knocked down by a bus? What do we do then?’
(Tom had a sudden, dislocated image of himself lying under the wheels of a bus. A solicitous crowd has gathered. As they bend over him, straining to catch his last words, they eventually realise that he is gasping, ‘My . . . record . . . of . . . work. Is. In my desk in Room Two. It's . . . under the register. It's not’ - tears course down his cheeks - ‘up to date.’ He dies unfulfilled.)
Tom stared solemnly at the inspector, as if he had terminal cancer. What do we do then? ‘Shove your record of work as far up your arse as you can get it,’ he wanted to say. ‘I'll have more to worry me.’ Instead he looked away in embarrassment, hoping his expression was conveying an adequately chastened awareness of what was important in life, as indeed it was.
Gill and Megan and Gus would probably survive for a little while without him. Did love of the family you came from diminish your love for the family you made? He would have thought it would augment it. I could not love ye, kids, so well loved I not others, too. The best gift I can give you is the truth of myself, as benignly and as honestly as I can give it, and that includes a passionate concern for people living beyond the enchanted circle of us four.
He heard Megan and Gus playing in another part of the house. May his and Gill's damaged lives never quite reach them. Forgive us for the gifts we give our children.
He chose the poems of Catullus, translated by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish - immortal trivia, living disrobed of false ideals, the scurrility of unacknowledged individual experience within social pretence. The randomness of the choice didn't help his state of mind. Did anything form a coherent pattern? He watched while Gill moved about the same room as he sat in but a different one. He couldn't quite believe that this was Grenoble or that he was going back to Graithnock.
He remembered a feeling that had often come upon him in his teens. He would be reading and suddenly a perfectly ordinary word - it might be ‘doorway’ or ‘bus’ - would turn into a weird hieroglyph. He couldn't imagine where the word came from or what it was supposed to mean. The continuity of the text fused and only that single word palpitated and glowed in the surrounding darkness, as if a flying saucer had arrived from another universe and he was the only one to see it. And through that fissure in assumed normality poured the overwhelming mystery of things.
Or he was in a room with which he was familiar, perhaps in John Benchley's house. He knew every piece of furniture and an armchair suddenly disjointed from the coherence of the room and was an incomprehensible extrusion, an alien in an ordinary day. The pattern of the cloth which covered it seemed impossibly intricate and bizarre. He wondered who could have made it and how it came to be in this place. It was as if he became immediately aware that all the contexts of his life, among which he moved so confidently and assumptively, were as fragile and as wilfully invented and as unreal as a backcloth in a theatre, and the cloth had just ripped and he glimpsed beyond it the real, ubiquitous, breathing and impenetrable dark.
Why did that feeling happen to him?
‘YOU'RE REALLY A MYSTIC,’ John Benchley replies. ‘But then a lot of teenagers are.’
He is in the sitting-room of his manse where he lives with his very elderly housekeeper, Mrs Malone, whose smile is a wince in disguise. The manse is on a hill beside the church and evening is gathering slowly in the room. Through the wide window a long low bank of cloud is reddening like a hillfire. The books that line the walls are receding into darkness, as if rejoining the past from which they emerged. The coal fire is hypnotic with blue flame.
‘All young people are expatriates, I suppose. They come from another country and they haven't quite settled in this one. They don't quite know the customs here. Some learn more slowly than others.’
‘I just wish I would hurry up.’
‘Maybe you shouldn't. Your self hasn't formed yet. Your social identity is still intermittent. Fragmentary. And nature keeps coming through the gaps. What's wrong with that?’
‘It can be embarrassing for a start.’
‘Embarrassment's all right. Never confuse embarrassment with shame. Embarrassment's when you can't bear others to see your secret self. That's a healthy instinct. Shame's when you can't bear to see your secret self. One's maintaining an honourable contract with yourself. The other means you've broken that contract. So be embarrassed.’
‘That's easy to say.’
‘Come on, Tom. A red face isn't fatal.’
‘Not so far.’
John laughs his thin laugh. Tam likes him so much, he always wishes he could laugh better. It's too small, that laugh, as if he knows he has restricted rights in this area. Tam thinks of his Uncle Charlie laughing like a chaotic symphony. If laughter's an orchestra, John Benchley is playing the triangle in it. Maybe that's what happens living with Mrs Malone.
‘There's an essay by Harold Nicolson. ‘In Defence of Shyness’. ‘A Defence of Shyness’? Anyway. He makes the point that shy people often have further to grow up to. I think there's something in that. If you know how to conform too quickly, you lose your originality. You can start to mimic other people instead of finding out who you are. Don't undervalue awkwardness. It's often just the truth clumsily refusing to be denied.'
‘I must be full of the truth, then.’
‘Like those times you were talking about. When you lose touch with the practicalities of what's going on. You see things out of context. That's you catching experience raw. Not dressed up in the purposes to which we insist on putting it. That really is a low-grade mystical experience. You're in touch with something beyond other people's preconceptions. You're seeing things fresh.’
He certainly seemed to be doing that all right. He is even doing it while John is talking. He doesn't want this moment to shift. He fears that John will rise and put on the light. He wants the darkness and the gathering sunset and the murmur of their voices in the stillness. It doesn't matter so much what they say. It is that they are talking, making their small human communion in the dusk.
He wants to say something to keep John talking, to maintain his concentration. But he is baulked by two feelings. The first is petulance that John has referred to his having ‘low-grade’ mystical experiences. It is as if he has failed some kind of exam. The second is the very embarrassment he has been talking about.
He has thought of an example of what John called ‘nature coming through the gaps’ and ‘the truth clumsily refusing to be denied’. It is a fairly crass example but nevertheless relevant, he feels. He thinks of his erections. They can happen anywhere - on buses, at the dancing, standing in a shop. One had even come upon him at his brother Michael's wedding.
HE IS DANCING with his Auntie Bella. They are doing a slow foxtrot among the circling relatives, smiling sweetly at each other, when one movement out of rhythm make their bodies come together. He is caught instantly in one of the frames of the American comics he used to read: Bam! Pow! Zowie! Hector is between them.
(‘Touch of flaccid tit on the port bow, Cap'n. Reporting for duty.’
‘Piss off, you dead head. It's ma auntie. She's ma mother's sister-in-law. She's the auntie of the groom, for God's sake.’)
But he remains adamantly there, nosing blindly about, trying to find out where he is required. Tam is too horrified to notice if she's noticed. He thinks of feigning illness But if he collapsed, that would only advertise the situation. And if he walks off the dance-floor with a small baton in his trousers, he might get lynched for mental incest.
He starts to dance like Quasimodo. Observing his new, crouched style of dancing. Auntie Bella probably thinks he has gone insane. But that is better than her realising the terrible truth. Then he has the inspiration of becoming suddenly drunk. That would be convincing. He is a boy who has been playing at being a man in the relaxed atmosphere of the wedding. As he mugs outrageously, he hopes nobody notices that his face is really screaming, ‘Don't look at my trousers.’ When the dance ends, he completes his performance by jocularly leaving the floor in the manner of Groucho