Glitter of Mica

by Jessie Kesson

  To dismiss the people of Caldwell like that was bad enough, but the man had gone on to do something worse than that: he had deprived them of the comfort of myth; had flung, as it were, all the little china statues of Highland Mary off their mantel­pieces and left them lying in broken pieces.

  Nor had he left them with their other substitute for comfort intact, their Bonnie Jean. In places like Mauchline and Caldwell, he had claimed, Burns would have been left with little choice but to marry Jean Armour—Oh, but aye! For any man could live after being worried, but no man could live after being disgraced. So, no particular credit to Burns for that marriage. And, having married him, Jean Armour would have had little choice but to put up with Burns. For, wasn’t that just the way of it in country places? In all their years in Caldwell, now, had any one of them ever known of a farm-worker, or even a farmer for that of it, going and getting divorced? Nor was it their religion which imposed this attitude upon them, for there wasn’t a Catholic within fifty miles of them.

  There were, the man had said, plenty women of Jean Armour’s sort who would have been willing enough to share Burns’ name, his bed and his board, but he had needed something much more than that in a wife; he had needed the impossible. To have one foot on the front step of the castle, and the other trailing behind on the dunghill, and never both together, was just about the loneliest thing that could ever befall a man, and the woman wasn’t born who could have bridged this gap with Burns. But, mind you, that had never prevented Burns from searching for her, and even glimpsing her fleeting reflection in the faces of all women; personifying her in the love songs he wrote to all the Peggies, Marys, Jeans and Nancys, for they but fuelled some flame already lit. And the self-same thing applied to all his nature lyrics. Had Burns never set eyes on the daisy, the briar, or the canna white ablown, he still would have sung for ‘some wee sma’ flower, whose seed was never sown’, knowing that the herb which cannot be found will not bring relief.

  Oh, but it had been galling to find Hugh Riddel’s Immortal Memory printed in full in the national press. one ploughman speaks of another—robert burns, the heading had said, instead of as usual tucked away in a column of the local paper under caldwell events, where everybody who was anybody in Caldwell would have been certain of seeing their own names in print. But not one word about the Colonel who had piped the haggis in, nor the Dominie who had ‘addressed’ it, or the Minister who had said the Burns’ Grace over it. Not a mention of ‘The Ladies’—which had included the Misses Lennox—‘who had helped to make the event such an unqualified success, by working like Trojans behind the scenes’, as their functions were normally described. Not even a mention of the ‘fine rendering of The Bonnie Lass O’ Ballochmyle, by Miss McCombie of The Whins’. Though quite unknown to the Misses Lennox, Hugh Riddel himself had observed on this to God Knows on their way home from the Burns Supper:

  ‘Miss McCombie will now render The Bonnie Lass O’ Ballochmyle, said the Chairman. And the Chairman was just about right at that. For yon bloody woman nearly tore The Bonnie Lass apart!’

  Not a mention of anyone at all, except a local farm-worker whom nobody even knew, nor, as far as the Misses Lennox were concerned, wished to know either. It just went to show. You never could trust the uneducated. Take that miner turned lay preacher, who had addressed them up in the Kirk Hall last month, accusing them of being quite capable of crucifying Christ again because they lacked recognition. A recollection which rankled particularly with the Misses Lennox, for it was one of their great dreams and small hopes that, for His Second Coming, Christ would choose Caldwell, convinced that they would be the first to recognise Him, after a lifetime acquaintance with Holman Hunt’s Light of World in their front parlour.

  And so they talked till other like ladies of the parish, who lurked in waiting, pounced out upon them from small side roads or clumps of whins, giggling together with feared surprise. Like ghosts of girls.

  * * *

  At this time, too, the farm-workers’ wives were taking the opposite direction to the Woman’s ‘Rural’, their tongues as sharp, their thoughts as bright and bitter as the jars of marmalade clanking in their baskets. For this was Marmalade Competition Night; two classes—Rough and Fine. These were no guardians of Caldwell, but content merely as critics, an easier role, and altogether safer. Yet, not one amongst them but knew how mornings were, earlier than you have ever known them: how in such isolated hours the well-trod path towards their byres was like some track in an uncharted world; how when darkness fell, overtaking them on the road, a lamplit farmhouse five miles away was surer guide than bright Orion and all the mariners’ stars. Small wonder, then, their tongues wagged wild, in general observation, for the small particular was ever without voice.

  Now! What did this one make of Hugh Riddel’s Immortal Memory, a week ago tonight, up in the Hall? They had not quite got beyond the fact that one of themselves had been allowed voice at last and were inclined to warm themselves contentedly at the thought; till God Knows’ wife began to scatter straws of doubt within their minds. ‘ ’Twas just the kind of thing could make a man go all above himself,’ she vowed, ‘not, mind you, that Hugh Riddel had ever had other than a fine conceit of himself—and that kind needs just a little push to send them clean off their balance.’

  ‘Take Charlie Anson now, and for example,’ the Plunger’s wife remembered. ‘Until yon creature was appointed Treasurer of the Farm-workers’ Union, who would have ever given him a second thought? And now the man was taking himself seriously. Just you observe him. Speaking English! As if he had never learned a word of Scots, or else was shamed of it!’

  ‘He has even given his bonnet the go-by,’ Lil recalled, ‘and taken to wearing a hat instead, lifting it to every conceivable woman he met on the road, just to prove that he knew what to do with a hat.’

  ‘Though, God help us,’ as the Plunger’s wife pointed out, in an attempt to modify resentment, ‘the creature looks just as like a weasel under the hat, as ever he looked under the bonnet! And, when he lifts his hat to me, I just look through it, and him too.’

  ‘Oh, but Charlie Anson does worse than that,’ as God Knows’ wife reminded them. ‘He not only speaks English, he’s beginning to think he discovered Scots as well. Yon talk he gave at the Cultural Society—Words Your Heritage, he cried it, and didn’t even know he was being insulting. As if it was us who had forsaken our Scots’ tongue, and not himself! I will say this much for Hugh Riddel; you may not like him, but you cannot despise him. And another thing, did you notice that when Hugh Riddel was saying Holy Willie’s Prayer that night at the Burns’ Supper, did you notice, he never once took his eyes off Charlie Anson?’

  ‘God!’ Lil remembered, ‘I even began to feel sorry for Charlie Anson himself, sitting squirming yonder under Hugh Riddel’s glower.’

  ‘Yon was a sight pleased me right fine,’ the Plunger’s wife admitted. ‘But I’ll wager you this much, Hugh Riddel would have done a damned sight more than glower at Charlie Anson, if he’d had any inkling that Anson’s taken up with his daughter. It’s an odd thing, but I’ll wager, too, Riddel will be the last man in Caldwell to hear anything about that.’

  ‘You always are the last to hear anything about your own,’ Lil pointed out. ‘And I, for one, wouldn’t take five pounds to be the first to tell Hugh Riddel about Anson and his daughter.’

  ‘Nor me, either,’ God Knows’ wife agreed. ‘But I would give ten pounds to be the first to see his face after somebody else has told him.’

  ‘Even so,’ the Plunger’s wife felt that the issue was getting out of perspective, ‘the pot can never call the kettle black. At least Hugh Riddel’s daughter is single. She can please herself, as can Charlie Anson for that of it. Though the woman who would ever look twice at him must be pretty desperate.’

  ‘But Helen Riddel is desperate,’ was Lil’s opinion. ‘For all her education, and all the speak of the brains she’s gotten. She’s a poor white shelpit creature. She takes after the mother i
n that respect.’

  ‘I just wonder what Isa Riddel would have thought of her man’s Immortal Memory, if she’d been there to hear it,’ God Knows’ wife pondered.

  ‘All Hugh Riddel’s womenfolk were better away that night.’ Lil’s emphatic largess consigned a harem to him. ‘Though I can tell you this much: if Sue Tatt had been yonder to hear him describe her like as ‘necessary’ to Burns, she would have sent him away with a flea in his lug.’

  ‘Still and on,’ the Plunger’s wife recalled, ‘the way Hugh Riddel spoke that night, about Burns’ farms at Lochlea and Ellisland, there was a while yonder I got the feeling that they were just two farms lying somewhere under Soutar Hill here. And that Hugh Riddel had ploughed every acre of them himself.’

  ‘Come ony man at all

  And tak me frae my faither’

  Lil started to sing, desirous suddenly of freeing herself of her companions, and strode away down into the night on her own.

  ‘For it’s O dearie me!

  What shall I dae

  If I die an auld maid in a garret.’

  ‘Wheesht, you now!’ the Plunger’s wife admonished, catching up on Lil. ‘Look see!’ she whispered mysteriously, grabbing Lil’s arm and holding her firm captive till the others caught up with them before revealing the mystery. ‘Look see! There’s a light just gone up in Sue Tatt’s bedroom. Business as usual there, on a Friday night!’

  * * *

  ‘Fiona!’ Sue Tatt shouted upstairs in warning, to her eldest daughter. ‘If you go mucking up all my new cleaned bedroom, I’ll land you one. You’ll go flying straight through the wall. And that’s a promise!’

  Having got this off her chest, Sue made her way back to the kitchen again, pausing in the doorway as though she were some complete stranger come to pay a visit to herself, and, standing there, took in every aspect of her newly turned-out room. Sue, a woman of many parts, was equal to many roles, and Fridays always brought out the house-proud in her.

  True, her household would rough it contentedly enough all the rest of the week, when Sue would be absorbed in some other role, though she would always justify her muddle to anyone who crossed her threshold uninvited, with the dubious welcome, ‘You’re just about the last one I was looking for. But come on away inside. The clartier the cosier! Or so they say’—accompanied by a slap on the back that would have flung you flat on your face if you hadn’t been expecting it. But, when the pendulum swung the other way, as now, a tiny speck of dust in any corner of her house was enough to send Sue up in smoke, and was more than a little unfair on her family, who could never quite adjust themselves to the suddenness of their mother’s change of role. And doubly unfair tonight, when Sue was com­bining two roles.

  She would let days pass on end, giving her face a lick and a promise, and her hair a rough redd through. But today a sudden beautifying spasm had seized her; a visit to the Town and Woolworths had become a Must. Descending on the cosmetic counter, Sue had bought up everything that promised anything: a Face Pack which ‘erased tell-tale wrinkles’, a Highlight Rinse which ‘brought out hidden golden glints’, a lipstick which ‘carried a breath of Spring’. And, miser-like, Sue was now preparing to lock herself away in the bathroom, with all her little packages, and looking forward to lying, soaking herself leisurely, and reading the instructions on her Beauty Aids as lovingly as if they were the word of God—though with more faith.

  ‘I’ll be in the bathroom if I’m wanted,’ she reminded Fiona. ‘And don’t any of you lot go mucking all my place up,’ she warned again.

  ‘Forget it, Mam,’ Fiona advised casually from the bedroom. ‘Don’t let it go and get your wick.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what does get my wick’—Sue turned to survey her kitchen again—‘and that’s just the sight of a pair of sharny boots lying on my new-brushed rug. You would think,’ she added in pained protest, ‘that we all lived in a pig-sty.’

  ‘We do, too.’ Young Beel dodged Sue’s aim, but gave her the cue for another role.

  ‘I work my fingers to the bone for you all,’ she complained, ‘slaving to bring you up, and that’s all the thanks I get.’ She made her way to the bathroom almost tearfully, remembering now that she was ‘a widow woman, bringing up a young family, all on her own.’

  And indeed it was a kind of truth. Though Sue did whiles confuse the names of the mythical husbands who had widowed her, certain it was that she worked with a fair degree of regularity to bring up her bairns. ‘Drag them up’ was Caldwell’s private interpretation of her efforts. But, then, Caldwell was seldom charitable towards its own. For though they accepted Sue as their own, they condoned neither Sue nor themselves for this acceptance.

  The role of Self Supporting Widow was dear to Sue’s heart. Mounting her bicycle two or three times a week to do the wash for surrounding farmers’ wives, Sue was aware of the heightened interest she aroused both in them and in their daily helps, who were forever making some excuse to pop into the wash-house for a news with Sue. And the self-same thing with the farm-workers’ wives. Sue Tatt was well aware that their attitude to herself veered between superiority and a kind of envy. And their approach towards her was transparency itself.

  Meeting any one of them alone on the Ambroggan road it would simply be as housewife to housewife: newsing together of this and that; the cost of food, exchanging a recipe maybe, or a cleaning hint. In such moments, Sue would become so enthusiastic over the preserving qualities of bees’ wax and turpentine, that she would deceive even herself and, mounting her bicycle, would take down the road a glow of goodness over her, and the assurance within her—I, Sue Tatt, am just an ordinary housewife after all. And what is more, I am accepted as such by the Plunger’s wife.

  When Sue Tatt ran into a group of farm-workers’ wives, things took a different turn altogether.

  ‘Aye! But it’s another fine night, again,’ the Plunger’s wife would shoot out of the side of her mouth in hurried passing, the remembered mutual addiction to bees’ wax and turpentine simply forcing the salutation out of her, while the other wives would just keep going, their gaze fixed steadily on the road ahead, their mouths clamped down in firm disapproval. Such an attitude always had the effect of bringing out the worst in Sue towards womankind—‘A drab-like lot! All gone to seed. Not one amongst them would have seen their feet if they hadn’t been all gripped in with brassieres and stays’: while she, Sue Tatt, could stand, and sometimes did, as now, as firm mother-naked as other women in all their harness; and standing so, she would think, ‘Oh, the pity of it! And the waste. To grow old. And there’s the whole wide world. And all of them that’s in it. And I have never seen the world. Nor half of them that’s in it. And what is more the pity is that they have never seen me so!’

  Sue would have stripped herself at any time, and just for that. The way a child might rush from school, its crayoned drawing held aloft, and shouting, ‘Look what I’ve got. It’s all my own!’ . . .And, just as the praise of some loving observer would ring in its mind for a long time after, so would some lover’s praise, when he himself and all his intimacy were long forgotten, bell in Sue’s mind—‘God, Sue! But you’re a bonnie woman right enough.’

  It was when Sue Tatt ran into two wives on the road that she really came into her own, for they held the fallacy that two could keep a secret. And, having taken the risk of a friendly encounter with Sue Tatt, two wives would become bolder still, skipping hastily over the polite preliminaries like bairns, weather and neighbours, till at last they landed warily but with relief on basic ground; drawing gradually from the well of Sue’s reputed experience . . .. For men were just a perfect nuisance—wasn’t that so, now? My goodness me! No wonder women always aged much quicker than their menfolk, considering all they had to put up with, one way or another. A man could go on being a man till he dropped into his grave; but a woman had to call a halt, sometime or other. ‘Oh, it was all right when you were young and daft,’ the Plunger’s wife had once confessed. ‘Though even then,’ she had a
dmitted, ‘I got to just wanting my good night’s sleep. And now, to tell the truth, it’s gotten like a cup of cold water.’

  Oh, but to tell truth was always so much easier than to be truth. At least, Sue Tatt had found that so; for she met so many sweet deceptions in herself, and each seemed genuine truth. As in times like that, when Sue would find herself in entire agreement with the wives; with, all the time, the other side of it badgering her inwardly for a hearing—‘But I never felt like that about a man, in all my born days. Well, maybe I did. But only once or twice. And even then, I always managed to put a face on it. For I could never let any man feel that he was other than the best man ever.’ Sue knew instinctively that a man in bed was as vulnerable as his own nakedness, and that only by covering his failure for him, could she reveal her own completeness.

  ‘There are some men, though,’ she had once assured Lil and the Plunger’s wife—only because she felt she owed them some little comfort and confidence for all that they had confided in her—‘There are some men, though,’ Sue had informed them, ‘and I have met one or two of them, that whiles feel the same way about it all as you and me. They go so off themselves when it’s all over, that they could just cut their throats.’

  Still and on, it was fine to be looked upon as something of a woman of the world, but overburdening whiles, and more like myth than truth; then it was finer to dissolve the burden in the wash-tub, for the sight of their washing blowing high and white along the lines seldom failed to produce the comment from the farmers’ wives:

  ‘Let Sue Tatt be what she likes. One thing is sure. She never fails to hang out a bonnie white washing!’