First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (4 page)

Everyone was silent. My aunt was watching my mother, who eventually spoke.

“Please,” she said. “Can’t we leave it alone? He’s dead. He didn’t want to live. What’s done is done.”

The doctor looked into those green eyes, then looked away and nodded his head quickly at Constable MacTaggart.

“Certainly,” the Doctor said, “this business of the arm isn’t important so far as the cause of death is concerned. Falling from a height—that’s what killed him.”

Constable MacTaggart was a scrawny, hawk-nosed man who’d represented law and order in Stroven for thirty years, and knew how to handle these local problems with the minimum of fuss.

“Let’s get the death certificate signed, then,” he said.

Jamie Sprung spoke to my mother.

“If you like, we’ll go back up and see if we can find the rest of his arm,” he said.

“No, don’t do that,” she said. “There’s no need to do any more. You’ve been very kind.” She looked at Doctor Giffen, Constable MacTaggart, Jamie Sprung and the other men. “You’ve all been very kind.”

Only women attended the funeral service, though men carried the coffins to the graveyard: two black mahogany coffins, one large, one small.

As the funeral procession passed through the Square, I was in someone’s arms at an upstairs window. The women of Stroven, of every shape and size, followed the black-curtained hearse, marching four abreast, in slow time, like a regiment in mourning. They wore the uniform of the Upland women: long black coats, black headscarves that lay low on their foreheads and flat black shoes. I could see among them Midwife Findley and the women who’d been
at the reception in the garden: Mrs Glenn, the Pharmacist’s wife, and Mrs Darvell, the Grocer’s wife, and Miss Balfour, the Librarian, and Mrs MacCallum, the Baker’s wife, and Jenny Morrison, the Tailor, and Mrs Gibson, the owner of the Stroven Café; and mixed in with them, some of the miners’ wives: Mrs Blythe, Mrs Mitchell, Mrs Haworth, Mrs Thomson, Mrs Harrigan, Mrs Kennedy, Mrs Holmes, Mrs Bromley, Mrs Cummings, Mrs Hewson, Mrs Browne and Mrs Thornwayne. At the rear of the column, two women marched abreast. One of them was tall, one short. The tall one carried a long staff with a silken pennant fluttering from the top. It had writing on it that was hard to read, because the banner was constantly shifting in the breeze. When these last two women passed below the window, my heart lifted, for I knew they were my mother and my aunt, and I loved them more than anything in the world. But as they passed, their heads and the heads of all the other women turned and they looked up at me. Their faces were the faces of strangers, and even though the sun was shining, it might have been the middle of the night, for their eyes glared like the eyes of wolves caught in headlights.

But it wasn’t the middle of the night; it was broad daylight, and the sun shone on the women, and on Stroven, and on the noose of hills around them. And it shone and it shone as though it would shine for ever.

T
HOSE FIRST DAYS
of my life hiccup through my mind like an old black-and-white movie. Not that I really remember them. I heard about them only once, much later, and in a very general way. But I suppose the mind can’t bear gaps, and my mind has filled in the details. Now, it’s hard for me to tell the difference between the things I was eventually told and those I invented; they’re all like memories of my own: the moment of my exit with my sister from my mother’s womb; the feel of that papery hand of the Provost on my head; the heat of the sun in the garden; the laughter, the chatter of voices, the chink of porcelain beer mugs, the fiddle music; the awful
crack!
; my father’s mutilated body on the kitchen table; the procession of the Stroven women to the graveyard.

When I eventually learnt about the circumstances of my birth, I was a good deal older. Only then did I understand that my mother had given me life twice: once, in the regular way of a mother bearing a child; the second time, in choosing to place my sister rather than me in the lethal arms of Thomas Halfnight, my father.

Nor was it my mother who told me the story. Any time I hinted to her that I’d like to know something about the past—even why I had that purple stain on my chest—she gave me a look that put a stop to my questions. By the time I was seven, I knew better than to ask.

Nor did any of the adults of Stroven tell me about that day in the garden, though none of those who were there ever forgot it. It was just that they believed certain things are better left untold.

The Stroven children weren’t quite so discreet. For instance, they talked about my father. To them, he was
some kind of legendary monster. The story of his missing arm seemed to be common knowledge amongst them. The first time I heard of it was from Jack Macdiarmid, the son of the Carpenter, during the heat of a football game in the playground.

“Hey, Halfwit!” he shouted. That was one of my nicknames, along with “Half-pint,” and “Half-baked.” “Your father was a cannibal! He ate his own arm and choked on it!” He laughed unpleasantly.

Another time, one of my classmates, Isabel Blythe, told me a different rumour. She said some of the other Stroven men had cut off my father’s arm and stuffed his fingers down his throat.

I’d no idea where these stories came from. But they caused me a lot of anguish. In history classes, whenever we came across the topic of cannibalism, I felt everyone was looking at me. The image of my father devouring his own arm gave me my first nightmares, and was part of my version of my life till I knew better.

I never told my mother about the stories I’d heard. If I had, she herself might have told me the truth about my father. She might have told me I once had a twin sister. I wonder what difference it would have made to me if I’d known these things sooner. Would I have become the man I am now if my past had been revealed to me when I wanted to know it? Would its impact on me have been the same? Perhaps and perhaps not. I’m not so sure the chronology of our emotional lives is all that linear.

At any rate, I was still ignorant about these earlier occurrences in my life.

I was now ten years old, a small boy for my age, shy, a good scholar at Stroven school. I felt awkward about our family name, Halfnight—I wished it had been a Mac-something,
or a simple Smith or Brown, or any of the other common Stroven names. I wished my past had been the same as everyone else’s. But we were outsiders. One of the only things I knew about my father was that he must have left my mother fairly well off. That was why we could afford to live in the big house and she didn’t seem to have to worry about money.

The house was a misfit in Stroven, too. It had been built as a place to retire in, by an old sea captain. He let it be known he’d chosen Stroven because it was far away from the sea. He lived alone in the big house, like an exotic hermit. He kept on wearing his seaman’s uniform, and he had as little to do with the townspeople as possible.

But he didn’t live long. In his first winter in Stroven, after a December storm, he was found leaning over the front gate, dead. He was dressed in his oilskins and sou’wester and still clutched a telescope in his hand. Some of the townspeople believed he’d forgotten where he was—that he thought he was on deck, trying to navigate his ship through the final gale.

After his death, the house was rented intermittently, mainly by mine managers. And lastly, not long before I was born, by my parents. I loved my mother deeply, though she was not an easy mother to love: in addition to not being much of a talker, she didn’t like to hug or be hugged. Displays of feelings seemed to be, for her, a sign of weakness. And yet I could never be sure if that was what she really thought, or what she thought about anything, for that matter. I had the impression it was as distasteful to her to reveal the contents of the mind as of the bowels.

“The unspoken words inside your head,” she told me once, “may seem very wise. But as soon as they come out of your mouth, you realize how foolish they are, and it’s too late then to call them back.”

She didn’t work, but volunteered to spend a few afternoons each week visiting the sick wives of miners. These women admired her. And she wasn’t without male admirers such as Jamie Sprung, the finder of my father’s body. He was a miner and a bachelor, and he made a point of dropping by the house regularly. He’d cut the lawn and do odd jobs, and he’d come some evenings for dinner. Sometimes he was still sitting with my mother by the fire when it was time for me to go to bed. One morning, I rose early enough to look out of my window and see him scurrying down the pathway from the house before anyone in town was up and about.

All that stopped when the War began. Jamie Sprung was conscripted into the navy. He drowned along with six hundred others when his ship, on a warm starless night, struck a mine in mid-ocean ten thousand miles from Stroven.

If my mother mourned his death, I didn’t notice.

“One man in my life is enough,” she would say from time to time.

I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to be flattering to me, or not.

A
CHANGE CAME OVER
her in the September after my eleventh birthday. She was coughing a lot, and I thought she’d caught a cold. I noticed how much paler than usual she looked and how much less she ate. That cough persisted, day after day, week after week—a dry, hacking cough that racked her body. Once or twice I asked her about it.
She made it plain that illness was among those things better not discussed.

So I remember very clearly the morning she broke that rule. It was a late November morning. A bitterly cold Upland wind had left the tips of the hills frostbitten.

“I’ve an appointment with Doctor Giffen this morning,” she said, as I was leaving for school.

The fact she told me even this much worried me all day. So when I came home from school that afternoon, I was anxious to know what had happened at the Doctor’s. Naturally, she said nothing about it for the longest time. When dinner was over, we sat by the fire reading. After a bout of coughing, she spoke.

“Andrew,” she said. “Doctor Giffen says I’ve to spend more time lying down. He seems to think that’ll help get rid of this cough.”

Doctor Giffen took to dropping by each day, and often he’d be with my mother when I came home from school. He was a small man who always dressed formally in a grey pinstriped suit. His black hair was like hair painted onto a puppet. He had a short black beard. He had small, bright eyes. He carried with him the austere smell of ether. He didn’t smile much, and when he did, it was a small thin smile, like one of those scalpels in his bag.

Once, I heard him say to my mother, after he’d examined her: “You have such lovely skin.” That made me suspect he loved her, though the ether smell that was always around him seemed to me the antithesis of love.

The fact that he was small was not unusual in Stroven. Most of the miners were short men, bred like moles for the tunnels. But his beard was a different matter. He was the only man in Stroven with a beard.

It was on his advice we moved my mother’s bed into the
living-room. Her bedroom, like all the bedrooms in the big house, wasn’t warm enough: there were dark blotches on the green wallpaper, and blisters on the ceiling. Dampness was one of the things she needed to avoid.

My mother and I together carried her bed downstairs and set it up in the living-room midway between the big fireplace and the front window. From that day on, she spent much more time in bed, though she still got up for a few hours each day, and cooked meals for me.

While she lay in bed, she’d read the books and magazines Miss Balfour, the Librarian, would drop off on weekends. She’d sit for a while, talking, and seemed to enjoy her visits. My mother didn’t say much, so she was a good audience.

Her cough wasn’t going away. It left specks of blood on her handkerchiefs. She coughed more and more, day and night. My bedroom was upstairs, and the walls and the floor were thick, but I could still hear her.

A particular evening at the beginning of December is nailed to my memory. Outside, the weather sounded like a demented military band, what with the sleet drumming against the windows and the piping of the wind. She wasn’t in bed, but sitting in one of the corduroy armchairs by the fire. I was sitting in the other, reading. She had a book on her knee, but she was using it as a writing desk. At one point I looked up, perhaps because I didn’t hear the scratch of the pen, and I saw she’d been looking at me, I don’t know for how long.

“I’m writing to your Aunt Lizzie,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

She began writing again. The wind howled outside. Inside, the fire crackled, her pen was again scratching. I watched her sitting there, in her nightgown, her legs
tucked under her, the book on her knee, a wisp of hair over her face.

And, suddenly, I could have wept. For at that moment, for the first time, I was struck with an awful fear that she was going to die, that she was going to leave me alone in the world. She looked up just then and her green eyes were shrewd. I tried to smile but it was too late. I knew she’d read the selfish fear in my face as easily as if it had been written on a page.

“Don’t worry, Andrew,” she said. “If anything happens to me, you’ll go and live with Lizzie. Doctor Giffen will make the arrangements.”

The fire was blazing, but her words were like slivers of ice in my heart.

At school, on the day before the winter break, I was called to the office. I knocked and the Principal came to the door. He was a tall droopy man with an oversized pale face, placid eyes, and lank brown hair that fell over his forehead.

“Ah, Andrew,” he said. “Come in. Doctor Giffen’s here to talk to you. I’ll leave you two alone.” He headed off down the corridor.

Doctor Giffen was standing by the desk. The smell of ether competed with the school’s stale, institutional smell. When I came in, he wiped the edge of the desk with a handkerchief and perched on it. I stood in front of him.

“Andrew,” he said. “Your mother’s very ill.” He spoke quietly, as he always did, though there was no one around to hear. Everything he said now had a confidential, lethal air.