Fergus Lamont Read online

  ‘You’d have to wear the Academy blazer,’ I said.

  ‘That’s nothing.’

  ‘You’d have to talk properly. You’d have to say “anyway” instead of “onyway” and “out” instead of “oot”.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with talking properly. It’s not Scots we speak, you know, it’s a mongrel mixture of Scots and English.’

  It annoyed me having Limpy’s dictum quoted at me so glibly.

  ‘Whit aboot your sisters? They’d miss you.’

  ‘I’d keep in touch.’

  ‘Maybe you’d try, at first; but you’d gie up trying.’

  ‘Speak for yourself. One day I’m going to be a member of Parliament.’

  ‘So you’ve said.’

  ‘I need the best education I can get.’

  ‘What’s to stop you living in the Vennel and going to the Academy?’

  ‘Lots of things.’

  I could think of some of them.

  It would be easier for me to go to the Academy. After all, my grandfather was a councillor and knew many important men in the town. I could give my address as Siloam Cottage. The red blazer would go well with my kilt. With luck I could scrape through the entrance exam.

  Tears were trickling down her cheeks. It was the first time I had seen her cry. I realised she meant a great deal to me. I would never want to kiss her, as I did Meg Jeffries, but I would always want to know what she was thinking.

  ‘Everybody’s got a right to do the best for themselves,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing it for myself, you fool.’

  I didn’t argue. I didn’t have to. If she were to tell herself a hundred times a day that she was living in the spacious house, sleeping in her own room in a bed with white sheets, and eating food four times a day, all for the sake of the poor whom she had vowed to help, she would not be able to believe it, she was too intelligent, and too honest. After all, if her dream came true, and she did become a member of Parliament, wouldn’t she then be even further away from her family and the poor?

  We took the tram to Firth Street, and from there walked along the esplanade beside the water which was rough with the wind. Seagulls glared at us with yellow eyes. Mary was wearing the same red coat. I was dressed in dark green jacket, kilt, and tweed overcoat, with a balmoral on my head. I attracted admiring glances. She said it was because I looked like Harry Lauder; even the gulls expected me to do a jig and sing. I never found her jokes funny; nor did she mine.

  I had been told Cathie Calderwood was twenty-eight, and wore bright clothes. In my expectations therefore I kept confusing her with my mother, who had been twenty-six and whose costume had been lilac-coloured.

  We went through iron gates wide enough for a carriage, and up a driveway lined with hundreds of daffodils. The grounds were as spacious as six backcourts at least. There were fully grown trees: ash, fir, and sycamore, according to Mary. She expected me to look overawed, so I didn’t.

  The house was large and square, built of dark grey stone with red ivy growing over the front. I calculated that if it had been divided into single-ends and room-and-kitchens it could have housed, by Lomond Street standards, fifty people, and by Vennel standards, a hundred. Two questions in a hurry collided in my mind: how could Mr Calderwood—it was absurd to call the owner of so imposing a house Limpy—call himself a socialist, a champion of the poor? And why did he teach at a scruffy school like Kidd Street? If I owned a house like this I wouldn’t work at all. Nobody would call me idle or unemployed or workshy. Only if you were poor, like Smout’s father, and needed help from the parish, did people that mattered call you lazy or good-for-nothing.

  On the doorstep was a mat with a foreign word worked into it. Mary said it meant welcome, in French.

  Why did I feel so confident? Was it because of my kilt and bonnet? Or because I knew this was the kind of house my mother had wanted me to live in? Or was it because of the stirring in me of ancestral memories? Anyone seeing Mary and me at the door of that fine big house would have assumed I was a friend of the son of the owner, and she a girl from the East End looking for a job as a kitchenmaid.

  The door was opened by a small, fair-haired, eager-eyed, fat-lipped, panting young woman, in a dress that even I thought more suitable for a girl of ten: it was light-blue, with an enormous red bow at the waist. Squealing with delight, she put her soft, inkstained hands on my shoulders—I was taller than she—and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled of violets and also, unaccountably for a few moments, of beef. Then I noticed on her high dainty bosom a stain of fairly fresh gravy, about the size of two violets. I was soon to learn ethereal Cathie was as slapdash an eater as my step-sister Agnes, aged two.

  ‘So you are Mary’s friend, Fergus,’ she cried, clapping her hands. ‘Mary has told us so much about you.’

  That interested and surprised me, but at the time I was more taken up with the house, though I took care to look about me politely. Smout would have gaped in awe at so much red carpet, covering all the floor and flowing up the stairs. Used to his single-end, he would have cringed, threatened by so much living space. The hall itself, with its high ceiling, was twice as roomy as his whole house.

  I helped Mary off with her coat. I would have done this even if Cathie hadn’t been there to be enchanted by my good manners, but perhaps I wouldn’t have done it quite so courteously.

  John Calderwood came limping into the hall. He wore a dark red velvet jacket, pink silk cravat, and black corduroy trousers. In my innocence I was pleased to see him dressed like a gentleman. I did not know then it was the garb of wealthy socialists.

  He had a magazine in his hand and was eager to show it to Mary. It was a socialist weekly well-known then but long since defunct. Evidently he often wrote articles for it. His contribution that week had been written in collaboration with Mary. It was on conditions in the Vennel. Heads together, they read it like conspirators.

  ‘Oh, never mind them and their silly politics,’ cried Cathie, taking my hand. ‘Come and see my fish.’

  She pulled me into a large room so full of plants and flowers it looked, and smelled, like a garden. The fish were in three tanks. Some were tropical, with bright colours and strange shapes. Others were ordinary goldfish, like those you could win at the shows. They did not look ordinary though as they pressed their noses against the inside of the glass, while Cathie flattened hers against the outside.

  Nothing was ordinary that Cathie came near. There were birds in the room too, two canaries, in a gilt cage. When she rattled the bars with her fingernails, and sang a cheerful French song, cage and birds, like the goldfish, became exciting and strange. Her neck looked so soft and warm I longed to touch it. One of her canary-yellow slippers fell off, being burst at the back. Putting it on to her red-stockinged foot, as she sat in a big flowery sofa, was for me a keener joy than carrying Meg Jeffries’ schoolbag ever had been.

  ‘Sit down beside me, Fergus,’ she murmured, ‘and tell me all about yourself.’

  We were so close a sixpence couldn’t have slipped down between us. I clasped my hands defensively on my sporran. She placed her hand on top of mine, and pressed down, affectionately.

  I wondered, at frantic speed, if she knew the physiological effect that delightful pressure could have, indeed was having. I was to learn later that this was a doubt shared by almost every boy and male teacher in the Academy. Some accused her of being a deliberate tease, but the majority thought that the fairest verdict was ‘not proven’.

  She put her lips to my ear and whispered: ‘Mary has told us you have a fascinating history.’

  I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  ‘Your poor, poor mother.

  It could have been because her hair was the same yellow colour as Jessie McFadyen’s, though softer and cleaner, that I suddenly noticed, or imagined I did, another resemblance to that beautiful but glaikit girl. Into Cathie’s big blue eyes would come a blankness, the same kind I had often seen in Jessie’s, only in Jessie’s it
lasted nearly all the time, whereas in Cathie’s it was gone in a second or two.

  Even to her, I did not want to talk about my mother.

  ‘Is it true she drowned herself?’

  ‘No. She got drowned.’

  ‘How sad. Mary says your real father is the son of an earl.’

  Smout had said the same thing, but I was five and a half years older now. Thanks to some roughly accurate but somewhat coarse playground and backcourt tuition, I knew what my mother and father must have done to create me. Though I was very fond of John Lamont, I had shrunk from the thought that he, with his hairy chest and hard quoiter’s hands, had done that necessary thing with or rather to my fastidious mother; but I had never tried to imagine any other man in his place. Once while he was at work I had searched the house for the photograph my mother had left under my pillow. I had found it in a drawer inside a Bible. It had told me nothing. All it showed was a young man, not much older than Jock Dempster, wearing a cap and white trousers, and holding a cricket bat.

  ‘You certainly look far too distinguished to be an ordinary East End boy,’ whispered Cathie.

  Then we heard Mary and John Calderwood outside the room. Cathie at once took her hand away and drew apart.

  ‘Don’t let on to Mary I told you,’ she said. ‘You see, I promised her I wouldn’t.’

  Yesterday I had a visitor. At first I took him to be a Mormon evangelist. A band of these had been in the district a few weeks back. He had the same ecstatic eagerness to talk, and the same exalted determination not to listen. He wore a thick black coat, tightly belted, and a fur hat like a Cossack’s. Under his oxter he carried a saddlebag, or so he made it seem.

  ‘Am I addressing Mr Fergus Lamont?’ he cried, in an American voice.

  I was taken aback and confused. In this place I am known as William McTavish. The only person who knows I am still alive and living here in Blackfriars Street, Glasgow, is Samuel Lamont, QC, and he has sworn never to tell anyone without my permission, not even Betty my former wife, nor Torquil my son, nor my daughter Dorcas, Lady Arnisdale.

  ‘Let me introduce myself, sir. Professor John G. Wienbanger, of the University of South Carolina. Do you recognise this, sir?’

  He plucked from his bag a thin volume. The original mauve of the cover was faded to light blue, but the drawing of the Auld Kirk of Gantock was still recognisable. It was my ‘First Poems’. Copies are as rare as ospreys.

  So many times have I declared that I have no wish for fame and would not shed a tear if every poem of mine was lost forever. Therefore I ought, in honesty, to have handled those first-born with indifference. I could not. Great joy and pride possessed me as I looked at the list of titles: ‘Gathering Dung’, ‘The Puddock Loch’, ‘Running with a Girr’, ‘Limpy’, ‘The Peaver Players’, and the eighteen others.

  ‘You will wonder, Mr Lamont,’ said my visitor, ‘why I have taken so much trouble to find you. I am here in pursuance of an idea, an inspiration, that came to me one day while I was studying the works of Enrico Bardes, a Patagonian poet. You probably have never heard of him. He is not well known even in Patagonia. This idea occurred to me while I was reading a poem called, roughly translated, “The Chewing of Testicles”. The reference is to a practice Patagonian shepherds have of castrating lambs with their teeth, and then eating their testicles, which are considered a delicacy. It seemed to me that that poem, by a series of curious inadvertences, got very close indeed to the innermost essence of Patagonian life.

  ‘After much pondering, I came to the conclusion that this peculiar insight was not likely to be found in any universally great poet, such as Shakespeare or Dante or Whitman. He would have to be a poet indubitably minor, with no beauty of language or depth of thought, with some humour mostly of the unconscious kind, and native of a small, unimportant country. On further investigation, I discovered, sure enough, such poets in Albania, Iceland, Turkey, Peru, and of course Scotland, in the person of your good self. Your poem “Gathering Dung” is a prime example of what I am getting at. Indeed, it will have a central place in my thesis.’

  There was a time when I would have kicked him down the stairs. But I decided long ago that of all the virtues humility is the greatest, superior even to courage. Nothing would have been easier than to find the courage to chastise this insolent fool, but to smile meekly at him, to shake my head at him sorrowfully and forgivingly, and to beseech him, in a quiet dignified voice to leave at once, this was far from easy, and brought me out in a shivering sweat.

  A humble man, in the full glory of his humbleness, is more formidable than a violent man. With cries of fright, Wienbanger shoved the books into his bag and fled.

  It is not likely so asinine a verdict of my poetry will be ratified by posterity; but even if it were, to be remembered because of an idiosyncratic mediocrity would be better than to be completely forgotten. I do not fear utter oblivion for my own sake, but for the sake of all the people who helped to make me the poet I was, both those already mentioned, like Cathie Calderwood, and those still to appear, above all Kirstie McDonald, most genuine of women. If it is decided I was a poet of no significance whatever, they will all have lost their immortality.

  TWELVE

  Aunt Bella seemed the one most likely to be tricked or coaxed into telling me more. Since my mother’s death she had had another still-born baby. Grief had made her drink more recklessly. A strange consequence of this deterioration was that she no longer spoke unkindly to Uncle Tam. Instead of being relieved he had become more anxious.

  ‘It’s his own fault,’ Bessie had said. ‘I hear he even buys her drink for her.’

  ‘He cannae bear to see her unhappy,’ my father had replied.

  There had been a change for the worse in Bessie too. Where before she had put fairmindedness first, now it was respectability. She often spoke about going to church. When she met Aunt Bella in a shop wearing ‘the cardigan she cleans the grate in’ she refused to talk to her.

  One evening, about five o’clock, wearing my oldest kilt, I paid a visit to Aunt Bella. She took so long to open the door I began to think she must be out. When she came she reeked of whisky and looked half-dressed. She was so pleased to see me she flung her arms round my neck. The buttons of her blouse were undone. Her breasts could be seen.

  ‘It’s nice of you to pay me a visit, Fergie,’ she said, with some sad sniffs. ‘Wad you like a treacle piece?’

  ‘No thanks, Aunt Bella.’

  She tried, feebly, to do up the buttons of her blouse.

  On the table, beside the bottle of Johnny Walker, lay a doll, as big as a real baby; it had on a pink dress. Aunt Bella must have been pretending to feed it at her breast.

  ‘Weans get aulder,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m nearly thirteen.’

  ‘Past treacle pieces, eh?’

  This time she persevered and buttoned up her blouse. Then she picked up the doll and placed it carefully in a basket under the bed.

  ‘Aunt Bella,’ I said, ‘you once promised that when I was aulder you’d tell me aboot my mither.’

  ‘I was sorry for you when you were a wee wean, Fergie, left withoot a mither. I wad hae adopted you, if your faither had let me.’

  ‘Tell me aboot her.’

  She helped herself to some more whisky. ‘I tak this for my nerves, Fergie. Maybe I was too hard on your mither. Maybe she missed you mair than I gave her credit for. It was being so bonny was her ruination. She thocht she deserved better than living up a close in a room-and-kitchen, and sharing a lavatory wi’ the likes o’ auld Strathglass.’

  ‘Was that why she went away?’

  ‘She went awa’ because she was selfish and bad. Better women than her hae lived a’ their lives in room-and-kitchens. She ran awa’ wi’ a man three times her age. It was his money she was efter.’

  ‘Was he rich?’

  ‘He used to hae one o’ the biggest hooses in the West End. Malcolm he was ca’d, Henry Malcolm.’

  ‘Where did they
go?’

  ‘Edinburgh, and ither places. Living in the best hotels. She’d enjoy that.’

  ‘But why did she come back?’

  ‘She said because o’ you, but I think mysel’ it was because auld Malcolm had dee’d and left her naething.’

  Part of the mystery was cleared up.

  ‘Somebody telt me, Aunt Bella, that my faither isnae my real faither.’

  ‘That was a terrible thing to tell ony wean.’

  ‘Is it true, though?’

  ‘My brither’s the only faither you’ve ever had, or ever will hae.’

  ‘Smout McTavish’s mither said my faither’s faither was a lord.’

  ‘Effie McTavish should hae kept her silly mooth shut. Her ain faither was as drunk as a lord, every Friday night in life.’

  ‘But whit did she mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you whit she meant. When your mither was a young lassie she was sent into service.’

  ‘Became a servant, you mean?’

  ‘Aye, that’s whit I mean.’

  ‘Who sent her?’

  ‘Wha d’you think? Her ain faither sent her. He wanted to humble her. She had too high an opinion of hersel’ to please him. But don’t think it was ony ordinary hoose he sent her to. It was a castle. Corse Castle.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘In Ayrshire. Hundreds o’ rooms. It’s where the Earl o’ Darndaff lives. Your mither went there when she was fourteen. She had to be ta’en awa’ when she was eighteen.’

  ‘Whit for?’

  ‘Because she was going to hae a wean.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Aye, you. They telt your grandfather that the man responsible was yin o’ the ither servants, a footman or something. But she claimed it was the earl’s ain son, a lad just turned eighteen. I believed her. Nancy McGilvray put faur too high a price on hersel’ to let ony penniless servant touch her. Like as no’ she egged the young gentleman on. But there’s nae proof in cases like that. Your grandfather’s no’ the man to gie trouble to a lord. So he made her mairry my brither John, wha’d always had a notion o’ her. She had to consent, for she was in terrible disgrace, and she didnae want to be saddled wi’ a bastard. But she must hae felt bitter in her hert, for when you were juist three she upped and awa’ wi’ Malcolm. She met him through the Auld Kirk. He attended it regularly. They tell me there’s a painted windae there paid for wi’ his money: an angel representin’ Hope. Your grandfather used to think highly o’ him.’