9

THE TOWN HAD a population of about 5,000, though of course the war had diminished it. There was a Town Hall, a library, numerous churches whose congregations streamed to them on Sundays in their rigid black, one cinema, three cafés, two newspaper shops and a variety of other buildings. The town stood by the sea and on certain days one could see the women in blood-coloured gloves gutting the herring and laying them tier on tier in their boxes of ice.

He spent a lot of time in the library. Once he had stayed a whole afternoon and was found there by an emissary sent by Miss Miles. He had completely lost himself in the world of upper-class magazines, leather-covered chairs and newspapers. He would go from paper to paper reading the Scotsman, then the Glasgow Herald, then the Express sadly thinned by the scarcities of war. On Mondays, he mostly read the football reports. This life progressed step in step with the war. One year he would be reading about the African campaign with its thrust and counter-thrust of tanks racing across infinite deserts. How capable Rommel looked, standing in the glare, wearing his goggles, and staring across to the British lines. Another year, it would be Timoshenko standing up in a frozen tank. He liked the library with its smell of varnish and comfortable leather and at times he would stand at the window looking down on the town, a hawk, he liked to imagine, looking down on the world of lesser birds. The novels he borrowed from the library were mostly by P. C. Wren.

Other times he would go and look at the boats which were tied up alongside the quay. He liked to watch the men in their white woollen jerseys and their wellingtons. He liked to see one of them sitting like a cobbler on the deck, mending his nets in a humdrum domestic atmosphere. He liked to watch the seagulls standing precariously on the wooden ledge rimming the stone quay, winking at him with idiotic moronic gaze. He liked the colours, the yellow of the oilskins, the green of the nets, the blue of the water. He liked to see the lanterns on the masts, the orange buoys, the names of the ships picked out in yellow, “Resolute”, “Island Queen”, and many others. Once or twice he’d been down in the galley of a motor boat with a local boy who was the cook, but he had been put off by the smell. He liked the feeling the boats gave him of another world, a world connected with the vast spaces of the sea, storms, illimitable horizons.

Sometimes he met one of the fishermen from home and talked to him, though he sensed that the fisherman didn’t think much of his pale face and scholarly appearance. At the same time he himself compensated for this by imagining that the fisherman looked very clumsy and unsophisticated away from his boat and the sea.

His mother would come up town now and again to do some shopping and he would meet her for lunch; they would go to one of the cafés where he would sit with her in an agony of embarrassment among the pupils, giggling over their ice drinks, she in her black coat and black hat, stiffly seated at the round-topped table with its veined inferior green marble.

“Won’t you introduce me to your friends?” she would say, but he would mumble that his friends actually weren’t in the café at the time. Who in fact were his friends, the villagers or the town boys?

“Where is the son of the minister you were telling me about?” she would ask, but he was careful to make sure that he never came. How pitiful she looked in this new environment, like a rabbit looking about it, nose nervously twitching.

Once one of his teachers had passed and he had pointed him out. She had said: “Why don’t you introduce me?” and then looking at the teacher carefully: “Mrs Mackenzie said he was forty. He can’t be more than thirty-five. And he’s bald, too. She didn’t tell me that.”

She was glad of this additional fact: it was worth putting in her bank. Usually after he had had his dinner he would wander round the town and perhaps look at the trailers on the cinema. There was one film that he always remembered. It was called “Wake Island” and was about the war in the Pacific between the Americans and the Japs. It showed a Japanese pilot in black helmet and goggles scowling ferociously behind the controls of a plane and a great area of flame behind him branching out into the Rising Sun. He could imagine his own hands tightening on the controls in the summer light, and the roar of the crowd cheering him on as he swooped out of the sun, guns flaring. Other times there were films of Laurel and Hardy. These he didn’t particularly care for. Sometimes he would walk down to the local newspaper offices and say to himself: “If I get a place in the Bursary Competition, I’ll have my name in the paper.”

When he was younger and before he went to the town school he only went to town once a year. He could still remember the rank foreign scent of the apples, the coolness of ice cream on his teeth, the sound of cinema gunfire in his ears, himself crossing mesas among cactus more alien, more needly than gorse. He even remembered his very first day in the town school, wearing his new brown suit, and being dandled on the knees of a girl on the bus and she saying, “My big man,” while her bangles clattered and her cheap perfume was a corrupt aura. He liked the freedom of walking about the town because he didn’t feel that anyone was watching him as they would be at home in the village, the worst ones being the religious people. In town he could walk along without having to look over his shoulder. What could he not do if he wished? There were no familiar faces at the windows and no twitchings of curtains.

On wet days he would spend a lot of time wandering through Woolworths, looking for cheap books (such as the Phantom and the Spider), studying which note books to buy, which pencils to use. All was colourful, but he couldn’t afford much. Sometimes he would meet one of the boys from the village during the lunch hour and they would go into a café or down to the boats. Once Dusky had said to him:

“Do you remember the day we had the fight in the school?” The village school. Yes, he remembered.

“I thought you were getting snooty,” said Dusky, “just because you were going to the town school. That was the cause of it.” He spat expertly on to the pavement. “I thought that right enough.”

Actually, Malcolm had thought they were fighting because they had had an argument about an aeroplane which had just flown over them, whether it was a Hurricane or a Spitfire. He remembered the two of them standing by the crumbling wall looking up at the blue hollow shield of the sky and the aeroplane quite low down.

“That was the cause of it,” said Dusky. “I wish I had stayed on. I was good at writing,” he added. “Here, I’ll buy you a lemonade. I wish I’d stayed on all right. Oh, look at that!” whistling after one of the schoolgirls in her uniform of black with yellow stripes. “I bet they’re pretty hot,” he said, winking at Malcolm.

“I don’t know, I suppose so,” said Malcolm, and was surprised at his distaste that Dusky should be talking about them in such a familiar way. He was also thinking about that fight and the blood on his nose, all because, as he had thought till now, of an aeroplane. The fight had been a one-sided one: he had lost in a short furious engagement behind the school at four o’clock. The other thing he remembered was bending his face under the water spurting from an old copper tap and later feeling if he had all his teeth intact. As well as that, he could hear again the tongue lashing he had received at home, as if he had been responsible.

Ah, well, it was all over now: he could afford to pity poor Dusky, condemned to servitude in the galley of a fishing boat, and probably putting sugar instead of salt into the men’s soup.