Alasdair Gray - The Ends of Our Tethers

I wait patiently for sleep

to cover me all up

like a cloak.

BEFORE TALKING ABOUT Tilda I’ll mention earlier wives. Wife 1 was an ordinary tidy home-lover. We met at secondary school and after leaving it she let us make love then refused to allow any more of that unless we married. So we married. Wife 2 was a bossy manager, wife 3 very quiet and messy. I married all of them because it made us feel more secure for a while and separated from them without fuss or fighting, so I am obviously no Bluebeard. Indeed, most of my life has passed in sexual loneliness which makes me hopeful when a new affair looks like starting, as happened a year ago.

In the park near my home I saw a couple stand quarrelling under a tree. No one else was in sight but they were yards away from me and I expected to pass without being noticed. Instead the woman rushed over to me saying, “Please help me, sir, that man is frightening me.”

“Good riddance!” shouted the man and hurried away leaving us facing each other.

She was in her late teens or early twenties, big and beautiful in a plain undecorated way, with short brown hair and a determined expression that showed she was no victim. Victims don’t attract me. Her clothes were of very good quality and conventional in a smart country-wear style, yet seemed slightly odd, either because they did not perfectly match or were more suited to an older woman. The silence between us grew embarrassing. I asked if she would like a coffee. She seized my hand saying, “Lead the way,” and I found us walking toward a hotel outside the park gates, gates through which the man who had shouted at us was rapidly vanishing without a backward glance. We walked side by side so easily that I thought she was leading me, though later I found she knew nothing of the neighbourhood. I asked her name. She said, “Mattie or Tilda, take your pick.”

“Surname?”

“ That ,” she said emphatically, “is what they want me not to advertise. The less said about that the better you cunt.”

Her loud clear voice had the posh accent that strikes most Scottish ears as English. I decided she was an eccentric aristocrat and suddenly, because I am a conventional soul, had no wish to take her to a hotel lounge or anywhere public. I suggested going to my place. She said, “Lead on,” so I did.

We had not far to go and as we swung along she murmured, “Cunt cunt. Cunt cunt,” very quietly to herself as if hoping no one heard. That excited me. My flat is a large bed-sitting room, workroom, bathroom and kitchen. She stood in the largest room and announced, “This is certainly more salubrious than that other man’s place.”

As I helped to remove her coat she whispered, “You cunt,” which I took as an invitation to help her out of more garments. She muttered, “Right, carry on.”

I led her to the bed. What followed was so simple and satisfying that afterwards I lay completely relaxed for the first time in years, almost unable to believe my good luck.

“And now,” she said, lying flat on her back and talking loudly as if to the ceiling, “I want apple tart with lots and lots of cream on top. Ice cream.”

“Your wish is my command,” I said jumping up and dressing.

The nearest provision store was a street away. I returned in less than fifteen minutes and found her in the middle of the floor, clutching her hair and dressed as if her clothes had been thrust on in panic. She screamed, “ Where have you been ?”

“Buying what you ordered,” I said, displaying tart and ice cream. She slumped grumpily into a chair while I prepared them in the kitchen. Later, while eating, I asked what had made her hysterical. She said, “You left me alone in this strange house and I thought you would come back hours later stinking of whisky and wanting us to do it again.”

I did want us to do it again but was not greedy enough to insist. I told her I was a freelance programmer who worked at home and I detested booze because my dad had been alcoholic. She looked pleased then said slowly and slyly, “Regarding the dad situation, ditto. Ditto but if disorder is confined to the family apartments others do not notice. And if you too detest alcohol and work at home like all sensible people it is possible, cunt, that you may be possible.”

I laughed at that and said, “Possibly you are too. Where are you from?”

“I have already said they do not want me to say.”

I explained that I was not interested in her disgustingly snobbish family but assumed she had not been long in Glasgow. She said cautiously, “Until the day before yesterday, or maybe the day before that, I occupied a quite nice caravan in a field of them. People came and went. Mostly went.”

“There must have been a town or village near your caravan park.”

“There was a village and the sea but neither was convenient. I ate in a hotel called The Red Fox. I met the man who brought me here in The Red Fox. He turned out to be most unpleasant, not my sort at all.”

“Have you things in his house? Things you want to collect?”

“What things?”

“A nightgown? Clothes?”

“No. Certainly not. Not at all. Please don’t be a …” She hesitated then said quickly, “cunt give me a glass of milk.”

It is almost impossible to judge the intelligence of someone from an alien culture so I have never discovered exactly how stupid or mad Tilda is. She behaved as if she expected to live with me. I wanted that too so it was hardly a sign of her insanity. Lunatics are supposed to have delusions. Tilda had none. She said what she meant or expected in a few clear words that always made sense. Only secrecy about her family and her compulsion to say cunt were inexplicable at first, and from remarks she passed in the following two weeks I soon pieced together an explanation.

Her “people” (she never said father or mother) ran a residential hotel or nursing home for “people of our own sort”. They seemed a pernickety sort because “everything has to be just so.”

I asked what just so meant. She said, “Exactly right forever and ever world without end amen. Dinner was awful. We had to dress.”

“In tuxedos and black ties?”

“Tuxedo is an American word. We British say evening dress. Female evening wear is less uniform than male attire but more taxing. Little hankies are an endless ordeal. I fidgeted with mine which is not the done thing, in fact utterly wrong, in fact a rotten way to carry on and I became quite impossible when I started (cunt) using (cunt) that word (cunt cunt).”

Tilda’s use of that word had obviously been an unconscious but sensible device to escape from bullying relations. They had lodged her in a caravan park very far from them (“half a day’s car ride away”) and made her promise not to mention their name because “if word gets around it will be bad for the business and we aren’t exactly rolling in money.”

This made me think their business was a sanatorium for rich mental defectives whose guardians might have doubts about the establishment if they knew people on the staff had an eccentric daughter. I suspected too that Tilda’s people were less posh than they wished. The few very posh people I have met care nothing for elaborate etiquette and swear like labourers. But Tilda’s family had given her worse eccentricities than that Anglo-Saxon word.