful of taps on the door, I opened it and whispered into the darkness: ‘Betty, my dear, are you asleep? I would like to talk for a few minutes.’

  After a pause her voice came from the bed, drowsily indignant. ‘Go away, Fergus. Observe the rules, please.’

  ‘What rules?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘The rules of civilised behaviour. Once a gentleman has accepted an arrangement he does not interfere with it.’

  ‘I don’t understand, my dear. What arrangement?’

  Another pause. Then a snort; definitely hers. Then a sigh; not hers at all, being too gentle.

  The bedside lamp was switched on.

  Before I saw Mutt-Simpson in the bed beside her I noticed his trousers on the carpet.

  He was using her left breast as a pillow. Never had his hair looked so infantile. His uppermost eye was open. It reminded me of a listening horse’s.

  I could not help admiring the calm way in which he was gathering his resources. Breeding told.

  ‘Surely you knew, my dear?’ said Betty, still on her back.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That James and I are lovers.’

  Of course I must have known. Had I not suspected him of being Torquil’s father? But there was a big jump from furtive adulteries behind my back to this sleeping with her in relaxed husbandly fashion.

  She whispered in his ear. Then they both sat up. They were naked.

  Her hair partly covered her breasts. Her fingers gripped her right nipple, as if it was the pin of a grenade. Her smile, though, did not seem hostile.

  I had seen Mutt-Simpson show breeding
even in stirring a teacup. Now, caught in the act of illicit love, he tried to look like a gentleman. The intrinsic indignities of the situation defeated him, but not nearly as much as they would have commoner men.

  I did not know what to say.

  ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’ asked Betty.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Surely tomorrow would do?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I would like to have a talk with you myself, Fergus,’ said Mutt-Simpson.

  His grandfather had kept as his mistress one of the most celebrated actresses of the day. Mine had been a rigid Puritan who wouldn’t keep even a canary lest it should sing on Sundays. Small wonder it was I who looked the more guilty.

  ‘Well, goodnight, my dear,’ murmured Betty, sliding down under the bedclothes.

  ‘Goodnight, old man,’ said her paramour, doing likewise.

  She switched off the lamp.

  There was nothing for it but to say goodnight too and take my leave. Grabbing him by the throat, dragging him out of bed, and kicking him in the balls would have been in order if he had been, say, a plumber’s mate and I a caulker. But since we were both blue-blooded gentlemen any such expression of natural passion was out of the question.

  Outside in the passage I wondered if what I had just seen had been hallucination or reality. Coming to Mutt-Simpson’s room I went in, half-expecting to find him innocently asleep and half-determined to wake him up and apologise; but the bedclothes weren’t even turned down. It seemed no one in the house except me had expected him to sleep in his own bed.

  Next morning Betty and Mutt-Simpson went off to Edinburgh in her car. An onlooker would have taken them for man and wife, and me, tamely waving from the doorstep, for some privileged kind of servant.

  TEN

  Mrs Shields had a small sitting-room of her own. I found her there drinking gin, though it was not yet eleven o’clock in the morning.

  I sympathised with my mother-in-law. She reminded me of limpets which could be knocked off their rocks only by a certain sudden artful skiffing kind of kick that not everyone knew how to apply. Betty had tried all kinds of tricks to dislodge her mother from Pennvalla; none so far had succeeded.

  She refused to be packed off to a cousin in New Zealand; she refused to be set up in a flat of her own in Edinburgh; she refused to modify her Scots accent; she refused to keep out of the way when we had titled guests; and worst of all in Betty’s eyes, she refused to give up her grandmotherly duty of giving Dorcas a disciplinary skelp now and again.

  I’d like a few words with you, Nellie,’ I said, ’if it’s convenient.’

  ‘If it’s to complain about catching her in bed wi’ Jimmy don’t bother.’

  I was taken aback.

  ‘For guidsakes, the haul hoose has kent for lang enough. It’s kept her happy and quiet.’

  Being confronted by aristocratic blackguardism with its roots in ancient royal example was one thing, being confronted by the insouciant acceptance of her daughter’s outrageous immorality by a woman who’d once mucked out byres was quite another.

  ‘Don’t you regard marriage as a sacred trust?’ I asked sternly.

  ‘I’d be a fool if I did, seeing I was never mairit myself.’

  Seldom was a bombshell of information tossed so casually.

  ‘But you call yourself Mrs Shields.’

  ‘If it suited my purpose I’d ca’ myself the Duchess of Buccleuch.’

  ‘But if this is true it means that—’

  ‘Betty’s a bastard? That’s richt. So she is. You’ve never had a guid look at your mairrage lines, have you? Her faither was a young fellow wi’ hair like corn. I let him put poppies in mine aince too aften. I was juist sixteen.’

  ‘I see.’

  What I saw was what gave Mrs Shields her sticking-power. It was blackmail.

  ‘You keep my secret,’ she said, with a wink, ‘and I’ll keep yours.’

  I crept away, not daring to ask what she thought my secret was.

  That evening I tackled Betty in her bedroom while she was dressing for dinner. In white corsets and pink crepe-de-chine knickers she sat massaging wrinkles out of her puffy face.

  She frowned at me in the looking-glass.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to be tiresome and common,’ she said.

  ‘Is it common to feel hurt when one finds one’s wife in bed with another man?’

  ‘It is always common to make a fuss. I shall be frank, Fergus. When being made love to a woman wants to be made to feel precious, exalted, and favoured above all other women. You, I’m sorry to say, make me feel like a prostitute with a client who is so busy grudging the money and the effort that he forgets he is supposed to be enjoying himself. You lack tenderness. Why look shocked? You handle my most sensitive and fastidious parts as if they were nuts and bolts.’

  What shocked me was not so much her accusation that I lacked tenderness as her assumption that she possessed it. After all, her simile of nuts and bolts applied far more accurately to my sensitive and fastidious parts.

  ‘I do not think,’ I said judicially, ‘that the Very Reverend Mr McBeagle who married us in St Giles would consider an alleged inability to make an act of holy and mystic adoration out of an activity that we have in common with camels, an excuse for your dishonouring the Christian institution of marriage. Be honest, Betty. Would he?’

  ‘I’ve wondered,’ she said, as she powdered her oxters, ‘what was in your mind at the time. So it was camels. But to answer your artless question. Publicly, from his pulpit, wearing his Geneva bands and addressing the common herd, no, he would not; but in private, speaking to intelligent people who know the difference between claptrap and truth, yes he certainly would. He would, you see, grasp what you do not seem able to: that my sleeping with James has saved our marriage. In realistic theology, Fergus, infidelities that save a marriage are not the same as infidelities that wreck it.’

  I was well aware, from observing my own at work, that the human mind is the trickiest thing in nature, easily able, if it so wishes, to justify the slaughter of millions, far less a few adulteries.

  ‘Just tell me this, Betty,’ I said. ‘Suppose Roger Wintercleuch had found Madeleine Ure in bed with Justin Sundhope, would he have forgiven her?’

  ‘If he had been as financially dependent on her as you are on me, my dear, he would not have had the impertinence to condemn her, let alone forgive her.’

  She stood up then, snapping the elastic in her knickers. This was her peremptory way of letting me know that the interview was over.

  ELEVEN

  A few days later I cantered over the fields to Heddleston House to have it out with Sir James. Under my kilt I wore specially padded underpants. My pony was small and unambitious. The day was sunny, the fields unhilly and all the gates openable. So I was able to do some thinking as I jogged along.

  Usually I made do with a hazel switch, but that afternoon I took with me a proper riding-crop, the kind with which cads who lead innocent young girls astray are traditionally thrashed. Betty was no innocent young girl and I had no intention of thrashing Mutt-Simpson, but I needed a symbol the sight of which would make him cringe with guilt. For I was faced with a difficulty: my wife’s seducer was in many respects a better man than I. His reputation as a Christian gentleman was deserved. While it was true that his store of goodwill towards humanity was not locked up in him by harsh circumstance as mine was, and that he had plenty of money of his own to be generous with, the fact remained that in his place I would have been less charitable. He was the only landowner in the county who allowed tinkers to camp on his land. The rest of us grumbled at having such thieves and pests in our vicinity, but he refused to have them driven away. He even gave them permission to use his wind-blown timber.

  He was far more likely to help a friend than harm him. He had done me many good turns.

  I took the whip into the house with me, stuck down my stocking, as if it was part of th
e accoutrements of a kilted horseman. The butler looked bemused.

  Sir James was in the library listening to music louder than massed pipe bands. Leaping up to shake my hand, he informed me, in a reverential whisper that had to be roared, that it was Wagner. He bent down to take a closer look at the riding-crop as if to compare it with the conductor’s baton he held, not as weapons in a possible duel but as indicators of idiosyncratic zest. Both of us then settled down to listen, myself with fortitude, he with winces of pleasure.

  ‘You don’t realise, Fergus,’ he said, when there was silence again, ‘you who fought so bravely in the War, how a timid non-combatant like me needs music to give courage.’

  Courage no doubt to face a friend whose wife he slept with.

  ‘Tea will be brought in in a few minutes,’ he said.

  Had he guessed that the drinking of tea was for me what smoking the pipe of peace was for Red Indians? So many times as a child had I watched adults overcoming their distrust of one another by drinking tea together.

  ‘Did you motor over?’ he asked.

  ‘I rode.’

  ‘I’m glad you came. I need your help, old man.’

  Since we were both Christians, myself nominally and he seriously, it was in order I supposed for him who had wronged me to ask my help in finding forgiveness.

  ‘I thought I was the one who needed help,’ I said.

  He nodded sympathetically.

  The butler came in with the tea.

  ‘What’s your trouble, Fergus?’ asked my host as soon as we were alone again. Try a buttered pancake. They’re delicious.’

  I tried one. It was tasty enough, but not to be compared with those that Jim Blanie’s mother had made long ago.

  ‘What’s your trouble, James?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you see, Fergus, I’m getting married.’

  I saw at once why he needed courage. He was afraid to tell Betty.

  ‘That’s no trouble, old man,’ I cried. ‘That’s splendid news. Congratulations. Do I know the lady?’