in.’
‘I’m too old for that now.’
‘A man’s never too old for that.’
‘I’m happier away from women,’ he said.
He elevated his glass sacramentally and plainchanted.
‘The happiest hours that e’er I spent were spent among the glasses-O!’
They communicated in silence after she poured another drink. The little clock went on ticking patiently because there was nothing else it could do. Mr Alfred said into himself the first line of a poem he had lately read, ‘The house was quiet and the world was calm’. It called up the small hours when he used to read poetry alone in his room and write little poems for himself. He was taken back, at peace with a glass in his hand and a verse in his head.
From a distance a merry cry rocked in the street. It rode above an advancing babble and rolled under the window.
‘Haw, Granny Lyons!’
Repeated.
Chanted loudly, chanted slowly.
‘Et ô ces voix d’enfants,’ said Mr Alfred, ‘chantant dans…’
But he was frightened.
‘I’ve been expecting them,’ said Granny Lyons.
She was calm. Mr Alfred was shaking. He forgot his whisky. There was an edge on the antiphonal voices now.
‘Granny Lyons, ye auld hoor!’
‘Sounds like Wilma,’ said Granny Lyons.
‘Why do they call you granny?’ said Mr Alfred, fretting. ‘I’ve never understood that.’
‘No idea,’ said his aunt, shrugging. ‘They always have. Since the day I came here. I’ve been old witch and old bitch and old granny. Doesn’t bother me.’
‘Here!’ yelled a girl outside. ‘Here’s your Christmas coming up!’
‘Jennifer!’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Quick!’
She stepped smartly to one side of the window and signalled Mr Alfred to get to the other.
First, a hail of stones against the glass. Next, a long rude ring at the doorbell. Mr Alfred turned to answer it.
‘Don’t move,’ Granny Lyons whispered.
The window imploded. A half-brick landed in the centre of the room bringing glass with it. Then the gallop away of the colts and fillies. The whinnying faded.
Mr Alfred stared dumfouttered at the inexplicable half- brick lying mutely on his aunt’s old carpet.
‘They’re getting worse,’ said Granny Lyons.
‘Anarchy,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Things fall apart.’
He was pale with fright.
‘I chased a crowd of them out the back-close last night,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Boys and girls. And still at school most of them.’
‘You know who they are?’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Tell me their names and I’ll go to the police.’
‘Don’t talk soft,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Do you think the police would welcome you? What could you prove?’
‘But you said you were expecting them. Have they been threatening you?’
‘They told me they’d be back. If you can call that a threat. I’m as broadminded as the next person but I’m not putting up with houghmagandy in my back-close.’
‘I wish you’d get out of this district,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘Where could I go? Anyway, it’s the same everywhere now.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘It’s my own fault,’ she said. ‘I ask for it. I should mind my own business. Let them take over. It’s their world now. But I never learn. That fight I stopped this afternoon. I should have walked on.’
‘What fight?’ he asked.
She told him about it while they tacked double sheets of newspaper across the frame of the broken window.
‘Some of them were your boys,’ she said. ‘That big lump Provan was there. One of Wilma’s boyfriends.’
‘He’s kind of young to be anybody’s boyfriend,’ said Mr Alfred.
‘He’s her age,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘She’s at your school. Don’t you know her? Wilma Beattie.’
‘Can’t say I do,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘But then I don’t take girls’ classes.’
‘I’ve chased the pair of them out that back-close more than once,’ said Granny Lyons. ‘Ah well! As God made them he matched them!’
CHAPTER SIX
Mrs Provan put on her Sunday coat and went to the school. She saw the headmaster at nine o’clock.
‘I’m very angry about this, Mr Briggs,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind anyone chastising my boy if he deserves it. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.’
A ruffled hen laying a complaint and making a song about it.
Mr Briggs listened carefully. He was a judicious little man, not long promoted. His brother had recently married a widow on the town council. He was perfectly happy signing the janitor’s requisitions and sending instructions round his staff in civil-service English and a neat hand. Other clerical activities were used to keep him from working and allow him to claim he had a lot to do every day. He liked talking to parents because that too occupied his time to the exclusion of less sedentary duties.
Mrs Provan ended her aria on a high note of horror.
‘But to slap a boy across the face for nothing! That’s something I won’t have. No!’
‘Ah now come, it couldn’t have been for nothing, surely it must have been for something.’
The tenor responded to the soprano, and continued piano.
‘I don’t mean I condone striking a pupil. Oh no, on the contrary. But on the other hand, I can’t believe a man walked up to a boy and suddenly hit him for nothing right out of the blue. I mean to say, it doesn’t sound a very likely story. Now does it, Mrs Provan?’
His forearms on the desk, his stainless fingers laced, he leaned forward on his magisterial swivelchair as if he was the Solomon of David’s royal blood who had to decide how far maternal affection could influence veracity.
‘Surely the boy must have given some provocation,’ he coaxed her.
‘No,
