The Ends of Our Tethers

by Alasdair Gray

  “Since you own this house and pay the rates and go out to work each day,” I told her, “I’ll be the housewife and see to the laundry and cleaning et cetera.” At first she did not mind that arrangement and I was heartily pleased with it because her level of domestic cleanliness was inferior to mine. All she had in common with my first wives was a determination to make the meals we shared.

  Despite meeting number 3 through friends of 2, 3’s closest friends were very different, being female hospital workers who called themselves The Coven, meeting at least once a week in a public lounge bar and once a fortnight for a party at one of their homes. Most had a husband or male partner who abandoned his home when The Coven convened there. Number 3, weather permitting, held barbecues in her garden, at which times I stayed tactfully indoors. Sometimes one of The Coven strolled in and we chatted. I gathered they preferred me to her previous lover, a doctor who had treated her “rather badly”. They also seemed to think me a handy man to have around a house: which made what happened later more surprising.

  Housework became the main source of tension between us. It was I who bought the foodstuffs, washed and dried dishes and put them away with the cutlery and cooking utensils so I naturally began arranging the kitchen cupboards and shelves as neatly as possible, throwing out old jars of spices and condiments on the verge of decay, replacing cracked insanitary crockery with clean, modern things. Instead of being pleased she accused me of trying to erase her. She said the same when I ironed her clothes, folded and put them neatly away.

  “NOBODY irons clothes nowadays,” she yelled, “NOBODY! Chuck them in the airing cupboard like I’ve always done.”

  She probably regarded home as a refuge from her highly regulated hospital life. I worked hard and unsuccessfully to stop my cleanliness and order offending her. I could do no kitchen work when she was home because what she called my “virtuous clattering” enraged her.

  One day she returned from work frowning thoughtfully and when I asked why said shortly, “Nothing,” and when I asked again the following night said, “Just a pain, it doesn’t matter.”

  Strange that a trained nurse belonged to that large class of people who dread referring their illness to a doctor! Luckily she worked in a hospital. A phone call one day told me she had collapsed and was being operated upon for appendicitis with acute peritonitis. I saw her that evening when she had recovered consciousness and acquired an astonishingly young, fresh, new-born look. I sat silently holding her hand, feeling closer to her than I had felt since our first night together. A month passed before she was fit for home and I visited her at least once a day, would have done so twice every day but her bedside during visiting hours was often crowded with hospital friends so she told me to come in the evenings only.

  “What present,” I asked myself, “can I give her when she returns home? Of course! A new kitchen.”

  The renovation carried out by her cheap, quick friend had annoyed me by its awkward shelving, badly hung doors and an old cupboard space walled off with plywood. I imagined many kinds of rot, fungus and insect life burgeoning in there. “Nobody who has been ill,” I told myself, “should return to a home with such a probable source of infection in it.”

  So I had the kitchen completely renovated, expensively and well, with the most modern and easily cleaned equipment, all electric instead of gas. I did not tell her this in hospital, perhaps fooling myself with the notion that she would enjoy the sight of it more when she got home, but of course she at once saw the new kitchen for what it was: a present to me, not her.

  “Yes,” she said, with a cold little smile, “you’ve erased me totally now.”

  I blustered a lot of explanations and apologies then ended by saying that, alas, what had been done could not be undone. She disagreed, saying she could undo it by shifting to a house she could feel at home in – the house of a friend. This house was now only legally hers, so she would sell it and if I was the buyer she would subtract the cost of my new kitchen from a surveyor’s estimate. I begged her to come to bed with me and talk the matter over next day. She made a phone call, packed some clothing and moved that night to the home of the friend. (I later learned he was the doctor who had been her previous lover.) Her last words to me, or the last words I remember were, “This hasn’t been my home since you brought in that bloody machine so you’re welcome to it. At a price.”

  She meant the purchase price of course, with the addition of her complete absence. Did this leave me desolate? Yes. Yes, with a mean little core of satisfaction that for the first time since leaving my parents I would possess a house that was wholly mine. But lying now in the dark with Tilda gently snoring less than two yards from me I started weeping tears I had never shed when number 3 left the house, and when number 2 told me to go to my new woman, and when number 1 said she was divorcing me for another man. I lay weeping for my whole past and could not stop for I suddenly saw what I had never before suspected: that I had lost three splendid women because I had been constantly mean and ungenerous, cold and calculating. Even my lovemaking, I suspected, had not been much more generous than my many acts of solitary masturbation between the marriages. I wept harder than ever. I crawled off the sofa, switched on a lamp and knelt on the floor beside the bed. Tilda stopped snoring, opened her eyes and stared at me.

  “Please, Tilda,” I said between sobs, “please just let me hold your hand for a while.”

  Her alarmed look gave way to puzzlement. She withdrew a hand from under the bedclothes and offered it almost shyly. I took it between mine, being careful not to press very hard, then her eyes opened wider as if she was only now clearly seeing me and she muttered, “Don’t go away. Always be there.”

  Then I saw that she needed me, would

  need nobody but me while our lives lasted.

  With great thankfulness and great

  contentment, holding her hand,

  I fell asleep on the floor

  beside our bed.

  PILLOW TALK

  WAKENING HE TURNED HIS head and saw she was still reading. After a moment he said,

  “About that e-mail you sent.”

  “I never sent you an e-mail,” she said, eyes still on the book.

  “Not before today, perhaps, but this afternoon you e-mailed me and said —”

  “I repeat,” she interrupted, looking hard at him, “I have never sent you or anyone else an e-mail in my life.”

  “But you did send one to the office this afternoon. I remember it perfectly – the heading stating it was from you to me and everyone else in the firm. Why did you have to tell them? You must have sent it from a friend’s computer or one in the public library.” “You’re still drunk.”

  “If you mean I was drunk when we came to bed you are wrong. We had only one bottle of wine with the evening meal and I drank only one more glass of it than you. I’m glad you’re sorry you sent that message but you’ll never persuade me you didn’t.”

  “You’re hallucinating. What am I supposed to have said?”

  “That you want to leave me. Five words – I want to leave you – just that.” She stared at him, shut the book and said bitterly, “Oh, very clever. Cruel, but clever.” “Do you want to leave me?”

  “Yes, but I never told you so. I’ve never told anyone that – they think ours is such a solid marriage. You must have noticed it’s a farce and this is your bloody cunning way of blaming me for something I never said and was never going to say.”

  “Blethers!” he cried, “I am never cunning, never cruel. I remember these words coming up very clear and distinct on the computer screen: I want to leave you.”

  “Then why didn’t you mention it when you came home? Why didn’t you mention it over dinner? Are you going to pretend you were brooding over it before we came to bed?” He thought hard for a while then said, “You’re right. I must have dreamed it before I woke a moment ago.”

  “I’m glad you’ve sobered up,” she said and resumed reading.

  After a whil
e he said, “But you want to leave me.”

  She sighed and said nothing.

  “When will you do it?”

  “I don’t suppose I’ll ever do it,” she murmured, still appearing to read, “I haven’t the courage to live alone. You’re an alcoholic bore but not violent and I’m too old to find anyone better.”

  “I’m glad!” he said loudly. “I don’t want you ever to leave because I love you. My life will be a misery if you leave me.”

  “Then you’re luckier than I am. Go back to sleep.”

  He turned away from her and tried to sleep. About half an hour later he heard her shut the book and switch off the bedside lamp. He got up and went to a room next door where he had hidden a bottle of whisky for this sort of emergency.

  MORAL PHILOSOPHY EXAM

  A BIG TELEVISION COMPANY regularly broadcast a news programme informing the viewers of bad deeds: not the bad deeds of corporations who might withdraw advertising revenues, or the bad deeds of big businessmen and government officials who could afford to bring strong libel actions, but the exploitive practices of small private landlords, tradesmen and moneylenders. This did some social good and entertained viewers, who were also encouraged to help the programme by supplying it with evidence of scandalous instances.

  So one day the broadcasters heard of a man who liked horses but had become so poor that the few he owned were badly fed and stabled. The broadcasters tried to contact the horses’ owner but he hid from them. They besieged his house with a camera crew until he emerged and was filmed fleeing from an interviewer who ran after him shouting unanswered questions. This was broadcast along with distant views of the horses, the faces and voices of concerned neighbours, the comments of a qualified animal doctor. The owner was subsequently charged with cruelty to animals by the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was found guilty and jailed for several months as he could not afford to pay a fine. The horses were humanely killed because nobody else wanted them.

  Which of the following cared most for the horses?

  Their owner.

  The RSPCA.

  The broadcasters.

  Who gained most by these events?

  Lawyers conducting the trial.

  The broadcasters.

  Other horses with incompetent owners.

  Who lost most by these events?

  The owner.

  The horses.

  JOB’S SKIN GAME

  FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T BELIEVE what my wife says: I am still one of the luckiest men who ever walked the earth. Yes of course we’ve had our troubles, like hundreds and thousands of others recently, and for a while it seemed impossible to carry on. I’d have paid a man to shoot me if I’d known where to find one. But I survived. I recovered. The sun is shining, the birds are singing again, though I perfectly understand why the wife has not recovered and maybe never will.

  It was my father who had the really hard life, years and years of it: a joiner’s son, self-educated, who after many slips and slides turned a small house-renovation firm into a major building contractor. Before he expired he was a city councillor and playing golf with Reo Stakis. He sent me to the best fee-paying school in Glasgow because “it’s there you’ll make friends who’ll be useful to you in later life”, and yes, some were. Not being university material I went straight into the family business and learned it from the bottom up, working as a brickie’s labourer for a couple of months on one job, a joiner’s labourer on another, a plumber’s mate elsewhere and so on till I had first-hand experience of all those jobs and painting, plastering, slating, wiring, the lot. Of course the tradesmen I served knew I was the boss’s son. He told them so beforehand and warned them to be as tough on me as on other apprentices. Some were, some weren’t. Either way I enjoyed gaining manual skills while using my muscles. I even worked as a navvy for six weeks, and (under supervision, of course) drove a bulldozer and managed a crane. Meanwhile, at night school, I learned the business from a manager’s standpoint, while calling in at the firm’s head office between whiles to see how it worked at the costing and contracting level. So when the dad collapsed of a stroke I continued the business as if nothing had happened. My mother had died long before so I inherited a fine house in Newton Mearns, a holiday home on Arran and another in the south of Spain.

  Is it surprising that I was able to marry the first good-looking woman I fell in love with? She was more than just a pretty face. In business matters she resembled my father more than me. I was less brisk than he in sacking workers when we lacked orders to fully employ them.

  “You can’t afford to keep men idle,” said the wife. I told her that I didn’t – that I found them useful though not highly profitable jobs until fresh orders arrived.

  “Maybe you can afford to do that but your wife and children can’t!” she said, using the plural form though still pregnant with our first child, “You’re running a modern business, not a charity, and seem anxious to run it into the ground.”

  I quietened her by signing the family property and private finances over to her on condition that she left the firm to me. It prospered! We sent our boys to the same boarding school as the Prince of Wales. Being smarter than their old dad they went from there to Glasgow University, then Oxford, then one took to law and the other to accountancy, though both eventually got good posts in a banking house with headquarters in Hong Kong and an office in New York. Alas.

  By that time I had sold the main business, being past retiral age. I kept on the small house-renovation firm my dad started with, more as a hobby than anything else. I had always most enjoyed the constructive side of business. Meanwhile the wife, on the advice of her own accountant (not mine) invested our money in a highly respectable dot com pension scheme which she said “will make every penny we own work harder and earn more”.

  I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded convincing until the scheme went bust. Highly respected traders had gambled unsuccessfully with the scheme’s assets while spending most of the profits on bonuses for themselves. Clever men, these traders.

  But when the fuss died down and the Newton Mearns house and holiday homes were sold, my wee remaining firm kept us from destitution. We shifted to a three-room flat in the Cowcaddens and without asking help from the boys had everything a respectable couple needs. If some of my wife’s friends stopped visiting her she was better without them, I say. And our two highly successful sons in their big New York office were a great consolation to her until, you know, the eleventh of September, you know, and those explosions that look like going on forever.

  Years ago I enjoyed a television comedy called It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum about a British army unit stationed in Burma or Malaya. There was a bearded sage who spouted proverbs representing the Wisdom of the East. One was, “When a man loses all his wealth after contracting leprosy and hearing that his wife has absconded with his best friend, that is no reason for the ceiling not falling on his head.” Or as we say in the West, it never rains but it pours. My wife never abandoned me though I sometimes wished she had better company. My efforts to console us drove her wild.

  “You must admit,” I said, “that compared with most folk in other countries, and many in our own, our lives have been unusually fortunate and comfortable. We must take the rough with the smooth.”

  “All right for you!” she cried. “What about the boys?”

  “After nearly thirty-five very enviable years their only misfortune has been a sudden, unexpected death, and their last few minutes were so astonishing that I doubt if they had time to feel pain.”

  “They didn’t deserve to die!” she shouted. “Would you be happier if they did?” I asked. “The only evil we should regret is the evil we do. As far as I am aware our sons’ firm was not profiting by warfare or industrial pollution. Be glad they died with clean hands.”

  She stared and said, “Are you telling me to be glad they’re dead?”

  There is nothing more stupid than trying to talk folk out of natural, heartf
elt misery. I had talked to her like some kind of Holy Willie, so I apologised.

  After a bath one morning I was towelling myself dry in one of these low beams of sunlight that illuminate tiny specks floating in the air. It let me see something like smoke drifting up from the leg I was rubbing and a shower of tiny white flakes drifting down to the carpet. Like most folk nowadays I know most dust around a house comes from the topmost layer of human skin cells crumbling off while the lower cells replace it. Looking closer I saw the lower layer of skin was more obvious than usual. It reminded me of the sky at night with a few big red far-apart spots like planets, and clusters of smaller ones between them like constellations, and areas of cloudy pinkness which, peered at closely, were made by hundreds of tiny little spots like stars in the Milky Way. Then came itching and scratching. The first is widely supposed to cause the second but in my experience this is only partly true. The first itch was so tiny that a quick stab with a needle could have stopped it had I known the exact point to stab. But this was impossible, so I scratched the general area which itched even more the harder, the more widely and wildly I scratched. This crescendo of itching and scratching grew so fiercely ecstatic that I only stopped when my nails had torn bloody gashes in that leg and the delight changed to pain.