she had brought home from her holiday at Millport the year she was married, a photo of her mother in a white-metal frame, a snap of her brother when he was a sergeant with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Singapore, an enamelled tray showing two pastoral lovers beside a rustic bridge, and her bottle of cough mixture. ‘How can I keep this corner tidy if you clutter it up with books? And they’re all overdue and I never see you open them anyway.’
‘You don’t see all I do,’ he answered, looking down on her from a great height.
‘There’s sevenpence to pay on each of them,’ she complained the night he was getting ready to go to the Bute Hall. ‘You might as well buy the damn things, the money you spend in fines. Do you think I’ve nothing to do with my money but give it to you to pay for all the books you keep past their time?’
‘Money, money, money! All you can think of is money!’
He was peevish with her. She was always nagging him since his father died a month ago.
‘Somebody’s got to think about it,’ she said, her head high, acting the calm lady to his bad temper. ‘Of course, you’re Lord Muck of Glabber Castle, you’re too high and mighty to bother about money. I’d have thought now your poor father’s dead at least you’d try and help your mother. You’ve only one mother in this world, you know, my boy.’
She wiped her eyes with a dirty hankie, and went ruthlessly on.
‘Your poor father’s no’ here any longer to look after us now, ye know. Him dying the way he did. Puffed out like a candle. Wan minute he was there, the next he wasna. It’s something I’ll never get over. The day after his brother was killed. No’ that he was any good. But your poor father was a good man. Do anything for anybody. Worked hard all his days. Then just to die like that, down in the cellar all by himself. And then they tried to tell me it was his heart. Funny he never complained about his heart before. Of course him and Sammy was twins. They was born together and I suppose they had to go together. Well, near enough. Sammy was killed on the Friday and your poor father was found dead the next day, couldny ha’ been more than a couple of hours after he heard about it. Makes you think. You ought to be helping me, no’ annoying me the way you do.’
She sniffed wetly, and his nerves jangled at the sound of air through mucus.
‘I’m helping all I can,’ he said dourly. ‘But I never get a bloody word of thanks for it. Don’t forget it’s me pays the rent for the house.’
‘You’re lucky to have a house at all to pay the rent for,’ she snapped, her nose clear again for a minute. ‘Don’t forget we lost a good house rent-free when your father went and died.’
‘Some house,’ he gibed, surveying her as if he was estimating her height and weight. How could he, so tall and handsome, come from such a shrivelled thing as this crabbit woman with grey hair, mournful eyes, a flat chest and skinny legs with black cotton stockings? It was another injustice. He should have had a beautiful elegant mother with shapely legs and a bosom like the advert for a shaving soap, not too much and not too little, a mother who would inspire him to write the poetry he knew he could write if only he could get peace and quiet. ‘A janitor’s house in the school playground! That’s a fine house! Living right in the middle of the slum where he worked.’
‘It was a bigger and better house than this,’ she shouted. ‘Who could I bring here, a room and kitchen up a dirty close with a stairhead lavatory, and a single-end on each landing? You never think what a come-down it is for me to have to go out to work and be a cleaner in the very school where your father was the janitor for fifteen year, aye, and his job was jist as important as the headmaster’s I can tell ye. He saw them come and he saw them go, and they’d all have been lost without him. He kept them right. And now I’ve got to be a cleaner there and live in a room and kitchen that looks right on to the four-apartment house I had rent- free in the playground. It just shows you how life treats you.’
‘You’re just after saying we’re lucky to be here,’ he stabbed quickly back, gloating over her cracked temper. ‘Lucky that big fat drip Nancy went to Canada. Ha-Ha! That was a bit of luck all right. If ever a dame got on my nerves it was her with her very coarse veins. A real intellectual topic of conversation she had!’
‘You’ll please me if you speak of your Aunt Nancy with proper respect for your elders,’ she said stiffly, on her dignity as a lady again. ‘If your Aunt Nancy hadn’t got the factor to agree to us getting her house I don’t know where we could have went I’m sure. And just having to flit across the street from the school was a big saving. If we’d had to pay for all our furniture getting took somewhere across the river it would have cost us a lot of money I can tell you. But you never think of that. You’ve a mind above money, like.’
‘You aye come back to money, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’d think that was all there was in this life, money, the way you talk, you’ve no idea of art and philosophy and – and—’
He was stuck for a moment for another subject, to let her see what a superior mind he had.
‘And poetry and the drama,’ he added quickly, remembering the card above the shelves in the far corner of the library. ‘You’ve never lived. I’ve lived, so I have. I’ve read the great poets, it’s more than you ever done. You, you’ve no idea of culture.’
‘Have you?’ she asked him very coolly, cutting him deep. ‘You couldn’t even pass your qually and you try and kid me about culture. You never read the half of the books you bring in here.’
‘Ach!’ he snarled at her.
‘Another thing,’ she pursued him cruelly, turning from the cracked, mottled sink where the window looked across Bethel Street to the ancient school where her husband had worked. ‘It’s high time you stopped hanging about the backcourt and going across there to the playground every night. If you could just see yourself! Be your age. It looks daft, a big fellow like you playing with wee boys at school.’
‘I’m not playing with them,’ he answered proudly. ‘I’m helping them. They come to me for advice. Cause I’m older and cause I know more than they do. I’m trying to learn them. If I’d had somebody to guide me the way I guide them when I was their age I wouldn’t be where I am today, so I wouldn’t.’
‘A crowd of scabby gangsters,’ his mother muttered. ‘There’s no’ a shop in the street safe from them.’
‘Okay they’ve got a gang,’ he admitted generously. ‘And what’s wrong with having a gang? A gang is only the expression of the primitive need for a community. You read any book on child-psychology, that’ll tell you. People feel they must belong. I mean ordinary people. And these lads aren’t even ordinary. They’re a lot of poor dirty neglected children with nobody to shower love on them.’
‘Shower,’ his mother sniffed, having trouble with her nose again. ‘They’re a shower all right. Shower o’ bastards.’
‘Their parents have no interest in them,’ he went on, making a speech at her, ‘and they’ve no interest in their parents. They were born in the jungle and their whole existence is one fierce struggle to survive. The only law they know is the law of the jungle and they’re beginning to learn its disadvantages. So they come to me and I try to learn them to live according to the law of law and order. They see you’ve got to have someone to appeal to so they come to me. I’m their referee. They rely on me for to see justice done. I’m the lawman. I’m the judge. Cause I stand above it so I can see it. Boys are like Jews, they’re different from the people round about them. And where would the
