The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  But Jake was in before him. Pulling Mat’s arm up in a boxer’s salute of victory he shouted. ‘Our Matthew! Hurray!’ Mat took one of his thickest jotters and beat time on Jake’s head with each syllable. ‘There’s nae – use – talking – to – you – at – all.’

  ‘Chuck it.’ Jake was laughing. ‘Here! I hope you haven’t bitten off more than ye can chew. You ought to write a book. Ha! Ha! Get the Seventh Day Adventists to take you up.’ He started to mollify Mat. ‘Never mind – let me see it sometime. Maybe give me a bit of education.’

  ‘Aye. I’ll give you a look if you’re nice and behave yourself.’

  Jake suddenly started to put on his shoes. ‘I’ll have to get a gildi on though. Must catch the corporation transport or I’ll disappoint that wee conductress.’ Then he was away into the kitchenette pouring out the cornflakes, shouting at Mat, ‘You’re going to be tired the day at the old darg. You don’t want to be at this game too often. Instead you should be in there keeping that wee wife of yours warm. I don’t know what’s wrong wi’ you young fellows noo-a-days – no enthusiasm.’ He came back into the living-room and started to clear a place for himself at the table by picking up the papers and throwing them gently at Mat.

  ‘Here! That’s great literature you’re chucking about.’ Mat started to tidy the papers up.

  ‘Aye, but a man can’t live by great literature alone.’ Jake slapped his stomach. ‘It’s got to make room for the bread and butter. The chuck comes first.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ said Mat, ‘we’ve got to eat. Sustain the old inner man. Keep body and soul together.’

  Jake was bending down tying his shoelaces. He looked up quickly. ‘Eh? Since when have you been getting worried about the corporate body?’ He pointed a finger at his stomach.

  ‘Since it started to worry me. As a matter of fact the bones are beginning to show.’ Mat pulled the lining from his pocket. ‘Starvation is looming round the corner.’

  ‘Here, have a cornflake.’ Jake held out the cornflake, his whole body and face in the pose of a man tight with his purse and refusing even to be asked for a loan. Mat started to laugh.

  ‘It’s a packet I need.’

  ‘Of cornflakes?’

  ‘No, the other thing.’

  ‘Oh, I see. So that’s the way it is. So.’ He rubbed his hands gleefully together. Jake was a great one for borrowing money on a Thursday night and he was always getting teased for it. Now the boot was on the other foot. He made Mat go through their usual pantomime of grovelling for the money, kissing his shoes, begging. ‘More alms for the love of Allah.’ Then he was at the table again eating his cornflakes speedily.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A couple of fivers.’ Mat was sitting on the floor propping himself up on his arms.

  ‘A couple of fivers? Ten quid? What have you been doin’? Been on the cuddies? You always were an awful man for the long shots.’

  ‘That’s for mugs like you.’

  Never before in his life had Mat borrowed money. At least not real borrowing, like ten pounds. Jake and he passed half-crowns and ten-bob notes back and forward without taking much account of them. Jake’s favourite approach when borrowing money from Mat was, ‘How about that half-dollar you owe me?’ But this was different. Ten pounds was real money. He was pleased to see Jake keeping up with his flippancy. It helped him to steel himself against the misery of the thought of asking for money. He knew that Jake would give him the money and ask no questions. He also knew that he didn’t mind being under an obligation to Jake. It was just that all his prejudices were against it – when he was living in that room and kitchen he knew that to be in debt was to be tilted that wee bit nearer disaster.

  ‘No, as a matter of fact I’ve had a couple of unexpected items of expenditure . . .’

  ‘Tch! Tch! And you a married man.’

  ‘Oh, get knotted. Look, I won’t need it till the end of the week.’

  ‘Just as well, laddie. I haven’t heard how the dividends are doing this quarter.’ Jake laughed, putting his feet up on the table, clasping his hands round an imaginary stomach, eyeing it, winking, then doffing an imaginary hat to Mat. ‘Ha! Ha! Struth though. I’ll have to get weaving.’

  ‘’S all right then, boy?’

  ‘It so happens,’ said Jake solemnly, ‘that the pocket book is in the pink of condition.’ Then he went out of the door and into the lobby, still talking. ‘It’s only natural that a clean living, upright young fellow like yours truly, scraping a little nest egg together for his old age, would have something to spare to help out a brother in need.’ He had reappeared at the door of the room wearing a warm belted jacket and a cloth cap. He was always neat and dapper, even when going to work in the slaughter-house. ‘The rate of interest is pretty stiff though.’

  Mat felt thankful to Jake for the persiflage. ‘I won’t forget this, laddie. And if you’re ever in need of anything – anything at all – then you know who not to ask.’

  ‘You’re too, too kind.’

  A little while later when Helen came Jake was about to go but not before he had slapped her on the buttocks. She had come into the room with a slight worried frown on her face, having fallen asleep then awoken to find Mat still up. She was tying the cord on her dressing-gown, still sleepy, her lips full and relaxed, her eyes blank and very big.

  ‘You nut.’ She came across the room avoiding Jake. She was too sleepy for horse-play. ‘Honest, I wonder if I’m safe with that half-witted maniac about the house.’

  Jake and Mat grinned. ‘He’s just a healthy red-blooded boy.’

  ‘I must go,’ Jake said. ‘Better clear that table of your magnum opus. You don’t want the old wife to know that you’ve been consuming the candles.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the lobby. ‘Or the dig money’ll go up. See you at the end of the week. Ta! Ta!’

  He left, closing the door. Helen and Mat looked after him waiting expectantly, then there came a loud crash as he slammed the front door shut. They both laughed. ‘That’ll be the whole building wakened up,’ Mat said. ‘Help me clear up.’

  Helen lifted Jake’s plate and the coffee pot. ‘Put your papers by. I’ll lay the table for breakfast. Your mother and father will be coming through soon. Did you manage all right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She came over to Mat and felt his chin. ‘You’d better get cleaned up, you look terrible. And you need a shave.’

  Mat was collecting his papers together, putting them into the cardboard box. ‘Just a minute till I get this junk put away.’

  ‘Your magnum opus?’

  ‘Aye. That’s what Jake calls it. I suppose . . .’ Mat dismissed the subject with a shrug. ‘I don’t know. It just seems like a week or two since the beginning of last spring. Every year gets shorter.’ Mat stood for a moment sawing his hand in the air. He wasn’t frustrated by an inability to formulate ideas so much as by the inability to speak out what he was thinking. It seemed to him to be too extravagant. Especially in the morning when everybody was getting ready for work, shaving in bathrooms, putting on clothes, gulping breakfasts, shivering in the cold, getting ready to run out to catch buses and trams. But he still stood looking at Helen, sawing his hand in the air, opening his mouth to speak, changing his mind. Then he burst out, ‘I mean you have a kind of crazy idea that you are exempt. That you have some kind of purpose. Something which you’ve forgotten but will remember some day. Then you look out of the window and you see that the light mornings are drawing in again. And you think – another year gone – and faster every time.’

  Helen demurred. ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean.’ Mat tried to reduce it to a mundane level. ‘It’s what everybody thinks. I mean, we’re all unique. And we all think that we’ve got something special in us. It’s true, too. We should believe in that – for everybody. It’s ridiculous. We’re trained to humility. I always think that kids at school are taught to be a little more polite, a little more humble than is re
ally necessary. You know, clasp your hands behind your backs, good morning, teacher, all that. But it makes good factory fodder for people to know their place and not to live in hope – or expectation. Then you say to yourself – it can’t happen to me. Mediocrity. But we know damned well what we are born to.’ Mat suddenly was illuminated by an idea. ‘Do you know something? Alec told me I’m ambitious. And he’s right. I am ambitious. I don’t mean the young Scotsman on the make type of ambition. That’s just servility. I mean real arrogant ambition. To do something. I was reading Yeats’ “Byzantium” last night. To emulate that sheer – sheer –’ Mat gazed slowly round the room, then shivered. ‘Eh, I’m a nut.’ He exhaled his breath slowly through fastidiously pursed lips, ‘Eh – eh – Jesus.’

  ‘Pride goes before a fall.’ Helen laughed at Mat.

  ‘It’s taking a helluva risk.’

  But Helen merely laughed this off. ‘C’mon, action,’ she said, and she carried the plate and the coffee pot through into the kitchenette. Mat was always trying to come to formal decisions about what he was going to do, but this didn’t really matter. Helen took the idea of risk in her stride. They were young, healthy, intelligent, well intentioned and they had expectations, which was as it should be. On the other side of the risk of failure is the expectation of success.

  They started to talk of everyday things while Mat cleaned the ashes out of the fireplace and set about making a new fire. It was the middle of the month and Helen was about to make her routine calls to the house-factors’ offices and for a while they discussed the possibility of their being successful in managing to get a house to rent. They got on all right living here with Mat’s parents but Helen was beginning to feel the disappointment of not being in charge of a household by herself.

  Mat went into the bathroom to shave and by the time he came out the quietness of the morning had gone. Somewhere there was a wireless blaring out jaunty orchestral music and there were vague noises of flushing and running water. It was still quiet enough to isolate the separate sounds; the grinding of gears as a bus changed down on the main road, the sound of a woman’s voice trying to raise some reluctant sleeper from his bed. Mat went to the door and shouted into the lobby. ‘You up?’ and the sound of his mother’s voice came from one of the bedrooms in answer.

  ‘Aye, aye, aye, aye. Keep your hair on. I’ll be through in a minute.’ Then there was the sound of her voice wakening Mat’s father. ‘Doug? You up?’ She continued shouting so that the two syllables of ‘You up?’ sounded together like ‘Yup? Yup?’

  Helen had started to set the table for breakfast and Mat sat in the chair in front of the fire yawning and nodding. He felt really tired.

  Jetta, Mat’s mother, came into the room with her hands twisted in her apron, a typical pose. She was smiling. She had just warned Doug not to get stuck in the lavatory pan. Mat and Helen could hear the rumbling chest notes of Doug’s reply but couldn’t make out what he said.

  Jetta held up some envelopes. ‘The post.’ She went through the bundle. ‘The electricity!’ With disgust. ‘What’s this? Soap coupons. Threepence and fourpence off. The way these folk want you to buy soap you’d wonder if they’re hinting at anything.’ She took a newspaper from under her arm and laid it on the broad arm of one of the imitation leather armchairs. ‘That’s old misery’s paper.’ She went through the letters again. ‘The pools – and what’s this? Matthew Craig, Esquire. Hey, Esquire, a letter for you.’ She gave Mat the letter and held up the one remaining envelope which was in her hand. ‘I know who this is for – you can tell by the smell.’ She sniffed at the scented envelope then squinted at it curiously. ‘I don’t know what these lassies see in Jake.’ But she sounded as if she had a good idea. ‘Always a different one.’ She spoke with affectionate pride. Then she addressed Mat. ‘You’re up early. Where’s Nell?’

  She poked her head through the kitchenette door. ‘Put the kettle on, hen.’

  ‘It’s on. In fact the tea is made. And there’s ham in the frying pan.’

  Jetta looked at Mat suspiciously and he tried to hide a yawn. ‘It’s a right bright fire,’ she said. ‘It seems funny. Everybody up, breakfast nearly ready. This early. Have you been up all night again?’

  ‘Ach, Ma, I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘You couldn’t sleep.’

  Helen came in from the kitchenette and put a milk jug on the table. Jetta looked at her with disapproval and Helen stopped short, embarrassed. She put the things on the table and went out of the room. ‘I’d better go and get dressed.’

  Jetta turned on Mat. ‘You ought to have more sense.’ But Mat shrugged, only half paying attention to her. He was busy reading his letter. ‘Ach, Ma!’ as if to say, ‘Don’t fuss.’

  ‘Don’t “Ach Ma!” me. It costs money to keep the light burning all night. And coal for the fire. And anyhow – how are you going to do your work the day? A young man like you not getting any sleep.’

  Mat couldn’t suppress another yawn and Jetta inhaled her breath through her open mouth and turned her eyes up towards the ceiling, spreading out her hands. Mat laughed. ‘Don’t lose your rag, Ma.’

  Doug had come into the room and was pottering about looking for the paper. Jetta was still going on. ‘It’s a’ these fancy notions he’s got into his heid. These letters addressed to him wi’ “Esquire” as if plain mister isn’t good enough.’

  ‘It’s good enough for me, Ma.’

  Doug agreed in principle with burning the midnight oil. He had done it himself in his time. He splayed his big hand out in a patting placatory gesture. ‘Now, Jetta. The boy’s only trying to improve himself.’

  ‘That’s right, Pa. You stick up for me.’

  By this time Mat had gone into the kitchenette and come back with a plateful of ham. He sat at the table and started to eat.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the boy except a wee bit honest ambition.’

  ‘You could dae wi’ a bit honest ambition.’

  ‘Now, now. I’ve always been a hard worker and so’s my two sons. There’s nothing wrong with a wee bit learning – if a man can make a better mousetrap . . .’

  Mat had been expecting the last phrase and he repeated it along with his father, then finished it himself. ‘– the world will make a beaten track to his door.’ Mat filled his mouth with bread and spoke with a wad of it filling out one cheek. ‘That’s what I was doing, Ma. Sitting up inventing mousetraps.’

  ‘If it was something practical like that it wouldn’t be so bad. But poems! It’s a wonder your brain is not turned.’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die, Ma. I never wrote a poem in my life.’

  Doug was disgusted at Mat’s flippancy. ‘Ach, the two of you.’

  Mat went on eating. He thought of his father’s simple boast. ‘We’ve aye been good workers.’ He felt touched by this. And yet it was the attitude deliberately bred into the people who would become factory fodder. Beneath the surface ambiguity of Mat’s attitude towards work there was another deeper equivocality. He loved work and this was a simple virtue, yet he felt something of the emotional regressiveness which was what immersing yourself in work amounted to. He thought of a phrase which he had read somewhere. ‘The flirtation with indolence.’ There was a virtue suggested here which was somewhat more complex. Was this the flaw, his ambiguity, his failure to find any resolution in all the paradox which he felt in life, the circles in which he was always thinking? Or was it that these paradoxes were continually being created by a deeper inner scepticism, a refusal to commit himself, the same regressiveness that forced him to immerse himself in work? It was interesting to see the same principle individualising itself in different ways and being then so critical of itself. But that was another paradox, and there was the flaw.

  ‘You’re a cool yin,’ Jetta said, ‘sitting there stuffing your face as if naebody was talking to ye.’

  ‘I’m a growin’ laddie.’

  ‘Aye, and you’ll be growing in the opposite direction if you don’t get
your night’s sleep.’

  Mat sat laughing and chewing his food.

  ‘You leave him alone. It’s not often he does it. Me, I’m having my breakfast.’

  ‘You sit down,’ Jetta said, ‘I’ll get it for you. But I’m not forgetting. Nothing good’ll come of not behaving like normal people.’

  Doug grinned at Mat when she went into the kitchenette. ‘Listen,’ said Doug, ‘I’ll tell you something. Karl Marx wrote with carbuncles on his behind. Have you ever had a carbuncle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. I didn’t think so. Had one myself on my arm. Here.’ Doug pulled up his sleeve and showed Mat a scar on his wrist. ‘Grim. But imagine something even worse than a boil on your behind. And you sitting on a hard bench in the British Museum Reading Room with the whole of Das Kapital unwritten before you. Just imagine the first time you sit down and all the boils on your behind all loup like hell.’ Doug eased his backside on the chair in sympathy with Marx and with an expression of distaste on his face. ‘And you think. What’ll I write? Yes, a critical analysis of the Capitalist system. You feel another twinge. A marathon sitting match. You’ve got to concentrate just to sit. And, incidentally, while you’re sitting there you have to rack your brains and tease out of them a lot of dusty ideas like relative and equivalent value, the labour process, you know, et cetera, and read up hundreds of volumes of statistics all crying out with misery and pain. Wee weans climbing up chimneys and pregnant women pulling wagons of coal and seamstresses dosing themself wi’ brandy to keep awake. Then your boils gi’ another twinge. What kind of lighting did they have those days in the British Museum? Did your eyes get tired? Did your arm get sore propping up all the Blue Books? Did your hand get cramped with writing? Then – oh!’ Doug raised himself from the chair suddenly twisting his face as if in pain. Then he grinned. ‘That’s one burst.’