‘But the earl’s son,’ I asked, ‘where’s he?’
‘Deid. They packed him aff to Australia or New Zealand, I forget which, whaur he had an uncle in a high position. He took badly oot there. He was delicate.’
So at last the mystery was cleared up, but another mystery had been left in its place: me.
THIRTEEN
I was the son of an earl’s son, but a shipyard joiner was my father. I should have been living in a castle with large policies; instead I was living in a two-room-and-kitchen with a shared backcourt. I should have been attending a school more exclusive than Gantock Academy, yet I was still a pupil at Kidd Street. My friends’ fathers should have been noblemen and landowners, whereas they were welders and caulkers and unemployed. My female friends ought to have been the daughters of gentlemen, not a madcap like Meg Jeffries, whose father was an official in the Orange Lodge, nor a juvenile socialist like Mary Holmscroft, born in a slum. I should have had servants to look after me, whereas I had to clean my own shoes, fetch up coal from the cellar, and even take wee Sammy for walks.
I was a conundrum all right, and I couldn’t see how I could possibly be unravelled.
Even before Aunt Bella’s, or Mrs Pringle’s, revelations, I had been experiencing vague intimations of superiority. Now that these were confirmed they naturally became clearer and more compulsive. I began to find it difficult to speak to people without making it too plain that I thought they were beneath me. Friends like Smout didn’t mind, because they were used to me, but foes like Mrs Grier did mind and accused me, both behind my back and to my face, of becoming more stuck-up and conceited every day.
I was at a loss how to deal with John Lamont, who still thought I thought that he was my father. So I began to avoid him as much as I could, considering how close together we had to live. Bessie noticed and scolded me. Often I was on the point of confiding in her, but I was afraid. Archie Paterson had put his eye to a keyhole once, not knowing there was a lighted squib at the other end. It had gone off. His right eye had been permanently damaged. The keyhole I wanted to peep through was the future. I hoped to see a castle, wide green lawns, immense gardens, and aristocratic people who were my relatives; but I might see nothing at all, for there could be an explosion in which all my affections and loyalties would be broken.
I consulted Mary. Our conversation took place in the playground, over the spiked railings. All round us our schoolmates played noisily in the sunshine. She was very happy, though she tried hard not to show it.
Everything had been settled about her going to live at Ravenscraig. Also, through John Calderwood, who knew the factor, her family were to be given a two-room-and-kitchen in Mavis Street, well outside the Vennel. There was the prospect of a job for her father. Her sisters and brothers were to visit her as often as they wished. Her mother was delighted.
Though I had a more extraordinary tale to tell about myself, I listened with pleasure and only a little scepticism. Her rising in the world made my own more spectacular ascent rather less unbelievable. Besides, she was my friend.
‘I’ve been finding things out,’ I said, when it was my turn.
‘What things?’
‘My mother ran away with a man called Malcolm.’
‘I knew that.’
I shouldn’t have been surprised. No doubt it was common knowledge in the district.
‘My name shouldn’t be Lamont.’
‘Oh.’
‘It should be Corse.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s the family name of the Earl of Darndaff.’ I had been to the library to find that out.
‘What’s that got to do with you?’
‘I think you know what it’s got to do with me. My real father was the son of the Earl of Darndaff. I’ve seen a picture of him.’
‘I heard he was an under-butler.’
‘An under-butler?’
‘Some kind of flunkey, anyway.’
‘You heard wrong, then.’
‘Maybe. But what difference does it make?’
Before I could tell her how enormous was the difference it would make, and was already making, out came Kruger Jamieson ringing the bell. She walked away at once.
Meg Jeffries came running over. She had bright red ribbons in her long black hair.
‘Hello, Fergus,’ she cried, and threw me a kiss.
Many boys saw and were envious. Given the choice between being the son of an earl’s son or having Meg Jeffries soft on them every one of them would have chosen the latter. They had no pride or imagination. They were content to become shipyard workers. Theirs was by birth the Scotland of tenements and low-paid jobs. Mine was the Scotland of castles, famous families, and heroic deeds.
It seemed to me I must apply to my grandfather for the solution. The trouble was, I did not trust him, and he was not well. He never told me lies, but he always managed to stifle my generous instincts with sermons about Christian duty. As for his pallor and thinness, John Lamont—I must be allowed to call him that from now on—said it was remorse eating him away; but Bessie thought it was more likely to be some disease.
One Saturday afternoon, in May, when the rhododendrons were in bloom, I went up the brae to Siloam.
He was seated in the garden. His eyes were shut, and his lips were moving. Likely he was reciting in his mind some passage from the Bible. Three white butterflies twinkled past his head.
He looked very ill. He had lost weight, and his lips were blue.
I stood watching him for over a minute. I remembered my mother sitting on that seat.
‘Hello,’ I said.
He opened his eyes. They were blue, like mine, and like my mother’s. ‘It’s yourself, Fergus. I didn’t hear you.’
‘You don’t look weel.’
‘A bit tired, Fergus.’
He wanted to shut his eyes and forget me, but he was too courteous. He was always courteous. He would be courteous to sinners roasting in hell.
‘Mary Holmscroft’s going to the Academy,’ I said.
‘Is she now? Do I know her, Fergus?’
‘I’ve telt you aboot her. She’s the girl from the Vennel. Mr Calderwood, the teacher, is taking her to stay with him and his sister in their big hoose in the West End.’
He did not approve. In spite of his pain and weariness he roused himself to defend his religious principles.
‘It is wrong to separate her from her family. No good can come of that.’
Deliberately I fed his prejudice.
‘They’re a’ socialists, Mr Calderwood, Mr Holmscroft, and Mary herself.’
‘Not to be content with your station in life is to oppose the Lord, Fergus. That is why socialism is wicked and impious.’
What I had come for was to find out what he thought my station in life should be.
‘Aunt Bella’s told me everything, grandfather. About my mother. About Mr Malcolm. About Corse Castle. About Henry Corse.’
Like a blind man, he rose and went past me towards the house.
I shouted after him: ‘Well, what am I supposed to do?’
If he heard me he gave no sign. Going into the house, he locked the door against me, for the second and last time.
FOURTEEN
He died that night. Judging from the fear and anguish on his face, the doctor said there must have been great pain; but I wondered if it had been caused by doubt during those last lonely moments as to whether, after all, he had really pleased the Lord.
The best people in Gantock attended his funeral. Present were: the Lord Lieutenant of the County, Lord Baidland; the Provost of Gantock, two bailies, and sundry councillors; a director of Stewart’s, the shipbuilders; three ministers of the Church of Scotland, one of them a leading official in the Orange Lodge; the Sheriff and Chief Constable of Gantock; Mr Kelso, publisher and owner of the Gantock Herald, in which appeared a full list of names; and various other citizens, all churchgoers and substantial ratepayers.
Among all these I was chief mou
rner. The only other living relative, a cousin in the Hebrides, had been written to but had not replied. Therefore I was the one at whom those notables had to direct their stares of sympathy. I took care that they saw, not the grandson of a chief pay clerk, however respected, but the grandson of an earl. Tall for my age, red-haired, kilted, straightbacked, and handsome in a haughty way, I was the most distinguished-looking person there, outshining even Lord Baidland, except when he spoke. From his lips I heard, for the first time, the authentic confident bray of the upper-class, and noted the instant obsequious effect it had on those bourgeois Scots. I knew then that I must acquire it too.
During that half hour at my grandfather’s grave I grew up fast. When I stepped away from it I was no longer a simple child.
In addition to Siloam and its contents, my grandfather left me nearly eight hundred pounds, a substantial sum in those days. How he could have accumulated so much mystified us all. Bessie, good at arithmetic, calculated that on his salary of £2 14s he could hardly have saved more than 10/ - per week, or £25 per year. At that rate it would have taken him 30 years to save up £800. Where then had all the money come from? She suggested it must have been given him by the Earl of Darndaff as compensation, or as a bribe to keep quiet. John Lamont reluctantly disclosed that when he had married my mother he had been offered money by my grandfather. He was not told how much because he had angrily rejected it. ‘More fool you,’ Bessie said, sharply. But then, during those weeks after my grandfather’s death, when I was turning myself from a Lamont into a Corse, we were all irritable with one another.
Luckily, the Scots are not a demonstrative or ostentatiously philoprogenitive race. In a situation where Italians, say, or Russians, would have wept, wailed, shouted, wrung hands, and appealed to God, John Lamont and I behaved with dignity and good sense.
He admitted he had known all along that I was not his son, but this had not prevented him from becoming fond of me. He had always intended to tell me who my true father was, but had kept putting it off. For a long time he had felt dependent on me, just as he hoped I had felt dependent on him. Now Bessie, Sammy, and Agnes had come into his life; he hoped they had come into mine too. He was sorry he did not think the Corses would ever acknowledge me, but whether they did or not he supposed I would not be content to remain in Gantock all my life, as he and his father before him had done. But then neither he nor his father had ever worn a kilt. I was different. He wouldn’t say I was better or worse, but I was different. Whether this had anything to do with my having an earl for one grandfather, and a man of serious religious principles—he really meant a hypocrite— for the other, he wasn’t clever enough to say. He had no bitter feelings whatever, and, given the chance, he would do as much for me as for Sammy and Agnes. He was very sorry my father was dead and I would never know him.
He did not tell me all that in one conversation. It took several, most of them in the garden at Siloam; and he did not. tell me so much as communicate it to me with stray words, clenchings of his fists as if they were holding quoits, and some rather agitated tugs at his moustache.
I was grateful to him for his example of restraint. I was still too confused to have devised a new mode of behaviour that would impress but not infuriate; but I did my best to let him know that I was fond of him too, and bore him no ill-will for his part in the conspiracy of silence that had kept from me knowledge of my aristocratic birth.
Like him, I was inhibited by the impossibility of physical contact, such as kissing on the cheek, or clasping the hand, or putting an arm round shoulders. When we came in from the garden one evening Bessie said that a stranger watching us would have thought we were both dumb or paralysed.
Bessie was reluctant to leave her two-room-and-kitchen to go up the hill and live in Siloam. She wanted me to sell it. In the end she agreed, but only on condition they paid me a rent, not into my hand or sporran, but into my bank account. I did not protest much. My campaign, already begun, to have myself accepted as a Corse of Darndaff by the world, if not by the Corses themselves, would probably be expensive.
She raised difficulties too over my proposed change of name from Lamont to Corse. She told me not to be insolent. When I was 21 and outside their control I could call myself anything I liked, but until then would I please get it into my head that joiners and ex-shop assistants had as much pride as illegitimate sons of consumptive aristocrats.
Her anger puzzled me. I had expected her to help me in my campaign, and not oppose. She was ambitious for Sammy, whom she wanted to be a doctor, for Agnes, whom she wanted to be a teacher, and for her husband, whom she wanted to be a foreman. It seemed foolish, unfair, and shortsighted therefore not to be ambitious for me.
We reached a compromise. For any purpose where my birth certificate was not required to be shown, I could call myself Fergus Corse Lamont, without a hyphen.
In writing it was easy enough to observe the condition regarding the hyphen, but not in speech. Therefore at Gantock Academy, which I entered at the same time as Mary, as a fee-payer, I was soon known, in playground and classroom, as Corse-Lamont.
FIFTEEN
Though I did not know it at the time, my childhood in Lomond Street had made me poet. Living at Siloam, and attending Gantock Academy, my main concern was to turn myself into a gentleman, as the first stage of my campaign to be accepted, one day, in Corse Castle as one of the family. The poet in me, though subdued, nevertheless persisted.
Head of the English Department was Mr Andrew Birkmyre, a gaunt Presbyterian with a mottled face and a peevish voice. He hated Burns for making fun of the devil, Shakespeare for not giving Lear the consolation of knowing that Cordelia had gone to heaven, and Keats for preferring the ancient Greeks to the ancient Hebrews. Having to teach ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, ‘King Lear’, and the ‘Ode to the Grecian Urn’, because questions on them might appear in the examinations set by the Education Authority in Edinburgh, he did it by dictating notes compiled from books written by dry-as-dust academics fifty years out of date. The reading of the poems themselves he did his best to discourage.
If an essay had full stops in the right places, contained no misspellings or abbreviations like ‘don’t’, and was legibly written Mr Birkmyre gave it good marks, however tepid the language or trite the theme. At first I followed this recipe and was commended. But something in me grew scunnered, and I wrote, for the school magazine, an article on ‘Quoiting’, in my own style, which was more Homeric than Presbyterian. In describing how some older men, in the act of throwing the heavy iron quoit, made noises of stress and expectation, I used the word ‘fart’. I was aware Mr Birkmyre might not be pleased, but then every other word I tried displeased me, as being ineffective and dishonest. ‘Broke wind’ was too polite, more suitable for ladies in church than for tough shipyard workers.
Holding my article between finger and thumb, Mr Birkmyre shouted at me to stand. For the first time in weeks the class was interested. It was also puzzled. Some boys copied from other boys’ work, in the school lavatories, where there was scope for exercise-books to be contaminated, but I was known to be too independent and lordly for such a furtive practice.
‘Corse-Lamont,’ said Mr Birkmyre, hoarsely, his face red as a tomato, ‘am I right in saying that you would resent being called a guttersnipe?’
‘You are, sir.’
‘Then would you please explain why, in this essay, you have used the language of guttersnipes.’
Never before had he interested a class so much. They even asked questions.
‘What’s the article about, sir?’
‘What sort of language has he used, sir?’
‘Please read it out to us, sir.’
‘Hold your tongues,’ he roared. ‘It is my opinion, Corse-Lamont, that you deliberately set out to show your contempt for me, for your schoolmates, and for your school.’
‘Read it out sir,’ they appealed. ‘Let us judge.’
His use of the word guttersnipe was making me wonder. ‘Fart’ was a tr
uthful word, but was it gentlemanly? Was there a contradiction between truth and gentlemanliness?
Would I say ‘fart’ when talking to Cathie Calderwood? Yes, in certain circumstances, I might. Cathie wasn’t my goddess so much as my naiad. She was a naiad too that dreamt of satyrs.
But I wouldn’t dare say it to Meg Jeffries, now working in a shop that sold ladiesʼ clothes. She would say it showed I didn’t respect her. She would ask me if I would say ’fart’ in Corse Castle.
What about Mary, though, lover of truth? I turned and looked at her. Living in Ravenscraig had made her plumper and healthier. But she still had nightmares about rats in the Vennel.
‘Come out,’ yelled Mr Birkmyre.
I marched out.
‘Hold out your hand.’ He swung his heavy leather belt over his shoulder.
In my school career I had been belted many times: often enough indeed to learn how, by drawing away my hand at the right moment, the whack would be delivered to the teacher’s leg or, in the case of a male teacher who stood with legs apart, to his backside or balls. But in all previous instances it could have been made out that I had done something wrong, even if it was just opening my eyes during a communal recital of the Lord’s Prayer. In this present situation it was credit I deserved, not punishment.
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