Mavis Belfrage (15 page)

Nobody answered. I realized nobody there had five pounds on them or the means of turning my cheque into cash if they had.

“Cash it at the bar Harry,” said Mish.

“I would like to – but do you think the barman will do it without a cheque card?”

“No cheque card?” said Mish on a shrill note.

“None! I've never had a cheque card. If I had I would lose it. I'm always losing things. But the barmen in Tennent's cash my cheques without one …”

Davenport, who had a black beard and a firm manner, waved to the barman and said, “Jimmy, this pal of ours wants to cash a cheque. He's Harry Haines, a well-known character in the west end with a good going business –”

“In fact he's loaded,” said Mish –

“– and you would oblige us by cashing a cheque for him. He's left his cheque card at home.”

“Sorry,” said the barman, “there's nothing I can do about that.”

He turned his back on us.

“I'm sorry too,” I told them helplessly.

“You,” Mish told me, “are a mean old fart. You are not only mean, you are a bore. You are totally uninteresting.”

At these my words my embarrassment vanished and I cheered up. I no longer minded my social superiority. I felt boosted by it. With an air of mock sadness I said, “True! So I must leave you. Goodbye folks.”

I think the three men were also amused by the turn things had taken. They said cheerio to me quite pleasantly.

I left the Whangie and went toward Mackay's bank, carefully remembering the previous ten minutes to see if I might have done better with them. I did not regret entering the Whangie with Mish. She had pleasantly excited me and I had not then known she only saw me as a source of free drink. True, I had talked boringly – had bored myself as well as them – but interesting topics would have emphasized the social gulf between us. I might have amused them with queer stories about celebrities whose private lives are more open to me than to popular journalism (that was probably how the duke entertained Mackay's father between drams in the tool shed) but it strikes me as an unpleasant way to cadge favour with underlings. I was pleased to think I had
been no worse than a ten-minute bore. I had made a fool of myself by wanting credit for a round of drinks I did not buy, but that kind of foolery hurts nobody. If Mish and her pals despised me for it good luck to them. I did not despise myself for it, or only slightly. In the unexpected circumstances I was sure I could not have behaved better.

The idea of taking a hundred-pound note from Mackay's money and buying a round of drinks only came to me later. So did the idea of handing the note to Mish, saying, “Share this with the others,” and leaving fast before she could reply. So did the best idea of all: I could have laid five hundred-pound notes on the table, said, “Conscience money, a hundred each,” and hurried off to put the rest in Mackay's account. Later I could have told him, “I paid back half what I owe today. You'll have to wait till next week for the rest – I've done something stupid with it.” As he heard the details his mouth would open wider and wider or his frown grow sterner and sterner. At last he would say, “That's the last interest-free loan you get from me” – or something else. But he would have been as astonished as the five in the pub. I would have proved I was not predictable. Behaving like that would have changed me for the better. But I could not imagine doing such things then. I can only imagine them since I changed for the worse.

I walked from the Whangie toward Mackay's bank brooding on my recent adventure. No doubt there was a smug little smile on my lips. Then I noticed
someone walking beside me and a low voice saying, “Wait a minute.”

I stopped. My companion was Roberta who stood staring at me. She was breathing hard, perhaps with the effort of overtaking me, and her mouth was set in something like a sneer. I could not help looking straight at her now. Everything I saw – weird hair and sneering face, shapeless leather jacket with hands thrust into flaps below her breasts, baggy grey jeans turned up at the bottoms to show clumsy thick-soled boots laced high up the ankles – all these insulted my notion of how a woman ought to look. But her alert stillness as her breathing quietened made me feel very strange, as if I had seen her years ago, and often. To break the strangeness I said sharply, “Well?”

Awkwardly and huskily she said, “I don't think you're mean or uninteresting. I like older men.”

Her eyes were so wide open that I saw the whole circle of the pupils, one brown, one blue. There was a kind of buzzing in my blood and the nearby traffic sounded fainter. I felt stronger and more alive than I had felt for years – alive in a way I had never expected to feel again after my marriage went wrong. Her sneer was now less definite, perhaps because I felt it on my own lips. Yes, I was leering at her like a gangster confronting his moll in a 1940 cinema poster and she was staring back as if terrified to look anywhere else. I was fascinated by the thin stubble at the sides of her head above the ears. It must feel exactly like my chin before I shaved in the morning. I wanted to rub it hard with the palms of my hands. I heard myself say, “You want money. How?”

She murmured that I could visit my bank before we went to her place – or afterward, if I preferred. My leer became a wide grin. I patted my inner pocket and said, “No need for a bank, honey. I got everything you want right here. And we'll take a taxi to my place, not yours.”

I spoke with an American accent, and the day turned
into one of the worst in my life.

Perhaps you know that musclemen – hard men who want to be extra strong – have a habit of eating big feeds of steak and chips, and the minute the last mouthful is swallowed they heave big weights, or run great distances, or work machines that let them do both at the same time. This converts all the food in their guts into muscle without an ounce of additional fat. When a dedicated muscleman overeats, sheer strength is the only outcome.

There was once a man who trained that way to strengthen his brain. Not only after but
during
big feeds he would read very deep books – trigonometry, accountancy, divinity, that class of subject – and think about them fiercely and continually till he felt hungry again. He grew so brainy that before you said a word to him he guessed the sort of thing you meant to say and quoted Jesus or Euclid or Shakespeare who had said it better. This destroyed his social life but at first he didn't care.

One day he was sitting in a restaurant reading Edison's
Tractatus
and beasting into his third plate of steak and chips when he noticed a young woman across the table from him eating the same stuff. She had cut it into small bits and was forking them steadily into her mouth with one hand while writing just as steadily with the other. She wrote in red ink on a block of the squared paper scientists use for charts and diagrams, but she was writing words as clear as print, words so neat and regular that he could not stop staring at them although they were illegible from where he sat being upside down. He noticed that the woman, though not a small woman, was neat and regular in a way that suggested a school mistress. He could not imagine what she would say if she spoke to him and the strangeness of this put him in a confusion through which at last he heard his voice ask if she would please pass the salt cellar, which was as close to him as to her.

The woman glanced at the salt cellar – at him – smiled – put her fork down and said, “What will I most dislike about you if I let that request lead to intimate friendship?”

He hesitated then said frankly, “My breadth of knowledge. I talk better about more things than anyone else. Nobody likes me for it.”

She nodded and said, “What do you know about the interface between pre-Columbian Aztec pottery, Chinese obstetrics during the Ming dynasty and the redrawing of constituency boundaries in the Lothian Region subsequent to the last general election?”

He said, “They are perfect examples of inter-disciplinary
cross-sterilization. When William Blake said that
The dog starved at his master's gate predicts the ruin of the state
he was stating a political fact. The writer who traced a North American hurricane back to a butterfly stamping on a leaf in a tropical rain forest was reasoning mathematically. The absurd interface you posit is (like most post-modernist and post-constructionalist concepts) a sort of mental afterbirth. Are you writing about it?”

“No but you can reach for the salt cellar yourself,” she said and went on writing. The man felt a pang of unintelligent grief. He tried to quench it with manly anger. “Tell me just one thing!” he said sternly. “If we had conversed intimately what would I have most disliked about you?”

“My depth of sympathy,” she answered with a patient sigh. “No matter how loud-mouthed, boastful and dismissive you grew I would realize you could never be different.”

“O thank
God
you never passed me that salt cellar!” he cried.

And continued reading Edison's
Tractatus
but could no longer concentrate.

In 1960 I went on holiday to Ireland with Andrew Sykes, a tough small stocky man with a thick thatch of white hair and a face like a boxer's. Like myself he dressed comfortably rather than smartly. We had met when he was a mature student at Glasgow University and I a very callow one just out of Glasgow Art School.
We were from the working class who had benefited when two post-war governments (Labour and Tory) agreed that all who qualified for professional educations might have them whether or not they or their parents could pay. Andrew, who had been a sergeant with the British army in India, eventually won a doctorate through a paper on trade unions in the building industry, getting his knowledge by the unacademic ploy of working as a navvy. His army experience and a course in economics had also given him insights into the workings of our officer and financial class. He took malicious glee in gossiping to me about the insider trading by which this minority manipulate the rest. My notion of Britain had been formed at the end of the Second World War when our government announced the coming of a fairer society and the creation of social welfare for all. I had thought Britain was now mainly managed by folk who had mastered difficult processes through training and experience. Andrew explained that, as often today as in the past, most British civil service and business chiefs had stepped into senior positions because they had been to three or four expensive boarding schools and a couple of universities in the English east midlands: institutions where exams mattered less than their parents' wealth and friends they had made. He persuaded me that Britain was not (as most of our politicians and publicity networks claimed) a democracy, but an electoral aristocracy.

I thought Andrew disliked this unfair system since he was entering a profession through a socialist act of
parliament. On our Irish holiday (we were guests of his friends Greta and David Hodgins at Nenagh in Tipperary) I was surprised to find he hated almost any group who wanted to change the dominant system. He even hated the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He forgave me for being a member but we could not discuss it. The only political hope we shared was a wish for Scottish self-government. I enjoyed what I saw of Ireland but enjoyed his company less than I had expected. His hobbies were wrestling and judo. He told me that body builders convert steak into muscle by a course of weight-lifting immediately after a meal. I will say more about him because he gave me more than the first sentence of “Edison's
Tractatus
”.

He became Strathclyde University's first Professor of Sociology in 1967, retired in 1989, died in 1991. His closest relatives were aunts with whom he lodged in a Glasgow tenement until they died long before he did. His job gave him prestige and colleagues. His holidays with the Hodgins in Tipperary gave him a family whose children regarded him as an uncle, a community which treated him as an equal. From a Labour Party member he became a xenophobic Tory. In the university staff club he once aimed a judo kick at a black visitor who was quietly minding his own business. Since his special study was trade unions in the 1980s he became a salaried adviser of the British government, telling Margaret Thatcher how to weaken them. He took self-conscious glee in the bowler hat, tailor-made striped trousers, black jacket and waistcoat
he acquired for visits to Downing Street. I fear he did a lot of harm but not to me. From 1961 to 1974 he was my only steady patron. He bought paintings and lent money when I was in need, usually taking a drawing as repayment. He lent me money as if it was an ordinary, unimportant action, leaving my self-respect undamaged. I cannot type so he got his secretaries to type my poems, plays and first novel onto wax stencils from which (in days when photocopying was hugely expensive) they printed all the copies I needed without charge. In 1974 he arranged for the Collins Gallery of Strathclyde University to give the largest retrospective show my pictures have ever had, getting a Glasgow Lord Provost to open it.