A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  The three of them sat at the table in a silence as solid as the walls of Edinburgh Castle. The head of the house was hungry and he wolfed in, but he tried to break through by asking his wife to have something to eat.

  ‘No, I’m all right,’ she said calmly. ‘A cup of tea’s all I want.’

  She had taken off her coat and her blouse was smart, her ungracious green skirt with the thin red stripe hidden as she sat at the table between her husband and her son. The latter squinted at her as he ate. He was too young to have nervous indigestion, but the state he was in wasn’t likely to do his digestion any good. His heart was going so emphatically he was sure it must sound like the alarm clock in the other room, his middle was the site of a civil war, and his palate was as parched as if he was a man with a hang-over. He kept on squinting because he liked the look of this strange woman. Before he has the possibility of a sexual appreciation even a boy of ten has an aesthetic appreciation of a woman, and Frank Garson warmed to his mother. This was no sour dame with specs and a flat front like Percy’s blighted mother, this was a woman like the kind you saw in photographs in the papers. This was like the woman he had dreamed he had kissed when he was in Miss Montgomery’s class, a woman that was at one and the same time Miss Montgomery and wasn’t. Not once but three times, and the dreams puzzled him when they came back to him the next day, recalled by a word, a sight, a sound. He had left his seat in class, walked out and kissed Miss Montgomery, only of course it wasn’t Miss Montgomery, it was somebody else who was Miss Montgomery. But what had he to do with kissing? The memory of the three dreams allured and repelled him. He felt he had been brave, he felt he had been ridiculous. What would his classmates have said if he had told any of them he had dreamt he had kissed Miss Montgomery? But not of course Miss Montgomery, because she was really Mrs Joyce and her husband was a captain in the Merchant Navy and she was a fit wife for a ship’s commander, so well dressed and beautiful. Had he been ridiculous or just gallant? It baffled him, and although it was only yesterday he had been Miss Montgomery’s lover it was also a thousand years ago, another world, another person.

  ‘Take your time,’ said his mother. ‘You’re shoving that down your throat as if you hadn’t seen food for a week. You’re not chewing it at all.’

  He put his eyes on his plate and he chewed.

  ‘And another thing,’ said his mother. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, young man.’

  It was only with those words that he remembered the silly advert he had put in the Citizen. He had made up that advert in a mood, much as a man might utter an oath in privacy, and no more than that man had he expected to find his words having any influence on the real world he couldn’t escape from. He was frightened. The civil war in his middle was settled by a truce that merely raised new problems. His heart slowed. His brain left its confusion of his mother with Miss Montgomery and settled on a simplified memory of Percy. He would be better to say nothing. His mother was back and he was sure she wouldn’t go away again in a hurry. He didn’t need to say anything to keep her. He had an old loyalty now to remember. He would admit the advert and pretend it was only a trick to get her to come back.

  That’s what he thought. But when his mother slapped the newspaper cutting on the table in front of him he saw he wasn’t going to be coaxed to admit it was his work. He was being told. He heard the rumbling of approaching disaster. He felt very small and unready. He had a passing memory of the time he had tried to pick up a full-size football with one hand. It was far too big for his grasp, he had to let it drop. And so it was now. He would have to let go. Yet even in the rout of his plans he noticed it was his mother leading the attack. His father just sat there and glowered.

  ‘Your face gives you away,’ his mother said sternly, and he felt his face hot with the blush of known guilt. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  She pretended to be asking him but he knew she was telling him. He nodded, afraid that if he spoke he would start crying, and he wasn’t going to cry in front of any woman, especially not this one.

  ‘What do you mean, loads?’ his mother demanded, her finger jabbing three times at the simple word, her other elbow on the table, her face close against him, intimidating him.

  ‘A li-li-lot,’ he answered with difficulty. He always had trouble with his ‘l’s, his throat was all tightened with anxiety, and people who frightened him always brought upon him the fear that his erratic stammer would win and make him ridiculous.

  ‘What do you mean a lot?’ his mother persisted. Her face was so close now, she was staring at him so hard as if she was trying to hypnotize him, that he was drowned in the dark-brown depths of her eyes, and a wisp of her hair touched his brow. But though her eyes and hair were soft her voice was hard. ‘When did you get a lot? Where? Have you been doing the pools?’

  He smiled unsurely, then he saw she wasn’t being funny at all. She was still grim. She really meant it. He wiped the smile off his face with a jolted reflex and shook his head.

  ‘Where did you get the money to pay for putting an advert in the papers?’ his father asked suddenly.

  ‘Out my tips,’ he said quickly, glad for a question he could answer reasonably.

  ‘Not out of the loads of money you say you’ve got?’ his mother suggested, and he wilted under the dry irony of her tone.

  ‘No, I – I – I haven’t got loads,’ he admitted in crumpled misery.

  ‘Then why did you say loads?’

  His mother kept at him, and he suffered for a moment a strange fear that she wanted to be told he really had loads of money so that she could claim her share right away as his mother. Then he saw it was his fault, not hers, if that’s how it was. He had hinted at money to get her back. So why should he be disappointed if she came back and asked for some? It was only what he had planned. He hung his head in shame at his own muddle. His plan had been a mistake from the start, and he learnt then that to use certain ways of getting what we want means that what we wanted wasn’t worth having. But he wouldn’t believe that of his mother.

  ‘Why did you say loads?’ she was repeating, hammering at him.

  She grabbed him by the hair and shook his head to make him look up and answer her.

  He broke. This woman blasted his loyalty to Percy. His loyalty to the Brotherhood he knew was already withered. He had never heard of la femme fatale, all he knew was that this woman was ruling him, that he felt himself an inferior part of her, and had to give in to her, because the whole is greater than the part. He wept a little and came out with his story through little sobs. It had to come out. He was sick with keeping it in. Maybe now he could sleep at night without bad dreams and take his dinner with some pleasure in what he was eating. It was like putting down a heavy load he had been carrying too far without a rest.

  ‘I haven’t got loads but I know where there is loads because it was me that found it in the cellar, in the cellar in the school. I said we ought to tell the police and I thought Percy would agree but he didn’t, and he’s giving it out to the gang every week but I wouldn’t take any. Everybody was getting money so I thought why shouldn’t I get a share because it was me that found it, but I didn’t want it for myself like them, they’ve been spending it on rubbish and things they can’t use, but I could take hundreds for you if it’s money you want. You went away to get money, so if it’s money you want I can get you hundreds, or thousands if you like. I can get it if you want it, cause I know there’s still loads left in spite of Percy. I know. I’ve seen it. But I don’t like it. I still think the police ought to be told. You don’t know what’s behind it.’

  He stopped. He couldn’t speak any more. His sobs and his stammer beat him.

  The husband and wife looked at each other anxiously, each seeming to expect the other to have the solution.

  ‘Has he been keeping all right?’ Mrs Garson whispered across the table, her clutch on her son’s thick hair slackening to an absent-minded caress of his skull.

  ‘There’s never been a thing w
rong with him since you went away,’ Mr Garson answered aggressively, provoked at the insinuation that the boy was mad and he didn’t know it.

  Mrs Garson put one hand across her son’s forehead. It was fevered all right, but hardly the fever of delirium. She was a woman, she was an intelligent woman. She had intuition. She could recognize when the truth was passing by, whatever odd garment it was wearing at the moment. She kept at the broken boy, determined to make him whole again. His life was more important to her than her own. She was only the tree. The fruit was more important. She couldn’t be at peace till she had made sense of him. She nagged at him, patiently, kindly though sometimes a little harshly, but always bearing down firmly on the issue. Her husband sat admiring her with a silent grudge. He could never have done what she was doing, but he saw she was right. She kept at the boy. She bullied him, she loved him, she smacked him, she caressed him. She was a good mother to him. She went over and over his story with him, sobering him with her careful questions. Even Mr Daunders could have learnt something of the art of interrogation from her. She even got out of him the story of how Savage had picked on him for not taking a share of the money and then dragged her name into it before the fight that turned out to be a massacre.

  ‘So there’s the fight you were trying to tell me about,’ she said indignantly to her husband. ‘You didn’t dig very deep, did you?’

  ‘Well, damn it all,’ he retorted, just as indignant as she was. ‘Boys are always fighting. How was I to know there was—’

  He searched his boyhood for a cutting phrase.

  ‘Buried treasure!’ he finished sarcastically.

  ‘There’s no use talking like that,’ she turned on him. ‘I think you should take him round and see the police.’

  ‘I’m not going near the police, I can tell you that,’ her man answered quickly. ‘I’ll go to the school with him tomorrow morning if you like. I don’t mind seeing old Daunders. I’ve met him before, he’s all right, but I’m not going to no police.’

  He fiddled with his knife and fork across his dirty plate.

  ‘Thousands and thousands,’ he muttered. ‘I’d like to see it.’

  There was silence except for the boy’s diminishing sobs.

  ‘Stop snuffling and redd the table,’ said his father abruptly. ‘Come away ben, Helen, I want to talk to you.’

  The routine job soothed the boy’s nerves and he put a kettle on the gas to get hot water for the dishes. It was good to be alone again, and he felt strangely happy at the way he had been left alone. He could hear a murmuring of earnest conversation in the other room, the clish-clash of two people disputing but not on bad terms. At least they weren’t quarrelling.

  He was drying the knives when his father called him. His parents were standing close together in the lobby between the two rooms, behind the half-open front door.

  ‘Your mother’s going away now,’ said his father. ‘Say goodbye to her.’

  He looked up at her and said nothing. She clutched his hair and shook his head again.

  ‘It’s time you were getting a haircut,’ she said. ‘You might have pinched the price of a haircut out your cellar instead of cheating the barber. Well, I’ll be seeing you.’

  ‘Go and get your dishes done,’ his father muttered and pushed him back into the kitchen.

  ‘I’ve done the dishes,’ he answered, grudging the way he was dismissed, but he had to go, with that strong hand thrusting him.

  Yet as he returned to the sink he was aware over his shoulder that his parents were still standing there together. He had a quick glimpse of them coming together in a swift hug and he knew they were kissing.

  ‘Will she be coming back?’ he risked later in the evening, an impulse letting him say what an hour’s brooding hadn’t given him the courage to say.

  ‘Who’s she?’ his father asked primly.

  ‘M-my m-mother,’ he took the rebuke nervously. Sometimes the ‘m’s were as unpredictable as the ‘l’s.

  ‘Well, you don’t just call your mother she. You speak of her with some respect. You say my mother, you don’t refer to her as she.’

  His father rested a moment after the strain of that lecture on etiquette. Then he answered the question.

  ‘Of course she’ll be coming back. But not tonight. These things take time. She’s got – I mean your mother’s got to settle things up where she’s living. But you’ll see her at the end of the week. It’ll be all right, don’t you worry. Now about this story of yours, you’ve got to come with me tomorrow and we’ll see your headmaster and we’ll go into it and—’

  His father blethered on, but he wasn’t listening. The money seemed of no importance. He was glad it was out of his hands.

  ‘Your mother’ll be there too,’ his father was saying. ‘She can speak better than I can. She’s good at explaining things. You know, your mother could talk the hind leg off a donkey once she gets started.’

  ‘Will she be staying here, I mean will my mother be staying here?’ the boy felt bold enough to ask. He was amazed at the difference in his father. He had never seen him so light and cheery. He remembered an encyclopedia he had seen in the school library. It showed the mammoths that once roamed over Europe before the coming of the Ice Age, and then it had drawings showing the retreat of the Ice Age. His father, once so huge and cold, now seemed a new and smaller continent, a Europe after an ice age.

  ‘Well, maybe not here,’ said the altered man. ‘I was just telling your mother. They’re building an awful lot of petrol stations the now on all the main roads out of the city. You know away up between Springburn and Bishopbriggs, aye and on to Kirkintilloch? There’s nothing but petrol stations on both sides of the road. Well, I know one of them, but it’s not out that way, it’s more the Stepps direction, and it’s actually got a house above the station. How would you like to live in a place like that? You see, this place never suited your mother. It was far too small, and she couldn’t be doing with buildings all round her. Your mother was born in the country. She wouldn’t mind living out in the wilderness again. And then you see she’d have space for the kind of things she wants. I can get that job there with the house above it, with two bedrooms too, mind you, I can get it if I want it. There’s nothing I don’t know about cars. I could manage a place like that with my eyes shut. Anybody would do for the pumps, but what they want is a man that would know what to do in an emergency, a manager. That’s me.’

  He had never heard his father boast before. He listened, fascinated. But he wasn’t so much concerned with his father’s ability to cope with a service and filling-station as with the prospect of escape. If he had to go to the police, if he had to tell old Daundy all about the cellar, it didn’t matter any more. Once it would have frightened him, but not now. Once he would have feared the vengeance of the Brotherhood, but now he could leave the Brotherhood behind him just as easily as he had stopped reading the Beano. As for Percy, he found he had no feeling. Yesterday he would have died for him. Today, he wouldn’t cross the street to speak to him. So sudden is the death of a boy’s love. And his mother would be there. He hadn’t felt the least bit jealous when he knew his father was hugging and kissing her like a man and woman on television. On the contrary, he was pleased. It made his father a better and surer means of bringing his mother back than all that business about the money. He didn’t want to go through with that. Now he was up against the test he had blundered into, he still didn’t want to touch the money. He was at peace that they hadn’t asked him to get the hundreds and thousands he had said he could get. He could trust them. He would sleep tonight all right.

  ‘Who is this Percy fellow anyway?’ his father was asking him.

  ‘Oh, he’s a nice big fellow,’ the boy answered vaguely. ‘But he’s a bit up in the clouds most of the time. You see, he’s a kind of poet.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘It’s a very true saying when you come to think about it,’ Percy told himself as he went carefully down the chute, his little to
rch stabbing the darkness with a long dagger of light. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt. They’ve forgot they ever made a gentlemen’s agreement, so they have. They don’t even bother to come to the Friday Night Service any more, well, most of them anyway, there was only four there last week counting me, and when they do come they just mumble through it and want to get out quick. They’ve no respect for anything now. And you can’t trust them. I don’t trust Savage for one. He’s sleekit, that fellow. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was getting in somehow and shifting it. Anyway there’s some of them getting money behind my back. Well, it doesn’t matter to me now, I’m finished with them. I’ve wasted too much of my time on them already.’

  The cellar was eerie with so much throbbing darkness fighting powerfully against the thin yellow line of his torch, and he shivered a little. But that was his nerves, not the cold. He had never been farther away from his front-close than the banks of Loch Lomond, and now he was set to go to Land’s End. It didn’t seem possible to go any farther, short of leaving the country altogether – and that would have meant getting a passport, but he couldn’t get his own passport till he was twenty-one. So Land’s End it had to be.

  ‘My Ultimate Thool,’ he called it.

  From Land’s End he would travel along the coast. He could buy a mo-bike when he got there. When he found a good spot far from anywhere he would buy a little cottage. There must be hundreds of cottages in these lonely parts of England. He would find one where the sun was warm, the sky was clear, and the waves were dancing fast and bright. Then he would settle in and write a play for television. Not for the money. He didn’t need money. But it would be great to see the words on the screen: Specially Written for Television by Percy Phinn. That would be one in the eye for old Elginbrod if she was still living, the old bitch. He had thought of a good title too. Rabbits With Ostrich Feathers. He liked that. It was striking, puzzling, original. All he had to do was get to Land’s End, find a cottage, get peace and quiet, and think up a plot.