by A. J. Cronin
‘I could tell them I was sticking up for King Robert the first.’
‘A subtle thought, Carroll. Emerging from the disgraceful Irish in you. But no, we will not demean a noble action with a lie, for which I perceive you have a natural aptitude. I will telephone your grandfather from the Board offices.’
So that, exactly, was the beginning of my association with a remarkable personality. His objective was not then apparent to me and became so only when it had failed. But for many months I was to enjoy the benefit of his wit, learning, and kindly charm. They left their impact upon me.
Today, however, I was less attentive at our usual session, I kept wondering what Frank had up his sleeve and who might be this someone special.
School was on the point of breaking up and on the following Thursday Frank and I set off for home together. He lived at Craig Crescent not far from my grandfather’s house, and we took the same road across Levenford Common. This afternoon, however, with an offhand yet mysterious air, he said.
‘Let’s go by the station tonight. I’ve someone to meet there.’
‘Who?’
‘Cathy Considine.’
‘And who’s she?’
‘She’s my girl, Laurence.’
I must have shown my amazement. He laughed delightedly.
‘We’ve known each other since we were kids. Brought up together in our prams so to speak. It’s not surprising we’re in love with one another.’
Now I was staggered. All that gush about holy purity and now this … this early commitment to Venus. God, you’re a queer one, Frank, I thought. And I was suddenly extremely curious to see Cathy Considine.
‘She’s at the S.H. Convent at Dalcair. Home for the holidays. We’ll have a ripping time.’ Frank ran on excitedly as we climbed the station steps to the upper level. Having exploded his news he was eager to talk. ‘I’m sure you’ll like her …’
But the train had just arrived and almost at once Frank cried:
‘Cathy! Look, Laurence, there she is!’
A stunningly pretty girl was coming towards us, smiling, and with an answering wave of her arm. She was not wearing her school uniform but, probably as one of the older convent girls, had on a natty little navy blue reefer jacket with brass buttons, a swinging kilted skirt and a fetching blue beret tilted slightly to one side. Never could I forget that first view of Cathy Considine. She was of medium height, her figure supple and free moving, her expression full of vivacity and life. Her eyes were dark, almost black, and sparkling with animation against her warmly coloured skin. She had a short rather flat undistinguished nose but her mouth was delicious, large, beautifully shaped with very red lips, parted now in a wide smile which exposed perfect teeth. Her dark brown hair, hanging loose from her beret, framed one cheek on which, high over the cheekbone, was a tiny dark mole. I felt my heart turn over as she drew near and, barely seeing me, took both of Frank’s hands.
‘Cathy.’
‘Frank.’
They stood like this, looking at each other for a long moment, then she gave me a cool examining look.
‘Who is the long-legged Borstal boy disguised in an Academy Blazer?’
‘Just A. N. Other standing in the background of this lovesick tableau,’ I said coldly. ‘Sorry I haven’t a camera. It’s so touching.’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘I’m glad you like it, because we do.’
‘Well, while you’re drooling over each other, have you any luggage? If so, I’ll get it.’
‘A suitcase. In the guard’s van.’
I left them together, found her case, then we set out for Craig Crescent. Frank offered to carry the case, which was no light weight, tried to bring me into the conversation, but without much luck. She was too busy with him, and apparently bent on excluding me. This vacation was going to be the greatest fun. They’d been set a competition at Cathy’s school to see who could bring back the best album of pressed wild flowers. A silver cup was the prize.
‘Naturally I’m not wild about botany, Frank. But I’d like to win that cup. Just to put Sister Philomena’s eye out, the old hag, she always has her knife in me. And it’ll be terrific fun scouring the Overton woods, and the Longcrags too.’
Frank agreed with enthusiasm, half turning to me.
‘You’ll join us, Laurie.’
‘Well … possibly,’ I said, distantly. ‘If I have time.’
‘Of course you will. Now, here we are. You’ll come in and have tea. Joint invitation from Cathy and me.’
‘No thanks. I’m expected at Davigan’s,’ I lied calmly and atrociously. I loathed the Davigans, and Daniel the son I particularly despised.
‘Well …’ Frank said doubtfully. ‘If that’s so …’
The Considine house was next door to Ennis’s property, a villa of the same size, with an adjoining unfenced garden which suggested intimate communications. I put the suitcase down at the front gate. Cathy was inspecting me with a critical, not quite comprehending yet definitely unfriendly eye.
‘I’m obliged to you, porter. Was it too heavy for your delicate constitution?’
‘A mere trifle. What have you inside? Coals or steel corsets?’
‘Both, naturally. And a hair shirt. How much is the tip?’
‘Pay Frank,’ I said. ‘I usually stand in for him when any physical effort is required.’
As I took off I saw colour flood Frank’s face at this underhand reference to the few engagements I had undertaken on his behalf and I felt badly about it. I blamed her, of course, and swore I would have nothing more to do with her. Yet, walking home in a rage, my mind was exasperatingly full of her. When I’d had my tea I put a few deliberately offhand inquiries to my grandmother. Yes, she knew of the girl’s mother in a general sort of way. Mrs Considine was the widow of the late head draughtsman at Dennisons, comfortably off on a life pension from the shipyard, a stout, lethargic woman whom I now vaguely recollected moving slowly, bedizened in beaded black, to a front seat in St Patrick’s.
‘So you’ve met her daughter?’
‘For the first and last time.’
‘They say she’s rather spoiled.’
‘She’s the giddy limit.’
Nevertheless, while I hated this little trollop in the brass-buttoned reefer jacket, I had fallen for her, stricken with the ridiculous anguish of an adolescent first love. When Frank came to the Bruce house next morning, without the slightest reference to my ill humour of the day before, my resolutions broke down, I agreed to go botanizing that afternoon.
Nothing could have been more mistaken, more fatally damaging to my self-esteem. Never before, even in the worst discomfitures of a penurious youth, had I been made to feel so unwanted, not of course by Frank, but by her. Our few verbal exchanges, at first deliberately offensive, became towards the end of the expedition, heatedly hurtful, and I swore by my favourite saint – Augustine before his conversion – that I would never go out with them again.
To assist them in their idiotic floral hunt they had roped in and were occasionally accompanied by that other youth, Daniel Davigan, a despicable hanger on, a clod who, though he had outgrown it by two years, was still at St Patrick’s parochial school, and whose obsequious attempts at friendship I had stiffly discouraged.
This co-optation of Davigan in my place was a bitter pill and since it has point later on he must merit a more accurate portrayal. In appearance he was not prepossessing: a flattish face with ill-assorted features, rusty red hair and the blanched skin and pale greenish eyes that often go with such colouring, as if all his pigmentation had been expended on his scrubby brush. Yet it was his manner that offended me, a blend of truculence and ingratiating intimacy with which he sought to advance himself. Doubtless I was prejudiced. Frank, who disliked nobody, was at least prepared to tolerate Dan who, after all, had his social difficulties as the eldest son of a small jobbing builder, a short, hairy red gorilla of a man lampooned in the town for his feat of propagating sixteen children, eleven of
which survived. Once on a rare visit to the Davigan home I had caught a shuddering glimpse of the marital chamber with its huge brassbound bed on which such incessant procreation and parturition had been enacted and which seemed to justify the lines dedicated to Mrs Davigan, whose maiden name was O’Shane, and generally attributed to Dr Ennis.
‘Oh, a terrible life has Bridget O’Shane,
Three minutes’ boredom and nine months’ pain
A fortnight’s rest then at it again.
Oh, a terrible life has Bridget O’Shane.’
This admittedly was a hard thing for Dan to live down and although I grudged him the privilege of accompanying Frank and Cathy he at least served as a kind of watch-dog. Indeed I began to want him to be with them, since when he was not, and they went alone, I suffered most cruelly, broodingly picturing them, not only in the most tender intimacies, but hotly and falsely endowing them with every act of sexual abandonment. Indeed, on many of these summer afternoons I hung about the vicinity of Craig Crescent, behind a convenient wall, in the vain hope of observing some evidence of misconduct and throwing it in their faces. Once, unable to restrain myself as they came down from the wood, I stepped out and brazenly accosted them, peering for signs of guilt. Alas, they only looked happy. Cathy certainly was bright-eyed and moistly flushed, diffusing a heady perfume, entirely her own, and gaily excited, full of life and undulant movement, but Frank, calm and undisturbed as ever, wore unmistakably that confounding expression of happy, guileless innocence. I was on the point of turning away when he called out.
‘Look what we found today. An absolute rarity. A bee orchis. And by the way, Laurie, I have to go to the Rectory tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you take Cathy up the wood.’
It seemed the chance of a lifetime to get even with her. While she watched me with a queer expression, half derisive, half expectant, I said,
‘Sorry, Frank, I wouldn’t be found dead with your Cathy, in or out of the wood.’ And I walked off.
From the first I had not meant to go, equally convinced that she had not the least intention of keeping the appointment. Nevertheless, at two o’clock on the following afternoon I was drawn irresistibly to that now detested end of Craig Crescent. And as I came round the final bend there she was, perched on the gate leading to Longcrags Wood. Surprise rooted me.
‘So you decided to turn up,’ she said.
I found my breath. ‘I wanted to see if you would.’
‘Well, I did. Disappointed?’
‘Not particularly.’
She laughed. ‘That’s a strange admission from the Bruce heir apparent. I thought you hated me.’
‘Isn’t it the other way round?’
‘I ought to be pretty sick of you, Frank’s been feeding me your good points until I almost threw up. Did you know it, he thinks you’re quite marvellous?’
‘Strange delusion, isn’t it?’
‘I’m beginning to wonder. It does look as if you’d done some remarkably odd sort of things. I mean for instance, writing that essay just after you came out of gaol and winning the bursary …’
There was nothing I could say to this, and a silence fell during which she seemed to study me with a scrutiny so unsettling that I said:
‘Shall we get a move on with your collecting?’
‘Let’s just take a walk.’ She jumped down from the gate. ‘The truth is I’m sick of all these ghastly ragged robins and bladderworts. And thanks to Frank I have enough to knock out Sister Philomena’s false teeth.’
‘You want to?’
‘Frequently.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Oh, just being herself.’ As we took the path into the wood, she went on: ‘Always nagging on propriety and that sort of stuff, making us wear shifts when we take a bath and looking me over as if I was going to have a baby.’ She broke off. ‘But let’s forget her. I get enough of her at school.’
For a few moments we walked on in silence under the tall beech trees that fretted the sunlight on the winding green path. The wood was warm and deeply still. I could not believe that I was physically here with her, in this quiet secret place. Perhaps she felt this too, for she moved restlessly and suddenly laughed.
‘Funny we’re doing this! And getting along quite nicely.’ She gave me a quick side-glance. ‘I really owe you an apology for being so beastly.’
‘We didn’t get off to a very good start, did we?’
‘It was my fault being so chippie at the station. I suppose I wanted to impress you.’
‘You did,’ I said, with a sudden constriction of my heart. ‘I thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen in my life.’
She actually flushed and kept her eyes down.
‘You see, Laurence,’ she paused awkwardly, unaware of the commotion aroused in me by her use of my first name. ‘It’s just that I’m so bound up in Frank that I sort of resented his being fond of anyone else. But I don’t now. If it means anything to you, and I don’t suppose it does, I really like you very much.’ She hesitated, still not looking at me. ‘I only hope you’ll like me.’
Now my heart seemed to expand and fill my chest so that I could scarcely breath. With all the anguish of unsullied adolescence I managed to say:
‘If you want to know, I fell in love with you the minute I set eyes on you.’
She gave a shaky little laugh. ‘ You can’t possibly mean that. But it’s nice of you, Laurence. And a relief. I’ve been upset and sort of jumpy over our misunderstanding. I suppose,’ she added hurriedly, ‘because I felt it was upsetting Frank. He’s so … so scrupulous about everything.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘Do you think … perhaps he’s a little too much that way?’
‘What way?’
‘Well … sort of strict about little things. Straitlaced. Just think, if you can believe it, all the time he and I have been up here by ourselves in this lovely wood he’s never once kissed me. He says we should wait till we’re properly engaged.’
‘If only I’d had his chance.’
Had I spoken these words and if so why had she not protested? Now my heart was thudding like a trip hammer. She was so close to me our arms touched as we moved slowly up the hill, a sudden contact that ran through every nerve in my body. Yet she made no effort to withdraw. Most disturbing of all there was the strange sensation of an answering emotion, an emanation that made my senses swim, an outreaching that sought with a nervous excitement for some long-frustrated fulfilment.
‘Oh, dear,’ she almost sighed. ‘It’s so warm. Let’s rest a bit. It’s dry and lovely here.’
She sank down on the grass by some wild azalea bushes. Her face, sunflushed, was turned towards me, her eyes dark and startled. Beside her, I took her hand, the small palm hot and moist. Her fingers closed on mine tightly, so tightly.
My head was swimming, yet some sense of loyalty remained. This was Frank’s girl, how could I poach on his preserves? And more: under his influence and the many sessions we had spent in Dingwall’s study, I had achieved a commendable state of virtue, even to the point of serving the Canon’s Mass when timed for eleven o’clock. Alas, in this recreation of the original Garden, the serpent was hissing in my ears and at any moment the apple might fall from nowhere into my companion’s lap. Indeed, as though in acceptance of this phenomenon, her eyelids slowly drooped. Then, as I bent blindly towards her, there came from below a shout, a series of shouts, almost a hullabaloo, and as we scrambled to our feet, shocked and shaken, a figure appeared threshing through the undergrowth, Davigan, sweating, panting, propitiating, yet somehow suspicious.
‘I thought I’d lost you. Met Frank on Chapel Street. Thought I’d come after you and give you a hand.’
He stood there, grinning, the oaf, clutching a tuft of something earthy, while we scrambled to our feet.
‘And look what I got for you. I don’t know what it is but it looks good to me.’
Cathy, her eyes downcast and averted, was fearfully pale. My br
eastbone was thrumming like a drum. I looked at Davigan and his trophy.
‘It’s a stinking fennel root, you clod. Why don’t you eat it?’
But nothing would ever get Davigan down. He hung on to us all afternoon and when I could stand it no longer and took off he was still there.
My state of mind may be imagined as I swung across Craig Crescent on the way home. Suddenly at the corner Dr Ennis came out of the side surgery door, carrying a cased salmon rod and a gaff. He called out.
‘How’s the gooseberry today?’
Although I couldn’t trust myself to speak I forced a sickly smile.
He looked at me keenly.
‘Want to come fishing?’
I knew that the good-natured old rip was sorry for me, apparently mooning around at a loose end. To preserve my self-esteem I should have refused his invitation. But I needed companionship and I liked to go fishing. Often I’d gone out with my father before he became ill.
We got into the old black Ford. Dr Ennis drove in silence and, as could be expected, at a wild, erratic speed. We were soon at Malloch on the far side of the Loch where he had a boat, and until late afternoon I sculled hard for him, sweating desire out of me, while he cast across all the likely bays. It looked like being a blank day, but just as were coming in he changed his fly to a big Zulu and at the first throw was into a fish. Ten minutes later I struck with the gaff and had it in the boat, a fine fresh-run salmon.
‘A good twelve pounds.’ He chuckled. ‘You did well for me, lad. And with the oaring too. This deserves a drink.’
We beached and padlocked the boat, went up the shingle to the bar of the Blairmore Arms where the doctor, after displaying our catch with a good deal of profane boasting, ordered a double John Dewar.
‘And what’s yours, Laurence?’
‘Beer,’ I said, hardily. I would have died sooner than ask for lemonade.
He laughed. ‘You’ll make a good medical student. Give him a mild and bitter, barman.’
About an hour and three double whiskies later, Ennis nosed his way into the soft dark night, racked the gears, and we set off for Levenford. I felt cosy after that second order of not so mild ale and the doctor was in high good humour. He liked an audience and in the bar he had unloaded his repertoire of broad Scots stories on the locals. He kept chuckling, coughing and grunting to himself. Suddenly he said: