Читать книгу A Glasgow Trilogy - George Friel - Страница 8

CHAPTER TWO

That same evening, in the Bute Hall, the Glasgow University Choral Society and the University Orchestra gave a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass. It was damned with faint praise by the music critic of the local paper, a sour Scotsman who complained of the acoustics and found the choir’s hundred and eight voices too light for the place and purpose. O’Neill and O’Donnell, like most people in the city, didn’t know the Mass was being sung by the University Choral Society, so they weren’t present. They were back in the Tappit Hen before the Sanctus. But among those who did attend the Bute Hall was the unwitting hero of this true narrative, a culture-hungry teenager who had failed in his eleven-plus examination and come to life at sixteen, just after he left school. He was working as a packer in the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society in Nelson Street, but he knew he deserved something a lot better. He went about his daily chores with a dagger of bitterness against a system that had refused him a higher education just because he didn’t happen to pass an examination when he was only twelve. He tried to educate himself. He went to the public library every night and brought home books on philosophy, psychology, economics, and the history of art from the cave-paintings to Picasso. He found his pleasure in the very act of borrowing them. When the girl stamped the date-label and filed the title-slips with his tickets he was sure she admired and respected him. Nobody else in his unjust position would have had the courage and intelligence to borrow such books. He had always to take them back before he had time to read them, but he felt that even having them in the house was something. To see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on the kitchen dresser alongside the first volume of Marx’s Capital was a great consolation to him. You never knew who might come in and see them. It only annoyed his mother. She had no patience with him.

‘It’s high time you took them books back,’ she scolded him every time she dusted the dresser where she displayed her grandmother’s two brass candlesticks, the four large seashells she had brought home from her holiday at Millport the year she was married, a photo of her mother in a white-metal frame, a snap of her brother when he was a sergeant with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Singapore, an enamelled tray showing two pastoral lovers beside a rustic bridge, and her bottle of cough mixture. ‘How can I keep this corner tidy if you clutter it up with books? And they’re all overdue and I never see you open them anyway.’

‘You don’t see all I do,’ he answered, looking down on her from a great height.

‘There’s sevenpence to pay on each of them,’ she complained the night he was getting ready to go to the Bute Hall. ‘You might as well buy the damn things, the money you spend in fines. Do you think I’ve nothing to do with my money but give it to you to pay for all the books you keep past their time?’

‘Money, money, money! All you can think of is money!’

He was peevish with her. She was always nagging him since his father died a month ago.

‘Somebody’s got to think about it,’ she said, her head high, acting the calm lady to his bad temper. ‘Of course, you’re Lord Muck of Glabber Castle, you’re too high and mighty to bother about money. I’d have thought now your poor father’s dead at least you’d try and help your mother. You’ve only one mother in this world, you know, my boy.’

She wiped her eyes with a dirty hankie, and went ruthlessly on.

‘Your poor father’s no’ here any longer to look after us now, ye know. Him dying the way he did. Puffed out like a candle. Wan minute he was there, the next he wasna. It’s something I’ll never get over. The day after his brother was killed. No’ that he was any good. But your poor father was a good man. Do anything for anybody. Worked hard all his days. Then just to die like that, down in the cellar all by himself. And then they tried to tell me it was his heart. Funny he never complained about his heart before. Of course him and Sammy was twins. They was born together and I suppose they had to go together. Well, near enough. Sammy was killed on the Friday and your poor father was found dead the next day, couldny ha’ been more than a couple of hours after he heard about it. Makes you think. You ought to be helping me, no’ annoying me the way you do.’

She sniffed wetly, and his nerves jangled at the sound of air through mucus.

‘I’m helping all I can,’ he said dourly. ‘But I never get a bloody word of thanks for it. Don’t forget it’s me pays the rent for the house.’

‘You’re lucky to have a house at all to pay the rent for,’ she snapped, her nose clear again for a minute. ‘Don’t forget we lost a good house rent-free when your father went and died.’

‘Some house,’ he gibed, surveying her as if he was estimating her height and weight. How could he, so tall and handsome, come from such a shrivelled thing as this crabbit woman with grey hair, mournful eyes, a flat chest and skinny legs with black cotton stockings? It was another injustice. He should have had a beautiful elegant mother with shapely legs and a bosom like the advert for a shaving soap, not too much and not too little, a mother who would inspire him to write the poetry he knew he could write if only he could get peace and quiet. ‘A janitor’s house in the school playground! That’s a fine house! Living right in the middle of the slum where he worked.’

‘It was a bigger and better house than this,’ she shouted. ‘Who could I bring here, a room and kitchen up a dirty close with a stairhead lavatory, and a single-end on each landing? You never think what a come-down it is for me to have to go out to work and be a cleaner in the very school where your father was the janitor for fifteen year, aye, and his job was jist as important as the headmaster’s I can tell ye. He saw them come and he saw them go, and they’d all have been lost without him. He kept them right. And now I’ve got to be a cleaner there and live in a room and kitchen that looks right on to the four-apartment house I had rent- free in the playground. It just shows you how life treats you.’

‘You’re just after saying we’re lucky to be here,’ he stabbed quickly back, gloating over her cracked temper. ‘Lucky that big fat drip Nancy went to Canada. Ha-Ha! That was a bit of luck all right. If ever a dame got on my nerves it was her with her very coarse veins. A real intellectual topic of conversation she had!’

‘You’ll please me if you speak of your Aunt Nancy with proper respect for your elders,’ she said stiffly, on her dignity as a lady again. ‘If your Aunt Nancy hadn’t got the factor to agree to us getting her house I don’t know where we could have went I’m sure. And just having to flit across the street from the school was a big saving. If we’d had to pay for all our furniture getting took somewhere across the river it would have cost us a lot of money I can tell you. But you never think of that. You’ve a mind above money, like.’

‘You aye come back to money, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’d think that was all there was in this life, money, the way you talk, you’ve no idea of art and philosophy and – and—’

He was stuck for a moment for another subject, to let her see what a superior mind he had.

‘And poetry and the drama,’ he added quickly, remembering the card above the shelves in the far corner of the library. ‘You’ve never lived. I’ve lived, so I have. I’ve read the great poets, it’s more than you ever done. You, you’ve no idea of culture.’

‘Have you?’ she asked him very coolly, cutting him deep. ‘You couldn’t even pass your qually and you try and kid me about culture. You never read the half of the books you bring in here.’

‘Ach!’ he snarled at her.

‘Another thing,’ she pursued him cruelly, turning from the cracked, mottled sink where the window looked across Bethel Street to the ancient school where her husband had worked. ‘It’s high time you stopped hanging about the backcourt and going across there to the playground every night. If you could just see yourself! Be your age. It looks daft, a big fellow like you playing with wee boys at school.’

‘I’m not playing with them,’ he answered proudly. ‘I’m helping them. They come to me for advice. Cause I’m older and cause I know more than they do. I’m trying to learn them. If I’d had somebody to guide me the way I guide them when I was their age I wouldn’t be where I am today, so I wouldn’t.’

‘A crowd of scabby gangsters,’ his mother muttered. ‘There’s no’ a shop in the street safe from them.’

‘Okay they’ve got a gang,’ he admitted generously. ‘And what’s wrong with having a gang? A gang is only the expression of the primitive need for a community. You read any book on child-psychology, that’ll tell you. People feel they must belong. I mean ordinary people. And these lads aren’t even ordinary. They’re a lot of poor dirty neglected children with nobody to shower love on them.’

‘Shower,’ his mother sniffed, having trouble with her nose again. ‘They’re a shower all right. Shower o’ bastards.’

‘Their parents have no interest in them,’ he went on, making a speech at her, ‘and they’ve no interest in their parents. They were born in the jungle and their whole existence is one fierce struggle to survive. The only law they know is the law of the jungle and they’re beginning to learn its disadvantages. So they come to me and I try to learn them to live according to the law of law and order. They see you’ve got to have someone to appeal to so they come to me. I’m their referee. They rely on me for to see justice done. I’m the lawman. I’m the judge. Cause I stand above it so I can see it. Boys are like Jews, they’re different from the people round about them. And where would the Jews have been if they hadn’t had Moses to give them the Law?’

‘Ach!’ his mother derided him. ‘Playing wi’ a lot o’ weans and ye call yourself Moses!’

‘They’re not weans,’ he shouted. ‘They’re innocent children. And Christ has said unless ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

‘Oh, it’s Christ now, is it?’ cried his baffled mother. ‘You’d gar anybody grue so you would the way you talk. Moses! Christ!’

She returned to the dishes in the basin in the sink.

At that point in their friendly discussion he banged out of the house, scampered down the three storeys to the close, went into the littered smelly street and walked across the city to the University. He liked passing through the Main Entrance in University Avenue. He felt he was entering the land he should have inherited. He often walked through the University to comfort himself. When he crossed the Arts Quadrangle and approached the Bute Hall he felt happier and lighter. All his grudges dropped from him. He was where he ought to be. If the girl in the library could see him now she would think he was a student all right. A university student, that was the life.

Bach’s music didn’t get over to him, but he was pleased to be sitting there while the choir and orchestra went through it. His attention drifted peacefully. Music always made his mind wander. That was why he liked to go to orchestral concerts. He felt liberated. So while the sopranos got lost in ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ he plunged contentedly through the jungle of his grievances.

All he wanted was peace, peace and quiet, and he couldn’t get it. He wanted to be free from the need to earn his living so that he could be a poet like Shelley or make documentary films like Peter Scott or be a novelist like Tolstoy or even a television personality. He knew he had other talents too. He had helped to prepare and move the scenery when the Drew Rowan Youth Club put on a pantomime, and he enjoyed being back-stage. He knew he had a good sense of the theatre. He could produce plays, or he could travel round the world with a cinecamera and do a series about strange places and peculiar peoples. There was nothing hard in what David Atten- borough did. Anybody could do it. All you needed was money. Anything was possible if you had the money to give you the leisure to do it. He could be an authority on modern art. Nobody else in Packing and Dispatch had read the amount of stuff he had read on Picasso and Henry Moore. Shelley and Wordsworth had enough money to write poetry without having to work as well. If they had been a janitor’s son like him they wouldn’t have had the chance. If he had the money he could buy a house on some lonely part of the coast in Devon or Cornwall, and it would be peaceful enough there to be a poet. To be a poet you had to see things as children saw them, all fresh and unspoilt, like the smell of apples or the colour of the sky when the sun was setting behind the Campsies in summer or the touch of a cat’s fur or the taste of a glass of milk and a buttered roll. And because he liked to be with kids and listen to them blether so that he could keep roots in the world of his childhood people laughed at him. They said he was soft.

They had said he was soft since the first day he went to school. He blamed it on his name. He hated it for years. Percy was a sloppy name. It was too uncommon in the tenements, too Kelvinside, too English, to get respect. It was worst in the qualifying class, where even the teacher made jokes about it. She kept on saying he was slow in arithmetic and backward in reading and poor at spelling and hopeless at composition. Her daily crack was to tell him he must persevere.

‘Ah, here’s Percy again,’ she said to the class every day when those with no sums right lined up for the strap. ‘He tries very hard. He’s very trying, is our Percy. It’s a fine old English name, Percy. So is Vere.’

She raised his hand a little higher, straightened his palm, and addressed him as she strapped him.

‘Well, Percy, you must Percy Vere. That’s all.’

And every day the boys and girls preparing for the eleven-plus examination laughed at the same joke and laughed at him. It was the girls’ laughter hurt him most. It fell from Heaven like the merriment of angels looking down on the antics of a clod-hopper who couldn’t get his big feet out of the mud. He grew sullen at Miss Elginbrod’s daily joke and one bright morning in May he challenged her. The room was stuffy in the early sun. Miss Elginbrod always kept the windows closed because she disliked draughts. His head was hot and he didn’t know what the sums were about. It was trains one minute and marbles the next, then it was rolls of cloth, then it was tons and quarts. One minute she was saying you add the speeds, then she was saying you subtract them. She kept on hopping about. You were just beginning to think you were bringing pounds to pennies when she made you bring pounds to ounces. She never gave you peace. So for the thousandth time he had only two sums finished out of the five, both wrong, and for the thousandth time she shrugged over him.

‘Well, Percy, you’ve just got to persevere, that’s all.’

He faced her, rather round-shouldered because of his height. Even then he was much taller than other boys of his age, and it made him look gawky.

‘Please, miss,’ he said, and then his nerve failed.

‘Yes?’ said Miss Elginbrod, looking at him with patronizing patience, swinging the strap in a practice smack. ‘Is there something you don’t understand?’

Her question gave him back his determination to oppose her.

‘I don’t understand why you call me Percy Vere. My name isn’t Percy Vere, it’s Percy Phinn.’

An earthquake unpredicted by the eight o’clock weather forecast shook the class. A cyclone of laughter lifted the roof and a tornado of girlish screams whipped the walls apart. He felt himself naked to the wind and weather when he had expected to stand there proud and respected in an awed silence. He was frightened. There was never a mockery like this, clawing at him on all sides and tearing him apart to eat him up.

For causing a disturbance in the class Miss Elginbrod gave him three hard ones with her strap, not the thin one she always had in her hand but the thick one she kept away at the back of her desk out of sight until she was really angry. And when she had done that she said he had been insolent, and gave him another three.

When he was reborn at sixteen he looked back on his past life and blamed Miss Elginbrod for his failure in the examination. She had discouraged him. She ought to have seen he was a case of late development like Sir Winston Churchill. She ought to have seen his true merit and given him love and understanding. She wasn’t fit to be a teacher. People like her would have failed to see Shelley’s gifts when he was a boy at school. She had never even told him he had the same name as Shelley. She just made a joke of it. That proved she was so ignorant she didn’t know Shelley’s first name. He had to find it out for himself after he had left school. The discovery excited him. He stopped hating his name. He became proud of it. It made him something of a poet too. He read up on Shelley. In a biographical dictionary in the public library he found a sentence that he copied out and learned off by heart. ‘Percy was a boy of much sensibility, quick imagination, generous heart, and a refined type of beauty, blue-eyed and golden-haired.’ He hadn’t only the same name as Shelley, he had the same colour of eyes and the same colour of hair – though his mother said his hair was ‘like straw hinging oot a midden’. But his mother had no sensibility, no quick imagination. It was a mystery where his had come from. And he was a rebel too, just like Shelley. It was for being a rebel that Miss Elginbrod had given him six with her Lochgelly strap. Well, he would remember her, and when he was famous as a poet or a producer or an authority on modern art she would be ashamed of herself. But to get fame he would have to get leisure, and to get leisure he would have to get money. It always came back to money.

‘If only!’ he dreamed while the choir exulted in the Gloria. ‘If only I had enough money to live without having to go out to work every day. If only I had a private income like Shelley and Wordsworth. I could get peace then I’d show them. If only I’d got a fair deal out of life I could play my cards better.’