Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

They have hoisted a wall-unit together and have just begun their interdependent shuffle with it to the kitchen wall. Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside, a voice commands: "We're here." Only then comes the rat-a-tat at the front door.

David whispers, "Bugger, they're early. But we can still hide. Just keep still. They can't see us through the window."

Footsteps crunch again, moving round the building. "Pretty derelict. Whatever could have got into him?" The voice is unafraid of being overheard.

"It's the sort of project many people like, renovating an old village school." Marion's judicious voice. In the course of her marriage to Lennox she has constituted herself a judicious person who has projects.

David cannot see Stephen's face, only his forearms either side of the wall-unit, which is in an inappropriate style chosen by Stephen called Siciliano. The shirtsleeves have been meticulously rolled back, because that is what you do when you get down to physical labour. David passes the time trying hard to see those forearms as those of a stranger. They are white, plumpish, almost hairless.

The forearms tremble.

"You losing hold?" Whispered.

"No." Whispered back from the other side of Siciliano. David hears the throaty catch, almost gurgle, that means that what is coming is one of Stephen's very conscientious attempts to apply official procedures for being humorous, lightsome. "We are like settlers in a log cabin hiding from Red Indians."

So it's silent laughter that's making the forearms tremble. No, coming from Stephen it's a sort of performance of laughter: Stephen knows that laughter is a thing people do, sometimes.

Whatever it is David has gained, he feels the loss of his whole soul. Once again he'll need to rev up within himself the David who's got life under control. He's enviable, that David: he's ageless (the fairish hair standing up like a brush helps here), he's at home anywhere (he has this careless ability to wear blue denims with a smart navy jacket without any incongruity at all), he's always got the answer.

"A face - up there!" Stephen has been surprised into speaking out loud.

They were seen. David roars too heartily, "Coming, coming." The aquiline face of the Reverend Lennox Burnett had ascended briefly into view in the fanlight above the kitchen door, followed by a jump-concluding gravelly crunch. Having position and Christian charity, Lennox has never seen a need for dignity.

Siciliano is set down, the door opened. "Sorry. You caught us in the middle of shifting something."

Lennox stares disapprovingly into the gutted kitchen, Marion appraisingly. Lennox rebukes: "You got my card saying we'd call."

"No." Later David will realise that the ease with which he shows pleasure at the unexpected arrival of his oldest friend owes something to glimpsing Stephen laying the do-it-yourself manual on top of Lennox's postcard on the kitchen table .

While Marion looks for a task for her to perform and finds it in holding out her hand to Stephen, saying, "I've been so looking forward to meeting you," Lennox sidles past abandoned Siciliano into the sitting-room. He glances out at the Aberdeenshire countryside beyond the playground wall. It rears up, rolls away in pale February sunshine.

"Well, you've got the view." Contemptuously. "But where are your customers to come from, David? Not a house in sight."

Stephen takes the chance to make a contribution. "There are quite a lot of farms and crofts, and we're between two quite large villages, and neither of them has a shop. And it's not as if ..."

"And what will you do for company, David? Is there a soul within twenty miles you can exchange two intelligent words with?"

David has wondered that, too.

He speaks with easy confidence. "As Stephen was about to say" - pause to point up Lennox's rudeness - "it's not as if I'm out to make a fortune. As if we are. So long as the shop just ticks over. And if the worst comes to the worst, Stephen can always go back to being a lawyer. Aberdeen's not that far." When he hears Lennox say, "So you'll be kept. Well, well," he hurries on: "As for company, our nearest neighbour is Annie, in a cottage about a quarter of a mile away. She's eighty-two. Came here from Harris to be near her son, Murdo Angus, who married a local girl and works in the grounds of our local country house hotel. We go to Annie for ceilidh - it just means socialising, you know - at least twice a week and hear about the latest delays over her hip-replacement operation."

As expected, Lennox rises to the challenge to be appalled, for he has no doubt that everyone is equal in God's eyes.

"Solitary confinement in the back of beyond! You'll go mad within three months, begging the BBC to have you back."

"Oh, but that's the view of someone from a city, where other people are just an entertainment and there are always new faces to distract you from old ones. Where people are disposable. Here in the country people are few and precious and you appreciate each person in their fulness, there's a sort of rootedness in each other, it's a different way of being. It's real human connection." David hears in his voice how far he is from being the person who believes this; though, true, he did put a bit of deflecting irony into it.

"Theology." Contemptuously. "That may have been all right when we were students, David. Do we get the guided tour?"

As they go through the door that connects the school house with the single large classroom, still stacked with boxes and furniture from their separate flats in Glasgow, Stephen takes it on himself to say, "We can't make any structural changes. That was a condition." Here it comes, the sawing gurgle, the machinery of conversational wit clanking up. Has no-one ever mentioned it to him, like a close friend dropping you a hint about bad breath?

Stephen says, "We shall probably find ourselves writing up our special offers for dog food and oven chips and toilet rolls on the old school blackboard." Which is, of course, not there.

Lennox confides his musing to the world at large: "People in rural Aberdeenshire may not wish to purchase from a shop run by two men." But Marion smiles appreciatively at Stephen and says, "What I'd like would be if you found piles of old exercise books." She says it with such authority that David and Lennox are transformed into by-standers. Marion's face is broad and bony like her body. She has dark circles round her eyes which make her look guilt-ridden. David remembers her saying, a year after she married Lennox, "I think I need to find something to take an interest in," and at that time the history of rural education in Scotland had seemed a more or less random choice of project, nothing to be said for or against. Now she is an acknowledged expert on it, she sits on committees, she has a book coming out, her enthusiasm is infectious as she continues, "I have a theory that rural literacy a century ago, even with children of all ages being taught in the same room sometimes, was far higher than among children today. I've seen letters written by a village girl in Towie to her brother in the trenches that are astonishingly capable in their use of language."

They all make remarks about literacy for a while, so that it does not seem at all a contrivance when Marion declines to go outside, saying, "Oh, I'll stay here and talk to Stephen."

In the weedy hard-trodden playground Lennox leads the way towards a brick outbuilding with "Boys" and "Girls" picked out in the concrete lintels. "All right, I suppose."

"Yes, the place needs a lot doing to it, but ..."

"Him!"

Lennox halts long enough for his eyes to emphasise David's misconstrual. It always seems a shame to David that the Church of Scotland can't offer Lennox the rank and office of prince-bishop. "What is he, thirty-five, forty? Still got his blond boyish good looks but they're getting a bit chubby. He'll suddenly put on a lot of weight and go slack. Not much intelligence or taste. Do for a bit, I suppose. An improvement on Billy Gotta, anyway. Ah, David."

The last two words offer a homecoming as, behind the children's lavatories, Lennox opens his arms. When David does not move Lennox steps forward, embraces him, runs his hands up and down David's body, grunts with satisfaction.

A little while after Lennox's hands have come to rest on David's buttocks, David steps out of the embrace.

"Whatever's worrying you? They can't see us here."

David says quickly, "Haven't thought of Billy Gotta for ages."

"Haven't you." Not a question.

"Poor little Billy. 'I gotta be true to my love, whatever it costs me.' 'I know I gotta think of his pleasure as well as my own.' He actually said that out loud, in bed."

Lennox contributes: "'I gotta see this through by myself.'" He makes no attempt at an American accent on "gotta".

Awkward moment passed, harmless reminiscences flowing. David pulls up some tall weeds. " 'I gotta remember that you gotta pay your dues for the love you get.' 'I gotta get through to my family that I gotta live my own life.' I suppose he got 'I gotta' from some American film. 'Gahdah.' The Glaswegian need for Americanisms. Even about his overdose. Took the pills, then had a shower, then stood there absolutely naked dripping all over the carpets in the lamplight: 'I gotta get to a doctor, I swallowed all the aspirins in the bathroom.'"

"I don't suppose you'll have that sort of problem with this latest one. Lawyers don't say 'I gotta'. And you're okay for our annual Glyndebourne jaunt? Te Kanawa as the Countess."

"Stephen doesn't like opera."

Finding images for his situation sometimes helps David feel reconciled to it. The image that comes to him most often is that in Stephen he glimpsed a golden god, and now the god has departed, leaving behind disconnected things like, oh, that scraping gurgle in the throat, and those weirdly waxy forearms, and the particular pause and faint frown when David wants to make love (no automatically answering desire) and then the absolutely meticulous performance. Scattered phenomena like these, with no-one inside them, let alone a god, are what you have to make yourself fit to live with.

Now a different image stirs. Just formulating it will have some power to comfort but Lennox's reply interrupts: "Just as well. I've only got the two tickets as usual. Could be awkward having him along. Looks the sulky possessive type. Would get po-faced about you and me having our little half hours to ourselves."

A high horse is conveniently at hand. "Lennox, can't you see it'll need to finish, you and me sloping off every so often? What Marion must have felt all these years!" He makes an effort to feel it for her.

"Marion has her interests, too."

"Oh yes, she trawls the archives, you troll for men. And old David once in a while."

"Chubby-chops is making you priggish."

David peeps round the edge of the lavatory block as though to ensure none of this can be heard back in the main building. One more sacrifice to a god who doesn't exist: "I won't be coming to Glyndebourne, Lennox." The sky is resolutely sunless now, the afternoon cold.

"Well, if you're that frightened he'll run off while you're away ..."

"It's not like that. We've bought this place jointly. It's his as much as mine. A project that will bring us together."

"'Will bring us together.'" Lennox's voice underscores the future tense. He nods several times at his penetration of how things stand in the present. "Love in a cottage, that's what they used to call it in the eighteenth century, this romantic whim for a cosy poor-but-happy rural idyll. You'll soon be looking for love in another sort of cottage." He smirks at his ease with the slang for a public lavatory. "You're not the sort of person who can be brought together with anyone for long. Billy Gotta!"

David pleads: "But you can become the sort, can't you? The sort who will settle for ... Who will settle." The high horse neighs. "I wouldn't have thought a minister of the Kirk would have any trouble with the idea of trying to make yourself into a particular sort of person. Trying to put into place within yourself another person's bones. The bones of the person you're committed to becoming. Isn't it called being born again?"

"Theology again." Incredulity: "You actually believe you can do it."

"Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief."

Abruptly Lennox leaves the shelter of the lavatory block. Dusk is falling. As David follows him back to the main building Lennox says, "This Annie. You must give me details. I knew one of the geriatrics people up here when he was in Edinburgh. Maybe speed things up."

Indoors they all take tea. They talk about the various repairs and improvements that David and Stephen are making, and it is as part of the general conversation that Lennox asks for the lavatory. David indicates the stairs, which ascend from an alcove off the sitting-room. "Top of the stairs, first on the right." They listen to him ascending the stairs. A little later they hear the flush.

Stephen is saying to Marion: "Coming back to what we were talking about" - what did they talk about while David and Lennox were outside? - "I wouldn't want to think too much about my neighbours' levels of literacy. It would be to judge them and distance myself from them. You have to set that sort of thing aside for a real human connection." Once again David winces mentally at his life-sentence.

There is still no sound of Lennox descending.

Stephen cannot possibly mean what he's just said, it's not his sort of remark at all, it's just a mindless echo of David's flight about relating to people in the country. Except that where David poised teasingly between pretentiousness and irony Stephen attempts earnestness.

David cuts him down: "One can't help judging people. It's part of being conscious of them."

The crash and the indignant yell happen together, confusion and dust and bits descend, Lennox's foot and ankle have appeared through the sitting-room ceiling. The sock is patterned in black and white diamonds. The foot wriggles; lumps of plaster, more clouds of dust, are dislodged. His cries contain no panic, address underlings: "Help. Help."

David rushes for the stairs. Opposite the lavatory, to the left as you come up the stairs, is an odd little room that he and Stephen have talked of fitting up to hang clothes in. Their bedroom opens off it. The bedroom door opens inwards and the light switch is awkwardly placed behind the hinge of the door. When David flicks it on Lennox is revealed trapped between the joists of the floor. His free leg writhes a little as though of its own accord. The double bed sits on an island of floorboards towards the far wall.

"I don't think I mentioned that a lot of the floorboards in our bedroom are being replaced."

Lennox speaks towards the bed. "Billy Gotta is dead."

As David, balancing on joists and stooping, places his hands experimentally under Lennox's arms, Lennox adds, "Since you were talking of disposable people."

"If I haul, can you pull yourself up? How on earth do you know?"

"You're hauling too delicately. Use some effort. I took the funeral two weeks ago. AIDS."

Lennox wriggles and scrabbles, gradually he is extracted from the ceiling below, is helped to crawl across the joists to the ante-room. "But why you to conduct it?" Lennox can't stand on the leg that went through. If it's something permanently crippling, like an irreparable tendon - well, presumably you grow into being a person who is permanently crippled.

With help he can hobble. He says, "I don't think I mentioned something, either. Never lost touch with him. Not since the night you told him you didn't want him any more, and he took an overdose. And then a shower. And you were too drunk to drive him to the hospital and 'phoned me to do it. Dressed by that time so I didn't have the benefit of ... Hair still wet from his shower, though. Baptism into a new life when you've been cast aside and taken a fatal number of aspirins? Theology again. Got him somewhere to stay since you didn't want him back in your flat. And a job. Turned up on our doorstep from time to time over the years. Glad to see him. Sweet. Marion liked him, too. Not that I ever laid a finger on him. Or anything else. Toothsome, though. That wiry body, that anxious working-class look of expecting to come off worst. Trying so hard. 'I guess I gotta try and profit from the experience.'"

"Lennox, it was twenty-odd years ago. I was, what, twenty-six. I was desperate to be in love, I'd dreamed so much of living happily ever after with someone. Okay, I chose someone totally unsuitable. I was inexperienced. Or put it down to wild oats. Whatever. It wasn't going to work out, that was clear."

"Clear after all of two weeks."

"I just didn't realise it could drive you mad, the sudden total proximity that makes you feel you've thrown your life away."

He adds, "Christ, he didn't really mean it. If you really mean to kill yourself, you don't then take a shower and run out and say you've got to get to a doctor. Manipulating wee toe-rag and bad at it." He says it affectionately, though.

For some time they've been positioning to descend the stairs. Lennox says, "Perhaps you're thinking, 'He was a loving, loyal boy. If I'd not booted him out, if I'd settled down with him, he'd probably be alive today.' But you mustn't torment yourself, David. Not your responsibility. At all."

Stephen is waiting at the foot of the stairs and they are only half-way down when he blazes at Lennox: "What the hell were you doing in our bedroom?"

Lennox will not tell a lie, so it's necessary for David to drag his eyes from Stephen towards Marion, urgently cueing her to say something in accordance with her lifelong project of making the way of Lennox straight.

Stephen's anger: nothing like the performance of indignation David supposes he has to attempt in court ("My Lord, there is not a shred of evidence ..."). David realises he will always be the person who was astonished by that anger.

Marion continues to stare out the uncurtained window at the gathered darkness. David covers for her: "Sorry, Lennox, I should have warned you, this place is a warren of odd nooks and rooms off rooms, it's easy to lose your way."

"It's not easy at all. To get here from the loo you just come straight back down the stairs." Stephen, unassauged.

Lennox has sat down. As if to distract them from distress at his injury, he says, "What perfect darkness. Not a light to be seen anywhere."

David tries to offer a flight: "Oh, but the one thing we don't want, Lennox, is lights shining in the distance, enticing us with glimmers of unknown delights, leading us on, luring us away from ..." He sounds unbelieving and deflates into silence.

Stephen completes: "... from each other." The darkness outside gives the light in the sitting-room, and blond Stephen within it, a golden hue. He volunteers that they won't hear a word about paying for the damage to the ceiling: they've got to get the plasterer in for lots of other things anyway.

"I suppose I'd better get Lennox to casualty," says Marion, though she doesn't move. David, of course, takes an arm, puts it round his own shoulders. Lennox flaps the other, summoning another underling. Stephen inserts his shoulders beneath it. Lowering himself into the front passenger seat, Lennox slides his hand slowly down the length of Stephen's body just like someone giving himself support. When David goes to shut him in he says, "Less chubby than he looks. Do for a bit."

David shuts the door on him. Marion says, "Now. I think you two should come and see us quite often. Will you promise to?" The committee is being presented with the project it was too dunderheaded to devise for itself.

"It's okay, Lennox and I never really fall out."

"This has nothing to do with Lennox. Will you promise?" In that very building, no doubt, children were coaxed into promising teacher things for their own good.

They both say, "We promise," smiling a little. But Marion has another sanction, for then she speaks to Stephen at some length about how they'll have to be in touch quite a lot once he's had time to look up various things about the law relating to educational charities, which it seems he's going to advise her on.

Side by side they wave the Burnetts' car away. Stephen's hand is raised just as high as his own.

There it is, the gurgling little rasp. Think of being someone who finds it touching, lovable - no, who doesn't notice it at all. "Well, the brave settlers saw off the marauding Indians."

As they turn to go in - Stephen appears to have positioned himself for an arm to go round him, but, no, that's utterly unStephenlike, doesn't fit at all - the elusive image that had beckoned in the playground suddenly comes to David. It's as though he's a member of that tribe in New Guinea where you're condemned to carry strapped to your back forever the bones of someone who's died. Absurdly, he wants to tell Stephen this image he has of him, even opens his mouth to do so. It will, of course, be years and years before he can tell him.