1982 Janine (38 page)

He said, “I thought you and Denny loved each other. You looked as if you did.”

I said, “I thought so too, till an hour ago.”

He said nothing. I said, “What would you do if you found Carole in bed with … with me, for instance?”

He said, “I'm not sure. I would probably thump her and kick you out. But I doubt if I would cut communications with either of you. I have no real pride you see.”

I said, “I have no taste for physical violence.”

He shrugged. I felt exhausted. The sun had not yet left the sky but too much had happened since I had wakened that
morning in Edinburgh. I unpacked and spread my sleeping-things on a sofa, got between them and slept.

I dreamed I was a redhot demon raping Denny among the flames of Hell. She screamed and beat my face with her fists, and I awoke and found I was beating my face with my fists. I lay till dawn in a state of petrified longing for her, yet it never occurred to me to return to her. The thought of her half-nude and doing enjoyable things with that half-nude lawyer made me groan aloud. I was rotten with rotten pride. When I got up next morning I was still exhausted but determined to find a place of my own. Instead of seeking a new place I returned to the flat kept by the respectable lady on Paisley Road West. I asked if she had a room to let. She asked why I needed one, and why I had left her premises ten months earlier. In a low, monotonous voice I said that I had gone to live with friends who were not as I had thought. I had the previous evening discovered them engaged in an activity which, though not criminal, was of a sort I would not insult her ears by describing. While saying this I almost believed I was an innocent country lad appalled by the corruption of the big city. The respectable lady softened at once. She said that since I had at last learned the value of a respectable home she would not bar me from one: she had a spare room, and it would be mine.

A dull time began. I still visited Alan's house but was no longer at ease there. Alan certainly had great natural talents but why did he surround himself with charlatans and eccentrics and bores? I think now that I was disappointed with myself and therefore disliked folk who were still hopeful. My disappointment was partly sexual. Once again I had no woman acquaintances and did not know how to make any. So when Alan said, “A friend was looking for you the other day”, and handed me a note from Helen, I felt a spurt of hope. The note gave me her phone number and suggested we meet for a chat. I phoned at once and thought she answered. I said, “Hullo Helen. Jock here.”

The voice said, “Exactly who is speaking?”

“Jock McLeish. Could I speak to Helen Hume please?”

“Just wait there please.”

I realised I had been talking to her mother. Then Helen spoke and suggested that she come to my lodgings. I said, “That would be awkward. My landlady doesn't approve of female visitors. Let's meet in a pub.”

“No thankyou Jock, I saw enough of you in pubs during the festival. Let's meet in a tearoom. Where do you live, by the way?”

I told her my address and she suggested we meet in Miss Rombach's at the foot of Hope Street. Her tone was businesslike. I asked if she had heard from the other members of the company. She said she would tell me what she knew when she met me and hung up. I felt chilled. She had not used the tone of a friendly girl talking to a former lover.

The sight of her at the tearoom table also chilled me. She was well dressed, elegant and handsome as ever but in a “please don't touch me” way I had not noticed before. While the waitress was bringing tea she said almost nothing at all. I said, “Have you heard from Diana recently?”

“Yes. She's in London. She's pregnant.”

“O.”

“So am I.”

“O?”

“And I don't know what to do.”

I thought about it. The only possibilities were abortion, marriage or adoption. I feel, “It must be very difficult for you. How does the er, father feel?”

“The father?”

“Brian.”

“You are the father.”

“But Brian and you were … Surely it was Brian and you who were …?”

“Yesyes Brian and I were lovers, but not lovers in any way you would understand. If you must know the truth, I was a virgin before you did what you did.”

I felt inclined to laugh. Helen not only sounded as if she was acting, she sounded like a poor actress in a very poor play. I was sure she was telling the truth because nobody lies about such important things, but when she said, “So what can I do?” I wanted to tilt my chair on to its two back legs, hook
my thumbs into the armholes of my waistcoat and say with an American accent, “Any damn thing you like, honey. Any damn thing you like.”

But she stretched a hand to me across the tablecloth, I saw tears in her eyes, I took her hand in mine and thought hard. Abortion was illegal and dangerous. Marriage, no no no. She did not love me, I did not love her. I said, “The child should be adopted. I hear there are waiting lists of childless people who want to adopt unborn children.”

“Yes I've heard that too. But who will pay for it? You see the neighbours and my relations must never find out. Father and mother are absolutely firm about that. They will die, they will kill me if anyone else finds out. So I must go away to a hotel in the south of England before I become noticeable, and then go into a nursinghome, and that will cost a lot of money.”

“Your parents have decided this?”

“Yes but dad, I mean my father, has had a very difficult life. He's always been careful with money so he doesn't see why he should pay for anything. And if you look at the business from his viewpoint, why should he?”

She was staring straight at me. Without moving her head she slid the pupils of her eyes sideways for a moment, and without moving my head I realised that three men at a nearby table were watching us. Could the oldest of them be her father? I stared a question. She nodded slightly and whispered, “Yes, I'm sorry Jock. I'm sorry.”

There were tears in her eyes and of course if they spilled out the men would think I was being brutal to her. But they were out of earshot so although my knees trembled I tried to be reasonable. I whispered, “I can't pay for hotels and nursinghomes, I have only my grant to live on.”

“What about
your
father?”

“He isn't a rich man, he's a collier. A miner.”

“Miners are rich aren't they? The newspapers keep telling us that. Jock, hold my hand again, just to stop me screaming. I hate the way I'm talking to you, it's not my way, it's dad's way.”

I also was on the verge of screaming. I felt that my life was sinking from one level of nightmare to another. I held her
hand in silence and even got some comfort from this. At last I said, “Do you fed any better?”

“A bit.”

“Listen, I must go away and think. You must let me go away and think about things very carefully for a while.”

“How long?”

“A week.”

“Oh God a whole week!”

“I need a week to find out about money and … and … other possibilities.”

“What possibilities?”

“Not abortion. Not abortion, I promise you Helen.”

Abortion must have been her worst fear. Some years later she told me that her father had discovered a safe but expensive abortionist he would have sent her to if I had been willing to pay. She now sighed with relief, dabbed her eyes with a hanky and managed a sad smile. She said on a conversational note, “Actually Jock, if you decide on marriage it might not work out too badly. You're quite kind and dependable. I'm neither of these, but if I try hard I may not upset you too much.”

I wanted to escape from this woman. I said, “How can I get away? I don't want to talk to your father.”

She said, “I don't want him to talk to you. He can be astonishingly antisocial when he's roused. I think that if I sit here while you take the payslip to the cashdesk he won't follow you. And when you've paid you can walk right out through the door. But we'd better act like friends before we separate.”

She gave me her hand again and I shook it wildly. I walked as straight to the cashdesk as my trembling knees would allow, and paid, and left.

Outside I stopped myself from running across Hope Street against the traffic lights and jumping into the first taxi in front of Central Station. I walked back to my lodgings telling myself that in this world men never chased other men along city streets, knocked them down and kicked them until they agreed to marry their daughters. I looked behind only once while going over King George V Bridge, and nobody seemed to be following.

I walked the floor of my room in huge agitation. Nothing I had just been told made reasonable sense so my reason could make nothing of it. How could one or two not very enjoyable minutes make a whole new human being? Helen's pregnancy had nothing to do with me, except that I had caused it. But how could I tell an angry father that his daughter had used me like a whore, discarded me and then proposed marriage? That was no foundation for a happy family life, adoption was the answer. Only money, my parents' money could save me from a hideous loveless marriage. Tomorrow, no, tonight I would return to the long town and tell them the whole story. But how could I? We had never talked about sex, never mentioned our emotions to each other. Would they believe I had been used like a whore? If they did, why should they think that a reason for giving me money? But if I simply said I had got a girl pregnant they would surely expect me to marry her. Perhaps I should run away to London and get a job as a bus-conductor. Perhaps I should emigrate to Canada. Perhaps I should kill myself. But first of all, this very night, I would go home to the long town and stay there till the term started. The important thing was to make no promises I would live to regret. The important thing was not to let strangers push me around. Then the doorbell rang.

The front doorbell rang. I heard my landlady open it, and then a dull but insistent male voice, then some footsteps, then a tap at my door and the landlady was saying, “Mr McLeish! Visitors for you!”

I opened the door and three men walked straight in through it without looking at me till they were all inside, then the last of them shut the door firmly and stood with his back to it. My nightmare sank to a newer and lower level because I could see these men hated me. They all thought I was utterly wicked. They had come to claim compensation for the damage I had done their daughter and sister, and they would seriously injure me if they did not get it. The father was the spokesman. He was an ordinary height but righteous indignation made him look as solid as granite. He said,

“Right. What are you playing at?”

“I'm not playing.”

“Oh yes you're playing. You arty student types think life is a game, but with respectable people like the Humes life is NOT a game. You upper-class arty types think you can do anything you want to a decent girl because your powerful connections will protect you from the consequences. Well you've made a bad mistake, son. We're here to teach you that your powerful connections will not protect you from ME.” For the second time within the hour I said, “My father's a collier − a miner.”

He said, “Then why are you wearing a bow tie?”

I said, “Why not? You are wearing a bow tie.”

His was also blue but had a pattern of little white wheels. He said, “Impertinence won't help you. If you're a miner's son why are you at drama college?”

I said, “I'm not. I'm studying to be an electrical engineer.” He said, “Then there is no possible excuse for you.”

But my words had disconcerted him. He was forced to notice that his daughter had told him almost nothing about me.

Mr Hume was a tobacconist employing two assistants. He was also an agent of the Scottish Co-operative Insurance Society, which was originally founded to give ordinary working people one of the benefits of capitalism. He was a staunch Conservative but when he wanted to bully wealthier people he automatically spoke like a morally superior working man addressing the idle rich. On learning that I did not belong to wealthy people he did not at once speak like the morally superior middle class confronting the lazy worker. He did that a week later, when he met my father. His accent now became more like his daughter's accent, more the accent of an employer, but he spoke as if he was my social equal, though a much wiser, honester, more virtuous equal. Five or six years ago I read a novel in which the main character made a speech so like Mr Hume's that I have never since been able to remember them apart. It was a novel which gave an impression of curt masculine authority by having a single surname for the title.
Gillespie
by Hay? No.
McIlvannie
by Docherty? No.
Docherty
by McIlvannie.

Docherty is a stern honest collier who lives in a place like
the long town. His son gets a girl with child, the girl's mother tells Docherty, and Docherty becomes that horridest of commonplaces, a Scotsman pretending to be God. He pretends very well. He tells a truth or two. He says that the rich can evade the consequences of their misdeeds because money can buy immunity, privacy and special considerations, but the only wealth of ordinary people is their decency – their readiness to help and defend each other in time of trouble. If an ordinary man illtreats and abandons the woman who has trusted him he is openly announcing his isolation from the human race. He is crossing that barrier which divides humanity from – I forget exactly what. One or two phrases kept recurring in the diatribes of both Docherty and Mr Hume: “that poor girl”, “that poor lassie”, “that poor woman”. Applied to Helen these phrases had not much force. Helen was not very poor. Her education was good, she had social confidence, she feared nobody in the world except her father. But as Mr Hume stonily raved and thundered like Moses on Mount Sinai he was talking about Denny, although he did not know it. My blood ran cold. I chilled all over at the truth of his words where Denny was concerned. She had loved and trusted me and given me everything I wanted, everything my own parents and education had not given, and I had responded by three times deserting her, twice out of greed and vanity because I wanted other women, finally out of spite because in her loneliness she had given comfort to someone as lonely as herself. I must have already suspected I was shit for Mr Hume's words completely crushed me. I saw that I was a dirty bit of stupid wickedness and it was right that three men were flexing their muscles to punch me. One with his back to the door, though grotesquely tall and skinny, looked very like Helen. Only Denny had ever beaten me, for fun, and Hislop of course, to make a man of me, and Hislop had failed. He had made nothing but another Hislop. Mr Hume suddenly stopped thundering and said in a shocked voice, “This is no laughing matter!”