I could not take that seriously and a week later referred to it as proof of how easily she was upset. She laughed and said, “I wasn’t upset at all! I just felt wicked and wanted to annoy you.”
But the longer we lived together the more explosive our quarrels became until I was pointing out, again and again, that the misery we gave each other was far greater than the comfort. But whenever I packed up to leave, again and again came appalling grief of the sort that had got me marrying her after seeing it was a bad idea.
She was fond of children, the younger the better, and was visiting someone with a new baby one evening when I decided to eat out alone. In the restaurant I met friends of number 2 with a woman I had never seen before. They invited me to join them, jocularly remarking that this was the first time they had ever seen me without a wife. I enjoyed that meal, drank more than my usual glass of wine and found the friends were leaving me with the stranger. “Don’t worry, we won’t clype,” they said, pretending to creep away on tiptoe. So I spent that night in the stranger’s home.
I call my wives by number instead of name to shield them from readers who may meet them, and I also disguise them with a few inaccuracies. With this in mind let me say that number 3 was a senior hospital nurse of a sort that used to be called matrons. She was as tall as me but so slimly built that she looked taller, with a delicate oval head and a thatch of blonde hair cut very short. More attractive than her beauty was her quietness. When not sleeping or sulking number 2 talked almost incessantly, often with questions that needed highly detailed answers. Number 3 used few words, never gossiped and seldom asked questions. Being unused to long silences I found hers disconcerting at first and tried to fill them with entertaining chatter but she murmured, “You don’t need to talk to me.”
Before I left next morning we had come to one of the unexpected understandings that have changed my life.
“I want to live with you,” I told her. “I am going straight home to tell my wife that. Have you room for me?”
“That depends on how much you bring with you,” she said with a Mona Lisa smile.
She lived south of the river, not far from Queen’s Park. Returning by bus I had plenty of time to plan what to tell number 2 and to imagine the hideous emotional explosion it would cause. My courage completely failed. I saw I hadn’t the guts to be so cruel and ended by inventing a lie to explain my overnight absence. I found 2 moodily working at her computer. She did not look up or turn round when I explained to her truthfully how, the previous night, I had met the friends who said they would not clype on me, adding only that I had gone home with them for a nightcap and fallen asleep. But she knew the addition was untrue because very early that morning she had phoned them while phoning everybody else she knew in search of me. She asked if I had spent the night with a woman.
“Yes, but nobody you know,” I said. The result was less violent than I had feared. She switched off the machine, bowed her face into her hands and in a muffled voice said she could do no more work that day, though it was Saturday, usually her busiest day. She behaved, and I acted, as if she was suffering from something like the death of a parent, something that left her too numb for outrage. I took her for a walk through the Botanic Gardens and up Kelvindale to the canal towpath. It was a mild, very pleasant spring day. We exchanged a few words about unimportant things, dined in a pub near Anniesland Cross and were returning home before she said, “Do you want to leave me for this woman I don’t know?”
“Yes,” I said.
“If you had said no,” she told me mournfully, “and begged and wept and pleaded like I sometimes do we could have gone on living together. But now I can’t help seeing that you really don’t want me, so it’s goodbye.”
She then wept a little, but very quietly, and that was the end of that because divorce by mutual consent was now as easy in Scotland as in England.
Number 3’s home (where I still live) was the basement and former kitchen quarters of a large Victorian terrace house divided into flats. The front windows looked into a sunken area and a back door opened on to a long narrow garden, a garden number 3 looked after beautifully for she preferred gardening to housework. I never knew a woman who seemed to care less for her home.
It was sparsely furnished with few of the ornaments and knick-knacks most women accumulate. She had lived there fifteen years, long enough to pay off her mortgage on it, but wallpaper and linoleum had obviously been inherited from earlier tenants, while a cumbersome gas cooker and huge earthenware sink with brass taps seemed as old as the building. I wanted to pay for having the kitchen completely modernised but she said firmly, “No, I’ll pay for that. I promised myself a new kitchen ages ago and I know someone who will do the job cheaply.”
I refrained from saying that all jobs done cheaply are done badly. Instead I offered to put in double-glazed windows and have the whole place re-painted, re-papered and carpeted. She agreed to this and let me choose colours and patterns because she wasn’t interested in these things. I was intensely interested because I had decided, with her permission, to make this flat the headquarters of a new business. I was tired of working for the housing department.
When I joined it in the early seventies Glasgow was still a partly socialist city state owning its own lighting, transport, water and schooling. It was the largest landlord of public housing outside London and proud of the fact, because John Wheatley, a Glasgow politician, had passed the act that made local government housing possible. By the 1980s central government pressure to privatise public property seemed irresistible, and Glasgow’s ruling Labour party put up no resistance at all. Soon after it became legal for council tenants to buy their houses the council appointed a housing chief who publicly announced that Glasgow city council was the biggest owner of slum property in Britain. We in his department looked forward with great interest to his remedy. After a few months he resigned the post and started an agency helping private housing companies to buy local government property. Having had access to municipal housing records he knew, of course, the properties people with money would most want to buy. This would once have been thought a disreputable if not exactly criminal act, but now people in authority accepted such doings with a smile or a shrug, so I decided to do something similar. The department had retrained me in computer technology, so I knew it was now possible to run a professional consultancy without many filing cabinets and a secretary. Number 2 had also shown me that an office could be run from home. Number 3 had no objection to me setting up my desk and machine in what was then our living room.
“Since you own this house and pay the rates and go out to work each day,” I told her, “I’ll be the housewife and see to the laundry and cleaning et cetera.”
At first she did not mind that arrangement and I was heartily pleased with it because her level of domestic cleanliness was inferior to mine. All she had in common with my first wives was a determination to make the meals we shared.
Despite meeting number 3 through friends of 2, 3’s closest friends were very different, being female hospital workers who called themselves The Coven, meeting at least once a week in a public lounge bar and once a fortnight for a party at one of their homes. Most had a husband or male partner who abandoned his home when The Coven convened there. Number 3, weather permitting, held barbecues in her garden, at which times I stayed tactfully indoors. Sometimes one of The Coven strolled in and we chatted. I gathered they preferred me to her previous lover, a doctor who had treated her “rather badly”. They also seemed to think me a handy man to have around a house: which made what happened later more surprising.
Housework became the main source of tension between us. It was I who bought the foodstuffs, washed and dried dishes and put them away with the cutlery and cooking utensils so I naturally began arranging the kitchen cupboards and shelves as neatly as possible, throwing out old jars of spices and condiments on the verge of decay, replacing cracked insanitary crockery with clean, modern things. Instead of being pleased she accused m
e of trying to erase her. She said the same when I ironed her clothes, folded and put them neatly away.
“NOBODY irons clothes nowadays,” she yelled, “NOBODY! Chuck them in the airing cupboard like I’ve always done.”
She probably regarded home as a refuge from her highly regulated hospital life. I worked hard and unsuccessfully to stop my cleanliness and order offending her. I could do no kitchen work when she was home because what she called my “virtuous clattering” enraged her.
One day she returned from work frowning thoughtfully and when I asked why said shortly, “Nothing,” and when I asked again the following night said, “Just a pain, it doesn’t matter.”
Strange that a trained nurse belonged to that large class of people who dread referring their illness to a doctor! Luckily she worked in a hospital. A phone call one day told me she had collapsed and was being operated upon for appendicitis with acute peritonitis. I saw her that evening when she had recovered consciousness and acquired an astonishingly young, fresh, new-born look. I sat silently holding her hand, feeling closer to her than I had felt since our first night together. A month passed before she was fit for home and I visited her at least once a day, would have done so twice every day but her bedside during visiting hours was often crowded with hospital friends so she told me to come in the evenings only.
“What present,” I asked myself, “can I give her when she returns home? Of course! A new kitchen.”
The renovation carried out by her cheap, quick friend had annoyed me by its awkward shelving, badly hung doors and an old cupboard space walled off with plywood. I imagined many kinds of rot, fungus and insect life burgeoning in there. “Nobody who has been ill,” I told myself, “should return to a home with such a probable source of infection in it.”
So I had the kitchen completely renovated, expensively and well, with the most modern and easily cleaned equipment, all electric instead of gas. I did not tell her this in hospital, perhaps fooling myself with the notion that she would enjoy the sight of it more when she got home, but of course she at once saw the new kitchen for what it was: a present to me, not her.
“Yes,” she said, with a cold little smile, “you’ve erased me totally now.”
I blustered a lot of explanations and apologies then ended by saying that, alas, what had been done could not be undone. She disagreed, saying she could undo it by shifting to a house she could feel at home in – the house of a friend. This house was now only legally hers, so she would sell it and if I was the buyer she would subtract the cost of my new kitchen from a surveyor’s estimate. I begged her to come to bed with me and talk the matter over next day. She made a phone call, packed some clothing and moved that night to the home of the friend. (I later learned he was the doctor who had been her previous lover.) Her last words to me, or the last words I remember were, “This hasn’t been my home since you brought in that bloody machine so you’re welcome to it. At a price.”
She meant the purchase price of course, with the addition of her complete absence. Did this leave me desolate? Yes. Yes, with a mean little core of satisfaction that for the first time since leaving my parents I would possess a house that was wholly mine. But lying now in the dark with Tilda gently snoring less than two yards from me I started weeping tears I had never shed when number 3 left the house, and when number 2 told me to go to my new woman, and when number I said she was divorcing me for another man. I lay weeping for my whole past and could not stop for I suddenly saw what I had never before suspected: that I had lost three splendid women because I had been constantly mean and ungenerous, cold and calculating. Even my lovemaking, I suspected, had not been much more generous than my many acts of solitary masturbation between the marriages. I wept harder than ever. I crawled off the sofa, switched on a lamp and knelt on the floor beside the bed. Tilda stopped snoring, opened her eyes and stared at me.
“Please, Tilda,” I said between sobs, “please just let me hold your hand for a while.”
Her alarmed look gave way to puzzlement. She withdrew a hand from under the bedclothes and offered it almost shyly. I took it between mine, being careful not to press very hard, then her eyes opened wider as if she was only now clearly seeing me and she muttered, “Don’t go away. Always be there.”
Then I saw that she needed me, would need nobody but me while our lives lasted. With great thankfulness and great contentment, holding her hand, I fell asleep on the floor beside our bed.
BIG POCKETS WITH BUTTONED FLAPS
A MILD SEPTEMBER MORNING. A man no longer young strolls thoughtfully on a narrow footpath along a former railway line. Noises tell of a nearby motorway but brambles, elders and hawthorns on each side hide all but the straight empty path ahead until he sees a small clearing among bushes on his right. Two girls sit here at the foot of an old telegraph pole. He pauses, gazing at the top of the cracked grey timber pole. It has cross-pieces with insulators like small white jam pots from which broken wires dangle. He is aware that the girls are in their teens, look surly and depressed, wear clumsy thick-soled boots and baggy military trousers from which rise pleasantly slim bodies. One says crossly, “What are you staring at?”
“At the wires of that sad sad pole!” says the man without lowering his eyes. “A few years ago they carried messages from this land of ours to a world-wide commercial empire.” “A few years? It was yonks ago,” says the girl scornfully. Without looking straight at her the man glimpses a stud piercing her lower lip and one through the wing of a nostril. He says, “Yonks. Yes. I suppose telegraphs were defunct before you were born.”
He continues looking up at it until the other girl stands, stretches her arms, pretends to yawn, says, “I’ll better away,” and walks off through the bushes. Her companion still sits as she did before the stroller arrived.
A minute later he takes a folded newspaper from his coat pocket, unfolds and lays it on the grass where the departed girl was, then sits down with hands folded on the knee of a bent leg. Looking sideways at the girl (who still pretends to ignore him) he says quietly, “I must ask you a difficult question about … about the eff word. Does it shock or annoy you? I don’t mean when used as a swear word, I detest swearing, I mean when used as a word for the thing … the act lovers do together. Eh?”
After allowing her a moment to reply he speaks briskly as if they had reached an agreement.
“Now I fully realise that a lovely young woman like you—” (she sneers) “— don’t sneer, has no wish to eff with a boring old fart like me in bushes beside a derelict railway line. But I suppose you are unemployed and need money?”
“Fucking right I do!” she cries.
“Don’t swear. This is an unfair world but I am no hypocrite, I am glad I have money you need. We should therefore discuss how much I am willing to pay for what you are prepared to do. I promise that a wee that will probably give all the stimulus I need. I have never been greatly enamoured by the down-to-earth, flat-out business of effing.”
“Ten pounds!” says the girl, suddenly facing him at last. He nods and says, “Not unreasonable.”
“Ten pounds now! Nothing without cash up front,” she says, holding out a hand. From a wallet within his coat he gives her bank notes.
“Thanks,” she says, pocketing them and standing up, “Cheerio.”
He looks up at her wistfully. She says, “You’re too weird for me as well as too old and you’re right. This is an unfair world.”
She goes off through the bushes. He sighs and sits there, brooding.
Then hears a rustling of leaves. The other girl has returned and stands watching him. He ignores her until she says, “I didnae really go away. I was listening all the time behind that bush.”
“Mm.”
“I don’t think you’re weird. Not dangerous-weird. You’re just funny.”
“Name?” he asks drearily.
“Davida.”
“I thought the Scottish custom of making daughters’ names out of fathers’ names had died out.”
“I’m giving nothing else away today Davida. Don’t expect it.”
But he is looking at her. She grins cheerily back until he shrugs and pats the grass beside him. She hunkers down slightly further away, hugging her legs with both arms and asking brightly, “What were you going to say to Sharon?”
“You too want cash from me.”
“Aye, some, but not as much as Sharon. Forget about money. Say what you like, I won’t mind.”
He stares at her, opens his mouth, swallows, shuts his eyes very tight and mutters,
“Bigpocketswithbuttonedflaps.”
“Eh?”
“Big,” he explains deliberately. “Pockets. With. Buttoned. Flaps. At last I have said it.”
“They turn you on?” says Davida, looking at her pockets in a puzzled way.
“Yes,” he says defiantly, “because violence is sexy! These pockets are military pockets with room for ammunition clips and grenades and iron rations. On women they look excitingly … deliciously … unsuitable.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s why they’re in fashion but they’re nothing to get excited about.”
“I enjoy being excited about them,” he groans, covering his face with his hands.
“Were you a school teacher?”
“You’ll get nothing more out of me, Davida … Why do you think I was a teacher?”
“Because you’re bossy as well as polite. Yes, and teachers have to pretend to be better than normal folk so they’re bound to go a bit daft when they retire. What did you want with Sharon’s pockets that was worth ten quid?”
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 62