A Field Full of Folk (6 page)

Her youth and her clear bones affected him so much that he trembled.

She laid the helmet down on the table and shook her hair out.

“Ah, well, maybe I'll take it up to Mary Macarthur and she can wear it in bed.”

She prepared to leave and he said, “I think I'll repair the window today.”

“You do that. Keep it up. That's the spirit.”

And then she was away again in her small bubbly blue car on an errand of mercy to someone else. She waved to him like an officer from a staff car acknowledging his salute on a morning in France.

The grey cat came and sat on his lap purring contentedly. Its green slanted eyes stared at him unwinkingly while he stroked it. Then he put it down on the floor and said, “Well, cat, I'll have to do something about that window.” As he worked he saw Annie heading steadily east on her one mile walk which she took every day except Sunday, her staff in her hand. My God there's a woman for you, he thought, there's a woman for you. As she walked along she beat at the tops of the bushes with her stick and at one point when forced into the ditch by the driver of a racing car turned and waved it furiously and angrily.

8

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the field little Hugh and Alisdair, guns at their sides, stared at each other. They had worked their way past the Indians and now their wagons were simmering in the sun.

“You go for your gun first,” said Hugh.

“No, you go first,” said Alisdair. “I'm the sheriff. The sheriff isn't s'posed to go first.”

“The sheriff is,” said Hugh. There was a wasp humming past his ear and disturbing him. He flicked at it with his hand, keeping his face stern and steady. The wasp zoomed and planed away.

“It's not the sheriff goes first,” Alisdair insisted.

“Right,” said Hugh. “I'll count up to ten and we both go.” And he began to count. “One, two, three,” and the wasp returned. Four, five, and he swiped at it again. Bloody wasp, he heard a phantom voice say. Six, seven, and his face tightened. He could feel it tighten. Eight, nine, ten, and he went for his gun, and he saw Alisdair going for his gun and the two of them were staring at each other and Alisdair was shouting, “I beat you, I beat you.”

“Bloody wasp,” he heard the voice again. No, Alisdair hadn't beaten him. He was stunned by the drench of sun around him, he wanted to run, to dance. “I've got better sandals than you,” he shouted. And the larks trilled around him and the bushes flamed with red.

“No, you haven't, you haven't,” shouted Alisdair. The wasp had cleared off to wherever wasps went. He should have killed it.

“See,” said Hugh and he was bending down and holding a ring in his hand. They stared at it in fascination.

Alisdair tried to take it and Hugh said, “It's mine, it's mine, I found it.” He put it in his pocket.

They went and looked at the calf which was feeding in the green, damp grass.

It raised its head and mooed softly.

They saw Mrs Berry coming down with a pail and later the calf burying its hard bony head in the mash. It boxed at the pail, butting at it with its head in its desperate desire to get from it all the sustenance it could. Mrs Berry waved to them as she left the field and closed the gate behind her. She was so very old. The ducks and one drake followed her, tall and disdainful, with their red leathery masks.

Hugh and Alisdair climbed over the fence and descended to the river, which ran green in the half darkness. A rat ran along a bank and they threw stones at it. Then it disappeared through a hole. The day was heavy with scent, their sandals had green blades of grass clinging to them.

They threw stones into the water, creating ring after ring.

9

C
HRISTINE
M
URRAY WAS
walking along Byres Road in Glasgow, the message bag in her hand. It was a sunny day sparkling on the glass of windows and cars and she felt around her the perpetual motion of people, as if she were in the centre of a continually flowing stream. Her steps were springier than before, she felt more alive, as if the presence of so many people had animated her and filled her with vigour.

I love him, she thought, he is so unlike John. He lives on the chances of the day. Why, even his betting on horses shows that. Only yesterday he had rushed in and poured money into her lap. You go and buy yourself a coat, he had said, dresses, anything you want. He had looked so confident and young, though he was in fact older than her. She had been out dancing three times and already her village, slow and almost empty, had become only a memory. She had thrown it off with the symbolic casting away of the ring as she had made her way to the railway station in her tall red boots. Nothing would happen to her children, that was certain, John was a good father. Her action had been instinctive, she would never have been able to take it except on impulse, and she was glad that she had done what she did. Now she felt more vigorous, energetic, able to cope with the world around her. They had a flat high above the street and at night she could see the lights from the high rise buildings as if they were becalmed ships in a mysterious sea.

She would get a job in the city soon. When she had settled down, she would perhaps work in an office or a supermarket. She would meet people. Day after day she had lived in the village, waiting for her husband to come home at night, and when he did he had very little to say to her. Terry was different, he was always talking, making plans, it wasn't at all like living in the village, nothing here lasted for too long. In her tall red boots she stopped at a window which showed a silver machine spinning round and round. She went in and found that it was one of those Eastern shops where even the assistants were dressed in foreign clothes. What were they called? Kaftans? There was a strong smell which was probably incense. There were foods she had never seen before. She felt the centre of attraction. A man in a long coat which trailed behind him glanced at her sideways. There were candles of different colours, a prayer wheel, asses and donkeys in onyx, lighters heavy and solid. The shop was a riot of colours and strange perfumes.

If Terry won more money on the horses she would certainly come in here and buy something. She left the shop and walked up the road, stopping now and then and looking in the windows. It was like Christmas in her mind when she would stay awake all night and finally in the early morning tiptoe in her white cold nightdress across the green linoleum floor, her father and mother still asleep. The city suited her, it was as if she wanted to dance. The light flashing from the windows was like the workings of chance itself. When she stood at corners and gazed at the street it was as if anything could happen to her, as if that boy who had passed in his careless red cape would turn and take her away with him like Batman.

One day she had walked past a cemetery in the city and she had seen people at their midday break sitting among the tombs and eating their sandwiches and playing radios. What an odd experience it had been, and something in her had stirred and been offended by it. There they were lying on the grass or sitting with their backs to the tombstones, some even sitting on the flat ones, drinking their lemonade while their radios played “Sailing”. After all it was life and not death that she was interested in.

And now she was going home to the flat high above the street. It was a big spacious flat, not as well furnished as she would have liked, up six flights of stairs past the names of Italians on name-plates outside doors, the circular shaft spinning dizzily below her. If she looked through a window she could see the street with trees growing along it and the cars ranged each behind the other. And at night Terry would come from work in the restaurant where he was a waiter and on Saturday mornings they would roar on his motor bike out of the city. John had met Terry years ago when they had been on a course together in Glasgow where John had been learning about electronics before giving it up and coming back home. Terry had come now and again to see him, having himself abandoned the study of electronics as well.

The three of them used to go out together to the local hotel for drinks and then each time Terry left she had felt an ache in her body that neither John nor the children could assuage. Worst of all she had felt it when she was listening to the radio during the course of the morning and heard the latest songs. It was for instance as if that song “Sailing” had spoken to her, as if it were inviting her to leave her well-ordered life and set off somewhere, anywhere, where there was motion and animation. She had hardly ever been out of the village except when she had been working as a hairdresser in the neighbouring town before she got married. But that hadn't really been like leaving the village. If John had succeeded in electronics they might have moved away but she knew that his heart wasn't really in it and by that time there were the two children and they had been unable to leave. But now she had finally left and she could hear a voice singing, at the back of her mind, “No Regrets”, a voice with a French accent and no fear of living.

Even tonight Terry might come home with a few friends and they would put on the radio or some records, and dance. This was what life ought to be like, the unexpected, the random. Or he might take her to the restaurant where he worked and they could have their food there in the half darkness while the juke box played and the wine bottles lay aslant in their baskets and the couples talked gently to each other in the light of candles as if in a TV advertisement. He had told her that it would have taken him too long to make money in the electronics industry. Some day he might
become a manager or own a restaurant. After all it was only a question of making contacts, knowing the right people. Before that he had started a sweet-shop which had failed not because of him but because of inflation. Sometimes when he was lying in bed beside her and she watched the lights scissoring the ceiling he would say, “There's so much you can do here. I'd like to have a restaurant which would serve only Scottish food, you know salmon and stuff like that. And I'd have Scottish music and girls in kilts. You could be the manageress.” Or he would say, “A bicycle shop might be the best thing to have. Soon there won't be any oil and people will have to ride bikes.” Or he would say, “A launderama would be a good bet. Many people don't have washing machines and they can't air their clothes.” And she would lie beside him as he talked. The future was a live chancey thing like the smoke that snaked bluely from his cigarette. It was romantic that they should sleep naked in bed. When she had been married to John such a thing had never happened but now it seemed the most natural thing in the world. His mind seethed with ideas like the sun on a loch, he wasn't frightened of the world. However, she had once told him that he smoked too much and he had turned on her. The incident had lasted only a short time, the quick almost insane rage had blown out of the blue and subsided quickly, and then he had been calm again. But that rage had been really vicious, he had been about to strike her. She knew she would have to placate him, there was such a sudden demented strength to his anger.

One day he had shown her the place where he had grown up. It was a slum area which even as she watched was being blown down, men with bluish lights flowering at their gloves, and others high on roofs whistling down at her. In the distance she could see a bridge and then the glitter of the Clyde with the idle cranes dominating the skyline.

She climbed the stairs. Soon she would be in the flat and preparing Terry's food on the gas cooker. She would have much preferred the electric kind to which she was used but it sufficed. And then at night Terry would come home and they would talk and make plans and she herself would decide about a job.

It was an old grey-haired retired schoolmistress who lived opposite them but she herself hadn't spoken to her except that night when she and Terry had asked if they could use her 'phone to call a taxi because the rain was pouring down outside. That was another thing she missed, the 'phone. And the schoolmistress had a chain on her door and then had finally opened it because she recognised Terry and they had paid her the money for the 'phone call. But the schoolmistress had looked at them suspiciously all the time as if she thought they were going to attack her. How lonely she seemed and how lucky she herself was to have Terry! As the taxi made its way among the lights and over the bridge she had clutched Terry's hand while all the time he was saying, “The bugger's taking the long way round, that's for sure.” And when he had protested the taxi driver had said, “You can get off here, Jimmy, if you want. It's no skin off my nose, but you pay where you get off,” and Terry had snorted angrily but had left it at that. That was the night they had visited his friend Eddie and had stayed there playing records till one o'clock in the morning. Eddie was hunchbacked and collected Space Fiction. “He's a clever lad that,” Terry had told her but all she could remember about Eddie was that he smelt, and his rooms were a desolate clutter of books and old boxes as if he were already half packed for somewhere else (perhaps Mars) but couldn't bring himself to go. A budgie jumped restlessly from bar to bar of its cage and preened itself in front of a tiny pink-framed mirror while the hunchbacked Eddie leaned like Humphrey Bogart against a wall.

10

“A
ND
I
SAY
,” said Murdo Macfarlane, “that they shouldn't be given the church hall for their dance.”

“And why not?” said the minister patiently.

“Well,” said Donald Drummond, pushing back a lock of his silver hair, and not committing himself till he saw what way the minister decided. Murdo's face filled with blood as he tried to put his feelings into words. They were all against him, it was only he that could see the Apocalypse that was coming by giving in to everybody, especially to the younger generation. Drummond always followed the minister, but neither Scott nor Macrae had spoken yet. Scott was the incomer from England who wrote the pantomime every year. As for Macrae he was a slow heavy farmer who had two children of his own.