been resolved by the Congress long ago, its success had apparently gone to its collective head.
I sighed and turned the page. Another American republic had voted a contribution from tariff revenue to the spaceship project, which was gratifying but mysterious—there was even an editorial comment about it, full of sage mutterings about how their ways were not ours, and that we should not disdain such assistance, immoral though it might seem to us. I wasn’t too sure; to me, it smelt of stealing money, but the Americans have a much greater reverence for their governments than people have in more civilised lands. If offered some loot by an African king or Asian magnate or South American cacique, I should hope the International Scientific Society would politely decline, and this case seemed little different. But all of this was, at this moment, quite theoretical, as no such offer, and indeed no news at all, from Asia or Africa appeared in today’s edition. I rolled it up and decided to leave the national news until later.
Menial brushed crumbs from her lips and looked at me with amusement. “You really look as though you’re paying attention to all that,” she said, picking up her leather poke. I hitched my canvas satchel on my shoulder and we strolled to the Glasgow train.
“Well, I do follow the news,” I said, somewhat defensively, as we took our seats, this time facing each other across a table. “What’s wrong with that?”
Menial shrugged. “It’s so… ephemeral,” she said. “And unreliable.”
“Compared with what?”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “I’m sure this, what is it—” she reached for the paper, and spread it out “—Congress here is real, and really did do what the article says it did. But it is only a tiny part of the truth, and perhaps not the most important part of what is going on there in Paris. Let alone what is going on elsewhere in Paris. So that, and all the other such pieces give you, really, a false picture of the world.”
I could have been offended, but was not. “I’m a scholar of history, remember?” I said. “I understand how newspaper reports, even documents aren’t everything—”
“Oh, you don’t want to hear what I think about
“So what else can you do?”
She frowned at me, puzzled. “You travel around and find things out for yourself.”
“Aye, if only we all had the time.”
She touched the tip of my nose with the tip of her finger. “It’s what tinkers do, and they have all the time in their lives for it.”
The train pulled out, the Moray Firth in sight at first, with its kelp fields and fish-farms, and then nothing to see for a while but the close-packed pines of Drumossie Wood as the train turned and the engines took the strain of the long, slow ascent to Slochd.
A couple of hours later, maybe, after Speyside of the malts and bleak Drumochter, we were in the long and beautiful glens between Blair Atholl and Dunkeld. On one side of the line were streams full of trout and turbines, on the other hillsides buzzing with the saws and drills of workshops. The train stopped for five minutes at Dunkeld. A small, old town of stone, still with its Christian cathedral.
Merrial looked out of the windows, around at the scene, and sat back with a slight shudder.
“A strange place,” she said, “with the hills around it like an ambush.”
“But that’s why it’s a great place,” I said, and told her the story of how the Cameronians had held off the Highland host and saved the Revolution to which they owed their freedom. She listened with more interest, even, than my telling of the tale deserved, and leaned back at the end and said, “Aye well, maybe there’s some use to history, after all. I’ll never be afraid of these hills again.”
It was two in the afternoon by the time the train reached Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, and glad enough we were to get off it. Sometimes two people who can fascinate each other endlessly when alone together, and who can spark off each other in convivial company, find themselves inhibited among strangers who are unignorably in earshot, and find themselves growing shy and silent and stale. So it was with us, towards the end of that journey. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to talk about the Battle of Stirling when we passed through the town.
We both brightened, though, on jumping down on the platform. The familiar Glasgow railway-station smell— of currying fish, and curing leaf, and spark-gapped air, and old iron and wood-alcohol and hot oil and burnt vanilla— hit my sinuses like a shot of poteen. Menial, too, seemed invigorated by it, taking a deep breath of the polluted stench with a look of satisfaction and nostalgia.
“Ah, it’s good to be back,” she said.
I glanced sidelong at her as we walked down the platform. “When were you in Glasgow? And how could I have missed you?”
She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Oh, I forget. Ages ago. But the smell brings it back.”
“That and the noise.”
“The what?”
“THE—”
But she was laughing at me.
We crossed the station concourse, agreeing that, on balance, pigeons were a worse nuisance than sea-birds (though, as Menial gravely pointed out, better eating). This comment, and some of the more appetising components of the smell, reminded us that we were ravenous, so we bought sandwiches and botties of beer from a stall in the station and carried them out to George Square.
We sat down on a bench by a grassy knoll under the statue of the Deliverer.
“Shee that,” Menial said, pointing upwards as she munched. “It’sh mean.”
“ What?”
She swallowed. “The statue. The old city fathers must have been a bit stingy.”
I looked up. “No argument about the city fathers,” I said. They’re still tight-fisted. But that statue looks fine to me.”
“The horse is black,” Menial pointed out. She tapped the handle of her knife on a fetlock. “And cast in bronze. The lady herself is green—just copper. They got out the oxy-acetylene torches and hacked off the original rider, a king or general or whatever, and stuck the Deliverer in his place!”
I stood up and paced around it, peering.
“You’re right,” I said. “You can see the joins. I must have looked at that statue a hundred times, and not noticed anything wrong with it.” I looked up at the lady’s head. “And she has a different face from the one in Canon Town, and they’re both different from any pictures I’ve seen of the Deliverer.”
“Well, there you go, colha Gree,” she said. “Some things a tinker can teach a scholar, eh?”
“Oh aye,” I said. I sat down again. “Mind you, it could hardly be just parsimony—it’s a fine piece of work after all, and they’ve done her hair in gold.”
Ton’s gold
She was right there, too, when I looked. This was no steppe horse, bare-back broken, roughly saddled, such as was shown quite authentically in Canon Square. Instead, it was a hussar’s mount, in elaborate caparison. But I thought then, and still think, that the representation of the Deliverer herself was well done. A fine example of the Glasgow style; which, perhaps, makes the equine bodge appropriate, and part of the artist’s point.
We binned our litter and headed for the nearest tramway stop, in Buchanan Street. The transport system is one of Glasgow City Council’s proudest public works, a more than adequate replacement for the great Underground circle, which was—it’s said—one of the wonders of the ancient world. Judging by the remnants of it that here and there have outlasted centuries of flooding and subsidence, it is quite possible to agree that such it must have been.
The tram came along, bell clanging, and we jumped on and paid our groats and clattered like children up the spiral steps to the upper deck. The bell rang again and the tram lurched forward, creaking up Buchanan Street and swaying as it turned the corner into Sauchiehall.
Glasgow’s main drag looked clogged with traffic, but everything—steam-engine and motor-car and horse-cart and bicycle alike—made way for the tram’s implacable progress. The pedestrians, at this time of the day, were mosdy women shopping. But all of them, whether young lasses just out of school or mothers with young children or
