A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  They were friends. They shared the sorrow of having blundered into Tordoch when they had set sail for a different port altogether. They were bewildered and frustrated, the way Columbus was when he tripped over the West Indies instead of making landfall in Asia. They couldn’t understand what had gone wrong with their navigation. Granny Lyons saw no escape. She knew it was a life sentence, at her age. Enrico was younger and so more optimistic. He said he would move to a better area soon and get a good-going shop.

  She liked to hear him talk about his plans. His accent charmed her. His voice was more lively and his tone more varied than anything the natives could manage with their flat utterance of half-swallowed syllables. She was fascinated by the energetic movement of his lips and the expressive assistance of his hands and shoulders. She preferred the vigorous activity of his mouth under the drooping moustache to the slack-jawed speech of his customers who mumbled at him with their hands in their pockets.

  His vocabulary too amused her. He knew all the dialect words and the local slang. He came out with the standard obscenities as fluently as anyone else in Tordoch, but he used them with an earnest innocence that made them sound decent. How was he to know they weren’t? He was no student of semantics, any more than that foreign girl, the wife of some literary gent, who typed a draft of that thing Lawrence wrote. Like Enrico, she assumed the gamekeeper’s tetragrams were normal usage in polite society. Naturally enough, like Enrico, she brought them into her conversation to show her command of English idiom. And naturally enough she was puzzled when her husband and his cultured friends said she must never use those words again.

  Not that Enrico was limited to four-letter words. Suddenly, in the same sentence, he would get his tongue round some polysyllable as if it too was a commonplace of intercourse between a man and a woman. He often misapplied and mispronounced the big word, showing he had never heard it used, but had merely met it in print somewhere.

  When that happened Granny Lyons didn’t hesitate to tell him. She knew him too well and he knew her too well for any offence to be given or taken. She saw no use trying to stop him using the monosyllables he heard the natives use every time they opened their mouth. But if he was going to use big words she wanted him to get them right. He was grateful to her.

  One day he spoke to her about Gerald Provan. His hands tried to help his tongue and his big brown eyes were sad.

  ‘He’s a perpernicious youth,’ he ended.

  ‘That’s very good,’ she commended him. ‘But just say pernicious. Imust tell my nephew what you said. He’ll like it. He had the same opinion when he taught that boy. Aye, and there’s a lot more like him he’s still teaching, poor man.’

  ‘Your nephew not happy in that school?’ he lilted. Eyebrows up. Eyes popping. Polite surprise. He shrugged and answered himself. ‘No, I suppose no. Who could be?’

  He shook his head slowly to indicate defeat, exhaled wearily through pursed lips, and murmured inoffensively, ‘Shower of fucking bastards, that’s all they are. I know them.’

  He was not without self-esteem. He believed he was superior to the autochthonous tribes he served.

  ‘They come in here and they look down on Enrico,’ he complained to her. ‘They call me a tally. They say, hey, tally-wally! Hey, you, Nello!’

  He snapped his fingers, acting customers calling him.

  ‘Like you call a dog. I leave Naples with my father. Me? Just a baby. We come to Scotland. Then the war. My father? Taken away. His own kind, his own kind mind you, frightened him. He had to join something. I don’t know what. I know politics never his care. But the police have his name. So. Internment they say. He goes down in the Andorra Star. My mother? She live. Somehow. She work hard. Brings me up. I never much go to the school. But I work. I learn by ear. My mother and me, we speak our father’s language at home. I marry. I have family. I come out here. Open my own shop. Me. Enrico Ianello from Naples. I have no boss. Ianello’s boss is Enrico. Poor boy makes it good. I speak their language. Can they speak mine? Speak mine? They can’t even speak their own fucking language.’

  ‘That’s very true,’ said Granny Lyons.

  ‘But yet still they look down on Enrico. I ask you. Tell me. The other night I say to that Poggy one, don’t be so obstreperous. Says he to me, what the fucking hell you mean, mac. Says I to him, you mac not me. All you Scotch fucking macs. Not clever there, me. He put a great big bloody brick through my window that night. That’s three times in four months my window in.’

  ‘They’re getting worse,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘I’ve had mine in twice since Christmas.’

  ‘A shop, well,’ he granted. His hands moved to say there were some things you had to put up with in this world. ‘But not a house.’

  ‘But I’m on the ground floor, you know,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘At a bad corner too. I wouldn’t mind getting a room right at the top of one of those thirty-two storey flats they’re building now. Away from it all, well above them.’

  ‘You well above them all right,’ said Enrico.

  He told her about his new juke-box.

  ‘Biggest mistake of my life,’ he wailed. ‘Pay for itself in a month says the man. Will bring in the young ones. Oh, big deal! Yes, brings them in too damn true. And in one night they drink what? One coffee, one coke. And what do I get? The sound of noise all night. I like hear singing. I sing myself. My father too. My mother tells me. Fine voice. You know, Italian. Not what these ignorant bastards go for.’

  And indeed she knew he loved the bel canto. Often in an afternoon when the shop was quiet because the boys and girls were at school, she would go in to hear him singing in the back scullery as he prepared ice-lollies for the fridge. He was Manrico singing farewell to his Leonora, the Duke singing about the nobility of women, or Cavaradossi singing that the stars were shining.

  When she heard him enjoying himself like that with his untrained tenor, she was moved to affection for him and made no sound till he finished his aria. Then she would sing out and he would come and chat with her. She would put her old-fashioned handbag on the counter and rest her forearms across the straps, hardly holding them. She was at peace in a calm oasis somewhere between the desert of three and four p. m., and Enrico too was carefree.

  On one such afternoon their pleasant counter-talk was interrupted by the entrance of three lanky hairy youths in donkey-jackets and tight trousers. They came in hipswaying as if Enrico’s cafe was a saloon in a Western and they were tough hombres on the trail who had just hitched their horses to the rail outside.

  ‘Lucky strike,’ said the first.

  His mates loitered behind Granny Lyons.

  ‘Excusa-me,’ said Enrico to Granny Lyons.

  He attended to his strange customers. Eyebrows raised, eyes questioning.

  ‘Lucky strike,’ repeated the gunless cowboy.

  Enrico’s eyebrows came down to a puzzled frown.

  The cowboy tried again.

  ‘Day ye sell Lucky Strike?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Enrico. ‘American cigarettes. Some I have.’

  He turned to the shelves.

  ‘But not Lucky Strike. Chesterfield, Stuyvesant. And I have—’

  Even as he began naming the brands he had in stock he had a dim feeling he was being silly. But he was that bit slow. One of the cowboys behind Granny Lyons charged at her like a football-player giving away a penalty. She tottered and teetered, lost her balance and fell. Her handbag remained on the counter. The other cowboy snatched it. The one that had asked for Lucky Strike knocked over a jar of hardboiled sweets and threw a tray of Wrigley’s pk at Enrico’s face. In a split second the three bandits ran out together.

  Granny Lyons clawed at the counter and got back on her feet. Enrico raced out of his shop like a whippet. Granny Lyons wept and trembled.

  ‘Oh, not again,’ she whimpered. ‘Not again.’

  Enrico came back, a lot slower than he had gone out.

  ‘Hopeless,’ he lamented, pulling his hair. ‘They dive in a close roun
d the corner. I see them. By the time I get there, gone. Up the stairs, across the back-court, through another close? Who knows?’

  ‘Oh well, it might have been worse,’ said Granny Lyons.

  Her hands quivered as she tidied her grey hairs and smoothed her coat and skirt. She felt handless without her handbag. The loss diminished her.

  Enrico saw how she felt. He wept in vexation.

  ‘It’s as well I was here,’ she comforted him. ‘Or it might have been the till they tried. And God knows what they might have done to you if you’d been alone. Lucky it was only me. They didn’t get much. My God. Let them ask for it if they’re that hard up and I’ll give them it.’

  ‘I give in,’ said Enrico.

  He wiped his brimming brown eyes with the cuff of his white jacket.

  It may have been the saying of it made him think of surrender, or he may only have been saying what he wouldn’t admit before. But from that day he lost heart. He was ashamed of his shop. He hadn’t the spirit to fight its invaders any longer. He was sick of non-paying customers, bullies and rioters. The booths where he had hoped to encourage a cafe society of young people discussing politics and literature and foreign affairs were an offence to the eye. The woodwork was hacked and scratched, the walls were defaced with the sprawling initials of his patrons, the floor was fouled with discarded wads of chewing-gum. The local lads and lasses had annexed his shop as a colony for revelry and disorder. They quarrelled at the drop of a joke and fights over nothing happened every night in the week. Enrico was always expecting to see blood shed but it never quite came to that.

  In an attempt to get some peace and quiet he put the juke-box out of commission. Too often it caused a fight between rival fans of different singers. But without it the boys and girls made their own noise, and that was worse.

  He made a last effort to get control. One wild night some laughing youths tested the solidity of the table in the back booth by kicking it from underneath and then jumping on it from the bench. They threw crisps across the cafe and poured coke into the coffees of the mixed company in the next booth. There was a lot of recrimination, and a threat and a challenge were heard. The uproar led to some punching and wrestling and somebody got up from the floor with a knife in his hand and a nasty look in his eyes. The girls screamed, some in terror, some in delight. Enrico phoned for the police.

  By the time two policemen arrived the cafe was empty except for Gerald Provan sitting in the middle booth with Poggy, having a quiet conversation with Wilma and Jennifer. Gerald wasn’t intimidated by a phone call. He knew Enrico knew what would happen if he named anybody.

  Enrico told the policemen about the disturbance. He said the culprits had run away as soon as they heard him phone from the back-shop. He didn’t know any of them. The boy who had drawn a knife? He had never seen him before. They were all strangers. Gerald sat back listening, his face solemn and sympathetic.

  ‘It’s a shame, Mr Ianello, so it is,’ he said.

  The two policemen gave Gerald and his company a hard look but said nothing. They went away. Enrico felt very foolish. After midnight his windows were smashed. For a week after that he had nuisance calls, sometimes at one and two in the morning. The various speakers threatened him and his wife and family. One call particularly alarmed him.

  ‘Do that again,’ said the voice in the earpiece, ‘and I’ll cut your throat from ear to ear.’

  And then the speaker laughed at him.

  He was going over some bills and his bank statement one night after the shop was closed. His flat above the cafe was quiet, his wife and two children were asleep. Into the hush there moved a vague scuffling and a susurrus of hostile voices. He looked up from his counting and listened. He was always frightened until he located and interpreted what he was hearing. It was youths quarrelling in the street. He waited for them to pass. They didn’t. Then his shop door was battered and young voices were raised, calling him. He could have thought his house was on fire, the way they were carrying on. He tiptoed downstairs and stood behind the door to the street. It was double-leaved, made of stout wood, double-locked and double-bolted. He felt safe enough. They would need an axe to break in. He heard his name called again.

  ‘En-RI-co I-a-NEL-lo!’

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, close to the wood.

  There was no answer.

  Upstairs, his wife and family wakened and listened, puzzled.

  ‘What do you want?’ Enrico shouted through the wood.

  He tried to sound tough and abrupt, a dangerous man to annoy.

  ‘You,’ said a bass voice, no less terrifying because it was disguised.

  The appalling monosyllable was followed by a crescendo of insane screeching and hysterical laughter, male and female. Enrico trembled in the dark. The assault on the door was renewed. He half expected it to come in, so fierce was the hammering and kicking. It didn’t. But while he waited for signs of it cracking and shouted to his wife to phone the police, one of his windows had a brick through it. He pulled his hair and cursed when he heard the glass shatter. His wife screamed on her way to the phone. Then there was silence.

  That was when he gave in. He made his surrender public and got his name in the papers. He had a nephew Gino who was a football reporter on the local evening paper, and Gino put a colleague in the news department on to it. Enrico’s rambling account of his grievances was printed in an edited version.

  ‘I cannot continue to live in this city. I must think of the safety of my wife and children. This has been building up. These people have made my life a misery with threats of violence over the phone. They have made my shop a shambles. I tried to give them service. They do not seem to want it. I am not saying where I will go. They said they will follow me if they find out.’

  He went away, and nobody ever knew where, except Granny Lyons. She missed him, but she told him to go. He tried to sell his shop with the flat above it but nobody wanted that kind of shop and house in that kind of district. The abandoned cafe became a derelict site where children played, and all the metal fittings and lead guttering were stripped by nocturnal raiders.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the new session Mr Alfred was given the same class of girls again for the same three periods. He made no complaint. It was what he wanted, to keep on seeing Rose Weipers. His fondness for her became egregious. It caused talk behind his back.

  ‘I knew none of them would ever take a crush on him,’ said Mr Brown. ‘But I never thought he would take a crush on one of them.’

  ‘If it keeps him happy why should you worry?’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Mr Brown. ‘A good teacher treats all his pupils alike.’

  Mr Campbell took his pipe from his mouth and put down his crossword. Clue: View an orphan hasn’t got. It was his function in the staffroom to correct the errors of his colleagues.

  ‘I don’t know that’s true,’ he said. ‘Pupils come in different styles. The right thing is to treat them accordingly. Not all alike. That’s wrong.’

  A disputation started.

  ‘You’re missing the point the lot of you,’ said Mr Dale. ‘If it makes him human surely it’s a good thing whether it’s right or wrong.’

  ‘How can it be a good thing if it’s wrong?’ asked Mr Brown. ‘Talk sense.’

  ‘It depends what you mean,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘A good thing. What do you mean by good?’

  ‘I mean he said good morning to me on the bus this morning,’ said Mr Dale. ‘Shows you how love can mellow an old crab.’

  ‘It depends what you mean by love,’ said Mr Campbell.

  ‘If you just mean a mellowing influence, then all you’re saying is a mellowing influence mellows.’

  ‘I agree a teacher should like kids,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘If he doesn’t he’s in the wrong job. But for a man to get especially fond of one pupil, above all a girl and a growing girl at that, I don’t think that’s right.’

  ‘But all girls are growi
ng girls,’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘Till they stop growing. Then they’re women. And what’s wrong with a man loving a woman tell me.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I gather it’s still quite common. But that’s not the point. It’s a teacher loving a girl in his class we’re talking about.’

  ‘Who says he loves her?’ said Mr Dale. ‘Maybe he just likes her. Sure we all have a Rose. I mean, you can’t help liking some kids more than others. It’s only natural.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Mr Campbell.

  ‘You’ve got to define your terms. Natural, for instance. You say it’s only natural. What do you mean by natural? You can have unnatural affection too you know.’

  Mr Alfred came in. In his right hand he carried a poke with the two rolls brought by the Rose who had just left him. He was singing softly the words of Longfellow’s translation of Müller’s ‘Wohin’, following but never quite catching Schubert’s tune.

  I know not what came o’er me,

  Nor who the counsel gave,

  But I must hasten downward,

  All with my pilgrim stave.

  He put the poke on the table and went through to the wash-hand basin.

  ‘See, the big bugger’s happy,’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘Would you grudge him it?’

  ‘Too young a rose to pluck,’ said Mr Brown.

  They heard him sing louder as he turned on the taps.

  Thou has with thy soft murmur

  Murmured my senses away.

  ‘Oh that’s that thing, ich hört’ ein Bächlein rauschen,’ Mr Kerr announced, recitative. ‘It sounds better in the German of course. You can’t beat the Germans for lieder.’

  ‘Yes, he does sound happy, doesn’t he,’ said Mr Campbell, and entered panorama in his crossword.

  Mr Alfred was indeed happy. He thought he had reason to be. Before she went away Rose let him hold her hand as usual and he stroked her hair and caressed her ear. What was new this time was, she sat on his knee for a minute. He was sitting sideways at his table, tired after being on his feet all morning. When he held out his hand for hers she was an arm’s length from him. He drew her in, meaning only she should come a little nearer. She seemed to take it he meant more. She came right over and sat on one knee.