THE MUSE (PART ONE)
The bar of Hyde’s Hotel had been her father’s local. He’d bought Lorna her first pint here when she was sixteen.
Eight years later, the bar hadn’t changed. Straw-coloured house ale flowed unstintingly, pre-war décor darkened the walls and a supernatural air still wafted from the snug, for Hyde’s was the howff of poets.
Since Lorna began frequenting Hyde’s, one or two of the poets had achieved outside success, even fame, but from the smoke-shrouded snug their flytings comfortingly circled the same grievances, like swallows coming to roost. Granted, their tweed suits frayed at the elbows, and their brogues could do with a polish, but the poets had always been of a shabby disposition. Although, Lorna couldn’t help but notice, the elder bards’ hair had either greyed or disappeared completely. Essentially, though, they were the same poets (she hesitated to call them men, believing poets a breed apart, closer to the fairies than normal human beings), and after eight years, Lorna remained their Muse.
Enamoured of her wilful wit (inherited from her mother) and the soft, girlish lips (inherited from her father), the poets had begun composing sonnets almost immediately. It was Ivor MacDade who first secured eternal glory with 'The Thistle Street Muse', a hymnal of passion that roused national sensibilities and had grown men greeting into their whisky glasses the length and breadth of Alba. Lorna, then nineteen, had taken exception at Ivor's mention of the 'life-braith stealin' birthmark on her inner thigh, but was pacified by the rounds of Glenlivet bought and quaffed in her honour.
But Ivor's lauded poem provoked unforeseen consequences; poets, from the young to the distinguished, made pilgrimage to Hyde’s to pay homage to the infamous birthmark. Their resulting poems - prize-garnering and published in the best anthologies - bestowed further totemic status on Lorna. Quite by accident, she became Muse to Scotland’s greatest poets of the age.
Lorna found the bottom of her dram. She shouldn’t turn her nose up at immortality. And yet, at twenty-four, she transcended death naturally. Apart from a wisdom tooth, extracted that morning, she was in the flush of health. Lorna swallowed the measure, mouth lopsided from anaesthetic. Things had changed since her father introduced her to his literary friends. Ivor’s crafty eyes twinkled beneath silver-laced brows and brown discolorations spotted the skin of his sparse temples. A gold band encircled the ring finger of his left hand. She no longer stayed the night at his Morningside flat. Hamish, their Makar, had hobbled into old age and eventually a wheelchair with characteristic grouchiness. Yet an air of respectability clouded him; he no longer ran up tabs he couldn’t settle or asked quite so many favours. The royalties from ‘Hyde’s Rose' and his Makar status, had kept him respectable for two years.
Smoother faces appeared at Hyde’s; the new crop of poets, closer to her own age. They watched her with reverent, supernatural hunger, awaiting the burden of inspiration. One eyeballed her now, from the shadowed snug. A rigid-jawed, shy youth from the islands whose name she couldn’t remember, but no doubt he’d make it in a year or two. Only yesterday his pamphlet (inspired by an inebriated compliment she’d paid him), received the Somerset Maugham Award.
Lorna looked towards the fire, drawn by fierce utterances rising from the tattered armchairs. MacDade and the Makar were arguing again. Cross mutterings pitched to raised fists, as their national poet’s violent streak erupted. MacDade’s lean hands rested in his lap, refusing the violence his opponent demanded. His wry composure only angered the Makar further.
They were arguing, as always, about Lorna. Who had the right to claim their Muse's wisdom tooth?
The young poets hushed and leaned towards their elders, eyes aflame, anticipating a verse of peculiar magnificence. Disappointingly, the only refrain that passed the Makar's lips was, "Scum, scum." It seemed her tooth would go to the pacifist.
The shy youth, encouraged by spirits, leapt to his feet. A table upended, dark ale splashing his hands. The broad, earnest face reddened. Lorna sighed. A mad gleam in the youth’s eye reflected the kind that blinded MacDade eight years back.
His ode was wrought in a thick accent and peppered with musical words from the northern isles. The ode, touching genius, silenced even the Makar, who turned pale as a man who had had his throat slit. The youth compared Lorna to the dark stacks of the North Sea, to treacherous tidal mudflats, which claim the bones of horse and man. He called her a centaur. There was mention of the dog star. Lorna looked at her tooth, nestled in a napkin upon the table. The poets murmured agreement: this boy from the islands had at last reached into her soul. He’d turned the wind inside out, he’d made the soul flesh with fleshless words.
Lorna had heard all this before. Poets and critics claimed discovery of her soul but she never recognised the magnificent, one-faced being that illuminated the stanzas. Her soul had yet to be realised on earth. However, she acknowledged the youth’s valiant effort, the closest, perhaps, any had come. She extended her hand to him, the napkin curled between her rose-pink fingers. His blush was the most sublime thing she'd seen all night. He retreated with his treasure to the snug, wordless.
MacDade bought her a round.
"A genius in the making," he said. “If he’d only restrain the passion a wee bit. One can have too much of that. Swamps the senses.”
Lorna thought she’d rather be swamped than dried out.
"I think you can prepare yourself for an onslaught. There's nothing like new blood to stir up a cock fight," said MacDade.
"Maybe I’ll turn the tables and write a poem about him", Lorna replied.
MacDade, sly mouth grinning, said, “Christ, we’ve one too many poets in Scotland thanks to you. Smile, my dear - that was a compliment. I’d wait until your exams are over before deciding whether the pen is the path for you. Billy there is a poet, his destiny’s unalterable. It'll be up to you to provide. If you think one poet makes a meagre living, think on two sharing the same roof!"
MacDade sidled back to the bar, leaving Lorna to fire into the night's fourth dram. He’d forgotten that she’d taken her last exams two years ago and that she’d been working as a shop girl since. He also presumed she’d been impressed enough by Billy’s ode to fall in love. Maybe she wasn’t a poet, like the rest of them. Yet something told Lorna she only needed to find her own Muse to turn the tables.
A tall stranger entered the hotel foyer. An unfashionably long fur coat dangled to his ankles. The poets, engaged in another flyting, took no notice. The stranger glanced through the glass door into the bar. Behind a white curtain of hair his eyes were tapered like a faun’s. A moment later the stranger hirpled up the staircase to the guest rooms. He gave Lorna the impression of being old and young at the same time - a poem in motion. Lorna shook her head. That was Hamish’s sensibility creeping in.
Lorna picked up her coat and glass and wobbled to a corner table where a myopic artist furiously sketched. Enormous, bespectacled pupils flitted from his work to the scene before him. He was making a sketch of the Makar for a mural that was to be painted in Glasgow Station.
"I'll have a half or a double," he told Lorna, without glancing up.
"That stranger who just arrived, who is he?" Lorna asked, plumping herself down.
Where it was the poet's duty to feel everything, Arthur Campbell, an artist, saw everything.
"He's letting a room above the bar. He arrived two nights ago. No one knows how long he'll stay or where he comes from, but everyone says he's a fairy."
"Don't they normally keep to themselves?"
Arthur's head darted up, birdlike, as eloquent chaos erupted from the bar. It seemed young Billy's right to her tooth hadn’t quite been decided.
"He keeps to himself, hasn't spoken to anyone," said Arthur, returning to the stranger.
An uncanny ache bruised Lorna's heart. Perhaps she’d found her Muse! Lorna keeked at Arthur's sketch to see how the Makar’s likeness came along. A snort escaped her lips. Words, not faces, clustered the page of Arthur’s sketchbook.
“Don't tell me you've been bitten by the writing bug, too," she said.
"Why not?" he replied, too engrossed to look at her. She liked that about him. "Our civilisation is founded on the three Rs, after all - reading, writing and 'rithmatic. No mention of pictures. I haven't a head for numbers, so it looks like I'll need to throw my hat into the poet’s ring. By God, the Makar looks like he'll strangle MacDade before the night’s out."
Lorna’s attention fixed on the staircase beyond the bar. Could the stranger really come from Fairyland?
"What’s he doing here? If he doesn't drink in the bar, and he's not joining the poets..."
Arthur laid down his pencil. His owlish eyes surveyed her face and then her legs.
"There's a ladder in your tights, dear."
"Your ear's dirty."
Arthur chuckled. "You shouldn't have given away your tooth, you know."
"Oh, another lecture from an old man past his best. I can hardly wait," said Lorna.
Heat pinched her ears. That bloody whisky was making her say unreasonable, unforgivable things again. Arthur's magnified eyes blinked a few times, but an artist was rarely vain in the way poets were. Arthur spent half his life peering into people’s blemishes and bunions, most if them below the surface. He forgave them all.
"Thirty-eight hardly counts as old," he said. "Great poets and artists don’t reach their prime until at least fifty. Take MacDade, he was fifty-one when he penned "The Thistle". You didn't mind his age then, if I recall. And the Makar's only just keeping his head above water now. He must be touching seventy."
Lorna looked up and Billy quickly averted his eyes. His fist clenched around her tooth; his rivals would need the dentist's pliers to prise it free. How old was he? Twenty-odd? Thirty? And she only twenty-four. The yawning years of poverty and poems spooled before her like an inescapable web.
"Why shouldn't I have given away my tooth?" Lorna asked, picking up the thread of her and Arthur’s conversation.
"You’re supposed to burn teeth, that's why. Now you've left yourself open to mischief from witches and fairies," said Arthur.
"Oh, that auld wife’s tale," said Lorna, rising from the table without any idea of where to go.
"It isn't, you know," said Arthur. "My grandmother drowned herself after a fairy drove her mad. She'd sold most of her teeth to the dental school. Where are you going?"
Lorna hovered, coat slung over her arm. The poets had forgotten her existence, conversely debating the national character and communism. They only came sniffing when an overdue bill landed on the doormat or a friend's pamphlet did too well and they needed to work up some inspiration.
"Home," she said to Arthur.
She headed for the door. Billy stood up, fist still clenched. She waited for him to approach, to mumble something to her but his cheeks only reddened until he sat down again.
"Scum!" yelled the Makar, at no one in particular.
To herself Lorna added, with a little hiccough. "Home. To write a poem.