‘You can have them! You can have them both! I don’t care, there’s plenty more where they came from!’
He was teetering there, certain he was going to gain her, and then her little hand darted. First in a vertical flash it scattered his precious wallet and then it came back on the horizontal plane and slapped him hard across the face. (Mrs Maguire on the ground floor stood with the teapot over her cup and breathed nervously, ‘What was that?’)
Percy put his hand to his cheek as if to make sure it was really his face she had smacked.
‘Well, I like that!’ Sophy flared. ‘So that’s the kind of girl you think I am! Just right here and now, eh? Just like that? Do you think I’m mad? And if you’ve got that kind of money to throw away what the hell are you bothering about me at all for, tell me that! You don’t need to come slobbering round me if you want to buy it. You know where to go or it’s high bloody time you did. Well, I like that! You and your po’try. And I don’t know what you’re doing with all that money anyway, a fella that’s no’ working. I’ve a good mind to tell my brother about you.’
Her inflated little bosom heaved, she flared and sputtered at him. Then she picked up her handbag and marched off. No side-slip this time, but a military quickstep, and Percy was left alone with his smarting face. He stood bleak and frozen in the twilight of the back-close, heard Sophy’s high heels tattoo upstairs, heard her knock at her door on the second storey of the three, heard the door open and the door bang. She was gone, gone for ever. He nearly wept. But perhaps her brother was in. There was no time to waste in tears. He picked up his wallet in a flurry, put the fivers back inside as he hurried through the front-close and ran to the nearest bus-stop.
It was all very well for Shelley. He could say it and get it printed in his immortal works and even in the Golden Treasury. But Shelley didn’t have to deal with these narrow-minded waitresses who had no appreciation of love’s philosophy. He worked hard on a grudge against Sophy as he waited splay-footed and nervous for a bus to come, one hand inside his jacket fondling his wallet as a talisman. He didn’t care which bus he got so long as it took him away from the scene of his Waterloo. He suddenly felt hungry, and a shattering thought lashed his already turbulent mind.
‘I’ll have to find somewhere else to eat now!’ he lamented to the bus-stop standard, and tutted to the night air at the nuisance of it. He felt himself wronged and humiliated. After the way she had mentioned her brother he would have to disappear for good so far as Sophy was concerned. He had made a mistake.
‘Ach, maybe she was right,’ he thought generously arguing against his fabricated grudge, for he took a pride in always seeing at least two sides to any question. ‘Maybe it was a mistake to offer her money. But I was desperate. I should have kept it till after.’
By the time he was speeding home on the bus his brain was empty. It was tired of fretting about Sophy and the absurd failure to seduce her. The stranger drifted in to fill the vacuum.
‘Oh, dear! There’s him to worry about!’ he remembered in misery. ‘He’s a menace, he is! I wonder where he’s got to.’
Stumbling on a rhyme he brooded about a poem in which a stranger was a danger. He thought out the first two lines.
Within life’s vale of tears I face one danger
That makes my blood run cold, a questioning stranger—
But he couldn’t go on. His headache began to bother him again, his stomach quivered, turned, tied itself in painful knots. He was frightened again. Sophy’s brother and the stranger merged into one cloud darkening his future, disturbing his peace of mind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mrs Phinn’s daily duties as a school-cleaner were in two spells. She went in at six in the morning before the school opened and worked till a quarter to nine, and she went back at four o’clock in the afternoon when the school was dismissed and worked till six in the evening. She did it with a grudge. She hated being a poor widow who had to do a menial job for a few shillings to pay her way, and a hardup way it was. She resented being under the eye of the janitor for clocking in in the morning and clocking out at tea-time, because she despised him as an interloper. He would never have got the job if her husband hadn’t been found dead in the cellar the day after his brother was killed in a car-crash on the Glasgow–Edinburgh road, the notorious A8. And he didn’t strike her as being a janitor in the true tradition. He wasn’t like her husband, serious, clever and experienced. He was a flippant, scruffy, inexpert little man, always calling in a plumber or a joiner for jobs her man would have done himself as a matter of course. And he knew next to nothing about janitor’s stock or janitor’s requisitions. He could never say, as her husband had said in all truth, that although he was only the janitor he was just as important to the school as any headmaster. Her husband knew his job. This fellow didn’t. He didn’t even know his place. He was chatty with the headmaster and familiar with the cleaners.
‘Well, with some of them,’ she complained to Percy, not that he was listening. ‘That Mrs Winters in particular is never out of his room. I don’t see how she can be doing her job right, the time she spends sitting in there drinking tea. They think I don’t know. She’s some widow, that one Made up to kill. Out at six in the morning with her powder on thick and her lipstick on like a chorus girl. I don’t know what he thinks he’s up to. She’s no’ as young as she makes out to be. Her hair’s dyed for one thing. And he’s got a wife of his own anyway. She calls him by his first name. Imagine that! None of the cleaners ever dared call your father by his first name when he was on duty. But this little upstart never wears a hat. Your father used to polish the badge in his hat every night. He looked the part. He knew how to hold himself. He knew how to speak to cleaners. But all these things is dying out now. Everybody’s equal. It’s all wrong.’
She crossed to the main gate at six o’clock the morning after her son had kept his chastity and her body trembled with longing for the sleep the alarm had broken. Yet it was a fine summer morning, the sky above the tall tenements was blue and unclouded, and the pigeons were already talking to each other in the high roof of the sandstone school. She grudged feeling it was good to be alive after all, but she felt it, and her awakening senses granted to her weary body that it was better to be up and doing on such a lovely morning than lying in a lazy bed. She was just coming really awake, approaching the gate, when a man at the corner of Bethel Street and Tulip Place whistled to her. She was affronted. She was wearing old stockings, her bare head showed her greying hair, and anyway six o’clock in the morning, even if it was a lovely morning, was no time for a man to be accosting a woman. Her head reared and her small thin body stiffened, dignity and alarm fighting for control of her. She glanced obliquely at the whistler, just to see what kind of man he was. He came quickly towards her, beckoning her over anxiously. She stood still and waited. She wasn’t going to walk to any man. Let him come to her. The janitor would hear her if she screamed.
‘Mrs Phinn?’ he asked civilly.
She didn’t deny it.
‘I’m the man that drove the car,’ he said. ‘You know, Sammy’s car.’
She looked at him hard. She didn’t believe in ghosts at any time, certainly not at six o’clock on a summer morning.
‘He was killed,’ she said. ‘They both were killed, Sammy and the man that was driving him.’
‘Aye, on the Friday, but I mean on the Thursday. It was me that drove the car on the Thursday, that’s what I mean, on the Thursday night.’
He smiled wisely to her, showing two yellow fangs, but she was
