Mr Alfred, MA Page 9
Whenever he read in the papers the story of a schoolgirl raped and murdered he was horrified at what a man could do. But it wasn’t incomprehensible, it wasn’t unthinkable. He could think it easily enough. He could imagine the damnable deed in all its details. But he was certain he could never do it himself. Any more than he could stick a knife into somebody, though he could imagine doing it. An indecent assault on Rose was one of the sins he knew he could never commit. Yet he longed to kiss her goodnight, to see her into bed. He longed to say he loved her. But never to love her by force. It was the lack of affection in rape that shocked him.
He was interested when he saw a story in the papers about a man of sixty marrying a girl of twenty. He worked out the difference between his own age and Rose’s. It was less than that. So marrying her, however improbable, wasn’t impossible. There were precedents. But at the same time as he thought of marrying Rose in a daydream future he kept thinking of her as his daughter in the waking life of his present.
The sodden autumn drained into a freezing winter. She came back carrying the quotidian poke, her hands blue with cold.
He took one. He was upset to feel it so chilled on his errand.
‘Che gelida manina,’ he said.
She looked up and said nothing. Puzzled. Wondering what he said.
He put the poke aside and chafed her hands. She let him do it without a word for or against, watching the operation with silent catatropia, and he was content.
After that he got into the habit of taking her hands when they were alone. He would pretend they looked cold and rub them. Then he stopped pretending. He held out his hand for hers while she was talking to him. The first time, she didn’t understand what he meant. When he put his hand out she thought he was pointing to something on the floor at her feet and she looked down for something to be picked up. But the second time she saw what he wanted and gave him her hands with a kind of motherly patience. It became a daily ritual, this holding of hands as they chatted alone at lunchtime, and he gave her half-a-crown every Friday. He called it her pocket money.
Christmas was coming. He thought he would give her a money present in recognition of the season and her services. He was all set for a tender donation when she came back with his rolls and beat him to the love scene he planned.
‘I’ve got a wee present for you,’ she said.
She smiled up at him with a child’s excitement at the time of gifts and peace on earth, the holy tide of Christmas, brimming over with good-will.
She gave him a box of ten small cigars. Holly and a robin and From and To on the cardboard wrapping.
‘They’ll be a change for you,’ she said. ‘From those cigarettes you’re aye smoking. I buy these for my dad at Christmas.’
He felt numbered among her clan.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.
He blushed as he took the nuzzer. Rose smiled.
‘I was going to give you something,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t know what to get you. You buy yourself something.’
He slipped a pound note into her drooping hand. It was a new one kept specially for her.
Rose palmed the note with a discretion equal to his. She looked up at him brighteyed and happy but didn’t say thanks.
‘If you were an orphan I’d adopt you,’ he blurted.
He wanted to kiss her. But he was so tall he couldn’t get his mouth to hers without an awkward swoop that would spoil the spontaneity of the action, and she didn’t hold her face up to help him. He settled for squeezing her hand as it closed on the money.
When she went away he found he was tumescent. He argued with the man inside that it was only a desire to give her all the love he had. Not a stupid lust, but an erotic urge to an impossible act of gratitude.
He was drunk that night. He always got drunk in the euphoria of starting a holiday from school. Recognising the face in the mirror of a public-house gents he made a face at it, questioned it.
‘Well, wotta ya gotta say for yourself, eh?’ he asked, swaying to the glass. ‘Sennimennal old fool. Wanting to kiss Rose. Rose upon the rood of time. Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days. Rose of the world, Rose of Peace. Far off, most secret and inviolate Rose. You want to frighten her? Stick your ugly mug into her lovely face and what would she get? A child’s sense of smell. The reek of tobacco and the smell of whisky. A fine Christmas that for Rose. A merry kiss-miss. Be your age, mac!’
He had never been at parties when he was a boy. He had never played at kissing games. He had only heard of them.
He thought a kiss was too serious for games. It wouldn’t be right to kiss Rose. He loved her too much to snatch an old man’s peck at her. He should leave her to get her first kiss from someone she loved when she was older.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mrs Provan got Gerald a job beside her in the biscuit factory. She was never backward in asking. She kept on at the man in charge of deliveries till he started Gerald as a vanboy. There was no future in it, but it was a job. She would find him something better in due course. Gerald liked it. The work wasn’t hard and the money was good. It was a carefree life, sitting in the van beside the driver, whistling and singing. He learnt his way round his native city, stopping here and there, kidding and kissing the shopgirls and getting known as Gerry. He was growing up, a handsome lad, and at the weekend he had money in his pocket. His mother let him keep most of his pay.
‘He’s not going to have the hard life I had,’ she said to her foreman. ‘I got on for years without a penny from him. I can still manage, please God. It’ll do him good to have money to spend. He’ll learn to look after himself.’
But she looked after him just the same as before, and Gerald’s money went without either of them knowing exactly where. He never bought a suit or a pair of shoes, never a shirt or a tie, and when he had to get a haircut he asked his mother for the money. When he started shaving she bought his razorblades and shavingsoap until she got him an electric razor for his birthday. At his summer holidays he expected a bonus from her. He always got it.
He spent most of his nights in Ianello’s, but time was all he spent. He never paid for his soft drinks or ices or sweets or cigarettes. He told Enrico he would see him later. He was a big, stronglooking boy, intimidating, largehanded, bold-eyed, insolent, armed. He had a knife he let people get a glimpse of when it suited him. Not the one Mr Alfred had seen. A new one, a bigger one. He challenged opposition with the glint of it to see what would happen. Nothing happened. He never used his knife. He got his own way with the show of it. Poggy and Smudge were what he called his handers. They admired him. Enrico suffered him for the sake of peace and quiet.
It was worse for Enrico when Jennifer and Wilma came in. It led to competition. The young males kept chancing their arm to prove who was the hard man. They peacocked, disputatious. The young hens egged them on, squawking and screeching. In the upshot Gerald stayed boss of the cafe. He had this knife. Enrico sighed, and settled for peace, though there wasn’t much quiet with it. The jukebox he had hoped would bring in a jolly company of regular guys and dolls was mono-polised by a dissident sect that kept other communicants away.
Gerald’s mother never asked him where he went at night but she was always worrying about his future.
‘You learn to drive that van, son,’ she said. ‘Never mind what your pals do. If you can drive you’ll always find a job.’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ said Gerald. ‘I aim to get a car of my own. You’ve got to have a car nowadays to be anybody.’
He loved the smell of petrol and oil, the motorodour of a garage, the sights of jacks and pumps and wrenches and spanners, he loved lolling in the van and grinning at the panic-stricken pedestrians who had to scamper back or scurry across when the van came breezing through at the changing of the lights.
He bought magazines about motorcycles and cars and kept them stacked under his bed. He read them through over and over again, hoarding an enormous specialist knowledge. He co
uld identify any vehicle at a hundred yards, make, model and year. But when he saw the price of a good secondhand car he lowered his sights to getting a motorbike first. The visceral image of the speed he could get on a motorbike excited him. It was like the way Jennifer and Wilma excited him when they leaned back crosslegged in Ianello’s wearing a miniskirt. He felt an urge to get on and on. Faster and faster. Onwards and ever upwards. He was growing up.
‘They won’t keep you on once you’re older,’ his mother warned him. ‘Once a vanboy wants a man’s wage they just sack him and get another boy. There’s never any shortage of boys.’
‘I wonder why that is,’ said Gerald.
He winked at Senga behind his mother’s back. Senga gave him a crosseyed snub. She was against him. She was loyal to Rose Weipers. She loved Rose Weipers. And she knew Mr Alfred was always getting Rose to go errands for him. She didn’t mind. There was no envy in her. She knew Rose had the prettier face. She was ready to like any teacher who liked Rose. But Gerald and her mother still kept on about Mr Alfred. They told her to stand up to him. She never found any occasion to, and kept her opinion to herself. Once in a month or so she had her childhood dream again, that she was sitting on her father’s knee, or some man’s knee. She couldn’t remember the face. Before he kissed her she wakened up. The only person she ever told was Rose.
Gerald wasn’t bothered about her. She was only his sister. He had a lot more on his mind than her silences. In the yard where the fleet of factory vehicles was parked he was learning starting and stopping, gear-changing, reversing and three-point turns. Hill-starting and stopping he learnt on Tordoch Brae on Saturday afternoons by plenary indulgence of the driver at the end of the week’s deliveries. He found it difficult at first. But he was interested, he concentrated, determined to learn. He was full of himself and nobody ever said he wasn’t intelligent. He was never nervous sitting in charge of a powerful, throbbing vehicle. He knew it was under his control. He was the lord of an engine that slavishly obeyed the touch of his hand and foot. He was the triumph of mind over metal. But apart from the lessons on hill-starting the driver wouldn’t let him take over outside the factory.
His mother was passing across the yard once when she saw him getting a lesson. A smile thawed her frozen face. To see him sitting up there in the cabin driving the van pleased her.
‘You know,’ she said to her foreman, ‘it’s an awful pity his teachers took a spite at him. They taught him nothing. Gerald could have been an engineer if he’d got the education.’
She was a patient woman, crafty, for ever planning ahead. Well in advance of the time when Gerald would be too old to stay on as a vanboy she was on to the maintenance men in the firm’s garage. She deaved them how good her Gerald was, what a smart boy, quick to learn, a willing worker. She got him started as an apprentice motor mechanic. Poggy and Smudge went into the same line. Poggy found a job in a bus company’s garage and Smudge scraped a place in a local petrol and repair station. They were all happy. It kept them sharing a way of life.
In the evenings when it was boring sitting any longer in Ianello’s talking shop, they swaggered out for diversion. They finished up on the prowl after midnight. They kicked over the wire litter bins on the arc-lamp standards, lifted the empty milk bottles outside a sleeping house and smashed them on the road. They chucked stones at the crossing beacons. When they passed a bus-shelter with any panes still unbroken they broke them.
Tired mooching around like that, Gerald was the first to get a bike. Always at his heels, Poggy and Smudge got one as well. Gerald’s was on monthly payments. It was new. Poggy and Smudge got second-hand ones cheap. The three of them overworked their bikes. Parts had to be replaced. But they couldn’t go on buying them. It cost too much. There wasn’t much they could lift where they worked that was any use to them. So at one and two in the morning they raided any motor-bikes parked in the street. Sometimes they stripped a bike for the fun of it. When they had more spares than they needed Smudge sold the surplus to any motor-cyclist who used his repair shop and asked no questions about a bargain.
Smudge was the first to steal a bike. His own was past it. After all, it was in its second childhood when he bought it. He swopped the numberplates and ditched his own in the quarry behind the brickwork. They moved on to cars. Many a man in the housing-schemes had a car but no garage. He had to leave his car in the street all night. Gerald took Poggy and Smudge with him ambling round side-streets after midnight looking for vulnerable vehicles. They had a good collection of car keys. They stripped a car of its radio, its battery, raided the boot. Anything left in the back seat they lifted.
‘Bugger doesn’t deserve to get keeping it,’ Smudge used to say when he fished out a briefcase, an A.A. handbook, a mascot, a paperback or magazine. Any trifle at all, he took it.
They had a good night in a quiet crescent of semidetached villas far from their own territory. There were a dozen cars parked along it. They smashed the windows, forced open any door they couldn’t unlock, and stole the car-seats and travelling rugs. They tossed the car-seats into somebody’s front garden well away from where they got them. Poggy and Smudge shared the travelling rugs between them. Gerald didn’t want one. He never took home anything that was stolen.
It was nearly two in the morning when he got home from that raid. He had been getting later and later, but this was the worst ever. His mother was angry.
‘Where have you been till this time?’ she shouted. ‘You’ve had me worried stiff!’
‘Ach, shut your face, you old nag,’ said Gerald.
He was tired, and that made him a bit short with her. He stared hard at the bare table.
‘What’ve you got?’ he asked. ‘You don’t mean to say there’s nothing ready for me.’
Mrs Provan was distressed. She couldn’t think what to say for a moment.
‘I can fry you a sausage and an egg if you like,’ she said humbly.
‘That’ll do fine,’ said Gerald agreeably. He never kept up a bad mood.
Senga, conscripted to sit up with her anxious mother, made a face unseen and slipped off silent and unnoticed to bed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Graeme Roy went to the university. He was excited but confident, a young hawk eager to swoop on a new field. Martha stayed on at school for another year to add to her leaving-certificate subjects. She liked French and German. She thought she would get a cosmopolitan job with a good degree in modern languages. They looked forward to being students together. He saw himself as the trail blazer, preparing the way for his soul mate. With a year’s experience in hand he would be able to guide and advise her, take her round the scattered buildings of the university, lead her to the French and German departments and the women’s union, tell her what clubs and societies she ought to join.
But he had no one to show him around. He enrolled in engineering and missed lectures in the opening weeks because he didn’t know where they were being given. When he settled to the work of his classes he discovered he was a country yokel in a mob of city slickers, a flounder in a shoal of smart students. He wanted to be a technocrat. That was how he saw it, that was how he said it. But he wasn’t up to it. He had poor results in the first term exams at Christmas, the Christmas Mr Alfred and Rose Weipers were holding hands. When it came to summer and the degree exams he was in a panic. He lost the place in all his subjects. He couldn’t decide which one to worry about most. He worried about them all and couldn’t concentrate on one in particular. When the results went up on the board he saw he had failed in them all.
It wasn’t Martha’s fault. Much as she liked to be with him she wouldn’t meet him oftener than once a week. She encouraged him to study. She wanted to be proud of being his girlfriend. She wanted to find him established at the university when she arrived there. She wanted him to be a student who had passed all his first year exams without any bother and who would pass all his exams the same way every year until he graduated with an honours b.s. c degree in Engineering.
His old teachers, always informed of university results, were as little surprised as Martha.
‘I don’t know what comes over these fellows,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘I advised him to take an Arts degree.’
‘He should have gone in for English Honours,’ said Mr Brown. ‘He had a talent for English. He wrote a very good poem for last year’s magazine.’
‘An engineering degree is just about the hardest degree there is,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘There’s a heavy plough every year. And Graeme Roy and engineering maths, well, I ask you! He’s a nice lad all right but no head for maths. I saw that when I had him in my last class. What makes them do it?’
‘They put a glamour round it,’ said Mr Brown. ‘An Arts degree is too common for them, thank you.’
‘That’s true,’ said Mr Dale. ‘They get this science bug. They want to be back-room boys.’
‘They think the ambition proves the capacity,’ said Mr Campbell.
‘His whole bent was for languages,’ said Mr Kerr.
‘He showed me a translation he had made of a poem by Rimbaud, “le Formeur du Val”. I’d never ask a schoolboy to translate Rimbaud.’
‘But wasn’t Rimbaud only a schoolboy when he wrote it?’ said Mr Dale.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Mr Kerr. ‘But he was Rimbaud. I would never take Rimbaud’s poems with any class here. But Roy had been reading French poetry on his own, God bless him. He wanted my opinion of his translation. I said it was quite good. So it was.’