The Holy City Read Free

I remember.
    It was Ethel Baird, in fact, who had given me the book — my golden treasury, a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson rhymes. On a day long ago in the year 1950.
    â€” This is for you, I recall her saying softly, as she carefully, patiently and methodically turned the pages, showing me the delicate illustrations of the constellations: those fantailing sprays of glittering diamonds that adorned the gleaming night-blue cover.
    Ethel and my birth mother had been friends all their lives. They were fond of Wee Dimpie but would never consort with her socially — they couldn’t.
    Orthodox Protestant ladies — high-bred and discreet.
    Obviously it would have been better to have a proper mother like anyone else but Wee Dimpie was a rock, in the circumstances, I have to say. There is not a bad word I could say about the woman. And she never tried hiding things, or telling me any lies.
    â€” So that’s who she was, I used to say when I got older, that’s who she was — the ‘mystery’ lady! With her airs and graces and presents and food. My my! My own mother!
    No, no ‘mammy’ on earth could have tended to my needs any better than Dimpie. Why, her breakfasts alone were enough to feed an army.
    â€” Me auld pal Chrishty! she used to say to me. That took his name after the besht auld saint of all!
    â€” She’s Lady Thornton, isn’t she, my mother? She’s the wife of Henry Thornton of the Manor. Isn’t she, Dimpie? Please tell me the truth.
    â€” Yes, she’d say then, shuffling off with a bucket, scratching her backside as she wiped her mouth and shouted ‘Chawk chuck chuck!’, a scatter of red hens charging raucously across the yard.
    Dympna McCool, it has to be said, was fond of me too, if in a functional, dutiful sort of way: she didn’t pass all that much heed on me, to tell the truth. Generally being too busy haring off up to the chapel. For Wee Dimpie, I’m afraid, was a bit of a religious zealot, bestowing on me, as a consequence, the names of two of her favourite saints. St Christopher, to whom she declared she had a ‘special devotion’, and John of the Cross, he for no other reason that I am aware of apart from the fact that his fly-specked picture adorned the wall. But they were names, I suppose, as good as any other. So all in all, Wee Dimpie did her job well. Being big-hearted and nice in a kind of vacant, uninterested manner.
    One thing for which I remain in her debt — she taught me all there was to know about rustic living. With the result that, by the time I was twelve years old — and it’s amusing when you think about it, considering the cosmopolitan lifestyle I ended up embracing — there was very little about chickens and cow shit that C.J. Pops didn’t know. As the two of us whacked the fat arses of Friesians, whistling as we trod the churned mud of the estate, Dimpie fingering herbeads as she implored God for yet another batch of favours, before wielding her ashplant and bawling at the livestock:
    â€” Will youse shoo outa dat, youse eejity bastards!
    The Nook was nice and warm and cosy and it could have been a worse arrangement, I suppose. And one which, surprisingly without a doubt, had been facilitated, in a quite extraordinarily uncharacteristic burst of largesse, by Henry Thornton himself. Primarily, of course, to prevent the impending nervous collapse of my mother. The conditions he outlined were as follows:
    â€” McCool can look after him down in the Nook. Just make sure he never darkens the door of this house, never once sets his foot across our threshold. Don’t ever even dare bring him inside the gates. For, if you do, if you even consider it, my dear: be assured of this, you’ll lose everything, all entitlements, everything that might be due to you. I’ll see you walk the roads of this county for the humiliation that bastard Carberry has visited upon me.
    After the