Glitter of Mica

by Jessie Kesson

And his own resentment of their unsolicited opinions.

  ‘There are other ways of judging a woman. It’s not a heifer that you’re sizing up.’

  They had been right, though. Hugh Riddel had to admit that to himself. Times he had felt like contradicting his daughter, Helen, when she came home weekends from her work in a Youth Centre in the Town, with words on the tip of her tongue, like labels, ready to be stuck on to all human faults and frailties. As though the correct word for them could cure them. Words like Delinquency, Hereditary, Environment, Behaviour Patterns. Whiles he felt just like boring through that wall of words with which Helen had surrounded both herself and her vocation, and blowing them sky high with the anger that would be over him.

  ‘Take murder now, Helen. Aye murder. Whiles I just feel like murdering your mother with my two bare hands. And not even for the big things that are wrong between us. Just, God help me, for the smallest thing of all. Like times when your mother’s standing silent by the window. And you know the look that’s on her face, by the back of her head. And I go clattering through to the sink to wash my face, making a racket to cover up the wordlessness that falls between us. Syne putting my head round the corner of the scullery door to see if the din I’ve made has stirred into movement, though Hell let loose itself, could scare do that! My eye takes in the whole of her—against its will. But when it reaches the stockings wrinkling round her legs, it’s then that I could kill her. For the disgust that’s on me for having chosen such a woman. What name have they given to that in your Youth Centre, Helen? What word is there for the wrinkled stocking that can incline a man to think of murder?’

  And, since doubtless Helen would have had the cool clipped reply, but never the answer, he had never deigned to put the question to her

  God! but it was damnable. A man could slip his boot off in the bottling shed, and hold his bare foot out for inspection—his foot—that most ridiculous intimate part of him, urging his workmates:

  ‘Take a look at that, now. At that great brute of a bunion! What would you do with a muckle thing like that? It has given me agony for weeks. Pure agony just!’

  And advice would pour forth thick and fast, for it would seem that all the dairy workers would have had a bunion the like, at some time or another, so it would prove complaint but common enough.

  But there was never time, nor place, nor person to whom you could confide this deeper agony:

  ‘Was it this way with you when you got married? Did your wife lie in a cold clam beside you? And for her youngness did you restrain yourself, feeling but brute and guilty. Yet hoping the time would come—and soon—when hugging and kissing were not enough even for her. And when time came, it was reluctant. And as time passed, became as cold as charity bequeathed from duty, so that your hunger for it left you altogether; and appetite itself turned to distaste, so that even were it offered to you now, you couldn’t stomach it.’

  That too, if aired within the bottling shed, might prove to be complaint but common enough, though one that was for Riddel beyond enduring.

  It came back to him now, as near as yesterday, his father’s voice, bewildered and defeated: ‘What would you make of womenfolk, Hugh? I can never say a bonnie wordie to your mother but she tells me I’m drunk. And maybe she’s right at that of it. For it is only when I am drunk that the words come to me, and the notion takes me.’

  And his mother’s bitter response:

  ‘The trouble with you is you should have married some great roaring quean who was more your like.’

  But it was senseless standing here, regretting. Hugh Riddel realised that. For regret neither eased an old pain, nor taught you how to avoid a new one. Live and learn, that’s what they said. He lived all right, but he just never seemed to learn, since experience itself but taught you not to make the same mistake twice. And sometimes, not even that.

  . . .Darklands’ milk lorry, roaring in the distance, was taking the Tienland Corner now, its headlights picking up the landmarks on the road, lifting them up into the light and dropping them down into the darkness again. Hugh Riddel still stood, reluctant to brace himself for the ordeal of facing the dairy. For, although the degree of a man’s fault is known only in part, even to himself, the exact opinions of that fault can be accurately gauged in the eyes and attitudes of his fellow-men.

  Not that he cared a tinker’s curse what his fellow-workers thought of him, Hugh Riddel assured himself. Far from it. He had always been indifferent to their opinions. And his knowledge of them had ensured this attitude. Good or bad, top dog was always top dog to them. Oh, it might bite them and they’d yelp out with pain; but the instant it barked out in more genial salutation, they would come panting, their tongues hanging out, and their tails wagging. It was only when one no longer proved to be top dog that apprehension might well set in. For then the pack—always bold on top of their own midden—would set about you, tearing you to pieces.

  The thought of that angered Hugh Riddel, but braced him into movement. Damn them! Damn them all. He would go up into the dairy as if nothing had happened. He would supervise the loading of that milk lorry, as if last Friday was still some future date on the calendar above the bottling machine, circled in red, for nothing more important than a reminder to ‘Order more Quart Bottles’. And he would do that, too. By God he would! For, at this moment, he was still Hugh Riddel, Head Dairyman, Darklands.

  The conviction took such a hold of him that the need for haste left him altogether. And it was with the slow loping stride of habit that he began to make his way up to the dairy, pausing only to interpret the night.

  There was an orange glow round the last quarter of the moon, and the Mother Tap of Soutar Hill was hidden in the mist that was starting to come down. The smell of ground frost rose dankly up from the nether park. Real Judas weather, and this now into February. Still, Darklands would cope with all that in its own good time.

  * * *

  The dairy was loud with the speculation of last Friday night. For it was the kind of night which should have found itself headlined in the Sunday paper, although it hadn’t done so, to the chagrin of God Knows.

  ‘Bloody near a murder!’ he shouted across to the Plunger, above the din of the bottling machine.

  ‘Forbye a try at suicide, and the Lunatic Asylum!’

  ‘Not the Lunatic Asylum!’ Lil Jarvis contradicted from her stool in front of the bottling machine.

  ‘Ambroggan House. A private Mental Hospital for Helen Riddel, if you please.’

  ‘Whatever name it goes by, its purpose is the same,’ God Knows snapped, nettled by the sarcasm in Lil’s voice. He had never had very much meed for any of the Riddel breed—except Hugh Riddel’s father—but he had even less for Lil Jarvis; always running himself and the other cattlemen off their feet with her perpetual cry of ‘more milk for bottling’.

  ‘And all kinds of queer going-ons in between,’ God Knows continued, ignoring Lil, and deliberately turning his attention to the Plunger.

  ‘Goings-on that you and me will never likely get to the bottom of,’ he added regretfully, ‘for God only knows what the world is coming to.’

  God Knows had been speculating on what the world was coming to for the best part of sixty years. A narrow enough speculation, since it was simply the neighbouring parishes outwith Caldwell that gave him such cause for anxiety. Caldwell itself was the promised land; its inhabitants the chosen people, though just as wilful whiles as the Israelites themselves. Until now, that was, for the world still knew nothing of Caldwell’s fall from grace.

  ‘There was not a single word about it in any of the Sunday papers,’ God Knows confirmed. ‘Just the usual tell of a puckle queans in the South being followed, or offered lifts in cars, syne kicking up a terrible rumpus about it all afterwards.’

  ‘I have never been followed in all my life,’ Lil boasted from the bottling machine, as though this was some hard-won personal triumph. ‘And I have walked about the earth for a good few years now. But I never ran into anything w
orse than myself on a dark night!’ It would have greatly surprised God Knows and the other dairy workers had Lil ever done so. Still, God Knows felt it more prudent to let her avowal go unchallenged.

  ‘They must be a terrible lot, thae queans in the South,’ was all he could think of saying in reply. ‘They must just all go about asking for it!’

  ‘It’s my opinion’—Lil clamped her conclusion firmly down with the bang of her bottling lever—‘my honest opinion—that Hugh Riddel, to say nothing of yon stuck-up daughter of his, Helen, with all her fine college education, and her eyes looking at you over the top of yon specs she wears, as if you were some kind of thing she didn’t see very often—it’s my opinion that they just all got what they’ve been asking for, for a long, long time.’

  ‘They say it’s still just touch and go with the Riddel quean, though,’ the Plunger ventured, reluctant to condemn one who might be at death’s door.

  ‘She’ll survive,’ Lil, plagued by no such ethics herself, assured the men. ‘Yon wish-washy molloching kind of creature always does. And as for yon Charlie Anson, he’s been asking for a good hiding all his life. And deed, that was the only good thing in the whole sorry business. They say that Hugh Riddel made a bonnie mess out of him!’

  ‘Deed aye.’ Despite himself, God Knows found himself in complete agreement with Lil on this point. ‘For I never yet looked on yon buck teeth of Anson’s but they put me in mind of a rabbit sitting up on its hunkers and laughing at something or other. But Anson will laugh no more like yon, for they say that Hugh Riddel didna leave a tooth in his head.’

  ‘There’s one thing, though,’ the Plunger straightened himself up from the tank to give his reflections full weight, ‘and it’s certain. Sue Tatt hasn’t gone into mourning over Friday night’s affair, for I saw her at the Grocer’s van, just yestreen, as large as life yonder and twice as sinful, chewing the fat and skirling away like a sixteen-year-old, with the new vanman that’s on the round.’

  ‘I never could understand that Sue Tatt business at all,’ God Knows pondered. ‘It was just fair beyond my comprehension. You would have thought that a man like Hugh Riddel would have been a bit more choosy, Sue being such a byword in the Parish, like.’

  ‘There’s no mystery to that at all,’ the Plunger said. ‘You know what Burns had to say about it? I’ll tone it down a bit—for Lil’s sake, there. It wouldn’t do to shock our Lil’s maidenly modesty. A desperate man has no conscience, and a willing woman has no objection. That’s what Burns said. In stronger language, though. But that, if you ask me, was all there was between Sue Tatt and Hugh Riddel.’

  ‘Maybe that, then,’ God Knows conceded, ‘though I’ll wager you that Hugh Riddel will give Sue the Soldier’s farewell from now on.’

  ‘He’ll have no other option,’ Lil concluded, ‘for I can see Darklands showing Riddel down the road real smartlike for Friday night’s work. For Darklands will not have very much option either, what with him being an Elder of the Kirk, forbye a County Councillor.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take a bet on it.’ God Knows spoke out of authority of long acquaintance with Dark­lands—the farm, and the farmer. ‘For I mind when I was fee’d to come home to Darklands here. And that wasn’t yesterday. That was before Darklands’ herd was built up, when he was just pleitering about with a bit of mixed farming and, say, a forty fifty stots; for even then, he had a kind of passion for kye. No T.T. Testing then, Plunger. You just had to take your chance with weedy milk and all the rest of it. And it was in the days when we were allowed to keep our own hens. In those days, Plunger, you could judge a farmer by his attitude to his cottars’ hens. If he said, ‘No Hens’, then you could be pretty certain that you had gone and bonded yourself not only to a suspicious man, but to a man as mean as cat’s dirt as well. Anyhow, the first question Darklands asked me was if I kept hens of my own. ‘Aye,’ I admitted, ‘I’ve got a two three hennies.’ He pondered on that for a while syne. ‘Well, well,’ says he at last, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll allow you, along with your Fee, a pucklie oats for your two three hennies!’ I was just about to thank him for the favour, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’ll allow you the oats to save you the bother of getting out of your bed in the middle of the night, and slinking up to the barn to help yourself.’ So you see, you can never tell what airt the wind will blow with a man who reasons like that! And don’t you forget this either,’ God Knows continued, fired by his listeners’ attention, ‘don’t you forget that it was Hugh Riddel’s father who was Darklands’ first cattleman when he started to build up his herd. They kind of built it up together. It was the only job that old Riddel had ever lasted in. He was never sent down the road on that job, for he was a grand cattleman. By God, he was that! It was never old Riddel’s work that was wanting. He could tell when a cow was in heat, when the bull itself would still be standing wondering about it! And he could have clippit a cow blindfold, going over her flanks as surely as he could always find his way home on Term Nights, and him as full as a distiller’s cask!’

  ‘Get to hell out of it! Back to your byre.’ Hugh Riddel’s voice sent Lil’s stool swivelling round in front of the bottling machine, and set the Plunger’s back bending over the tank again. The lorry men sauntered in with the large deliberate assurance of men who had every right to be there anyhow.

  ‘I said back to your byre,’ Riddel repeated to God Knows, who, lacking his fellow-workers’ speed of camouflage, still stood staring blankly.

  ‘Aye, aye surely, Mr. Riddel.’ It was only when he reached his byre that God Knows reproved himself for not taking a firmer stand. ‘There was me Mistering him!’ he confided to the Third Cattleman. ‘Mr. Riddel,’ says I, ‘and the man accepted it, as if it was just his due as usual. You would think that Hugh Riddel would walk humbly enough now, after last Friday night’s happenings.’

  * * *

  Last Friday night had started off like any other Friday night in Caldwell—furious with activity.

  Up at Ambroggan House, the younger nurses coming off day duty made hasty applications for late-night passes, and sprawling on each others’ beds indulged in sartorial barter. Not without reason were the nurses the best-dressed girls in all the parish. And, having acquired a Late Night for themselves, and finally decided Which of Whose to wear, were puzzled now by how to use both gains to best advantage: to the Half Crown Hop in Caldwell Hall, on the pillion of a Vespa with some male nurse as hard up as themselves; or to the Guinea Dinner Dance in the Town, in the front seat of a Consul, with some farmer’s son who—sure as death—would, at some time or another before the night was over, suggest, and even attempt, a bodily transference to the back seat of the car.

  Their older colleagues, contemptuous now of such acrobatic feats, were just content to sink into easy chairs, slip off their shoes, and proffer their advice—rejected either way.

  The nurses coming on Night Duty cast eyes half filled with sleep upon the world outside their bedroom windows, took yet another vow that never again would they skip morning sleep to have their hair done, not if they walked the world the rest of their days looking like Meg, the ‘parish patient’ who did the laundry. And yet one other vow they reinforced, as the isolated landmarks of Caldwell penetrated their half-awakened consciousness, to apply forthwith for a transfer to the Hospital’s branch in the Town, for in all four years between taking her Prelims and sewing the strings of Charge Nurse on her cap, Caldwell was surely the most forsaken dump a girl could land herself in.

  While all the afternoon the daft Dominie, their patient on parole, had sat on Soutar Hill, certain it was the mountain of Gilboah, with neither dew upon it, nor fields of offerings.

  It was the night the Misses Lennox, and other like ladies of the parish, slipped from small houses with long names on their gates, armed with damp sandwiches, and clinging trails of jasmine, just in bloom. Then, drawing fur tippets firm around their necks, sniffed the night air and bowed their heads against the oncoming wind be
fore stepping warily Kirkwards, decrying the noise and fumes of passing cars, hell bent for Dugald’s Road-house, and all New Rich, and ostentatiousness in every form, as well as couples who boldly strode the road together, hand in hand, pausing to watch the lights go up in distant farmhouses, acclaiming each and recognising all. Then stopping to kiss each other under the moon, and in the sight of the Misses Lennox; laughing about it to high Heaven, as if love itself were but a joke. For Miss Lennox had never thought love so, while Miss Maud even doubted whether it was love at all, or just one more manifestation of why Caldwell had the highest illegitimacy rate in all the County.

  The Misses Lennox felt themselves to be the guardians of Caldwell by right of birth. And yet—despite this accident, and for all their years within Caldwell—could not have told you from which direction the wind was rising now, nor in which quarter the moon above them lay. They only recognised full moons, and rapturously acclaimed the huge red harvest ones; could never discern quarters, nor yet appreciate small blue elusive February moons like this, which seemed to them but accident of light and cloud.

  Their thoughts turned Kirkwards now, and to the men in their own lives, the Minister, visiting missionaries home on furlough—and God. Perhaps God most of all. Though He, of course, was more than man, but yet fulfilling their emotional needs, without man’s nuisance value.

  And thinking so, the Misses Lennox remembrance fell, while their wrath rose on one such man. It was just the man’s presumption roused their ire.

  A farm-worker to be asked—far worse consent—to give the speech, and toast ‘The Immortal Memory’, at the Burns’ Supper the other night, an honour usually reserved for Colonels retired, or Ministers, active and passive. The insolence of the man, Head Dairyman at Darklands, Hugh Riddel by name, to stand barefaced up and tell them that half the people sitting there, listening to and praising Burns’ songs and poems, would have no more meed for Burns himself if he were to settle down amongst them tomorrow, than the ‘unco guid’ had for him in Mauchline in his own day.