her driver asked casually.
‘You don’t miss much, do you?’ she answered, crumpling the paper viciously.
In a little while she was busy collecting fares again as her bus weaved east, and when the top deck was full and she had five standing downstairs she stopped anybody else from boarding, barring them with the lucid command always given by Glasgow bus-conductresses in such circumstances, ‘Come on, get off!’
She was too harassed to think any more of Percy, who had anyway been displaced by the advertisement she had seen, and she didn’t know that when she passed Partick Cross he was standing with his girl in the back-close of a grey tenement north of her route. The back-close is that part of the close that lies beyond the stairway to the flats and leads to the back-court. Since it usually turns at an angle from the front-close and can’t be seen from the street it is the site of countless Glasgow courtships and seductions. Some write of beds and sofas, some sing of the green cornfields and acres of rye, some tumble panting in the hay, but Glasgow’s sons and lovers have the back-close.
For all he had a pride in possessing the refinement of a true poet Percy was insensible to the drabness of the setting. He was in a state. It didn’t matter that the midden was only fifteen paces away across the back-court nor that the brown paint of the close was chipped, peeled, and scarred with obscure incisions by the pocket-knives of schoolboys. He was exalted. He had been aching for a girl and now he had one. He had one all to himself, all alone, against the wall though not against her will. He was trembling on the brink. His curiosity was as wide and burning as his ignorance, but it was the way girls dressed disturbed him more than the girls themselves. Indeed the girls he saw every day left him inwardly as cold as a Scots summer. It was advertisements for nylons, brassieres and girdles made his heart quicken, toilet soaps and deodorants told him of breasts and armpits, and foam petticoats under wide skirts whispered to him a warming suggestion of the unseen thighs above the calves and the instep arched by high heels. They all created a mysterious world of elegance, freshness, cleanliness and softness that he longed to enter and embrace, a world not inhabited by the girls he saw every day. But Sophy had long legs and a wide skirt, she had a bust like a girl in a television advert, her hair was glossy, she smelt of soap and something else, so it was Sophy he wanted.
Of course, his curiosity concerned anatomy as well as underwear. Faces never moved him, for the face was always visible. But he would saunter slowly past the window of a ladies’ gown shop in Sauchiehall Street, squinting in a fluster at the naked wax models of women, and pretend he wasn’t looking at the breasts, belly and thighs at all, his big feet pointing north and south as he ambled west. Not sure of what he had seen he would turn back at a decent distance and stroll past the window again, his head hot with guilt, but he never dared stop and stare and get it right once and for all.
And now at last he had a girl of his own. Now at last he could come to grips with the problem and be satisfied with the answer. He had survived the first stage of saying goodnight at the bus-stop. He had been given a pass-mark and allowed to enter the second degree of saying goodnight at the close-mouth. Tonight Sophy seemed ready to let him graduate. She let him edge her into the back-close and when they were there she put her handbag on the ground to leave her hands free if he tried to make love to her.
She was a very junior waitress in a cheap restaurant, a rough eating-house where he went for a midday meal when he first gave up his job. Then he began going there for morning coffee because it wasn’t so busy before lunch, then for afternoon tea too when it was quiet again, and he could sit and look at her in peace. She couldn’t help getting to know him by sight, and when she moved around and Percy sat admiring her bright legs and her hips under her black dress she answered him with a little smirk of a smile over her shoulder. He spoke to her at last with all the confidence in the world, depending on the money in the cellar to see him through all difficulties. Without telling her a direct lie he let her think he was a student. He thought that would explain why he could spend so much time just sitting around. Helet her see he had money by tipping her absurdly every day and making a show of opening his wallet to pay his bill so that she could see the wad of notes inside.
Naturally she agreed at once to go out with him, but for all his money he never took her anywhere special. He had the money all right, but not the knowledge gained only from experience how to spend it. He was intimidated by the uppish look of expensive places, with a commissionaire at the door, and he never dared cross the threshold. A frugal eater and a non-drinker, he could move only within a narrow circle of cafes and cinemas. It didn’t bother Sophy. A cinema in town and a box of chocolates were luxury enough to her. She wouldn’t have been comfortable drinking cocktails in a hotel lounge. Percy suited her, except when he told her he was a poet. Still, she got over it quickly. She supposed a boy had a right to at least one oddity and she believed poets were great lovers. She waited for the great lover when they embraced in the back-close.
As for Percy, he had dreamed of this hour and this solitude so long and so often that the reality of it was but a dim substitute for the ideal. Yet because it was the nearest he had come to his desire he felt himself on the verge of great deeds and great discoveries. He believed he was thrilled, and he was. He was wandering in the pathways of the moon, guided by a celestial light that illumed her remote beauty while he drowned in the deep mournfulness of a love not yet made known and satisfied. He gazed at Sophy’s brow and cheeks and the curve of her throat and his worship grew and grew. He was in bliss. The light of consciousness went out and his heart vibrated in a fecund darkness that promised the unutterable satisfaction he deserved.
With an inscrutable smile Sophy spoke.
‘Did you ever think of writing a pome about me?’ she asked in a voice as if some tender soul imprisoned within her was asking the question. After all, she was only seventeen, though she had been kissed often enough. ‘I mean, when you’re writing your pomes do you ever do one to me? Just how you see me, I mean, when you sit watching me serve the tables and saying what you think about me?’
‘Well, I did start something,’ he admitted, red-faced but encouraged by her interest in his work. ‘It’s a sort of song. You know, what Rabbie Burns used to write, that kinda thing.’
He chanted huskily.
‘Doh, soh, me, re-doh.’
After a nervous swallow he went on, incanting his composition to her in the development of a simple melody.
Darling, you must know
How I dream of you
Morning, noon and night,
You make the world seem bright,
Fill me with delight.
Sweetheart, kiss me gaily
As I play my ukelele,
Then just hold me tight,
Hold me tight and love me right,
And be mine tonight.
‘That’s lovely,’ she beamed the brightness of her smile in the dim corner while his hands fidgeted up and down her flanks. ‘I like the way it rhymes. You could sell that.’
‘Oh, I don’t write for money,’ he said proudly.
‘But it doesn’t say much about me. I mean, it doesn’t describe me. I’m just not there, am I?’
‘Well, that’s not the point,’ he defended his lyric. ‘You see, a poet writes about his emotions, not so much what he sees like, it’s what he feels. That’s what matters to him, what he feels.’
He felt her hips and back with wandering hands and she squirmed in a movement ambiguously encouraging and disapproving.
‘Yes, but there’s not many girls with hair like me, or my complexion,’ she suggested. ‘Then there’s my eyes. Did you never think of writing about my eyes, for instance?’
‘No, it wasn’t so much your eyes,’ he answered, a crease in his brow as if he were thinking.
‘Well, what was it then?’ she persisted. ‘What was it first attracted you to me?’
‘It