A Glasgow Trilogy Read online

  ‘Does she really?’ Donald murmured remotely. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never spoken to her.’

  Main gave him no help there and he had to try again.

  ‘Will you please stop tying up the tassels like that? This girl Bobo. I wouldn’t mind if it was my tablecloth, but it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Mrs Stockwell. I have looked on her with lust. Therefore I have committed adultery with her in my heart.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t know about it, so she won’t mind,’ Main comforted him. ‘She’ll be all right. You don’t need to worry. Nothing’ll happen.’

  ‘You must help me,’ Donald appealed in a small, hungry voice. ‘She’ll do anything you ask her.’

  ‘Oh aye, she will, she will that,’ Main smiled. ‘But that’s true only because she knows there are things I’d never ask her.’

  ‘Couldn’t you introduce me?’

  ‘Damn it all, man! She stays across the landing from you. You don’t need me.’

  Main divorced the tassels he had joined together and kept his eyes on them as he spoke.

  ‘You seem to be suggesting, if I follow you, that since you’ve already committed adultery you ought to get the chance to commit adultery. But there’s a hell of a difference between ploys you get up to in your heart and the real thing, bible or no bible. I mean to say, be your age! How do you expect me to help you? Do you think I could just go across the landing and tell Bobo to come in here, you want her? You’re up the wrong close if that’s what you think.’

  ‘At least you could speak to her,’ Donald said with a simplicity that frightened his cousin. ‘You could put in a word for me. Break the ice. She never even says hullo to me.’

  ‘You say hullo to her then. It’s as easy as that.’

  ‘It would mean nothing to her,’ Donald muttered, beyond advice. ‘So much to me, and nothing to her.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Main scolded him. ‘What do you mean? It would mean a lot more to her.’

  ‘Not her kind,’ Donald fought back.

  ‘What kind?’ Main got up and stood over him, his fingers tipped on the green cloth. He was beginning to get a wee bit angry.

  ‘I’m not a penniless student, you know,’ Donald barged on. ‘I’ve got money. There’s never a month I spend all my allowance from home. I’ve got a little saved. Not much. But enough for Bobo.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Main cried to the ceiling.

  ‘Only I’d need you to put it to her first,’ Donald said at the same moment.

  Main clenched his fists and banged them several times on the table before he was able to speak.

  ‘Look, man, you’re making a mountain out of nothing. Adultery in the heart be damned. A fellow your age ought to know by this time. It’s a biological urge, that’s all it is. Bobo would understand. She knows damn fine what she does. But she wouldn’t buy your idea. Get a hold on yourself, Donald Duthie son of Isaac. It will pass. Och aye, it’ll come back. So will Christmas. But don’t let it get you down. Laugh, clown, laugh! It’s the kind of world we’re born into.’

  ‘You could speak to her, you know you could,’ Donald wouldn’t let up. ‘You two, you’re that thick. She’d do anything for you. You could raise my name when you talk to her, you could get her to agree, and then you could bring her in here some night and you could go away. You could easy think up some excuse to leave us.’

  ‘And the Stockwells? What do you think they would say?’

  ‘Och, they’d trust me,’ Donald answered, sincerely innocent, innocently sincere.

  ‘Aye, maybe, but would Bobo?’ Main laughed, throwing away his anger.

  He ambled round the room twice, safe behind his glasses, and he glanced with a smile at the nape of Donald’s horse-like neck each time he passed behind him.

  ‘I’ll do what you want,’ he announced when he came to rest facing his cousin again. ‘I’ll speak to Bobo. I don’t know what I’ll say exactly. Maybe I’ll tell her you’re madly in love with her. She’d like that. She likes to be loved. Don’t we all? Or maybe I’ll just say she’d find you worth getting to know if she’d only give you the chance. She likes men. She’s interested in all kinds of men. I don’t know how I’ll put it. But I’ll think of something. I’ll get the pair of you together if that’s what you want, though I can hardly tell her what else you want. And then hell mend you. You’ve never danced in your life, have you? Well, by God, she’ll lead you a dance.’

  ‘Och now, I don’t want to go dancing or anything like that,’ Donald protested. ‘Maybe the pictures once or twice. So as not to be too sudden. But that’s about all. I don’t want to give a lot of time to her, you know.’

  ‘It won’t be what you want,’ Main warned him.

  I met Main again many years later when I was in hospital and he turned out to be the doctor in charge of the ward. A couple of casual words that were meant to be merely polite conversation to put me at my ease before he examined me put him on to where I came from and who I was. I recognised him of course, though he didn’t know me, and I made the most of the opportunity to talk to him. When he found out I had Miss Partridge’s diary at home he got quite interested, even excited, but he seemed disappointed I couldn’t tell him anything about Bobo, and after I was well again I had several sessions with him in his house in Scotstoun. He told me a lot I had only guessed, things even my mother didn’t know.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bobo and Dross got into the habit of using the Phoenix a lot in the autumn of that year. It was about a mile away down the main road, near the Cross. For years it was called the Green Cockatoo, a common city pub, the property of an Irish immigrant, Barney Geoghegan, with its outside painted a plain chocolate brown, the bar a long straight counter with a sawdust track, and at the rear a couple of unhappy sitting-rooms with varnished tables in front of a fixed settle, and an ironbarred window looking on to the back-court. But time marches on. After a fire that temporarily closed the Green Cockatoo, the premises were taken over from Barney by a Scottish brewery and Barney retired to his native village in Donegal. The abandoned baby’s linen shop next door was annexed by the brewers and the Green Cockatoo arose from the ashes as the Phoenix. The brewers squandered a barrel of money to modernise the enlarged premises to a fashionable modern- antique style, and the part where Bobo and Dross liked to drink had a low ceiling with imitation oak rafters, plastic panelled walls, gawky little tables, and portraits of laughing cavaliers, simpering bareshouldered beauties in Louis Quatorze dress, a Regency buck, and a coloured print of stout men in red coats riding chestnut horses. You got into it by going down three rubbertiled steps off the lobby flanking the bar, because the baby’s linen shop had been floored at a slightly lower level than the old Cockatoo. Above the lintel a neon sign blushingly whispered tudor lounge in simplified gothic.

  Dross used the bar when he was drinking alone or with his pals, but it was always the Tudor Lounge when he was with Bobo. He called it the Chewed Her, but not as a joke. That was how he said it. There was often an intrusive aspirate in his speech. For ‘isn’t’ he said ‘hisn’t’, just as he said ‘hit’ for ‘it’.

  ‘I’ve just had about enough of Wee Annie,’ Bobo, blonde and vehement in a green dress and a string of pearls, declared to him in their cosy corner. ‘She was stuck on the landing like death warmed up again after I left you last night. Waiting for me to come up, that’s all she was doing. And you know what she says? Go on, you’d never guess.’

  There were six of them together in the Tudor Lounge that night, but she had the best seat, against the panelling with Dross at her right hand so that they could sit back twisting fingers in comfort and see all that went on, identify the regulars and criticise strangers. Two of the other four sat facing each other, and two facing Bobo and Dross, alternate male and female courtiers round the table of the king and queen. But for all their submission to the supremacy of Bobo and Dross they were liable to wander off on their own conversation and pick up only at hazard the fragments dropped across the tabl
e. By the time the three men had all bought a round nobody was sure who was listening to what, but everybody kept on talking in the feeling somebody must be taking it in, something must get over, somewhere, sometime.

  The supporting quartet was made up of two smart lads known in the district as Yoyo and Yowyow with their female comforters Jean and Jess, a couple of starchers from the laundry where Miss Partridge worked. Accustomed as they were to washing dirty linen by day in the line of duty, the two girls enjoyed nothing better than washing dirty linen by night for pleasure. Their gossip was as wide-ranging and deadly as a jet-bomber. They knew not only the sins of all the girls in the laundry, but the sins of their brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents, cousins and in-laws as well. Yoyo and Yowyow were garage hands, scholars in the language, literature and history of cars. Their comradeship was fortuitous, but none the less appropriate, perhaps even inevitable from the point of view of those who believe in the preordained fitness of things or the conjunction of twin souls, destined from all eternity. For Yoyo was Alexander Jeffrey and Yowyow was Geoffrey Alexander.

  Yoyo was as Glasgow as the Fair, called Yoyo because he was never at peace, a fidgety, finger drumming, bobbing up-and-down fellow, moody as a day in April, smiles in the morning and scowls in the afternoon, a friend in the evening and a foe at night. One minute he was all over you with a hail-fellow-well-met enthusiasm for the very fact of your existence, and the next minute he was narky and touchy, grudging you even the space you took up on earth, picking a fight with you over a straw in the wind, pinning you down with a sharp word you never rightly meant to use but now you were stuck with it. He was a little below the average height, a small dark man with his own key to the door, good features and good teeth, and unusually powerful shoulders, so broad he seemed to fill the doorway every time he came into a room. He was no Glasgow bauchle, but he carried a chip against the world that although he was dark and handsome he wasn’t tall. In his black moods he was ready to go gunning after anybody for nothing, a rebel who would kneel to no gods.

  Yowyow was a taller and slimmer type, a fair haired blue-eyed boy, an immigrant who spoke a foreign language. He was English. His father was a glassblower who had come to Glasgow from London, a reversal of the normal flow of labour that made him an oddity rightaway. It seems he was given the chance of a more responsible job with a local subsidiary of his firm and bravely faced the prospect of living amongst the savages of North Britain for the sake of the extra cash. Then he went and died of a coronary before he had been manager a twelvemonth. His wife and family, a plump pleasant mate and three hungry chicks, lacked the wings to fly south again. They nested on forlornly in Glasgow and pecked for a living. After mourning a night or two for her love the widow bird went out to work as the milk-lady in a primary school, seeing to the allocation of the crates to the classrooms, and Yowyow the eldest fledgling left school and got a job in McLellan’s garage I think it was, beside the rubberwork. That’s where he met Yoyo.

  The trivial coincidence that his real name reversed the name of his fellow-worker and friend merely convinced the natives that he was congenitally tapsieteerie to the order around him. It was rumoured he was first called Yaow-Yaow by a poor mimic who tried to imitate his cockney accent and couldn’t get any nearer to it than mouthing derisively, ‘Yaow, yaow, yaow, yaow’. Later Yaow-Yaow was simplified to Yowyow, and growing up in a friendly tribe Yowyow eventually picked up some of the pure vowels he heard around him, but he never quite managed to pronounce a final or median ‘r’, and never got ‘loch’ or ‘Auld Lang Syne’ correct. His nickname may have been influenced by the fact that Jeffrey was already known as Yoyo, so that by a malicious twist Alexander had to be called Yowyow, the southern diphthong being deliberately opposed to the pure round ‘o’ of the natives. Or for some other reason. After all, who knows how names are first given? When the Lord had formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam it must have greatly interested Him to see what Adam would call them. And why should Adam have called them whatever he did call them? It could only have been an impromptu nickname. Anyway, whatever Adam first named those two creatures, Yoyo and Yowyow were their names thereafter. They were as proper a pair as a pair of gloves or a pair of shoes. The one opposed and required the other, matched and completed him.

  ‘You know what she says? Go on, you’d never guess!’ Bobo kept on, peeved that nobody seemed very interested. They still weren’t warmed up. It was only the first round on the table.

  ‘She says, You hoor you,’ Bobo told them when nobody made a guess.

  ‘You should just have said, Hoo’re you yourself,’ Yoyo advised her casually, playing the piano on the edge of the table.

  ‘You don’t want to let her needle you,’ Dross was cross with her. ‘That auld bitch is no worth bothering about. You’ve got her on the brain, that’s your trouble.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you, it’s no you she calls names,’ Bobo sulked, and twisted Dross’s fingers viciously. ‘I just wish she’d lay off me, that’s all. If I get much more of it I’ll do something to her, so I will.’

  ‘Wot I sigh is giver a damn good fright,’ Yowyow suggested vaguely. ‘Tiker down a peg. Tha’ll lahner.’

  ‘You mean?’ Bobo asked politely.

  ‘Kid the breeks affer,’ Yoyo explained. ‘She’ll soon stope annoying you then.’

  ‘I don’t know why she calls herself Miss Partridge at all,’ Jean murmured dreamily. ‘Dew Jess?’

  ‘Well,’ said Jess modestly, trying and failing to tug her skirt over her bright knees, ‘what I do know is. It’s not much. She married an American sailor when she was nineteen and went out to some wee place in Nebraska.’

  ‘Who the hell would ever marry her?’ Bobo asked the middle distance.

  ‘Then she comes back here and calls herself miss,’ said Jean. ‘Bet she’s got something to hide.’

  ‘You could blackmail a dame like that,’ said Jess. ‘She’s living under false pretences.’

  ‘That’s no false pretences,’ Dross differed. ‘You take folk in show business. Maybe they’re married. Maybe they’re married five or six times. You never know. It doesn’t matter a damn. They never use their married name anyway. They’ve got a stage name. They’re pros.’

  ‘Like me,’ Bobo muttered, still aggrieved. ‘That what you mean?’

  ‘No, what I mean is,’ said Dross. ‘It’s quite legal. You think o’ the folk you could blackmail if Jess was right. No, I mean to say, Jess. You can use any name you like so long as that’s what you use. That’s show business.’

  ‘But Wee Annie’s no in show business,’ Bobo reminded him.

  ‘Naw, she hasna a leg to stand on,’ Yoyo agreed, thumping the table in majestic chords.

  ‘Scare her outa her wits is wot I sigh,’ Yowyow slipped in again. ‘Think up a scheme to frighten her. She’ll know it’s us but kent prove it. Then she’ll leeve Bobo alown in kise she gets wuss.’

  ‘Have a word with Tommy about her,’ Jean suggested knowingly.

  ‘Tommy?’ Yoyo frowned a question. ‘Whee’s Tommy?’

  ‘You’ve been using this place all this time and you don’t know Tommy!’ Jess admired him.

  ‘Tommy? You mean Tommy here? Him that’s charge- hand? Him wi’ the funny face and big kisser? Half man and half mouth. Whit would he know?’

  ‘Plenty,’ said Jean. She fondled her glass of vodka between her palms. ‘Tommy’s Mr Partridge.’

  ‘Wee Annie’s wee brother,’ said Jess.

  Tommy came along at that moment like a genie summoned by the rubbing of the lamp he had to obey, or like an earth-spirit who had to appear once his name was spoken. Grinning from here to here was how Dross put it.

  ‘Good evening, boys and girls,’ the genie said with a blend of servility and patronage, as if he knew that although he had to obey their summons the ultimate power was his if they made one blunder and abused his obedience.

  They answered him with a show of o
ffhand courtesy, but they were pleased to have him come over. It made them feel they belonged, the Phoenix lounge was theirs, the charge-hand valued their custom. They weren’t nobodies.

  ‘Well I never knew that,’ said Yoyo.

  ‘We did,’ said Bobo and Dross together.

  ‘I’ve saw him often up our close seeing her,’ said Bobo alone.

  ‘We know about her, working with her,’ said Jess and Jean.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Yowyow.

  Tommy beamed down on them. He was used to his customers carrying on with their conversation after they had returned his greetings. He didn’t mind hovering a couple of moments to see if they had a word for him in due time, and then he could take his smile elsewhere to pay a duty. He was no relic of Barney Geoghegan, no clod who outstayed a welcome. He knew his job from the cellar to the gantries, from travellers and police to the public. The brewers had brought him in as manager from the last dingy pub they had modernised because he had a reputation. He was ‘a good man’ in the trade. As so he should have been. He had spent his life in it. He served in the bar only if it was very busy. Usually he just stood by, watching and waiting, welcoming arrivals and regretting departures, telling the latest funny story to favoured customers and quick to see strangers were served promptly. He made a tour of the lounge three or four times every night to keep himself informed, to smile here and chat there, share gossip and sow hullos to reap the gain later, and at the end of the session he saw them all out from bar and lounge alternately with the routine farewell Barney Geoghegan too had used in his time like any other Scotch publican, ‘Haste ye back!’

  ‘Bobo was complaining there about your sister,’ Jean said without animosity, showing her teeth in an adver- tisement-smile.