Fergus Lamont Read online

‘You refuse?’ he bellowed.

  ‘I have done nothing wrong.’

  ‘I shall have you expelled. Do you think, because you wear a kilt, you are immune? On the contrary, you are more vulnerable.’

  It was the first joke he had ever made, though he hadn’t intended to make it. The class laughed at the idea of my getting the belt on my bare backside.

  ‘You and I will pay a visit to the Rector,’ he cried. Turning to the class, he gave instructions: ‘Grammar-book, page 170, Exercise 91, Analysis and Parsing, do numbers 8 to 15 inclusive.’

  In the corridor he hesitated, not sure whether to take me to Mr Fyfe, the Deputy-Rector, or to Mr Beaton, the Rector. He approved of neither, and considered it a disgrace that he, a man of strict morals and a Christian, should be subordinate to, in the one case, a baldheaded philanderer, and in the other case, a classical scholar more likely to quote from Virgil than from Leviticus.

  Mr Fyfe might laugh coarsely at my use of the word ‘fart’ and be content to give me, with a wink, two soft whacks as punishment. He knew I often visited Cathie Calderwood’s house. Like most of the male teachers he delighted in Cathie. He had been seen once patting her bottom.

  As for Mr Beaton, he lacked what was necessary in a good headmaster, that was, a Jehovah-like perseverance in the punishment of malefactors. Once, when some senior boys had tied a pair of girl’s knickers to the school flagpole, Mr Beaton had refused to allow an investigation to take place to root out the culprits. He had contented himself with quoting, at a school assembly, some sonorous Latin.

  Mr Birkmyre felt that his honour and reputation would suffer if I did not return to his classroom with bowed head and swollen hands.

  The Rector was seated at his desk with a book open. It was in Latin. Though I did not know it then, he was engaged on a translation into broad Scots of the De Natura Rerum of Lucretius. A neat-headed, sallow-faced man, he looked up with a civilised smile.

  ‘Read this, Mr Beaton,’ cried Mr Birkmyre, throwing my article on to the desk.

  ‘Whit is it?’

  Another of the Rector’s failings was that he often lapsed into Scots. He had been brought up on a farm in Ayrshire.

  ‘It is a piece of abominable impertinence.’

  ‘It appears to be an essay on quoiting. I used to watch quoiting when I was a lad. You catch the atmosphere very well, Fergus.’

  ‘I hope you are noticing that the language used is vulgar and indecent.’

  ‘Vigorous and accurate were the epithets I was thinking of, Mr Birkmyre.’

  ‘What about this word in particular?’ He pointed to it, under the Rector’s nose.

  I was watching, I realised vaguely, a clash between two traditions in Scotland, that of love of learning and truth, and that of Calvinist narrow-minded vindictiveness.

  ‘You believe he deserves punishment for using this word?’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘But in that case must not the nature of his offence be made known?’

  ‘I see no need for that.’

  ‘You have no scruples about being accuser, judge, and inflictor of punishment, all in secret?’

  ‘If I may be allowed to say so, Mr Beaton, you are speaking nonsense. We are dealing with a school-child, please remember.’

  ‘But not with a helot, Mr Birkmyre.’

  At that Mr Birkmyre rushed out of the room, with a groan of rage.

  The Rector gazed ruefully at me.

  ‘All the same, Fergus, it is only poets who can afford to speak the truth and defy convention. Are you a poet?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘You are a member of the Cadets?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You play rugby?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You always wear a kilt?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You are related, I understand, to the Earl of Darndaff.’

  That had been said by others, both pupils and teachers, with sneers of incredulity, or scowls of envy, or coughs of embarrassment, or sniggers of ridicule. Never before had anyone said it with a congratulatory chuckle.

  ‘I was born on a farm not ten miles from Corse Castle,’ he said.

  One summer’s afternoon I had cycled to Darndaff, with Major Holmes, history teacher and Cadet commander. From a distance, and above the tops of mighty beeches, I had seen my ancestral towers.

  ‘I would never have expected you to use the word fart in an essay, Fergus. Perhaps you are a poet, after all.’

  SIXTEEN

  Major Holmes, who commanded the school cadets, was a thin hollow-chested man of fifty or so, with anxious eyes and a rasping cough. He had been an officer in the Buteshire Highlanders but had been invalided out with bad lungs. Mary Holmscroft and John Calderwood despised him for, as they saw it, encouraging boys to look on killing as a lark. They called him a provider of cannon fodder for the defence of capitalism.

  He was really a gentle rather timid man, the least assiduous wielder of the tawse in the school. Other teachers, who disapproved of the cadets as militaristic, belted more boys in a day than he did in a month.

  I often visited him in his big, gloomy, chilly flat, where he lived alone except for mice. He loved to smoke big cigars though they provoked fits of coughing that lasted for minutes. I almost asphyxiated myself holding my breath in sympathy. Sometimes, when he was feeling well, he would wear a steel cuirass that he had bought in an antique shop in Edinburgh. It had belonged to a John Prentice, a trooper in the Scots Army in the time of Cromwell. His name and a date, 1651, were incised on the back.

  On being told that I was related to the Corse of Darndaff, he remarked that it was a pity I couldn’t have got myself derived from a more militarily competent family.

  He did some research on my behalf. One of the reasons for the defeat of the Scots army at Dunbar by Cromwell had been the incompetence of Major-General Corse, eldest son of the then earl. He had helped the Presbyterian ministers to badger General Leslie into leaving his advantageous position on a hill. When Cromwell had seen the Scots come rushing down he was supposed to have cried that the Lord God had delivered them into his hands. According to Major Holmes, he had really said Lord Corse.

  The Corses had been founded as a noble family in 1593 by Robert Corse, a merchant in the town of Ayr, trading in coal and herring. He had lent James vi large sums of money. In return for the cancellation of these debts the king had created him Earl of Darndaff. Judging by his portrait by the contemporary painter, John Scougall, Corse had been a big, heavy, red-faced man with baggy, suspicious eyes. He had built Corse Castle like a fortress, with walls ten feet thick, and furnished it so austerely that the king, after spending a night in it, had complained his ‘banes were sair’.

  In the eighteenth century the 15th Earl had commissioned the famous architect Robert Adam to make the inside of the house beautiful, to compensate for the grimness of the exterior. The finest craftsmen in Scotland had been employed; others had been imported from France and Italy. The Earl’s heir, fonder of horses and whores than of magnificent galleries and painted ceilings, had looked on in stupefaction as his home within grew more and more splendid, and the family’s finances more and more depleted.

  The present Earl, however, was rich enough. He had married the only child of Lord Broadfoot, a Glasgow industrialist, whose grandfather had been a crofter in Skye. She had brought wealth into the family, but also plebeian blood.

  I felt hopeful. My grandmother at least did not seem too high above me.

  ‘High enough,’ said the Major, amidst clouds of tobacco smoke, and between fits of coughing. ‘You see, Fergus, your accent’s what’s wrong. It’s too recognisably Scottish.’

  I had made such great efforts to learn to speak properly that it was very disappointing to hear him imply that I still spoke, say, like Smout McTavish, now a grocer’s message-boy.

  ‘Like my own,’ he added. ‘Like William Wallace’s. Like Robert Burns’s. Like the great Marquis’s. Like,
in short, that of almost every Scotsman of consequence.’

  ‘Then what’s wrong with it?’

  ‘You must bear in mind, Fergus, that the Scots landed gentry are a tribe apart. They do not speak like us. They go to considerable trouble and expense to avoid speaking like us. They are sent to exclusive English schools, to acquire their characteristic accent and peculiar habits.’

  I remembered how oddly but how potently Lord Baidland had spoken. Even the provost with his gilt chain had cringed.

  ‘Couldn’t I learn to imitate it?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps you could learn to imitate the sounds they make, Fergus, but I doubt if you could ever acquire their superb assurance. You see, they are not aware the rest of the world exists. They live in the grandest houses, eat the choicest food, and wear the most expensive clothes, but they know nothing of stonemasons, or ploughmen, or weavers. They believe everything comes to them by magic’

  It was hard to tell whether he was condemning them, as Mary would have done, or admiring them, as I was inclined to do.

  ‘Aren’t you exaggerating, sir?’

  ‘Only a little. It is important that you appreciate fully what you will be up against. It is not more difficult for an outsider to sail up the Amazon and be initiated into a cannibal tribe than it is for him to be accepted by the Scots landed gentry as one of them. Such things can be done, of course. Resolute explorers have done the one, wealthy brewers have done the other. But they are the rarest of achievements.’

  ‘But I am not an outsider, sir.’

  ‘Even so, Fergus, it will be an ascent as arduous as that of Kangchenjunga.’

  ‘I shall need help.’

  ‘I shall be very glad to give it. There is one thing likely to be in your favour. It is pretty certain there will be a war fairly soon, between Germany and Turkey on the one side, and Britain and France on the other. You would have no difficulty in obtaining a commission. You are the kind of chap, cautious with bursts of recklessness, that wins medals. As Major or even Captain Fergus Corse-Lamont, dso, MC, you would find the great door of Corse Castle being opened to you. War has been an opportunity for advancement for young Scotsmen of ability but without fortune, throughout the centuries. On the other hand, you might be killed.’

  He said those last words not with a sigh of sorrow but with a smile of congratulation. In his opinion to die bravely fighting for your country against enemies bravely fighting for theirs was the finest death: certainly to be preferred to sitting at home, waiting for the last bloody haemorrhage.

  SEVENTEEN

  Scotsmen do not find it easy to speak frankly of love, especially the physical aspects, without some protective coarseness. We call the act houghmagandy, and, alas, in the performance we are too apt to make it measure up or rather down to that crude term. A natural earthiness of mind added to a Calvinist conscience make a combination prejudicial to any lover. In my own case as a young man there was the extra complication that I could never quite make up my mind whether my approach should be that of apprentice lordling or neophytic poet.

  Whatever their cause, my deficiencies as a lover were partly to blame for Cathie Calderwood’s going mad, and Meg Jeffries’s making an ill-fated marriage.

  Out of many scenes of dalliance between Cathie and me I shall choose two.

  One warm afternoon in summer she and I were playing badminton in the garden at Ravenscraig. I was fifteen at the time, she twenty-nine. She wore a long loose white dress, greenish with grass marks, for she kept tumbling down, and darkened under the oxters with sweat. Her yellow hair floated about her face, her bare pink feet skimmed the grass, she smote sunshine more often than she did the shuttlecock.

  Her brother and Mary Holmscroft were in the house, in his study, discussing the works of Marx or Mill or Proudhon or some such boring would-be benefactor of mankind. Since Mary’s coming to live at Ravenscraig, John Calderwood had grown more hopeful and less embittered, with less need of whisky to sustain his faith in socialism. He reminded me of a child given an ingenious and complex toy. Fuelled with economic and political knowledge, it could be made to perform remarkable tricks, such as coming out first in all the Academy examinations, and impressing his ILP friends from Glasgow.

  Suddenly Cathie tossed away her racquet, crying she was too hot and sweaty, she must go and take a bath. Singing in French, she danced away, with flutters of her arms. I was reminded of butterflies, which I had vowed never to harm.

  Temptation stung me like nettles. I wanted to see Cathie naked in her bath. Previously, by rubbing the smarting places with the moral equivalent of a docken leaf, I had managed to soothe them in time. That afternoon no such palliative was effective.

  Creeping into the house, I stood at the foot of the stairs. I heard Cathie singing. I also heard water running. The bathroom door must be open. Perhaps she would leave it open while she was taking her bath. It would be the forgetfulness of a dryad in a pool in a lonely wood.

  In the stained glass window on the landing above, Ceres, red-cheeked amid the yellow corn, seemed to wink.

  Up I crept, sliding my hand along the polished banister, and thinking of silky thighs. Under my feet the carpet was red, with black designs. The sound of a door shutting made me pause. The keyholes had covers like eyelids, one on each side. Earlier that afternoon I had slid the interior one aside, giving myself no reason, but really as a preparation for this present enterprise. Unfortunately, experiment had proved that through the keyhole the bath itself could not be seen or any occupant of it; the lavatory pedestal could, though, and that was a throne I had no wish to see my princess perched on.

  I could not have said exactly what it was I wanted to see of Cathie. Not her bosom, really: Aunt Bella’s, or rather Mrs Pringle’s, bigger breasts, seen when she had been feeding the doll, had made that part of a woman’s anatomy more terrible than beautiful. And certainly not her pudenda.

  I had seen female private parts before. When Agnes Lamont was a baby I had often seen her being bathed, for Bessie insisted on doing it by the hearth. Also, when I was five or six, in the McFadyens’ coal cellar, I had inspected Jessie’s. The experience had been peculiarly disappointing, not only because I had kept stumbling over the coal, but also because I must have been expecting appendages of a more marvellous kind than my own, and the reality was an unsatisfactory plainness, as if the whole thing wasn’t properly finished.

  If then it wasn’t Cathie’s breasts or pudenda or buttocks or navel I wanted to see, what could it have been? Something indescribable, something unimaginable; yet something that I knew Cathie had.

  Filthy young brute, prudes will say, and if it had been anyone but myself doing it I might have said so myself. Yet why should not a young man, particularly if he is a poet in bud, with his mind in flames, be allowed a cooling peep at a naked woman, if his feelings towards her are tender and affectionate?

  On my knees, I put my eye to the keyhole, having first pushed the cover aside. I saw nothing; and while, in some agitation, I was undecided as to whether the nothingness was caused by the inside keyhole cover or by that still more opaque obstruction, black shame itself, a voice addressed me from behind.

  ‘Lost something?’ it asked.

  It was Mary. She had come up the stairs with her usual nun-like stealth.

  I couldn’t answer, for I didn’t want Cathie to know I was outside the door. In any case, as I got to my feet, I could think of nothing whatever to say.

  Mary said no more, but walked past into her own room.

  I swithered about going after her and begging her not to say anything either to Cathie or to John. Her attitude towards love, romance, and sex was as much a mystery to me as it was to the boys at school. They whispered among themselves that she had no paps and her legs were bandy. They had to find some fault in her, because she beat them in examinations, and also because she was so nun-like in the plainness of her dress and the austerity of her smiles. I knew, too, what they didn’t: that if she had said a grace before meals it wou
ld have been ‘Lord, forgive me’: she felt guilty at having too much to eat while there were millions of people in the world, some of them in Gantock itself, with too little.

  She came out, carrying a book.

  ‘Still not found it?’ she asked, and then walked, bandily, past me and down the stairs.

  Later that evening, as I was about to leave for home, I asked her if she was going to say anything to John.

  ‘What about?’ she asked, with only a little contempt.

  I was relieved, and yet, as I cycled up the steep streets to Siloam, I felt indignant too. She had implied that I had done a filthy little furtive thing that was best forgotten, whereas what I had been trying to do was pay homage to something mysterious, beautiful, and precious.

  Other men were haunted by that magical quality in Cathie. Mr Fyfe, for example, bald-headed Deputy-Rector. Boys shouted after him in the street Old Itchy-Balls‘, because of the way he ogled good-looking senior girls and young women teachers. After he was retired, when he was living alone because his wife had died, and he was a shrunken old man long since impotent or in no need of potency, he would go for a walk every day rain or shine, just to pass the house where Cathie had lived. He would pick up a stone and throw it over the wall. ’Any kind of stone at all, Fergus. Even a bit of orange peel.’

  One Sunday afternoon, when I was eighteen, knowing that John Calderwood and Mary Holmscroft had gone to an ilp meeting in Glasgow, I cycled to Ravenscraig, in the hope that I would find Cathie alone. Sometimes other women teachers visited her, or girls in her classes, or even Mr Fyfe with his moustache dripping scented oil. If an opportunity occurred, I intended to seduce her; or, as I preferred to think of it, to let her seduce me. She had given so many thrilling signs of wanting to do it. So anyway I told myself.

  The only defence of my conduct that I could have offered was that Meg Jeffries, after years of being more or less my sweetheart, still allowed me no closer embrace than a brief kiss, so strong was her working-class virtue, and therefore, like most young men of my age, I was in a fairly frequent state of unappeased lust, a condition in no way mitigated by the wearing of a kilt.