Debatable Land (19 page)

It was never so: the labels on the empty benches: ‘Given in everloving memory of . . .’ were never obscured. The benches looked out on the cemetery, the writing on their backs, their temporariness and application to the living somehow more desolate than the names upon the graves of Alec’s mother and his stepmother. He would read these names in stupefaction. The repetitive beauty of Scots names, their combination of modesty and ancient grandeur, their unchangingness (a publican could be called Robert Bruce, a plasterer William Wallace. In Alec’s form in school had been an Annie Laurie), perhaps all this had allowed of a mistake. Other women of the same name lay now in Alec’s mother’s grave and in his stepmother’s, another Mairi Dundas, another Jean Dundas. Such comfort was no comfort.

They made memorial to the mothers in chat so dry a listener might have heard and thought: These are men that take their women overmuch for granted. Alec’s father did what he said, said what he did, and stuck thereto in a way that was falling to disuse.

‘Mairi and Jean did good meals,’ his father said today on this picnic with Alec and Lorna, quickly adding, ‘Jean and Mairi.’ He was a fair man all through.

‘It’s so.’

‘A bit of fish was what I liked,’ his father said. It was so, he no longer had a true appetite. These foreign feasts were a way for Lorna to cajole him into pecking. He spoke of himself as a man with dead feelings.

‘I went there,’ he might say of a place, although he was actually at the spot.

They left the bus in the Queen’s Park, where it stopped for a while for the driver to eat his piece looking down the town. Alec’s long love for the city was still with him, stronger because affronted; he had shared some of his battling furies about buildings blown up and burnt down by greed and by planners with his father, even, after the morning a certain delicate, witty building was flattened, taking away a pair of finials that he set in his father’s garden, black stone lupins among the flowers’ own blue-and-yellow soft spires.

His father could see his son was angry, but he wanted to believe that good things could not be destroyed to make way for bad, so he continued to hope that the squares demolished and streets torn away would be replaced by buildings full of light and warmth for the safe shelter of human life. He was relieved when the tenements and lands began to be levelled. Anything would be an improvement on these eyeless tall towers, he thought, not envisaging the deaf inhuman towers, all eyes, to come.

They climbed a way towards the summit, through low green grass and tougher grass like straw that caught in loops sometimes around their ankles. When this happened to his father, Lorna signed him to go on and she disentangled the older man. When it became a little steeper, they began to walk along the hill by the paths the sheep had made, dense green turf just a few inches wide, sprung within with roots of tough small flowers. Lorna took his father’s arm.

When they had gone high enough for the view to have opened itself up, but not so high that the wind caught them, Alec spread down the rug. Lorna began to extract blue-paper packets of food-stuffs; Alec unclasped the lid of the wine jug and poured three mugs.

‘I’m unused to this,’ said his father, tipping the wine to see what lay below its horizon.

‘Yes,’ said Lorna, ‘I know. So am I. I haven’t had any since last Saturday.’ It wasn’t true, Alec thought, but it was what it was right to say, to josh his father along.

She was drinking then, but without dedication, only to enhance the great pleasingness of their days together.

She went on: ‘Could you grow used to it with a bite to eat?’ She passed over two loose, dripping sandwiches, neither Italian nor Scottish, but understood by the Scots as Italian.

Taking off her shoes, she lay back and drummed her feet on the grass, stretching. Her interesting long body lay all before Alec’s father and Alec was in the same moments angry with her and proud of her. She was covered entirely with her wool dress but he saw inside the blue wool and imagined his father doing so too.

His father was looking not at Lorna’s limbs at all but at her face and at the top of her head, where all those thousands of grey hairs began. He thought of death so quickly all it did was give flavour to his wine.

Two blonde young women, one dressed in shorts, both with the full rippling stride of Americans or Swedes, came up the hill, arriving section by great section over the horizon. Such of their conversation as could be heard was implausibly simple, as though they were neither of them English speakers, but had no other common language.

‘. . . very green. And tall to ascend.’

‘But there will be many things to look on.’

In time, Lorna stopped herself from doing what she always did when good-looking women passed close to Alec. As a rule, she would have protected herself by saying what was good, never deprecating, and always having a care to pre-empt Alec’s very particular tastes.

Just before she began to talk, in the way she had devised, like a man, lying there on the hill, before she began to say, ‘Did you see the way they moved before she did, like cygnets before the swan . . .’ she remembered that this habit was a private one and that Alec’s father might not like to encounter it.

Anxious, though, to let Alec know he was on her mind, that she had no hard feelings about whatever had made him sharp that morning, she said, ‘What do we see from here, Eck?’

Depending upon the way she snapped off his name, her mood towards him was clear. Eck was good. Alex she never said, choosing to leave some name for anyone spare to their lives to address him by.

‘He’d enjoy that, telling us about the place you and I have lived in all our lives,’ said his father.

‘I’ll do it, Dad, if you let me peel you a bit of fruit.’ He worried about his father’s health, his resistance to germs. He cajoled the old man as a parent does a baby.

With his penknife, Alec quartered the skin of an orange, then peeled it back, and carefully picked off the pith from the fruit, leaving a ball within four leaves. Slowly, in order not to rip the membrane, he divided the orange inside into the fourteen segments and six tiny inner umbilical pieces, gently keeping them all just attached to the base of the peel. He sat with his knees up, arms around them, looking out over the city. As he spoke, he dispensed pieces of orange to his father, who ate the odd one and passed the others to Lorna, who swallowed them guiltily, failing to extract the juice.

‘The Castle, that’s obvious enough, up on its rock, with to the left of it, do you see, down a bit, very low, the shallow dome of the McEwan Hall, the dark circular building, built in the Venetian style. It’s all built for the teaching of medicine, yet it’s in the style of Italian church architecture. Think of that confidence. There are courtyards and parts of the building that are deliberately modelled on Italian palaces too. There’s a huge balustraded hall with galleries, and paintings decorating it inside, including one of the goddess of wisdom accepting the McEwan Hall.’ By mistake, he ate a piece of orange, saw what he had done and began surreptitiously to peel another one so that his father would have sufficient fruit that day.

‘Then past the Castle, there’s the Tolbooth Church. It was designed by Pugin who did the Houses of Parliament down in England, and by the great James Gillespie Graham, who did much of the early nineteenth-century city. It’s a church for congregations, though its own seems to be shrinking, and it’s the meeting hall of the General Assembly of the Kirk, too. It’s closely related to another church planned by Pugin, in England again. They were both close to the ideal church of the True Principles of Christian Architecture. Imagine having that certainty. I couldn’t tell you the true principles of agnostic potato peeling.’

He passed his father, who was now lying on the rug, two pieces of orange, then said, ‘Want a Polo?’

‘I wouldn’t say no after all that fruit,’ said his father. Though the lecture had been like the fruit, better if you forgot it was good for you.

‘I’m not lecturing you am I, Dad? Lorna?’

Lorna enjoyed being told things by Alec, always had, knew more than him often enough but let him talk, happy to hear him working out what he thought. She felt close to him like that, hearing the habits of his mind. It was like watching him paint, which he rarely let her do, but when he did it was like seeing a swimming bird from below, through the water, up to the sun, while she paddled down low, tugged by weeds.

‘Then you’ve the University Old Quad Dome, the crown of St  Giles’s, known as the High Kirk, a very un-Presbyterian term for it, the Cathedral of the Kirk, if you like, but that’s worse. Famous for being where Jenny Geddes slung her stool at John Knox. It’s a dark church full of old flags and old battles. It began as a big kirk in the Middle Ages. It was made newly Gothic by the Georgians and tarted up within by the Victorians. It has a ladies’ vestry,’ he wanted a gesture from Lorna, so said a thing that might amuse her, ‘and dagger-shaped windows whose form is called mouchette. Are you awake, Little Fly, yourself?’

‘Yes,’ she said, from her sleep.

‘It is full of the dim, thrilling showing off of the noblemen of Scotland. It’s crowded with memorials to their courage in arms and that of their men who have considerably less memorial. Among its stones are indigenous Scots marbles from Ailsa Craig and from Iona. It’s a crowded dark place, yet it contains a chapel of youth. Its distinction is very Scots, old history still being found each time they set to build anew.’

‘And the little tower?’ asked Lorna. Her eyes were closed, and anyway she knew, but she loved him and she believed the city was involved in their love in a way she had not got to the end of.

‘It was built to house the congregation of St  Giles’s when that became a cathedral. It’s plain and light in design, owes a lot to the Dutch. The interior has been gutted.’

He had made himself sad. He remembered what had gone in his shortish life. He wondered as he often did what had made a child love a city in this way, a child who had turned into an adult positively unconservative, yet so anxious, in this case, to conserve. For more than two hundred summers the New Town and for more summers than could be counted the Old Town had been growing at a human pace. Now they were being lit from below like great rockets of stone, these buildings, and launched into the future and annihilation. The town that had been drained of a loch two centuries before was being drained of its own nature now.

Chapter 6

Ancient Romans preserved loved infants’ corpses in honey, thought Alec, and that is what I have done with my mother and my stepmother, preserved them in a sweet suspending medium through which it’s hard to see what they were like. Yet people flee their parents, that is clear, just as they cling on to their children. So perhaps I am lucky that they fled me, these two mothers, and allowed me to soak them in sweetness?

Our illusions matched one another, Elspeth was thinking. That is why we married, and now we are paying for it. He will not recover from the death of his first wife because he does not want to. She was perfect like all pretty women who die suddenly. Even the atrocious ones are endowed in the flash of the car hitting the tree with the virtues that might have replaced their beauty had they lived. I’m not jealous of her, but I do not like living up to someone unreal. If it came to that, I would rather live up to someone unreal but helpful, God in Man or something. Trying to be like Hortense would mean doing my nails in the way she did, or worse. For certain those nails are more characteristic of her than the spiritual qualities she grows when Logan is more than usually disappointed in life.

He is served well by the shade of Hortense. She is a standard for me, and a grief for him. For both of us, she is punishment. Her death was part of her life in a fashion one may try to achieve over a long and well-lived life but never achieve; it was fast and ostentatious and symbolic. She was twenty-five. After such an age so obviously symbolic a death would be out of keeping. The death I know and fear will come while I do something as symbolic for me as driving in a fast car was for Hortense; labelling jam, or trying to find out which pair of black stockings is laddered by putting it on up my arms. One thing in his obsessive telling of the life and death of Hortense makes me love him, though. It is when he tells me he went to have his eyelashes dyed so that he could cry safely at the funeral and not look too bad afterwards with the piggy look fair men get after tears. Each of us is maimed, but in a specialised way that seems to make it more difficult, not easier, for us to help the other.

How close I am to being sick; it’s the engine and these long rollers. The sick’s lying in my neck like the urge to tell a white lie. Under sail, I hardly ever feel sick. Is it the thinking about Hortense? No, I think it really is not. In a way, she is something to have in common between us. As a wife dead, not divorced, she is more alive than a living predecessor.

Elspeth went above. Ahead of them was the double peak of Bora Bora, under a sky like thrown pigment. The sun was a ball that did not shine. She wondered if anyone on the boat was expecting a letter. Letters were the thread along the days of her life on land and she missed them at sea more than any other contact. She wondered how it would be to have a child and to be apart from them for some reason for long periods of time. She thought, and pitied anyone who had to know, that it must be like it was for her to be without letters, but worse by a factor that was the difference between an inanimate letter and an envelope full of human life.