“Denny, I want you to listen to me carefully. I am going to tell you something you will not like to hear, but there is a practical reason for it which I am sure even you will understand, I mean money. We need more money because you have no job and my grant was not intended to support two people. So I must get more money somewhere, and I will. This daft play in Edinburgh – this company – has a chance of doing well, I think. All the omens point that way, so I am going back to Edinburgh this morning, and you will not see me for perhaps more than a fortnight, though I will of course write to you, yes indeed, you will get a postcard from me every morning because I love you, I think. I am placing the rentbook here, upon the mantelpiece. It contains two weeks’ rent and five extra pounds for food etcetera because I have no wish to be mean and I know you are not extravagant, Denny. So now, what about a nice wee goodbye kiss?”
234 DESTRUCTION LANGUAGE
Was a more practical, reasonable, considerate farewell speech ever spoken?
It was a lie. It was an anti-Denny demolition job. The speech meant this: “You are not coming to Edinburgh with me. You will never see me at work, or meet or mix with my interesting new friends or have an exciting life, because you are not in my class. You are just the wee hoor I keep at home. You are a luxury I can no longer afford, but I am maintaining you for sentimental reasons because I am better than you, although I am also tired of you.”
I did not know I was saying this, but Denny was sharper than me and she knew it. When I handed her the cup of tea her face had the exhausted but newly-born look of someone who has come out of a bad storm or a bad illness. She maybe thought our desperate lovemaking had brought us together again and was wholly unprepared. In a moment her face went sharp and ugly, became the face of a nasty little terrified girl, then not even the face of a girl or a child but the face of something presexual and preanimal, something that was nothing but agonised helpless lostness and complaint, petty, nagging complaint because out of a mouth wide enough to emit the most deafening yell in the world came only a thin, eerie, continuous whine. Only horror-films and fairy-stories tell the truth about the worst things in life, the moments when hands turns into claws and a familiar face becomes a living skull. My words turned a woman into a thing and I could not face the thing I had made because the thing saw in my face the disgust it caused me. I turned my back upon the thing with the whine, I speedily packed my suits and underwear into a couple of cases. I was afraid that the thing with the whine would jump up and grab me. I rushed out saying, “This is not the end of the world Denny, I’ll drop you a postcard. See you in three weeks, that’s a promise.”
235 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
I fear I cannot go on with this story, God. It is too dismal.
Needlessly dismal. I could easily have taken her to Edinburgh. We had plenty of room there. One of the upper chambers had been turned into a dormitory for the performers and helpers, it had been scrubbed clean and rows of mattresses laid on the floor. The mattresses were called cowlays. The practical radical had rented them from a farm-supply-warehouse, they were of green plastic but perfectly comfortable when covered by a blanket. Being too shy for communal sleeping I took my cowlay into a closet beside a fire-exit at the top of a small wooden stair, Denny could have slept with me there, the strangeness of the place would have refreshed our lovemaking. She would have worked in the restaurant, which needed helpers after the first two nights. Later on I saw opera singers washing plates behind the counter, not for money but just to be helpful. When the club started succeeding all sorts of surprising mixing and joining happened between the members and the performers and those who ran the place. The cast of a famous Oxford or Cambridge drama group ate and drank beside the Gorbals Young Communist Party: plumbers, electricians and folksingers who had split with the official party after Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech. Both lots were delighted to be rubbing shoulders with such dangerously far-out people. Had Denny been there she would have been welcomed as a useful, practical, good-natured attractive lassie, not well-educated, perhaps, but who is? If a good education is reading and remembering a lot of good books then most lawyers, doctors, businessmen, members of parliament and royalty don’t have it. If good education means a wider experience of people and possibilities then that nightclub would have been the best possible school for Denny because she was only sixteen or seventeen and, as Alan said, very sharp. But I wanted to be A FREE SPIRIT, someone posh who could flirt with posh girls like Helen and Diana who (I learned later) were not very posh, but seemed posh to me because they dressed well and had the confident speech-style they had learned at drama college; while they (I learned later) thought I was an eccentric scion of the landed gentry because of my Harris tweed three-piece suits and blue bow ties and the confident speech-style I had learned from my father and Old Red and a lunatic English teacher and a gifted descendent of some Irish tinkers. But I am sure they mainly suspected me of exalted origins because of the relaxed bodily assurance I had gained with Denny, who I did not want them to meet. Our system of class prejudice is the cleverest piece of self-frustrating daftness since the Tower of Babel, it benefits nobody but a few at the top. We fool ourselves into fooling others into fooling ourselves even more. Get through this dismal story as fast as possible. (You exaggerate.)
236 THE OPENING
Correct, I exaggerate. The rest of the story is not all dismal. I will tell it a night at a time.
FIRST NIGHT
The club opened its doors at five o’clock and thirty or so helpers and performers sat round the great cellar feeling excited and uneasy and foolish. We had spent so much time getting premises and productions ready that we had failed to advertise them, taking it for granted that “word would get around”. By nine o’clock four customers had joined us and were drinking coffee and being serenaded by a glum guitarist. Our director suddenly used up nervous energy by ordering us to carry down the big masonic portraits from the upstairs room and place them on each side of the stairs to the hall where we would perform. He also ordered the art student to paint top hats on the chieftains’ heads. The art student said, “I don’t think I should. They’ve been ruined by what looks like two centuries of mastic varnishing, but for all I know they could be Raeburns or Ramsays.”
The director said, “They are ugly objects nobody gives a damn for. I’ll give you a couple of quid to turn them into something amusing within the next forty minutes.”
The artist complied. Our show opened at eleven o’clock to an audience of three. The director said beforehand, Regard this as a rehearsal.”
237 THE ENGLISH
SECOND NIGHT
We played to an audience often or twelve, half of this being smart young people wearing (is this true or has my memory imposed it on them?) black dinner suits with white starched linen shirtfronts and collars with black bow ties. Our company was greatly excited because this was the cast of the Oxford or Cambridge group performing in the official part of the festival. At the end of the show they applauded politely. We cleared everything up and went downstairs and occupied a table in the cellar, where helpers and performers still outnumbered the customers. The club had no liquor licence but members could buy it outside and bring it in. The director produced bottles of wine and invited us to get drunk with him. The girls refused and so did I. After that sordid night with Denny I had decided never to drink alcohol again. The writer seemed to be drunk already. At this moment one of the Oxford or Cambridge cast, who were all drinking at a nearby table, said, “May I join you for a moment?”
Our director said, “Please do.”
The English actor, who became well known later on, although I cannot now remember if his name was Frost or Miller or Bennett or Moore, sat down with us and said,
“Congratulations. Your show is very good.”
“We don’t think so,” said the director.
“Don’t worry about the thinness of the house, that could improve quite rapidly,” said the actor, “but would you consider it an impertin
ence if we gave you one or two notes on your characters and timing? You see the play mocks the kind of people we are, and mocks us very cleverly, but the impact will be even greater, we feel, if you slightly modify one or two details. For instance, you –” he pointed at Rory – “you were splendid up to your final speech, the speech that ends the show, but you should not play that speech for laughs. You are no longer a sympathetic moron, you have become it, the thing, the establishment, old corruption, there are hundreds of names for the power you have become. It is time to reveal to the audience that this play, after all, is no laughing matter, so expand. Terrify them.”
238 THE ENGLISH
Rory nodded thoughtfully then said, “Should I hector them like an angry trade union official?”
“Certainly not. Bluster has no effect on the British public when uttered with a regional accent. You’ve got to be damned hard and dry and incisive. Use an Anglo-Scots accent. The Scotch do change their accents when they get into positions of power.”
“Thomas Carlyle didn’t!” said the writer loudly.
“As far as I know Thomas Carlyle was never in a position of power,” said the actor, “fortunately for Britain.”
“You English are cunning bastards,” said the writer, and walked out. The director apologised. The actor said, “Think nothing of it. Writers are notoriously temperamental. Now, you, in the part of Sir Arthur–”
He spoke, we listened, and were gradually joined by the rest of the English company. We tried to hide how pleased and flattered we were beneath a certain stiffness, and failed, I think. The English mixed their practical suggestions with so much friendly appreciation that they seemed not to condescend at all. A feeling of festivity resulted. Our director said, “Have you a suggestion about the lighting?”
The English actor started to laugh. He said, “None! None at all! The lighting is perfect.”
I said, “So what’s the big joke?”
He said, “You’re the electrician aren’t you? Congratulations on a splendid performance. I loved the way you appeared to be doing a difficult job which you thoroughly despised but were determined to do properly, no matter what anyone else thought. You were in silhouette most of the time, but when your effects were most theatrically stunning your whole body registered a sort of glum resignation and perseverance which nearly had me falling out of my seat. Who designed that amazing structure you occupy?”
“I did.”
He looked solemn for a moment. He said, “I apologise, but it’s hard not to laugh at the wholly unexpected. You see, what you’ve built works wonderfully, but it could only work with this particular play, in this particular acting space, with you operating it. You are either an undiscovered genius or an uninstructed amateur.”
239 THE DANCE
“Our Jock is both,” said Diana, putting her arm around my shoulders. Helen looked at me closely, I think for the first time. With an effort I met her eyes and smiled slightly, then I told the English actor, “You are wrong, my lighting is not perfect. Your advice to Rory about the final speech has given me a better idea. Good night.”
I went back up to the acting area hoping Diana or Helen would follow me out of curiosity. They did not, so I went to bed.
THIRD NIGHT
A lot more people came to the front office in the earlier part of the day and signed on as members, so when the premises opened for the evening the public outnumbered the staff by two to one, and later by three to one. Our audience filled over half the available seats because the English company returned bringing actors and musicians and singers from other festival productions, and these applauded so generously that we felt as famous as they were. Downstairs afterward there was a lot of dancing, starting with jive which I disliked because it made the partners hold each other in harsh, spasmodic ways. Then there was Scottish country dance, which Old Red once said would be the ballroom dancing of the future after the Great British Revolution. In each group every dancer comes to handle all of the other sex equally, and when groups split and reform with adjacent groups the dance is supposed to go on until everybody has held, twirled or embraced all of the other sex on the floor. When we had exhausted ourselves with democratic revolutions we had some slow private-enterprise waltzing. I waltzed once with Diana and once with Helen. Diana told me she was afraid that Brian was becoming far too keen on her, which was a pity because she was becoming keen on someone else, someone in the same line of business. I said, “Oh?”
After a pause she said sadly, “Directors seem to be the only men I can fall for.”
With a pang of jealousy I realised that the new man was our friend in the English company, who directed it. However, I wished her luck. Helen told me very little. She and I never had much to say to each other. I realised I enjoyed her conversation less than I enjoyed watching her on the stage, and that she knew this.
240 HAPPINESS
By four in the morning everyone had left except the artists and helpers. The practical radical gave everyone free toasted cheese and coffee, then the party became a ceilidh. Roddy, Rory, the director and I sang The Ball of Kirriemuir in a quartet, which led to each of us delivering a short solo, because in early adolescence we had all learned or invented a verse which the others did not know. The English theatre people sang the libellous and bawdy versions of songs they did differently on stage, and the folksingers sang the then unpublishable versions of Burns’ songs, which have since been published, but fairly recently. The opera people were too shy to sing when not rehearsing privately or on stage so they performed some comic charades. The concert musicians were more daring. They borrowed instruments from the jazz and folksong people and joined with these in duets, trios, quartets etcetera which mostly sounded tuneful to me, though people who knew about music kept laughing because of the eccentric combinations. I drank none of the booze which was freely passed around yet felt as drunk as those who did. This was our happiest night.
FOURTH NIGHT
The club received such an influx of new members that the practical radical recruited kitchen-staff from among his folksingers, and our company washed and dried plates in the earlier part of the evening before playing to a full house with a lot of people standing at the back. From the top of my tower, high above the familiar silhouettes of London, I conducted our actors on to the stage in travelling spots of light. I cast pools of it for them to plot and pontificate and die in, and floods of it for them to quarrel and make love in. I struck the chimes of Big Ben and made telephones glow in the dark. I was monarch of all I surveyed, my right there was none to dispute. In the final scene, when the whole auditorium was used to represent the House of Commons and all the cast but Rory rose out of it to ask querulous questions, I bounced so much unexpected light into the audience from a reflector on the stage behind McGrotty that he became a shadow with a voice in the middle of a dazzling radiance. I struck the final notes of Big Ben, put on all the house lights and there was loud applause. The actors went forward and bowed to it and some audience voices shouted, “The electrician! The electrician!” The director beckoned to me. I climbed down to a very loud storm of applause. I removed my overalls, hung them neatly on the scaffolding and then (none of this had been rehearsed) Diana and Helen seized a hand on each side and led me to the front of the stage. I could not find it in me to acknowledge the applause by bowing, but I gave the audience a nod of approval. For some reason this provoked so much laughter that Diana and Helen, without changing their dresses or removing their make-up, led me out through the audience and down to the cellar where a table with food and wine was reserved for us. Diana kissed me enthusiastically (but chastely). Helen squeezed my arm and said, “You really are perfect, Jock.”
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven. The director arrived and said, “What has he got that I haven’t got?”
241 SUCCESS
The girls coldly ignored him. Something was happening among these three which I did not understand, though I knew it had nothing
to do with me. I suddenly thought how much Denny would have enjoyed the show and my success in it. I had not sent her a postcard yet, but promised myself I would send one next morning.
FIFTH NIGHT
This was like the fourth night. The girls and I walked out through the audience again but since this was not a spontaneous act it felt phoney and we never repeated it.
SIXTH NIGHT
Half the folk who queued for the show had to be turned away and were angry because they could not book for subsequent performances. (Having no clerical staff we had simplified our book-keeping by not having tickets and admitting people when they paid cash at the door.) At the very end, without being beckoned, I climbed down, stood in line and bowed as gratefully to the audience as the rest of the company.
242 PUBLICITY
SEVENTH NIGHT
The Daily Record or the Bulletin or the Scottish Daily Express printed a double-page article about our club, three-quarters of it filled with photographs. One showed myself in silhouette at the top of the tower while Helen and Rory, fully clothed, simulated sexual intercourse on a carpet of light at the bottom. One showed the most glamorous girl in the university review drinking and laughing with the hairiest man in the Gorbals Young Communist Party. One showed Rae and Archie Fisher being applauded by Felix Stokowski and Albert Finney, or perhaps it was Robin Hall and Josh Macrae being applauded by Yehudi Menuhin and Tom Courtenay. The text said that the organisers of the Edinburgh Festival were seriously worried because our “friendly, informal Glaswegian atmosphere” was “attracting worldwide celebrities of the stage and concerthall away from the mausoleum-like solemnity of the official festival club”.
1982 Janine Page 27