The Serpent Read Free Page B

remembered little scraps of letters he had got from her when he was in Glasgow. She knew she could not write or spell very well and his father formally answered all letters, but these scraps, painfully and probably secretly written, had a curious suppressed warmth, though they attended entirely to physical needs. The ordinary phrase ‘see and be eating plenty’ could make him laugh and feel awkward, and even, if he thought about it, slightly hot. It was almost as if she had come into the room and spoken to him with others there.
    And that would have been awkward! Never any real idea had she had of the life he had moved amongst in Glasgow in the two crucial years between nineteen and twenty-one.
    And it was as well! Bowed her head would have been then, and her back, like the women who turned away from Calvary as the darkness came upon the world. What agony there must have been at that scene, what incredible affright!
    He was the only son. A second child had died at birth, following an accident with a washing tub, and conception had ceased in her after that. When a neighbour came with sad news, her eyebrows would go up, making arched creases immediately above, so that her eyes, now round and wide open and dark, seemed smaller than ever, while she sat with resigned palms on her broad knees. In a curious haunting sense, she was like an animal. She had never told him astory when he was a child, and if she did refer to bogles when he was obstreperous at bedtime, it was never more than a reference, as if he knew the creatures only too well himself. What a fearsome reality this often gave to them!
    When society could produce beings like his mother, it could from that moment dispense with all force and coercion. He had realised as much more than once, and always in a moment of illumination. Was she in this respect in her simple way the embodiment of a once perfected mode of society?
    Not at all so unusual a question as it might seem – in those days in Glasgow, away back in the late ’eighties or early ’nineties, when questions about society and socialism had an eagerness, almost a bloom, upon them which they have since lost, however a practical earnestness may have increased.
    Huxley. Darwin. Robert Owen. Haeckel. Oh, the excitement in those days! Impossible for this late age ever to recapture that first fearful delight, that awful thrill, of Scepticism. The horizon lifted, the world extended itself like a Chinese lantern and glowed with strange beasts and designs.
    He had taken to the Glasgow life, the life of the streets, almost at once and with a real avidity. For a boy out of the Highland country, this may have been unusual, but then he had always had a zest for life, and particularly the outsider’s zest. He was not in himself a ‘character’ so much as a ‘watcher’ – something more than a spectator, ready if need be to mix in, and shout, and retreat, doubled up with laughter. Something of the gamin in him from the beginning, beyond doubt.
    If his mother’s mind had had to express evil in its two highest forms it would naturally have avoided definition and sought for images, and if Antichrist and the Scarlet Woman had been whispered to help her out, she would have gone silent in utter acknowledgment or, at the most, said ‘Yeth’ on a slow intake of breath, solemn and sad, as though these two eternal figures, caparisoned in the scarlet and black of night and of nightmare, could hardly be on this earth.
    Antichrist and the Scarlet Woman.
    The little shop, before it sprouted a red petrol pump, had warred disastrously enough with the grey church.
    In and around such war had come love, that red terrifying urge, and tragedy, that bitter defeat, and murder that had sat in his head through days and nights with so awful a clarity.
    Antichrist …
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    Coming into close contact with Dougal Robertson had been so simple. A customer, a stout noisy woman, had returned to