Meeting the English (16 page)

Struan didn't think it did, particularly. He started to walk to the double doors. Through them, lit up like the cinema in the sunset, was Celia. She was wearing a long cheeseclothy dress, with cuffs, and she actually looked really pretty, really grown-up, with her wispy hair and wee triangle face. Like a model. She was dancing, or sort of holding a pose, to some music from a tape machine someone was carrying along the street, and Jake popped up beside her, holding another pose, holding her hand.

‘See what I mean?' hissed Juliet. ‘They're throwing shapes.'

‘Is that what that's called?' said Struan. ‘I've never seen that.' It made him lonely, that dancing. He thought, you had to be English, to do that. You had to be born to it.

Then the music box walked off down the street and Struan put the tray of drinks on the table. Everyone took one and Mr Fox and Celia and Juliet sat down and there wasn't a chair over for Struan. So Struan stood behind the table, facing them, leaning against the wall beside Jake Prys, who had a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Jake removed his cigarette, blew out, and said:

‘How's it hanging, Stru-anne?' Then went on smoking.

‘I'm grand. Thanks,' said Struan. Jake was wearing a singlet and shorts, and Struan could all at once see that Juliet was right, and it was better to dress like that than it was to wear his damp checky shirt. It was a terrible humid evening. ‘What are you up to yourself?' he said to Jake Prys.

But Jake wasn't really listening to him. He was listening to Mr Fox making Celia laugh, and his loose mouth was tight while he did so. Mr Fox was telling more stories about Cuik, and the girls were listening, that was what was happening in the conversation. Juliet's eyes were shining, her cheeks were flushed: she had never been so interested in Struan's version of Cuik. Jake puffed his cigarette loudly, sighed aloud, and Struan thought probably Juliet was right about Jake and Celia having a thing, and he'd probably treat her badly soon enough, poor wee lassie, but was that any of his business?

Mr Fox was going on about the mines again, and Jake leaned forward and said, ‘If the mines are empty, why keep scraping them out? If there isn't any work, why keep the people there? They need to move.' And what Struan thought about that was – Struan who knew about the broken unions, the boarded-up shops, the closed clubs, about the symptoms of emphysema, about men who work fifty years underground and die in the Home a year later, about the pair of brothers who came to his school on alternate days because they had one coat between them – well, Struan thought that was a point of view.

‘Jake,' said Mr Fox, ‘what you don't understand is the whole mindset. This is a whole community built round one thing. You can't simply uproot them. It's not just about money, it's about imagination. These are people who can't imagine themselves anywhere else, doing something different.'

Then he started telling about the High School staffroom, and how all the seats had greasy patches worn in the antimacassars and special owners for the last five hundred years, and Struan said to the table: ‘Could you do it, though? I mean, if there wasn't any work in England all of a sudden? If they all of a sudden said you couldnae do arty stuff in Hampstead any more, that you couldnae do anything with words, even, and all of youse had to work with your hands in the open-cast mining. Could you imagine yourself somewhere else, doing something different?'

But the Pimm's had strange effects, and those words somehow stayed in Struan's head and didn't make it out his mouth, or maybe some of them did, but Jake didn't seem to notice, he was leaning forward listening to Mr Fox tell about the annual patchwork Christmas tree competition the women teachers had, and watching Celia watch Mr Fox and laugh her tinkling grown-up laugh. Mr Fox started telling about the Head of French who'd said, ‘Och, I can't abide an orange, it's such a messy froot.' Struan knew that was probably true: she was a dull enough woman, Mme Carmichael, with her falling-forward bun of grey hair and well-filled detention book. She raffled the trees, every year, and that was for charity, but—

‘The trouble,' said Mr Fox, ‘is again that narrowness, that lack of experience of the world. The children of Cuik know nothing outside Cuik, and that means, apart from anything else, that they can't see themselves. Tragic.'

Celia and Juliet looked quite cast down by this insight, but Jake jumped in, from behind Mr Fox's shoulder: ‘And so you lit up their lives, did you?'

‘No, Jake.' Mr Fox shook his head slowly. ‘Nothing like that. I … I did my best for a year. You can only do what you can do.' And he shook his head, sadly.

‘And do you think that was good of you?' asked Jake. ‘A favour?'

‘I think it was the right thing to do,' said Mr Fox, folding his arms.

‘Well, I think you should have left them alone, actually,' said Jake.

‘Jake,' said Juliet, ‘don't start.'

‘Did they want you there, Ron?' continued Jake. ‘The little primitive Scottish people? Did you want him, Stru-anne?'

‘We needed an English teacher,' said Struan. ‘You see, Mr Nicholl, that was the Head of English, he had a stroke.'

‘Did you need
him?
' said Jake. ‘Did you need our friend Ron? Or wouldn't you have been just as happy with one of your own sort? A Scottish teacher?'

Struan gulped his drink. ‘I liked meeting Mr Fox,' he said, calmly and firmly. ‘He was that bit different.'

‘Jake,' said Juliet. ‘Stop being a total fascist.'

‘Oh,' said Jake, ‘but I am, you see, little sis? The more I go on in theatre, the more I believe in an elite. An elite of the brilliant. The truly talented. I think only a few people can make art, and life is too short. We have to meet each other. We have to get on with our work.'

‘Don't you think,' said Mr Fox, ‘that there might be artists in Cuik? People who just need discovering, bringing on? Like Struan, for instance?'

‘Many a flower is born to blush unseen?' said Jake. ‘I don't, actually. I think that's a bit of a PC myth. I think that actually the provinces are full of weeds. And that flowers announce themselves. And that Stru-anne is going to be a dentist.'

‘But,' said Mr Fox. ‘Your father. His background, his career. A miner's son with such a talent—'

‘That,' said Jake, ‘is a bit of a myth too. Dad was the manager's son. His mother was a schoolteacher. Granny Prys. Never forgave him for all the swearing in
The Pit
– did she, Juliet?'

‘Washed out his mouth with soap and water,' said Juliet, in her best cod-Welsh. ‘She still had us to stay though, Jake.'

‘Though, of course, she can't have been much fun before that, can she? Gran. Or why would
The Pit
be so misogynist?'

‘Oh, now, come on,' said Mr Fox, ‘
The Pit
may be rooted in its time and place but—'

‘All the women in that play are nags or whores,' said Jake. ‘Actually. Whores who become nags at best. Well, well, Granny Prys was a bore and my mother was a whore, so maybe that is how they all are, in the Provinces. Why don't you tell me, Ron, after your outing to the darkness? Dr Livingstone of Cuik.'

This thought went down Struan's body like an ice cube. Not about Mr Fox being a missionary – he'd worked that one out for himself, a while back. No, about the women, in
The Pit and Its Men.
Why the play didn't feel true. It was because of the women. They weren't real, they were systematically wrong. Suddenly, he was angry with Mr Fox. It was so obvious. Mr Fox should have pointed it out. Struan could have written that in the Higher exam, and not come away with the feeling of being a phoney.

‘Your father's work is of a piece with its time,' said Mr Fox.

‘Dated,' said Jake, ‘fatal. It's a failure of sympathy, you see. Subtlety. A denial of depth.'

Struan knocked back the end of his Pimm's. It was like swallowing a pikestaff, a chilled, stainless-steel one. He put the glass on the table, felt giddy, and planted both his fists there too. The table wobbled.

‘That's what you're doing, though,' he said to his clenched hands, and this time he could hear his own voice. ‘That's what
you're
doing. All of you with Cuik and the provinces and that, you're not letting them be real.'

‘Real?' said Jake.

‘Yeah,' said Struan. ‘That's it. Real. 3D. But we are real, up there. You haven't met us, that's all.'

‘I think you're real, Struan,' said Juliet.

‘I spent a year of my life,' began Mr Fox.

‘Nine months,' said Struan, ‘and you still didn't meet us, Mr Fox.'

‘Ron,' said Mr Fox. ‘Now, Struan…'

‘No,' said Struan. ‘Excuse me, you didn't.' And he stared at Mr Fox until Mr Fox dropped his gaze. ‘It's OK,' he went on, ‘Cuik folk are hard to meet. And anyway, it's hard to meet folk who are different, even if you are staying with them, because you bring your own mind with you. Like me. Like I bring my mind with me. I thought English people were different until I came down here.'

‘We are different,' said Jake.

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘you are, you really are, you're different. And what happens in my head is, I look at you and the way you act, and I want to say, that's all they are, these people, different, English. They're all the same. That's the thing that's not right. It's like what you were saying about your dad's play, Jake, I really liked what you said. About denying depth. Subtlety.'

‘
You
liked what I said about
subtlety,
' said Jake, on the edge of a titter. He was squared up to Struan now, both of them standing, with the girls and Mr Fox fixed in their chairs, the audience.

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘aye, I did. You see, what I think is, it's about letting folk be all there. 3D. Having all their feelings. I have to let you English people have all your feelings, not the just the English ones. And you, you have to let the folk in Cuik be stupid and clever, and nice and nasty as well. You have to let them feel stuff. I mean, have the whole range.'

‘They can't,' said Jake. ‘
Feel.
They're Scottish. They're
brutally
repressed.' Juliet and Celia laughed at this, delicately, relieved, and Mr Fox snorted. And Struan felt very angry, which he hadn't been before, he'd been trying to explain something, and he said:

‘And you don't? You English? You don't repress your feelings? What about you, Jake Prys, you've never come to see your dad in his chair, since he's had his stroke. You think that's not
repressed?
'

Jake slapped Struan, then. He reached out his flat hand and just hit him. And Struan put his hand to his burning cheek, bent his head, and walked dizzily away. He thought he would just go to the Heath, then, and have a swim.

15

So now Juliet was thin, and with someone who fancied her, and walking on Hampstead Heath on a warm summer's night on an anti-Jake mission. She was not enjoying it as much as you might think.

‘Of course Struan is proud,' said Ron, foraging ahead on the Heath path, his fringe bouncing in the faint moonlight. ‘If your brother had ever been to Cuik, he might have had some understanding of that. It's not the sort of thing you learn at Oxford.'

‘Jake actually just got expelled from Oxford,' said Juliet. Her heels were still bouncy, but her head had a bobbing, poorly tethered feeling. She wondered how old Ron was. She wondered if he had been to Oxford, and betted he hadn't, that was why he was so wound up about it. She thought how boring it was, the way people went on about Oxford, and wondered where Celia went, after the scene at the pub. She wondered, with a little hot wonder, whether she and Jake were having sex right now, and what they would look like from outside, and then she thought how totally unfair it was for anyone to think for a minute that that was normal, or that Juliet shouldn't be curious about it.

‘Sent down?' said Ron. ‘That's unusual, these days.' He paused at a junction, stroking his chin, like he knew.

‘Well,' said Juliet, ‘rusticated. He has to stay away for a year. He couldn't do his play either. He was going to take his play up to Edinburgh, but they wouldn't let him. Or maybe his money ran out, or something, I'm not very sure. To be honest that's the first time I've seen him for ages, just now in the pub, I know that's weird because we're family but it's a pretty odd relationship. Look, do you think he's shagging Celia?' Juliet was conscious that as soon as she opened her mouth, words poured out as if they'd been tightly stacked behind her teeth. That was the pills again, though combined, let's be honest, with her actual personality: the real, escaping Juliet. Suddenly, Ron grabbed her hand and fixed her with his glossy gerbil eyes.

‘Is Jake taking drugs?' said Ron.

‘How should I know?' squeaked Juliet. Ron pushed back his quiff with his free hand.

‘He had,' said Ron, ‘something strange and glittering about his eyes. I thought – just from my experience with kids, you know – that maybe he was taking something. It's all right, Juliet, you can tell me.' Juliet took her hand back, and stuck it her armpit.

‘He's always looked like that,' she said. ‘He was on the telly in
The Sword in the Stone
when he was eight looking like that. He was a child actor, you know, Daddy had all the connections, you know those programmes on the BBC with cardboard sets and all the acting is so crap, it hurts your teeth? I wasn't a child actor because they said I was too fat for the cameras. We should try and find Struan.'

Juliet bustled along the path. She was trying to outrun the picture in her head of Celia and Jake, throwing shapes in the street. Jake would dump Celia and it wouldn't matter, someone else would want her now, she was all woken up, she was a sex-pot, she, and not Juliet, had perfect skin. Not telling Juliet about it was weird and wrong and she should be done for it.