Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  Those were yelps of astonishment and horror. My Scotch accent showed through.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A brick fell on his head.’

  A situation that I had often chuckled at in the comics of childhood. Lumps like eggs had appeared on skulls. But no one had been hurt, no one had been made blind. Some of those comics Uncle Tam had bought me.

  ‘I didn’t know a blow on the head could make you blind.’

  ‘I’m afraid it can.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘About five years ago.’

  ‘Is he ever likely to get his sight back again?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Still in Kirn Street.’

  ‘Living by himself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But how can he, if he’s blind?’

  ‘Neighbours help.’

  I understood that. No man was ever better liked.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘In his middle sixties, I should think.’

  ‘Does he keep well, apart from his eyes?’

  ‘He gets headaches.’

  I felt my hand shrinking to childhood size, and being enclosed by one as hard and rough and reliable as a brick.

  I dreamed of taking him back to Pennvalla with me.

  ‘Dad wanted him to come and live with us, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, you know how proud and independent he’s always been.’

  Did I know that? All I knew of him was that he had been kind to me. That was all I had wanted to know.

  ‘Do you still visit him?’ I asked.

  ‘Whenever I can. My office is in Glasgow, you know. He often mentions you.’

  I felt very small. ‘He wrote to me once, when his wife died. I never answered.’

  ‘He didn’t expect you to. Well, here we are. We’ll probably meet my mother.’

  He put it like a warning.

  I had been in Gantock Infirmary once before, when I was about seven. A boy in our street was ill with diphtheria. His face had looked as green as the tiles on the walls. Two days later he had died.

  It was very quiet in the room where John Lamont lay: so much so that Bessie’s intake of breath as I entered sounded like a sob of pain.

  It had been seventeen years since we had last met. She had been close on fifty then. Yet I always kept remembering her as the young woman with dark-brown hair, honest eyes, and firm mouth who had become my stepmother. It was disturbing to see her with white hair and eyes not quite so frank.

  What was giving her courage not only to face me boldly but also, as it turned out, to forgive me, was the improvement in her husband’s condition. I, who had looked on many dead and dying faces, knew at a glance that John Lamont’s was that of a man sleeping, and not of a man dying.

  I did not want to look at him too closely with those others watching. I might have given myself away, not only to them, but to myself too.

  The Sister conducted us out.

  ‘Sorry,’ murmured Sammy, ‘if you think I’ve brought you back to Gantock unnecessarily.’

  ‘It was high time he came,’ said his mother. ‘You’ll come back to the house with us, Fergus?’

  Before I could think up a dignified and tactful refusal, she added, as we passed the open door of a ward where old women lay ill, There’s an old friend of yours in there, dying. Of cancer.’

  I stopped. ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Grier. Surely you remember Mrs Grier, Maggie they called her, that used to live in Lomond Street? Terribly vulgar woman, but good-hearted enough. If she was on one pavement you’d cross to the other so as not to have to pass her.’

  I wanted to hurry away from the stricken ogress, but found myself saying, ‘Do you think they’ll let me see her?’

  Bessie looked shocked. Evidently she thought there could be only two reasons why I should want to see a woman who had once terrified me: either I wanted to jeer at her now that she was very old and dying; or else the humanity in me wanted to pity and honour the humanity in her, all grudges forgotten. Since the second reason was most unlikely, considering the heartless snob I was, it must be the first.

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘Without her family’s consent, I mean.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  Suddenly I needed to. If I did not make my peace with this old enemy before she died, my Gantockian triumph, if it ever came, would not be complete.

  I stopped a young nurse coming out of the ward.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Is it possible for me to see Mrs Grier, just for a minute?’

  ‘Mrs Grier?’ She sounded incredulous, and looked it too, as she stared open-mouthed at my kilt, my cape, and my jewelled skean-dhu.

  ‘I know she’s very ill, but I would very much like to see her.’

  ‘Sister said nothing about anybody coming. You’re not a relative, are you?’

  Oh yes, I was. All of us in our section of Lomond Street had been in a sense one family; that was why our quarrels had been so bitter, our reconciliations so boisterous.

  ‘She’s got the screens round her. They think she’ll die today.’

  ‘Come on, Fergus,’ whispered Bessie.

  I saw, though, that she was proud of me: only a genuine upper-class person would insist on so impertinent and inconvenient a request.

  Sammy said nothing but his discreet smile seemed to be warning me that sentimentality was a dangerous game to play. If I wanted to convince Gantock that I was a genuinely upper-class person I ought not to be seen wasting time or pity on the likes of old Maggie Grier.

  But no genuine upper-class person would be intimidated by a lawyer’s warning. Nor would he wait for official permission. Neither screens nor the imminency of death would deter him. He would not mind being stared at by toothless ill old women. He would simply stride over the polished floor, smile at the two ancient hags inviting him into bed with them, make for the bed in the far corner with the white screens round it, and look in, paying no heed to the clatter of indignant heels in pursuit.

  I recognised her immediately. Age, illness, and pain had shrunk her once massive head and throat, bleached and thinned her hair, and robbed her hands of their devilment, though not of their courage. Her devil’s spot on her chin had dwindled with the rest of her face. The stiff hairs that once had sprouted from it were now subdued.

  She was not likely to waken. If she had, I felt sure she would have known me as quickly as I had her.

  She had laughed evilly when Mrs Lorimer had spat in my mother’s face. But had she not afterwards apologised? When she had gripped and squeezed my balls during the celebrations in the street on the day war was declared, she had been letting me know that she was sorry and wished me well, stuck-up young bastard though I was. It had been her way of giving me her blessing.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a stern voice behind me. ‘You’ve got no business here.’

  It was the ward sister. Her cheerful face belied the sternness of her voice. She was impressed too by my appearance and manners, but most of all by my tears.

  Those were momentary, but genuine just the same. They must have seemed to her as miraculous as if they had been in the eyes of the badger on my sporran.

  ‘You’ve split a few stitches,’ she said, as we crossed the ward, to the accompaniment of some screeched ribaldry.

  ‘They don’t seem to be showing much grief for their companion who is dying.’

  ‘Gracious me, two days ago Mrs Grier herself was the worst of the lot. Goodness, the things she’d have said about that beautiful kilt!’

  THREE

  Still hardening my heart, I turned down Bessie’s invitation to come in and have lunch. I said I had not yet made up my mind how long I intended to stay in Gantock. If John Lamont’s improvement continued I might return to Pennvalla tomorrow. There was no possibility of my wife and children joining me.

  A
ristocrats never explained, no matter how outrageous their conduct.

  She was hurt, but I could not help it.

  Sammy said little, but as he drove me to the hotel he became quite loquacious.

  ‘Pretty convincing,’ he murmured.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You hurt my mother’s feelings, you’ve hurt them for years, and yet I’m ready to wager that at this moment she’s thinking of you with more pride than anger. I would say that was as good a test as any.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of hubris. To make people whom you’ve insulted feel they have been honoured.’

  ‘I did not insult Bessie.’

  ‘Ah, so part of the secret lies in not being aware that you’ve been obnoxious.’

  In extenuation of his impudence, I had to remember that in the days when I was being coached by Major Holmes, Sammy, then aged about ten, had been my eager accomplice. I had tried out my landed-gentry accent on him. He had offered sensible suggestions.

  Perhaps therefore he had earned a right to criticise. Your wife wrote a story, didn’t she,’ he said, ’in which a duke’s heir was brought up in a tinker’s tent? I should think the people of Gantock are more likely to think of you as some creation of your wife than to remember you as the boy born up a close in Lomond Street.

  ‘Some people think,’ he went on, as we stopped outside the hotel, ‘that you threw away the chance of a greater distinction.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘As a poet. You’d be surprised at the number of people who have told me what a pity it was you gave up writing poetry. But perhaps you didn’t choose to stop. The life of a country gentleman with a wealthy wife must be very comfortable and self-satisfying, but I shouldn’t think it as inspiring, say, as Lomond Street thirty years ago, or the Great War.

  ‘Well, if you want to get in touch,’ he said, ‘you know where we are’; and he drove away, leaving me to carry my suitcase up the brass-bound steps of the Gantock Hotel.

  I had been told that irreverent Gantockians referred to the angel on their War Memorial as Glaikit Mary, because of the attitude and expression of silly supplication that the sculptor had inadvertently given her. Intending her to be beseeching heaven to deal kindly with the souls of the dead soldiers, he had succeeded in making her look as if she was pleading with the gulls not to shit on her.

  The Memorial was situated in a public park near the iron drinking fountain put up to commemorate victory over the Boers. The water came gushing out of four lions’ mouths, and had to be drunk from thick iron cups attached to chains. As boys, we had warned one another that we would catch diseases which would cause our lips, tongues, and pintles to rot and fall off. We used to tell the most delicate-minded among us that the cup they had just drunk from was the one used by the noseless woman from Cowglen Street.

  I paused at this fountain, not to drink, but to take out of my pocket my MC medal and pin it to my breast. This was not done out of conceit. It was to honour all the Gantock men who had been killed.

  Close by some little girls were playing with skipping-ropes. I was pleased. Their presence would give a resonance and poignancy to my homage to the dead. In the gaslight their young faces and shrill voices chanting the numbers were ancestral. They could have been the daughters of men killed at Flodden.

  Despite her appeal, the gulls had much defiled the angel’s face. Luckily, this had the effect of giving her a rather desperate, harassed look, and therefore a resemblance to many a Gantock housewife. It was easy, by ignoring her wings, to imagine her standing at a closemouth, offering doleful contributions to the conversation.

  ‘That big man in the kilt’s awfully interested in Glaikit Mary,’ cried one of the girls.

  ‘Maybe he wants her for a click,’ said another.

  They all shrieked with laughter.

  These were friendly observations: the dead men would certainly have appreciated them. All the same, I hoped there would be no more, and moved round the Memorial to where I would be out of their sight.

  There were over a thousand names on the four sides of the plinth. The town’s grief must have been very great. Yet I had not been here to help it grieve.

  Lomond Street had suffered as much as any other. Of my close friends there were Private William McTavish, Private James Blanie, Private Samuel Jackson, Private Robert McIntyre, and Corporal John Dempster; and also, though not from our own particular sector, eight others I remembered.

  With tears in my eyes, I hoped that during the exchanges of hope and sorrow at all the closemouths in those terrible years, some kindly mention had been made of me.

  I was standing at the salute when I heard spurts of giggles behind me.

  ‘Wheehst, Jeanie.’

  ‘Don’t punch me, Isa.’

  ‘He’s talking to himself.’

  ‘I think he’s greeting.’

  ‘Dae you ken whit I think? I think he’s a ghost.’

  ‘Jees, Mary, you’re richt. He’s the ghost of a sodger that was killed.’

  Their squeals of terror then were only half-feigned. They dashed past me, making for the gate. The boldest came close enough to put out her hand and touch me. I got a look at her face. It was merry and impudent. It reminded me of Meg Jeffries.

  They were nearly half a mile from their homes in the East End. They would enjoy the journey home along the gaslit streets, stopping to look in shop windows and in prams, returning with interest abuse yelled by boys, yodelling snatches of songs, pulling up stockings, and at the end from their respective closemouths shouting arrangements for tomorrow’s play and goodnights. As they ate their teas they would tell their families of the ghost of the soldier they had seen talking to himself at the War Memorial.

  They had interrupted a conversation between me and Smout.

  I had tried to conjure him up as the shy twenty-one-year-old volunteer with the very short haircut who had so defiantly kissed Jessie McFadyen in the station, but I had not known that Smout very well. It was the skinny-shanked, solemn, patient, little Snout with the holes in his breeks who came and stood beside the angel.

  I asked his advice.

  It was the same as it had always been. Be grateful for what you’ve got; or, in the words of a hymn that the Salvation Army used to sing at our street corner, and in which he had joined enthusiastically, to the consternation of all his friends: ‘Count your blessings’. With his ragged clothes, and his mother preferring to talk to the dead and play whist rather than sew or cook, he had struck us as having very few blessings of his own to count. Yet no one had ever heard him whine with envy or self-pity.

  ‘You live in a twenty-room-and-kitchen, Fergus. When you’re in the lavatory with a sore belly nobody’s going to come and bang on the door. If you’re fed up with corned beef and butter beans you can eat something else. If it’s raining you don’t have to stay in because your boots are leaking. You’ve got a bed to sleep in.’

  ‘It’s true, Smout, that I don’t have to suffer the hardships and humiliations of poverty.’

  ‘You never did.’

  ‘What other advantages would you say I have?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got a big fat bonny wife.’

  Like Rubens, he had had no time for skinny women. At the station Jessie had looked quite voluptuous.

  I could have pointed out that my big fat bonny wife had been unfaithful to me, but it would have been useless saying that to him, who, if he hadn’t been killed, would have married daft, tender, promiscuous Jessie.

  ‘You won a medal. You became a toff. You got what you wanted.’

  ‘Not quite, Smout. My real family, the Corses of Darndaff, have never acknowledged me.’

  ‘Who cares aboot them?’

  ‘And my daughter hates me.’

  ‘Have you taken her to Lomond Street, to see where you were born?’

  ‘I could never do that, Smout. She would hate me all the more. I might, one day, take Torquil my son. He might find the sordidness interesti
ng. He wants to be an artist.’

  ‘I used to like drawing trains.’

  ‘I’m in a bit of a fankle, Smout. What should I do?’

  ‘Yin thing you could do, for me: look efter Jessie.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, Smout.’

  ‘That’s a promise.’

  It was then that I heard the girls giggling.

  FOUR

  Back at the hotel, after a bath, and a change into an evening kilt, and a couple of whiskies, I telephoned first the hospital where they told me John Lamont was maintaining his recovery, and then Sammy Lamont whom I astonished by asking if he knew what had happened to Jessie McFadyen.

  I had to make some effort to keep my promise.

  ‘Jessie who?’ he asked.

  ‘McFadyen. She lived in Lomond Street, up the next close to ours. Mrs Grier’s her grandmother. Pretty girl, fair-haired, lovely skin, but a bit weak in the head. I believe she was often taken advantage of, for she was too kind-hearted to say no. Before he joined up Smout McTavish considered himself engaged to her.’

  ‘Well, my goodness,’ murmured Sammy.

  ‘What’s the matter? Is she dead?’

  ‘No, no. Well, she may be, for all I know. It’s just that your local knowledge, and your extraordinary interest in such odd people, never cease to surprise me. I keep forgetting you wrote those poems. I’m afraid I can’t help. I left Lomond Street before I was four, and I’ve never been back. I never knew the people there the way you seem to have done. To be truthful, I never wanted to. Mum might know. She never goes there but by some mysterious means she seems to keep in touch. Jessie McFadyen, did you say? What do you want to know about her?’

  ‘Just what’s happened to her.’

  ‘All right. I’ll consult Mum and then ring back.’

  But it was Bessie herself who telephoned.

  ‘Is that you, Fergus?’

  ‘Yes, Bessie. I hear John is still gaining strength.’

  ‘Yes, thank God. We’re visiting him in the morning, before we go to church. Would you like to come?’

  ‘To the hospital yes, to the church I think not.’

  ‘You’d cause quite a stir. Of course, you’d cause a great deal more if you had your wife with you. You were asking about Jessie McFadyen?’