Читать книгу A Glasgow Trilogy - George Friel - Страница 16

CHAPTER TEN

Helen Garson was working the Yoker–Auchenshuggle route with a new driver two nights later. Her husband was right when he had told their son the West Indian had nothing to do with her leaving home, but she still kept up with her old driver. She had to have some friends, and she visited the West Indian and his wife about once a month and had the distraction of sitting for an evening with a happy family where she felt welcome. Apart from that, she was a lonely woman, determined to like living alone. She bashed on, doing her best not to grieve for her man and her boy and her old home in Bethel Street, and she was doing as well as could be expected until two things upset her.

The first thing was Percy got on her bus about ten o’clock at the Hielenman’s Umbrella, and the sight of him reminded her of Bethel Street and that reminded her of all she was stubbornly forgetting. He wasn’t alone. He was escorting a girl, a long-legged, wide-skirted, pony-tailed, large-breasted, gum-chewing, big-eyed teenager. She knew him at once but he didn’t know her. He was only a boy at school the last time she saw him and now he was like a young man, so stylishly dressed that he looked slightly odd. He sat in the back seat upstairs, holding his girl’s hand and their brows touched as they mooned together the whole journey. She grued a little at the sight of them, for she was an anti-romantic, and the girl seemed to her anyway a stupid-faced doll who would be none the worse for a scrubbing and a haircut. Percy wore the gawky look he had always worn, but he was wearing it with a difference now. Instead of the gawkiness of a backward schoolboy he was showing the gawkiness of the male animal reaching towards the female for the first time and not quite sure how to set about it. She was glad to see them get off at Partick Cross. They linked arms when they stepped on the pavement and she sent a sniff of contempt after them.

‘He never was very bright,’ she thought as she rattled upstairs and down, breezily collecting her fares and tyrannizing the passengers as only a Glasgow bus-conductress can. ‘He was aye kind of glaikit and he doesn’t seem to have improved any. Seeing a girl home at his age! And where did he get the money to dress like that? I bet he hasn’t got two pennies to rub together. I don’t know how they do it nowadays, courting before they’re right out of school. And he’s left himself with some journey back home too, the silly fool! It’s no’ a girlfriend he’s got, it’s a pen- pal, staying that distance from him. The things they’ll do when they think they’re in love! Ah well, they’ll get a rude awakening one day and hell mend them. All they think of is sex, they’re sex-mad, these kids nowadays. The way she sat pushing her breasts up to him, must have been pads she was wearing, the little bitch. Ach, they’ll learn one day, when they’ve rent to pay and light to pay and coal to get and weans to feed and clothe.’

She was so annoyed with Percy for coming on her bus and raising ghosts that she made up for it by tearing him and his girl to pieces all the way along Dumbarton Road to the end of the line.

Then at the lying-in time there the second thing happened to upset her. It was worse than the first, much worse. She saw her son’s small ad in the paper. It was just a piece of bad luck, for she never bought an evening paper. She happened to see this one because on the last lap of the journey she left her bus for a moment and bought two pokes of chips, one for her driver and one for herself. It was a bad shift they were on, and they had got the habit of buying chips to give them a filling bite between the end of one run and the start of another. The Italian who owned the fish-and-chip shop always served her at once, no matter who else was waiting, and she was back on her bus before the passengers knew she had left it. She handed the chips in to the driver. They would keep warmer in his cabin than on her platform.

When the empty bus lay at the terminus she sat downstairs facing her driver, and since he was the strong silent type she occupied herself reading one of the sheets of newspaper Enrico had wrapped round the two pokes.

‘That’s last night’s paper you’re reading,’ her driver remarked detachedly, recognizing a headline.

‘You don’t expect him to wrap the chips in tonight’s paper, do you?’ she answered crossly, and turned the page.

She gazed amongst the births, marriages and deaths, delving into the chips with coin-grimed fingers while her driver ate his way steadily through the other poke.

‘Harry didn’t put much salt on them the night,’ he commented.

‘You’re hell of a talkative all of a sudden,’ she retorted. ‘Just you go get them tomorrow night then and you tell him that!’

‘I don’t like a lot of salt,’ he said, after brooding over her answer.

‘I see there’s an awful lot of shorthand-typists wanted,’ she muttered.

‘Ach, they’re no’ well paid they girls,’ he said. ‘You’re getting more than them, even without your overtime.’

She turned from the situations vacant to the ads for second-hand furniture, vacuum cleaners, fur coats and tape-recorders.

‘What do people buy all these things for if they’re that damned hard-up they’ve got to sell them?’ she asked peevishly. ‘They buy them the one day and want to sell them the next. Aye, they’re all as good as new according to the advert. Aye, I don’t think!’

She was just going to crumple the paper and dump it in the litter-bin at the bus stop when she saw her married name in small capitals at the foot of a column.

The whole thing was a sheer fluke, a pure accident, a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances. That Enrico had happened to use that page to put round the chips and that she happened to see the ad at all, was the kind of coincidence that happens every day in the real world that God created but is condemned as far-fetched in the work of a novelist, as if God wasn’t the greatest novelist of all.

She frowned. She scowled. She stared. She read it three times and squinted over at her driver. He was lighting the remainder of the cigarette he had started at the other end of the route. He didn’t seem to be watching her and she didn’t tell him what she had seen. She wasn’t a woman given to confidences. She tore out the ad roughly and stuffed it quickly in her pocket.

‘Are you going after another job?’ her driver asked casually.

‘You don’t miss much, do you?’ she answered, crumpling the paper viciously.

In a little while she was busy collecting fares again as her bus weaved east, and when the top deck was full and she had five standing downstairs she stopped anybody else from boarding, barring them with the lucid command always given by Glasgow bus-conductresses in such circumstances, ‘Come on, get off!’

She was too harassed to think any more of Percy, who had anyway been displaced by the advertisement she had seen, and she didn’t know that when she passed Partick Cross he was standing with his girl in the back-close of a grey tenement north of her route. The back-close is that part of the close that lies beyond the stairway to the flats and leads to the back-court. Since it usually turns at an angle from the front-close and can’t be seen from the street it is the site of countless Glasgow courtships and seductions. Some write of beds and sofas, some sing of the green cornfields and acres of rye, some tumble panting in the hay, but Glasgow’s sons and lovers have the back-close.

For all he had a pride in possessing the refinement of a true poet Percy was insensible to the drabness of the setting. He was in a state. It didn’t matter that the midden was only fifteen paces away across the back-court nor that the brown paint of the close was chipped, peeled, and scarred with obscure incisions by the pocket-knives of schoolboys. He was exalted. He had been aching for a girl and now he had one. He had one all to himself, all alone, against the wall though not against her will. He was trembling on the brink. His curiosity was as wide and burning as his ignorance, but it was the way girls dressed disturbed him more than the girls themselves. Indeed the girls he saw every day left him inwardly as cold as a Scots summer. It was advertisements for nylons, brassieres and girdles made his heart quicken, toilet soaps and deodorants told him of breasts and armpits, and foam petticoats under wide skirts whispered to him a warming suggestion of the unseen thighs above the calves and the instep arched by high heels. They all created a mysterious world of elegance, freshness, cleanliness and softness that he longed to enter and embrace, a world not inhabited by the girls he saw every day. But Sophy had long legs and a wide skirt, she had a bust like a girl in a television advert, her hair was glossy, she smelt of soap and something else, so it was Sophy he wanted.

Of course, his curiosity concerned anatomy as well as underwear. Faces never moved him, for the face was always visible. But he would saunter slowly past the window of a ladies’ gown shop in Sauchiehall Street, squinting in a fluster at the naked wax models of women, and pretend he wasn’t looking at the breasts, belly and thighs at all, his big feet pointing north and south as he ambled west. Not sure of what he had seen he would turn back at a decent distance and stroll past the window again, his head hot with guilt, but he never dared stop and stare and get it right once and for all.

And now at last he had a girl of his own. Now at last he could come to grips with the problem and be satisfied with the answer. He had survived the first stage of saying goodnight at the bus-stop. He had been given a pass-mark and allowed to enter the second degree of saying goodnight at the close-mouth. Tonight Sophy seemed ready to let him graduate. She let him edge her into the back-close and when they were there she put her handbag on the ground to leave her hands free if he tried to make love to her.

She was a very junior waitress in a cheap restaurant, a rough eating-house where he went for a midday meal when he first gave up his job. Then he began going there for morning coffee because it wasn’t so busy before lunch, then for afternoon tea too when it was quiet again, and he could sit and look at her in peace. She couldn’t help getting to know him by sight, and when she moved around and Percy sat admiring her bright legs and her hips under her black dress she answered him with a little smirk of a smile over her shoulder. He spoke to her at last with all the confidence in the world, depending on the money in the cellar to see him through all difficulties. Without telling her a direct lie he let her think he was a student. He thought that would explain why he could spend so much time just sitting around. Helet her see he had money by tipping her absurdly every day and making a show of opening his wallet to pay his bill so that she could see the wad of notes inside.

Naturally she agreed at once to go out with him, but for all his money he never took her anywhere special. He had the money all right, but not the knowledge gained only from experience how to spend it. He was intimidated by the uppish look of expensive places, with a commissionaire at the door, and he never dared cross the threshold. A frugal eater and a non-drinker, he could move only within a narrow circle of cafes and cinemas. It didn’t bother Sophy. A cinema in town and a box of chocolates were luxury enough to her. She wouldn’t have been comfortable drinking cocktails in a hotel lounge. Percy suited her, except when he told her he was a poet. Still, she got over it quickly. She supposed a boy had a right to at least one oddity and she believed poets were great lovers. She waited for the great lover when they embraced in the back-close.

As for Percy, he had dreamed of this hour and this solitude so long and so often that the reality of it was but a dim substitute for the ideal. Yet because it was the nearest he had come to his desire he felt himself on the verge of great deeds and great discoveries. He believed he was thrilled, and he was. He was wandering in the pathways of the moon, guided by a celestial light that illumed her remote beauty while he drowned in the deep mournfulness of a love not yet made known and satisfied. He gazed at Sophy’s brow and cheeks and the curve of her throat and his worship grew and grew. He was in bliss. The light of consciousness went out and his heart vibrated in a fecund darkness that promised the unutterable satisfaction he deserved.

With an inscrutable smile Sophy spoke.

‘Did you ever think of writing a pome about me?’ she asked in a voice as if some tender soul imprisoned within her was asking the question. After all, she was only seventeen, though she had been kissed often enough. ‘I mean, when you’re writing your pomes do you ever do one to me? Just how you see me, I mean, when you sit watching me serve the tables and saying what you think about me?’

‘Well, I did start something,’ he admitted, red-faced but encouraged by her interest in his work. ‘It’s a sort of song. You know, what Rabbie Burns used to write, that kinda thing.’

He chanted huskily.

‘Doh, soh, me, re-doh.’

After a nervous swallow he went on, incanting his composition to her in the development of a simple melody.

Darling, you must know

How I dream of you

Morning, noon and night,

You make the world seem bright,

Fill me with delight.

Sweetheart, kiss me gaily

As I play my ukelele,

Then just hold me tight,

Hold me tight and love me right,

And be mine tonight.

‘That’s lovely,’ she beamed the brightness of her smile in the dim corner while his hands fidgeted up and down her flanks. ‘I like the way it rhymes. You could sell that.’

‘Oh, I don’t write for money,’ he said proudly.

‘But it doesn’t say much about me. I mean, it doesn’t describe me. I’m just not there, am I?’

‘Well, that’s not the point,’ he defended his lyric. ‘You see, a poet writes about his emotions, not so much what he sees like, it’s what he feels. That’s what matters to him, what he feels.’

He felt her hips and back with wandering hands and she squirmed in a movement ambiguously encouraging and disapproving.

‘Yes, but there’s not many girls with hair like me, or my complexion,’ she suggested. ‘Then there’s my eyes. Did you never think of writing about my eyes, for instance?’

‘No, it wasn’t so much your eyes,’ he answered, a crease in his brow as if he were thinking.

‘Well, what was it then?’ she persisted. ‘What was it first attracted you to me?’

‘It was the way you walked, you know, the way you go round the tables,’ he said. He didn’t want to say it was her legs. He talked around it.

She made a low humming sound of acknowledgement, staring over his shoulder at the scribbling on the opposite wall as if she was trying to read what was there.

‘Did you ever hear of Shelley?’ he asked. He felt he had a duty to educate her. ‘He was a great poet if you like, a rebel. That’s what I am. I don’t agree with the world as it is today. I mean to say. I’ve read all his works. Do you know him?’

‘No, I can’t say I do,’ she conceded. His hands were at rest now he was going to teach her all about Shelley, and she wasn’t sure if she would have preferred his tongue to be at rest instead.

‘There’s a smashing wee pome of his I learned off by heart,’ he said relentlessly. ‘Would you like to hear it?’

‘I don’t mind I’m sure,’ she said patiently. She had been out with all kinds of boys in her short sweet life. She had learnt to be accommodating.

‘See!’ he declared abruptly, and she was reminded of a Scots comic she had once heard say, ‘See? See me! I don’t like fish!’

He gulped and went on in a canting voice.

The mountains kiss the heavens

And the waves clasp one another.

And the moonbeams kiss the sea.

What is all this kissing worth

If you don’t kiss me?

‘That’s nice, I like that,’ she breathed, and they kissed. He wasn’t very good at it and she felt he needed practice.

‘That’s Shelley, that is,’ he broke off. He couldn’t kiss and talk and he had to talk. He was getting scared at his own state. He was there on the brink, afraid the dip would be too cold. Talking would put off the embarrassing need for action. ‘It’s called love’s philosophy.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she answered intelligently.

‘It goes on,’ he said.

And he went on, his hands onher hips inside her open coat while hers dangled daintily over his narrow shoulders.

The fountains mingle with the river

And the river with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

With a rare emotion.

Nothing in the world is single,

All things by a law divine

In one another’s being mingle,

So why not you with mine?

He ended throatily, appealingly.

‘I don’t like that,’ she said severely, staring beyond him again. ‘I don’t think it’s very nice.’

She wriggled. He was pressing too hard against her. She squirmed loose and stepped past him, right shoulder forward, her body very straight and her head up as if she was doing the side-stepping movement in a reel.

He managed to grab the tail of her coat just as she reached the bend in the close under the gaslight. She was halted. Percy tugged and she pulled and they wrestled. They finished up panting in the back-close again, only this time they were against the opposite wall. So Percy won. Or Sophy let him win, for who would dare argue that the parallelogram of forces represents the resultant of a lovers’ scuffle?

‘Don’t be daft,’ he complained, standing over her with his long arms on either side of her drooping shoulders so that she was barred from escape. ‘What did you want to run away like that for?’

‘Cause I didn’t like what you were insinuating,’ she said firmly.

‘I wasn’t insinuating nothing,’ he answered, all hurt. ‘It was Shelley I was saying.’

‘I still don’t like it,’ she tossed her head.

‘But there’s nothing wrong in it,’ he argued. ‘It’s perfectly natural. That’s what Shelley was saying. If two people love each other like you and me—’

His arms came closer in his eagerness to confine her.

‘I wish you’d lay off the subject,’ she muttered, scowling darkly in the dimness.

‘Why?’ he demanded, and his arms went round her like the coils of a boa-constrictor. Inspired by a confused recollection of a novel by Lawrence he had tried to read he was proud of his wholesome maturity and maleness and he longed to reach the dark roots of her being and quicken her. ‘We should act according to our impulses, it’s the only natural thing to do, if a man’s to be a man.’

‘I thought you was a nice boy,’ she complained, struggling again.

He was worse than he had been. The wrestling-match at the bend of the close had raised his temperature to boiling point and he was in a state again.

‘Oh, Sophy, please,’ he groaned, an asthmatic bull in a grassless meadow. ‘I think you’re wonderful. I love you. I want you.’

She didn’t even pretend to be impressed. She sent a little signal of scepticism through her nose, a maidenly snort of disbelief, but he blundered on. He felt he was face to face with death, the death of his hopes for an initiation with Sophy. He didn’t want to die, ever, and he was panic- stricken in case he died wondering.

‘Come on, be a sport, let me!’ he pleaded, as hoarse as an NCO after his first day taking a squad in the square.

He wound round her to crush her squirming body in a heroic hug, but she ducked, side-stepped, and stood free of him. He was bang up against the scarred brown paintwork on the wall while Sophy stood at his side with one hand on her hip and the other caressing her pony-tail. But he still wasn’t beaten. He was only provoked. He went on blundering.

‘I can make it worth your while,’ he declared, staggering from the unwelcoming wall. He delved into the pocket inside his new sports jacket (best Harris tweed, heather mixture pattern, fourteen guineas in Carswell’s), fumbled with his pocket book, opened it trembling, and brought out a five-pound note, another five-pound note, waved them before her astounded young eyes.

‘You can have them! You can have them both! I don’t care, there’s plenty more where they came from!’

He was teetering there, certain he was going to gain her, and then her little hand darted. First in a vertical flash it scattered his precious wallet and then it came back on the horizontal plane and slapped him hard across the face. (Mrs Maguire on the ground floor stood with the teapot over her cup and breathed nervously, ‘What was that?’)

Percy put his hand to his cheek as if to make sure it was really his face she had smacked.

‘Well, I like that!’ Sophy flared. ‘So that’s the kind of girl you think I am! Just right here and now, eh? Just like that? Do you think I’m mad? And if you’ve got that kind of money to throw away what the hell are you bothering about me at all for, tell me that! You don’t need to come slobbering round me if you want to buy it. You know where to go or it’s high bloody time you did. Well, I like that! You and your po’try. And I don’t know what you’re doing with all that money anyway, a fella that’s no’ working. I’ve a good mind to tell my brother about you.’

Her inflated little bosom heaved, she flared and sputtered at him. Then she picked up her handbag and marched off. No side-slip this time, but a military quickstep, and Percy was left alone with his smarting face. He stood bleak and frozen in the twilight of the back-close, heard Sophy’s high heels tattoo upstairs, heard her knock at her door on the second storey of the three, heard the door open and the door bang. She was gone, gone for ever. He nearly wept. But perhaps her brother was in. There was no time to waste in tears. He picked up his wallet in a flurry, put the fivers back inside as he hurried through the front-close and ran to the nearest bus-stop.

It was all very well for Shelley. He could say it and get it printed in his immortal works and even in the Golden Treasury. But Shelley didn’t have to deal with these narrow-minded waitresses who had no appreciation of love’s philosophy. He worked hard on a grudge against Sophy as he waited splay-footed and nervous for a bus to come, one hand inside his jacket fondling his wallet as a talisman. He didn’t care which bus he got so long as it took him away from the scene of his Waterloo. He suddenly felt hungry, and a shattering thought lashed his already turbulent mind.

‘I’ll have to find somewhere else to eat now!’ he lamented to the bus-stop standard, and tutted to the night air at the nuisance of it. He felt himself wronged and humiliated. After the way she had mentioned her brother he would have to disappear for good so far as Sophy was concerned. He had made a mistake.

‘Ach, maybe she was right,’ he thought generously arguing against his fabricated grudge, for he took a pride in always seeing at least two sides to any question. ‘Maybe it was a mistake to offer her money. But I was desperate. I should have kept it till after.’

By the time he was speeding home on the bus his brain was empty. It was tired of fretting about Sophy and the absurd failure to seduce her. The stranger drifted in to fill the vacuum.

‘Oh, dear! There’s him to worry about!’ he remembered in misery. ‘He’s a menace, he is! I wonder where he’s got to.’

Stumbling on a rhyme he brooded about a poem in which a stranger was a danger. He thought out the first two lines.

Within life’s vale of tears I face one danger

That makes my blood run cold, a questioning stranger—

But he couldn’t go on. His headache began to bother him again, his stomach quivered, turned, tied itself in painful knots. He was frightened again. Sophy’s brother and the stranger merged into one cloud darkening his future, disturbing his peace of mind.