grieved Mr Alfred. Sometimes he thought he was making a mistake frequenting a common pub with common customers and a common barmaid when he had nothing in common with them. In every pub he went to he recognised anonymous faces. For besides being a bachelor and a schoolmaster, a Master of Arts and the author of a volume of unpublished poems, the only child of poor but Presbyterian parents and now a middleaged orphan, he was a veteran pubcrawler. But it was his weakness to stand always on the fringe of company, smiling into the middle distance, happy only with a glass in his hand. He had been a wallflower since puberty. He wanted to love his fellow men. When he was young he even hoped to love women. Now every door seemed locked, and without a key he was afraid to knock.
Stella drew a pint. The beer was brisk. She brought the glass down slowly from the horizontal to the vertical. She was pleased with the creamy head on it, not too much, not too little. With pride she served her customer.
‘There! How’s that for a good top? See what I do for you!’
The man at Mr Alfred’s elbow put a big hand round the pint-measure. He grinned.
‘Nothing to what I could do for you.’
‘Ho-ho,’ said Stella. ‘I’m sure.’
Her frolic smile said enough for a book on sex without fear. Mr Alfred caught a reprint tossed to him free. He jerked and fumbled for something to say. Distracted to find nothing, he missed what they said next. When they stopped laughing Stella turned to him as if he had heard.
‘This man brings out the worst in me.’
Mr Alfred smiling tried again to find a mite to contribute. By the time he was ready to catch the speaker’s eye she was slanted from him, sharing another joke with the man at his elbow. She ended it laughing.
‘Aye, I know. The doctor says it’s good for you.’
Mr Alfred meditated. Alcohol always made him meditate. His cigarette smouldered at an angle of fortyfive. There was a glow in his middle and a halo round his head. He was getting what he came out to buy. An anaesthetic between the week’s drudgery behind and the week’s drudgery ahead. Stella was his world for the moment. Stella and what she said and the way she said it. His daily thoughts assured him he was the victim of a coarse and even foul mind. He accepted it, as a redhaired man accepts his red hair. He was willing to believe Stella was never guilty of an equivocation and to blame himself for thinking her conversation was loaded with a wrapped freight of allusions to sexual intercourse. He wondered how he would get on if he tried to make love to her. But he had a good idea what would happen. Even if she ever gave him the chance he would muck it up somehow. He would be sitting an examination in a practical subject when all he had was a little book-learning. He drooped.
When he came out of his soulsearching the man at his elbow was turning to go.
‘Good night, sir,’ Stella called out, moving up from the other end of the bar to give him a wave.
‘You never call me sir,’ he said as she came level.
He thought his joking pretence of jealousy would amuse her.
Stella strolled down the bar again and threw him a vague smile over her shoulder. It said she heard him say something but didn’t quite know what and didn’t think it mattered.
He staggered out on the bell to wintry streets and shivered. Between tall tenements and down dark lanes, his cigarette out, he talked to himself. He criticised the chaste loneliness of his habits. He muttered Milton’s question. He had a habit of thinking in quotations when he had a drink on him.
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles in Neaera’s hair?
When he recited the pleasant alternative suggested by the great puritan poet he remembered an old surmise that with should be withe, meaning bind or pleat. It seemed an idea worth lingering over. But at that point in his erotic meditation he was interrupted by a woman who had no resemblance to Amaryllis or any other nymph. She linked her arm in his.
‘Coming home, darling?’
He recognised her as the reason for his wandering, and he knew the trembling of his lean body when he left the cosy pub was due less to the chill of a sleety wind than to the hope of finding her. But the moment she opened her mouth and touched him he was as empty as all the glasses he had drained. Still, with his usual politeness he answered insincerely, or with his usual insincerity he answered politely.
‘Yes, of course.’
There was a public convenience, doublestaired, a dozen steps ahead. He disengaged his arm from hers with a gentlemanly apology.
‘You wait here. I’ll be right back.’
He descended, leaving her loitering at the top of the stairs. When he had emptied his bladder he returned to the street by the other staircase and weaved home to his single bed.
CHAPTER THREE
Two of Gerry’s classmates collided at playtime. There were about four hundred colts running wild in a small area. Collisions and spills were common. Most often they led to nothing more than a vindictive shove and a corresponding push. But this time Gerry intervened. When the boys began their ritual snarling he jostled them. They tangled. He persuaded one of them to challenge the other. A square-go was fixed for four o’clock in the Weavers Lane. The news of the engagement circulated with a speed only slightly less than the speed of light, which is of course the maximum velocity at which any signal can be communicated in our universe, and Gerry was sure of a big attendance. He sprawled in Mr Alfred’s class after playtime, dreamy with pride at being a fight-promoter. He put a pencil between his lips, took it out and exhaled.
‘Is that a good cigar?’ Mr Alfred asked, very sour.
He was lately finding the afternoons tiring. They sent a jangle of pain round his skull. He felt he was a foreigner trying to get across to people who didn’t speak his language. The days when he enjoyed teaching seemed so far away he believed they belonged to somebody else.
Gerry rolled the cylinder between his fingers, tried to squeeze it, sniffed it, looked at it suspiciously.
‘Aw sir, it’s only a pencil,’ he decided.
‘Put it away,’ said Mr Alfred.
Gerry tapped the end of the pencil on the desk as if he was stubbing a cigarette and set it down with hyperbolic care.
Mr Alfred gave him a hard look. But he had been teaching too long to go looking for trouble. He meant his glare to be enough to show he knew cheek when he saw it and wouldn’t take any more.
He glanced at the textbook to check the place and resumed the lesson tabulated there for teacher and pupils. It was, in his opinion, a rather childish exercise in oral composition. But the boys seemed to find it difficult. They hadn’t an answer to any question. They sickened him.
‘They just sit there pandiculating,’ he said to himself. ‘Shower.’
From the day Collinsburn became a comprehensive school he had always been given the dullest classes. He resented it. The men who took the bright boys and girls to leaving-certificate level were all honours graduates. But he was
