In the hall there now appeared a tall, middle-aged woman with girny face. Miss Shields introduced her as her mother.
Mrs Shields sniffed at me, as if, like a dog, she judged by her nose. Slowly her spaewife ill-will turned to what was ever more disturbing, spaewife pity.
‘So you’re the yin,’ she said. ‘God help ye.’
‘My mother has a sense of humour that strangers find rather alarming,’ said Miss Shields, grimly.
‘You’ll find keeping her in order a lot harder than killing Germans,’ said her mother.
‘Mother, Captain Corse-Lamont’s tired, after his long journey. He would like to rest.’
As she spoke Miss Shields laid her hand fondly on her mother’s head; yet it was easy to imagine, in her other hand, behind her back, a muzzle or even a hatchet.
In my room, with the initial panic subsided a little, I considered my position more rationally. If Miss Shields wanted me, whatever such wanting might involve, if with her romantic novelist’s imagination she saw in me something to love or at any rate to desire, would I not do well to submit? Judging from her house, with its elegant furniture and its many pictures with gilt frames, she was comfortably off. It was true she was a few years older than I, but the strain of the trenches had put bags under my eyes and pallor in my cheeks, whereas she was pink and fresh and youthful. What her mother had meant by her being difficult to keep in order was easily conjecturable, but I had just come from commanding a company of some of the most pugnacious soldiers in the world, in the bloodiest war in history. Surely the management of one woman, no matter how many sharks were in her blue eyes, was not beyond me.
I did not venture out that cold, snowy night. My hostess suggested I might like to write letters, and showed me into a study where there was a big stag’s head. To put her off the scent, and also in an effort to re-orientate myself, for I still felt astray, I sat down and for three hours wrote letters, to John and Bessie Lamont, Thomas Pringle (Uncle Tam), John Calderwood, Mr Kelso, my former employer, the Rev Mr Ainslie, minister of the Auld Kirk of Gantock, and Mary Holmscroft. That I had no intention of posting any of them did not prevent my taking care with them all, but especially with the one to John and Bessie Lamont.
That night Miss Shields and I dined alone, by candlelight. The old fellow who had carried in my bags attended us. His hands were so shaky that in handing us our cockaleekie soup he spilled some on the tablecloth. Perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t senility that was making his hands shake, or at least not senility in itself; perhaps it was senility tormented by the sight of his mistress’s breasts, rising like two full moons out of her dark-blue velvet dress.
Though strong drink was deprecated in all her books, in her house it flowed. Before dinner we had drunk whisky; during it much wine.
‘Fergus is such a virile name,’ she murmured.
‘My mother happened to like it, that’s all.’
‘She is dead, is she not?’
‘How did you know?’
‘There was such a sad, beautiful little break in your voice.’
I had hiccuped, and she knew it.
‘Tell me about your mother, Fergus. Has she been long dead?’
‘As long as I have been alive.’
‘She died giving birth to you, is that what you mean?’
Launched upon lies, I would have to be as crafty as a chess-player. Already I knew her well enough not to be deceived by the triteness of her mind into thinking she was not dangerous: she stalked by instinct, like a lioness.
‘You do not remember her then?’
‘No.’
‘Poor Fergus. Is that why you’re so distant with women?’
She was right. I had never been able to get close enough to any woman, not even to Meg Jeffries or Cathie Calderwood or Aunt Bella or Bessie Lamont.
‘Never mind, Fergus. I think I can cure that. Were you and your father a comfort to each other?’
It occurred to me her own father was kept well in the background.
‘He died when I was ten. In Australia.’
‘So far away? Among the platypuses? Was he there on business?’
‘He was paying a visit to his uncle, Lord Drumelzier, then Governor of New South Wales.’
Conceit made me say it, though within caution whimpered and self-respect groaned.
She sipped wine.
‘So your father was well-born?’
‘Youngest son of the Earl of Darndaff.’
I saw what I was doing: providing her with an opportunity to turn me into one of her heroes. She would insist that I live by the absurd standards of Roger Wintercleuch and Ronald Glenartney. I would be expected to find my greatest happiness in kissing the hem of her skirt.
It was not too late to escape. None of her heroes was a bastard, or had a boilermaker’s daughter as an ex-sweetheart or a socialist agitator as a friend. A little truth might still save me, even if served up with a dish of lies.
‘I’m afraid I am illegitimate. You see, my mother was only 18 when she met young Henry Corse. He was 18 too; he had just left Eton. They fell in love. She became pregnant. The Earl was willing that they should get married, but her father, my grandfather, was not. He was a stern Calvinist. He refused to let her marry the man who had seduced her: that was how he saw it. So my father, young Henry, was packed off to Australia, where he took fever and died. My mother was married off to a man almost twice her age, a doctor, who in due course became my foster father. He was called Lamont. I must admit he was kind to me. He died five years ago.’
I had rehearsed it so often I believed it myself. Tears were in my eyes. If I was making myself more appetising to the lioness, I could not help it.
‘Poor Fergus. Still, you must have had many sweethearts to comfort you.’
‘Only three.’
‘Tell me about them.’
‘One married a Catholic, another went mad, and the third became a socialist agitator.’
My intention was to scunner her off me, but what I really did was to make her more voraciously interested.
I was to learn later that she distrusted Catholics as much as my grandfather or John Knox did. There is not one in all her thirty-three novels.
Also she was afraid of going mad. Campbell Aird was to tell me, in his exaggerated way, that she kept bringing off a transformation, more difficult and a greater strain on her sanity, than that attempted by medieval alchemists: they tried to turn lead into gold, Betty turned shit into sugar.
In addition, as a feudalist, she looked on socialists and communists and levellers of all kinds as anti-Christs. In her books at least three clergymen, with their creator’s approval, refer to Christ’s remark that the poor will be with us always.
‘However did you come to be acquainted with a female socialist agitator?’
‘Among other things, she’s devoted to seeing that the poor all have inside lavatories.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-five. She has already been in jail for her principles. You may have heard of her. Her name is Mary Holmscroft.’
‘I have not heard of her.’
‘You cannot read the newspapers then. Lloyd George himself has done her the honour of denouncing her.’
‘I do not read about political termagants.’
‘She was born in a hideous slum.’
‘Is she one of those dreadful Clydeside traitors?’
‘Her people are the poor. Only if she were to betray them would she be a traitor. She would suffer her breasts to be cut off first.’
‘Has she any to speak of? You have not answered my question: how did you come to know such a creature?’
‘Some day, Betty, I may tell you. Some day I may even have the pleasure of introducing you to each other.’
‘I think you’re drunk, Captain.’
‘My head may be floating, my speech may be slow, but I am not drunk.’
‘Time for bed.’
When I rose I found my legs shaky. She had to help me
up the stairs. I wondered how it was that she, who had drunk as much as I, was so steady in her speech and on her feet.
The servants, and her mother, slept downstairs, at the back of the house.
She pushed me, with some impatience, past my room and into hers.
I was in no state, nor did I have the time, to assess the morality or tactics of my being in my hostess’s bedroom at half-past eleven on my first night in her house, or of my acceding to her suggestion—it sounded very reasonable— that we should get undressed, or of my stroking my hostess’s breasts (more like one laying a ghost than enjoying a treat), or of my permitting her to make serviceable what, alas, no longer deserved the innocent appellation of pintle.
Afterwards, when it was over, when the bizarre deed was done, on my part not too satisfactorily, she kept me awake in order to assure me, grimly, that when we were married she would see to it, for our children’s sakes, that I obtained my rights from the Corses of Darndaff.
TWO
Among the places on Betty’s list were the shipyards of Gantock. I told her I would go anywhere she liked, except there.
‘But, Fergus, Gantock makes ships, ships are very necessary if we are to win the war. I cannot see why, having agreed to visit Kirkcaldy, you should jib at Gantock.’
‘You forget I was born there.’
‘All the more reason, I should have thought, for including it.’
‘That may be so, Betty, but all the same I will not go.’
‘You sound like a man with something to hide.’
‘Let it be enough for me to say, the place has memories too painful.’
‘But, Fergus, I would like to see your native town. I would like to see Ravenscraig, the house on the sea-front where you were born. I would like to see the Auld Kirk where your grandfather was an elder. I would like to see your mother’s grave. I would even like to see the slum in which your friend Mary Holmscroft was born.’
‘Later, Betty. Not now.’
‘I should think Gantock would be eager now to welcome back its hero.’
For a minute or two I was tempted. All the influential citizens would certainly want to honour me because of my medal. There would be no need for me to be bothered by people like John and Bessie Lamont, or Mrs Grier and the other inhabitants of Lomond Street: these would be kept well back in the rear, as they always were. Even if one or two did push to the front, with characteristic thrust and impudence, they would want to applaud me: like Sammy Jackson they would look upon my distinction as in some way theirs too.
But it would not do, it was not enough, I was not ready for that momentous return. I had promised myself to go back when I had become famous. Military decorations did not represent the kind of fame I had meant. These would put me at a distance from the folk of the East End, whereas I wanted to be brought as close to them again as I had been long ago as a child of eight.
Also, for my mother’s sake, I must not go back among her destroyers until I had been acknowledged by the whole world as the grandson of an earl. Only then would I be able to clear my soul of the terror and ignominy of her death. It was not revenge I sought, but purgation; with this would come release of the stores of charity, faith, and hope locked up in me.
When I went back to my native town therefore it must be, not just as hero, aristocrat, and poet, but as absolver and redeemer.
‘Don’t,’ said Betty, with a sudden stridency in her voice that I had already come to expect, ‘don’t when I am trying to reason with you, don’t ever hide behind a fatuous, secretive smile.’
As a description of my smile, how meanly unfair that was; and she knew it.
‘Very well, Fergus, I shall agree to leave out Gantock, in the meantime, provided you give me an assurance that your reason for refusing to go there is not connected with the woman you knew who went mad.’
‘She is not in Gantock, Betty. She is in an asylum outside Glasgow.’
‘I see. Well, when we are in Glasgow we may pay her a visit. Please do not say no. You have denied me once already. Once is quite enough.’
‘Yes, Betty.’
Thanks perhaps to my grandfather’s Calvinist influence, I have always been slow on the sexual uptake. Filthy innuendoes that others have instantly sniggered at, I have often never even noticed. Invitations by women to make love to them, conveyed by lewd smiles and blue-lidded winks, I only became aware of afterwards, when they were pointed out by more observant friends. In the same way, I was never proficient at the preliminaries to love-making, the nibbling of lobes or the pinching of nipples or the griping of buttocks, etc. More often than not I found these more inhibiting than stimulating. It was furthermore always an amazement to me how intelligent men and women could regard as wonderfully special an act of such frequency. Once I lay in bed, after another addition to the score, trying to calculate how many times the deed of venery had been done by human beings, leaving out the animal and insect kingdoms. It came to a figure exceeding the number of stars in the universe.
Nonetheless, in spite of my sexual greenness or innocence, it was obvious to me that the reason why Betty was given such quiet hearings and afterwards such hootings of applause, by grimy-faced workmen with horny palms, was that every one of them in his imagination was stripping her naked, implanting on her breasts oily kisses, and vigorously bestriding her. I noticed too how aware she was of those imagined ravishments, and encouraged them, so that it was no scowling face her ravishers saw beneath them, but one radiant with satisfaction.
When they went back to their machines and benches it was probably true that those men worked a bit more enthusiastically for an hour or two. To that extent the newspapers were right in saying she was successful in her efforts to increase production. But it was not her patriotic speeches or her readings from her novels which caused her to succeed. It was the voluptuousness of her appearance and her voice. She would have done even better if she had just recited the alphabet, naked as a snail.
Long before Campbell Aird warned me, I knew Betty was a monster.
I felt sure that women who worked long hours at dreary jobs in bleak chilly factories would see through her as a fraud or at any rate a hypocrite. She came to them so fresh, so blooming, so fragrant, so expensively and warmly dressed. She spoke to them as if they were semi-imbecilic. She read out passages from her novels that might as well have been about cannibals with bones through their noses for all the relevance they had to working-class women worried about their men at war and their children sleeping three in a bed in room-and-kitchens. Yet, to my astonishment, they listened to her with rapture on their haggard faces, showed their bad teeth in smiles of delight, and clapped their work-worn and lumpy hands in delicate applause.
That was something I never understood: how Betty could transform tough-minded, rough-speaking, physically uncouth women into radiant, happy, and sensitive ladies. It was a trick of the monster’s that remained incomprehensible, though I saw her bring it off many times. It worked too on women I would have thought particularly insusceptible, such as Mary Holmscroft.
One cold wet evening, in a Templars’ hall in the East End of Glasgow, our little troupe was performing. It consisted of Betty (wearing her white fur coat), me (in uniform, with medals on my chest), a fat contralto who was to sing patriotic songs, and some jingoistic middle-class ladies, who included the chairwoman, wife of a local Tory mp. The audience consisted mostly of middle-aged, working-class women, devout readers of The People’s Companion. It was easy for me to pick out among them counterparts of Mrs Grier, Mrs Lorimer, Mrs McTavish, Mrs Blanie, and Mrs Dempster, those Gantock women who had influenced my childhood. I ought therefore to have looked on them with friendly gratitude and twinkles of humour. Instead, I stared at them through, as it were, a monocle of disdain; and when it was my turn to address them, on the fellowship in the trenches, I used my landed-gentry accent. The result was, paradoxically, that I was as great a success as Betty. They saw me as a hero of one of her books still to be written. If those women ever
had libidinous fancies, the men they imagined as fondling their breasts were no doubt like Roger Wintercleuch, Ronald Glenartney, Sir Ralph Balmanno, and Captain Fergus Corse-Lamont, who would make love, not in animal fashion, like their own husbands, but chivalrously and high-mindedly.
Sometimes they asked Betty questions. These had nothing to do with the war: they were all about her stories. A typical one might be: ‘What kind of dress did Madeleine Ure wear at her wedding in St Giles’ Cathedral?’ (Evidently in The Heirs of Crailzie Betty had forgotten to describe it.)
That evening, though, she was asked a question that involved the war. A woman at the back—I could not see her because of a pillar between us—cried in a hoarse voice: ‘Miss Shields, in your books there is no violence, and death is beautiful. I’m thinking of the death of Lady Crailzie, for example. Why then are you going about urging people to produce more shells to blow men to pieces?’
Leaning to the side, I saw the woman, and recognised Mary. I had not heard from her for months. It was no surprise to see her there: I had been half-expecting her to turn up to scarify us. What was a surprise was the mild irony of her question, which seemed to take Betty and her books seriously.
‘Who is she? Does anyone know her?’ whispered Betty.
‘Looks like Holmscroft,’ whispered the chairwoman. ‘But she wouldn’t ask anything so reasonable.’
‘It is Holmscroft,’ muttered another lady on the platform.
Betty gave me a smile. Then she faced the audience.
‘I understand I have been addressed by the notorious Mary Holmscroft. You know, my friends, what she cannot know, for she is blinded by treacherous hates, that my books, with their lack of violence and their message that death is not to be feared, portray life as it will surely be after the threat of the barbarous Hun has been lifted forever from the fair face of humanity.’
As a girl of 13 in the Tally’s in Morton Street Mary would easily have demolished that preposterous statement. Yet now, a seasoned campaigner with many speeches and a spell in jail behind her, she just shrugged, gave me a wave (I was sure it was for me, and so was Betty), and left the hall, to the accompaniment of hostile cries from members of the audience whose dreams of paradise she had bespattered with blood and guts.
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