LITMIR.BIZ

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hedgehog. Doubt he couldn’t endure. Placed in it, he would grasp a wilful decision and cudgel his way out with it, no matter what. His aggressiveness was already well known in High Street. She often felt that he was challenging something to happen to him. He seemed to get into so many fights, and win them, which perhaps was worse. He had never turned his tongue on her, and Tam’s forcefulness had kept him a polite and biddable boy, as far as they knew. It was the extent of what they didn’t know that worried. Even so young, he was chafing, she could tell. And soon he would start work.

      Hearing his bored voice as an indirect insult to her parents, she was glad she had brought Conn along tonight. He could try to read a bit for them. He should be able to, he was doing so well at school – top of his class. She had even once received a note from one of the teachers – a Miss Anderson – saying that Conn was ‘something special’ and was to be ‘given every encouragement’. She still kept it, at the back of a drawer, like an IOU from the future.

      Watching Conn’s face as he listened, she saw the difference in the two boys. The words that Angus gave out grudgingly, so that his voice’s meanness seemed to make them worth nothing, were transformed by Conn’s receptiveness. His expression seized them, smiled over them, went into a conspiracy with his Granny, and everything was enlarged in his reaction to it. Angus’s flat insensitivity to things and Conn’s vulnerability to them were a contest.

      When Angus paused at the end of an article, Jenny said, ‘Here, Angus. Take a wee rest. We’ll let Conn read a bit.’

      Angus was canny.

      There’s only the Jean McFarlane bit left, noo.’

      It was her parents’ favourite column – written in the first person by Jean, a saga of trivia about the doings of herself and her husband, John. Helped by the name, Jenny’s mother identified with the writer. Conn would be starting at the top of the bill.

      ‘Aye. Ye’ve done well, son. Let Conn dae some work noo,’ Jean said.

      Conn became immediately excited about it. Jenny understood the momentary reluctance with which Angus handed over the paper. He was trying to calculate what proportion of a shilling the Jean McFarlane column was worth. Conn settled himself on the footstool.

      ‘Noo,’ Mairtin said, ‘wan mistake an’ ye’re fired, wee yin.’

      He made several. He started too high, had to modulate in the middle of a sentence, mispronounced some words. But finding his confidence, he read well. His voice really animated the small happenings it described. Mairtin and Jean responded well. They laughed, interpolated That’s a guid yin’. They were like a congregation which has suffered long under a minister apathetic enough to be an unbeliever, and suddenly rediscovers an old commitment in a new voice. Their enjoyment was refreshed through Conn.

      Jenny recognised a success and knew that Thursday evenings were entering a new era. It saddened her a little – not for Angus, who would be glad to get free of the duty, if not the shilling. She simply saw in this minute shift of routine another sign that her family was growing up. Which was good. But along with the growth went the loosening process that frightened her, the loss of the difficult equilibrium of security in their lives which she had somehow managed to maintain. Development meant the shifting of their postures, the need for her family to put themselves one by one into positions of danger to themselves, to move out of the range of their parents’ protection.

      Kathleen and Mick were already working. Kathleen was an attractive girl, getting big in the breast, subtly secretive about the eyes. She had started going to dances, being with boys. With that blank belief in the mysterious power of a faith which those who don’t believe it can best indulge, Jenny cloudily hoped that Kathleen, as the only practising Catholic in the house, had special protection. Mick was least worry of all to her. He seemed happy working at the mill in Menford Lane, where Kathleen also worked. He hadn’t wanted the pits, and his father was glad. Kathleen said that all the men liked him. He was so easy-going, pleasant, kind. He possessed some secret store of good nature, of unflappability, that had eluded the others. Perhaps it came from her father, whose favourite he was, and of whom he reminded Jenny.

      It certainly didn’t come from Tam. Tam still had, it was true, the most instinctively generous nature she had found in a man. She believed him simply the man most worthy of love she had ever met. But more often now she felt him at times recede from her, become opaque. Having seen men go mean with the pits many times before, she dreaded what might be happening in him. It troubled her how ferociously he held to certain hopes. One of them was Conn. Vaguely Tam had decided Conn would go on with his education. She feared the time when that vagueness would have to form into something concrete. She could see no way in which it was possible. Financially, they lived on the edge as it was.

      That disillusionment was one of the dangers she sensed ahead. She quite frequently experienced a deep but inexplicable sensation of catastrophe to come. It wasn’t something you could relate to specifics. Sometimes things were going smoothly when she felt it. It was like being on a river. The boat was sound enough. Everyone was reasonably well secured. Sometimes there were rapids, but you got through them with some fright, a bump here, a bruise there. Often there were nice times, good weather, easy talk. Yet always there was something else. A premonition. Heard faintly beyond laughter.

      Conn’s voice, a small complacent contradiction to her fears, finished off. There were kind words for applause. There was milk with home-made biscuits, the traditional follow-on from a reading. They all had some. In spite of Jenny’s protestations, it was decided that Angus should still have his shilling, and Conn a sixpence. Both were pleased.

      When Jenny told them to go straight home, Mairtin went out with them to see that they did. This too was traditional. He would wet his whistle in Mitchell’s pub before coming back. Jean didn’t approve of the drink. She went kirkwards every Sunday without fail and was well informed of the Lord’s opinions on the subject. But short of the Lord putting in a personal appearance, nothing was likely to change her husband. Mairtin was Mairtin. She had learned to accept him as such, and he in turn, though he might tease her with it, was tolerant of her holiness, which, in truth, tended to be more obtrusive than his drink. He usually drank little, but, having been staggering drunk on quite a few occasions, he always found that Jean had wrapped cloths round the smoke-board of the fire by the time he got back.

      ‘To protect them that canny protect themselves,’ she used to say.

      But he suspected that it was all meant as a wordless gesture on the degrading evils of drink, and his favourite response was to go into a parody of drunkenness, swaying her into vision, missing his footing, reaching unsteadily for things. Since she could never tell whether it was real or not, it always got her hooked.

      Jenny and her mother sat chatting for an hour. Their experience was so much a common factor that their conversation was a monologue for two voices. In the quiet of the house, with the evening settling softly around them, mother and daughter talked like two women teasing out a ball of wool between them. There were only a few, brief snagging moments when one knew something which the other didn’t.

      Conn was coming on well, wasn’t he? Jean still regretted not having been able to help at his birth. She had been ill at the time. At least she had done something by taking Kathleen out of the way and letting her sleep here.

      Jenny asked her if she had seen Johnny Hose’s latest poem. She hadn’t. He was a milkman who came round High Street, and he pasted verses to the back of his milk-cart. While he filled a half-pint or pint measure from the tap in his churn, and then poured it into your jug, you could stand and read his most recent offering. ‘Nae extra charge, ma bonny lass. Ye can’t put a price on genius.’ Every other morning at the mill gates, he could be seen waiting patiently, unconcerned with sales, while mill-workers crowded round his cart, some of them trying to memorise the lines they liked best. Usually they were funny, occasionally about women or nature. Jenny tried to tell her mother bits of the latest one. It was about prices.

      Suzie Temple was rumoured to be ill. But then Suzie Temple was always rumoured to be ill. Miss Gilfillan almost certainly was ill, though she had mentioned it to nobody. A proud old woman. She couldn’t be feeding herself.

      Gibby

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