“The film Tony,” said the teacher implacably. “Give it me.”
“No.”
McCrimmon moved away. The teacher seized and jerked the strap of the camera case. It broke. With the case swinging from the strap in one hand the teacher hurried down the lobby fumbling for the lid with the other. Roaring horribly McCrimmon leapt after him and grabbed him low from behind in a rugby tackle. The camera slid out of the case and hit the floor with a sharp crack as the teacher fell face down behind it with McCrimmon on top. There was a hubbub of voices. The weight on the teacher’s back was removed. Kneeling up he saw McCrimmon also kneeling, held back by men grasping each arm. Without lifting the camera the teacher opened it, pulled out the film, exposed it, dropped it and stood up, breathing heavily. Everyone looked at McCrimmon. He seemed so horrified that his captors, feeling him harmless, let him go. He crawled to the camera and lifted it with something like the unbelief of a mother lifting a dead baby. In a faint female falsetto he crooned, “Broke. My camera. Oh and it wasnae insured, it wasnae insured.” He wept.
The teacher found Tom Forbes beside him saying, “Here’s your coat.”
“Thanks.”
They went to the front door. Tom opened it. The teacher paused a moment and slid his arms into the sleeves saying, “I’m sorry about all this …”
“Just go home to your wife, Jimmy. Good night.”
“Good night. See you on Monday …”
The door closed behind him.
8
The time was eighteen minutes past midnight. At one a.m. buses left Glasgow’s central square for the suburbs but rather than wait for one the teacher walked five or six miles along Sauchiehall Street, Parliamentary Road and Alexandra Parade: thoroughfares of shops and tenements which in twenty years would be reshaped, shrunk or abolished by pedestrianization and a motorway system. But the teacher was thinking of the recent past. Since his last class became unruly that afternoon it had all been disastrous. The only action he did not regret was the exposure of McCrimmon’s film.
“No more nights off for me,” he thought. “No more nights off for me.”
He also resolved to visit his grandparents again tomorrow, or on Sunday, or perhaps the following weekend. There came a fall of rain so slight that he hardly noticed it until he saw privet hedges round the Carntyne gardens glittering under the street lamps. He may not have felt exactly like Ulysses landing on the coast of Ithaca but while turning the key of his front door and quietly entering years seemed to have passed since he left for work that morning.
In the living-room his wife, who disliked going to bed alone, lay dozing on a sofa before the fire. Opening her eyes she smiled and said, “Hullo.”
He tried to smile back. She said, “Bad?”
“Bad.”
“Worse than last week?”
“Aye.”
“What went wrong?”
“The whole day went wrong. I’ll tell you tomorrow. How’s the lad?”
“Not a cheep from him.”
“Next week,” said the teacher watching himself in a mirror above the mantelpiece, “I’ll be thirty-four.”
“You poor pathetic middle-aged soul,” said his wife standing up and laughing and leaning on his shoulder.
“Has that been worrying you?”
“A bit. Let’s have a keek at him.”
They went quietly upstairs to a bedroom holding a child’s cot and switched on a low light in one corner. The cot contained a not quite two-year-old child soundly sleeping. His snub-nosed head with mouth pouting like a bird’s blunt beak was larger than a baby’s head but still babyish. On the coverlet lay a plastic duck, his mother’s hairbrush and a small red motor car. The teacher bent to kiss him but was restrained by his wife’s hand. She switched the light out and they tiptoed to the room next door.
Sitting on the bed he unlaced and removed his shoes saying in a baffled voice, “You … and that wee boy in there … are the only worthwhile things I know.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“A man should have something more in life than his family. I used to think it would be my work but it isn’t my work. I don’t know what it is.”
“I’ll help you look for it tomorrow,” said his wife gently rumpling his hair.
“No use, I’ll never find it now,” he said, smiling at her in a way which showed he felt much better.
“Perhaps wee Jimmy will find it.”
“O yes,” he said yawning, “put it off for another generation.”
“You need your bed my lad,” she said.
They went to bed.
Mister Goodchild
“Nobody over fifty can tell where or how they’ll live a few months hence Mrs … Mrs?”
“Dewhurst.”
“Look at me, for instance. A year ago I was headmaster of a very good comprehensive school in Huddersfield. My wife made me take early retirement for the good of her health — not mine. She thought the warmer climate in the south would suit her so down to Berkshire we came. Fat lot of good that did. A fortnight after settling into the new house she died of a stroke. Since I do not intend to follow her example I will pause here for a few seconds Mrs … Mrs?”
“Dewhurst. Let me carry that,” she said, pausing at a bend in the staircase.
“No no!” he said putting a cumbersome suitcase down on a higher step without releasing the handle. “I was talking about losing my wife. Well my son has a garage with five men working under him in Bracknell. ‘Come and live with us, Dad,’ says he, ‘we’ve tons of room.’ Yes, they have. New house with half an acre of garden. Huge open-plan living-room with dining alcove. Five bedrooms no less, one for marital couple, one each for my two grandchildren, one for guests and one for poor old grandad. But poor old grandad’s bedroom is on the small side, hardly bigger than a cupboard and although I have retired from education I have not retired from public life. I am now ready to proceed — to continue proceeding — upward Mrs … Dewhurst.”
They continued proceeding upward.
“I edit the You See Monthly Bulletin, the newsletter of the Urban Conservation Fellowship and that requires both space and privacy. ‘Use the living-room!’ says my son, ‘it’s big enough. The kids are at school all day and if you work at the sun patio end Myra won’t disturb you.’ Myra did. How could I get a steady day’s work done in a house where lunch arrived any time between twelve and one? I didn’t complain but when I asked for a shelf in the fridge where I could keep my own food to make my own lunch she took it for a slight on her housekeeping. So this!” said Mr Goodchild putting the suitcase down, “is my fourth home since last September. I’m glad my things arrived.”
He stood beside Mrs Dewhurst in a high-ceilinged room that had been the master bedroom eighty years earlier when the mansion housed a family and six servants. An ostentatiously solid bed, wardrobe, dressing-table and set of chairs survived from that time. The gas heater in the hearth of a white marble fireplace was recent, also a Formica-topped table, Laura Ashley window curtains, wall-to-wall fitted carpet with jagged green and black pattern. The carpet was mostly covered by twenty-three full cardboard boxes, a heap of metal struts and shelving, a heavy old typewriter, heavier Grundig tape player, a massive black slide and picture projector called an epidiascope which looked as clumsy as its name.
“I am monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute,” said Mr Goodchild. “Forgive me for stating the obvious Mrs Dewhurst, but you are NOT the pleasant young man who showed me this room two days ago and asked for — and received! — what struck me as an unnecessarily huge advance on the rent.”