There were tears in her eyes and of course if they spilled out the men would think I was being brutal to her. But they were out of earshot so although my knees trembled I tried to be reasonable. I whispered, “I can’t pay for hotels and nursinghomes, I have only my grant to live on.”
“What about your father?”
“He isn’t a rich man, he’s a collier. A miner.”
“Miners are rich aren’t they? The newspapers keep telling us that. Jock, hold my hand again, just to stop me screaming. I hate the way I’m talking to you, it’s not my way, it’s dad’s way.”
I also was on the verge of screaming. I felt that my life was sinking from one level of nightmare to another. I held her hand in silence and even got some comfort from this. At last I said, “Do you fed any better?”
286 THE ESCAPE
“A bit.”
“Listen, I must go away and think. You must let me go away and think about things very carefully for a while.”
“How long?”
“A week.”
“Oh God a whole week!”
“I need a week to find out about money and … and … other possibilities.”
“What possibilities?”
“Not abortion. Not abortion, I promise you Helen.”
Abortion must have been her worst fear. Some years later she told me that her father had discovered a safe but expensive abortionist he would have sent her to if I had been willing to pay. She now sighed with relief, dabbed her eyes with a hanky and managed a sad smile. She said on a conversational note, “Actually Jock, if you decide on marriage it might not work out too badly. You’re quite kind and dependable. I’m neither of these, but if I try hard I may not upset you too much.”
I wanted to escape from this woman. I said, “How can I get away? I don’t want to talk to your father.”
She said, “I don’t want him to talk to you. He can be astonishingly antisocial when he’s roused. I think that if I sit here while you take the payslip to the cashdesk he won’t follow you. And when you’ve paid you can walk right out through the door. But we’d better act like friends before we separate.”
She gave me her hand again and I shook it wildly. I walked as straight to the cashdesk as my trembling knees would allow, and paid, and left.
Outside I stopped myself from running across Hope Street against the traffic lights and jumping into the first taxi in front of Central Station. I walked back to my lodgings telling myself that in this world men never chased other men along city streets, knocked them down and kicked them until they agreed to marry their daughters. I looked behind only once while going over King George V Bridge, and nobody seemed to be following.
287 THE DOORBELL
I walked the floor of my room in huge agitation. Nothing I had just been told made reasonable sense so my reason could make nothing of it. How could one or two not very enjoyable minutes make a whole new human being? Helen’s pregnancy had nothing to do with me, except that I had caused it. But how could I tell an angry father that his daughter had used me like a whore, discarded me and then proposed marriage? That was no foundation for a happy family life, adoption was the answer. Only money, my parents’ money could save me from a hideous loveless marriage. Tomorrow, no, tonight I would return to the long town and tell them the whole story. But how could I? We had never talked about sex, never mentioned our emotions to each other. Would they believe I had been used like a whore? If they did, why should they think that a reason for giving me money? But if I simply said I had got a girl pregnant they would surely expect me to marry her. Perhaps I should run away to London and get a job as a bus-conductor. Perhaps I should emigrate to Canada. Perhaps I should kill myself. But first of all, this very night, I would go home to the long town and stay there till the term started. The important thing was to make no promises I would live to regret. The important thing was not to let strangers push me around. Then the doorbell rang.
The front doorbell rang. I heard my landlady open it, and then a dull but insistent male voice, then some footsteps, then a tap at my door and the landlady was saying, “Mr McLeish! Visitors for you!”
I opened the door and three men walked straight in through it without looking at me till they were all inside, then the last of them shut the door firmly and stood with his back to it. My nightmare sank to a newer and lower level because I could see these men hated me. They all thought I was utterly wicked. They had come to claim compensation for the damage I had done their daughter and sister, and they would seriously injure me if they did not get it. The father was the spokesman. He was an ordinary height but righteous indignation made him look as solid as granite. He said,
“Right. What are you playing at?”
“I’m not playing.”
288 THE TWO BOW TIES
“Oh yes you’re playing. You arty student types think life is a game, but with respectable people like the Humes life is NOT a game. You upper-class arty types think you can do anything you want to a decent girl because your powerful connections will protect you from the consequences. Well you’ve made a bad mistake, son. We’re here to teach you that your powerful connections will not protect you from ME.” For the second time within the hour I said, “My father’s a collier − a miner.”
He said, “Then why are you wearing a bow tie?”
I said, “Why not? You are wearing a bow tie.”
His was also blue but had a pattern of little white wheels. He said, “Impertinence won’t help you. If you’re a miner’s son why are you at drama college?”
I said, “I’m not. I’m studying to be an electrical engineer.” He said, “Then there is no possible excuse for you.”
But my words had disconcerted him. He was forced to notice that his daughter had told him almost nothing about me.
Mr Hume was a tobacconist employing two assistants. He was also an agent of the Scottish Co-operative Insurance Society, which was originally founded to give ordinary working people one of the benefits of capitalism. He was a staunch Conservative but when he wanted to bully wealthier people he automatically spoke like a morally superior working man addressing the idle rich. On learning that I did not belong to wealthy people he did not at once speak like the morally superior middle class confronting the lazy worker. He did that a week later, when he met my father. His accent now became more like his daughter’s accent, more the accent of an employer, but he spoke as if he was my social equal, though a much wiser, honester, more virtuous equal. Five or six years ago I read a novel in which the main character made a speech so like Mr Hume’s that I have never since been able to remember them apart. It was a novel which gave an impression of curt masculine authority by having a single surname for the title. Gillespie by Hay? No. McIlvannie by Docherty? No. Docherty by McIlvannie.
Docherty is a stern honest collier who lives in a place like the long town. His son gets a girl with child, the girl’s mother tells Docherty, and Docherty becomes that horridest of commonplaces, a Scotsman pretending to be God. He pretends very well. He tells a truth or two. He says that the rich can evade the consequences of their misdeeds because money can buy immunity, privacy and special considerations, but the only wealth of ordinary people is their decency – their readiness to help and defend each other in time of trouble. If an ordinary man illtreats and abandons the woman who has trusted him he is openly announcing his isolation from the human race. He is crossing that barrier which divides humanity from – I forget exactly what. One or two phrases kept recurring in the diatribes of both Docherty and Mr Hume: “that poor girl”, “that poor lassie”, “that poor woman”. Applied to Helen these phrases had not much force. Helen was not very poor. Her education was good, she had social confidence, she feared nobody in the world except her father. But as Mr Hume stonily raved and thundered like Moses on Mount Sinai he was talking about Denny, although he did not know it. My blood ran cold. I chilled all over at the truth of his words where Denny was concerned. She had loved and trusted me and given me every
thing I wanted, everything my own parents and education had not given, and I had responded by three times deserting her, twice out of greed and vanity because I wanted other women, finally out of spite because in her loneliness she had given comfort to someone as lonely as herself. I must have already suspected I was shit for Mr Hume’s words completely crushed me. I saw that I was a dirty bit of stupid wickedness and it was right that three men were flexing their muscles to punch me. One with his back to the door, though grotesquely tall and skinny, looked very like Helen. Only Denny had ever beaten me, for fun, and Hislop of course, to make a man of me, and Hislop had failed. He had made nothing but another Hislop. Mr Hume suddenly stopped thundering and said in a shocked voice, “This is no laughing matter!”
289 HUME ON MOUNT SINAL
I was shuddering with silent laughter and had a grin that hurt my face. I no longer feared anything because perfect self-hatred casteth out fear. I sat down, folded my arms and crossed one leg over the other. This made me safer. Standing men cannot with dignity punch a seated one, and these belligerent men stood very much upon their dignity. I said softly, “Please inform your daughter that I love her dearly and will marry her whenever she feels it best that I do so.”
290 MAD HISLOP RETURNS
He gaped at me. If (as I suspect, but maybe I wrong him) if his moral bullying had been aimed at making me buy Helen an abortion this outcome was a defeat for him. The abortion was to have been at my expense. A wedding would be at his. He did not shrink, but his mass lost some of its righteous density. I was still grinning but he did not mention that. Maybe the grin indicated pain. He said plaintively, “Would she not prefer to hear these words from your mouth?”
I said, “Perhaps. She and I have arranged to meet a week from now when we will discuss the matter in detail, but if you feel before then that she requires reassurance, tell her what I have just said. Tomorrow I am visiting my parents. The news will be as much a shock for them as for the rest of us –”
“No miner need regret seeing his son marry my daughter!” cried Mr Hume.
“Good,” I said. “I will phone Helen when I return.”
I stood up and pointed at the table where my books were spread. I said, “And now I would like to resume my studies. The college will reopen shortly and I had better do well there, I will soon have a wife and family to feed.”
I walked to the door and said to the tall, staring youth who stood against it, “Excuse me please.”
He stood aside. I learned later he was only fifteen. He said uncertainly, “I’m called Kevin.”
I opened the door and said, “Goodbye Kevin.”
He walked through after the briefest of inquiring glances at his father. His older brother followed him without a word though on the way past he gave me a straight hard stare. I answered with a nod and another “Goodbye”.
Mr Hume left with slower steps, sighing and shaking his head. He stopped in front of me and said, “You’re a cold fish.”
I shrugged. I felt that what I was no longer greatly interested me. He went out and I shut the door.
291 MY PARENTS DON’T ASK
The room was calm again. It contained a queerly familiar feeling, a slight but steady pinching pressure on the brain and heart. My parents’ house had felt like this in the years before I escaped from it to Glasgow. After the nightmare of the last hour and a half this well-known sensation was a comfort, and it was deserved, which was also a comfort. For more than six months I had lived in a free vast universe with no limit to the things I might do, the love and comradeship I might enjoy. I was now starting to pay for that freedom. From now onward Glasgow and the universe would feel like my parents’ house, and in some centre of myself a voice whispered, “Quite right too”, and sniggered meanly.
Back in the long town my parents received the news with regret but no acrimony. Dad said with a sigh, “Well, Jock, it is not the first time that has happened.”
Mum glanced at him expressionlessly. He seemed not to notice and explained that he was referring to history – the unlooked-for pregnancy was a very frequently recorded historical fact. Their resignation must have depressed me if I had hoped they would ask if I really loved the girl? (No.) Did she love me? (No.) Had we not considered adoption? (Yes.) What prevented that? (Money.) How much was needed? (Between two or three hundred pounds.) Well son, your mother and I are by no means rich, but we’ve a little laid by, so if it’s any use to you etcetera. But they only asked if she was a nice girl, and the news that she was receiving a college education, and that her father owned his own shop, reassured them on that point.
So all the McLeishes visited the Humes in Cambuslang. Mum was probably sincere when she told Mrs Hume that it must be wonderful to have a house with your own garden round it but her tone conveyed more politeness than admiration. Mr Hume asked Dad about the state of the British coal industry in the tones of a successful industrialist querying an employee of a less fortunate rival, but Dad’s quiet answers discouraged condescension and both sides got down to business. There was not much to be decided. Everyone wanted a quiet wedding. Mr and Mrs Hume wanted a quiet wedding in a local church followed by a reception for a few family friends at a nearby hotel. I said I would prefer a wedding in a Glasgow registry office followed by a meal in a restaurant for the families alone. Mrs Hume said, “But that will suggest we have something to be ashamed of. Something to hide.”
292 HUMES AND McLESHES
I said, “We have.”
“You have!” Mr Hume said fiercely. “My daughter has not.”
To my astonishment Helen said quietly, “I agree with Jock.”
At this the elder Humes ignored their daughter and future son-in-law and appealed to the elder McLeishes: “Surely you see the importance of a respectable start in life for a young married couple?”
My mother said, “I know what you mean, but should not the wishes of the bride and groom come first?”
“Certainly not,” said Mrs Hume.
“Remember who will be paying for all this,” said Mr Hume. “Me.”
This caused a silence. Mr Hume broke it by saying, “Helen! Do you really detest the notion of a decent wedding, or are you trying to curry favour with your future husband?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Well then,” said Mr Hume cunningly to me, “since both my daughter and your parents are prepared to be guided by your preference, the only real difference is between you on one side and myself and Mrs Hume on the other, and we outnumber you two to one.”
I arose, seized the shaft of the standard lamp and, swinging it like a scythe, knocked the cut glass vases off the sideboard, the framed views of Clyde coastal resorts from the walls, and Mr Hume’s spectacles from his heavy selfish dour practical face. Then I peed on the hearthrug. No I didn’t. I said, “Do what you like, Mr Hume.”
If there was contempt in my tone he did not notice it.
During this visit I sometimes saw my mother direct upon Helen, when Helen did not notice, a glance of puzzled curiosity. She was clearly wondering, ‘Is this the woman who so exercised my son that he lost half a stone in six weeks and had to have the waistbands of his trousers narrowed?’ She could not understand it. She recognised that Helen was not a sensual woman, or not a woman whose senses could be much roused by me. Denny and I had always slept in each other’s arms but even when we were married Helen turned away from me after lovemaking. I saw Mum give up the question with a slight shrug and headshake. Maybe she decided I was a secret footballer. My path to matrimony was punctuated by cryptic shrugs.
293 THE FALL OF ALAN
So everything was settled to Mr and Mrs Hume’s satisfaction, but I planned a small, satisfying revenge on them. I would ask Alan to be my best man. If I rented him an evening dress with starched shirt front etcetera, his friendly but impeccable lordliness would make it impossible for the Humes and their relatives to feel anything but inferior to this peculiar person. And at the reception I would have Isi with his t
hick German-Jewish accent and absentminded air varied by intense moments of intellectual curiosity, and wee Willie with his Glasgow shipworker’s accent, and ancient boyish face, and shining enthusiasm for a future based upon alchemy and anarchy. These three would be perfectly polite but would strike everyone except my father (who would enjoy conversing with them) as indefinably and totally wrong. But I did not at once visit Alan to discuss the matter, because everything concerning my marriage made me lethargic.
Then one day on a billboard outside a newsagent’s I read the words GLASGOW TECH STUDENT PLUNGES TO DOOM. One of Glasgow’s ornate Victorian buildings near the city centre was awaiting demolition. Alan’s fractured body was found shortly after dawn in a lane at the foot of the back wall. The report hinted that he had fallen from the roof while attempting to strip lead from it. Which is possible. He hated waste and was always short of money. But why should a man who feared heights force himself on to a great height to make a few pounds, at most, when many would have felt privileged to lend him a fiver? But he hated borrowing. O, I was enraged with him, but not surprised. With his death the ceiling and walls of my shrunk universe narrowed even further. I asked Dad to be my best man, and the wedding was as dull as the Humes wanted it to be.
294 PRESENTS
But before the wedding came THE SHOW OF PRESENTS. I had not realised how many folk in the long town respected my parents until I saw in their house the swelling heap of domestic utensils and ornaments which was later carted to Cambuslang and added to THE SHOW OF PRESENTS in the Hume’s bungalow. Do other countries than Scotland practise this natural, obscene ritual? Married couples naturally want all the gifts they can get, their families naturally want to display the extent of their friendships, friends and relations naturally want their generosity to be widely recognised. So in the bride’s parents’ best room the tables and sideboards are loaded with presents all ticketed with givers’ names so that everyone’s generosity can be priced and compared to whoever is interested in the matter. Well, the fucking royal family do it, why should not the fucking Humes and McLeishes? And this socially competitive incitement to generosity does more than satisfy our greed for gifts and ostentation, it makes the young folk less likely to escape each other.
1982 Janine Page 33