1982 Janine (27 page)

I did not want to leave Denny all alone in that house. I asked her to come with me when I visited Alan, who admired her, but she said, “I'm never going to visit him.”

“Why not?”

“I hate that big Alan.”

“Why?”

“He thinks he can do anything he likes.”

She was right. In Alan's company I always felt that anything we imagined was possible. After a pause I said, “That is no reason for hating him. He never wants to do nasty things.”

She said, “Mibby he can do anything he likes but people like us cannae do anything we like.”

I saw then that Denny, who lacked proper parents and education and could not even dress properly, thought she and I were the same sort of person and Alan and I were not. This put me in a bad mood which I did not allow her to turn into a friendly sexy squabble. I became perfectly quiet and sat with my arms tightly folded on my knees and let her slap and nip me until she was exhausted and weeping and pleading; then I stood up and walked out of the house without saying a word.

It was a mild sunny summer evening so when Alan opened the door I suggested we go a walk and enjoy a pint somewhere. He was wearing pinstriped trousers tucked into Wellington boots and a dirty collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He said, “Good idea, Jock, but let me finish this small job first.”

I followed him into the front room. He was stripping paint from a table he had found in a midden.

“A valuable antique?” I asked ironically, for it looked nothing special to me. He said, “Not yet, but if I stain and polish and keep it for sixty-eight years it will become a valuable antique.”

The circular top was two feet across with a single, tapering leg ending in a tripod base. The tripod was certainly elegant. Alan showed me that the sections had been so dovetailed and angled that the joints would be strengthened, not weakened, by ordinary wear. He said, “It won't last for ever, of course. One day an unusually heavy weight will be placed off-centre on it here, and it will crack here.”

He touched a line in the grain of the wood. I said, “Could you prolong its life by reinforcing that part?”

He said, “No. It's too well made. Additional material would weaken the rest of the structure.”

He worked on the table for two hours, delicately scraping and sandpapering. I did not mind. We chatted, or I leafed through his piles of old technical magazines, or listened to
the pigeons croodle-crooing in the chimney. At last he said, “It's a bit late for a walk and a pint, Jock, and anyway I have no money. How much have you?”

I showed him a halfcrown, a florin and sixpence. He said, “My table has a Parisian look, let's have a continental evening at home. For less than that money you can buy a bottle of Old Tron, a unique full-blooded Scottish wine greatly favoured by the afficionados, the cognoscenti and connoisseurs. Use the change to purchase two cigars of the best quality. I will provide glasses, a match and, of course, the table.”

When I returned he had gained formal dignity by donning his army officer tunic and knotting a white cotton scarf round his throat. The newly cleaned table now stood before the open window and had three upright chairs round it and three glasses on top, besides a shining brass candlestick holding three inches of candle, and a clean saucer containing matches and a cigar cutter. Alan unwrapped the cigars and laid them across the saucer saying, “It is not yet lighting-up time.”

He poured some of the red syrupy wine into two of the glasses then carefully emptied the rest into a cut-glass decanter which he placed in the exact centre of the table. Like an experienced waiter he pulled out a chair and pushed it forward under my thighs as I settled into it, then sat opposite me. We touched glasses and sipped. I said, “You are expecting more company.”

He said “Carole may drop in.”

Carole was his girlfriend, an artist. He said, “Why do you never bring Denny to see me?”

I told him what Denny had said. He sighed and said, “She understands me. She really is very sharp. You ought to marry her.”

I said, “I have just turned eighteen. Denny is the first and only woman I ever slept with, and she chose me, I did not choose her. And I will not marry till I earn a wage that will support two of us, without debt, in my own house.”

He said, “Yes. A pity.”

I said, “Will you marry Carole?”

“No no no. Have you seen how she handles her belongings? She likes books on art, she really does study the pictures and read the text, and because she is expertly shaped and exquisitely
crafted plenty of infatuated dolts give her these books. And as soon as she owns one she gets it smeared with paint and bends the spine back till it cracks. She would treat me like that if I married her, so I never will. But I'm afraid we'll continue to see each other, probably even love each other, till death-do-us-part. Carole has a grip like an iron vice. I envy you with Denny.”

I said mildly, “I don't believe a word of that.”

“A pity.”

The street was getting a ruddy tint from the descending sun. We watched it and sipped the wine, commenting on the passers-by and whatever we could see of life through the windows of the tenement opposite. Carole arrived, a slim girl with a lost lonely fascinating look. I think she was sorry to see me there but I don't know how she conveyed that. She was pleasant and friendly. She wore flat sandals, jeans, a paintstained sweater and her hair in a pony-tail. Alan said briskly, “Carole, you are improperly dressed for a continental evening. Please go to the bedroom, take off all your clothes and put on this. And remove that rubber band from your hair, I am sure Parisiennes don't wear rubber in that particular place.”

He gave her a black dress which had belonged to his mother who must have been a big woman, for when Carole came from the bedroom it hung to her ankles and would not lie on both shoulders. She looked splendid. She could look splendid in any garment. Alan lifted her hair, laid the mass of it carefully on her naked shoulder, then placed behind her ear a convincing white blossom he had made a moment before by cutting and folding a sheet of paper. He handed her ceremonially to the chair between us and filled the three glasses with the last of the wine. The street lamps came on. He lit the candle, clipped the cigars and bade me set fire to mine first. For half an hour we sat sipping and smoking and watching the slow summer gloaming darken the street, and colour the sky above the opposite tenement, and bring electric lights on in the rooms facing us. I knew that the window framing this subtly altering picture was framing a picture for the street outside: a picture of a young candlelit woman seated between her lover, a fine tall man, and his
friend, a refined smaller one. I felt, I'm sure we all felt, as good-looking, as interesting, as comfortable, as civilised, as everlasting, as contented as folk in a good painting by Renoir. Alan had contrived this, but the foundation of my contentment was the knowledge that Denny was waiting for me a mile to the west. My body was already anticipating the peaceful satisfaction she and I would know after we had delighted each other.

I returned later than I intended and was very glad to find Denny sitting in the kitchen chattering cheerfully to the landlord, who was appreciating her company. I had advised her to avoid him because I had feared he could not do that. He was a solemn young fledgling lawyer whom I greatly respected, perhaps because he was rather like me. He dressed in good suits, chose his words carefully and hardly ever smiled. But now he was chuckling. Denny was telling stories about her relations – the ones she disliked – and though the information shocked him he enjoyed being shocked, and kept asking questions. She was exhilarated to find she could entertain a man of his sort. We all had a cup of tea together and when at last I said briskly, “Bedtime, Denny,” he detained me for a moment as I was leaving the kitchen and whispered, “You have a great wee woman there.”

When I embraced her that night I knew how very lucky I was. That was the happiest day of my life.

So when Alan introduced me in the refectory to a woman he did not want and who did not want me, why did I follow her to the drama college? Greed. I wanted to discover how much more enjoyment I could have. From the serving hatch Denny saw me talking to Helen, and later that day she said glumly, “I bet you fancy that big woman.”

I said, “She's a snooty bitch and I'll have nothing to do with her, I'll be working for a group, a team. The experience will be useful. I may even make some money.”

But when I met the team I abandoned hope of money. They were too disorganised to make any of that.

I found them in the Athenaeum, whose pillared front and
marble entrancehall did not prepare me for the small corridors and dusty rooms I first had to search through. Two women and three men stood on a square of brown linoleum staring with their mouths ajar at the door I had opened. Another man sat on a line of chairs against a wall. One of the women was Helen. She quickly introduced me to the director who said something like this: “It's terrific that you've turned up, er, Jack, Jake, Jock is it? Good good good. We're all of us absolutely delighted to see you, we'll be totally dependent on what you're going to do for us
but
I'm going to ask you to be angelically patient because you've interrupted us in the middle of something important. Would you mind parking your botty on one of those chairs and just … observing us? Soak in the atmosphere. Don't judge us harshly, we're at the amorphous stage. Here's a copy of the script. Don't take it too seriously. We've made a lot of changes that are not marked in, and there's bound to be more. Later on you and I will have a tête-à-tête and hammer something solid together. Now darlings, back to where you were.”

This speech annoyed me in so many ways that as I walked to one of the chairs against the wall I was imagining walking out of the building, but I sat down and divided my attention between the script on my knee and the continuing rehearsal, which kept quarrelsomely interrupting itself.

The play was a modern version of
Aladdin and His Wonder
ful Lamp
. Apart from the hero, who was a Scottish working-class simpleton, the characters were upper-class English types of the sort who are continually caricaturing themselves on radio and film. The production called itself A
Political Pantomime
, and had no doubt been written with satirical intent, but I saw nothing funny in it. Only Helen made it worth watching. She played a selfish, sexy, calculating bitch with so much vigour that her lines sounded witty. When not performing she sat hugging her shoulders as if she was cold, and her face above the long elegant neck looking as dreamy and remote as Carole's; or else she lay flat along four seats with closed eyes, her hair and one arm hanging to the floor. I thought it remarkable that she could put on three different versions of herself – aggressive,
thoughtful or utterly abandoned – within three adjacent minutes. The director, who also played the hero, struck me as a silly man and a bad actor. I can still picture him distinctly: effeminately handsome with narrow, pale-blue eyes and well-groomed wavy blond hair. He wore sandals, black slacks and sweater, also an earring and many silver necklaces. But in the fifties men who wanted to look gorgeous never wore jewellery, so I have imposed these on him from a later decade. When not acting he spoke a drawling Oxford accent which became very distinct when he pretended to lose his temper, which was once every five minutes or so. He called people “darling”, or “blossom”, or (when pretending to be angry) “tooty-fruity”, and he waved his arms a lot, so I knew at once he was homosexual. I was wrong. He was the lover of Helen and also of Diana, a less glamorous girl who acted all the other female parts in the play. Diana knew he was also Helen's lover. Helen was only beginning to suspect he was also Diana's lover, and Diana was her best friend. This was why Helen was so thoughtful between her performances and did not hear what folk said to her unless they spoke louder than usual. The others present were Roddy and Rory, straightforward manly young actors with no extravagance of dress, speech or manner, and a middle-aged man with the truculent, querulous voice of someone who knows he is insignificant and resents it. He sat in a hunched position and passed remarks that nobody else seemed to hear. I assumed he was a janitor attached to the rehearsal rooms. Wrong again.

As the rehearsal continued the truculent man hunched further and further into himself, then covered his face with his hands and started saying in a monotonous voice, “Oh no … Oh no … Oh no … Oh no … Oh no …” until the director stopped in mid-declamation and said wearily,

“What is it this time?”

“Overacting.”

“You are telling me that I cannot act?”

“I am telling you that your Glaswegian dialect is the corniest sort of ham.”

“Tooty-fruity, you are insane!” cried the director in a clear,
shrill Oxford-accented, phoney, fury, “I was born and bred in the Calton. My father works in Parkhead forge. Until I was twelve years old I thought that only the monarchy and Hollywood film stars had lavatories in their own houses. And now a schoolteacher from Carntyne tells me I can't speak the dialect of my own family!”

The querulous man said, “Yes, Brian, I agree that you are, essentially, a dirty wee Glasgow tyke from an even slummier background than my own. You are also quite a good actor. You can act
anything
except what you essentially are.” The director, with an indefinite expression on his face, walked round the room in a slow circle. We were all watching closely so he must have felt that his present performance was more interesting than the scripted one. When he got back where he had started he said mildly, “There is a simple solution. Let me play McGrotty as a cockney. I'm a master of the jellied-eels-on-the-Old-Kent-Road dialect. We're putting this thing on at an international festival, remember, with many more English than Scots in the audience, so there's no need for us to be narrowly provincial – is there?”