‘I remember,’ she said.
The town had changed a lot since they had left it, that much was clear. Now the old tenements were being knocked down and the people shuttled out to huge featureless estates where the windows revealed the blue sky of TV. There were hardly any picture houses left: they had been converted into bingo halls. Instead of small shops supermarkets were springing up, flexing their huge muscles. The lover’s lane had disappeared. The park seemed to have lost its atmosphere of pastoral carelessness and was being decorated for the visitors with literate slogans in flowers.
‘It’s thirty-five years since we left,’ said her husband.
And the wallet bulged from his breast pocket, a wife, two children, and a good job in administration.
He moved about restlessly. He wanted to tell someone how well he had done but how could he do that? All the people he had known were gone elsewhere, many of them presumably dead and completely forgotten.
‘Do you mind old Hannah?’ he said.
She had been a fat old woman who sat day after day at the window leaning out of it talking to the passers-by. A fat woman with arthritis. He wondered vaguely what had happened to her.
‘I wonder if the coal-house is still here. Come on.’
He took his wife by the hand and they walked down the close to the back. The coal-houses were incredibly still there, all padlocked and all beside each other, all with discoloured doors.
She kept her fur coat as far away from them as she could.
‘Do you mind the day I went to the factor?’ he said. The factor had been a small, buttoned-up, black-suited lawyer. In those days of poverty he himself had been frightened to visit him in his wee office with the dim glass door. He imagined what he would do to that factor now.
He had gone there after coming home from the office, and the wee lawyer in the undertaker’s suit had said to him over his shoulder,
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to report the rain coming through the roof.’
‘How much do you pay Jackson?’
‘Fifteen shillings a week.’
‘And what do you expect for fifteen shillings a week?’ said the factor, as if even giving words away were an agony of the spirit. In a corner of the office an umbrella dripped what seemed to be black rain.
‘I was hoping that the house would be dry anyway.’
‘I’ll send someone round tomorrow,’ and the factor had bent down to study a ledger with a rusty red cover.
‘You said that a week ago.’
‘And I’m saying it again. I’m a busy man. I’ve got a lot to do.’ At that moment he had been filled with a terrible reckless anger and was about to raise his fist when the factor looked up. His mouth opened slightly showing one gold tooth in the middle of the bottom row of teeth, and he said carefully, ‘Next week.’
So he had walked out past the dispirited receptionist in the glass cage – the one with the limp and the ageing mother – and then home.
Thinking back on it now, he thought: I was treated like a black. That’s what it amounted to. By God, like a black.
He wished that that factor was alive now so that he could show him his bank balance. The wee nyaff. The Scottish words rose unbidden to his mouth like bile.
For a moment he did in fact see himself as a black, cringing in that rotting office, suffering the contempt, hearing the black rain dripping behind him from the furled umbrella.
But then a black would buy a bicycle and forget all about his humiliation. Blacks weren’t like us.
As he turned away from the coal-house door he saw the washing hanging from the ropes on the green.
‘Ye widna like to be daeing that noo,’ he told his wife jocularly.
‘What would the Bruces say if they saw you running about in this dirty place like a schoolboy?’ she said coldly.
‘Whit dae ye mean?’
‘Simply what I said. There was no need to come here at all. Or do you want to take a photograph and show it to them? “The Place Where I Was Born”.’
‘I wasna born here. I just lived here for five years.’
‘What would they think of you, I wonder.’
‘I don’t give a damn about the Bruces,’ he burst out, the veins on his forehead swelling. ‘What’s he but a doctor anyway? I’m not ashamed of it. And, by God, why should you be ashamed of it? You weren’t brought up in a fine house either. You worked in a factory till I picked you up at that dance.’
She turned away.
‘Do you mind that night?’ he asked contritely. ‘You were standing by the wall and I went up to you and I said, “Could I have the honour?” And when we were coming home we walked down lovers’ lane, where they had all the seats and the statues.’
‘And you made a clown of yourself,’ she said unforgivingly.
‘Yes, didn’t I just?’ remembering how he had climbed the statue in the moonlight to show off. From the top of it he could see the Clyde, the ships and the cranes.
‘And remember the flicks?’ he said. ‘We used tae get in wi jam jars. And do you mind the man who used to come down the passage at the interval spraying us with disinfectant?’
The interior of the cinema came back to him in a warm flood: the children in the front rows keeping up a continual
