And now he pouted thoughtfully, childish brows furrowed, as he read the small ad rates. His father never bought an evening paper, so he felt he could proceed in safety. The prices interested him. It was like sending a telegram. Intimations (Births, Marriages, Deaths) two and six a line; Property, three shillings. Holiday Guide, three shillings, Situations Vacant, three shillings, Personal (Private), four shillings, and Personal (Trade), four and six a line. He wrote his appeal four times on a sheet of jotter- paper before he got it right, and asked Percy to let him use the portable typewriter to type it out fair. He knew Percy was too much of a gentleman to ask what he was typing. He did it in the cellar, alone in a corner, before the start of a mid-week service. GARSON, he jabbed with one finger, and went slowly on, searching the keyboard grimly for the necessary letters. HELEN, he assembled. Come home. Admit was wrong. Money no bother. Frank has loads. Bob.
He knew his father’s Christian name was Robert and he supposed his mother must have called him Bob, but he couldn’t hear her in his mind. She seemed to belong to that other world he had lived in when he was young. Now he was old, living in a real world, a hard, solid world where things were enemies. He felt he was trying to call up a ghost. But for all his doubts he went to the Citizen office alone, wandered round fearlessly till he found the right counter, and tholed the squint glance of the clerk who counted the words. It cost him sixteen shillings. He paid it with a pound note Percy had thrust on him to make up for not giving him better support against Savage. He took it as a gift from Percy. It came privately from Percy’s pocket, not from the chest in front of the Brotherhood, so he claimed before his conscience that he still hadn’t taken any share of the hoard. It would be time enough to demand his rights in it when his mother came home.
CHAPTER TEN
Helen Garson was working the Yoker–Auchenshuggle route with a new driver two nights later. Her husband was right when he had told their son the West Indian had nothing to do with her leaving home, but she still kept up with her old driver. She had to have some friends, and she visited the West Indian and his wife about once a month and had the distraction of sitting for an evening with a happy family where she felt welcome. Apart from that, she was a lonely woman, determined to like living alone. She bashed on, doing her best not to grieve for her man and her boy and her old home in Bethel Street, and she was doing as well as could be expected until two things upset her.
The first thing was Percy got on her bus about ten o’clock at the Hielenman’s Umbrella, and the sight of him reminded her of Bethel Street and that reminded her of all she was stubbornly forgetting. He wasn’t alone. He was escorting a girl, a long-legged, wide-skirted, pony-tailed, large-breasted, gum-chewing, big-eyed teenager. She knew him at once but he didn’t know her. He was only a boy at school the last time she saw him and now he was like a young man, so stylishly dressed that he looked slightly odd. He sat in the back seat upstairs, holding his girl’s hand and their brows touched as they mooned together the whole journey. She grued a little at the sight of them, for she was an anti-romantic, and the girl seemed to her anyway a stupid-faced doll who would be none the worse for a scrubbing and a haircut. Percy wore the gawky look he had always worn, but he was wearing it with a difference now. Instead of the gawkiness of a backward schoolboy he was showing the gawkiness of the male animal reaching towards the female for the first time and not quite sure how to set about it. She was glad to see them get off at Partick Cross. They linked arms when they stepped on the pavement and she sent a sniff of contempt after them.
‘He never was very bright,’ she thought as she rattled upstairs and down, breezily collecting her fares and tyrannizing the passengers as only a Glasgow bus-conductress can. ‘He was aye kind of glaikit and he doesn’t seem to have improved any. Seeing a girl home at his age! And where did he get the money to dress like that? I bet he hasn’t got two pennies to rub together. I don’t know how they do it nowadays, courting before they’re right out of school. And he’s left himself with some journey back home too, the silly fool! It’s no’ a girlfriend he’s got, it’s a pen- pal, staying that distance from him. The things they’ll do when they think they’re in love! Ah well, they’ll get a rude awakening one day and hell mend them. All they think of is sex, they’re sex-mad, these kids nowadays. The way she sat pushing her breasts up to him, must have been pads she was wearing, the little bitch. Ach, they’ll learn one day, when they’ve rent to pay and light to pay and coal to get and weans to feed and clothe.’
She was so annoyed with Percy for coming on her bus and raising ghosts that she made up for it by tearing him and his girl to pieces all the way along Dumbarton Road to the end of the line.
Then at the lying-in time there the second thing happened to upset her. It was worse than the first, much worse. She saw her son’s small ad in the paper. It was just a piece of bad luck, for she never bought an evening paper. She happened to see this one because on the last lap of the journey she left her bus for a moment and bought two pokes of chips, one for her driver and one for herself. It was a bad shift they were on, and they had got the habit of buying chips to give them a filling bite between the end of one run and the start of another. The Italian who owned the fish-and-chip shop always served her at once, no matter who else was waiting, and she was back on her bus before the passengers knew she had left it. She handed the chips in to the driver. They would keep warmer in his cabin than on her platform.
When the empty bus lay at the terminus she sat downstairs facing her driver, and since he was the strong silent type she occupied herself reading one of the sheets of newspaper Enrico had wrapped round the two pokes.
‘That’s last night’s paper you’re reading,’ her driver remarked detachedly, recognizing a headline.
‘You don’t expect him to wrap the chips in tonight’s paper, do you?’ she answered crossly, and turned the page.
She gazed amongst the births, marriages and deaths, delving into the chips with coin-grimed fingers while her driver ate his way steadily through the other poke.
‘Harry didn’t put much salt on them the night,’ he commented.
‘You’re hell of a talkative all of a sudden,’ she retorted. ‘Just you go get them tomorrow night then and you tell him that!’
‘I don’t like a lot of salt,’ he said, after brooding over her answer.
‘I see there’s an awful lot of shorthand-typists wanted,’ she muttered.
‘Ach, they’re no’ well paid they girls,’ he said. ‘You’re getting more than them, even without your overtime.’
She turned from the situations vacant to the ads for second-hand furniture, vacuum cleaners, fur coats and tape-recorders.
‘What do people buy all these things for if they’re that damned hard-up they’ve got to sell them?’ she asked peevishly. ‘They buy them the one day and want to sell them the next. Aye, they’re all as good as new according to the advert. Aye, I don’t think!’
She was just going to crumple the paper and dump it in the litter-bin at the bus stop when she saw her married name in small capitals at the foot of a column.
The whole thing was a sheer fluke, a pure accident, a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances. That Enrico had happened to use that page to put round the chips and that she happened to see the ad at all, was the kind of coincidence that happens every day in the real world that God created but is condemned as far-fetched in the work of a novelist, as if God wasn’t the greatest novelist of all.
She frowned. She scowled. She stared. She read it three times and squinted over at her driver. He was lighting the remainder of the cigarette he had started at the other end of the route. He didn’t seem to be watching her and she didn’t tell him what she had seen. She wasn’t a woman given to confidences. She tore out the ad roughly