Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

THE STORY OF A RECLUSE

FOR AGNES OWENS AND JAMES KELMAN

LONDON 1996

MY FATHER WAS THE REV. JOHN KIRKWOOD OF EDINBURGH, a man very well known for the rigour of his life and the tenor of his pulpit ministrations. I might have sometimes been tempted to bless Providence for this honourable origin, had not I been forced so much more often to deplore the harshness of my nurture. I have no children of my own, or none that I saw fit to educate, so perhaps speak at random; yet it appears my father may have been too strict. In the matter of pocket-money, he gave me a pittance, insufficient for his son’s position, and when, upon one occasion, I took the liberty to protest, he brought me up with this home thrust of inquiry: “Should I give you more, Jamie, will you promise me it shall be spent as I should wish?” I did not answer quickly, but when I did, it was truly: “No,” said I. He gave an impatient jostle of his shoulders, and turned his face to the study fire, as though to hide his feelings from his son. Today, however, they are very clear to me; and I know how he was one part delighted with my candour, and three parts revolted by the cynicism of my confession. I went from the room ere he had answered in any form of speech; and I went, I must acknowledge, in despair. I was then two and twenty years of age, a medical student of the University, already somewhat involved with debt, and already more or less (although I can scarce tell how) used to costly dissipations. I had a few shillings in my pocket; in a billiard room in St Andrew’s Street I had shortly quadrupled this amount at pyramids, and the billiard room being almost next door to a betting agency, I staked the amount on the hazard of a race. At about five in the afternoon of the next day, I was the possessor of some thirty pounds — six times as much as I had ever dreamed of spending. I was not a bad young man, although a little loose. I may have been merry and lazy; until that cursed night I had never known what it was to be overpowered with drink; so it is possible I was overpowered the more completely. I have never clearly been aware of where I went or what I did, or of how long a time elapsed till my wakening. The night was dry, dark, and cold; the lamps and the clean pavements and bright stars delighted me; I went before me with a baseless exultation in my soul, singing, dancing, wavering in my gait with the most airy inconsequence, and all at once at the corner of a street, which I can still dimly recall, the light of my reason went out and the thread of memory was broken.

I came to myself in bed, whether it was that night or the next I have never known, only the thirty pounds were gone! I had certainly slept some while, for I was sober; it was not yet day, for I was aware through my half-closed eyelids of the light of a gas jet; and I had undressed, for I lay in linen. Some little time, my mind hung upon the brink of consciousness; and then, with a start of recollection, recalling the beastly state to which I had reduced myself, and my father’s straitlaced opinions and conspicuous position, I sat suddenly up in bed. As I did so, some sort of hamper tore apart about my waist; I looked down and saw, instead of my night-shirt, a woman’s chemise copiously laced about the sleeves and bosom. I sprang to my feet, turned, and saw myself in a cheval glass. The thing fell but a little lower than my knees; it was of a smooth and soft fabric; the lace very fine, the sleeves half way to my elbow. The room was of a piece; the table well supplied with necessaries of the toilet; female dresses hanging upon nails; a wardrobe of some light varnished wood against the wall; a foot bath in the corner. It was not my night-shirt; it was not my room; and yet by its shape and the position of the window, I saw it exactly corresponded with mine; and that the house in which I found myself must be the counterpart of my father’s. On the floor in a heap lay my clothes as I had taken them off; on the table my passkey, which I perfectly recognized. The same architect, employing the same locksmith, had built two identical houses and had them fitted with identical locks; in some drunken aberration I had mistaken the door, stumbled into the wrong house, mounted to the wrong room and sottishly gone to sleep in the bed of some young lady. I hurried into my clothes, quaking, and opened the door.

So far it was as I supposed; the stair, the very paint was of the same design as at my father’s, only instead of the cloistral quiet which was perennial at home, there rose up to my ears the sound of empty laughter and unsteady voices. I bent over the rail, and looking down and listening, when a door opened below, the voices reached me clearer. I heard more than one cry “good night”; and with a natural instinct, I whipped back into the room I had just left and closed the door behind me.

A light step drew rapidly nearer on the stair; fear took hold of me, lest I should be detected, and I had scarce slipped behind the door, when it opened and there entered a girl of about my own age, in evening dress, black of hair, her shoulders naked, a rose in her bosom. She paused as she came in, and sighed; with her back still turned to me, she closed the door, moved towards the glass, and looked for a while very seriously at her own image. Once more she sighed, and as if with a sudden impatience, unclasped her bodice.

Up to that moment, I had not so much as formed a thought; but then it seemed to me I was bound to interfere. “I beg your pardon —” I began, and paused. She turned and faced me without a word; bewilderment, growing surprise, a sudden anger, followed one another on her countenance.

“What on earth —” she said, and paused too.

“Madam,” I said, “for the love of God, make no mistake. I am no thief, and I give you my word I am a gentleman. I do not know where I am; I have been vilely drunken — that is my paltry confession. It seems that your house is built like mine, that my passkey opens your lock, and that your room is similarly situate to mine. How or when I came here, the Lord knows; but I awakened in your bed five minutes since — and here I am. It is ruin to me if I am found; if you can help me out, you will save a fellow from a dreadful mess; if you can’t — or won’t — God help me.”

“I have never seen you before,” she said. “You are none of Manton’s friends.”

“I never even heard of Manton,” said I. “I tell you I don’t know where I am. I thought I was in — Street, No. 15 — Rev. Dr Kirkwood’s, that is my father.”

“You are streets away from that,” she said; “you are in the Grange, at Manton Jamieson’s. You are not fooling me?”

I said I was not. “And I have torn your night-shirt,” cried I. She picked it up, and suddenly laughed, her brow for the first time becoming cleared of suspicion. “Well,” she said, “this is not like a thief. But how could you have got in such a state?”

“Oh!” replied I, “the great affair is not to get in such a state again.”

“We must get you smuggled out,” said she. “Can you get out of the window?”

I went over and looked; it was too high. “Not from this window,” I replied, “it will have to be the door.”

“The trouble is that Manton’s friends —” she began, “they play roulette and sometimes stay late; and the sooner you are gone, the better. Manton must not see you.”

“For God’s sake not!” I cried.

“I was not thinking of you in the least,” she said; “I was thinking of myself.”

And then Robert Louis Stevenson laid down his pen leaving a fragment of perfect prose which has tantalized me since the mid sixties when I read it in a little secondhand book bought for one shilling from Voltaire and Rousseau’s shop at the corner of Park Road and Eldon Street. The cover is soft black leatherette with a copy of the author’s signature stamped in gold on the front, a grove of three gold palmtrees on the spine, and on the titlepage, in red, the words Weir of Hermiston: Some Unfinished Stories.

Suetonius says that the Roman Emperor Tiberius enjoyed asking literary men awkward questions like, what songs the sirens sang? What name Achilles used when disguised as a girl? In the seventeenth century Doctor Browne of Norwich suggested these questions were not wholly unanswerable, so in our century the poet Graves tested his muse by making her answer them. Can I deduce how The Story of a Recluse would continue if Stevenson had finished it?

I must first get Jamie out of this house which is so miraculously like and unlike his own. By like and unlike I mean more than the coincidence of architecture and doorlocks, the difference of moral tone. In both the Rev. Dr Kirkwood’s manse and Manton Jamieson’s Grange a spirited youngster of twenty-two, one a boy, one a girl, lives with an older man they are inclined to dread. Stevenson had a habit of creating characters dialectically. Perhaps every author works in this way, but Stevenson’s antagonistic or linked opposites are unusually definite. In Kidnapped the cautious lowland Whig, David Balfour, contains a pride and a courage which only become evident when he is coupled with the touchy highland Jacobite, Alan Breck Stewart, who displays his pride and courage in his garments. The Master of Ballantrae is about two brothers, one a dutiful, long-suffering toiler who hardly anyone likes, the other an adventurous, revengeful waster with charming social manners. In Weir of Hermiston each character is the antithesis of one or two others, with the Scottish State Prosecutor, Lord Weir, maintaining unity by being the antithesis of everybody. In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a respected healer and detested murderer alternate inside the same skin. Manton Jamieson can only be the counterpart of the Rev. Dr Kirkwood if he is a dominant antifather, a strong lord of misrule. Since men drink and gamble in his house this has been already indicated, but if he too gambles it must be with no fear of losing. He must be formidable. No more need be deduced just now about this character. Several pages will pass before Jamie meets him, because Stevenson had already written a story about a young man blundering at night into a strange house containing a young woman and being caught there by a formidable older man.

The Sire de Malétroit’s Door is one of his poorer tales. His imagination works best when he deals with Scotland, and this tale is set in the blood-and-thunder France of The Three Musketeers. A young nobleman, fleeing from enemies, escapes through a mysteriously open door at the end of a cul-de-sac. He finds he has got out of one trap into another, a trap set by a rich old man for the lover of his niece. The old man refuses to believe that the nobleman and niece do not know each other, and gives them till dawn to choose between being murdered or married. Stevenson had a deliberate policy of putting heroes into exciting positions for which they are not responsible. He expounds it in his essay, A Gossip About Romance, where he declares that most human life is a matter of responding to circumstances we have not chosen, and that “the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms and the diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human conscience. But it is possible to build, upon this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.” The lively, beautiful and buoyant tales Stevenson wrote in accordance with this theory are Treasure Island and Kidnapped. The heroes of these are boys, but so obedient to ordinary, conventional promptings, and keen to be thought adult, and so trusting, and mistaken, and fearful, and capable of the rare brave act, that folk of any age or sex can feel they would be that sort of boy in those circumstances. And the circumstances are so interesting! The Sire de Malétroit’s Door is a poor story because only the circumstances are of interest. The trap which closes on the young nobleman squeezes nothing out of him but a gallant speech about his readiness to die. This wins him the niece’s affectionate respect and a marital conclusion which is meant to be triumphantly life-affirming but is actually servile. This hero is not believable.

But Jamie Kirkwood is believable; and at first sight, and to my mind, is a far more distinct person than Jim Hawkins and David Balfour. No wonder. These youngsters cheerfully leave home with a fortune in view, getting trapped for a few hours on the way to it by Long John Silver and Captain Hoseason. But Jamie Kirkwood, a man of twenty-two, eats and sleeps inside the trap where he was born. His jailer is no 18th century buccaneer but a 19th century, rigidly respectable, damnably ungiving Edinburgh clergyman who offers his son a choice of three courses: servility, hypocrisy, or rebellion. But Jamie will not turn hypocrite to get a little of the freedom he craves. By honestly answering his father’s home thrust of enquiry he brands himself — in his father’s eye and in his own — as a rebel and a cynic, the last of which he certainly is not. A cynic would have lied to get more money. This is a moral story about human conduct and the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience. The circumstances which drive Jamie are the circumstances of a father’s overbearing nature pressing to a division his son’s appetites for freedom and for truth. Truth wins, and drives the son to despair. Despair drives him to gamble and drink the winnings. It is now highly likely that a young man of his class, and city, and century, will impose himself on a strange woman in a disreputable house. Jamie’s blackout, the coincidence of doorlocks and bedrooms, lets Stevenson cut whole pages of transitional scenery and present this likely outcome as an achieved fact, while screwing our curiosity to a new, surprising level. What now?

To hold our curiosity, to give Jamie’s feelings time to develop through the exercise of his own curiosity, he must leave this house without learning much more about it. Of course, he knows the architecture. The back door opens into a kitchen and cellar region where at least one servant is waiting for guests to depart and the master to go to bed. Jamie must leave by the front door, opening and closing it in stealthy silence. His passkey allows this. The danger is that someone may unexpectedly leave the gaming room and catch him creeping through the hall. The girl, with another sigh, tells Jamie that she will return to the company downstairs, announce she has changed her mind about retiring, and hold their attention for four or five minutes. She seems in no doubt of her ability to do this. She fastens her bodice, ignoring Jamie’s thanks and apologies with the look of someone about to lift a familiar, weary burden. She descends the stairs. He follows her halfway, then waits. He hears a door open, one boisterous shout of welcome, a door firmly closed. Shortly afterward a piano strikes out a tune by Offenbach. This is his signal to escape. He therefore uses it to do so.

But in the second paragraph of his story Jamie said, “I came to myself in bed, whether that night or the next I have never known.” If this means that he never gets back to the daily calendar of events in his father’s home then he must be caught by Manton and Manton’s friends while attempting, with the girl’s help, to leave the Grange. Her conduct shows that Manton is jealous and powerful. If he is also intelligent, and the young people tell him the truth, he will neither quite believe nor disbelieve them. If he is a kind of 19th century de Malétroit, a touchy megalomaniac, he could offer Jamie a choice between emigration or public disgrace. Let Jamie depart at once for America, without the girl, and Manton will pay him something more than the fare out; otherwise Manton will hand him to the police on a charge of unlawful entry. Stevenson certainly had the skill to make such an operatic twist seem plausible, but why should he? It would not bring the end of the story an inch nearer, that end which has been announced at the very start, indeed before the start. This is The Story of a Recluse. Jamie will divide himself from humanity and have no children of his own, or none he sees fit to educate. A high-spirited young man who may be merry and lazy, but is brave enough to be honest while in difficulty, will become a deliberately lonely, coldhearted rake who cares less for his children than his own harsh parent cared for him. If the splendid interview in the study, and the debauch, and the meeting with the girl, produce nothing but Jamie decamping abroad then they are trivialized, because many different stories could start like that. They are equally trivialized if Jamie is charged before a magistrate, reported in the press, expelled from university and disinherited by his father. If we are to feel more than some shoulder-shrugging pity for a very unlucky fellow we must see him develop before attracting the blows which warp him. He must whole-heartedly desire something, and fight hard for it, and be horribly defeated.

What stops him noticing the day of the week for a long time is a sudden, almost total lack of interest in his immediate circumstances. This begins a few moments after leaving the Grange. As Jamie strides along the pavement, each street lamp casting his shadow before him as he passes it and behind him as he approaches it, his feeling of delighted release is replaced by astonishment at his close dealings with an attractive, brave, interesting woman. Everything to do with her which embarrassed and frightened him is now a vivid, intimate memory. He has worn her night-dress, slept in her bed, seen her in a privacy allowed only to lovers and husbands. She has talked to him as an equal, conspired with him as a friend, and saved him from social ruin. He and she now share a secret unknown to anyone else in the world, yet he does not even know her name! He cannot believe that he will not meet her again.

He gets home, stealthily opens the door and closes it more stealthily behind him. He is perplexed to see that the hall, dimly lit through the fanlight window by a lamp in the street beyond, is exactly as it was when he last saw it — surely it should have changed as much as he has changed? And it is doubly familiar, for without the different arrangement of hats and coats on the hallstand he could be entering the house he left half an hour before. He tiptoes across the hall and upstairs, so exactly reversing his recent actions that he hesitates before his bedroom door, heart thudding in hope and in fear that when he opens it he will again see the girl’s bedroom. However, this is no tale of the supernatural. He undresses, puts on his own night-gown, slips into bed and lies remembering what happened after he last found himself in this situation. He recalls especially the girl’s sigh and her long, very serious look at herself in the mirror. He is sure he knows what she was thinking at the time: “Who am I, and why?” Although most young people ask themselves that question the thought makes him feel nearer her. And who is Manton Jamieson, this man she lives with but dare not trust with the truth about herself? Her husband? (The idea brings a touch of panic. He dismisses it.) Her brother? Uncle? Step-father? (Few women in Scotland, in those days, would call their own father by his first name.) Whoever Manton is, he gambles for money with his guests while providing them with strong drink; no wonder the girl is discontent. (And Jamie, who has so recently gambled and drunk, does not notice he is viewing Manton from his father’s standpoint.) In the midst of these speculations he falls asleep.

And is roused as usual next morning by a housemaid tapping his door, and lies for a while staring blankly at the ceiling, knowing he is in love. I assume that Jamie’s nurture has depended so exclusively on his father because his mother died young — perhaps in childbirth. Before what now seems a dreamlike encounter with the girl Jamie has met only two kinds of women: the mainly elderly and unco good who belong to his father’s congregation, and those who drink in pubs and shebeens used by nearly penniless medical students. Jamie cannot not be in love with the girl. He feels no need, at this stage of his passion, to be more than gloriously astonished by it. He dresses, goes downstairs and breakfasts with his father. This meal is usually eaten in a taciturn silence broken only by his brief replies to infrequent paternal questions. These questions always take the form of remarks. His father never asks Jamie where he spent a day or evening, but says, “I am informed that you were seen last Thursday in Rose Street,” or, “You did not come directly home from college last night.” This morning his father makes several such remarks which Jamie hardly hears but responds to with a nod or a murmur of “Yes indeed.” Near the end of the meal he notices that his father has risen and now stands with his back to the fireplace, declaring in firm tones that he fears Jamie is not attending properly to his studies; that man is born to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow; that a minister of religion is required to set an example to the community and that he, personally, has no intention of supporting a mere idler, wastrel and profligate. Instead of hearing these familiar words with an expression of sullen resentment Jamie nods a little, murmurs that he will give the matter thought, and absentmindedly leaves the room and the house.

Thirty minutes later, passkey in hand, he discovers himself about to enter the drive of the Grange. With a quickened pace he continues along the road, almost amused. He has been too busy mixing hopes and speculations with memories of the night before to notice where he is going. He spends most of that day and the next two or three days in the same walking dream. The Grange is a fairly new building so I imagine it in a line of prosperous villa residences, part of the western suburbs along the Glasgow road near Corstorphine hill. Twice or thrice a day he strolls past the front of it from a great distance on one side to a great distance on the other. More frequently, and taking great care not to be seen by servants, he prowls the mews lane at the back, for there he can see her high bedroom window. Sometimes, like someone shaking off a lassitude, he hurries into the city and wanders the city streets near the kind of fashionable shop she must occasionally visit, or sits on a bench in Princes Street gardens, watching the strollers in the comforting but not yet urgent knowledge that if he could sit there for three or four weeks he would certainly see her passing. He believes that the chance which brought them together will certainly, if he stays ready and alert for it, bring them together in a perfectly ordinary, social way which he will manage to build upon. He fears she cannot be thinking about him as much as he thinks of her, but is certain she thinks of him sometimes, and if it is with even a fraction of his own emotion he believes he can persuade her to break free of twenty Mantons. Meanwhile the notion of a strong, jealous Manton strengthens him. If the girl was wholly free or only slightly confined he might feel compelled to hurry, but he is sure that Manton can keep her for him. He is also fascinated by the kind of person he is becoming under her influence: patient, determined and steady. He has nothing now to say to the friends he met in pubs and betting shops. None are fit to share the secret he is nursing. He is close to monomania. All the loving capacities of a soul starved of love are flowing, silently, in one direction. The nearly unbroken silence in which he breakfasts and dines with his father no longer seems a gloomy oppression to be avoided. His spirit is grateful for it. This is fortunate. Days must elapse before his next small allowance and he lacks the means to eat elsewhere.

But if Jamie’s obsession is not fed by a new occurrence he will be driven to keep it alive by some rash initiative which I cannot imagine. I have read, and so has Jamie, of lovers who further their intrigues by bribing and plotting with a servant, but Jamie is too stiff-necked to make a social inferior his confidant. He also assumes that even servants are inclined to honesty, so any approach he makes will be reported to the master of the house. Also he has no money for bribes. His love is doomed to fade and dwindle unless providence — who in this story is me masquerading as Robert Louis Stevenson — provides another useful coincidence, and why should I not? Nowadays the wealthier folk of Edinburgh know each other very well; they were certainly not more ignorant a century back. After a few days Jamie, in mere restlessness of spirit, resumes attendance at the university. He tries to hammer down his memories of the girl (which are no longer pleasurable, but frustrating) by concentrating on the demonstrations of his lecturers. He tries to believe that everything which disturbs him is located in a circulatory, respiratory, digestive system animated by nervous shocks similar to those generated in the Galvanic pile or Wimshurst apparatus, but here generated in a cerebral cortex reacting to external stimuli. Later, feeling very dismal, he stands in the cold dusk on the range of steps overlooking the great, grey, classically pillared and pilastered, gaslit and cobbled quadrangle. Let there be a haze of fog in it, seafog from the Firth tinted brown and smelling of smoke from the Edinburgh lums, and making opal haloes around the lamps, and making ghostly the figures of the students hurrying singly and in groups toward the gate, and making their voices very distinct in the thickened air.

“Good night Charlie! Will I see you later at Manton’s place?” cries someone.

“Not me. I’m clean out of funds,” says another. Jamie leaps down the steps and overtakes the last speaker, who is known to him, under the high arch of the entrance. They turn side by side into Nicolson Street. Jamie asks, “Who is Manton Jamieson?”

In answering this question I must describe the person who does so, for Stevenson, like nature and like every good storyteller, creates nobody to inform and change someone else without giving them an equal fulness of life. Those who appear most briefly speak for whole professions or communities. See the doctor in Macbeth, the housepainters in Crime and Punishment, the itinerant barber at the start of Kidnapped. If they are a bigger part of the plot they often emphasize the main characters’ obsession by lacking it while resembling them in other ways: thus Macduff is given the same rank, courage and royal prospects as Macbeth, but less ambition and a less ambitious wife; Raskolnikov’s best friend is also a clever student in poor circumstances, one who works to get money by translating textbooks instead of murdering a pawnbroker. Stevenson frequently coupled young men in this contrasting way because (quite apart from his dialectical habit of mind) young men often do go in twos, and he was more fascinated by the beginnings of lives than by the middle and later periods. Since I have hinted that Charlie is a fellow student who has also lost money by gambling I will enlarge him by basing him partly on Alan in the novella John Nicholson and partly on Francie in Weir of Hermiston. He is more elegant and popular than Jamie and his guardian grants him a far larger allowance, but he has squandered it and will be poor for a while to come. Though in love with nobody but himself he greatly likes company. He has recently started avoiding his wealthy and fashionable friends because he owes money to some of them. He is shrewd enough to know that the casually superior manner which makes him acceptable to such people will make him obnoxious to those he considers their inferiors. Although Jamie is a very slight acquaintance, and not one he would normally want to cultivate, he is disposed to treat him, for the time being, as a kindred spirit. He assumes that Jamie’s interest in Manton is the same as his own, and the most natural thing in the world: the interest of an outsider in a special sort of glamorous elite. It will soothe his hurt pride to instruct Jamie in the ways of Manton’s world, and eventually lead him into it.

So what strong lord of misrule can preside in this douce, commercially respectable, late 19th century city where even religious fanaticism reinforces unadventurous mediocrity? Scotland had many wealthy landowners who were equally indifferent to gambling losses and bourgeois opinion but almost all these had shifted their town houses from Edinburgh to London a generation earlier, and the names of the few who remained would be known to the sons of the professional classes, especially if they had the same social habits as the Prince of Wales. Jamie has not heard of Manton Jamieson when the story starts. Despite Manton’s Scottish surname he is a wealthy, recent incomer. Let him be the son of depressed gentry or educated tradespeople or a mixture of both. The death of his parents at an early age leaves him a little money, but not enough to buy an officer’s commission or a professional education. He has no special talent but a deal of energy, courage and practical ability, so he takes these abroad to where they will best profit him. He is pleasant, tough, cautious, and whatever he does is done well, but for many years he keeps losing his gains by shifting to places where there are rumours of better opportunities. Let him eventually (though this is a cliché) make a pile of money in the Californian gold fields, not by prospecting but by selling necessities to prospectors. Let him take it to San Francisco where he manages to increase it on the stock exchange. He resides with, perhaps even marries (this is vague) the widow or mistress of a dead rich friend. She also dies, leaving him her money and making him guardian of either her daughter or her much younger sister — this also is vague. And now he tires of San Francisco. One reason for his many restless shiftings has been a secret desire for social eminence. He knows he can never shine among the millionaires of Nob Hill because their lavish expenditure would bankrupt him; it also strikes him as childish and hysterical. He is almost fifty, and because he has formed no strong attachment to any other place the memories of his native city are increasingly dear to him. He decides to return there. This is a mistake.

Since the days of Dick Whittington, the exile who returns transformed by foreign adventure is as common in popular fiction as in history books, and a lot more distinct. His earliest struggles are described in Robinson Crusoe and parodied in Gulliver’s Travels. He arrives unexpectedly in Gaskell’s Cranford to save his genteel old aunt from working in a sweetie shop, and in Galt’s The Member he cheerfully uses a fortune made in India to make another in the corruption of British politics. Suddenly, in Dickens’ day, his cheerful bloom quite vanishes. Little Dorrit has him sent to China by an unloving mother and returning, after years of clerical toil, to confront a land run by greedy rentiers, callous civil servants, venal aristocrats and shady capitalists. Great Expectations has him transported to Australia by an oppressive government and returning, after years of manual toil, to a land where he is a hunted criminal and an embarrassment to those he enriched. In Stevenson’s day stories about prosperous, rather stuffy citizens suddenly shocked by intrusions from a dangerously unBritish past had become commonplace. They were plausible because although middle-class conventions had become more rigidly confining, the middle class was full of monied adventurers who adopted these conventions. Manton cannot adopt them because he never learned them. Like all returned exiles his memory of the homeland is out of date. The Edinburgh of his youth was dominated by free-thinking, hard-drinking lawyers and the remnant of a gentry who could still entertain themselves by using that demotic lowland speech which had been the language of the Scottish kings. Manton was sure that only poverty excluded him from this society. His notion of good living is to dine, drink and converse where his wide knowledge of life will receive attention, followed by some gentlemanly gambling where his superior skill will bring a profit. He knows this last amenity is enjoyed by many thousands in Paris, the German spas and Saint Petersburg. He finds it is now illegal in Britain and thought wicked and foolish in an Edinburgh whose social leaders belong to rival kinds of Presbyterian church. Manton is no churchgoer and his social chances are further reduced by the young woman he introduces as “My ward, Miss Juliette O’Sullivan, the daughter of a very dear friend”. He jealously oversees all her actions but is silent (so is she) about her marriage prospects. In such a man, in an age when marriage is a respectable girl’s only prospect, this suggests she is his mistress or his bastard. Only rakish bachelors, itinerant members of the acting profession and defiant youths of Jamie’s age visit the Grange. Manton must feed his sense of eminence by teaching college students his own slightly vulgar notion of gentlemanly conduct.

The superficial part of all this is told by Charlie to Jamie as they stroll south along Nicolson Street, their breath adding puffs of whiter density to the haze of the fog. Jamie learns little more than he suspected already, but Charlie’s suspicions of the girl’s status in that household fill him with a queer sick excitement. He stands still and says, “Can you take me there?”

“Nothing easier,” says Charlie. “You’re a sort Manton would take to. The deuce of it is, I’m clean out of funds just now. Not that gaming is compulsory at the Grange, but it’s the done thing. We’ll be given all the champagne we want, so it’s common decency that at least one of us hazards something on a game. How much have you got?”

“Nothing!” cries Jamie, staring at him.

“Not even a watch?”

Jamie hesitates, then detaches a watch from within his overcoat and hands it over. Charlie snaps open the silver case and brings it near his eye with something like the professional regard of a pawnbroker. He says, “This is a good watch — we can raise quite a bit on it. Shall I show you where?”

An hour later, with coin in their pockets, they are received by Manton at the Grange.

He is a calm, bulky man with a quietly attentive manner. His heavy lidded, rather narrow eyes, and bushy, welltrimmed whiskers, and mouth half-hidden by a neatly brushed moustache, all convey amusement without definitely smiling. I am modelling him slightly on Edward, Prince of Wales, whom Stevenson found interesting enough to parody in two quite different ways, as the hapless hero of John Nicholson and as Prince Florizel of Bohemia in The New Arabian Nights. For this reason I will also have him playing baccarat when the young men call — roulette is kept for later in the evening. But first he introduces Jamie to, “My ward, Miss Juliette O’Sullivan, the daughter of a very dear friend.”

The girl regards Jamie with a face as impassive as his own. Does she wear the black velvet gown he remembers? He is too full of whirling emotions to notice. It is her face he wants to gaze and gaze into so he tries not to see her at all, bowing deeply and turning again to Manton. He hears her murmur “Good evening” and on a louder, welcoming note greet Charlie with a “How nice to see you, Mr Gemmel.” He is glad she knows how to dissemble. She is the only woman present and plays hostess to those not engaged by the cardplay. Jamie stands watching it, ensuring, by slight turns of the head, that she is always in the corner of his eye, never the centre of it. This is easy, for he can now see that the gown she wears is white satin. He is not jealous of those who chat with her, for they cannot know her as intimately as he does, and he is sure she is now as conscious of him as he of her. Meanwhile he watches the baccarat, a game unknown to him. It is a form of the games known nowadays as pontoon and Black Jack. Manton, being host and the richest person present, is of course the banker. Charlie joins the game and wins a little, then loses a little, then wins more, then much more, then loses everything. Charlie suggests that Jamie takes his place at the table. Jamie refuses but gives Charlie money to play for him. In a pause for refreshment Juliette goes to the piano and accompanies herself in a song. Her voice is slight but sounds sweet and brave for she is clever enough not to force it beyond its range. If Jamie attended closely it would bring him to tears, so he stands beside the fire with his host, for it is from Manton that the girl must be won. Manton’s conversation is entertaining, anecdotal, and polished by years of use. A bawdy element in it is not too heavily emphasized. He presents himself as onlooker or victim rather than cause of strange events, and seems as ready to listen as to speak. By occasional questions and an unmoving, attentive expression he usually draws from raw young men news of their families, college experience, hopes and opinions; but he draws very little from Jamie. Jamie sees that Manton is condescending to him, and dislikes it, but he still attends as closely to Manton as he did to the cardplay, and for the same reason — he wants to defeat him. So he notices what few others notice on their first visit to the Grange. Whether gaming or conversing, Manton’s mind is only half occupied with his immediate company. As he and Jamie stand side by side with their back to the fire, both are keeping half an eye on the white figure at the opposite end of the room. Manton is less sure of her than Jamie is! The thought fills Jamie with a giddy foretaste of supremacy. Gaming is resumed. Again Jamie watches, but with greater understanding, and all at once his close-contained, highly stimulated, busily searching mind conceives a plan, a plot which will bring together himself, the girl, the Grange, Manton, cardplay, his father’s tiny allowance and even Charlie in a single scheme of conquest. Throughout the evening Jamie (like Manton) has drunk almost nothing. The slightly tipsy Charlie is about to stake the last of the money on a new game. Jamie lays a firm hand on his shoulder and says, “We must go now.”

He approaches his hostess, says “Good night Miss O’Sullivan,” and is now bold enough to give her one steady glance. She turns to him the bright smile she has been bestowing on someone else, bids him good night and turns away leaving him disconcerted by her powers as an actress. Manton, perhaps flattered by the close attention of this taciturn guest, escorts both young men to the door, cheerfully commiserating with Charlie’s misfortune and inviting both young men back with a particular nod to Jamie.

The cold night air slightly sobers Charlie. He says glumly, “I shan’t be back there in a hurry. It’s nearly a month till my next allowance and my brute of a governor won’t allow me another advance on it. You are walking beside a desperate man, Kirkwood. You were wise to drag me away when you did. I usually hang on to the bitter end, because of Juliette, you know — the beautiful Miss Juliette O’Sullivan. But I’ve no hopes there. What do you think of her, Kirkwood? Isn’t she a woman to die for?”

Jamie finds these remarks impertinent. He holds out his hand, palm upward, and with a sigh Charlie places the last sovereign on it saying, “Sorry I didn’t do better for you, but luck was against me.”

“Luck does not exist,” says Jamie firmly. “Luck is superstitious nonsense. You lost to Manton like everybody else did, because he is skilful and you are idiots.”

Charlie is inclined to be angry but is daunted by the small tight smile Jamie gives him. He says, “Could you have done better?”

“Of course not, so I did not play. When I go back there, Charlie — when we go back there, Charlie — we will play and win because we will have made ourselves better than Manton.”

“How?”

“By study and practice. By practice and study. There are books about cardgames are there not? Books by dependable authorities?”

“Well, Cavendish is considered pretty good, and two or three French fellows.”

“We’ll work on them. A month just might be sufficient if we apply ourselves hard. After all, you have nothing better to do with your time.”

And at breakfast next morning Jamie says to his father, “I have a favour to ask you, sir. I believe I will do better in my studies if I share them with a college friend, Charlie Gemmel. Since this house is a quieter place than his lodgings I want us to work most evenings in the privacy of my bedroom. Would you object to him sharing our evening meal beforehand?”

The Rev. Dr Kirkwood looks at his son for a while. Jamie’s face flushes a hot red. The father says quietly, “I can have no objection to that.”

So each evening and for most of the weekends Jamie shuts himself up with Charlie in that room which is so like yet unlike her room. On the doorward side of a small table they make a barricade of medical books high enough to hide a card-pack and Cavendish’s book on games of chance. (This is mainly a guilty ritual, for the Rev. Dr Kirkwood is not one who would enter his son’s room unannounced.) They play game after game, and catechize each other on the details of the Cavendish strategy, and sometimes probe a foreign work which gives other strategy and teaches the techniques of foul play under the guise of warning against them. But at this stage Jamie neither intends to cheat nor suspects Manton of doing so. He is striving for purely conventional mastery. His obsessions with the girl and with the game are now identical. Each card dealt or lifted seems to put him in touch with her, with every petty victory he feels she is closer. Since Charlie does not share this erotic drive he is frequently exhausted, less by the games than by the intricate post-mortems which follow. He scratches his head woefully and cries, “We would soon be qualified doctors if we gave our medical studies this degree of attention.”

Jamie smiles and shuffles the pack and says, “You’re tired, Gemmel. Be banker this time.”

So Charlie also becomes an obsessive player. The manse is a good place to evade his creditors and responsibilities. The meals there are well cooked, well served, and cost nothing. His only social life now is cardplay with Jamie. We can become addicts of almost any activity prolonged past the healthy limit. People have drunk themselves to death on water, the anorexic finds hunger intoxicating, some of the worst treated learn to welcome pain. The freedom of pushing faster toward death than our body or society requires is the essence of every perverse satisfaction, gambling included. Charlie, in the circumstances, is bound to get hooked on this cardgame, though not as absolutely as Jamie. When outside his room Jamie now plays imaginary games in his head. He no longer seems obstinately silent or fretful in his father’s company, just thoughtful and deliberate. His step is firm, his manner composed, and though he eats as much as ever he has grown thinner. He never visits public houses, billiard rooms or betting shops. All pocket money is hoarded for the decisive game with Manton.

And one day, on the corner of the study table where a certain number of florins are usually placed for him, he finds as many guineas. He stares at his father with open mouth. The elder Kirkwood says, “I am giving you more, Jamie, because you deserve more. A while ago you asked for an allowance worthy of a gentleman’s son while declaring that you would not spend it as a gentleman ought. You have changed since then, Jamie! When I look at you I no longer see an ordinary, thankless young drifter, I see a man determined to make his way in the world, a man I can trust.”

Jamie continues to stare. His father is smiling at him with a futile expression of pride and approval and Jamie has a desolate feeling of loss. This is the first proof he ever received that his father loves him. He remembers once being a person who longed for such proof and would have been changed by it. That person no longer exists. Jamie would like to weep for him as for a dead brother, and also yell with laughter at the good money he has earned, yes, earned, by his love of a woman and devotion to a game his father would abhor. He sighs, whispers “Thank you sir,” picks up the guineas and leaves the room.

For me that is the climax of the story. The catastrophe may be sketched rapidly and lightly.

That evening or the next Jamie suddenly grasps the nature of this baccarat which Cavendish so clearly explains. It is only partly a game of skill — anyone following the Cavendish system will play it as well as it can be played but, as in roulette, the main chances will always favour the banker: the banker has most money and therefore most staying power. Manton’s superior skill merely maintains his lead in a game which is already on his side. Banks, of course, can be broken by runs of luck, but very seldom. Jamie knows that the chance which introduced him to Juliette will not wed him to her. With rage, then horror, then resignation, he sees that to win by skill he must win by cheating. He has now complete ascendancy over Charlie. They devise and practise signals which strike them as impenetrable, but are not. They decide to hazard all they can on a game: Charlie’s quarterly allowance, Jamie’s hoarded pocket-money, and money borrowed at exorbitant interest from a professional lender, I imagine an evening at the Grange when the whole company gradually gather round the table to watch the play between Jamie and an increasingly grim-faced Manton. Just before or just after Jamie breaks the bank his fraud is exposed by the girl, who is Manton’s accomplice and supporter in every possible way. We have no reason to think she ever found Jamie interesting. He was not, perhaps, an attractive young man.

LACK OF MONEY

IN BRITAIN ONLY SNOBS, perverts and the wholly despairing want friendship with richer or poorer folk. Maybe in Iceland or Holland or Canada factory-owners and labourers, lumber-jacks and high court judges eat in each other’s houses and go holidays together. If so they must have equally good food, clothes and schools for their children. That kind of classlessness is impossible here. Mackay disagrees. He says the Scots have democratic traditions which let them forget social differences. He says his father was gardener to a big house in the north and the owner was his dad’s best friend. On rainy days they sat in the gardener’s shed and drank a bottle of whisky together. But equal incomes allow steadier friendships than equal drunkenness. I did not want to borrow money from Mackay because it proved I was poorer than him. He insisted on lending, which ruined more than our friendship.

I needed a thousand pounds cash to complete a piece of business and phoned my bank to arrange a loan. They said I could have it at an interest of eleven per cent plus a forty-pound arrangement fee. I told them I would repay in five days but they said that made no difference — for £1000 now I must repay £1150, even if I did so tomorrow. I groaned, said I would call for the money in half an hour, put down the phone and saw Mackay. He had strolled in from his office next door. We did the same sort of work but were not competitors. When I got more business than I could handle I passed it to him, and vice versa.

He said, “What have you to groan about?”

I told him and added, “I can easily pay eleven per cent et cetera but I hate it. I belong to the financial past. I agree with Maynard Keynes — all interest above five per cent strikes me as extortion.”

“I’ll lend you a thousand, interest free,” said Mackay pulling out his cheque book. While I explained why I never borrow money from friends he filled in a cheque, tore it off and held it out saying, “Stop raving about equality and take this to my bank. I’ll phone them and they’ll cash it at once. We’re still equals — in an emergency you would do the same for me.”

I blushed because he was almost certainly wrong. Then I shrugged, took the cheque and said, “If this is what you want, Mackay, all right. Fine. I’ll return it within five days, or within a fortnight at most.”

“Harry, I know that. Don’t worry,” said Mackay soothingly and started talking about something else. I felt grateful but angry because I hate feeling grateful. I also hated his easy assumption that his money was perfectly safe. Had I lent him a thousand pounds I would have worried myself sick until I got it back. If being aristocratic means preferring good manners to money then Mackay was definitely posher than me. Did he think his dad’s boozing sessions with Lord Glenbannock had ennobled the Mackays? The loan was already spoiling our friendship.

Five days later my business was triumphantly concluded and I added a cheque for over ten thousand pounds to my bank account. I was strongly tempted not to repay Mackay at once just to show him I was something more dangerous than decent, honest, dependable old Harry. I stayed honest longer by remembering that if I repaid promptly I would be able to borrow from him again on the same convenient terms. Since handing him a cheque would have been as embarrassing as taking one I decided to put the cash straight back into his bank. Despite computerization my bank would have taken two or three days to transfer the money, which would have meant Mackay getting it back the following week. I collected ten crisp new hundred-pound notes in a smooth envelope, placed envelope in inner jacket pocket and walked the half mile to Mackay’s bank. The morning air was mild but fresh, the sky one sheet of high grey cloud which threatened rain but might hold off till nightfall.

Mackay’s bank is reached by a road where I lived when I was married. I seldom go there now. On one side buildings have been demolished and replaced by a cutting holding a six-lane motorway. Tenements and shops on the other side no longer have a thriving look. I was walking carefully along the cracked and pitted pavement when I heard a woman say, “Harry! What are you doing here?”

She was thin, sprightly, short-haired and (like most attractive women nowadays) struck me as any age between sixteen and forty. I said I was going to a bank to repay money I owed and ended by asking, “How are your folk up at Ardnamurchan, Liz?”

She laughed and said, “I’m Mish you idiot! Come inside — Wee Dougie and Davenport and Roy and Roberta are there and we haven’t seen you for ages.”

I remembered none of these names but never say no to women who want me. I followed her into the Whangie, though it was not a pub I liked. The Whangie’s customers may not have been prone to violence but its drab appearance had always made me think they were, so the pleasure I felt at the sight of the dusty brown interior was wholly unexpected. It was exactly as it had been twenty or thirty years before, exactly like most Scottish pubs before the big breweries used extravagant tax reliefs to buy them up and decorate them like Old English taverns or Spanish bistros. The only wall decorations were still solidly framed mirrors frosted with the names and emblems of defunct whisky blends. This was still a dour Scottish drinking-den which kept the prices down by spending nothing on appearance, and it was nearly empty, being soon after opening-time. Crying, “Look who’s here!” Mish led me to people round a corner table, one of whom I knew. He said, “Let me get you a drink Harry,” starting to stand, but, “No no no sit down sit down,” I said and hurried to the bar. Apart from the envelope in my inner jacket pocket I had just enough cash to buy a half pint of lager. I carried this back to the people in the corner. They made room for me.

A fashion note. None of us looked smart. The others wore jeans with shapeless denim or leather jackets, I wore my old tweed jacket and crumpled corduroys. Only my age marked me off from the rest, I thought, and not much. The man I knew, a musician called Roy, was almost my age. The one oddity among us was the not-Mish woman, Roberta. Her hair was the colour of dry straw and stood straight upright on top of her skull, being clipped or shaved to thin stubble at the back and sides. The wing of her right nostril was pierced by several fine little silver rings. Her lipstick was dull purple. She affected me like someone with a facial deformity so to avoid staring hard I completely ignored her. This was easy as she never said a word the whole time I was in the Whangie. She seemed depressed about something. When others spoke to her she answered by sighing or grunting or shrugging her shoulders.

First they asked how I was getting on and I answered, “Not bad — not good.” The truth was that like many professional folk nowadays I am doing extremely well even though I sometimes have to borrow money. It would have been unkind to tell them how much better off I was because they were obviously unemployed. Why else did they drink, and drink very slowly, at half past eleven on Thursday morning? I avoided distressing topics by talking to Roy, the musician. We had met at a party where he sang and played the fiddle really well. Since then I had seen him busking in the shopping precincts and had passed quickly on the other side of the street to avoid embarrassing him, for he was too good a musician to be living that way. I asked him about the people who had held the party, not having seen them since. Neither had Roy so we discussed the party. Ten minutes later we had nothing more to say about it and I had drunk my half pint. I stood up and said, “Have to go now folks.”

They fell silent and looked at me. I felt that they expected something, and blushed, and spoke carefully to avoid stammering: “You see, I would like to buy a round before I go but I’ve no cash on me. I mean, I’ve plenty of money in my bank — and I have my cheque book here — could one of you cash a cheque for five pounds? — I promise it won’t stot.”

Nobody answered. I realized nobody there had five pounds on them or the means of turning my cheque into cash if they had.

“Cash it at the bar Harry,” said Mish.

“I would like to — but do you think the barman will do it without a cheque card?”

“No cheque card?” said Mish on a shrill note.

“None! I’ve never had a cheque card. If I had I would lose it. I’m always losing things. But the barmen in Tennent’s cash my cheques without one…”

Davenport, who had a black beard and a firm manner, waved to the barman and said, “Jimmy, this pal of ours wants to cash a cheque. He’s Harry Haines, a well-known character in the west end with a good going business —” “In fact he’s loaded,” said Mish –

“— and you would oblige us by cashing a cheque for him. He’s left his cheque card at home.”

“Sorry,” said the barman, “there’s nothing I can do about that.”

He turned his back on us.

“I’m sorry too,” I told them helplessly.

“You,” Mish told me, “are a mean old fart. You are not only mean, you are a bore. You are totally uninteresting.” At these my words my embarrassment vanished and I cheered up. I no longer minded my social superiority. I felt boosted by it. With an air of mock sadness I said, “True! So I must leave you. Goodbye folks.”

I think the three men were also amused by the turn things had taken. They said cheerio to me quite pleasantly.

I left the Whangie and went toward Mackay’s bank, carefully remembering the previous ten minutes to see if I might have done better with them. I did not regret entering the Whangie with Mish. She had pleasantly excited me and I had not then known she only saw me as a source of free drink. True, I had talked boringly — had bored myself as well as them — but interesting topics would have emphasized the social gulf between us. I might have amused them with queer stories about celebrities whose private lives are more open to me than to popular journalism (that was probably how the duke entertained Mackay’s father between drams in the tool shed) but it strikes me as an unpleasant way to cadge favour with underlings. I was pleased to think I had been no worse than a ten-minute bore. I had made a fool of myself by wanting credit for a round of drinks I did not buy, but that kind of foolery hurts nobody. If Mish and her pals despised me for it good luck to them. I did not despise myself for it, or only slightly. In the unexpected circumstances I was sure I could not have behaved better.

The idea of taking a hundred-pound note from Mackay’s money and buying a round of drinks only came to me later. So did the idea of handing the note to Mish, saying, “Share this with the others,” and leaving fast before she could reply. So did the best idea of all: I could have laid five hundred-pound notes on the table, said, “Conscience money, a hundred each,” and hurried off to put the rest in Mackay’s account. Later I could have told him, “I paid back half what I owe today. You’ll have to wait till next week for the rest — I’ve done something stupid with it.” As he heard the details his mouth would open wider and wider or his frown grow sterner and sterner. At last he would say, “That’s the last interest-free loan you get from me” — or something else. But he would have been as astonished as the five in the pub. I would have proved I was not predictable. Behaving like that would have changed me for the better. But I could not imagine doing such things then. I can only imagine them since I changed for the worse.

I walked from the Whangie toward Mackay’s bank brooding on my recent adventure. No doubt there was a smug little smile on my lips. Then I noticed someone walking beside me and a low voice saying, “Wait a minute.”

I stopped. My companion was Roberta who stood staring at me. She was breathing hard, perhaps with the effort of overtaking me, and her mouth was set in something like a sneer. I could not help looking straight at her now. Everything I saw — weird hair and sneering face, shapeless leather jacket with hands thrust into flaps below her breasts, baggy grey jeans turned up at the bottoms to show clumsy thick-soled boots laced high up the ankles — all these insulted my notion of how a woman ought to look. But her alert stillness as her breathing quietened made me feel very strange, as if I had seen her years ago, and often. To break the strangeness I said sharply, “Well?”

Awkwardly and huskily she said, “I don’t think you’re mean or uninteresting. I like older men.”

Her eyes were so wide open that I saw the whole circle of the pupils, one brown, one blue. There was a kind of buzzing in my blood and the nearby traffic sounded fainter. I felt stronger and more alive than I had felt for years — alive in a way I had never expected to feel again after my marriage went wrong. Her sneer was now less definite, perhaps because I felt it on my own lips. Yes, I was leering at her like a gangster confronting his moll in a 1940 cinema poster and she was staring back as if terrified to look anywhere else. I was fascinated by the thin stubble at the sides of her head above the ears. It must feel exactly like my chin before I shaved in the morning. I wanted to rub it hard with the palms of my hands. I heard myself say, “You want money. How?”

She murmured that I could visit my bank before we went to her place — or afterward, if I preferred. My leer became a wide grin. I patted my inner pocket and said, “No need for a bank, honey. I got everything you want right here. And we’ll take a taxi to my place, not yours.” I spoke with an American accent, and the day turned into one of the worst in my life.

MISTER GOODCHILD

NOBODY OVER FIFTY can tell where or how they’ll live a few months hence Mrs… Mrs?”

“Dewhurst.”

“Look at me, for instance. A year ago I was headmaster of a very good comprehensive school in Huddersfield. My wife made me take early retirement for the good of her health — not mine. She thought the warmer climate in the south would suit her so down to Berkshire we came. Fat lot of good that did. A fortnight after settling into the new house she died of a stroke. Since I do not intend to follow her example I will pause here for a few seconds Mrs… Mrs?”

“Dewhurst. Let me carry that,” she said, pausing at a bend in the staircase.

“No no!” he said putting a cumbersome suitcase down on a higher step without releasing the handle. “I was talking about losing my wife. Well my son has a garage with five men working under him in Bracknell. ‘Come and live with us, Dad,’ says he, ‘we’ve tons of room.’ Yes, they have. New house with half an acre of garden. Huge open-plan living-room with dining alcove. Five bedrooms no less, one for marital couple, one each for my two grandchildren, one for guests and one for poor old grandad. But poor old grandad’s bedroom is on the small side, hardly bigger than a cupboard and although I have retired from education I have not retired from public life. I am now ready to proceed — to continue proceeding — upward Mrs… Dewhurst.”

They continued proceeding upward.

“I edit the You See Monthly Bulletin, the newsletter of the Urban Conservation Fellowship and that requires both space and privacy. ‘Use the living-room!’ says my son, ‘it’s big enough. The kids are at school all day and if you work at the sun patio end Myra won’t disturb you.’ Myra did. How could I get a steady day’s work done in a house where lunch arrived any time between twelve and one? I didn’t complain but when I asked for a shelf in the fridge where I could keep my own food to make my own lunch she took it for a slight on her housekeeping. So this!” said Mr Goodchild putting the suitcase down, “is my fourth home since last September. I’m glad my things arrived.”

He stood beside Mrs Dewhurst in a high-ceilinged room that had been the master bedroom eighty years earlier when the mansion housed a family and six servants. An ostentatiously solid bed, wardrobe, dressingtable and set of chairs survived from that time. The gas heater in the hearth of a white marble fireplace was recent, also a Formica-topped table, Laura Ashley window curtains, wall-to-wall fitted carpet with jagged green and black pattern. The carpet was mostly covered by twenty-three full cardboard boxes, a heap of metal struts and shelving, a heavy old typewriter, heavier Grundig tape player, a massive black slide and picture projector called an epidiascope which looked as clumsy as its name.

“I am monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute,” said Mr Goodchild. “Forgive me for stating the obvious Mrs Dewhurst, but you are NOT the pleasant young man who showed me this room two days ago and asked for — and received! — what struck me as an unnecessarily huge advance on the rent.”

He smiled at her to show this was a question. Without smiling back she told him the young man was an employee of the letting agency and she did not know his name because that sort come and go; she, however, lived in the basement with her husband who cleaned the hall and stairs and shared bathroom. He also looked after the garden. It was her job to collect the rent, change sheets, pillowcases and towels once a fortnight and also handle complaints.

“You will hear no complaints from me or about me, Mrs Dewhurst. A quiet, sensible, sober man I am, not given to throwing wild parties but tolerant of neighbours who may be younger and less settled. Who, exactly, are my neighbours on this floor?”

“A couple of young women share the room next door. They do something secretarial in the office of the biscuit factory.”

“Boyfriends?”

“I haven’t bothered to ask, Mr Goodchild.”

“Admirable! Who’s above and who’s below?”

“The Wilsons are above and the Jhas are below: both married couples.”

“My age or yours Mrs Dewhurst? For I take you to be a youthful thirty-five or so.”

A very slight softening in Mrs Dewhurst’s manner confirmed Mr Goodchild’s guess that she was nearly his own age. She told him that the Wilsons were young doctors and would soon be leaving for a bigger place because Mrs Wilson was pregnant; that Mr Jha had a grocery in a poorer part of town, his wife was much younger than him with a baby, a very quiet little thing, Mr Goodchild would hardly notice it.

“Jha,” said Mr Goodchild thoughtfully. “Indian? Pakistani? African? West Indian?”

“I don’t know, Mr Goodchild.”

“Since I have no prejudice against any people or creed on God’s earth their origin is immaterial. And now I will erect my possessions into some kind of order. Cheerio and off you go Mrs Dewhurst.”

Off she went and Mr Goodchild’s air of mischievous good humour became one of gloomy determination.

He hung his coat and jacket in the wardrobe. He unpacked from his suitcase a clock and radio which he put on the mantelpiece, underwear he laid in dressingtable drawers, pyjamas he placed under the pillow of the bed. Carrying the still heavy suitcase into a kitchenette he took out bottles, packets, tins and placed them in a refrigerator and on shelves. This tiny windowless space had once been the master’s dressing-room and had two doors, one locked with a putty-filled keyhole. This useless door had once opened into the bedroom of the mistress, a room now rented by the secretaries. Mr Goodchild laid an ear to it, heard nothing and sighed. He had never lived alone before and sounds of occupancy would have soothed him.

In the main room he rolled up shirtsleeves, produced a Swiss army knife, opened the screwdriver attachment and by twenty minutes to six had efficiently erected four standing shelf units. Returning to the kitchenette he washed hands and put a chop under the grill. Faint voices from the next room showed it was occupied though the tone suggested a television play. He opened tins of soup, peas and baby potatoes and heated them in saucepans which he clattered slightly to let the secretaries know they too were no longer alone. Ten minutes later he ate a three-course dinner: first course, soup; second, meat with two vegetables; third, cold apple tart followed by three cups of tea. Meanwhile he listened to the six o’clock news on the BBC Home Service. Having washed, dried and put away the kitchenware he brooded long and hard over the positions of the rented furniture.

The Formica-topped table would be his main work surface so had better stand against the wall where the wardrobe now was with his shelf units on each side of it. He would shift the small bedside table to the hearthrug and dine on that. The dressingtable would go beside the bed and support the bedside lamp and his bedtime cup of cocoa. The wardrobe could then stand where the dressingtable had been. The boxes on the floor would make these shifts difficult so he piled as many as possible onto and under the bed. The hardest task was moving the wardrobe. It was eight feet high, four wide and a yard deep. Mr Goodchild, though less than average height, was proud of his ability to make heavy furniture walk across a room by pivoting it on alternate corners. The top part of the wardrobe rested on a base with a deep drawer inside. He discovered these were separate when, pivoting the base, the top section began sliding off. He dropped the base with a floor-shuddering thump. The upper part teetered with a jangling of wire coathangers but did not topple. Mr Goodchild sat down to recover from the shock. There came a tap upon the door and a voice with a not quite English accent said, “Are you all right in there?”

“Yes yes. Yes yes.”

“That was one heck of a wallop.”

“Yes I’m… shifting things about a bit Mr… Jha?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve just moved in and I’m shifting things about. I’ll be at it for another hour or two.”

“Exercise care please.”

Mr Goodchild returned to the wardrobe and wrestled with it more carefully.

Two hours and several heavy thumps later the furniture was where he wanted it and he unpacked his possessions, starting with a collection of taped music. After putting it on a shelf beside the Grundig he played Beethoven symphonies in order of composition while unpacking and arranging books and box files. Handling familiar things to familiar music made him feel so completely at home that he was surprised by rapping on his door and the hands of his clock pointing to midnight. He switched off the third movement of the Pastoral and opened the door saying quietly but emphatically, “I am very very very very —”

“Some people need sleep!” said a glaring young woman in dressing-gown and slippers.

“— very very sorry. I was so busy putting my things in order that I quite forgot the time and how sound can propagate through walls. Perhaps tomorrow — or some other day when you have a free moment — we can discover experimentally the greatest volume of sound I can produce without disturbing you, Miss… Miss?” “Shutting your kitchen door will halve the din where we’re concerned!” hissed the girl. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard from the Jhas. He’s up here complaining if we drop as much as a book on the floor.” She hurried away.

With a rueful grimace Mr Goodchild closed the door, crossed the room, closed the kitchen door and pondered a moment. He was not sleepy. The encounter with the young woman had pleasantly excited him. Sitting at his newly arranged work table he wound paper into what he thought of as “my trusty Remington” and, starting with the boarding-house address and date in the top right-hand corner, typed this.

My Very Dear Son,

You receive this communication at your work-place because I am no stranger to married life. If it arrived with other personal mail on your breakfast table Myra might feel hurt if you did not let her read it and equally hurt if you did. I must not offend either partner in a successful marital arrangement. My fortnight in Foxdene was a worthwhile but unsuccessful experiment. It has proved me too selfishly set in my ways to live without a room where I can work and eat according to my own timetable, a timetable which others cannot

He was interrupted by hesitant but insistent tapping and went to the door full of lively curiosity.

The young dressing-gowned woman outside was different from the previous one. He smiled kindly and asked, “How can I help you Miss…?”

“Thomson. Gwinny Thomson. My friend can’t sleep because of the clattering your machine makes. Neither can I.”

“To tell the truth Gwinny, when typing I get so engrossed in words that it’s years since I noticed my machine made any noise at all. Your room-mate must be flaming mad with me.”

Gwinny nodded once, hard.

“What’s her name, Gwinny?”

“Karen Milton.”

“Tell Karen that from now on my name is not George Goodchild but Mouse Goodchild. She won’t hear a squeak from the kitchen tonight for I will go to bed with a small malt whisky instead of my usual cocoa and toasted cheese. But she must first endure the uproar of a flushing toilet if that sound also pierces your walls. Does it? And YOU must remember to call me George.”

“We’re used to the flushing so it doesn’t bother us, Mr… George.”

“Then Karen may now rest in peace. Good night, sleep tight Gwinny.”

Gwinny retired. Mr Goodchild changed into slippers and pyjamas, took towel and toilet bag to bathroom, brushed teeth, washed, shat and smiled approvingly into the lavatory pan before flushing it. Sleek fat droppings showed that his inside still harmonized with the universe.

Next morning he arose, shaved, washed, dressed, breakfasted and waited until he heard the girls leave for work. Then he switched on the end of the Pastoral symphony, read the last six lines of his interrupted letter and completed it.

My fortnight in Foxdene was a worthwhile but unsuccessful experiment. It has proved me too selfishly set in my ways to live without a room where I can work and eat according to my own timetable, a timetable which others cannot be expected to tolerate.

This is my second day of boarding-house life and I am settling in nicely. My closest connections so far have been with Mrs Dewhurst our saturnine housekeeper, Mr Jha an excitable Asiatic shopkeeper, and two young secretaries in the room next door. Karen Milton is sexy and sure of herself and thinks I’m a boring old creep. No wonder! Gwinny Thomson is a sort teachers recognize at a glance: less attractive than her friend because less confident and needing someone she feels is stronger to hide behind. I’m afraid Karen bullies her sometimes. Gwinny ought to “shack up” (as the Americans say) with an experienced man who thoroughly appreciates her, then she might blossom. But I’m far too old for that little job.

So have no fear, son o’ mine. When I kick the bucket all I have will be yours, apart from £2500 for the UCF who will probably spend half of it renovating a Victorian drinking fountain on Ilkley Moor and waste the rest attaching a bronze plaque inscribed to my memory. I should put a clause in my will forbidding such wicked waste but there are uglier ways to be remembered.

The Fellowship is forwarding my mail here. A big stack arrived by first post this morning so my editorial work with the newsletter has not been interrupted. The only upsetting thing here is the pattern of the carpet. It looks fierce enough to bite off any foot standing on it. Give my love to Myra and the kids. I will visit Foxdene for a couple of days when she feels fit enough for a short dose of me. Ask her to suggest a weekend when I can babysit while you take her out for “a night on the town”. Take care of yourself, son.

Mr Goodchild lifted his fountain pen from a small glass tray of stamps and paperclips, pulled the letter from the drum and wrote Love from Dad neatly at the foot of it. A week later he typed this.

Dear, Dear Harry,

I have solved the problem of the carpet by turning it upside down. Through the weave of the brown backing the jagged pattern looks faded, antique and restful. When Mrs Dewhurst called for the rent yesterday she stared at the carpet, then at me. I smiled sweetly back. She must think I’m daft.

I would have liked a reply to my last letter because I’ve been feeling a bit lonely and dreaming a lot about your mother. She comes to me quite unlike her usual self and accuses me of all sorts of improbable crimes — dismantling the British rail system was the worst. A family man suddenly deprived of family must feel low until new friendships fill the gap and last night I had a surprising social triumph.

Gwinny Thomson, probably acting under orders from Karen, had come to me the night before and said she and her friend were going to have a party — not a rowdy do, but there might be music and chat till after midnight if I had no objection. I said I had no objection to anything which happened at their party as long as I was invited. She was horrified but tried to hide it by saying “of course” I was invited. But I let the girls down gently by joining the party late after it had plenty of time to warm up. But it hadn’t warmed up. The guests were all office workers in their twenties and early thirties, female colleagues of the girls and male colleagues of their boyfriends. They stood huddled in groups of three or four, talking in low voices and obviously waiting for the earliest possible moment to leave without seeming rude, while Karen served them drinks and tried without success to get them chatting and mingling. The source of embarrassment was Gwinny and her boyfriend, Tom. Gwinny was on the verge of tears. Tom kept turning his back and talking to other women whenever she came near.

Enter Mr Goodchild looking exactly like his name — small, stout, cheery and too innocent to notice anything wrong. This act of mine is not a phony one. Humanity would have become extinct centuries ago if what holds folk together were not stronger than what pulls us apart. My act worked. Folk clustered round me. The UCF also came in handy. Karen’s boyfriend is an architect and thanks to the Fellowship urban conservation is a source of more profitable commissions than it was ten years ago. Karen’s bloke asked such detailed questions about our projects that I took him back to my room to show him photographs. Karen was not pleased about that and came too, so I sweetened her by offering both of them a tot of The Macallan. Then everyone but Gwinny and Tom came here too so I set up the epidiascope and gave my introductory lecture on the renovation of Britain’s industrial heritage. You’ve never attended my lectures, Harry, so don’t know that this one, though devised for schoolchildren, draws bigger laughs from adults. I got a round of applause which brought the Dewhursts up from their basement. Them too I sweetened with nips of The Macallan. Lastly Tom and Gwinny entered hand in hand, him grinning as smugly as an office boy who had just seduced a company director’s daughter, her as bashful as a bride on her honeymoon. They had obviously been reconciled by a bout of what the Scotch call “hockmagandy” and the nasty lad liked flaunting the fact more than poor Gwinny did. I sent everyone away by saying it was my bedtime.

I understand your silence, Harry. Perhaps my stay at Foxdene would have ended more kindly — or not ended at all — if I had discussed my domestic problem with you instead of Myra. We might have found a solution she would have accepted — like me buying a modern Portakabin with all mod cons, one you could have set up behind the big hedge hiding the kitchen garden from the lawn. Myra need never have seen me during the day and I could have shared the regular evening meals and Sunday lunch, and helped the kids with their homework. You and I could have enjoyed an occasional game of chess like in the old days and my music would have irritated nobody. But you and I never discuss things. It’s my fault. When you were little I always told you everything I knew in such detail that you recoiled into reticence like your mother and, unlike your mother, never told me to shut up. No wonder you won’t answer letters. But I will burble on to you since I have nobody else.

I enclose bulldozer, roadroller and pickup truck for Nigel’s Dinky Toy collection, and a set of Flower Fairy books for Tracy.

Love from

Dad.

Exactly a week later Mr Goodchild started typing his last letter in that boarding house.

Dear Harry,

When I came here a fortnight back I told the housekeeper that nobody over fifty can foretell how they’ll be living a few months hence. I was wrong. A few days, a few hours hence would be more accurate. I’ll explain this. On the evening of the day after the party I accidentally passed Karen, then Gwinny on our landing. The quick angry manner of one and the glum look of the other suggested a quarrel, though their replies to my greeting showed it was not with me. Later I heard a slamming of doors then silence. Thinking both had gone out I started playing Mendelssohn’s “Italian” symphony louder than I’ve dared play anything since my first night here. The rhythm was helping me rattle through my report for our annual general meeting when someone tapped the door. Was this Mr Jha? Had my long-lost son motored over from Bracknell? It was Gwinny. I said, “Sorry, I thought you were out, I’ll turn down the noise.”

“I like that music — it’s cheerful,” said she.

“Come in and listen,” said I, “if you can stand the noise of my typewriter too.”

She sat by the fire while I finished the report, then I put on Vivaldi’s “Seasons” and made us a little snack. We consumed it seated on opposite sides of the table like a married couple. Suddenly she said, “Karen’s not the bad one. It’s me who’s bad. I’m jealous of her lovely boyfriend so I make scenes when she borrows my hairbrush or leaves a crumby plate on the mantelpiece.”

I hate heartfelt confessions. I told her I enjoyed the company of quiet folk and sometimes liked the company of talkative ones but complainers bored me, especially if they complained about themselves. She pulled a sour face at that then suddenly cheered up and told me horrible stories about her boyfriend Tom, playing them for laughs. She’s a good little comedian so I laughed quite a lot though I said not one word for or against him. I told her I wanted to do some reading now and if she decided to stay she could play any of my tapes she liked. That’s how the rest of the evening went. At half past ten I noticed her listening for the return of Karen so got rid of her by saying it was my bedtime and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem — I said she’d been as good as a pussy cat. I tell you all this, Harry, to show that I did not invite what follows.

Last night noises from next door suggested that once again the residents were not in perfect harmony. At my usual hour I went to bed with a mug of sweet hot chocolate and J B Priestley’s history of the old northern music halls. Around midnight the door softly opens and Gwinny creeps in, dressed for outdoors and with a finger to her lips. In a low voice she explains that horrible Tom had invited her to spend the night at his place, but when she got there he was so horrible that they’d quarrelled and split up, probably for good. Returning to her own room she found Karen in bed with her bloke who was obviously expecting to spend the night there. Gwinny, in no mood to explain her change of plan, pretended she’d come back for a toothbrush or something, grabbed it, went downstairs then realized she hadn’t money for a hotel and a respectable bed-and-breakfast place would not want a girl without luggage. So here she was!

Without a word I got up, put two armchairs together and made them up as a bed using cushions, a quilt, a bedcover I do not need, and two overcoats. I told her that I would not be gentlemanly and give her my bed, because if I lay on the chairs my old bones would stop me from sleeping and force me to crawl in beside her. I offered to make her a cup of cocoa. She refused. I returned to bed and lay with my back to her while she undressed and lay down, then I put the light out.

But I was quite unable to sleep and restless movements from her part of the room showed neither could she. Sounds from the room next door were to blame. After an hour or two she heaved a great sigh and began talking about her family and Karen and Tom. I think most of it was complaints but her low monotonous voice worked like a lullaby. I kept muttering “I see” and “that’s a pity” between moments of dozing off. At last she said something complicated which I asked her to repeat: “I’m afraid I’m developing a father-fixation on you.” I said she shouldn’t use Freud’s vocabulary when she’d never read him. She said, “You’re right. Why must you always be right? You’re giving me an inferiority complex.”

I told her that now she was quoting Adler and that before Adler described the inferiority complex folk just said they felt shy. For a while we lay listening to the faint sounds of Karen gasping and her architect grunting in unison. I had forgotten to shut the kitchen door. I was about to ask Gwinny to shut it because she was nearer when she asked in a tiny voice if I’d like her to join me in bed. I said I would. Nothing much came of it but enough for us to fall comfortably asleep together afterwards. We slept sound till nearly ten in the morning.

Over the breakfast table (usual English breakfast) she apologized for being bad at lovemaking. I asked why she thought she was. She said Tom had said so. I asked how often they had made love. After a lot of hesitation she said once, on the night of the party. I chuckled at that and said all she needed was some more lovemaking with someone she did not think horrible. She stared at me then said, “Are you asking me to.?” and went on staring without another word. I said cheerily, “Nay! At my age I can ask nothing from lovely young women but I can’t stop hoping. I’m a great hoper.”

I felt young, Harry. Twenty years younger at least. I still do. Is that stupid of me?

Suddenly she laughed and jumped up saying, “I don’t care if those two next door ARE still in bed, it’s my room as much as Karen’s and I’m going in, see you later George.”

She grabbed her things and rushed out. That was forty minutes ago. Now just suppose, Harry,

Mr Goodchild stopped typing and thought hard, then went to the kitchen and made a cup of camomile tea. From the next room came sounds of two women and a man exchanging casual, friendly words. Once Gwinny said something and the others laughed. Mr Goodchild sat before his typewriter again and stared at the unfinished letter until someone forcefully knocked on his door. Mrs Dewhurst stood outside. She said, “A visitor for you,” and went away. Her place was taken by a big man wearing a business suit.

“So the mountain has come to Mahomet! Come in,” said Mr Goodchild pleasantly. “Would you like a cup of tea? Have a seat.”

The big man entered but did not sit. His mouth and eyes resembled Mr Goodchild’s but their expression was careworn. Glancing round the room he asked, “How are you, Dad?”

“Never better. How’s the garage?”

“Listen, Dad, I’ve talked to Myra about your Portakabin notion. She agrees to it.”

“That’s interesting but there’s no need for haste, Harry. Let her think it over for a month or two. How’s Nigel and Tracy?”

“They keep asking for you. Come back to us. Do it today.”

“Don’t be daft, Harry! It’ll take months for you to get planning department permission for a cabin in your vegetable patch, no matter how many palms you grease. I asked how the garage is doing.”

“It needs me there as much as it always does!” said his son impatiently. “A small businessman can’t afford days off and I’m not going to stand here gassing. Myra says you shall have your shelf in the fridge and make your own lunches till the Portakabin comes.”

“Anything else?” said Mr Goodchild, staring hard at him. “You can also use our guest room as a work room.”

“Where will your guests sleep, Harry?”

“On the bed settee in the living-room,” said Harry, sighing. “At last, my son, you are talking sense. Shake!” said Mr Goodchild holding out his hand. His son shook it a little wearily but with obvious relief, then left after another minute of conversation.

Mr Goodchild walked to his typewriter and stared at the single sheet of paper typed closely on both sides. After a moment he pulled it out, tore it carefully into small bits and dropped them in a waste basket. He then entered the kitchen, put four glasses on a tray, poured a small measure of The Macallan into each and placed the tray on his work table. Then he left the room, opened the door of the room next door and stuck his head round it without knocking. Karen, Karen’s architect and Gwinny sat with mugs in their hands, staring at him.

“Boo!” he said. “You must all come into my place — now — this instant. I have something to celebrate and can’t do it alone. Leave those mugs! Drink will be provided.”

He returned to his room. They filed in after him, Gwinny looking as curious and willing to be pleased as the others but slightly apprehensive. He gave her a reassuring nod as he handed round the whisky glasses. Glass in hand he then faced the three of them, proposed a toast to family affection, clinked his glass with theirs and took off the contents of his own in one swallow. As they sipped theirs he told them of Harry’s visit and what he had said.

“… which brings my stay here to a satisfying conclusion. Of course I knew before I came he would want me back. I just didn’t know when. Now YOU! — ” (he told Karen’s architect) “— have a car. Right?”

The architect nodded.

“Half an hour from now you must drive us to the best restaurant you know where I will order and pay for a slap-up celebration champagne lunch. Of course the driver won’t be allowed more than a couple of glasses. But this is not an unselfish proposal. Afterwards you must help me pack my thin, because a van will arrive this evening to take me and them back to Bracknell.” Gwinny said, “I’m not coming. I’m expecting a phone call from Tom.”

She put down her glass and left the room so abruptly that she left a silence.

Mr Goodchild looked enquiringly at his two remaining guests. After a moment Karen said apologetically, “She used to be quite a sensible girl — I would never have shared a room with her if she’d always been so moody. I thought it was Tom who upset her but an hour ago she came home from a night with him so cheerful and relaxed I thought he’d done her some good for a change. She was chatting quite happily before we came in here. I’ll never understand her now. Maybe it’s my fault.”

The kitchen door was open and from the room next door they heard faint sounds of sobbing. Mr Goodchild drowned them by talking in a more Yorkshire accent than he normally used.

“Nay lass, you aren’t the world’s conscience! You can help some people sometimes but nobody all the time — that’s my philosophy. Let’s go for that lunch I promised you.”

THE GRUMBLER

THERE IS A SOUR TASTE in my mouth no matter how hard I brush my teeth, and though I change my underwear every morning and take a bath every night I am haunted by a faint, stale odour. Maybe the sourness and staleness is the taste and smell of myself. Is something rotting inside me? I have very little energy nowadays and often sweat for no apparent reason. My urine is the colour of very strong tea — I’m sure it used to be the colour of very weak tea — and I keep running to the lavatory and shitting almost nothing but wind and water. Last week, while shopping, the top half of my body suddenly felt too heavy for the bottom half and I got this pain round my middle, especially in the small of the back, a pain which made it hard to sleep at night. I saw two doctors: my General Practitioner who thumped me all over, said the pain was purely muscular and gave me a bottle of pills to reduce inflammation; and a chiropractor who said I had a slightly displaced vertebra then wrenched my thigh and shoulder before working on the inflammation with heat rays, massage and acupuncture. The backache remained. I went to bed and lay reading dull books I had read before and not enjoyed much, even then. I lacked the strength to read anything enjoyable.

It occurred to me that I was dying. I had a friend who once started dying. I saw him limping and asked why. He said there had been a pain in his knee the day before but it was much better now. For four years his leg was a bit worse every time we met but always much better than the day before, so he refused to see a doctor until he was unable to stand. Then, of course, he was taken to hospital where they diagnosed a heart condition and arthritis and psoriasis, and gave him treatment, and let him out a bit better than he went in, but not much. He hirpled around for another year getting worse and worse again, but always feeling better than the day before, till at last he was dead.

Well, as soon as I thought I was dying I felt a lot happier. I greeted visitors with a smile of patient tolerance. My voice became soft, slow and monotonous. When asked how I felt I replied that I was experiencing no pain, really — just a slight, continuous discomfort. Which was true. I felt magnanimous toward the world. “In a short year or two,” I told it, silently, of course, “you and I will cease to trouble each other.” However, I gave medical science one last chance. I went to the two doctors and told them there was no improvement. My G.P., with a touch of impatience, said again that my condition was muscular and I should keep taking the pills. The chiropractor frowned in a puzzled way and gave me more acupuncture. I still felt magnanimous. “There are some conditions medical science will never understand,” I thought, “before it is too late,” and I was about to put off all arrangements and appointments for the foreseeable future when the backache vanished! It suddenly did not exist. This hurled me into my former depression. I went out and got drunk and woke in bed next morning with no clear memory of where I had been the night before and with a huge bruise on my right shoulder which still hurts when I move my arm.

Why must I complain all the time? I have nothing nowadays to worry about except the state of the world as a whole. Especially the part where I live. It is a comparatively prosperous district but even here there is an increase of cracked pavements, rusty lamp-posts and litter in the streets, and women and children with aggressively ugly clothes and hair, and many more haggard, ill-dressed and mad-looking people. Britain grows fouler and fouler as it retreats from the full employment and social welfare it enjoyed when I was a student in the fifties. But I must admit that in the fifties, sixties and even seventies I spent a lot of time feeling like a lonely outcast. I had many friends, and saw them often, but they too felt like lonely outcasts. We grumbled a lot. We decided that our city was completely cultureless because it refused to blend imagination with political commitment. We hired halls and organized meetings to agitate and change things, but we were too poor and useless to do much good. When I say “poor and useless” I do not mean that I, personally, was ever penniless or unemployed, but I felt poor and useless because I had hardly any sex life and was getting older all the time.

When my marriage stopped a certain pub became the centre of my social life. Twice or thrice a week I drank with people I met nowhere else, university people, and Linda who was a dental receptionist, and her boyfriend who worked in a travel agency. One evening, when slightly drunk, Linda asked me, in a perfectly friendly way, why I hung about with people so much younger than me? Honestly, till that moment I had not noticed they were younger than me, but they were, by at least ten years. I sat with them because I enjoyed their company and supposed they liked mine, but when I thought about it I realized that their conversation bored me. What I enjoyed was exactly their youth, especially the youth of the women, though I had no hope of going to bed with one. I had become a harmless middle-aged lecher.

Several years after I had stopped visiting that pub I passed some other young people in the street, and an attractive girl left them and said, “Excuse me sir, may I kiss you on the mouth?”

“Of course!” I said, and embraced her, but she got embarrassed and broke away and ran back to her friends, who were laughing heartily. They must have dared her to say that because I appeared to be a very respectable, easily shocked old chap. It was a great relief when something similar happened which looked like ending differently. Around closing time one night a girl ran out of a pub door, slipped her arm through mine and said, “You look sexy. Will you take me for an Indian meal?”

I am sure she was not a prostitute. She looked dull, ordinary and overweight, but so do I, so I did not mind. I said, “Of course I’ll buy you a meal,” and led her to a place I know. I swear to God I did not expect us to make love that night. She was not a prostitute and I was not a fool. The most I hoped for was a flirtatious conversation with some double entendre and innuendo etcetera, and later we would separate with perhaps a slight squeeze and a kiss. I would also give her my telephone number, which might lead to something later if she learned to trust me. When we came to the eating place she halted and said, “This isn’t an Indian restaurant.”

It was not. It was dearer than an Indian restaurant, but I was friendly with the management, who allowed me credit, and as I had very little money on me there was nowhere else where I could get her a meal that night. I persuaded her to enter and we sat in a glass-roofed courtyard beside a waterlily pond and were served by some very friendly waitresses. She hated it. She ate fast with her face low over the plate. I kept filling her wineglass and she kept emptying it but she spoke not one other word till we were out on the street again, when she asked me to lend her money for the bus fare home. I gave it to her and she hurried off. That was typical of my sex-life in those days.

Why remember such miserable things? I lived for my work in those days and I was good at it, though a lot of folk said my methods were unsound. I suppose that is why the marriage stopped — I earned very little at first. My wife thought me a poor provider, so when she took a job of her own she didn’t want to share anything at all with me, not even the children. But I knew I was right. I plodded straight on as if nothing had happened, and eventually some big men started referring to me in the trade journals. At the age of forty-five my bank manager allowed me to open a new account with a really gigantic loan. I left that bank feeling like a child of eight released from school by the summer holidays. Safety, power and freedom! At last all were mine again. Something tight and hard in me uncoiled, or maybe lay down and died. I was finished with love, sex, women. They had never wanted me, I no longer wanted them.

Shortly after, within the space of a week, I had an enjoyable time in bed with four different women, two of whom I had known for years and who had never shown the slightest interest in me. I don’t know why this suddenly happened. I had not become a local celebrity. My reputation in the trade meant nothing to these women, and as for money, nobody ever got money out of me. Recently I read an article about Hollywood which said that if a woman there takes a lover, “all her best friends go through him like an express train”. But these women were not acquaintances, so I was definitely not being passed around. There was a royal wedding that week, perhaps it inflamed some irrational passions, I can think of no other explanation. However, I found that I disliked casual sex. I started visiting regularly the only two who regularly want me. They are quite unlike each other, apart from being highly independent and not at all aggressive or malicious. They do not know each other but they know of each other, so I am not deceiving them. I am astonished by myself. I had thought this sort of luck was enjoyed only by aristocrats in improbable romances. I now have all I ever wanted or ever dreamed of wanting: professional respect, prosperity, independence and as much love as I need.

At first it was very nice but I’ve got used to it and it’s driving me mad. It feels like a happy ending. There seems nowhere to go but downhill. I’ve started drinking too much. Friends ask me what’s wrong, but when I tell them I have everything I want they are unable to sympathize. My education is to blame. Two important things I learned at school were worry and boredom. My teachers, who were themselves usually worried and bored, seemed to think we would only become decent human beings if we were like that. Perhaps they taught me too well. I now turn everything I enjoy into worry and boredom in order to feel like a decent human being. This must stop. I refuse to be the creature of my education, a creature of habit. I will change myself tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. Tomorrow.

FICTIONAL EXITS

BECAUSE OF A MISTAKE (though I do not know whose) someone was shut in a windowless room with nothing to look at but a door which could only be opened from outside, a lavatory pan and a wall poster showing the face of the nation’s ruler. After imagining a great many dealings with this official the prisoner tried to find pleasure in a landscape behind the face. This first soothed by its suggestion of spaciousness, then annoyed by its completely tame nature. On one side wellcultivated farms receded to a distant line of blue hills, on the other was a seat of government, a cathedral, university, and very clean factory and workers’ residential block. There were no clumps of forest or winding rivers to explore; the bland distant hills clearly contained no ravines, torrents, cliffs, caverns or mountain passes, they were a mere frontier, shutting off the horizon. Though designed to advertise a sunnier world than the electrically lit cell, the poster showed the inside of a larger jail.

On the brink of melancholy madness the prisoner found a pencil on the floor behind the lavatory pan. When this had been carefully nibbled to a sharp point it might have been used to draw anything on the whitewashed walls: faces of friends, bodies of lovers, the scenery of great adventures. Not able to draw these convincingly the prisoner carefully drew a full-size copy of the room’s unopenable door, with one difference. The drawn door had a key in the lock, and it could be turned. Then the prisoner turned the lock, opened the door and walked out. Though describing how fantasy works this is a realistic story. Free will being the essence of mind, everyone who feels trapped must imagine escapes, and some of them work. New arts and sciences, new religions and nations are created this way. But the story of the door can be told with a less happy ending.

A blind man living alone in a municipal housing scheme heard people breaking through his front door, so phoned the local police station. While he was asking for help the housebreakers got to him and knocked him down. They were policemen who had mistaken his door for the door of someone they suspected of selling dangerous drugs without a licence. The mistake was discovered when one of the housebreakers lifted the telephone receiver and found he was talking to a colleague. He told the colleague in the police station not to worry, because the blind householder would be stitched up. So the blind man was summoned to a court of law and charged with assaulting the police while they were trying to do their duty.

In Britain all emergency phonecalls to police stations are recorded twice: once by the police stations for the use of the police: once by the British telecommunication company for the use of the caller. The blind man’s defence lawyer played the Telecom recording to prove that his client was innocent, pointing out that stitched up was slang for arrested on false evidence. The police witness agreed that stitched up meant that in criminal slang, but explained that in police slang it meant properly arrested with no hint of falsehood or perjury in the procedure. The sheriff on the bench (magistrates are called sheriffs in Scotland) believed the police witness, since our nation will sink into anarchy if magistrates distrust the police. So the blind man was fined, but not imprisoned, as would almost certainly have happened in an old-fashioned fascist or communist nation.

Like the sheriff on the bench my sympathy is mainly with the police. Opening a door with the big key (which is police slang for sledgehammer) is a desperate deed, even if you think someone behind the door is wicked, and that if you grab them fast enough you may find proof of this. Nearly all our experience and education, besides the natural law of do-as-you-would-be-done-by, teaches us to handle doors gently. They are usually quiet, unthreatening, protective creatures. Some of our dearest joys and most regular functions have been made easier by them, so smashing one MUST feel like punching a face, or bombing pedestrians from an aeroplane in broad daylight. We may earn a wage by doing it, we may believe we are defending decency and justice by it, but we cannot help feeling abnormally excited, so mistakes are inevitable. I also sympathize slightly with the blind man, for I am not one of those who think everyone in a municipal housing scheme deserves what is done to them. The man’s blindness may not have been his own fault, and may have stopped him seeing he ought to live in a better part of the city. But he should certainly have used his imagination, which would have let him see in the dark.

The big key unlocked the blind man’s door in 1990 when Glasgow was the official Culture Capital of Europe. The story was not reported by the press. I give it here because the police, like the prisoner in my first story, found themselves in a terrible situation but imagined a way out. They created a fictional exit which worked.

INCHES IN A COLUMN

I READ THIS STORY many years ago in a newspaper. It had no big headline and filled very few inches but I cannot forget it.

A London lawcourt sentenced a man to several years’ imprisonment because, not for the first time, he had been found guilty of getting money by false pretences. Handcuffed to a policeman he was driven to the yard of a London gaol; there the cuff round the policeman’s wrist was unlocked before being attached to a warder’s. At that moment our man broke free and ran through the yard gateway which was still open. In the road outside a taxi stood at traffic lights which were about to change. Our man leapt in giving the name of an expensive hotel. The cab accelerated. He was free.

Though the paper did not say so I suspect this sequence took less than a minute and he entered the taxi with pursuers close behind. If they saw the taxi drive off the story is certainly from days before taxis had radios. Not till later that afternoon had the driver reason to think anything was wrong.

Our man’s position was this: he was penniless with the police in pursuit of him and a right hand he must keep in his pocket to hide the handcuffs locked to its wrist. He was being driven without luggage to the Ritz or Dorchester or Royal Hilton by someone who would expect payment. If he jumped out at lights before reaching the hotel the driver also would start chasing him. His only advantage was a voice and manner which persuaded folk he was rich.

On the way to the hotel he asked if the driver had other business that day. The driver said no. Our man said, good, in that case he would hire the cab for the afternoon, but first they must have lunch. They entered the hotel where our man told the cabby (who probably wore the peaked cap worn by most London cabbies and chauffeurs in those days) to sit down in the foyer lounge. He then went to the reception counter, gave a false but impressive name, booked a room for the week and explained that his luggage would arrive from abroad later that afternoon. He was very particular in ordering a room facing the quiet side of the hotel and in arranging that a hot-water bottle be put in his bed at 11.30 exactly, since he would soon be going out and might return late. Meanwhile he ordered for himself and his driver a snack lunch of sandwiches and champagne to be served in the foyer lounge, also a racing newspaper. The waiter who served the champagne would also naturally pour the first glass so our man was able to eat and drink with his left hand only. He asked the cabby to look through the paper and tell him what races were on that afternoon. The fact that he asked others to do everything for him must have made him a more convincing member of the British officer class. He decided to be driven to Epsom or Ascot or Goodwood — I cannot remember the racecourse, perhaps the report I read failed to mention it. On the journey there he borrowed money from the driver, saying he would cash a cheque later, and in the crowd at the races he managed to lose the driver in a way that seemed accidental.

But the police knew his methods of work and had phoned hotels until they found the one where he had booked a room. His order of a racing paper gave a clue to his destination. When two plain-clothes policemen suddenly grabbed him in the crowd he played his last trick. Pulling his right hand from his pocket he waved the cuff locked to his wrist in the air by its chain and in commanding tones shouted to everyone around, “I am a police officer! Help! Help me arrest these criminals!” The trick did not work. Our man was again brought to court where a judge added more time to his first jail sentence. The taxi driver, appearing as witness, said his day with the swindler had been one of the pleasantest in his life.

Were I writing this story as fiction I might imagine the driver saying that but would leave it out. Such details are too sentimental for convincing fiction.

The whole incident tells a lot about the British class system but hints at something greater. Sooner or later most of us find life a desperate effort to postpone meeting the foe who will one day catch and shut us up forever. I prefer the reckless and witty hero of this short story to more famous confidence men who are sometimes praised, sometimes blamed but always celebrated in longer newspaper articles, and official biographies, and history books. I hope he thoroughly enjoyed his last taste of champagne.

I OWE NOTHING, I OWN NOTHING

THE MOUNTAIN HAD TWO SUMMITS. One of them had been excavated to uncover ridges of rock around the main contours, ridges with flat upper surfaces and sheer cliff-like sides. I noticed that some ridges were not natural rock but reinforced with concrete.

The site manager and head ganger stood beside the workmen’s huts staring hard at the second summit, a dome-shaped mass with granite outcrops. The site manager wanted to know if it could be concreted over by the following night? The head ganger was uncertain. The site manager said, “Let’s take a closer look.”

He turned and called to me, “Like to come?”

I followed them to a small vehicle used for inspection purposes. The driver was already seated, for there was one place available for me at the back. When I stepped in and sat down the tops of my thighs were as high as the vehicle’s side.

From a state of rest we started straight up the mountain so fast that I was terrified of being jerked out backward by my inertia. I desperately wanted something to cling to but the only sure grip was on the edge of the vehicle’s underside a few inches above boulder-strewn soil against which it continually banged and scraped without once reducing speed. I passed the journey in a state of fear while also feeling the amazement and exhilaration of flying over ground where folk normally only plod or crawl. We swooped up a curving path between the two summits. I expected us to turn a corner and crash into a rocky rampart, but when we reached one it was red earth and pierced by an arch. We ran through this into a huge quarry or amphitheatre enclosed by walls of scree curving up all round on to cliffs of vertical rock. The vehicle, powered by a strong four-wheel drive, ran part way up a slope of rubble, reversed faster down it, then sped up it even faster, the driver clearly building up momentum to take him on to the vertical. I shouted, “This can’t be done!” but the vehicle rushed up an angle of the quarry wall and at the moment of reaching vertical twisted sideways on to the lowest point of a sloping cornice and we ran safe on to a rounded part of the second summit. The manager indicated it with a Napoleonic wave of the arm. “Tomorrow night?” he asked the ganger.

“We can try, anyway,” said the ganger.

The site manager pointed at me, said, “This can’t be done!” and chuckled. I saw he had asked me along so that my terror of the ride would emphasize his understanding and control, and make it easier for him to persuade the head ganger to attempt the impossible.

Later I was in a big crowded shed among the workmen’s huts. Men were queuing in long lines before little booths fixed to the walls, booths containing oxygen masks. They were preparing to work in the thin air of the second summit by breathing deeply from these. Signs above the booths said that more than six minutes’ oxygenation was bad for the health. I suspected that the whole business was bad for the health, a mere management trick to make the men believe their needs were being attended to. Having no intention of working on the second summit I went next door into a bleaker, emptier shed which was the restaurant. The only food was sandwiches in white polystyrene trays covered with transparent plastic. I knew the white bread of the sandwiches was as flavourless and un-nourishing as the polystyrene, but being hungry I chose an egg sandwich and a ham sandwich, and my mouth watered, anticipating with some glee the taste of the fillings. Since we had no better food we got great satisfaction from whatever flavour it contained.

As I lifted my sandwiches I was greeted by an old workman wearing spectacles and a dirty raincoat. He also was not going to work on the second summit. He said, “I’m getting a bit old for these impossible jobs. Mind you, I’ve nothing to complain about.”

He pointed to a plastic table-top on which someone had scratched the words: I own nothing, I owe nothing. He said, “That’s me too, yes. I can only manage the odd day’s work now and then but I like to hang around the site and listen to the lads when they come back in the evenings. You hear a lot of different views of life if you keep your ears open. I hope I’m not boring you?”

THE DOMINO GAME

TWO BIG MEN CALLED A AND B are discussing how to cut up a territory which is in contest between them. Their organization, their cunning, their success are about equal. The contest, if continued, will so weaken them that both will fall prey to X, a much bigger man who has hitherto held aloof. This is partly because he is doing very well in a distant territory where he has destroyed or absorbed every other competitor, and partly because he knows A and B will unite against him if he tries to destroy or absorb either. Their problem is that the disputed territory cannot usefully be cut in two. For geographical, religious and linguistic reasons, splitting it will more than wipe out the profit to be got by taking it over. Yet they cannot leave it alone. The disputed ground is occupied by small independent people who mostly want to stay small and independent, but some of the richer among them also want, with foreign help, to grow bigger at the expense of their neighbours. If A or B do not offer this help X will regard it as a sign of weakness and move into the territory himself. Of course, if A and B combined forces they could easily run the whole territory for the profit of both, but when B suggests this A says, “Combine under who?”

And the subject is dropped

The discussion is a long one. They exhaust themselves trying to find a solution to the problem. At last A sighs and says, ‘”Why can’t we decide it by playing a game of dominoes? Winner take all.” B laughs and says, “Why not? The winner will be a hell of a lot richer, the loser won’t be one penny the poorer.”

They relax by discussing the idea.

Neither has played dominoes since childhood and they suspect it is mainly a game of chance. A suggests that if there is any skill in it they had better play snakes-and-ladders, to equalize their chances. B disagrees. Snakes-and-ladders in played with dice, and dice, like card games, are associated with nervous tension, cheating, social ruin, knife fights and suicide. Dominoes is a game with friendly, jocular associations which harmonize better with the whole idea. They should play it in the dining-car of a train running through splendid scenery. They will invite X along as a guest and witness. It is essential that he sees they are good friends who trust each other before the game, and also during it, but especially after it. Yes, after it especially, X must see that although the game ends in a great acquisition by the winner, the loser is not sullen, humiliated, and keen for an ally who will assist him in a counter-attack. X must also see that the winner will not be made so greedy by his gains that he will do a deal with X to cut up the loser between them. And of course, the loser must see this too.

“What a surprise for old X if we settled it that way!” says B, chuckling. “He might even learn something from us.”

“Yes!” says A, “if we did it that way we would be starting a new era in civilization. However —” and he shrugs. “— while I trust you, B, I certainly can’t trust C, D and E.” These are members of A’s organization. One of them, though nobody can yet say which, will replace him when he falls sick or retires.

“I know exactly what you mean,” says B, who also has ambitious men under him, “We’ll just have to combine forces.”

“Combine under who?” asks A. “Will you agree to settle that by a domino game?”

And they both laugh heartily. Each knows now the other will not serve under him. They also know that an organization cannot work with two heads.

So their contest continues to spread frustration and anxiety among their employees, poverty and fear among small independent people. It will continue until one of them is so weak that he accepts X as his ally, thereby winning a victory which will leave him, too, in the power of X. This future, which they see very clearly, pleases neither of them, but they have four consolations.

1 They are not young, the years seem to flash past them faster and faster, they will soon have to leave what they sense is an increasingly dangerous world.

2 Though not young, their conspicuous place in a well-reported contest makes them feel young.

3 They have private fortunes which the contest increases.

4 A contest which profits them is only natural.

EDISON’S TRACTATUS

PERHAPS YOU KNOW that musclemen — hard men who want to be extra strong — have a habit of eating big feeds of steak and chips, and the minute the last mouthful is swallowed they heave big weights, or run great distances, or work machines that let them do both at the same time. This converts all the food in their guts into muscle without an ounce of additional fat. When a dedicated muscleman overeats, sheer strength is the only outcome.

There was once a man who trained that way to strengthen his brain. Not only after but during big feeds he would read very deep books — trigonometry, accountancy, divinity, that class of subject — and think about them fiercely and continually till he felt hungry again. He grew so brainy that before you said a word to him he guessed the sort of thing you meant to say and quoted Jesus or Euclid or Shakespeare who had said it better. This destroyed his social life but at first he didn’t care.

One day he was sitting in a restaurant reading Edison’s Tractatus and beasting into his third plate of steak and chips when he noticed a young woman across the table from him eating the same stuff. She had cut it into small bits and was forking them steadily into her mouth with one hand while writing just as steadily with the other. She wrote in red ink on a block of the squared paper scientists use for charts and diagrams, but she was writing words as clear as print, words so neat and regular that he could not stop staring at them although they were illegible from where he sat being upside down. He noticed that the woman, though not a small woman, was neat and regular in a way that suggested a school mistress. He could not imagine what she would say if she spoke to him and the strangeness of this put him in a confusion through which at last he heard his voice ask if she would please pass the salt cellar, which was as close to him as to her.

The woman glanced at the salt cellar — at him — smiled — put her fork down and said, “What will I most dislike about you if I let that request lead to intimate friendship?”

He hesitated then said frankly, “My breadth of knowledge. I talk better about more things than anyone else. Nobody likes me for it.”

She nodded and said, “What do you know about the interface between pre-Columbian Aztec pottery, Chinese obstetrics during the Ming dynasty and the redrawing of constituency boundaries in the Lothian Region subsequent to the last general election?”

He said, “They are perfect examples of inter-disciplinary cross-sterilization. When William Blake said that The dog starved at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state he was stating a political fact. The writer who traced a North American hurricane back to a butterfly stamping on a leaf in a tropical rain forest was reasoning mathematically. The absurd interface you posit is (like most post-modernist and post-constructionalist concepts) a sort of mental afterbirth. Are you writing about it?”

“No but you can reach for the salt cellar yourself,” she said and went on writing. The man felt a pang of unintelligent grief. He tried to quench it with manly anger.

“Tell me just one thing!” he said sternly. “If we had conversed intimately what would I have most disliked about you?”

“My depth of sympathy,” she answered with a patient sigh. “No matter how loud-mouthed, boastful and dismissive you grew I would realize you could never be different.”

“O thank God you never passed me that salt cellar!” he cried.

And continued reading Edison’s Tractatus but could no longer concentrate.

EPILOGUE TO EDISON’S TRACTATUS

In 1960 I went on holiday to Ireland with Andrew Sykes, a tough small stocky man with a thick thatch of white hair and a face like a boxer’s. Like myself he dressed comfortably rather than smartly. We had met when he was a mature student at Glasgow University and I a very callow one just out of Glasgow Art School. We were from the working class who had benefited when two post-war governments (Labour and Tory) agreed that all who qualified for professional educations might have them whether or not they or their parents could pay. Andrew, who had been a sergeant with the British army in India, eventually won a doctorate through a paper on trade unions in the building industry, getting his knowledge by the unacademic ploy of working as a navvy. His army experience and a course in economics had also given him insights into the workings of our officer and financial class. He took malicious glee in gossiping to me about the insider trading by which this minority manipulate the rest. My notion of Britain had been formed at the end of the Second World War when our government announced the coming of a fairer society and the creation of social welfare for all. I had thought Britain was now mainly managed by folk who had mastered difficult processes through training and experience. Andrew explained that, as often today as in the past, most British civil service and business chiefs had stepped into senior positions because they had been to three or four expensive boarding schools and a couple of universities in the English east midlands: institutions where exams mattered less than their parents’ wealth and friends they had made. He persuaded me that Britain was not (as most of our politicians and publicity networks claimed) a democracy, but an aristocracy.

I thought Andrew disliked this unfair system since he was entering a profession through a socialist act of parliament. On our Irish holiday (we were guests of his friends Greta and David Hodgins at Nenagh in Tipperary) I was surprised to find he hated almost any group who wanted to change the dominant system. He even hated the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He forgave me for being a member but we could not discuss it. The only political hope we shared was a wish for a Scottish self-government. I enjoyed what I saw of Ireland but enjoyed his company less than I had expected. His hobbies were wrestling and judo. He told me that body builders convert steak into muscle by a course of weight-lifting immediately after a meal. I will say more about him because he gave me more than the first sentence of “Edison’s Tractatus”.

He became Strathclyde University’s first Professor of Sociology in 1967, retired in 1989, died in 1991. His closest relatives were aunts with whom he lodged in a Glasgow tenement until they died long before he did. His job gave him prestige and colleagues. His holidays with the Hodgins in Tipperary gave him a family whose children regarded him as an uncle, a community which treated him as an equal. From a Labour Party member he became a xenophobic Tory. In the university staff club he once aimed a judo kick at a black visitor who was quietly minding his own business. Since his special study was trade unions in the 1980s he became a salaried advisor of the British government, telling Margaret Thatcher how to weaken them. He took self-conscious glee in the bowler hat, tailor-made striped trousers, black jacket and waistcoat he acquired for visits to Downing Street. I fear he did a lot of harm but not to me. From 1961 to 1974 he was my only steady patron. He bought paintings and lent money when I was in need, usually taking a drawing as repayment. He lent me money as if it was an ordinary, unimportant action, leaving my self-respect undamaged. I cannot type so he got his secretaries to type my poems, plays and first novel onto wax stencils from which (in days when photocopying was hugely expensive) they printed all the copies I needed without charge. In 1974 he arranged for the Collins Gallery of Strathclyde University to give the largest retrospective show my pictures have ever had, getting a Glasgow Lord Provost to open it.

Yet in his last fifteen years I hardly saw him at all, maybe because I no longer supported a family so had less need to borrow. After his retirement he became a recluse and solitary drinker, his only human contacts being a cleaning lady and a weekly phone call from Greta Hodgins in Ireland. I felt sad and guilty when he died. He had given me much more than I had ever given him.

I will now list other ingredients which went into “Edison’s Tractatus”.

1 In the 1960s I heard that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was a very brainy book. I thought it might not be too brainy for me but never got hold of a copy.

2 I am too shy and pessimistic to start conversations with strangers but when public transport or an eating house places me beside an attractive one I sometimes fantasize about talking to them. This habit led to my first television play and a novel which is still in print. In 1982 I worked with Liz Lochead, Jim Kelman and Tom Leonard on a review called The Pie of Damocles. I scribbled a sketch in which a young woman at a café asks a depressed young man to pass her the sugar bowl and he insists on discussing what this might lead to before refusing. My friends did not think it funny. I discarded it.

3 I started hearing the word interface in the 1970s. It seemed to be used by people erecting a barrier round their work practice while talking across it. The barrier made the job they had mastered feel safer but conversation across it sometimes made new work, as forensic medicine had developed from the interface between policing and doctoring. My facetious attitude to new words led me to link activities between which no interface was possible — the gap between Aztec pottery and Chinese obstetrics, for instance, seemed unbridgeable. Around the same time I heard a lecturer amuse a university audience by referring to something as “an example of interdisciplinary cross-sterilization”.

4 For several years I have been perplexed by the adjective post-modern, especially when applied to my own writing, but have now decided it is an academic substitute for contemporary or fashionable. Its prefix honestly announces it as a specimen of intellectual afterbirth, a fact I only noticed when I reread my brainy character saying so.

5 A few years ago I heard that a scientist had shown how a butterfly stamping on a leaf in a tropical rain forest might precipitate a hurricane in North America. This may or may not be true.

6 In the first months of 1994 I conducted a creative writing class at St Andrews University. Going home by train to Glasgow I sat opposite a young woman who was writing in red ink on a block of graph paper. I could not read her words but they were shaped with unusual clearness and regularity. She was slightly bigger than average, neatly dressed and with no apparent make-up or anything to catch the eye. I felt a strong prejudice in her favour, believing, perhaps wrongly, that she was unusually intelligent. I suddenly wanted to put her in a story exactly as she appeared. She sometimes exchanged words with a young man but their conversation did not interest me.

I broke my journey home at Markinch to visit Malcolm Hood in Glenrothes Hospital. Two years earlier he had been paralysed by a cerebral stroke: his brain was in full working order but his body could give no sign of it. He was now able to speak and move a little. On this visit I read him a story from Somerville and Ross’s Experiences of an Irish R.M. and occasional comments and snorts of laughter showed his enjoyment. When students at Glasgow Art School forty years before we had often read aloud to each other from amusing authors. My favourites were Max Beerbohm and Rabelais, Malcolm’s were Dickens and Patrick Campbell. Campbell — an Anglo-Irish humorist not much read now — probably gave us our first taste of Blarney, which I define as the employment of an Irish idiom to make an unlikely story more convincing. The Somerville and Ross tale was full of it.

When I boarded a homeward-bound train at Markinch “Edison’s Tractatus” was germinating. I scribbled most of it in a notebook before reaching Glasgow, and as I did so imagined an Irish voice saying it, an Irish voice deliberately constructing an improbable tale. That is why I gave it an improbable title. Were I to read it aloud I would do so in my Scottish voice, but when writing “Edison’s Tractatus” the sentences moved to a second-hand Irish lilt.

7 This lilt must come from more than a fortnight in Tipperary thirty-five years ago and from renewed pleasure in the Blarney of Somerville and Ross. Flann O’Brien’s writings are an ingredient because, though Joyce, Synge and O’Casey use Blarney on occasions, O’Brien is the only Irish genius whose work is Blarney throughout. In the previous six months I had also read with pleasure “This Fella I Knew”, a short story by my friend Bernard MacLaverty who never talks Blarney and hardly ever writes it. This one story is an exception. It appears in his anthology, Walking the Dog, published in 1994.

1. A week after scribbling the first version of “Edison’s Tractatus” a student in my St Andrews class asked how I got ideas for stories. I gave a long confused answer because each novel, short story or play seemed to form differently. What set it going might be a story I had read which I wanted to tell differently, or a day dream, or dream remembered on waking, or a fantasy I had evolved during conversation, or an incident which had befallen someone else but it was unforgettable because of its oddity, humour or injustice. Ideas have sometimes come from commissions to write on a particular subject. Thereafter the idea grew through alternation of writing and deliberate daydreaming. If a narrative drew in many memories, ideas and phrases which had lain unused in my brain it sometimes expanded to a novella, novel or play. All but my first novel came that way. The first came from childhood faith in a long printed story as my surest way of getting attention. I daydreamed and scribbled it for years before accumulating enough ideas and experiences to finish it. I have also developed stories by telling or reading parts to friends before completion. Most authors I know avoid this because displaying unfinished work reduces their enthusiasm for it, but some listeners’ suggestions have expanded my tales in ways I might not have discovered myself.

The student’s question produced this account of what went into “Edison’s Tractatus”. There is probably more than I am conscious of, but I believe the brainy hero is mainly a caricature of traits which Andrew Sykes and I had in common. We were both inclined to turn sexual urges into clever, sometimes boring monologues. The urge to deliver an uninterrupted monologue is the energy driving most teachers, story-tellers and politicians. “Edison’s Tractatus” is obviously a portrait of someone too wordy for his own good, which also explains the addition of this bit of intellectual afterbirth.

HUFF HARRINGTON: A Tale Due to Kipling

OUR COLONEL WAS EVERYTHING such a British officer should be, though not always as clever as he believed. He enjoyed playing chess and had never lost a game before Harrington joined us. Before then his only steady chess partner was near retirement age and kept having to be reminded how the pieces moved. After one game with the Colonel everyone else refused his challenges saying, “No point in playing you Sir! We know the result beforehand.”

He took that as a compliment. On Harrington’s first night in the mess he was pleased when the young man admitted to enjoying an occasional chess game, while declaring he was a very poor player. The Colonel may not have known that every player who is not a grand master says that before playing a new opponent, because he replied cheerfully, “Then you will probably learn something by playing me.” Those of us who understood chess gathered to watch this game with unusual interest.

It began as usual with the Colonel recklessly swapping pieces to maintain a very slight advantage, while leaving gaps in his defence that showed he was either a very cunning or very stupid player. Harrington soon decided which. After securing his king behind a small barrier of pawns he gave a polite show of futile resistance while letting his rooks, castles and a bishop be taken. Twice he left openings that would have given an alert opponent immediate victory, but the Colonel was enjoying the game too much to notice these. At last he removed Harrington’s queen and asked pleasantly, “Had enough, Harrington?”

With a slight sigh Harrington brought his remaining bishop across the board from a far corner and placed it murmuring, “Checkmate.”

The Colonel stared at the new position, at first in bewilderment, then with gradual understanding. His face reddened. His eyebrows concentrated in a scowl. His underlip protruded further and further beyond his moustache. Harrington said quietly, “Sorry Sir. I should not have done that, especially as I am new here.”

In the monotonous, distinct growl only used when he was extremely angry the Colonel said, “Are you suggesting that it is etiquette for my junior officers to let me win?”

After a pause Harrington said, “Surely Sir, a soldier of your standing is entitled to a few privileges in private life, and my victory was probably beginner’s luck.”

For nearly two minutes the Colonel thought hard about this, then suddenly grinned and clapped Harrington on the shoulder saying, “Right on both counts, my boy! I can see you will go far.”

From then on he treated Harrington with great affability, but never again challenged him to a chess game.

That is how Harrington came to be called Had Enough, which was shortened to Huff in case the Colonel overheard us use the longer form and remembered why. Huff did go far because in tricky situations he usually won through at the last minute. When he became a general his men called him Old Huffy, though by then perhaps even he had forgotten why.

THE WORST TALE

THIS HAPPENED IN 1971 OR 72 when public education and health were better funded, when British manual workers were better paid, when the middle classes were almost as prosperous but less in debt than today, when the richest classes were (by their own obviously high standards) much poorer. Other tales in this book have sour endings but none as bad as this because the others are fiction. I heard it from Angel Mullane, once a colleague of the teacher who is the story’s most active yet least interesting character.

A school in the east of Glasgow taught children who could barely read, or found it hard to sit still and concentrate, or had other traits which unsuited them for normal schooling. In times of full employment (and this was in a time of full employment) such children can be prepared for ordinary jobs by teaching them to read, count and talk with greater confidence, but they cannot be taught really well in classes of more than ten. The average class size was twenty-five so the teachers often had to teach badly. Before 1986 this meant threatening and sometimes inflicting physical pain. Deliberately inflicted pain was in those days used by teachers in schools for normally healthy and even wealthy children — why should the damaged children of poor folk suffer less?

The pupils mostly came from a council housing scheme built for the very poor in the early 1930s. People there felt that the police were more of a threat than a protection, so small weak people believed that a strong male member of their own family was their likeliest defender. In many Scottish schools the most effective-sounding threat a pupil could hurl at a punitive teacher was, “I’ll get my dad to you!” This threat was almost a ritual. Teachers had a stock of equally ritualized replies to it. But many children in the school I speak of had no father or uncle or big brother in their family, and knew that their teachers knew it. A few had mothers with dogs, perhaps for protection. These were able to say, “I’ll get my dug to you.”

One day at this school a small boy faced a teacher wielding a leather belt designed to strike palms of hands. The boy was either trying to stop himself being beaten or had been beaten already and wished to show he was not completely crushed. Either in fear of pain or in a painful effort to keep some dignity he cried out, “I’ll get my —” and hesitated, then cried, “I’ll get my Alstation to you!” He lived with a granny who could not afford to keep a big dog. The way he pronounced Alsatian proved that his dog was nothing but a badly learned word — a word without power — a word which got the whole class laughing at him.

THE MARRIAGE FEAST

I MET JESUS CHRIST only once, in Cana, at some sort of marriage feast. I say “feast” because that word was distinctly printed on the invitation card, though it aroused expectations which were not fulfilled, for the parents of the bride had either pretentions beyond their incomes or were downright stingy. The waiters’ tardiness in refilling our glasses suggested the booze was in short supply, and long before we finished the unappetizing main course there was none to be had. The person most obviously upset about this was a little old Jewish lady who had already (I seem to remember) consumed more than her fair share of the available alcohol.

“They have no wine!” she hissed in a stage whisper which was heard throughout the room and embarrassed everyone except (apparently) our hosts. I was compelled to admire their equanimity in the face of so audible a hint. The little lady was addressing a man who looked like — and actually was — both her son and a carpenter wearing his best suit. Like many mothers she was blaming her offspring for other people’s faults, but his reaction surprised me.

“Woman!” he declared, “My time is not yet come!”

This struck us all as a meaningless remark, though I later realized it was advance publicity for his brief, disastrous career as a faith healer. However, a moment afterwards he beckoned the head of the catering staff, and whispered something which resulted in more wine being served.

At the time I assumed Christ had himself paid for extra booze so was almost inclined to feel grateful, but Freddie Tattersal (who is also Jewish) told me, “Remember that Christ belonged to the self-employed tradesman class, and that sort don’t lash out money in acts of reckless generosity. There must still have been a lot of wine at that feast, but the waiters were saving it for themselves and the guests at the main table. Christ put the fear of God into the caterers by threatening to make a stink if they did not serve everyone equally, especially him — and he would have done it! They probably watered the plonk to make it go round.” I still find this hard to believe. The plonk they served later was nothing to boast of but it was genuine plonk. I now believe I met Christ in one of his better moods. He was an unpleasant person who went about persuading very ordinary fishmongers and petty civil servants to abandon their jobs and wives and children and go about imitating him! There were a great many such self-appointed gurus in the sixties. Who cares about them nowadays?

MORAL PHILOSOPHY EXAM

A BIG TELEVISION COMPANY regularly broadcast a news programme informing the viewers of bad deeds: not the bad deeds of corporations who might withdraw advertising revenues, or the bad deeds of big businessmen and government officials who could afford to bring strong libel actions, but the exploitive practices of private tradesmen. This did some social good and entertained viewers, who were also encouraged to help the programme by supplying it with evidence of scandalous instances. The broadcasters heard of a man who liked horses but had become so poor that the few he owned were badly fed and stabled. The broadcasters tried to contact the man but he hid from them. A camera crew besieged his house until he emerged and was filmed fleeing from an interviewer who ran after him shouting unanswered questions. This was broadcast along with distant views of the horses, the faces and voices of concerned neighbours, the comments of a qualified animal doctor. The owner was subsequently charged with cruelty to animals by the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was found guilty and jailed for several months as he could not afford to pay a fine. The horses were humanely killed because nobody else wanted them.

Which of the following cared most for the horses?

1 Their owner.

2 The RSPCA.

3 The broadcasters.

Who gained most by these events?

1 Lawyers conducting the trial.

2 The broadcasters.

3 Other horses with incompetent owners.

Who lost most by these events?

1 The owner.

2 The horses.

DECISION

I WAS IGNORANT when I was young. I didnae know that sex and children were connected — they seemed to belong to different worlds. My Mammy and her pals talked about sex in a queer oblique kind of way but they were quite open and direct when they spoke about children: “She’s decided not to have a child yet,” they said about a girl who had just married. I was sixteen when I married and I decided not to have a child either. I talked it over with my husband — he was a year older than me — and he entirely agreed. “Time enough for us to have children when we’ve a home of our own,” he said, “and that won’t be for a few years yet.”

My Mammy thought it was a wise decision too. We were living with her.

Imagine my astonishment when my stomach swole up and the doctor told me I was pregnant. I said, “I can’t be! I’ve decided not to have a child.”

He said, “What precautions did you take?”

I didnae answer him. I don’t take precautions when I decide not to have a cigarette, why take precautions when I decide not to have a baby? A woman in the bed beside me at the maternity hospital told me about birth control, but a week after I came out I was pregnant again.

A REALITY SHOW

NOWADAYS THE DANISH CROWN PRINCE is a keen amateur actor who only talks to friends, members of his family, civil servants and journalists in Copenhagen’s Theatre Royal, on a stage set for the last act of Hamlet. Admission is free. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons the front stalls are full of children brought by teachers from primary schools all over Scandinavia, as part of their social science education. At other times the audience is seldom more than eight or nine adults, mainly American tourists. Broadcasters agree that the prince’s performances are lifelike and convincing but too dull to be recorded or televised. The prince believes that as standards of living and decency deteriorate throughout the world, many will start to enjoy watching what he calls “the banality of virtue”.

AUTHORITY

I DID NOT STRUGGLE FOR IT. By accident alone five older brothers died before I took the crown of a thousand-mile-long kingdom, founded by our grandfather, when the T’ang dynasty could not hold China together. My handwriting was excellent. I was not blatantly unfaithful to my wife. Like a true philosopher I eschewed ambition and let landlords and merchants run the country. The Sung empire swallowed us whole. When ordered, I killed myself. Never mind. I once wrote my name on a famous painting. I am remembered, though my people are not.

TRANSLATION

THE ELDER GRANDMOTHER, or stipendiary magistrate, or rich farmer’s prodigal son scratches, or ignores, or perhaps greedily enjoys the young slave-girls of the harem, or the petitioners from an unimportant suburb, or the white feathered-longnecked-furiously-hissing denizens of the poultry yard: while in another continent and century and civilization I turn a vertical row of pictograms into a horizontal sentence of phonetic type, without spilling a nuance.

HUMANITY

And one mild midsummer day, high among the rocky and heathery summits of Ben Venue, we found a small hollow brimful of perfectly smooth untrodden snow, and shouting “See the lovely white snow!” jumped into the middle of it with our great big boots.

ENOUGH MONEY

MY CEILING ADMITS NO RAIN. I admire the movement of clouds over the city. Every weather, every season has its unique beauty.