Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

by Gray, Alasdair

  “Matilda, I admit this is not the Glasgow hell-hole the detective agency led me to expect. Maybe you have landed lucky. This second cavalier of yours certainly seems more presentable than what I have heard about the first who picked you up. So marry this one. We don’t want you. Having made that crystal clear I will take my leave. I have a car waiting. Goodbye.” “Come back!” I cried as she turned to go, for I was angry and wished to annoy her, “Come back! Your address please.”

  “What can you possibly want with my address?”

  I told her I was willing to believe Tilda had been brought up so meanly that she had no personal belongings in what was once her home, but marriage had been mentioned. That would need copies of a birth certificate and notification of her parents’ occupations and place of residence. The little old lady said, “Oh, very haughty. Very cunning.”

  She took a printed card from a purse, laid it on a sideboard and, scribbling on it with a slim small pencil, said through clenched teeth, “I am substituting – my name – for your father’s, Matilda, because he died a fortnight ago of a stroke in his bath. Not a messy business thank goodness. This news of course holds no interest for you. All the affection was on his side, though it was not a very exalted form of affection and you might have done more to discourage him. I can leave now, I think.”

  She had been perhaps ten minutes in the flat but it now felt as if she had burned huge dirty holes with a flame-thrower in floor, walls and ceiling. I wanted to go outside and walk in the fresh air, but could not persuade Tilda to move or turn her face from the wall. I tried soothing words but she stayed silent. I laid my hand gently on her shoulder but she shook it off and sat where she was until long after nightfall. When she came to bed at last she would not let me cuddle her but lay as far from me as possible. Next day she did not get up and hardly touched the food I brought. I could not bear to leave her alone in the house that afternoon. At night when I came to bed I discovered she had peed in it. That made me furious enough to drag her out and wash her. While making a clean bed on the floor I told her I would send for a doctor if she did not pull herself together. She said nothing. I asked if she wanted me to send for a doctor. She said, “If you do I will scream.”

  I told her that if she screamed when a doctor came he would quickly whisk her into a mental hospital. At this she turned her face to the wall again.

  “Tilda,” I said, pleading, “I realise your father’s death had been a terrible shock, but you mustn’t just lie down and fall apart. Is there nothing I can do to help?” She muttered, “You know what you can do.”

  “Honestly, Tilda, I don’t know! How can I know?”

  “Because she told you.”

  “Who told me?”

  “My mother told you. Twice.”

  That our wicked little visitor was Tilda’s mother had never occurred to me. I thought furiously back over her words then said, “If you mean, Tilda, that you want us to marry, of course I’ll do it if that will restore us to being as friendly and loving as we were before she stormed in.” “Don’t bank on it!” said Tilda bitterly between clenched teeth, sounding so like her mother that I felt the short hairs on my neck bristle. I tried to be reasonable and explained there was no point in marrying if it did us no good. She neither answered nor turned her head but I saw tears pouring from her eyes, saw she was shuddering with soundless sobs. What horrible training had taught her to weep noiselessly? The sight maddened me. The madness took the form of promising to marry her as soon as possible. At last I got her into the clean new improvised bed and we fell asleep cuddling again. Something had been regained and something lost. Tilda’s mother had brought me to the same start as my previous marriages.

  Several days had to elapse before the marriage. During them Tilda refused me the lovemaking I had once taken for granted, but we cuddled at night and steady cuddling has always nourished me more than the irregular pleasures of fucking. I was also fool enough to think that, despite the past, we had a honeymoon ahead and suggested visiting

  Spain, Greece or Barbados.

  “Why?” asked Tilda.

  I pointed to colourful pictures in a spread of travel brochures and said, “Bright sunshine. Blue skies. Warm sea. Soft sand.”

  “Foolish extravagance and a waste of good money. We aren’t exactly rolling in it.”

  “The money is mine, Tilda, and I promise I have enough to easily pay for a trip.”

  “Nobody who knows anything about money ever has enough,” she said contemptuously. I was glad she no longer seemed pathetic. Nowadays on rising she sat around the sitting room instead of joining me in the workroom. It was a healthy sign of growing independence, though I missed her silent company.

  I wrote to tell Tilda’s mother of the wedding, suggested one of her family should witness it, received in reply a card saying, “My brother-in-law will attend.” We met him at the registry office: a big laconic man with an expression suggesting all that happened was his own very private little joke. I suspected him of being a highly self-controlled drunkard though he smelled of nothing worse than the tweeds he wore. The witness I had invited was Henderson, a freelance programmer whose character was like mine – we shared business when one of us had too much of it. After the signing I took the four of us for a meal at The Ubiquitous Chip despite Tilda muttering, “Do we have to do this?” She refused to drink anything but soda water and lime or eat anything but ice cream. For us men her uncle ordered preprandial brandies, wine with the food, and after the dessert an astonishingly expensive champagne with which he gave a toast prefaced by the words, “Be upstanding.” He and I and Henderson stood holding fluted glasses with what resembled mist arising from them while Tilda sat glowering into her third dish of ice cream. Her uncle said, “Here’s to the blushing bride. Here’s also, more importantly I think, to a very honourable groom. You!” – he suddenly stared straight at me without the faintest trace of a smile – “You are a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” He emptied his glass, said he must rush for a train and left. I am unable to regard him as a parasitic clown because later I found he had paid for the drink, which cost much more than the food.

  Tilda and I went home, both entering the flat with sighs of obvious relief. Tenderly I helped her off with her outer garments and was about to undo inner ones when she said, “Don’t be silly.”

  I shrugged and we sat facing each other across the hearth rug. Then she said slowly and firmly, “I think. It is time. I had a bed of my own.”

  I gaped at her for at least a minute before asking why. She said, “Why not? My mother and father sleep, no, slept you cunt in different beds, in fact different bedrooms. The best people do.”

  That thrust me into a confusion of thoughts and feelings from which the most definite to surface was the most mean and trivial: I regretted having thrown out the old mattress and getting another, because if she insisted on sleeping alone she could have done it on the bedding she had wet. And she did insist on sleeping alone. I argued with her of course, at one point was on the verge of threatening violence when tears started from her eyes and I knew unbearable silent sobbing would begin if I persisted. I made a bed for myself on the sofa then decided to go for a walk and brood over this new, alarming development, but she screamed, “You can’t leave me alone here now!”

  And I couldn’t. I saw that without me Tilda would melt down into nothing but helpless, terrible misery. I was trapped and could only break out of the trap by acting like a beast. I could not call a doctor and tell him that the woman I had married that afternoon was now certifiably insane.

  I made myself a bed on the sofa. Without Tilda’s body to snuggle against I was unable to sleep but found the situation oddly familiar. She was now rejecting me like three previous wives who began by liking me then found they could not. I had blamed neither them nor myself for that – a calm, uncomprehending acceptance had seemed the sanest attitude. It now felt like madness to try seeing why everyone I loved had rejected me, but I had nothing else to do. The simplest
explanation was the old Freudian one that, like most men, I married women who resembled my mother, thus condemning myself to enact the same stupid drama with each. But my mother had been nervous and clinging, a type I avoid. Apart from strong wills and their wish to marry me wives 1, 2 and 3 had been as different from each other as they were from wife 4.

  Number 1 had this in common with my mother: she expected and wanted to be a housewife. Before the 1960s most wives outside the poorly paid classes expected to be supported at home, because they were fully employed there. Before washing machines, good housewives scrubbed and wrung clothes for body and bed by hand – ironed and mended them – knitted socks and other woollen items – cut, sewed, embroidered garments, curtains, cushions and chair covers. Before vacuum cleaners they drove dust out of carpets by hanging them outdoors and whacking them with canes. Shopping was more frequent before refrigerators and freezers because foods had to be eaten near the time of purchase. Good wives baked scones, biscuits, cakes, tarts, puddings, made jams, jellies, pickles and an exquisite sweet called tablet, for which everyone had a slightly different recipe. They regularly cleaned and polished linoleum, glass, metal and wooden surfaces. Their homes were continually restored works of art, exhibited once a week at a small afternoon tea party for friends and neighbours who were similar wives.

  Number 1 had looked forward to that life, though we acquired every sensible labour-saving appliance available in 1972 having saved up for them through a three-year engagement when we lived with our parents. She gave up her teaching job just before the wedding after making sure all our well-wishers would give us useful presents. We had a short honeymoon in Rothesay then moved to a rented flat in Knightswood, the earliest and, in the year 2002, still poshest of Glasgow’s housing schemes. We were very happy at first. The washing machine, Hoover et cetera left her free to whitewash ceilings, re-paper walls and carry out many improvements I thought unnecessary, as previous tenants had left the flat in excellent condition. My job in a local housing department office let me walk home for lunch. On Friday nights we went to a film or theatre, at weekends had polite little dinner or bridge parties with other couples, and on most evenings found entertainment in television and a game of cribbage before the small snack we called supper. And so to bed.

  I was pulling on a condom after undressing one evening when she suggested we should have a child. It had not occurred to me that her domestic activity was a form of nest-building. Perhaps because I was my parents’ only child I dislike children, so suggested we wait a bit before starting to multiply ourselves: we should first get a bigger house, a bungalow in King’s Park or Bearsden, which would be possible when I was promoted to head office and able to pay a large deposit for a mortgage. She said grimly, “If it’s a matter of payment I’ll go back to teaching and earn us more money that way. But you’ll have to take your share of housework. I can’t bring in a wage and do everything else.”

  I said I did not want her to go back to teaching; we were still young and had no need for impatience. She did not reply but refused to make love that night and (though my memory may be at fault – this was nearly thirty years ago) I think we never made love again. She returned to teaching, I started doing the shopping and would have made meals too, but she refused them. When I suggested that I could make meals as good as those my mother made she said, “That’s why I’d find them inedible.”

  A month or two later I remarked that only a third of her weekly wage was being deposited in our joint bank account. She said, “That’s because I do at least two thirds of our housework. You may think you do half but you don’t.”

  I shrugged and said, “So be it.”

  She began going out once or twice a week with teacher friends. My promotion to head office came sooner than I expected. I began lunching in a snack bar with a colleague who also enjoyed cribbage and had a folding board we played upon. His system of marking was different from mine and more interesting. I explained it to my wife one evening while dealing the cards. She flung hers down saying, “If you’re going to change the rules of this bloody awful game I’m done with it.”

  I realised that for months she had been pleasing me by playing a game she detested and suddenly I felt for her a terrible loving pity. Had she told the truth at the start I could easily have done without cribbage because we had enjoyed so many other things together – meals and films and small polite parties and lovemaking. But maybe she had only pretended to enjoy these things too because she loved, not me, but a conventional marriage.

  One evening she explained she was having a steady love affair with a colleague and wanted to divorce me. I took several minutes to absorb the shock of this.

  “If,” I said carefully, “you really need a child let us make one. Let us make it now. We don’t need someone else to give you one of those.”

  She smiled mournfully and said, “Too late, you poor old soul.”

  I was only twenty-four but shrugged and said again, “So be it.” In those days divorce by mutual consent was impossible under Scots law; one of the parties had to get it by proving the other’s misconduct. She gave me proof of her misconduct, I passed it to a lawyer and paid for half the costs of the action. I moved to a boarding-house leaving her the flat with all its furnishings so she had no reason for a grudge against me.

  Years later at an office party I danced with a very lively little stranger. She had huge eyes, a mass of thick black hair, a slightly transatlantic accent and told me she was Polish-Canadian. Contact with her was so exciting that I asked her back to my place. She rolled the pupils of her eyes upwards and murmured, “No, no, impossible tonight, Charlie is very jealous. But we will keep in touch.” We did. I learned that both Charlie and her husband worked for the housing department. One morning the husband stopped me as we passed in a corridor and said, “You know my wife, I think. Has she told you I am divorcing her for promiscuity?”

  She had told me but I denied it. He said, “Yes. For promiscuity. Don’t worry, you will not be cited in court, you are only her latest. Street clear of her if you value your sanity.”

  I thanked him for the advice but was enjoying my casual affair too much to take it. That she had Charlie as well as me made it all the more casual.

  One Sunday afternoon she arrived unexpectedly at my lodgings in a state of happy excitement. Early that morning she had discussed Charlie with a close woman friend who had burst into tears and confessed that she too was having an affair with Charlie.

  “Guess what I did then?” cried number 2. “I calmed her and cheered her up then rushed round to Charlie’s place and said, ‘Sit down, I’ve news for you.’ He went as white as a sheet. I told him I knew he’d been having it off with Sharon but I didn’t mind at all because I’ve been having it off with you. So now we can all carry on with our new partners and everything will be fine! Isn’t that wonderful? Now you can come and live with me!”

  Though foreseeing she would almost certainly marry me I pretended to agree that this was wonderful.

  Her home was beside the Botanic Gardens. She had her office there and was the first in Glasgow – perhaps in Scotland – to run a dating and escort business by computer and telephone. It was a profitable business. She ran it efficiently yet insisted on also doing everything good Scottish housewives did, refusing all assistance because she was sure only she could do such things properly. Luckily she wanted no more children, having two girls and a son in their teens who often visited her but preferred their father’s house because, she said, “They think I’m too much of a bossy-boots.”

  She was certainly bossy. She both gave and was asked to many parties, and before setting out would glare at something I wore and say, “I refuse to be seen with you wearing that!”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s years out of date. Ten or twenty years out of date.”

  “Male clothing doesn’t date like women’s does.”

  “That shows you know nothing about it.” Yet she was generous and I had no objec
tion to the new clothes she bought me: they always fitted well and were smart without being eccentric. But I was appalled when I came home one evening and found she had given all my former clothes to Oxfam, so appalled that I packed the few things I needed with the firm intention of leaving that house forever, though invitations had been posted for our wedding reception a fortnight hence. She had a master key and used it to lock me in. I managed to open a window and would have jumped out but her anger suddenly turned to a terrible storm of weeping and pleading. I had never before seen anyone in that state. I could not possibly leave her in it, so stayed and comforted her until we were friends again and got married after all.

  Through number 2 I met people whose lives seemed jumpier and more erratic than I was used to: journalists, broadcasters, women who managed their own shops. All had children by former husbands or wives and lived with partners they seemed to leave or change without conspicuous fuss. Despite her ex-husband’s warning I am sure number 2 was not promiscuous while we lived together. She enjoyed declaring her feelings too openly to hide them for long and in five or six years confessed only twice to having brief affairs with other men. These confessions were made partly to annoy me so I annoyed her back by saying I did not care what she did when I could not see it, which was true. Yet despite our main faithfulness to each other, and the lovely tricks and eccentricities by which she turned ordinary meals and events into pleasant occasions, every month came a huge explosion of grief and rage which made a hell of that marriage. They were provoked by trivialities that I could never foresee and can now hardly remember. I think her love of drama was the main cause. While stooping to lift a fallen pencil at work I struck the corner of a desk with my brow and raised a small lump. When I got home she screamed, “What’s happened to your face? You look horrible!”