She was smiling, he noticed, but in the friendliest possible way, as she said, obviously with the intention of helping him out, “Oh, don’t mind, I’m always talking to myself. Why not? It's the only way to learn anything about yourself.” His heart warmed towards her as he grinned, sheepishly, saying, “Down home it's reckoned a sure sign o’ goin’ barmy, miss. It's just that… well… this bloke Leyden… it set me thinking and it come out, before I could stop it!”
She said, drawing her fine dark brows together, “What came out?” and he noticed then that she had little trace of the brogue but spoke like a person difficult to place. Not “ladylike” exactly, but easily and naturally, with effortless enunciation.
“I suppose I was thinkin’ o’ brains,” he said, slowly. “Brains, like this chap had an’ muster bin born with. I mean, some are and some ain’t, and if you ain’t you c’n on’y get so far and then, bang goes the door, smack in yer faice, if you see wot I mean.”
“Oh, I see what you mean,” she replied gaily, “but it isn’t in the least true. Leyden started from nothing, right here in this village, and so did John Scott, the famous botanist, and Sir James Murray, the man who made the dictionary. It's no more than a matter of making up your mind to do whatever you want to do.”
“Three of ’em! From a place this size?”
She smiled. She had, he decided, a bewitching smile. “Up here it's the only way to a better life and it's always been so. Education gives a man something to set his sights on, for money is hard to come by this far north. Is that your waggonette over there?” and when he nodded, “Then you don’t have to worry, do you? To run a team like that, and wear broadcloth of the kind you’re wearing, you must be comfortable to say the least.”
The statement amazed him. He had never once thought of himself as being “comfortable” as she put it, although Swann paid his provincial managers very well and he had been putting money aside for some time now.
He said, carefully, “Well, the waggonette an’ cattle ain’t mine, exactly. I’m Scottish manager fer Swann-on-Wheels, the carriers. At least, I will be, soon as Mr. Fraser packs in. Mr. Swann—our Gaffer that is—he likes us to drive a good rig. Says it's good fer business.”
“And so it is,” she said, but then, to his amazement, “Why don’t you step across to the Manse and take a dish of tea with myself and my father? We don’t get much company and someone from London is a rarity about here. It's well enough for father. He has his work to occupy him, but I’m on holiday and I miss Edinburgh, I must confess.”
“You live in Edinburgh, Miss…?”
“McKenzie. Mary McKenzie. I’m a teacher there in a school near the Infirmary. I know your yard. It's the one in the Grassmarket, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, eagerly, “and I’d like very much to take tea with your father, Miss McKenzie. I’d… I’d like it fine!” and with that, a gamin's trick to identify with the locality by using a local idiom, she laughed, showing two enormous dimples and he thought that never, in the whole of his life, had he seen a prettier or more engaging face.
He walked beside her across the green to the Manse and was introduced to a gnomish little minister, who gave him the welcome he was learning to expect up here. They all drank tea together and exchanged mild courtesies, Miss McKenzie telling him she lodged with an aunt in George Square, and he telling her and her father the nature of his work as Swann's manager in Edinburgh.
It was past three o’clock before Mary McKenzie walked him to the inn where his team had been fed and watered, and as they shook hands he said, falteringly, “Everyone I met up ’ere ’as bin… well… so friendly like. But it's all give an’ no take. Mr. Fraser says no one expects tit-fer-tat, like they do dahn south, but seein’ you work right alongside our headquarters coulden I, coulden we…” And he stopped, for somehow, although well accustomed to making assignments with young women, ordinary techniques failed him in the presence of the daughter of a minister, clearly a respectable girl, of the kind he rarely met outside business hours.
She said, to his gratification, “Couldn’t we meet? Why, of course we could. It would be a pleasure, Mr. Higson. You shall pay a call on me at my aunt's, and then show me your stables if you wish, for I love horses and your firm is famous, isn’t it? I remember that trademark on vans when I was a girl about here. Well, then, goodbye for now, and we’ll meet again after Easter, I hope. You can reach me at this address,” and she whipped out a pocketbook and wrote the address, her pencil flying over the paper in a way that made him as envious of her as he had been of John Leyden, for he found any kind of writing very laborious.
It was difficult to accept that a chance encounter in a remote Teviotside village could have wrought such a devastating change in his life.
She seemed, on the instant, to bring him luck, for he landed a lucrative haulage contract in Kelso that same night, and later, as the evenings began to draw out, he paid several uneventful but pleasurable social calls on Mary McKenzie and her widowed aunt, Mrs. McFie, in the latter's home in the city. Mrs. McFie had been housekeeper here when her late husband had been a coachman to a rich old bachelor. He had left her house and furniture when he died without heirs a year or so before.
He got along very well with Aunt Flora, a bustling, cheerful woman, who seemed to think of him as someone very important in the commercial life of Edinburgh. Although his admiration for Mary McKenzie's face, figure, and accomplishments grew and grew, so that soon he found it difficult to give his full attention to anything else, he made little progress with her save as a source of information concerning the history of a city that he was already beginning to think of as his own.
He once called for her at her school near the Infirmary, finding it daunting to watch her queening it over some three score neatly dressed children who paid her the kind of respect accorded to royalty. In a way it removed her still further, if that was possible, from the orbit of his daily life, for he now began to regard her as a female equivalent of John Leyden, who must assuredly think of him as a gauche, coarse-grained creature, forever hanging about in the background of her well-ordered life, with nothing much to say for himself unless it was about horses.
Their relationship remained on this one-sided level until one day, out of the blue as it were, she said to him, over the ruins of a supper cooked for them by Mrs. McFie, “You’re hazed about something, Jamie Higson, apart from the responsibilities you’ll be called upon to face when Mr. Fraser retires. It's to do with that first conversation we had by John Leyden's obelisk, isn’t it? Come now, we’re friends, aren’t we? If I can help I’d be glad to.”
Her prescience, in being able to go directly to the heart of the matter in this way, amazed him, so that he blurted out, “You’ll think me daft, no doubt, but the fact is… well… sometimes I wonder why you bother wi’ me at all. Wot I mean is, you’re a scholar. You mus’ be, to teach in school, but me—well, I’m ignoranter than any one o’ them bairns o’ yours. You’re right tho’, it does get me down in the mouth sometimes. Oh, I c’n manage the job all right, but that ain’t the point, is it? Not if a man wants to make something of ’imself! He's got to have book learnin’ and ’ow does he go abaht gettin’ it at my age?”
She said, “How old would that be, lad?” He said, glumly, “I dunno, reely. About thirty, I reckon. I don’t remember no mum or dad. I was a chimney sweep as a nipper, straight aht o’ the Guardians. That's ’ow I come be the one piece o’ luck I ever ’ad.”
“Tell me, Jamie.”
“My mate Luke choked ter death in one o’ Mrs. Swann's flues. Twenty years ago, that was, an’ Mr. Swann bashed the livin’ daylights out o’ that gaffer of ours, took me away from ’im, and set me to work as a vanboy, then a waggoner, then head stableman, and ’ere I am. ’Ere, why am I tellin’ you all this?”
She said, gently, “It's time you told somebody, and I really can’t see why you have to feel so humble. You’ve already come a long way by your own efforts.”
“Ah,
yes,” he said, “abaht as far as I c’n ’ope to go, an’ that's the rub when I meet people like you. Money don’t come into it. I thought money was every-think once but it ain’t. I found that out soon as I got ’ere. It's… it's, well, torkin’, knowing things, bein’ able to put ’em dahn on paper. It's being able to think abaht things outside o’ work, and readin’ books, like that chap Scott wrote, besides the latest murder in the Police Gazette.” He stood up, driven to a point of desperation by his own sense of inadequacy. “You know something else, Miss Mary? I can’t even read the bits in the paper about pollerticks, for I don’t know ’arf the words. Now how could I begin to go abaht putting that straight?”
She said, smiling, “You could begin by ceasing to address me as ‘Miss Mary.’ Then you could get it into that head of yours that you can go just as far as you want to go, if you’ve got the patience. If you really want to educate yourself, it's a perfectly straightforward process. You can do that by reading, once you’ve spent a little time on the spadework, and I could help there. Suppose you spend an hour or so at my school in the evenings. We have primers there, and a blackboard and copybooks, and everything you need, and I’m sure I could get permission from the authorities to coach you from seven to eight, three evenings a week. They’ve started evening classes for adults, of course, but I don’t think you would make much progress there because you’re shy with people outside your business. Besides, no pupil could expect a teacher all to himself as you could have if you wished it.”
Her practicability, her patent understanding of his plight elevated her to a niche in his mind almost as high as that occupied by Adam Swann. He said, fervently, “You mean you’d do that? You’d take that much trouble?”
“If it's so important to you, of course I would, Jamie.”
“It’d be the most important thing that ever ’appened to me, Miss Mary.”
“Mary,” she said, and looked at him in a way she had never looked at him before, as though she was already assessing his ability as a student.
Then began for Jake Higson a sojourn in a kind of euphoric purgatory, where his senses, sharpened in one way to a degree where he became aware of all manner of irrelevant detail, were dulled in another way. For while his wits responded to the instruction he was receiving, with his long legs cramped under one of the small schoolroom desks in front of her blackboard, the rest of him was half-anaesthetised by the presence of Mary McKenzie, who moved to and fro before his ecstatic gaze. Sometimes—moments that he came to anticipate as a foretaste of Paradise—she stepped down from the rostrum and bent over him, correcting his exercises and addressing him as though he was not a future manager of Swann-on-Wheels but a chimney sweep again, albeit a privileged one.
She went about the process with great practicality, dividing their three hours a week, hours when the caretaker was cleaning up after the children and attending to the stove, into six periods, four devoted to improving his word power and handwriting, the remaining two to what she called “free periods,” in which she strove to bring his knowledge of geography and history up to what she called “standard Six level.”
He found each period equally absorbing, imbibing the rudiments of grammar (he had not realised until then that the English language was something that could be taken apart and examined piecemeal) and labouring away at what the children called “pothooks and hangers,” copied from a book compiled for someone just such as he, who had the greatest difficulty in shaping letters and getting them to run together legibly, so that his scrawl began to take on a monkish aspect, uniformly sloping and, to him at least, as stylish as the writing of Tybalt, the chief clerk.
Sometimes she would hang a large, shiny map on the blackboard and take a pointer, moving about the world in a way that implied she was as familiar with, say, the upper reaches of the Congo and the foothills of the Andes as the Royal Mile and Castle Rock. At other times she would read passages describing Wallace's struggle against King Edward, or the Young Pretender's foray in 1745, but there was a handicap here, for it meant a tedious session at his lodgings after they had parted, when he was under orders to summarise a passage of Scott's Tales of a Grandfather, or some other book, in what she called “a composition.” The next time they met she would turn the pages he had written and strike out words with her blue pencil, and sometimes make a disparaging comment on the work. He made progress, however. Even he was not oblivious of that, and she was just as ready with praise, when he earned it, as with reproof concerning his spelling or the use of a phrase borrowed from the Police Gazette.
All the time, however, part of him was observing irrelevancies attendant upon their sessions, some relating directly to her but others to aspects of the room in which they worked, with its rustling stove and ineradicable smell of chalk, dust, ink, paper, and apple cores. Ever afterwards he associated the smell of school with snugness and serenity, in a way that must have been unique among those who had occupied those desks all the years the building stood there.
He had, of course, other sharper impressions, like the way the evening sun filtered through the tall, Gothic windows, lingering for a moment or two in her hair. It astonished him sometimes that he could be aware of such things whilst bending the whole of his attention to the loop of a pothook, or Bruce's order of battle at Bannockburn—a word, incidentally, that he loved to hear her speak aloud, for it was one of the few that proclaimed her race, emerging as a long, rolling, rattle:“Bannockburrrrrrne.”
So they continued, in the role of tutor and pupil, right through the summer and autumn, never missing a single session. He adjusted his business trips to fit into the schedule, until Christmas loomed and word arrived from Headquarters that there was to be a gathering of Swann's viceroys in London on the first day of the new year.
Ordinarily, he would have been delighted to attend his first conference (and what promised to be an important one according to the circular) as trainee gaffer of the Scottish territory, but he realised that this would mean missing at least three evenings in her company. He was only slightly comforted by the way she frowned when he announced the fact, for to him the grimace proved she took his lessons as seriously as he did.
She said, pouting, “Eight days? Ten, allowing for travelling time? Now there's a nuisance! It’ll mean you missing Hogmanay, and Aunt Flora was looking forward to it so much.”
“Me too,” he said, “but it can’t be helped. The Gaffer's keen on all of us meeting round that table once a year. He must have something special lined up or he wouldn’t have risked leaving the branch without someone to keep an eye on things.”
She stepped off the rostrum and stood close to him as she made a pretence of correcting his latest exercise. Her neat grey dress, or the little tartan cape about her shoulders, held the scent of lavender. He had never seen her in that high-waisted dress before, that fastened to the neck with a long row of jet buttons and a brooch shaped like an Irish harp. Probably, it had been laid away in a drawer and that explained the scent of lavender; now that he looked closely at it, he thought how smart and trim it was, emphasising the gentle swell of her breasts and the long, graceful sweep of her thighs as she half-sat on the adjoining desk looking, for once, as if she was impatient with his work. Then, laying aside the pencil, she leaned back on her hands and smiled down at him.
“It's odd,” she said, “but I’d almost forgotten you worked for Swann-on-Wheels. All the time we’ve been here, ever since I heard you talking to yourself about John Leyden, I’ve thought of you as a bairn learning his lessons in front of a blackboard.”
“You mean… as a kid? Never as someone older’n you?”
“I mean just that,” she said, and there was a hint of teasing in her voice. “After all, Jamie, that's what you’ve been to me for nearly a year now, a boy who came here to learn how to spell and write and parse. Why, we’ve hardly ever talked of anything else, have we?”
“No,” he said, “we’ve not that, but sometimes it wasn’t so easy not to.”
She re
acted to this. “No? Well, that is a surprise! Tell me, Jamie, or are you too shy?”
“I dunno,” he said, guardedly, “I reckon that depends on you, Mary.”
“Why, Jamie?”
“Well, see here, I’ve put me mind to the work, you’ll own to that. But I’m not a kid, am I. Why sometimes…” but he stopped, biting his thumb nail.
“Sometimes what, Jamie?”
“Aw, let it go.”
“But I don’t want to let it go. Just you say what you had in mind to say.”
“Well, then… sometimes, wi’ me down here, and you up there, moving about before that blackboard, you seemed a lot more’n a teacher and that's a fact!”
“Just what did I seem, Jamie?”
“Why, a woman, and a mighty pretty woman at that.”
She did not blush or look bleak and disapproving. About half a minute ticked by, the schoolroom clock regulating the pace of his thoughts but doing nothing to regulate his heartbeats. Then she said, slowly, “Do you know that's the first compliment you’ve ever paid me, Jamie. And so long as you mean it, it's very welcome, tho’ long overdue!”
“If I mean it!” He sounded outraged. It seemed inconceivable that she could have failed to detect the worship he had directed towards her all these months, that she could have mistaken all the unwavering looks he had aimed at that rostrum for dutiful attention. “Why, Gorlumme,” he complained bitterly, “I sat here… every word you said… every time you moved,” but, notwithstanding his lessons in word power, he had no phrase that was adequate to this occasion. He fell back on instinct, catching up the hand nearest to him and crushing it against his lips and holding it there for what seemed to him a long time before he realised what she would take such a gesture to mean; whereupon he dropped it like a hot coal and stood up, looking, she thought, like a bull calf awaiting the slaughterer. “I’m sorry,” he growled, at length, “that's spoiled things for us, ’asn’t it?”
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