The Ends of Our Tethers

by Alasdair Gray

  “Your wish is my command,” I said jumping up and dressing.

  The nearest provision store was a street away. I returned in less than fifteen minutes and found her in the middle of the floor, clutching her hair and dressed as if her clothes had been thrust on in panic. She screamed, “Where have you been?”

  “Buying what you ordered,” I said, displaying tart and ice cream. She slumped grumpily into a chair while I prepared them in the kitchen. Later, while eating, I asked what had made her hysterical. She said, “You left me alone in this strange house and I thought you would come back hours later stinking of whisky and wanting us to do it again.”

  I did want us to do it again but was not greedy enough to insist. I told her I was a freelance programmer who worked at home and I detested booze because my dad had been alcoholic. She looked pleased then said slowly and slyly, “Regarding the dad situation, ditto. Ditto but if disorder is confined to the family apartments others do not notice. And if you too detest alcohol and work at home like all sensible people it is possible, cunt, that you may be possible.”

  I laughed at that and said, “Possibly you are too. Where are you from?”

  “I have already said they do not want me to say.”

  I explained that I was not interested in her disgustingly snobbish family but assumed she had not been long in Glasgow. She said cautiously, “Until the day before yesterday, or maybe the day before that, I occupied a quite nice caravan in a field of them. People came and went. Mostly went.”

  “There must have been a town or village near your caravan park.”

  “There was a village and the sea but neither was convenient. I ate in a hotel called The Red Fox. I met the man who brought me here in The Red Fox. He turned out to be most unpleasant, not my sort at all.”

  “Have you things in his house? Things you want to collect?”

  “What things?”

  “A nightgown? Clothes?”

  “No. Certainly not. Not at all. Please don’t be a …” She hesitated then said quickly, “cunt give me a glass of milk.”

  It is almost impossible to judge the intelligence of someone from an alien culture so I have never discovered exactly how stupid or mad Tilda is. She behaved as if she expected to live with me. I wanted that too so it was hardly a sign of her insanity. Lunatics are supposed to have delusions. Tilda had none. She said what she meant or expected in a few clear words that always made sense. Only secrecy about her family and her compulsion to say cunt were inexplicable at first, and from remarks she passed in the following two weeks I soon pieced together an explanation.

  Her “people” (she never said father or mother) ran a residential hotel or nursing home for “people of our own sort”. They seemed a pernickety sort because “everything has to be just so.”

  I asked what just so meant. She said, “Exactly right forever and ever world without end amen. Dinner was awful. We had to dress.”

  “In tuxedos and black ties?”

  “Tuxedo is an American word. We British say evening dress. Female evening wear is less uniform than male attire but more taxing. Little hankies are an endless ordeal. I fidgeted with mine which is not the done thing, in fact utterly wrong, in fact a rotten way to carry on and I became quite impossible when I started (cunt) using (cunt) that word (cunt cunt).”

  Tilda’s use of that word had obviously been an unconscious but sensible device to escape from bullying relations. They had lodged her in a caravan park very far from them (“half a day’s car ride away”) and made her promise not to mention their name because “if word gets around it will be bad for the business and we aren’t exactly rolling in money.”

  This made me think their business was a sanatorium for rich mental defectives whose guardians might have doubts about the establishment if they knew people on the staff had an eccentric daughter. I suspected too that Tilda’s people were less posh than they wished. The few very posh people I have met care nothing for elaborate etiquette and swear like labourers. But Tilda’s family had given her worse eccentricities than that Anglo-Saxon word.

  Next day I arose later than usual, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers on a tray in bed and got down to business. At ten she came into the workroom wearing my dressing gown and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, placidly watching figures and images I manipulated on the screen. Shortly after eleven she announced that she wanted a coffee. I said, “Good idea. Make me one too.”

  She cried indignantly, “I can’t do that! I don’t know how!”

  “I’ll tell you how,” I said, treating the matter as a joke, “In the kitchen you will see an electric kettle on a board by the sink. Fill it with tap water and switch on the heat. There is also a jar of instant coffee powder on the board, a drawer of cutlery below, mugs hanging on hooks above. Take two mugs, put a small spoonful of powder in each, add boiling water and stir. Add milk and sugar to yours if you like, but I take my coffee black.”

  She stamped out of the room and shortly returned with a mug she slammed down defiantly on my worktop. It contained lukewarm water with brown grains floating on top. When I complained she said, “I told you I can’t make coffee.”

  I found that Tilda could wash and dress herself, eat and drink politely, talk clearly and truthfully and also (though I didn’t know how she learned it) fuck with astonishing ease. Everything else had been done for her so she stubbornly refused to learn anything else.

  Despite which our first weeks together were very happy. She added little to my housework. Former wives had insisted on making meals or being taken out for them. Tilda ate what I served without a word of complaint, nor did she litter the rooms with cosmetic tubes, powders, lotions, toilet tissues, fashion magazines and bags of shopping. She hated shopping and refused to handle money. I gathered that “her people” had never given her any, paying the caravan rent and Red Fox food bills by bank order. She brought to my house only the clothes she wore, clothes passed to her by someone of similar size, I think an older sister. By threatening to chuck her out unless she accompanied me and by ordering a taxi I got her into the women’s department of Marks and Spencer. Buying her clothes was not the slightly erotic adventure I had hoped as she cared nothing for what she wore and would have let me dress her like an outrageous prostitute had the garments been comfortable. But there is no fun in buying sexy clothes for folk who don’t feel sexy, so I bought simple, conventional garments of the kind her sister had given, but more modern and in better-matching colours. I did not then notice that her attitude to clothes and making love were the same. She never restricted the pleasures I had with her in bed once or twice a night, so only later did I see she was indifferent to them.

  Being together outside bed was also easy because we had no social life and did not want one. Since expulsion from her people’s “rather grand place” her only society seemed to have been fellow diners in The Red Fox, and she would not have eloped with “that other man” if she had liked them much. My own social life once depended on friends met through my wives and a job in local housing, but during the last marriage I had become a freelance working at home, which perhaps drove away wife number 3. Since then I had managed without friends, parties et cetera. I like films and jazz I enjoyed in my teens. I play them on my computer and discuss them over the internet with fellow enthusiasts in England, Denmark and America so need no other society. An afternoon stroll in the park kept me fit. Tilda managed without even that. Apart from the Marks and Spencer’s visit she has only left the flat once since entering it.

  Our daily routine was this. After an early morning cuddle I rose, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers in bed, laid out her clothes for the day, put dirty clothes in the washing machine, started work. Tilda arose around ten, I made coffee for us at eleven thirty and a snack lunch at one. Then came my afternoon stroll and shopping expedition which she bitterly resented. I insisted on being away for at least ninety minutes but had to mark the exact minute of return on the clock face, and if I was a single minute late she got in
to a furious sulk. Then came a cup of tea and biscuit, then two or three hours of more programming, then I made the evening meal, we consumed it, I did some housework, internetted for a little and so to bed. And wherever I was working Tilda sat on the floor, looking perfectly relaxed, sometimes frowning and pouting but often with a strange little satisfied smile. I assumed she was remembering the people and place she had escaped from. I once asked what she was thinking about and she murmured absent-mindedly, “Least said soonest mended. Curiosity killed the cat.”

  I asked if she would like a television set? A Walkman radio? Magazines? She said, “A properly furnished mind cunt is its own feast cunt and does not need such expensive and foolish extravagancies.”

  But she did not often use the cunt word now and when she saw an arresting image on my screen sometimes asked about it. I always answered fully and without technical jargon. Sometimes she heard me out and said “Right”, sometimes cut me short with a crisp “Enough said”, so I never knew how much she understood. When someone speaks with the accent and idiom of British cabinet ministers and bank managers and company directors it is hard not to suspect them of intelligence. I sometimes think even now that Tilda might be trained to use a computer. Many undeveloped minds take to it easily, having nothing to unlearn.

  But during our mid-day snack one day the entry-phone rang very loud and long. Tilda stared at me in alarm.

  “A parcel delivery,” I said to reassure her, but without believing it. Part of me had been expecting such a ring. A crisp voice on the phone said, “I am here to see Matilda and if you try to stop me I will summon the police.”

  I opened the door to a tiny old woman who looked nothing like Tilda except for the determined look on her terribly lined face.

  “You are?” I asked, thinking she was a grandmother or aunt. She walked past me into the lobby saying, “Where?”

  I pointed to the sitting-room doorway and followed her through.

  Tilda sat at the end of a sofa where I had left her but her arms were now folded tightly round her body and she had turned to face the wall.

  “Well!” said the little woman. Standing in the middle of the floor she drew a deep breath and thus addressed the back of Tilda’s head.

  “You will be pleased to hear, delighted to know, ecstatic to be informed that it has cost us a very pretty penny in private detectives to track you here. A small fortune. More than a family not exactly rolling in wealth can afford, you ungrateful, inconsiderate, selfish, shameless, debauched what? What shall I call you? Slut is too mild a word but I refuse to soil my lips with anything more accurate. And you, sir!” – she turned to me – “You cannot alas be sued for abducting a minor but we have lawyers who will make you wish you had never been born if you try to get as much as a farthing out of us. Not a chance. No dice. Nothing doing sonny boy.”

  I told her I had no intention of getting money out of Tilda or her family. She said, “Fine words butter no parsnips. Are you going to marry her?”

  I said we had not yet discussed that. She told the back of Tilda’s head, “Make him marry you. It’s your one chance of security.” She then strolled round my flat as if she was the only one in it, fingering curtains and furnishings and examining ornaments while I stared in amazement. Returning from an inspection of workroom, kitchen and lavatory she spoke as firmly but less fiercely.

  “Matilda, I admit this is not the Glasgow hell-hole the detective agency led me to expect. Maybe you have landed lucky. This second cavalier of yours certainly seems more presentable than what I have heard about the first who picked you up. So marry this one. We don’t want you. Having made that crystal clear I will take my leave. I have a car waiting. Goodbye.” “Come back!” I cried as she turned to go, for I was angry and wished to annoy her, “Come back! Your address please.”

  “What can you possibly want with my address?”

  I told her I was willing to believe Tilda had been brought up so meanly that she had no personal belongings in what was once her home, but marriage had been mentioned. That would need copies of a birth certificate and notification of her parents’ occupations and place of residence. The little old lady said, “Oh, very haughty. Very cunning.”

  She took a printed card from a purse, laid it on a sideboard and, scribbling on it with a slim small pencil, said through clenched teeth, “I am substituting – my name – for your father’s, Matilda, because he died a fortnight ago of a stroke in his bath. Not a messy business thank goodness. This news of course holds no interest for you. All the affection was on his side, though it was not a very exalted form of affection and you might have done more to discourage him. I can leave now, I think.”

  She had been perhaps ten minutes in the flat but it now felt as if she had burned huge dirty holes with a flame-thrower in floor, walls and ceiling. I wanted to go outside and walk in the fresh air, but could not persuade Tilda to move or turn her face from the wall. I tried soothing words but she stayed silent. I laid my hand gently on her shoulder but she shook it off and sat where she was until long after nightfall. When she came to bed at last she would not let me cuddle her but lay as far from me as possible. Next day she did not get up and hardly touched the food I brought. I could not bear to leave her alone in the house that afternoon. At night when I came to bed I discovered she had peed in it. That made me furious enough to drag her out and wash her. While making a clean bed on the floor I told her I would send for a doctor if she did not pull herself together. She said nothing. I asked if she wanted me to send for a doctor. She said, “If you do I will scream.”

  I told her that if she screamed when a doctor came he would quickly whisk her into a mental hospital. At this she turned her face to the wall again.

  “Tilda,” I said, pleading, “I realise your father’s death has been a terrible shock, but you mustn’t just lie down and fall apart. Is there nothing I can do to help?” She muttered, “You know what you can do.”

  “Honestly, Tilda, I don’t know! How can

  I know?”

  “Because she told you.”

  “Who told me?”

  “My mother told you. Twice.”

  That our wicked little visitor was Tilda’s mother had never occurred to me. I thought furiously back over her words then said, “If you mean, Tilda, that you want us to marry, of course I’ll do it if that will restore us to being as friendly and loving as we were before she stormed in.” “Don’t bank on it!” said Tilda bitterly between clenched teeth, sounding so like her mother that I felt the short hairs on my neck bristle. I tried to be reasonable and explained there was no point in marrying if it did us no good. She neither answered nor turned her head but I saw tears pouring from her eyes, saw she was shuddering with soundless sobs. What horrible training had taught her to weep noiselessly? The sight maddened me. The madness took the form of promising to marry her as soon as possible. At last I got her into the clean new improvised bed and we fell asleep cuddling again. Something had been regained and something lost. Tilda’s mother had brought me to the same start as my previous marriages.

  Several days had to elapse before the marriage. During them Tilda refused me the lovemaking I had once taken for granted, but we cuddled at night and steady cuddling has always nourished me more than the irregular pleasures of fucking. I was also fool enough to think that, despite the past, we had a honeymoon ahead and suggested visiting Spain, Greece or Barbados.

  “Why?” asked Tilda.

  I pointed to colourful pictures in a spread of travel brochures and said, “Bright sunshine. Blue skies. Warm sea. Soft sand.” “Foolish extravagance and a waste of good money. We aren’t exactly rolling in it.”

  “The money is mine, Tilda, and I promise I have enough to easily pay for a trip.”

  “Nobody who knows anything about money ever has enough,” she said contemptuously. I was glad she no longer seemed pathetic. Nowadays on rising she sat around the sitting room instead of joining me in the workroom. It was a healthy sign of growing independence, tho
ugh I missed her silent company.

  I wrote to tell Tilda’s mother of the wedding, suggested one of her family should witness it, received in reply a card saying, “My brother-in-law will attend.” We met him at the registry office: a big laconic man with an expression suggesting all that happened was his own very private little joke. I suspected him of being a highly self-controlled drunkard though he smelled of nothing worse than the tweeds he wore. The witness I had invited was Henderson, a freelance programmer whose character was like mine – we shared business when one of us had too much of it. After the signing I took the four of us for a meal at The Ubiquitous Chip despite Tilda muttering, “Do we have to do this?” She refused to drink anything but soda water and lime or eat anything but ice cream. For us men her uncle ordered preprandial brandies, wine with the food, and after the dessert an astonishingly expensive champagne with which he gave a toast prefaced by the words, “Be upstanding.” He and I and Henderson stood holding fluted glasses with what resembled mist arising from them while Tilda sat glowering into her third dish of ice cream. Her uncle said, “Here’s to the blushing bride. Here’s also, more importantly I think, to a very honourable groom. You!” – he suddenly stared straight at me without the faintest trace of a smile – “You are a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” He emptied his glass, said he must rush for a train and left. I am unable to regard him as a parasitic clown because later I found he had paid for the drink, which cost much more than the food.

  Tilda and I went home, both entering the flat with sighs of obvious relief. Tenderly I helped her off with her outer garments and was about to undo inner ones when she said, “Don’t be silly.”