by Archie Hind
If he had previously side-slipped into living the commonplace life, developing an aptitude and a taste for what he called ‘real living,’ he had now found a rationale, a good substantial reason why he should continue in this way.
He began to look upon the act of writing with the realisation of the presumptuousness of the thing and he felt towards it that mixture of embarrassment and disgust which he would have felt in having to take part in an everyday role dressed in a top hat and tails. Although this disgust was of a moral nature it began to find expression every time he thought of writing, as a nose-wrinkling grue, a flutter of the fingertips, a soured grimace, a clearing of the tongue, a long fastidious exhalation of the breath through pursed lips. Sometimes it went as far as real physical nausea, sometimes he would cause himself a real physical blush when he thought of his presumption and his complete incapacity to live up to it.
Early in the year, at the same time that Mat had started work in the slaughter-house, Helen had become pregnant. The baby was due in September, so Mat and Helen redoubled their efforts to find a house for themselves. In April they succeeded in renting a very small room and kitchen on the south side of the city.
The day that Mat had come home from work and found that Helen had managed to persuade a house factor to rent a house to them – at long last, after waiting around for weeks and months in various waiting rooms, putting their names down on lists, calling every month on a dozen different offices – that day Mat was inspired by the hope that at last he would be able to consolidate, at last make something permanent, have something solid and absolutely lasting in his life, and he thought of the life ahead of him with a home of his own and a family and the quiet day-to-day pleasures that would be his. A door of his own which he could lock against the world, and the life of his family which would be good from the beginning. He would find in making a home with Helen a resolution to all those tensions which he had sought before in writing, and they would be resolved in actuality and not in the false and insubstantial way of art.
All this was bound up in some way with Mat’s view of Helen as she had stood before him as she always did with that significant open-handed gesture, her body towards him and her hands turned out. In her early pregnancy her whole body took on a soft amplitude and Mat felt continually drenched in an atmosphere of love and womanly generosity.
On very rare occasions Mat would remember how he had created an image out of the actual reality that surrounded him, and how this had given him a release from fear and anxiety; when he had sat in the office and listened to the clock ticking, posting up the big heavy bound ledgers and enjoying the half somnolent tedium of the inflexible routine. That had come to an end out of something in him, perhaps no more than a primitive energy of will, which recognised that even tedium and boredom does not put a stop to the processes of life or the passing of days, that his mortality was just as sure, his life just as precarious whether he immersed himself in routine work or whether he threw open all doors and dared to presume. But he dismissed these thoughts on the authority of the works of one of the greatest writers of the century and persisted in his profound and deliberate misunderstanding of Mann’s work and of his own nature, ignoring the irony that what he was experiencing in himself as a dismissal of art was in fact that very doubt which is at the centre of the experience of art itself.
Mat and Helen sat in the tramcar in the third seat from the front on the left-hand side. Whenever this particular seat was empty, and they were together, they always took it. Mat did this out of nostalgia, Helen out of sentiment. Once they had sat on this seat on an empty tram and steeped in the roseate glow of young love they had made shy confession. They had been travelling home after being out together the whole day, having been to see a French film – a whimsical and touching film about youth and memory in which a haunting little musical theme had been played which they whistled as they waited for the tram. Before seeing the film Mat had stood waiting in the foyer while Helen went to hang her wet raincoat in the cloakroom. When she came back she had stood at the entrance to the foyer in her characteristic stance – peering about her short-sightedly yet without the slight stoop that is usual among short-sighted people. Instead she stood erect and supple and with a little smile on her face as she looked for Mat among the crowd in the foyer. Mat did nothing to attract her attention, for it amused and touched him to see her little smile of expectation as she peered in quite another direction from the one in which he was standing. Then as she had noticed him she had come forward and he had noticed her body and her movements which had an amplitude not so much sexual as purely human, an attractiveness entirely personal and out of which sex was compounded rather than an attractiveness having its basis on sex. Then they had gone upstairs to see the film, Helen running, Mat following behind smiling quietly and comfortably as Helen stood at the top of the stairs waiting for him and holding the door of the balcony open and looking back down towards him. Mat remembered that day; a day when the wind had whipped sheets of rain up and down the streets, but which they had spent in warm carpeted restaurants and lighted rooms, gazing outwardly from the gay interiors to the grey city outside.
So it added to Mat’s sense of expectation that they should sit together in this seat. It was a lucky sign. Mat had the quaint habit of holding to these things. If he was going somewhere which involved a choice of routes he would consciously take that one which he remembered as having taken at a special happy moment in his life. Moments like sitting on the third seat from the front on the left-hand side were too rare not to be partaken of again when possible – if only in memory. And so they sat together, Helen clinging to Mat’s arm, Mat pressing her arm against his side. They were going to see their new house together.
As the tram went through the streets Mat gazed out at the lit-up windows of the houses. The tram slid through the bright streets into the town. They changed in the town to another tram which would take them over the Clyde to the south side of the city, across the bridge, where they looked over the light-streaked river to the gay upside-down reflections in the water, and on out through the Gorbals to the quiet streets beyond. They found the street they were looking for in a recess between a sunken railway shunting yard and a bus garage. Before finding it they had walked through several streets in the wrong direction, quiet streets with big sandstone tenements or smaller two-storey houses with stretches of worn garden in front. The streets seemed peaceful with the gas-lamps casting their individual quiet pools of light around them; they passed a little square with a railed-in children’s playground in the centre and with trees planted close to the railings, overhanging the pavement. The trees hissed slightly from the wind and the light smirr that was falling. After that they found themselves in what was to be their own street and they walked down it looking for the number of their close.
When they had found the close they walked inside and found the vacant house they were to look at, a door at the back of the close. Mat had the keys in his pocket and they opened the door and groped their way into the darkness of the house. Mat found the electric switch and turned it on, but they had forgotten that the electricity had been turned off and there was no light.
They spent the next half-hour wandering up and down the adjacent streets looking for a shop that was open. The rain had begun to fall heavily but they were so eager to see the house that they kept on looking until they found a shop open. It was a tiny cluttered shop full of cheap kiddies’ sweets, cards of hair pins, tin mugs and coarse china cups lying in cardboard boxes among dry straw. The old woman who looked after the shop insisted on parcelling the two candles with her twisted arthritic hands, wrapping them up tightly in a piece of newspaper and giving the end of the little parcel a twist so that it would not come apart. Then they went back to their new house.
It was very quiet when they got back and they stood in the close, Mat fumbling for the keys and unwrapping the old woman’s parcel to get at the candles. They could hear the splutter and slap of water falling from a gutte
r in the roof on to the back yard. Mat opened the door and went inside to the dark lobby and shut the door behind them so they could light the candles out of the bitter wet draught which was blowing through the close. They found themselves standing in a small irregularly shaped lobby. There were two doors to the right-hand side, one opening into a cramped privy, the other into a small square room. As they walked into the room on tiptoe, so as to avoid the empty exaggerated sound which their feet made on the bare wooden floor, they passed the candles slowly round the walls of the room so that each feature of the room moved before their eyes like a film. To the left of the door through which they had entered, in the same wall, was the bed recess about four feet deep into the wall and about six feet long. Then in the left-hand wall there was a gap and some loose exposed bricks where the previous tenants had removed the fireplace, then a cupboard the door and shelves of which had been removed and the back all roughly tiled. Running along the door frame of this cupboard was a lead gas pipe, the end of which had been sawn off and crushed with a hammer and which had obviously connected with a gas cooker in the cupboard. Opposite the doorway were the double windows, tall and narrow, and below them the sink and draining board. Mat was able to pull the crumbling damp wood round the sink apart with his fingers. The sink itself was of cast iron and brown with rust. In the right-hand wall at the window end of the room was another door which led into another room even smaller than the kitchen.
Back in the kitchen Mat held up the candle and looked at Helen’s face. There were still drops of rain on her cheeks and the fringe of hair on her brow was damp. She was looking around, her eyes shining in the candlelight, her face composed and serious with that look of being disconnected with her surroundings that people often have in a strange place.
‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ said Mat.
‘Och!’ Helen shrugged. She didn’t seem to expect, anything else. ‘A wee bit scrubbing out. Some wallpaper.’
They went over together and looked at the hole in the wall where the fireplace had been. ‘We’d need a fireplace and a cooker – and a new sink – and all that woodwork round the sink.’
They went out leaving the candles lying on the floor of the lobby. Mat locked the door and they went to the front of the close and looked out into the wet street.
‘I suppose we’ll take it.’
‘We must.’
There was really no question about it. Houses were scarce and any house, any house at all was a blessing. On the way home they sat in the tram counting up the probable cost of the things they would need. Mat sat with a piece of paper on his knee and a pen in his hand and jotted down the figures. The seat third from the front on the left-hand side had already been taken.
* * *
During all the time following, while getting the house ready and buying things for the expected baby, Mat’s mind became preoccupied again with the art experience. He felt this time precipitated into thinking about writing by the experience of actuality rather than through the direct experience of literature. For these first few months when he had been working in the slaughter-house and living in his parents’ house, when Helen’s pregnancy had been a half realised thing, a mere twinkle in the eye, as the saying goes, a mere abstract speculation – these few months had been comparatively safe. The circumstances of his life had wrapped him round with protections. The routine of work and domesticity and enjoyment. Now his preoccupation with the need to find and make shelter for his family, Helen and the expected baby, began to grow into an enormous symbol in his mind.
Mat had signed the missive in the factor’s office and paid over the month’s rent on the day after Helen and he had paid their first visit to the house. After that there were a million things to attend to. Jake and Mat had gone over to the house in their working clothes and redd the place out of rubbish. Then they had taken stock of everything that would have to be done. A simple thing had caught Mat’s imagination that day and became later an obsession with him. The skirting board in the house was in bad condition, the wood was warped and old and crumbling. The sink, which was old and rusted through was boxed in with damp mouldy wood. Mat and Jake tore all this rotten woodwork away and left exposed the black stones which were at the back of the outer wall of the building. When they took off the skirting board round the bottom of the wall and left the crumbling plaster exposed, Mat had the impression of the lack of definition in the room. It was not precisely a room any more, what with the broken plaster, the exposed blackened and mildewed stone, the gaping hole with the loose bricks round it which was the chimney place, the raw irregular line of the floor boards where they butted against the wall and were not nicely trimmed by the skirting – not so much a room as a scrabbled-out hole in the building.
Although it was now April the weather was still raw and damp and this gave point to Mat’s search for a fireplace. He wandered round the Gorbals one day in a bitter cold wind looking for a tradesman from whom he could buy a fireplace and order it to be built in. They weren’t entirely satisfied with the fire they bought, but there was so much to do to the house and they had to buy as cheaply as possible. The fireplace which he bought was of cheap highly glazed tile, with an ugly stippled finish. He managed to scrounge a very good porcelain sink from a demolisher’s yard and some good timber which he used to replace the rotten woodwork which had been torn out. Then there was a gas cooker to get from the Gas Board, and paint and wallpaper, various items of furniture and household necessities – pots and pans, brushes and scrubbers, cloths, paraffin. turpentine, linoleum, hooks, hangers, pegs, ropes, towels, basins, trays, covers, varnishes, soap receptacles, pails, mops – all the paraphernalia needed to set up a household.
What struck Mat about all this, what struck his imagination in a kind of perverse way, was the provisional nature of all the various accoutrements which they had to buy. When Mat had written of his Burghers, of the old fellow who sat at his escritoire and clipped his lighted taper on to the little stand, or the maid in the kitchen who popped the heated bolt into the goffering iron in order to crease her linen, he had been obsessed by the role which the ordinary household artefact or working tool has to play in the life of men. Giving men a place in which they could live their lives and shutting out what was alien and inhospitable, or chilling, or brief. As if the warm fires, the workaday routine, the traditional family effects, the Bibles and diaries, had something in them which fronted against what was contingent or provisional, created that order and definition in the material world which the little house lacked and which was so necessary for men’s peace of mind, containing in their craftsmanship and substantialness a little glow of permanence, being handed down through the generations to temper a little of men’s sense of the brevity of their lives.
And so Mat and Helen wandered among the shops, buying and counting their money; or they sawed and painted and constructed and measured; they arranged for plumbers and electricians and plasterers. Six weeks passed and the summer had come when they moved in. By this time all their ready money had gone and they were left with hire purchase debts which stretched a good two years ahead.
Mat felt it was great nevertheless, when they were able to come home to their own house and be by themselves. Helen sat contentedly knitting for the baby. They fitted up the tiny little room with its long narrow window with a cot and a little chest of drawers for the baby’s things and put the big expensive pram, which had been their only extravagance, in it. Mat loved the journey home from his work which took him through the Gorbals with all its movement and excitement, its big broad streets and Jewish shops and Irishmen with their wide floppy trousers standing outside the pubs. Living here they could buy Jewish bread and properly roasted coffee and exotic fruits and vegetables from the Jewish and Indian shops. The summer was long and hot once it had started so that work in the slaughter-house was slack and money became a worry to them. But they could still afford to take a tram or a bus out to the south of the city and walk up to Cathkin Braes and look down on the spires and chim
neys and the hazy pall that was Glasgow. Or they’d spend a whole day in a quiet corner of the park with sandwiches and a flask of coffee. When they stayed in at night Mat pottered about the house while Helen knitted. Occasionally Mat would get some books from the library, but now they would lie unread until he had to take them back and pay a fine for keeping them too long.
But beneath all this Mat began to feel uneasy again. He would be surprised occasionally when thoughts and ideas would spring to the surface of his mind completely fledged and new as if they had developed of their own accord. He would catch himself at the old dangerous habit of writing in his head. Becoming conscious of it he would sometimes wonder if he weren’t in fact doing it all the time. Sometimes he would be aware of a mixture of unease and exhilaration at the growth going on inside himself, of a crystallisation taking place. It had something to do with his putting aside the great novel, with his dismissal of art, as if this act of rejection had left inside him a new maturity. But it was a maturity which was going to get him involved. Then again the new house was completely unsatisfactory really. It wasn’t that he was avaricious for more than his share, more that a cool knowledge of what life had to offer made him realise that all his arrangements were a pretty weak bulwark against the possibility of accident, that the putting up of a structure between himself and life could never guarantee safety.