The cane waste-paper baskets were the work of boys in the same age-group. Her hands began to recognise the basket they held, as if they had woven it. The fine close-knit start made by the teacher; the tightening tension of a determined effort to follow the start exactly; the gradual slackening off to the widening gaps which marked that midway moment when boy and basket fell out of mood with each other and the end seemed as far away as the beginning; the teacher’s even work again, bridging the moment; the last wild spurt to the rim’s edge, and the careful finish applied to all conclusions.
The nightdress was the work of a much older member. Old enough to be engaged, Helen Riddel knew, examining its care and detail. The work of some girl who had simply come here to learn to sew. She would be the first to arrive in the Dressmaking group, and the last to fold away her work. She would join in no other activity, so officially she would be defined as a poor Youth Club Member, and described as one who took everything and gave nothing. ‘But she’ll never forget how, as long as she lives,’ Helen Riddel reflected, smoothing the folds of the nightdress; ‘though I doubt whether any of the small boys will ever again tackle a waste-paper basket.’
‘But surely that isn’t the important thing.’
For a moment she felt as if Mr. Fleming, of Senior Lads’ Group from her own Centre, had taken her up on her conclusion. But no, it was Anson who had spoken. He had not yet got the rote of it, but she could feel the principle struggling within his comprehension.
‘It is only . . .’
‘Only incidental to the purpose behind the work.’ She supplied him with the words he was searching for, and so coveted. That was one thing she could bring to him in marriage, she thought, watching him assimilate her words and tuck them away in his memory. A lifetime of foolproof phrases.
‘But it’s perfectly true,’ Anson claimed, ‘and not to be smiled at’—for the irony had reached her mouth. ‘Surely you’re not trying to make out that there’s no real purpose behind the work?’
‘Purpose in plenty,’ she assured him, still smiling. ‘So much purpose that sometimes I feel it’s like the reams and reams of wrapping paper that conceal the smallness of a gift. The giver has to make it look good, for his own sake at least. And purpose, I suppose, is as good a way as any.’
‘But there’s results,’ Anson protested, beginning to claim them. ‘Even here, in my own small way, I’m beginning to get them. Just you take a look at this.’ He lifted a canvas that leant against the table and held it up for her inspection. ‘Now this is the exhibit that me and the Vet’s wife have decided on as the show-piece of the exhibition.’
They were painted from memory, Helen Riddel knew, staring at the flowers on the canvas. She knew that suddenly, but just as surely as she knew the origin of the memory. Searching for specimens up in the Free Kirk Wood. Tracing them in dark blue jotters. Pressing them in dark green ones. Suspended between wood and classroom, and concentrating in a dimness with the sunlight flickering in the back of your mind, so that when you wrote ‘Dog Violet’ more carefully than you would ever write again, and closed your jotter, memory itself would ettle to straighten out the crumpled purple petals so that the mind’s eye could see again the splash of yellow hidden in the corner of the flower. The painter too had remembered. The flowers on her canvas revealed all that their natural origins had tried to conceal.
‘Take a right good look at it, now,’ Anson urged, ‘for the girl who did it never painted before in her life, till Dr. Finlay’s son—the one that’s the Art Teacher in the Town—dropped in on us one night, to see how we were getting on, and just as a kind of experiment like, set them all to trying their hands at a painting. Here, as you can see, is the result.’
‘It deserves,’ Helen Riddel agreed simply, ‘to be the show-piece of the exhibition.’
‘So you cannot deny that I’m getting results, then?’ Her humble admission increased Anson’s arrogance. ‘And that, mark you, without any of your Social Science Diplomas or Government Grants either.’
It was his arrogance, rather than his slighting allusions to her own qualifications and Centre, that stung her into truth.
‘She’ll never paint another. Not unless Keith Finlay, or one of his calibre, continues to draw it from her. And that’s unlikely—people like him have wider worlds to work in. You see, he didn’t discover a potential artist; he created the potentiality. Not that it matters,’ she added despite herself, and for herself; ‘if it happens only once, it’s enough.’
* * *
‘I’m sorry I’m late. I had an awful job to persuade George to let me have the brake.’ The Vet’s wife’s apologies reached them before herself. ‘Ah, but I see you’ve had expert help.’ Bright with acknowledgement, her eyes smiled down on Helen Riddel, and her hands began to rearrange the exhibits.
‘I couldn’t label them for you.’ Helen Riddel moved aside to let her take over. ‘I didn’t know their owners. Except in absentia.’ The phrase came to her suddenly, out of summers and summers ago, when she had rheumatic fever and couldn’t come up here to the school on Prize Day to get her medal. But all her disappointment had been atoned for on the day the local paper reported the prize-giving. Dux Medallist, Helen Riddel. In absentia. In absentia. Seen in print, the words had added extra to her name. Spoken aloud, they had sounded her somebody special.
The teenagers, crowding round the table now, laid claim to their own work by loud rejections of it. You didn’t need to know their names. Their likeness to each other was such that, if you knew one, you knew them all. And certainly they never wanted to know your name, for their curiosity seldom extended to anyone beyond themselves, so that you became but someone odd, old as Methuselah, to be absorbed from top to toe in a glancing instant, and then ejected in a second’s cool conclusion. Helen Riddel knew that, now that she was outwith them. For still and only in absentia was she endowed.
It was then that she found herself searching their bodies and not their faces, as if her own body, groping out for reassurance, searched for one in like condition. Her very hands could have questioned such a body, her urgency to know was such. Did it feel trapped by its conception, subjected, in anger with itself, and so repulsed?
The chatter round her began to quieten down as Anson mounted the platform to open the meeting. Gripping the back of the seat in front of her, she tried to break the trend of her thoughts by concentrating on his speech. His words ventriloquised but touched her hearing, keeping her eyes fixed on their source. A man and a woman should sleep together completely naked, she thought, staring, so that when next they look upon each other fully clothed, the metamorphosis is so absolute that neither can the imagination distort nor speculation intrude.
The laughter round her was subsiding, and she knew she must have missed the point of some joke.
‘Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ Anson was saying. ‘Thank you. But to conclude on a more serious note. Although I would be the very last to claim perfection for the samples of work you have seen here tonight, I would be the very first to claim that if perfection happens only once, it’s enough.’ He raised his hand to acknowledge the appreciative applause. ‘At the same time,’ he continued when it had subsided, ‘at the same time, all that you have seen here tonight is but incidental; but incidental to the real purpose behind the work.’
How naked you felt when the mask slipped from your face, leaving your eyes out of focus, your mouth trembling, and yourself wondering where the mechanism which had always controlled them had gone to.
* * *
Outside the hall, Helen Riddel waited for the sickness within her to settle down. Only once before had she been so conscious of her body’s separate entity. That was in the summer of her rheumatic fever, when she discovered that once she could will herself to accept her pain’s severest spasms, the lesser ones seemed respites, but long enough for acquiescent wonder. This is how it feels to be free of pain. Illusory enough to raise false hope. Maybe I’m better now.
Or like the way we used
to work it with the wind, she remembered, its sharpness against her face stirring the recollection. When the wind was in our faces, we’d just turn our backs on it and go racing in its own direction. But now she knew that, were she to live to be a hundred and feel the first winds of more than seventy springs sharp on her face, never again would they rise from a landscape where every landmark led to some long innocence.
* * *
‘It all went off very well, I thought.’ Anson was as full of his own importance on the road back as he had been on the way going. ‘I got a few points home the night. You could tell by the way Mollison held back at the end and stood yonder asking about this and that. Well, didn’t you think so?’
Helen Riddel’s lack of response gratified him. He simply put it down to professional jealousy—an interpretation that suited his mood of general triumph. His mind now touched on the particular triumph. He was going to marry her all right. That had always been the intention. In his own time though, and on his own terms; for a lifetime of snubs and slights from her father demanded an eradication as slow and deliberate as their accumulation had been. Not that they ever could be completely eradicated. Anson himself was aware of this. You could overcome one of your own like—that was simply a test of strength; but you could not wipe out your antithesis—that opposite aspect of yourself which had first revealed itself years and years ago. A small enough revelation at the time, but still the embryo of an antipathy that was to grow to its full height.
It was on the day Hugh Riddel had left school. The kind of day the younger boys dreaded, when all the long-breeked scholars who were leaving set about them, sighting them. Whether by accident or design, Anson had been Hugh Riddel’s victim; and Riddel’s finding had rang out through the Free Kirk Wood. ‘Anson’s got nothing. Charlie Anson’s got damn all!’ And, although the other young victims had got very little either, their persecutors had simply accepted the fact as but one more proof of their own approaching manhood. But not Hugh Riddel. Never Hugh Riddel. It seemed to Charlie Anson that, ever since, Hugh Riddel had gone on discovering him, had kept on proclaiming that he had got damn all.
But at last, and for all that, he had got something—nothing less than Hugh Riddel’s daughter.
‘Well then, Helen,’ he remembered, slowing down and drawing the car in to the edge of Soutar Hill, ‘so that’s how things are with you? God, but you must have clicked very easily.’
The numbness began to gather on her mind and left her body to its own devices. Surely, to prove its independence, it began to lead the way to the clumps of bracken in search of the hollow to lay itself down in.
‘You might be the better of my coat under you,’ Anson suggested, disconcerted by her waiting body, ‘the bracken’s damp.’
‘No.’ She shook her head and, freeing her face from the pressure of his own, lay looking up into the nothingness of the night.
‘Come on now, quean. You can do a lot better than this. What ails you?’
His urgency reached her mind from a long way off; but her body, exercising its independence still, responded to the clawing of his hands.
‘That’s better. That’s more like it. We can go the whole hog the night, seeing you’re filled.’
* * *
It was her father’s hands were round his throat; her father’s voice that rose to blaspheme; his body that took over from her own and set her free. But neither for her, nor for her sake. She stood in envy and in need of every blow her father struck at Anson. Thrusting herself forward she was at last observed by him. But not in possessive anger, nor outraged shame, nor even with the saving grace of sorrow’s self, but just with pity. That wondering brand of it, and brief, which casts its glance on the misfortunes of some utter stranger, then passes on.
‘You poor bitch. Was this the best that you could do for yourself?’
* * *
‘But she must have seen the brake coming,’ the Vet’s wife was insisting when Hugh Riddel reached the crowd that had gathered at the crossroads. ‘She must have seen it, for I saw her clear enough. She just stepped out from the side of Soutar Hill, and walked right in front of me.’
‘They took her to Ambroggan House, Hugh,’ Wylie the Blacksmith was saying. ‘Only because it happens to be the nearest hospital,’ he insisted. ‘For I’m sure that it was an accident. I’m sure Helen never saw the brake till it was on her. I’m damned sure of that, Hugh,’ he urged, thinking it mattered.
* * *
Last as usual, God Knows clattered up into the dairy, rattling his milking machines.
‘There’s no need for you to sound so bloody busy all of a sudden. It’s only me that’s here. Darklands hasn’t arrived yet.’
Hugh Riddel’s voice snapped through the empty dim-lit dairy, and God Knows shot up like some soundless shadow.
‘If your hands had been half as ready at the milking as your tongue’s been at the gossiping,’ Hugh Riddel said when he himself found voice again, ‘that lot of milk could have been through the cooler, bottled and off with the first load.’
‘So you’ve gotten the first load off on the road then, Hugh?’ Darklands, as always, entered his own dairy with the courteous curiosity of a visitor who doesn’t know the answers, yet asks all the right questions.
‘How’s Andromeda’s yield after calving this time, Andrew?’ He turned his attention to God Knows, who, surprised by the privilege, began to fuss and fluster.
‘She’s up, Mr. Gordon. She’s well up on her last calf. Look see,’ he urged, ‘just you have a look for yourself.’
A dark face within Hugh Riddel watched God Knows tugging and riving to get the lid off his milking machine. Poor fumbling bugger—fear still made his fingers thumbs; and though there was no need at all for it now, it was a fear God Knows had grown too old within to ever outgrow.
‘Let me see the damned thing,’ Hugh Riddel suggested at last. ‘It’s just as I thought,’ he said when he had unscrewed the top; ‘it’s that machine me and the Plunger got jammed the other day, and hell and all to manipulate since.’
‘But you were right, Andrew,’ Darklands agreed when the machine was opened, ‘you were quite right. She’s well up on her last yield. I could near swear she’s doubled it.’
‘Any more news of Helen?’ Darklands withheld the question until God Knows had disappeared down into his byre again.
‘Not so far,’ Hugh Riddel said. ‘They’re going to ring through next door when there’s any change.’
‘I’ve been wondering, Hugh,’ and because he still wondered, Darklands didn’t find the right words easily, ‘I’ve been thinking, maybe, that when all this blows by, you might feel the better of a bit change. I’ve got a brother down in the Mearns yonder, who has been thinking this while back of changing over to dairying. And I know for a fact he wouldn’t refuse the chance of a good Head Dairyman.’
Hugh Riddel shook his head, refusal reaching him faster than his reasons for it.
‘It was Mistress Riddel I was thinking mainly on,’ Darklands went on as if he hadn’t noticed. ‘They say that this kind of thing hits womenfolk the hardest. And it could just be that she’s feeling a change might help. A fresh start like, Hugh.’
Hugh Riddel shook his head again. East or west, north or south, a mile near or a hundred miles away, the only fresh start a farm-worker ever knew was within the space and in the time it took him to get from the old farm to the new. He had long since found that out from the frequent flits of his boyhood. Only when the horse and cart, with themselves and all their worldly gear piled high on top of it, turned out of sight of the farm they were leaving, had his mother stopped worrying whether she had scrubbed the cottar house they had left behind clean enough for the new folk. And it wasn’t until they came in sight of the new farm, that she started worrying about the dirt she was sure she would find in the cottar house they were going to take over. But, in between, they had travelled in some high, far-seeing anonymity that liberated them from every place and every person they passed on the
road, and bound them all together in a rare happiness with each other. Much as his mother had always grumbled about all the shifts they made from farm to farm, it was only then, with the past behind them and in the hope it would not precede them, that his mother had taken on some strange new quality.
Gay she had been at such times, he remembered, defining her mood. That was how she must have looked before she ever came to be with his father and himself. The glint of her gaiety caught at his remembrance, but it was wonder held him as he began to recognise the face of a girl he had never set eyes on.
‘It would be a fresh start for you all,’ Darklands was urging still, misinterpreting his silence.
‘No.’ Hugh Riddel had found his reason for refusal this time. ‘There’s no such thing as a fresh start. Only the belief in it, somewhere on the road between the old farm and the new.’
‘But at least you’ll speak it over with the mistress,’ Darklands coaxed. ‘Do you know something, Hugh?’ he confided, thinking it was his own secret, ‘I never yet fee’d a man to work for me without first trying to win over his wife. It’s the only way I know to ensure a contented worker. And if I hadn’t given in to your mother, years and years ago, your father would never have stayed on to build up the herd with me. That was a precedent, mind you. But I hadn’t very much option. It was your father smuggled the two three bantam hens into the farm, but it was your mother insisted holding on to them, once she found out that they were there.’
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