Fergus Lamont Read online

  FOUR

  All that day I had a funny feeling I had something missing, not an eye or an ear or a leg, but something just as necessary and conspicuous. Girls and women, and even my pals, would stare at me and look shocked, as if my nose was eaten away by disease, like the woman’s who lived in Cowglen Street. Most of them were too sorry for me to ask about my mother. When any did I followed Aunt Bella’s instructions and looked as stupid as a seven-year-old is expected to be. They all assumed my mother had gone away again.

  I went up to the house four times. Once I let Smout McTavish come with me. Of all my friends he was the one least likely to pester me with curiosity about my mother. It wasn’t that Smout wasn’t curious about her, he was obsessively curious about everything, but the difference between him and everybody else was that he never asked, he just waited till he found out. He was like the small birds that see the bone first but don’t come to peck at it until all the bigger birds are finished with it.

  Though six months older, he was smaller than I, hence his nickname. His hair was always cropped so close you could see his skull. He had big brown solemn eyes, and he seldom laughed, at least not outwardly. I often wondered if he was chuckling inside.

  He lived in a single-end, with his parents and three sisters. There were two set-in beds. Smout himself slept on the floor on an old mattress: mice trotted over him. If he was sorry for himself, no one ever heard him say so. That he was embarrassed by the holes in his breeks was shown by the way he tried to hide them, but still he didn’t complain. He was very fond of his family, especially his mother. Other women said Mrs McTavish should be ashamed of herself, going to every whist drive in the town, instead of staying at home and looking after her children. But Smout was pleased that his mother was a good whist player and won prizes.

  The McTavishes were considered out of their class in Lomond Street. Single-ends there were meant for married couples, not families of six. That was the way slums developed. The Vennel was the proper place for them.

  Smout was the perfect guest. When I made pieces they were thick and uneven, for I wasn’t good at cutting bread, and all I could find to spread on them was condensed milk. He ate them with solemn relish, and when some of the condensed milk dripped on to his knee he licked it off as neatly as a cat. When we played with my glassies on the carpet he raised my self-esteem by plunking like a lassie: I plunked like a boy. When I needed to pee and said I would stand on a chair and do it in the jawbox, because the lavatory outside would be sure to be occupied, he just nodded: lots of others would have made rude jokes. He uttered polite little coughs when I showed him some family photographs: Aunt Bella and Uncle Tam at their wedding, my McGilvray grandparents in the garden at Siloam, an unknown uncle and a cow beside some hills, my father about to throw a quoit, my mother with me as a baby in her arms, me as a baby sitting on a cushion, and my father’s father and mother just sitting on chairs. This last interested Smout most, to my surprise. He put his finger on Mr Lamont, senior.

  I wondered if it was the moustache like the Kaiser’s that he found interesting, or the watch chain, or the big ring.

  ‘He doesnae look like a lord,’ said Smout.

  I did not know what a lord was. I wondered if it was an official in the Masons or the Orange Lodge. Mr Lamont had died of fever before I was born. He had been a storekeeper in Stewart’s.

  ‘My mither telt me,’ said Smout, ‘as a secret, that your faither’s faither was a lord.’

  Thus casually, out of the mouth of my most reticent friend, came the first hint of my aristocratic birth, at any rate the first hint to take root in my mind. Perhaps there had been previous hints when I was genuinely too wee to understand.

  ‘Is it true?’ asked Smout.

  ‘I don’t ken. He worked in Stewart’s.’

  Smout nodded, letting me know he thought he had talked about it enough.

  If he had asked to see my mother’s case with her clothes in it I would have adamantly refused. He didn’t ask, so I insisted on showing them to him.

  He gazed at the beautiful clothes without comment. When I asked him to touch a red blouse to feel how silky it was he touched it and said it felt silky. When I asked him to smell how scented it was he sniffed it and nodded. If he had asked where she was I was ready to answer that she had gone to Glasgow for the day and would soon be back. He didn’t ask, and therefore, as I held her blouse in my hand, I felt the loss of her very sharply, and was afraid.

  Smout had his eye on my kilt lying on the bed.

  ‘Dae you need galluses to keep it up?’ he asked.

  It’s got buckles. Look.’

  ‘Sodgers wear kilts.’

  I nodded.

  ‘There’s a difference between a kilt and a lassie’s skirt.’

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  ‘I like the colours.’

  They’re a‘right.’

  ‘You couldnae wear troosers that were yellow and black. You’d look daft.’

  ‘Maybe you’d look daft in this.’

  ‘Could I try it on?’

  I was wary. If it had been anyone else I’d have been sure he was kidding. Smout never kidded. I remembered that he hadn’t laughed at me yesterday when I was wearing the kilt.

  ‘If you like,’ I said.

  As if they were of silk, he took off his ragged trousers and laid them on the floor, with great care. His pintle was longer than mine. His behind was so skinny it reminded me of rabbits hung up on a hook in the butcher’s.

  Ignoring my inspection of his private parts, he wrapt the kilt round him and buckled it on. It came well below his knees, but he didn’t seem to mind. Its splendour made his dark blue jersey with the holes at the elbows, and his filthy sandshoes, look more poverty-stricken than ever; but he didn’t seem to mind that either. He admired himself in the mirror. He smiled.

  ‘Yin day I’ll hae a kilt,’ he murmured.

  FIVE

  Puddock Loch has long since been filled in: today council houses stand on its site. When I was a child it was a place of adventure and danger. Parents warned their children not to go near it, for its banks were precipitous and its water deep enough to drown in. A path passed close to it, leading to McSherry’s Wood, a lovers’ haunt. It was a pair of lovers who saw, in the moonlight, first my mother’s handbag on the path, at a place where the fence was broken, and then down below, in the water, under some alder bushes, my mother herself.

  Two policemen came knocking on our door at two in the morning. I heard nothing, being sound asleep. My father got up in an eager hurry, thinking it was my mother come back at last. One of them was Sergeant McCormick. He knew my grandfather. There was no mistake, he said: he had seen Nancy McGilvray, as she used to be, too often not to recognise her. There weren’t two women in Gantock with such bonny red hair.

  Even my father’s shock and anguish had to be expressed in whispers, so as not to waken me. It was an unsuitable time to knock on a neighbour’s door, and anyway it was better to leave neighbours out of it in the meantime: so the young policeman was ordered to stay with me until my father came back from the mortuary.

  It was half-past six before I awoke. The first thing I did was to look to see if my mother was there. I was whimpering with disappointment when I heard, coming from the kitchen, what sounded like a man weeping. I listened harder. It was a man weeping. It was my father weeping. In my shirt tail I crept through, ready to weep myself.

  My father was sitting with his face pressed against the table, amongst teacups. Usually the sight of cups on the table was reassuring, since it meant people had been drinking tea, and the world was the safe companionable place every child liked it to be. But not that morning. Aunt Bella, who should have been in her own house, was seated by the hearth, with her face hidden behind her hands. Wearing his Sunday suit, Uncle Tam stood on the hearth rug. He was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Whit’s up?’ I asked.

  I felt a painful need to pee. I should have done it in my chamber-pot, but I
had forgotten.

  Aunt Bella keeked at me through her fingers. She saw me squeezing my knees together.

  ‘Go and make yoursel’ comfortable,’ she said, in a voice harsh with kindness.

  I wondered if my father had toothache or something.

  The wink Uncle Tam gave me was curiously crippled.

  Peeved a little, for I didn’t like everybody to know I still used a chamber-pot, I went through to the room. Nervousness made my fingers shaky and my aim bad.

  I had to cover myself somehow. It was either the kilt or my breeks. I chose the kilt. It was like choosing my mother. From that day on I never wore trousers.

  This time, when I returned to the kitchen, my father was at the sink splashing cold water over his face. Above him Rob Roy’s cage was still covered. Uncle Tam’s cap was on the sideboard, beside the cup my father had won for quoiting. Aunt Bella’s face looked strangely bare. It wasn’t just because she had taken away her hands. There was another reason. She had given herself the task of telling me.

  ‘Whaur’s my mither?’ I asked.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked.

  I shook my head, scornfully. I had asked for my mother, they were offering me tea.

  There’s been an accident,’ she said.

  My father let out a great groan. Then he covered his face with the towel.

  Uncle Tam beckoned with his finger. I went over to him, making sure I didn’t pass close enough to Aunt Bella so that she could grab me. He was sitting opposite her. He tried to lift me up on to his knees, but I resisted. I wasn’t a baby to be nursed, and besides, I knew they had terrible news for me. I preferred to be standing when I heard it.

  Your mither—‘her voice trembled, for she often said she was a better mother to me than my mother ever was— ’is deid.’

  ‘Does he ken whit deid means,’ whispered Uncle Tam.

  ‘He kens.’

  She was right, of course. I had seen all sorts of creatures dead: flies, bees, minnows, butterflies, beetles, earwigs, spiders, mice, cats, dogs, and even people: when Morag McFadyen, Jessie’s wee sister, had died two or three months before I had let myself be lifted up to see her in her coffin.

  My father suddenly rushed out of the kitchen, with a wail. I felt deserted.

  ‘She was found drooned in Puddock Loch,’ said Aunt Bella.

  I had once been frightened by a dragon-fly there. I thought of it now. What I had just been told was so terrible I knew I had better think as little about it as possible, and instead think hard about other things, things not important, such as that dragon-fly, and the tea caddy on the mantelpiece with the scenes of Rothesay painted on it, and the tap dripping in the sink.

  ‘She must have gone for a walk,’ murmured Uncle Tam, ‘and fell in. It’s slippy there.’

  It wasn’t slippy on dry days. There hadn’t been any rain for a week. But if she hadn’t fallen in, did it mean she must have jumped in? My heart gave a great leap in sympathy. Just in time, I thought of baggy-minnows and frogs’ spawn.

  ‘Dae you understaun’?’ asked Aunt Bella, hoarsely.

  She could not see, not having enough imagination, that I was deliberately warding off understanding, because I was afraid that when I did understand I would be more stricken than I could bear.

  Then she said something that she later regretted, though she never apologised to me for it.

  ‘You’re like her. You’ve got nae affection.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Bella,’ said Uncle Tam, ‘he’s only seven.’

  SIX

  My father insisted that the coffin be brought home and placed on trestles in the room. I slept beside him in the kitchen. It was me who discovered that Rob Roy was dead too: he lay in the cage with his legs in the air. Uncle Tam said he had died of old age, but I was sure my mother’s death had something to do with it. When I shut my eyes I felt that everybody and everything would be dead when I opened them again. My relief was tremendous when, opening them, I saw a fly or, if I was at the window, people below in the street.

  The coffin was left unscrewed, not because neighbours might call to see my mother in it—my father refused to let any of them in—but because he hoped her own father might come to say, if only to her corpse, that he had forgiven her, and was praying she was safely in heaven.

  I didn’t go out unless with my father or Aunt Bella or Uncle Tam. I needed them to keep my friends at bay. Once, seeing Smout McTavish by himself, with his back against a lamppost, I stopped beside him. Aunt Bella waited to let me speak to him. But I didn’t speak, nor did he. We didn’t even nod or shake our heads or blink our eyes.

  Aunt Bella must have been confirmed in her opinion that I lacked affection. Certainly I took care not to let her or anyone else see me weep.

  The night before the funeral she and I were in the house alone. My father and Uncle Tam had gone out. They didn’t tell me where they were going.

  Aunt Bella played with me at ludo. Every now and then she asked if I was ready for bed. I kept saying no and shaking my head. Then I foolishly yawned. Immediately she gathered up the pieces and closed the board. In less than ten minutes I was in bed, with my face washed and my supper eaten. I pretended to go to sleep at once. She drew the curtains across the bed and turned the gas down. I lay looking at her through the gap between the curtains.

  She sat down at the fire with ‘Peg’s Paper’ in her hand, but she couldn’t settle to read. She got up and stood at the sink, but the dishes were washed and there was nothing to do there. She opened a drawer in the sideboard but seemed to forget what she was looking for, because she closed it again without taking anything out. She went through to the room where the coffin was. I heard her talking, but it must have been to herself, for there was no one there except my mother, who wasn’t really there. She was wearing a long black dress.

  I was beginning to think I might as well let sleep have me when there was a knock on the outside door. Aunt Bella hurried to see who it was. Stupidly, for a few seconds, I thought it might be my mother come home again: it was so easy to forget she was dead.

  There were two or three voices. One sounded like Mrs Grier’s. Had she come, I wondered in horror, to shout angry things at my dead mother? Surely Aunt Bella would keep her out.

  Then into the kitchen came not only Mrs Grier, but fat Mrs Lorimer too: the first carried a bottle wrapped in tissue paper, and the other a bunch of flowers. They had black shawls over their heads.

  Aunt Bella invited them to sit down. They thanked her politely, but before sitting down Mrs Grier, still with the bottle in her hand, came over to the bed and looked in at me. There was a smell of whisky off her breath. I pretended to be sound asleep. It was lucky it was her, because if it had been somebody I wasn’t afraid of I might have burst out laughing.

  ‘Puir wean,’ she said, as she turned away. ‘Does he ken yet, Bella?’

  Aunt Bella was taking glasses out of the sideboard. ‘Ken whit, Maggie?’

  I was astonished at her calling Mrs Grier Maggie. I had not known they were friends. I hadn’t known either that Aunt Bella drank whisky.

  ‘Aboot his mither, I mean. And aboot his real faither.’

  ‘As faur as I’m concerned, Maggie, my brither’s his real faither.’

  This was unintelligible. I put it away in the part of my mind where I kept things to be considered when I was older. I suspected many of them would turn out to be lies.

  ‘I understaun’ your feelings, Bella,’ said Mrs Grier. ‘Say when.’

  Mrs Grier poured whisky into the glasses. Aunt Bella and Mrs Lorimer said when. Mrs Lorimer said it with a sad giggle.

  ‘We hope you don’t mind us coming up to keep you company, Bella,’ said Mrs Grier. ‘When we heard your brither and your man were in the “Auld Hoose” droonin’ their sorrows, Teenie and I thought it a shame you should be left on your ain. Weel, here’s to John Lamont, a decent and unlucky man.’

  They drank. Mrs Lorimer smacked her lips.

  ‘Maybe
his bad luck’s ended,’ she said. ‘D’you think, Bella, noo he’s free, he’ll mairry Bessie Armstrong? He’s been sweet on her for years.’

  I had seen Miss Armstrong with my father two or three times. She was cheerier than Aunt Bella. She worked in a draper’s in the Main Street, and lived up a tiled close in Nelson Street.

  ‘She’ll want better than this, will Bessie Armstrong,’ said Mrs Grier, looking round the little kitchen. ‘Lomond Street will no’ be guid enough for her.’

  ‘John Lamont’s a first-class tradesman,’ said Aunt Bella. ‘He’ll no’ stay here a’ his life.’

  ‘Still, Bella, even first-class tradesmen lose their jobs,’ said Mrs Lorimer.

  I understood this part of the conversation very well. Smout McTavish’s father had been idle for months. Some men were always idle. My grandfather had said it was mostly their own fault, there was always work for those willing to do it.

  ‘Wad Bessie want to take on a stepbairn seven-years-auld?’ asked Mrs Lorimer.

  ‘If she didnae,’ said Aunt Bella, ‘I’d be glad to tak him.’

  They meant me. I thought I’d prefer Bessie; in any case I didn’t want to be parted from my father.

  ‘I’d think twice before I did that, Bella, if I was you,’ said Mrs Lorimer. ‘Whit’s going to happen? In the future, whit’s going to happen? Tell me that.’

  Mrs Grier laughed. ‘This is whisky we’re drinking, Teenie, no’ tea.’

  ‘Dinnae laugh, Maggie. Is he going to be claimed? Yin day, will there be a cairrage in the street, sent for him?’

  ‘Let’s talk aboot something else,’ said Aunt Bella. ‘He micht waken.’

  ‘He’s sound asleep, Bella,’ said Mrs Grier.

  I almost smiled.

  ‘Is it true her faither’s no gaun to the funeral?’ asked Mrs Lorimer.

  To my alarm I was slipping into sleep. It was like falling down the bank into Puddock Loch. I tried to hold on to a bush, but it was no use. I fell asleep thinking how could my grandfather go to my mother’s funeral when he thought she was in hell.