I had one friend among the élite, or thought I had: a senior military man’s son. He enjoyed modern American literature as much as I did. We never noticed each other when he was with his fashionable friends, but on meeting apart from them in the school library we sometimes went walks together chattering enthusiastically about books whose main characters rebelled against social codes of a type that seemed to rule our own institution. Our form of rebellion was to identify various teachers and head boys with the deranged bullies and conformists of Catch-22, Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint. Doing so often reduced us to fits of helpless laughter. Our homes in Glasgow were the only other thing we had in common. At the start of a summer holiday we exchanged addresses.
I phoned him a fortnight later and suggested we meet in town.
“I’ve a better idea,” he said, “You come over here. Come this afternoon. I’m having a kind of a party …”
He hesitated then added, “As a matter of fact it’s my birthday.”
I thanked him and asked if it would be a very smart occasion? He said, “No no no, just come the way you are.”
He lived in Pollokshields, south of the river, and I arrived with a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 in my pocket, a book I knew he would enjoy. I had never before visited a mansion standing in its own grounds. I pressed the bell and after a while the door was opened by an elderly woman in a black gown who stared at me, frowning. I said, “Is Raymond in?”
She walked away. It seemed foolish to remain on the doormat so I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. The hall had a mosaic floor, a huge clock, corridors and a broad staircase leading out between Roman-looking pillars. I stood there listening hard for sounds of a party and could hear nothing at all. A tall man with a military moustache entered and said very gently, “Yes?”
“Is Raymond in?”
He said “I’ll see about that,” and went away. A lot of time passed. The clock struck a quarter hour. I sat down on the slightly rounded top of an antique ebony chest and noticed the time pass, feeling more and more bewildered. Fifteen minutes later the tall man appeared again, stared at me, said, “Why are you still sitting there looking so miserable? Get out! We don’t want you.” He opened the front door and I walked through it.
That was my first and worst sinking, also the end of my friendship with Raymond. I planned to studiously ignore him when our paths next crossed in the school library, but I never saw him there again.
The second sinking was a milder affair on my last day at that school. I stood with eight or nine other leavers, Raymond among them, in the Headmaster’s study, pretending to absorb a flow of the man’s brisk, facile, foreseeable, completely uninteresting platitudes. He ended with a firm, “Goodbye and good luck gentlemen. And Gilliland, stay behind for a moment.”
He shook hands with the rest who left and I remained feeling rather puzzled, because this was the first time he had ever spoken to me. He sat behind his desk, clasped his hands upon it, looked at me sternly over them for a while then said, “Don’t forget, Gilliland, that syphilis is an absolute killer. You can go now.”
So I went.
Why did he talk as if I was a sexual maniac? Why was I the only school leaver he said that to? As in all single sex schools for adolescents there had been discreet homosexual liaisons among us, but not among us in the invisible class — we were too demoralised to enjoy anything but the most solitary kind of sex. Was it possible that my slightly secretive walks with Raymond had been noticed disapprovingly by his other friends and reported to the teachers? Was our laughter over the antics of Portnoy and Yossarian overheard and interpreted as something sexually and socially dangerous? Was this reported to his father? And was keeping me behind to make that inane remark a headmaster’s ploy to avoid shaking an unpopular pupil’s hand?
I don’t know, but if so Britain is a very queer nation.
WELLBEING
I SAW A PLAIN strewn with marble rocks, the smallest higher than a man, the largest as big as a cathedral. They were pieces of a statue that had once stood taller than Ben Nevis. Groups of little people moved with horse-drawn wagons among these rocks. They were searching for a piece recognisably human yet small enough to carry away — the lobe of an ear or tip of a toe. Each group wanted to put such a fragment where they could love and pray to it, as it would prove there had once been power, beauty and unity that the world no longer contained. A group found a rock pierced by a beautifully smooth oval arch, part of a nostril. As they lifted it into their cart other groups combined to attack and rob them. This happened to all who found a good fragment, so none was ever carried away and love and prayer were impossible. I opened my eyes because my Japanese host was asking a question.
“In the second chapter of book ten you say till all the seas gang dry, my dear. My useful dictionary defines gang as a band of ruffians or criminals, a number of labourers working together. None of these definitions seems to fit.”
I said that gang was also a Scottish transitive and intransitive verb meaning go and these words were a quotation from Robert Burns’s greatest love song. My host murmured politely, “I believe Robert Burn’s poetry is still sung in parts of North America.”
I nodded. I was happy.
We were in the Smooth Grove, which had been the Central Station Hotel in days when Glasgow was joined to other places by railway. I felt the luxury of a good meal in my stomach, good wine on my palate, clean socks, underwear and shirt against my skin. They had been worth waiting for. Foreign translators, journalists and writers of dissertations always buy me new clothes before standing me a lunch — posh restaurants won’t let me in without new clothes after I’ve slept a few weeks in ones the last foreigner bought me. Foreigners contact me through my bank. Ordinary pubs and all-night cafés accept me since I can pay for drink and food and can sleep in short snatches sitting upright.
I was not always dependent on foreigners for a smart appearance. I used to have several friends with homes and visited each of them once a fortnight. They gave me food and a bed for the night and put my clothes through a machine. Modern machines not only wash, dry and iron, they remove stains, mend holes, replace lost buttons and re-dye faded fabric to look like new. Or am I dreaming that? If I am dreaming such a machine it is certainly possible because, as William Blake said, nothing exists which was not first dreamed. Most of these friends steadily disappeared but were not, I think, stabbed or burned. People with homes still usually die of diseases or a silly accident.
My one remaining friend is now my first wife who pretends to be my daughter. I don’t know why. I visited her a month ago. After enjoying a plate of her excellent soup I asked how Mavis was getting on in London. She stared and said, “I am Mavis. Cathy is dead — died twelve years ago, shortly after I came home.”
“Nonsense Cathy!” I said. “You can’t be Mavis because Mavis quarrelled with you and she was right to quarrel with you because you were not kind to her, though I was too tactful to say so at the time.”
My host in the Smooth Grove was as ancient as I am and still used a notebook. Looking up from it he said, “I hear there is now no middle class in Scotland and England. Is that true?”
I told him it was not true: the middle class are those who used to be called working class — they have jobs but no investments, and their only pensions are state pensions. “But middle class implies a lower class. Who are they?” I explained that thieves, swindlers, rapists, drug dealers and murderers are our lower class nowadays, many of them registered with the police. They have a place in society because without them police, lawyers, judges, jailers and journalists would be unemployed, and the profits of drug companies would slump.