Childish Things. Robin Jenkins
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Название: Childish Things
Автор: Robin Jenkins
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Контркультура
isbn: 9780857863768
isbn:
Jean, sly besom, then hit on what she considered an incontestable argument. ‘You’d have to shave off your hair and your moustache.’
She knew I would never sacrifice my abundant, wavy, snow-white locks and moustache to match for all the gurus in India.
Madge had another announcement to make. ‘You may like to know,’ she said, haughtily, ‘that Frank and I recently gave ourselves to Jesus.’
I was horrified but not surprised. I had met the minister of their local church in San Diego: a fat, bald, evangelical clown, who kept crying, ‘Hosannah!’
Jean took the news coolly. ‘That’s your privilege, Madge,’ she said.
Just then, Frank, straightening his black bow tie, came into the study to say in his soft voice that the taxi to take him and Madge to the airport was at the door. He had already shaken my hand, soulfully, at least eight times in the past three days, but he did it again.
‘I hope Madge has told you, Dad,’ he said, ‘that you will be very welcome in San Diego if ever you should choose to pay us a visit.’
‘Robert and I will always be glad to see you in Edinburgh,’ said Jean.
‘They often ask about you at the Country Club,’ said Frank. ‘Don’t they, Madge?’
Madge did not answer.
‘Mrs Birkenberger – you remember her, Dad? – asked me just the other day when you were coming back.’
‘Didn’t she used to be the actress, Linda Blossom, in black-and-white films?’ said Jean. ‘Married and divorced four times.’
‘Five’ said Madge.
‘But she’s very very rich’, said Frank, fervently. ‘Our bank handles a lot of her affairs. She owns the land on which the Country Club is situated.’
‘And she thinks it gives her a right to behave disgracefully,’ said Madge.
I well remembered the redoubtable Mrs Birkenberger. As Linda Blossom, she had been an internationally famed beauty. I had met her at the Poinsettia Country Club. Impressed by my graceful golf swing, and by my ducal demeanour, she had invited, or rather, commanded me to play a few holes with her. I had enjoyed it, though she had played very badly and used language unfit for a golf course. ‘Fuck it!’ she had cried after every duffed shot, and there had been many. Afterwards, members had whispered congratulations into my ears. I had been in a cage with a lioness of unreliable temper and had emerged unscathed. She was small and stout, with her face heavily made up and her hair dyed jet black. She had laughed often and randily. It was rumoured that she hired young athletes to pleasure her in bed. I hadn’t been attracted to her sexually, thinking her too old and uncouth, but I had had Kate to be faithful to and keep me in line. It could be different now. If, after a lifetime of sleazy amours, the lady was looking for a mature gentleman, cultured, handsome, witty, knowledgable, and (fingers crossed) an able enough lover, given the right encouragement, why shouldn’t I toss my Panama into the ring?
As for Kate, she, good sport, herself out of the game, would cheer me on. Hadn’t she, on her death-bed in the hospital, too weak to wink, whispered that I was not to grieve too long but was to try and enjoy what little was left of my life?
Some may think me a monster, one minute talking of retreating to an ashram, and the next dreaming of a dalliance with a foul-tongued elderly millionairess. But that is how human beings are. No one is surprised to learn that the keeper of the gas chambers was a loving husband and indulgent father.
3
When they were all gone I wandered about the house, touching things that Kate had touched and looking at photographs with her in them. There was one when she was young, smiling fondly. Who is she so fond of? Whose arm is she holding? It is a young soldier, in the kilted uniform of the Argylls, with the ribbon of the MM on his chest. It’s me, more than 40 years ago: the moustache is black. I look upwards, as if I had high ambitions. Yet, when the war was over, I returned to being a primary schoolteacher. It was a safe, worth-while job, and I had two small children, but it fell far short of what I thought my talents deserved. True, I rose to be headmaster of a large school, I became influential in educational circles, in spite of being a member for a while of the ILP, and I always did well in the Scottish Amateur Golf Championship, once reaching the quarter-finals. Latterly, Susan Cramond, who was a friend of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, had suggested putting my name forward for an OBE for services to education.
There was an apron of Kate’s hanging on its usual hook in the kitchen. Madge and Jean must have overlooked it when getting rid of their mother’s clothes. I pressed it against my face.
Despair crept near, but was I capable of genuine despair?
Suddenly it came to me that there was one person I had never taken in. I had last seen her at least ten years ago. We had parted in anger. I had called her a slovenly bitch, she had called me a fraud. She might be dead, for she had had a tendency to become fat and was a heavy smoker, but I felt a desire, a passionate need, to go and find out.
Her name was Chrissie Carruthers. She lived in Gantock, 15 miles along the Firth. I could hardly call her my ex-mistress for I had never spent any money on her and had been to bed with her once only. It hadn’t been a success. She had laughed and quoted Plato, and her feet hadn’t been clean. A common interest in literature and politics had brought us together. We were both members of the ILP. In spite of painful feet, she had gone on marches against the Bomb and other abominations of our time, while I had stayed away, using the argument that such demonstrations were never effectual, but really, as Chrissie had pointed out, because I thought them vulgar, with their silly banners and idealistic optimism. If she was alive, was she still politically active? Did she still have the portrait of Rosa Luxemburg on her mantelpiece?
I would go and find out. I might look in on Hector too.
It was dark as I drove alongside the Firth. The amber lights of Dunoon twinkled across the water and, every five seconds, there was a flash from the Toward Lighthouse. If any of my Lunderston acquaintances recognised my Mercedes, they would think I had come out for a drive, being unable to settle in the empty house. If they had ever heard of Chrissie, it would have been as Miss Carruthers, eccentric teacher of English in Gantock High School.
The west end of Gantock is a district of wide tree-lined avenues and big stone villas built in Victorian times, when there were no motor cars. Most, therefore, had no garages, so that cars had to be left out in the street. I parked mine, not in Chrissie’s avenue, but in the one next to it. There was no need to be apprehensive about leaving it unattended. Police cars frequently patrolled that area of high ratepayers.
As I walked to Chrissie’s, I met no one. I saw a cat. Perhaps it was one of Hector’s on the prowl. He lived close by.
Most of the villas being too big for single families to maintain, they had been divided into flats. Chrissie’s was on the ground floor. Furtive as Troilus sneaking past the Greek sentries, I went through the gate and up the short flight of steps. Careless as ever, Chrissie had left the outer door open. The inner door of frosted glass showed a light in the hall. I rang the bell.
She still lived there. On a small brass plate was the name C. Carruthers.
She came shuffling to the СКАЧАТЬ