The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray Page A

when he was with his fashionable friends, but on meeting apart from them in the school library we sometimes went walks together chattering enthusiastically about books whose main characters rebelled against social codes of a type that seemed to rule our own institution. Our form of rebellion was to identify various teachers and head boys with the deranged bullies and conformists Catch-22 of Catch-22, Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint . Doing so often reduced us to fits of helpless laughter. Our homes in Glasgow were the only other thing we had in common. At the start of a summer holiday we exchanged addresses.
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    I phoned him a fortnight later and suggested we meet in town.
    â€œI’ve a better idea,” he said, “You come over here. Come this afternoon. Pm having a kind of a party …”
    He hesitated then added, “As a matter of fact it’s my birthday.”
    I thanked him and asked if it would be a very smart occasion? He said, “No no no, just come the way you are.”

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    He lived in Pollokshields, south of the river, and I arrived with a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 in my pocket, a book I knew he would enjoy. I had never before visited a mansion standing in its own grounds. I pressed the bell and after a while the door was opened by an elderly woman in a black gown who stared at me, frowning. I said, “Is Raymond in?”
    She walked away. It seemed foolish to remain on the doormat so I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. The hall had a mosaic floor, a huge clock, corridors and a broad staircase leading out between Roman-looking pillars. I stood there listening hard for sounds of a party and could hear nothing at all. A tall man with a military moustache entered and said very gently, “Yes?”
    â€œIs Raymond in?”
    He said “I’ll see about that,” and went away. A lot of time passed. The clock struck a quarter hour. I sat down on the slightly rounded top of an antique ebony chest and noticed the time pass, feeling more and more bewildered. Fifteen minutes later the tall man appeared again, stared at me, said, “Why are you still sitting there looking so miserable? Get out! We don’t want you.”
    He opened the front door and I walked through it.
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    That was my first and worst sinking, also the end of my friendship with Raymond. I planned to studiously ignore him when our paths next crossed in the school library, but I never saw him there again.
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    The second sinking was a milder affair on my last day at that school. I stood with eight or nine other leavers, Raymond among them, in the Headmaster’s study, pretending to absorb a flow of the man’s brisk, facile, foreseeable, completely uninteresting platitudes. He ended with a firm, “Goodbye and good luck gentlemen. And Gilliland, stay behind for a moment.”
    He shook hands with the rest who left and I remained feeling rather puzzled, because this was the first time he had ever spoken to me. He sat behind his desk, clasped his hands upon it, looked at me sternly over them for a while then said, “Don’t forget, Gilliland, that syphilis is an absolute killer. You can go now.”
    So I went.

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    Why did he talk as if I was a sexual maniac? Why was I the only school leaver he said that to? As in all single sex schools for adolescents there had been discreet homosexual liaisons among us, but not among us in the invisible class – we were too demoralised to enjoy anything but the most solitary kind of sex. Was it possible that my slightly secretive walks with Raymond had been noticed disapprovingly by his other friends and reported to the teachers? Was our laughter over the antics of Portnoy and Yossarian overheard and interpreted as something sexually and socially dangerous? Was this reported to his father? And was keeping me behind to make that inane remark a headmaster’s ploy to avoid shaking an unpopular