Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [60]
Soon afterward we all began eating together and I slept in the little low room by myself. My mother spent most of the time in an upstairs room I could never visit and an old woman came each day to do the housework. I believe the old woman was first employed as temporary help while the baby was born, but she was still cleaning the house and making meals many months later, and carrying eggs and toast upstairs on a tray while the farmer, his children, and I breakfasted on porridge at the kitchen table. All my memories of the farm have eggs in them. When exploring the barnyard one day I found a great cluster of brown eggs in a clump of nettles behind an old cart. It was a surprising sight, for our eggs usually came from wooden henhouses in a nearby field. I trotted into the kitchen to tell someone. The farmer was there, and he explained that hens sometimes laid astray in an effort to get their eggs hatched instead of eaten. I led him to the eggs; he gathered them in his cap, praised me and gave me a peppermint. Whenever I felt lonely after that I would crawl into a henhouse through one of the tiny doors the hens used, steal an egg from under a sitting fowl and go to the stackyard or byre and pretend to find it under hay or among the cowcake. Then I took it to the farmer, who always patted my head and gave me a peppermint. I think he must have known where I got the other eggs, but it was friendly of him to pretend otherwise. He probably liked me.
His children did not. There was a garden of tangled grass and stunted fruit trees behind the house, and on warm summer evenings I played there, building nests in the ivy round my bedroom window. One evening the farmer’s daughter came and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
She may have been less than twelve but she seemed a grown woman to me. I said I was making a nest for a bird to lay an egg in. She said, “A wee chooky birdy? That’s daft. And where did you get the straw?”
I said, “On the ground in the yard.”
“Then it belongs to my daddy and you stole it so put it back there.”
Since I continued building she gripped and twisted my wrists until I kicked her ankle, then she went off screaming she would tell my mother and I would be sent away. I ran crying to the henhouse field, squeezed through a hen door on hands and knees and squatted in a corner of the grain-sprinkled floor till it grew dark. I meant to starve to death there but I heard my mother distantly calling, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, and at last I felt that the misery in her breast and the misery in mine were the same thing. I squeezed through the door and moved among the black henhouses under a high ceiling of stars. An owl was hooting. Suddenly I found her and wrapped my arms round her big stomach and she was kind to me. A few nights later I was wakened by a great uproar and she entered the room and climbed into bed. This was less pleasant than it had been in town, for she brought my sister and the bed was overcrowded. The loving heat she baked me in was still deliriously exciting, but my mind was now too strong to be unmade by it. I was worried, because I liked the farm in some ways. A week later the farmer took us in his pony cart to a railway station, gave me a bag of peppermints and left us on the platform without saying a word.
I understand my mother now. She expected splendour. Most of us expect it sometime or other, and growing old is mainly a way of learning to do without. My mother could never learn to do without so she kept altering her life in the only way she knew, by shifting to other men. She shifted when pregnant because pregnancy made her more hopeful than usual, or because she feared that bearing a child when living with the father would fix her to one man forever. If this is so then I never saw my real father. The third substitute was a bank manager who lived with his widowed sister in a mansion in a small fishing port. He was a gentle, dismal, kindly man; she was an abrupt, unhappy, slightly acid woman, and my mother (with a four-year-old son, one-year-old daughter, five-month-old