Poverty Castle (25 page)

‘Yours most sincerely,

‘Edward Sempill.'

After his signature came, in their own handwriting, the names Diana, Effie, Jeanie, Rowena, Rebecca, and Margaret Sempill, who must be Mrs Sempill.

Mrs Gilchrist was impatient. She had her coat on, ready to go off to work. ‘Is it frae Miss Sempill?' she asked.

‘No. It's from her father.'

‘Whit does he want? You've never met him, have you?'

‘No. Would you like to read it?'

Her mother took it and read it, with pursed lips. Now and then she uttered a little snort. ‘He's being sarcastic,' she said, at last. “The pleasure of meeting you”. Some hope. They juist want you there to laugh at you.'

‘Do you think so?'

‘Whit else would they want you for?'

Peggy was silent.

‘Don't tell me you're thinking of going?'

Peggy still said nothing.

‘You start work, mind, no' this Monday but the next. Ah wouldnae want you to disappoint Mr Stevenson, efter him being so obliging. Maybe they do respect you, Peggy, as they should, but they're no' oor kind. Amang them you'd be naething, amang your ain kind you're somebody. Weel, Ah'll have to be aff.'

When her mother was gone Peggy lay staring up at the ceiling. She wanted very much to read the letter again but she wasn't going to. She was going to put it in the fire, except that there was no fire, the house being all electric. She would put it in the garbage bin under the sink.

When she got up her father was in the kitchen reading his
Daily Record
. Every morning he went first thing to the newsagent. It was, he admitted, full of trivialities but he couldn't do without it.

‘Your mither said you got a letter frae Miss Sempill.'

‘From her father.'

‘Whit does he want?'

‘You can read it if you like.'

‘Are you shair it's no' private?'

‘Maybe you could advise me, after you've read it.'

‘Thanks, Peggy.'

He read at first with frowns and then with smiles and nods. Evidently he thought Mr Sempill was sincere.

‘It's a very nice letter,' he said, cautiously. ‘Are you going to accept?'

‘Do you think I should? Mum thinks I shouldn't.'

‘Your mither would be terrified to find herself amang folk like that, but she forgets you're a different generation and you're educated. If you're no' on their social level yet you will be one day.'

He was supposed to believe in a time when everyone would be on the same social level. Were his dreams of justice and equality, like her mother's fantasies, merely compensations for the irreducible harshness of real life?

‘I'm not going, Dad,' she said.

‘If it's money Ah'm shair your mither and me could help.'

‘It's not money.'

‘He hints in his letter as if he thocht it might be. Why don't you want to go?'

‘I want to but I can't.'

‘Whit's preventing you?'

It would have taken a long time to sort out the mixture of prejudice, fear, envy, inhibition, and self-distrust that stood in her way. She was used to doing without things that she couldn't afford, but making do a while longer with old jeans or old shoes was hardly to be compared with giving up this opportunity to spend a few days at Poverty Castle. Was her mother right in thinking that when she saw how they lived in their beautiful and comfortable corner she would be sick with discontent?

Better not to go. She would write to Mr Sempill, thanking him and saying she was sorry she could not accept his invitation. She would tell the kind of lie used on such occasions: her
mother wasn't well. She would write it at once and go out and post it. Once it was in the letterbox she would be free to concentrate on the book she was reading, which was Prescott's
Conquest Of Mexico
. Her dropping the letter in the box would be the equivalent of Cortes' burning of his boats on the beach at Vera Cruz!

It took her only ten minutes to write the letter. The notepaper and envelope she used were cheap in comparison with Mr Sempill's. But then hers were coming from a council flat with a view of an abandoned steelwork, his had come from a castle in sight of the sea.

She went through to the living-room to look for a stamp in the little silver dish in the display cabinet.

Her father was still reading the newspaper. ‘Are you going to post it right away?' he asked.

‘Why not?'

‘Shouldn't you wait a day or twa? Second thoughts are often best.'

‘I've thought about it too long already.'

It was a bright morning. In Kilcalmonell the sun would be glittering on the sea. Here it shone dully on heaps of litter and some haggard grass. She remembered how Diana had looked at all this unloveliness with pity for those condemned to live amidst it but also with impatience at their failure to tidy it up. She had not realised that living here for years had a paralysing effect. To tidy it up and keep it tidy would need Herculean efforts hardly within the capability of people burdened by generations of deprivations. Flowers and bushes had once been planted by the council, only to be torn up within days by children whom everyone, including their parents, had called vandals. But it had seemed to Peggy, herself a child then, that that vicious and exultant destruction had also been an unconscious gesture of revenge. In this television age the children of the poor saw every night how the rich lived.

She came to a letterbox in a wall. She took the letter out
of her pocket and held it in the slot but did not let it go. It might not be safe here. Children dropped in lighted matches. Better to find a letterbox in a safer place.

It would be as well to make for the post office in the main street. A letter posted there went faster.

She came to it and walked past. She told herself she must not send a letter that contained a lie. But that itself was a lie. The truth was she had sentenced herself to a kind of death and dreaded to pull the trigger.

She sat in the public park, reading the
Conquest Of Mexico
. Young women with babies in prams passed, talking about babies. There had been babies in Montezuma's kingdom. Prescott, that blind admirable man, generously excused the conquistadors, on the grounds that they were men of their time and ought to be judged by the standards of that time. They had believed that cruelties and murders perpetrated by them on heathens in an attempt to win them to Christ were not only pardonable but praiseworthy, and would earn them a place in heaven. But what if, thought Peggy, there was one person, just one, in the sixteenth century who believed in his heart that those cruelties and murders were evil like all other cruelties and murders, that Cortes and his men, for all their endurance, courage, and fame, were brutal murderers, especially as a part of their motive was greed for gold?

She imagined that one person, sitting in the sun in a public park in Medellin, the town in Spain where Cortes was born, not daring to say it but thinking it, that treachery was treachery, greed was greed, cruelty was cruel, and murder murder, no matter what extenuations were offered, religious or patriotic.

In her own day, she thought, such a person might say, in defiance of the vast majority, that the killing of thousands of innocent people at Hiroshima, say, could never be justified. In the twenty-second century, if mankind had not destroyed itself by then, would some historian like Prescott write that it had been the general belief of the twentieth century that such massacres, though unfortunate and lamentable, had nonetheless been
necessary, so that civilisation might be saved. Since all believed it no one was to blame.

‘I don't believe it,' she said, aloud.

Two old men passing glanced back at her. One said something and they both laughed. She could guess what had been said. Talking to oneself was to be expected in the old, whose sweethearts were mostly dead, but not in a young girl of twenty with her whole life in front of her. It must be because she was in love. Fifty yards away they were still glancing back and laughing.

She was not being mocked but honoured.

Old men in Cortes' Spain and Montezuma's Mexico had laughed at young girls talking to themselves.

She shut the book and the great problems receded. The small insistent ones returned, as she felt the letter in her pocket.

Her father was still reading the newspaper. He read everything, even the car advertisements, though he couldn't drive and was never likely to buy a car. In the evening he would watch television with the same fixation. He had used to argue back if anyone on the screen said something with which he vehemently disagreed, but his wife had got fed up and ordered him to keep quiet as he was spoiling her enjoyment. Now he just sat and listened to opinions that he detested, without saying a word.

‘I didn't post it, Dad,' she said.

‘So you took my advice, eh? You're haeing second thochts.'

‘I thought I would telephone instead.'

‘It's a lot dearer.'

‘It's cheaper after six. I'll wait till then. It's not so easy to tell lies on the telephone.'

He had seldom occasion to telephone himself. ‘Ah think Ah see whit you mean. Did you tell lies in your letter?'

‘I said Mum wasn't well. Don't tell her.'

‘Better no'. She wouldnae be pleased.'

Peggy's mother was superstitious about her health. She didn't like it to be talked about, far less lied about.

At seven Peggy said she was going out to telephone the Sempills.

‘Hae you decided whit you're going to tell them?' asked her mother.

‘Yes, I have. I'm going to tell them I'm not coming.'

Her mother was satisfied. ‘You'd better go then. You micht hae a long walk before you find yin that's working.'

There were two kiosks in the scheme. They were out of order so often that the post office no longer bothered to repair them.

‘Writing would hae been a lot cheaper,' said her mother. ‘But he did put his telephone number on the letter, so maybe he wants you to phone. You ken, Peggy, you mak things a lot mair difficult than they need to be. Is that whit education does?'

‘It helps you to see a' sides of a question,' said Peggy's father. ‘That's whit it's for.'

‘Is that why she can never mak up her mind?'

‘About what?' asked Peggy.

‘Aboot lots o' things. Aboot who you belang to, us or them.'

‘Who are them?'

‘Thae Sempills, to start wi'.'

‘I said I wasn't going to visit them.'

‘So you did, but you didnae soond very happy aboot it. Ah was talking to Mrs Davidson, or to be mair exact she was talking to me. This very day, in the shop. “Is your lassie blin', Mary? Or does she need new specs?” “Why dae you ask, Mysie?” “Because Ah was in the post office for my pension and she cam in and ignored me. Ah said, hello, Peggy, but Ah micht as weel hae been talking to myself. So Ah thocht maybe a' her reading has weakened her eesicht.”'

‘I didn't notice her,' said Peggy. ‘It was crowded.'

‘Don't worry aboot it, Peggy,' said her father. ‘She's an illdisposed woman. She'd dearly love to hear you'd failed at University.'

‘She's no' the only yin,' said his wife, grimly.

But Peggy knew that just as many would be pleased if she
succeeded. Like Pauline and Trixie, whom Diana had thought scarcely human. They would see Peggy's success as in a way their own too.

She made for the nearest kiosk, less than two hundred yards away. It might miraculously be working.

There was no miracle. The cord had been cut, the instrument stolen. Panes of glass were broken: a hammer must have been used. Obscene graffiti were scribbled on the wall. Human excrement fouled the floor. It was as if heathens had desecrated a shrine.

She set off to where she knew there would be a kiosk in good order. Broomfield was the most desirable part of the town where the houses were bungalows or semi-detached villas, all with gardens and all owned by the occupiers. The people there paid high rates and voted Tory. Since every house had its own private telephone the public one was seldom used.

It was only five minutes' walk, so close to the poor did the well-off live. The streets were called avenues. There were flowers in the gardens and full-grown trees. On the footpaths there was no litter, not even dog-shit. The dogs were taken to the public park, to shit there.

Two girls came out of a gate. They were well dressed. They had been at school with Peggy and were now at University where she occasionally saw them.

One walked past without a blink of recognition but the other hesitated and then said: ‘Hello, Peggy.'

‘Hello, Betty,' said Peggy.

They didn't stop, nor did she.

She felt more encouraged by the greeting than depressed by the snub.

The telephone kiosk, with flower beds behind it, was not only in working order, it was also whole and undefiled.

Her hands trembled as she put coins in readiness on top of the black box. She remembered the number, for she had been saying it to herself on and off for the past few days.

The telephone went on ringing in the house by the sea. Perhaps on such a fine evening they were out of doors.

Peggy's mouth was dry.

A voice spoke, briskly: ‘Kilcalmonell 288. Effie Sempill speaking.'

Peggy could hardly speak. ‘This is Peggy Gilchrist. I got a letter from your father this morning.'

The voice became warm and friendly. ‘Hello, Peggy. How nice to hear from you. I'm Effie, Diana's sister. Diana's at the Big House where they're back in residence. I hope you're calling to say you're coming. We all very much want you to. We think, well I do anyway, that you would do the Sempills a lot of good.'

‘No. I'm sorry. I can't come.'

There was a pause. ‘Forgive me for asking but is it money? Fares are very expensive nowadays.'