Mr Alfred, MA Read online

  Enrico told the policemen about the disturbance. He said the culprits had run away as soon as they heard him phone from the back-shop. He didn’t know any of them. The boy who had drawn a knife? He had never seen him before. They were all strangers. Gerald sat back listening, his face solemn and sympathetic.

  ‘It’s a shame, Mr Ianello, so it is,’ he said.

  The two policemen gave Gerald and his company a hard look but said nothing. They went away. Enrico felt very foolish. After midnight his windows were smashed. For a week after that he had nuisance calls, sometimes at one and two in the morning. The various speakers threatened him and his wife and family. One call particularly alarmed him.

  ‘Do that again,’ said the voice in the earpiece, ‘and I’ll cut your throat from ear to ear.’

  And then the speaker laughed at him.

  He was going over some bills and his bank statement one night after the shop was closed. His flat above the cafe was quiet, his wife and two children were asleep. Into the hush there moved a vague scuffling and a susurrus of hostile voices. He looked up from his counting and listened. He was always frightened until he located and interpreted what he was hearing. It was youths quarrelling in the street. He waited for them to pass. They didn’t. Then his shop door was battered and young voices were raised, calling him. He could have thought his house was on fire, the way they were carrying on. He tiptoed downstairs and stood behind the door to the street. It was double-leaved, made of stout wood, double-locked and double-bolted. He felt safe enough. They would need an axe to break in. He heard his name called again.

  ‘En-RI-co I-a-NEL-lo!’

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, close to the wood.

  There was no answer.

  Upstairs, his wife and family wakened and listened, puzzled.

  ‘What do you want?’ Enrico shouted through the wood.

  He tried to sound tough and abrupt, a dangerous man to annoy.

  ‘You,’ said a bass voice, no less terrifying because it was disguised.

  The appalling monosyllable was followed by a crescendo of insane screeching and hysterical laughter, male and female. Enrico trembled in the dark. The assault on the door was renewed. He half expected it to come in, so fierce was the hammering and kicking. It didn’t. But while he waited for signs of it cracking and shouted to his wife to phone the police, one of his windows had a brick through it. He pulled his hair and cursed when he heard the glass shatter. His wife screamed on her way to the phone. Then there was silence.

  That was when he gave in. He made his surrender public and got his name in the papers. He had a nephew Gino who was a football reporter on the local evening paper, and Gino put a colleague in the news department on to it. Enrico’s rambling account of his grievances was printed in an edited version.

  ‘I cannot continue to live in this city. I must think of the safety of my wife and children. This has been building up. These people have made my life a misery with threats of violence over the phone. They have made my shop a shambles. I tried to give them service. They do not seem to want it. I am not saying where I will go. They said they will follow me if they find out.’

  He went away, and nobody ever knew where, except Granny Lyons. She missed him, but she told him to go. He tried to sell his shop with the flat above it but nobody wanted that kind of shop and house in that kind of district. The abandoned cafe became a derelict site where children played, and all the metal fittings and lead guttering were stripped by nocturnal raiders.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the new session Mr Alfred was given the same class of girls again for the same three periods. He made no complaint. It was what he wanted, to keep on seeing Rose Weipers. His fondness for her became egregious. It caused talk behind his back.

  ‘I knew none of them would ever take a crush on him,’ said Mr Brown. ‘But I never thought he would take a crush on one of them.’

  ‘If it keeps him happy why should you worry?’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Mr Brown. ‘A good teacher treats all his pupils alike.’

  Mr Campbell took his pipe from his mouth and put down his crossword. Clue: View an orphan hasn’t got. It was his function in the staffroom to correct the errors of his colleagues.

  ‘I don’t know that’s true,’ he said. ‘Pupils come in different styles. The right thing is to treat them accordingly. Not all alike. That’s wrong.’

  A disputation started.

  ‘You’re missing the point the lot of you,’ said Mr Dale. ‘If it makes him human surely it’s a good thing whether it’s right or wrong.’

  ‘How can it be a good thing if it’s wrong?’ asked Mr Brown. ‘Talk sense.’

  ‘It depends what you mean,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘A good thing. What do you mean by good?’

  ‘I mean he said good morning to me on the bus this morning,’ said Mr Dale. ‘Shows you how love can mellow an old crab.’

  ‘It depends what you mean by love,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘If you just mean a mellowing influence, then all you’re saying is a mellowing influence mellows.’

  ‘I agree a teacher should like kids,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘If he doesn’t he’s in the wrong job. But for a man to get especially fond of one pupil, above all a girl and a growing girl at that, I don’t think that’s right.’

  ‘But all girls are growing girls,’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘Till they stop growing. Then they’re women. And what’s wrong with a man loving a woman tell me.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I gather it’s still quite common. But that’s not the point. It’s a teacher loving a girl in his class we’re talking about.’

  ‘Who says he loves her?’ said Mr Dale. ‘Maybe he just likes her. Sure we all have a Rose. I mean, you can’t help liking some kids more than others. It’s only natural.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Mr Campbell.

  ‘You’ve got to define your terms. Natural, for instance. You say it’s only natural. What do you mean by natural? You can have unnatural affection too you know.’

  Mr Alfred came in. In his right hand he carried a poke with the two rolls brought by the Rose who had just left him. He was singing softly the words of Longfellow’s translation of Müller’s ‘Wohin’, following but never quite catching Schubert’s tune.

  I know not what came o’er me,

  Nor who the counsel gave,

  But I must hasten downward,

  All with my pilgrim stave.

  He put the poke on the table and went through to the wash-hand basin.

  ‘See, the big bugger’s happy,’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘Would you grudge him it?’

  ‘Too young a rose to pluck,’ said Mr Brown.

  They heard him sing louder as he turned on the taps.

  Thou has with thy soft murmur

  Murmured my senses away.

  ‘Oh that’s that thing, ich hört’ ein Bächlein rauschen,’ Mr Kerr announced, recitative. ‘It sounds better in the German of course. You can’t beat the Germans for lieder.’

  ‘Yes, he does sound happy, doesn’t he,’ said Mr Campbell, and entered panorama in his crossword.

  Mr Alfred was indeed happy. He thought he had reason to be. Before she went away Rose let him hold her hand as usual and he stroked her hair and caressed her ear. What was new this time was, she sat on his knee for a minute. He was sitting sideways at his table, tired after being on his feet all morning. When he held out his hand for hers she was an arm’s length from him. He drew her in, meaning only she should come a little nearer. She seemed to take it he meant more. She came right over and sat on one knee.

  He felt the cheeks of her bottom pressed just above his kneecap. He was sure he was blushing. He was uncomfortable. He put his arm lightly round her in case she fell off, and she was so thin above the waist, she had so little on, he thought he could have counted her ribs if he had dared to squeeze her. But he didn’t want to frighten her. He shifted his hand and fingered t
he pinna of her left ear. She drank through a straw a surplus bottle of milk left inadvertently in his classroom, and chatted about her father and family between imbibitions.

  So soon does the new become a habit that in a week, when she came at lunchtime with his rolls or pies or sandwiches, she sat on his knee as a matter of course for five minutes and talked to him. She did it without any shyness, no fuss and no comment, did it calmly and casually. He was the one who felt guilty. He got into a drill of waiting for her at the door to his room and locking it swiftly when she came in. She would walk past him, slender, unsmiling, slightly splay, put the poke on the table and count out his change. By that time he had reached his chair and sat down, ready to receive her. She perched herself on his left knee, her toes just touching the floor. He was sure there must be a more comfortable position, and he was always uneasy. Yet he was disappointed any day she didn’t do it.

  One day she sat right across his lap. It may have been the way he was sitting or it may have been her angle of approach. But there she was. He believed her voluntary session sanctioned him to show more affection. Her legs and knees were convenient to his gangling hand, her slightly-parted thighs were settled trustingly across his. He imagined his hand moving over the unseen limbs. He would be gentle and loving. But his nerve failed. He couldn’t. He thought it would be wrong. He put his arm round her waist and his hand stroked her lean flank.

  ‘Oh Rose! I do love you!’ he whispered, his mouth against her ear.

  He felt at once he was silly to have said it. He tried to unsay it.

  ‘But don’t tell anybody,’ he added, smiling as if it was only a joke.

  He put his finger on her nose and followed the line of it down to her nostrils. To make it clear he was only teasing, he tenderly flipped a fingertip at her chin. She smiled.

  Then an impulse beat him. Sitting across his lap, she was so accessible in a way she had never been when they were standing up together that he plunged at her. He kissed her, not on the mouth but on the forehead, somewhere above the right eye. It was a shot badly off target, but he felt he had done something tremendous.

  Like all that had gone before the kissing too became a habit, with all the necessity of a habit. At first he kissed her only when he gave her a halfcrown at the end of the week for doing his errands. He looked forward to Fridays as payday. He was sour if anything happened to prevent his rite, as when some leech of a classmate came back with her and hung around. Usually it was Senga Provan, and he came near to disliking her as much as he had disliked her brother. To make up for those unkissing Fridays he began to kiss Rose during the week whenever he got a chance, whenever she didn’t seem in a hurry away, for he needed time to create the dialogue of lovers’ talk that was properly ended in a parting kiss.

  Sometimes he worried over what he was doing. He was afraid she would tell her mother or a classmate. It would make him look ridiculous. Her mother might think it worse than ridiculous. She might think he was trying to entice Rose on to something wicked.

  He went over it every night between waking and sleeping, recalling how his love had been born, in her sudden burst of confidence, unexpected and unpredictable, when they first met. Nobody had ever spoken to him like that before. It was she who had started their love affair by the way she chatted to him, by her rare trusting smiles. It was all her fault. How could he refuse to love her when she urged him to it? But he believed that what she urged him to was a father’s love. She was no precocious miss just trying to provoke him. She spoke to him like a daughter, and his kisses were chaste, like a father’s kisses.

  He loved her very name. Rose Weipers seemed no less worthy than Rose Aylmer to appear in a poem, and she herself no less possessed of ‘every virtue, every grace’ than that earlier Rose. But he never found time to write a poem to or about her, though he kept on intending to consecrate some faultless lines to his love for her. He settled for making her name his talisman, a pious and even apotrapaic ejaculation in moments of temptation. When he was accosted after the last pub of his nightly crawl was closed, or when he found himself in Blythswood Square or Hope Street, not drunk and yet not sober, he remembered Rose and said her name aloud to the darkness. He believed she would be shocked, or at least disappointed, if she saw him go off with a woman who had to be paid. The fact that she couldn’t know what he did made no difference. She was to him like God, who knows and sees all things, even our most secret thoughts. So he never went with even the youngest prostitute he met. Rose was the only person he wanted.

  Day and night he was the victim of his autumnal love, a love that seemed at one and the same time to exclude and include the possibility of sexual pleasure. Rose, its only object, had to be female or he could never have fallen in love with her. He could never have loved a boy her age. The idea disgusted him. He knew boys too well. He thought pederasty ugly. But Rose had a girl’s face, not a boy’s face, a girl’s body, not a boy’s. That was why he could love her. Yet he had no desire to proceed beyond his constant awareness of her sex. The awareness was its own pleasure. A boy could never have interested him. His love was a heterosexual love. Therefore a normal love. To love Rose seemed natural and pure in a way that loving a boy would never have seemed to him.

  He was pursuing these meditations round the alcoholic confusion of his skull one night when he was importuned on his way home after the pubs were shut. He knew he ought to have gone straight for a bus instead of wandering about to ask for encounters he didn’t want.

  ‘Looking for someone?’ she said pleasantly, suddenly in front of him.

  He put his palms under her elbows, rocking and beaming.

  ‘No rose in all the world, until you came,’ he sang into her powdered face.

  Then dried up and lurched away.

  She gaped after him. She was fed up with men who mooched round dark streets and loitered in doorways and closes and floated off when she spoke to them.

  ‘Away hame, ya stupit big bastard!’ she shouted after him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Rose Weipers leaned against a wash-hand basin in the girls’ toilet at morning-break whispering with Senga Provan. They had agreed to stop going to the playground. To walk there was like wandering across a battlefield where Amazons ignored the rights of non-combatants and blithely mowed them down. They wanted a quiet corner and the chance of a confidential talk.

  ‘I get right fed up with the pair of them at times,’ Senga was saying. ‘You’d think, my goodness it’s years ago now, you’d think they’d forget it.’

  Wanda Clouston, a mammose wench in third year, waddled to the door of a cubicle and tore a yard of toilet-paper from the fixture. Flushed with hebetic vulgarity she draped the streamer round Rose Weiper’s neck and made to kiss her on both cheeks in a gallic award.

  Rose recoiled.

  ‘Aw, for Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘Be your age.’

  She scattered the paper with a cross hand and smacked Wanda. Wanda pulled her hair. They wrestled. Wanda broke away, getting the worst of it, and delved a hand under her blouse.

  ‘Ach, you! You’ve bust ma bra, ya bitch!’ she yelled.

  ‘It’s no’ a bra you need,’ said Rose, still cross. ‘It’s a couple of hammocks.’

  ‘Think you’re somebody?’ Wanda asked. Bellona.

  ‘Ignore her, Rose,’ said Senga. Grave-eyed Pallas Athene, goddess of good counsel. ‘I wouldn’t demean myself talking to the likes of her.’

  Rose looked straight into Wanda’s rash eyes. A petrifying Medusa. Wanda turned, sniffed, and waddled off.

  ‘Think because your big sister goes wi’ a toffee-boy,’ she muttered vaguely.

  ‘You see, I made a mistake,’ Senga said. ‘As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted. You’d think they’d forget it. I happened to say he was all right. He could make a joke now and then. I quite liked him. You should have heard them! You’d have thought they were going to put me out the house.’

  ‘You should never take school home,’ said Rose. ‘I
never do.’

  ‘But it was them raised his name first,’ said Senga. ‘They make me sick. Every night. How’s that big dope, says Gerry. And my mother, she’s not a bit better. Just because he once tried to belt her darling boy. Calls him a mean-minded big bully.’

  ‘I could tell her he’s not mean,’ said Rose. ‘He gives me half-a-crown every week. Sometimes more. Just for going down to the shops for him.’

  ‘I don’t like taking money from teachers,’ said Senga. ‘I always feel they can’t afford it. Especially Alf. Did you ever look at his shoes?’

  ‘It would hurt him if I refused,’ said Rose. ‘That’s what I feel.’

  ‘He’s a daft big lump,’ said Senga. ‘Remember the morning he walked in wearing one brown shoe and one black? I bet he had a hangover. They say he’s a terrible drinker. Anyway, it showed he’s got two pairs of shoes. But neither of them’s any good.’

  ‘I’ve sometimes smelled drink on him,’ said Rose.

  ‘Can’t say I have,’ said Senga. ‘I just know what they say.’

  ‘It’s when I go back and the room’s empty,’ said Rose, ‘and I’m right close to him.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Senga. ‘I think he likes you.’

  ‘You know what he said to me once?’ said Rose.

  ‘No,’ said Senga. ‘What?’

  ‘If I was an orphan he’d adopt me.’

  They smiled together.

  ‘O-la!’ said Senga. ‘I’d hate to live in the same house as a teacher.’

  ‘When he gives me the half-crown,’ said Rose, ‘you know what he does?’

  ‘No,’ said Senga. ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He gives me a wee kiss,’ said Rose. ‘I feel right daft, the way he does it. It’s not a smacker. Not even on my cheek. It’s a kind of peck at my forehead. But what can I do? I’d hate to hurt him.’