The Complete McAuslan (47 page)

‘Newspapers,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be a reporter.’

‘Zattafact?’ He beamed. ‘Here, that’ll be rerr. Goin’ tae the fitba’ matches – free?’

‘Probably.’

‘An’ – an’, interviewin’ fillum stars?’ he went on, his imagination taking wing.

‘Well, I shouldn’t think – ’

‘ – an’ gettin’ the goods on the bad bastards in the corporation, like Alan Ladd in the pictures! Here, that’s a gran’ joab! Ah could jist be daein’ wi’ that.’ You could see him envisaging himself perched on the comer of an editor’s desk, with his hat tilted back, addressing Veronica Lake as ‘baby’.

‘Aye, but,’ he added, and fell silent, and I knew what he was thinking. He had come into the Army illiterate, and in spite of the Education Sergeant’s perseverance, he was going out not much better. He frowned at his cup. ‘Ah doubt Ah wouldnae be up tae it, though.’ He drank again. ‘Ah’ll jist see whit’s daein’.’

I looked across at him, scruffy and hunched over his cup, and had a sudden picture of thirty years on, and saw him as one of these seedy wee Glasgow men one encounters coming out of pubs – the threadbare coat, the dirty white scarf knotted to conceal the absence of collar (and sometimes of shirt), the broken shoes, the thin greying hair defiantly brushed, and still with a gamin jauntiness in the way they shuffle along, looking this way and that with their bright, beaten eyes. And I had a thought that choked me – of the heat and dust and thunder of Alamein, and the flower of the finest military machine ever to come out of the Continent being broken and scattered, and chased out of Africa, and I felt a terrible anger at – at I don’t know what. The world, or the system, or something. My hand was shaking, I know, as I put down my cup.

It subsided after a moment or two, while I carefully drank my tea, into an uncomfortable feeling that was half annoyance and half embarrassment. I can’t define it, even now. I suppose it sprang from all I knew about McAuslan, and all the trouble and alarm and impatience and fury he had caused me, and the responsibility I’d carried for him. But in the past I’d always known what to do about it; we had been bound rigidly inside the Army framework. Now that was all over, but the feelings were still there, without the means to cope with them – or with him. I was worried about him – God knew he hadn’t been fit, most of the time, to go about unattended in uniform; what he would be like in civilian life, with no one to watch him, and berate and bully him and pick up the can for him, I couldn’t imagine. Strictly speaking, it was none of my business; it was almost impertinent to think that it was. But responsibility doesn’t just end – or if it does, the feeling of it doesn’t.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to shift myself if I’m to catch that train.’ I shoved a threepenny bit under my cup and started to collect my things, knowing that I couldn’t just go off and leave it as it was. Without really thinking, while we both got up and made the preliminary noises of farewell, I pulled out my pen and a scrap of paper, and scribbled my home address. It was just a gesture; I had no connections, I couldn’t offer any constructive help, and I knew it. But it seemed the least I could do.

‘That’s my home, and phone number,’ I said, with a momentary qualm at the thought of what McAuslan might do to the internal economy of the G.P.O. if he tried to make a telephone call. ‘If there’s anything I can do . . . you know, any time, if you think I can help, or . . . I mean, you need any . . . I mean, have any problems . . .’ I was making a right hash of it, I realised. ‘Anyway, that’s where I am.’

‘Oh, ta,’ he said. ‘Very nice of ye.’ And he took the paper, handling it reverently, as he always did when confronted with the mysteries. But there was an odd expression on his rumpled face as he looked at it, a trace of that slow, dawning self-assertion that I remembered before his court-martial, a slight tilt of his head as he looked at me, a stiffening of the Palaeolithic frame.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said. ‘But yez don’t need tae worry aboot me. Not at a’. Ah’ll be fine; nae bother.’ It wasn’t anything like a snub, just a self-respecting reminder of what I’d said myself earlier; that we were both civilians now. I could have kicked myself for my clumsiness, and tried to shrug off my embarrassment.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘it would be nice to . . . to keep in touch.’

God, I thought, what am I saying? Keep in touch with McAuslan; the mind boggled.

‘Och, sure,’ he said, jauntily. ‘We’ll be around.’

We were outside the café by this time; the station entrance was just along the way.

‘Well,’ I said, and held out my hand. ‘Good luck, McAuslan.’ And why I added it, I don’t know, but I said: ‘Thanks for everything.’ It was not a statement that could be defended on any logical ground, but I meant it.

‘Och,’ he said, ‘s’been nice knowin’ ye. Orrabest, sir.’

We shook, and picked up our parcels.

‘Aye, weel,’ he said, ‘Ah’ll jist tak’ a dauner roon the toon afore my train goes.’

‘Mind you don’t miss it.’

‘Nae fears,’ he said, and with a nod set off down the pavement towards a pedestrian crossing, cardboard box in one hand, kitbag on the other shoulder – bauchling jauntily along, with one hose-top already wrinkling down to his ankle, his scruffy kilt swinging. I watched him go, slightly sad, but – I must confess it honestly – with considerable relief. I knew he wouldn’t get in touch – even if he wanted to, the mechanics of the thing would defeat him. I just hoped the world would be kind to him, the sturdy, handless misfit, with his bonnet cocked at a pathetically jaunty angle, and the other hose-top now descending to join the first.

He turned on to the crossing, and I moved off to the station entrance, and just as I reached it there was a hideous shriek of brakes from behind me, a woman screamed in alarm, someone shouted, and I looked round to see a lorry half-slewed round on the crossing, and under its near front wheel a cardboard box, squashed flat. For an instant my heart died, and then to my relief I saw him, skipping like a startled sloth from under the very bonnet, his kitbag falling to the pavement, where its top burst, scattering the contents among the pedestrians.

There were oaths and cries, mainly from McAuslan, standing raging in the gutter, while a red-faced driver leaned from the lorry’s cab, hurling abuse at him. Phrases like ‘bloody daft jay-walker, where the ‘ell d’you think you’re goin’?’ and ‘You in yer bluidy van, ye near kilt me!’ floated on the summer evening air. Then the driver was descending from his cab, McAuslan was stooping to gather the gruesome litter that had fallen from his bag, and at the same time was directing a flood of colourful invective over his shoulder.

‘Ah wis oan the crossin’, ye daft midden!’

‘Nowhere bloody near it! Niver even looked! Just come slap across t’road!’

‘Away, you, an’ bile yer can!’

‘Think you own t’bloody street, then?’

On the pavements, people had stopped. So had the traffic, with the lorry blocking one side of the road, and horns were honking. A small crowd was gathering, as McAuslan, still exchanging personalities with the driver, scooped up his effects and stuffed them into his bag. A policeman was approaching – no, there were two policemen, and a bus conductor, who by his gestures appeared to be prepared to offer evidence.

I watched, fascinated. My first instinct was to go to the scene of the upheaval, naturally, but then I checked. No one was hurt, there was nothing to it; the disorderly idiot had just managed to put his foot in it again, and there was no useful purpose to be served by interfering. I watched the gendarmes arrive with official calm, while the lorry driver, full of virtuous outrage, stated his case, and McAuslan, protesting vehemently, pointed to the squashed ruins of the box beneath the wheel.

‘Ma new suit! Ma new civvy shoes! Look at yon! Hoo the hell am Ah gaunae be able to wear them noo? Him an’ his bluidy van . . .′ With his bonnet gone, his hose-tops down, his face contorted with misery and rage, and his tunic and kilt looking as though they were joining in the general depression, he was a woeful sight to see. ‘Ah’m no’ hivin’ this! Yon man’s a road-hog! He near did for me, so he did!’

One of the policemen was ushering him back across the pavement; the other was directing the driver to get his van in to the side. One of the small throng watching stepped forward and picked up McAuslan’s kitbag, unfortunately by the wrong end, and the contents came cascading out again. And I froze as I saw, among the litter of unwashed laundry and oil-smeared clothing, the unmistakable brassy glitter of rounds of .303 ammunition, tinkling away across the pavement.

‘Oh, no!’ I exclaimed aloud, as the second policeman stooped and picked up one of the rounds in one hand – and the old sword bayonet in the other – looked at them, and then at McAuslan, and then drew himself up purposefully.

I didn’t waste time wondering how he’d got live ammunition in his luggage; souvenirs, maybe – he was idiot enough. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that kitbag had also contained several live grenades and a two-inch mortar. Sufficient that he had got himself into dire trouble, and the Law were taking out their notebooks, while the protesting author of the scene was backed against the wall, roaring:

‘Keep the heid! Whit aboot yon lorry-driver then? Ah’m no’ hivin’ it! The man’s a menace . . .’

The lorry-driver had come back to watch, and doubtless contribute his quota, the small crowd were looking on astonished, amused, intrigued. The second policeman was holding out a handful of live rounds, speaking sternly, and the ape-like, hounded wretch in the middle was protesting violently and obviously wishing he could burrow under the wall.

I had taken a half-pace forward, and stopped. What did I think I was going to do, anyway? Conditioned by years of sorting things out for McAuslan, standing between him and authority, taking responsibility for him, I had been about to intervene. And then the wonderful realisation flashed across my mind. It wasn’t my place to, any longer. Three hours ago it would have been my bounden duty – and now? Legally speaking, I was no longer responsible for McAuslan’s random wanderings in front of lorries, for his offering insulting language, for his being illegally in possession of Army property, to wit, live ammunition, or for his resistance to arrest which would probably follow. I had no longer any right to interfere. He was his own man, now, and it would be sheer patronising officiousness to pretend otherwise. I was (as his own attitude had reminded me) a mere civilian, with no authority over him. ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ I actually said aloud, and a passerby looked curiously at me. And dammit, while I might feel a sentimental concern for him, responsibility was something else. Besides, I knew from bitter experience what getting involved with McAuslan was like; there was no future in it. He was free, white (well, greyish) and twenty-one, let him fight his own battles for a change, and – and I had a train to catch in three minutes.

So I swore, and shook my head for the thousandth time, turned to a military policeman in the station entrance and said: ‘Would you mind keeping an eye on my things for a moment, corporal?’ And then I pulled down my bonnet, took a firm grip on my ashplant, said ‘Oh, hell’ with deep weariness, and like a man reshouldering an enormous burden, but with a strange lightness of heart, strode off purposefully towards the group on the other side of the road.

THE SHEIKH AND THE DUSTBIN

The Servant Problem

One of the things I never learned from my tough grandmother (the golfing Calvinist, not the Hebridean saga-woman) was how to deal with domestic help, and this although she was an authority, having been both servant and mistress in her time. As a girl, straight from the heather, she had been engaged as kitchenmaid at one of those great Highland shooting lodges to which London society used to repair a century ago, and being a Glencoe MacDonald of critical temper and iron will, she had taken one cold Presbyterian look at the establishment with its effete southern guests and large inefficient staff and decided, like Napoleon contemplating the map of Europe, that this would never do. Within six weeks she had become senior housemaid, by the end of the season she was linen-mistress, and before her twentieth birthday she was head housekeeper and absolute ruler of the place, admired and dreaded by guests and staff alike. I can only guess what she was like as a teenage châtelaine, but since in old age she reminded you of a mobile Mount Rushmore, handsome, imposing, and with a heart of stone, it is a safe bet that living in that lodge must have been like being a galley slave in a luxury liner. Knowing her zeal for order and reform, I suspect that her aim would be that of an enlightened prison governor – not to break the spirit of the inmates altogether, but to see that they went back into the world better and wiser human beings.

Whatever effect she had on those sophisticated ladies and worldly gentlemen – and I’m sure she taught them that there were higher things in life than grouse-shooting and flirtation – they can have been in no doubt that the Highland servant, whether lowly menial or autocratic housekeeper, was very different from the southern domestic. My grandmother was not alone in her generation in simply not knowing what servility meant; indeed, mere civility was no commonplace, as witness the famous John Brown, whose devotion to Queen Victoria was matched only by his rudeness. My grandmother, who gave respect only when she felt it was due, which wasn’t often, used to recall (without a glimmer of a smile) an event from her early years in service when the lodge’s head cook, another stern Caledonian, noted for her prowess at whist drives, was called in by her employers to take part in a bridge game, there being a shortage of players among the guests. As luck had it, the cook partnered a Prince of the blood, who took mild exception to her bidding, whereon the cook rose in her wrath before the Quality assembled, and hurled down her cards, exclaiming: ‘Away, ye crabbit auld Prooshan, and play by yersel’!’ Nor was she dismissed; a Prince may be a Prince, but a Highland cook who knows the secrets of venison and cold salmon is something else.

It may be significant, too, that grandmother’s only joke was based on the English master-Highland servant relationship. It described how a chimpanzee escaped from the circus and was found dead in a ditch by two ghillies employed at the local castle, then occupied by a London shooting-party. The ghillies had never seen a chimpanzee before, and didn’t know what to make of it. At last the elder said: ‘It’s ower hairy for a MacPherson, no’ broad enough in the chest for a Fraser, and too long in the lip for a Cameron – away you up to the big hoose, Erchie, and see if ony o’ the gentry’s missing.’