Читать книгу Childish Things - Robin Jenkins - Страница 11

3

When they were all gone I wandered about the house, touching things that Kate had touched and looking at photographs with her in them. There was one when she was young, smiling fondly. Who is she so fond of? Whose arm is she holding? It is a young soldier, in the kilted uniform of the Argylls, with the ribbon of the MM on his chest. It’s me, more than 40 years ago: the moustache is black. I look upwards, as if I had high ambitions. Yet, when the war was over, I returned to being a primary schoolteacher. It was a safe, worth-while job, and I had two small children, but it fell far short of what I thought my talents deserved. True, I rose to be headmaster of a large school, I became influential in educational circles, in spite of being a member for a while of the ILP, and I always did well in the Scottish Amateur Golf Championship, once reaching the quarter-finals. Latterly, Susan Cramond, who was a friend of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, had suggested putting my name forward for an OBE for services to education.

There was an apron of Kate’s hanging on its usual hook in the kitchen. Madge and Jean must have overlooked it when getting rid of their mother’s clothes. I pressed it against my face.

Despair crept near, but was I capable of genuine despair?

Suddenly it came to me that there was one person I had never taken in. I had last seen her at least ten years ago. We had parted in anger. I had called her a slovenly bitch, she had called me a fraud. She might be dead, for she had had a tendency to become fat and was a heavy smoker, but I felt a desire, a passionate need, to go and find out.

Her name was Chrissie Carruthers. She lived in Gantock, 15 miles along the Firth. I could hardly call her my ex-mistress for I had never spent any money on her and had been to bed with her once only. It hadn’t been a success. She had laughed and quoted Plato, and her feet hadn’t been clean. A common interest in literature and politics had brought us together. We were both members of the ILP. In spite of painful feet, she had gone on marches against the Bomb and other abominations of our time, while I had stayed away, using the argument that such demonstrations were never effectual, but really, as Chrissie had pointed out, because I thought them vulgar, with their silly banners and idealistic optimism. If she was alive, was she still politically active? Did she still have the portrait of Rosa Luxemburg on her mantelpiece?

I would go and find out. I might look in on Hector too.

It was dark as I drove alongside the Firth. The amber lights of Dunoon twinkled across the water and, every five seconds, there was a flash from the Toward Lighthouse. If any of my Lunderston acquaintances recognised my Mercedes, they would think I had come out for a drive, being unable to settle in the empty house. If they had ever heard of Chrissie, it would have been as Miss Carruthers, eccentric teacher of English in Gantock High School.

The west end of Gantock is a district of wide tree-lined avenues and big stone villas built in Victorian times, when there were no motor cars. Most, therefore, had no garages, so that cars had to be left out in the street. I parked mine, not in Chrissie’s avenue, but in the one next to it. There was no need to be apprehensive about leaving it unattended. Police cars frequently patrolled that area of high ratepayers.

As I walked to Chrissie’s, I met no one. I saw a cat. Perhaps it was one of Hector’s on the prowl. He lived close by.

Most of the villas being too big for single families to maintain, they had been divided into flats. Chrissie’s was on the ground floor. Furtive as Troilus sneaking past the Greek sentries, I went through the gate and up the short flight of steps. Careless as ever, Chrissie had left the outer door open. The inner door of frosted glass showed a light in the hall. I rang the bell.

She still lived there. On a small brass plate was the name C. Carruthers.

She came shuffling to the door – so her feet were still sore – and opened it without hesitation. Her spectacles were pushed up onto her hair, which was almost as white as mine but as unkempt as ever. She reached forward to peer at me. There was a cigarette in her mouth and a smell of whisky off her breath. She was wearing a long green skirt and a red woolly jumper, fastened at the neck by a large safety pin. Her colour hadn’t improved and the shadows under her eyes were almost black.

She took the cigarette out of her mouth. ‘Why, Gregor, it’s you,’ she said, as if unsurprised.

‘What’s left of me, Chrissie. How are you?’

‘Fatter, as you can see, and my feet are still killing me. You’re looking grand.’

She must have meant the blue blazer with the gold buttons, and the white cravat. Surely she wasn’t too myopic to see the grief on my face.

‘Come in, Gregor.’

‘Thank you, Chrissie.’

As I followed her, I saw that her bottom had got bigger and more shapeless. ‘It never bothers me, Gregor,’ she had said. ‘I just sit on it.’

In the living-room, on a table in front of the gas fire, were exercise books, a glass with whisky in it, a box of cigarettes, and an ash-tray. When I was headmaster, I had objected to members of my staff marking, drinking, and smoking at the same time. That I had done it myself before my elevation had been beside the point.

‘Make yourself at home,’ she said.

She took my hat and threw it at a sofa. It landed on the carpet among books and newspapers.

‘Would you like a cigarette?’ she asked.

‘No, thank you, Chrissie. I gave it up years ago.’

‘Is that why you’re looking so spry? What about a dram then?’

‘A small one, please. I’m driving.’

Glasses in hand, we stared at each other.

Tears came into my eyes. This was unwise, in that company, this was the woman who had called me a fraud, but I could not help it. They were as genuine as my nature allowed.

‘So your wife’s dead,’ she said. ‘I saw the notice in the Herald.’

‘Kate was buried this afternoon.’

‘I’m sorry, Gregor. Cancer, was it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Her brother told me.’

‘Hector?’

‘I go into his shop now and then to buy a book.’

‘You must be the only one who does.’

‘Yes, he’s not very busy. I met her just the once. I liked her. She had a merry laugh.’

‘Yes, she had.’

‘I hope she didn’t suffer.’

‘She did, a bit, at the end, but she bore it bravely.’ My voice trembled.

‘Poor soul.’

Then we sat in silence for a minute or so.

‘You’ve lost no time in coming to ask me to take her place, Gregor. I’m afraid I can’t accept but I appreciate it just the same.’

This was Chrissie’s not very subtle irony.

‘I’ll never marry again, Chrissie,’ I said. ‘No one could take Kate’s place.’

‘If anyone does, she’ll be younger, bonnier, tidier, thinner, and richer than me.’

She had often poked fun, with a tinge of contempt, at my ambition to be rich. After all, I was supposed to be an egalitarian. But she was not to know, for I would never tell her, that what I really wanted was to be in a position one day to exorcise memories of childhood, when I had been so often, so bitterly, degraded by poverty.

Not even Kate had known about that.

I said, ‘My daughter Madge and her husband want me to go and live with them in San Diego.’

‘Why don’t you? Best climate in the world, they say.’

‘And sunshine is kind to old bones.’

‘Lots of rich old widows.’

‘Why not? Look what money can buy.’

‘Swanky cars. Swish blazers.’

‘And books. And theatre tickets. And travel to exotic places. And immunity from the insolence of inferior men.’

She laughed. ‘Who ever dared to be insolent to you, Gregor.’

‘There was a time, Chrissie.’

‘You’re not going to tell me about it?’

‘No.’

‘Well, would you like us to read something suitable? Adonais? Urn Burial? Ecclesiastes?’

‘You’ve got those essays to correct.’

‘I’ll finish them later. It’s a waste of time anyway. They pay absolutely no heed to my corrections and suggestions.’

As a teacher, I had had similar doubts about the value of homework but, as a headmaster, I had had to insist that every class got plenty of it.

There was no sign of the portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, the German pacifist and socialist, murdered by evil men. Chrissie’s ambition had been to write a book about her.

What had happened? I did not ask. If her dreams of a juster world had faded, it was not for me to crow.

‘Are you going to pay Hector a visit while you’re here?’ she asked. ‘He’s not well.’

‘He looked very ill at the funeral.’

‘He was fond of his sister.’

‘He didn’t visit her very often. I suppose that was because of me. Yet I never did him any harm.’

‘He thought you weren’t fair to your wife.’

An opinion, it seemed, shared by many. If they were right, it was too late to make amends. I felt desolate.

‘Were you unfair to her, Gregor?’

‘You’d have given me six-and-a-half out of ten, Chrissie.’

‘What would she have given you?’

I heard Kate’s voice. It’s no business of hers, Gregor. Tell her ten.

It was the kind of question typical of Chrissie. Even at 60 or so, she still put truth, as she saw it, before compassion.

‘What are we heathens to do, Chrissie, if we feel we deserve divine punishment but there’s no God to inflict it?’

‘If I was God, I’d punish no one.’

‘Not even the exploiters of the poor? The supporters of the Bomb?’

‘You should go to California, Gregor. You’d be in your element there.’

‘Because I’m a determined individualist?’

‘Because you’re a fraud. But then, we all are, aren’t we? You do it with more style than the rest of us.’

‘I loved Kate.’

‘I’m sure you did, Gregor, in your own way. But who am I to talk? I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say, Chrissie.’

‘Is it?’

‘You’ve spent your life loving the poor.’

‘Being sorry for them. I can’t claim to have loved them.’

‘Have you given up politics then?’

‘I don’t go to meetings, if that’s what you mean.’

I stood up. I picked my hat off the floor. ‘I’ll see myself out.’

‘No. I’ll see you out. It might be the last time.’

In the hall, she gripped my arm. ‘I’m sorry, Gregor, if I’ve hurt your feelings again.’

I patted her hand. ‘I think I came to have my feelings hurt. Good for me, Chrissie.’

At the door she said, ‘Good luck,’ and added, ‘with the rich old widows.’

‘Good luck to you, Chrissie.’ Perhaps, before she died, she would find someone to love.

I wanted to be at my most dignified as I went out but I missed a step and stumbled.

‘What do you wash your steps with, Chrissie?’ I asked.

‘I can’t remember when I last washed them.’

‘They should be washed regularly. Wet moss can be slippery.’

Like human relationships, I almost added.