The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray

tart and congealed custard that followed. The meal was also delayed by my mother-in-law or her daughter washing, drying and putting away the last course’s cutlery before serving the next. They did that swiftly, but to enjoy some remaining warmth in the second and third courses we had to eat them at a gallop. Despite causes of delay I once shared a family Christmas dinner, with crackers and funny paper hats, where three courses and every sign of us having eaten them vanished in half an hour.
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    Perhaps that was the kind of food and way of eating Colin enjoyed at sea. I could not provide such normality and refused to eat with his family more than once a week. I tried persuading him to dine with me in Italian, Indian and Chinese restaurants, but he found them too exotic. I suppose our marriage lasted for years because he was usually at sea. When at home – I mean the home we shared – he usually watched television while sipping lager in our sitting room. We only quarreled once. Friends had visited me on a localpolitical matter. The television was playing at a low volume so I exchanged a few quiet words with them in a corner of the room. After they left Colin declared that, before inviting others in, I should have picked up and hidden the empty beer cans he had strewn over the carpet. I pointed out that I was a wage-earner like himself, not a house serf like his mother.
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    Soon after this he moved back in with her, having left the navy and found work in our town as a security guard. She was certainly tidier than me. Divorce in Scotland was now as cheap and frequent as in other places, so we divorced. I raised another bank loan and paid him for his share of the house. I heard later that he bought a flashy car, a Reliant Scimitar with the money, but never told his mother where he got it, so she came to think I had cheated him. That is my only grudge against him.
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    Thank goodness we had no children.

SINKINGS

    S UCCESS IS OVERRATED. The best proof of our worth is how we respond to failure. Herman Melville said that or something very like it. My marital partner still loves me, so do our children, I have recently retired with a cosy pension from a professional job which did some good and very little harm, so I have never been tested by really big failures. Yet the moments I remember with most interest are not my happiest ones, but those times when the ordinary ground under my feet seemed suddenly to sink, leaving me several yards lower than I thought normal or possible. This lower level did not prevent pleasures I had enjoyed at higher ones, but the pleasure never seemed to raise me up again. These sinkings (depressions is too mild a word forthem) were never caused by irrevocable disasters, like the death of a parent. I am no masochist, but disasters on that scale stimulated and bucked me up. What let me down worst were failures of common decency, especially the first two.
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    My father was a businessman who died leaving just enough money for mother to send me to what was thought a very grand boarding school – the sons of many rich, well-known people went there. My immediate dislike of the place on arrival increased with time. The sons of the rich and famous were a social elite to which the teachers also belonged. Boys without much pocket money were excluded unless a brilliant appearance or talent for sport or clowning got them “taken up” by the smart majority. I belonged to a minority who were not physically bullied but usually treated as if invisible. I suppose if we had not existed the rest could not have felt so exclusive and fashionable. If we invisibles had united we would have formed a class more exclusive than the rest because smaller, but we despised ourselves too much to do that.
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    I had one friend among the élite, orthought I had: a senior military man’s son. He enjoyed modern American literature as much as I did. We never noticed each other