“But arguing about God,” I told him, “is as futile as arguing with God. Let us agree that his mercy and justice are beyond any understanding. Goodbye and good luck.”
That was a week ago and I’m not going back to him, though I feel our little chats did me good.
This morning I dreamed of wakening and lying naked on top of the bed, unable to move even a finger because my whole skin had stiffened into a hard rigid sheath. With a mighty effort I at last heaved myself up, feeling a delicious pang as the sheath cracked all over. Looking down I saw myself clad in a mosaic of parchment patches that began to move apart as their edges curled upward making them easy to pluck off. And what lay beneath was not raw cuticle but clean healthy skin. I awoke and found this was not so, but now believe that one day my skin will heal as unexpectedly as it diseased. Meanwhile my wee house-renovation firm, even without my controlling hand, is doing very well.
It will soon be quite a big firm again,
thank God.
MISS KINCAID’S AUTUMN
WHEN LOCAL NICKNAMES were common I grew up in a place we called The Long Town, a name not printed on maps or railway timetables. It had council houses where coal miners lived, a high street of properties rented by our shopkeepers and tradesmen, and several mansions and bungalows owned by so few professional folk that everyone in the town knew them. Conversations about local affairs usually mentioned Big Tam Kincaid the Free Kirk Minister, also his son Big Sam, schoolteacher and Labour councillor. I knew both by sight, the first as a gaunt striding figure in the streets, the second as a stout one crossing the school playground. I was never Big Sam’s pupil but often heard his voice booming from an adjacent classroom. Joe Kincaid, a second son, was of usual height but in the merchant navy so hardly ever seen. Almost as invisible were Poor Mrs Kincaid and a daughter, Wee Chrissie, who were only mentioned in women’s conversations. When I asked why Mrs Kincaid was Poor my mother said, “Her men need a lot of her attention.”
I left The Long Town for university when television aerials had sprouted on most rooftops and the cinema had become a bingo hall. A job and a marriage kept me away from it but I often returned to visit my parents so saw the town change like the rest of Scotland. The railway and colliery closed. Cars and unemployment increased. Council houses took on a slummier look. At the edge of the town arose an estate of private houses, each with a garden and garage facing a circular drive. To discourage outsiders, it had only one way in, no through road and no shops, but it brought little extra business to the high street. The owners were commuters who mostly shopped in Glasgow or Edinburgh, where they worked. The wee shops of my childhood (baker, grocer, draper, sweet shop, newsagent, cobbler, clock mender) became mini-markets or shut forever.
I also heard that Poor Mrs Kincaid died, leaving Wee Chrissie as housekeeper. Big Sam became a headmaster, married one of his staff and brought her to live in the Free Kirk manse where his father was now a bedridden invalid. Soon after the wedding Sam’s wife left him and a stroke paralysed his legs, events so close together that gossip differed on which came first. Though confined to a wheelchair Big Sam fought bravely to keep his jobs as headmaster and local councillor. Having many sympathisers he succeeded for a while, but misfortunes had destroyed the joviality that had made his bullying ways bearable. Former colleagues joined with enemies and forced him to resign from both jobs. These colleagues had been his only friends; he now regarded them as traitors. Then his father died, leaving Sam alone with Wee Chrissie in the former manse. I asked if she had no friends.
“I never hear of Miss Kincaid having visitors,” said my mother in a way that showed the nickname was not now appropriate, “though nobody dislikes her.”
I got divorced and between jobs lived with my parents for a whole summer. Single women visiting Long Town pubs were looked at with grave suspicion. I dislike bingo so joined an evening class on modern Scots literature held in the public library. The lecturer was an enthusiast who tried hard to hide a conviction that the best things about his subject had been his meetings with the authors who wrote it. When he failed to do so I sensed that a straight-faced woman beside me was trembling. I glanced at her sideways. She gave me a smile that showed she was holding in tremendous laughter. I smiled back.
We left the library together, fell into conversation and I was surprised to learn she was Chrissie Kincaid, whom I had always imagined a poor wee timorous beastie. This woman was as tall as most of us who don’t wear high heeled shoes. She was quiet and self-contained but keenly observant, with highly independent and broadminded views. Our parental homes lay in the same direction so I invited her back for tea. She sighed and said, “Alas, no. I regret my early training but it has made it impossible for me – a Kincaid! – to accept hospitality I cannot return.”
“Then return it. I’ll take tea in your house any day.”
“No you won’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t tell you because Kincaids never explain family matters to outsiders. Nor can we meet in a pub because female Kincaids don’t drink alcohol in public. Nor can we meet in a tearoom or café because The Long Town hasn’t one nowadays. But I hope you and I have another talk after the next evening class.”
Curiosity drove me to see her sooner. I had offered to lend a book. Two days later I took it to the former manse, a solid grey stately Victorian building with a tall monkey puzzle tree on the lawn. A brass bell handle, pulled, made a distant dolorous clanging somewhere inside. Two minutes later Miss Kincaid opened the door and looked at me with raised eyebrows. I gave her the book and was saying something about it when a great voice from behind her said, “No whispering! No secrets from me, Chrissie! Bring your friend in.”
It was a voice I remembered from childhood, booming but distinct and able to penetrate walls without yelling. Miss Kincaid shrugged her shoulders and ushered me in.
We crossed a dark lobby with a staircase and entered a very warm room of dark furniture with a bright coal fire. Beside it in a wheelchair sat Big Sam, now hideously fat, his legs covered by a tartan rug. A table at his elbow had books and papers on it, a jug of water, a glass and a decanter of pale golden liquid. He said, “Your name is? Valerio? Formerly Ferguson? Then your father had the excellent dry goods shop on the high street. I taught your uncles and your elder brother. Chrissie, offer our Mrs Valerio biscuits, cake and – tea? Coffee? Sherry? Why not sherry? I, you see, am a whiskyholic” – (he waved toward the decanter) – “but I never drink enough to become a total victim of my sister’s ministrations. No. I am careful to keep my mind intact, my intellect in control.”
I said I would like tea and Miss Kincaid left the room.
“Good!” he said on a more intimate note, “I am a crippled giant but not the ogre my sister has probably suggested to you. My sufferings derive from a strong intelligence diverted by those who hate me into the cul-de-sac of memory – a form of torture I assure you, Mrs Valerio. What a relief to meet someone with whom I can intelligently converse!”
He talked to me for a very long time. Miss Kincaid must have brought biscuits and tea but his flow of talk wiped out any sense of consuming them. He told me the social history of The Long Town in the lifetime of his father and himself, illustrating it with personal anecdotes, many of them interesting, but it is exhausting to be treated as an audience for over an hour by a single intense speaker. The more often I looked at the clock the more often he asked if he was boring me. I lacked the courage to answer truly but he was watching me far too closely to miss other signs of restlessness. They inspired him to talk faster and faster. Miss Kincaid must have learned not to hear Sam when not wanting to. She sat nearby calmly reading with a slight smile on her face that first struck me as mischievous then downright malicious until, after ninety minutes, she snapped the book shut, stood up and said, “Mrs Valerio has to visit some other people, Sam.”
I stood up too.
“Goodbye, Mrs Valerio,” he said, offering his hand. “I am at the mercy of a sister who is
given to engineering these abrupt departures. My little holiday is ended but please visit the crippled giant again. Come again soon. Don’t be a stranger.”
I said I would come again. With something like a sneer he reached for the whisky muttering what sounded like, “I doubt it.” Miss Kincaid escorted me to the front door murmuring, “Serves you right,” but our later walks back from the evening class were as friendly as the first.
Years later I returned to The Long Town for my father’s funeral, then for my mother’s. Both had Church of Scotland services. The second was better attended because the Free Kirk congregation had by then joined ours, having become too small to maintain a separate minister of its own. I knew hardly any of the old people present so on leaving the church was pleased to see Miss Kincaid looking remarkably unchanged. I told her so and asked about her brother.
“Here he is!” she said, introducing a small compact man with eyes as blue and alert as her own. The complexion of his bald head and cut of his neatly trimmed beard showed this was Joe, the nautical brother. I asked how Sam was.
“As vocal as ever,” she said merrily. “We’ve moved him upstairs. Come home for a drink with us.”
So we three walked back to the old manse.
It was a chill November afternoon with occasional gusts of thin rain and I made a conventional remark about the weather. “Yes, a miserable climate,” said Joe cheerily. “I’ve seen much worse weather but for sheer dull depressing misery a damp Scottish November cannot be surpassed.”
He seemed highly satisfied with such Scottish Novembers.
“I disagree,” said Miss Kincaid. “Autumn is Scotland’s most colourful season. Fresh spring leaves look lovely but they don’t look fresh for long. By the end of summer they’ve been tired and dusty for months. Then comes September and they start withering into golden greens, deep purples and all the rich colours I’ve seen in reproductions of Gauguin’s paintings. I’m sure they would damage our eyes if we saw them by the strong sunlight of Tahiti.”
“Those don’t look very dazzling,” said Joe, pointing to the pavement. Adhering to the tarmac and almost as black was a thin carpet of rotten old leaves with some recent ones the colour of dung.
“But what an excellent background for those!” said Miss Kincaid, pointing to a couple of fallen chestnut fans further on. Each leaf was a glowing yellow that blended through orange into crimson at the tip, with a pale green streak along the central veins.
As we entered the manse lobby we heard from above a vocal hullabaloo. Miss Kincaid looked at Joe who said calmly, “Yes, it’s my turn.”
Without haste he removed and hung up cap and coat and went upstairs. Miss Kincaid led me into the room where I had last seen Sam, switching on bright lights that made the dark furniture look solidly comforting instead of forbidding. The air was pleasantly warm.
“Home,” she said. “Home home home. Would you like a sherry? I’m having one.” We sat sipping sherry and watching the flames in the hearth. She said, “They’re gas flames now and no trouble at all. Sam loved the old coal fire, said the constantly changing flames were a more varied show than television. He also liked to see me poking it or adding coals every half hour. When Joe came home we outnumbered Sam. Our change to gas so enraged him that he retreated upstairs. We installed a lift attachment to the banister that can easily take the twenty stone of him up and down. Joe would gladly drive Sam and his wheelchair to the park or anywhere else he likes, but no. Sam says he will never let anyone see a Kincaid in a pitiable state, will never let Joe condescend to him, so he sticks in his room. Laziness masquerading as pride, you see. Sheer obstinate idiocy in fact. Yet Sam used to be a better Labour councillor than most of them.”
We had another sherry. She said, “Our father is to blame. He was a selfish monster who forbad us to play with other children. He damaged Sam most because Sam was his favourite so grew up like him, only happy with people he could bully. Thank God Joe and I had each other. We told each other all sorts of lovely stories and invented all sorts of exciting games when nobody was looking. Our affection made us quite unfit for matrimony. By going to sea Joe was able to sample other sorts of affection. He told me about them in letters because he knew I could never be jealous of purely temporary mates. He was living the life I would have led had I been a man, and I knew he would return to me at last. Another sherry?”
Joe entered and said, “Dinner-time. The Great I Am upstairs has grudgingly assented to oxtail soup, bangers and mash, tinned peaches with ice cream. What do you ladies want?”
We wanted the same. Joe prepared it and the three of us dined at the kitchen table with long chatty intervals between courses, the last of which was coffee with chocolates and liqueurs. Prompted by Chrissie Joe quietly recounted very entertaining comic or terrifying oversea adventures and every forty minutes he or she went upstairs and attended briefly to Sam. Sitting round the kitchen table was so agreeable that we ended the evening there playing scrabble. My companions showed a relaxed pleasure in each other that I have sometimes (not often) noticed in recently married couples, but such marital pleasure is usually exclusive. I felt part of this Kincaid domesticity and had not felt so happily at home for years.
I told Miss Kincaid so when I was
leaving. I think she replied that Autumn
could be quite a satisfactory season,
but being tipsy I may have
imagined that.
MY EX HUSBAND
I WAS NINETEEN WHEN COLIN and I met at a friend’s party. He was nearly the same age and had a job in the navy. Though not in uniform and not remarkably handsome he was well dressed and carried himself handsomely without seeming arrogant. His conversation was good humoured, with a pleasant touch of shyness. He was also interested in me: the first to be interested since my father’s death seven years earlier. We decided to marry. I had a good secretarial job. We raised a joint loan that let us buy a nice house in a pleasant street.
Shortly before the wedding I discovered he expected me to marry his mother too, so was terrified by the thought that our marriage might be a lasting one. In 1960s Scotland this was not an absurd idea. At that time the law made divorces too expensive to be usual in working-class districts where the few divorced men were widely pitied because they must now cook their own meals and wash their own clothes. The divorced women were thought easy meat by men and public dangers by other women. I hated the idea of a divorce but knew I could not live till death parted us with a man who expected me to eat with his relations. I had no mother, having been orphaned in my teens. My only relatives were two aunts who prided themselves on their intelligence and avoided me because I was cleverer than their own children. I was therefore shocked to find Colin expected us to visit his mother almost every night of the week and his married sister every weekend. He said the meals they made were more normal than mine. Here is an example of that normal.
Chicken Soup, made by boiling a chicken in water with salt but nothing else. The resulting liquid, ladled into deep plates, had a layer of chicken fat on top. I made a hole in this with my spoon and tried to drink the soup through it, but the layer of fat still kept the fluid underneath scalding. It had to be sipped slowly: so slowly that when the bird’s carcass arrived as a main course it was nearly cold. As were the sprouts and totties served with it. As were the tart and congealed custard that followed. The meal was also delayed by my mother-in-law or her daughter washing, drying and putting away the last course’s cutlery before serving the next. They did that swiftly, but to enjoy some remaining warmth in the second and third courses we had to eat them at a gallop. Despite causes of delay I once shared a family Christmas dinner, with crackers and funny paper hats, where three courses and every sign of us having eaten them vanished in half an hour.
Perhaps that was the kind of food and way of eating Colin enjoyed at sea. I could not provide such normality and refused to eat with his family more than once a week. I tried persuading him to dine with me in Italian, Indian and Chinese rest
aurants, but he found them too exotic. I suppose our marriage lasted for years because he was usually at sea. When at home – I mean the home we shared – he usually watched television while sipping lager in our sitting room. We only quarreled once. Friends had visited me on a local political matter. The television was playing at a low volume so I exchanged a few quiet words with them in a corner of the room. After they left Colin declared that, before inviting others in, I should have picked up and hidden the empty beer cans he had strewn over the carpet. I pointed out that I was a wage-earner like himself, not a house serf like his mother.
Soon after this he moved back in with her, having left the navy and found work in our town as a security guard. She was certainly tidier than me. Divorce in Scotland was now as cheap and frequent as in other places, so we divorced. I raised another bank loan and paid him for his share of the house. I heard later that he bought a flashy car, a Reliant Scimitar with the money, but never told his mother where he got it, so she came to think I had cheated him. That is my only grudge against him.
Thank goodness we had no children.
SINKINGS
The Ends of Our Tethers Page 6