in July 1990. The bride, my cousin Pippa, was equally John’s cousin, as she was the daughter of my uncle and his aunt. Both of us had been especially urged to make the trek west for the wedding, I from New York and John from London, as the last of Pippa’s assorted cousins to remain unmarried. We had met once before, as children; our families had converged in Italy back in 1954. But the age difference between us—thirteen and a half years—was then enough to make us almost unaware of each other. I was a toddler when he was a teenager.
At fifty-three John was still a bachelor. At thirty-nine so was I. Strategically, the family had arranged for us both to be put up for the weekend with the neighbours, an elderly Mr and Mrs Hamilton. When my taxi pulled in from the airport at dusk, a lanky dark-haired figure lurched out of the house to help me with my bags.
This must be John.
Inside, over a drink with our hosts, I watched his long, lean figure unfold awkwardly into a chair, like a youth still searching for the right fit, as we attempted to ground ourselves in relation to our Canadian cousins and catch up on the last thirty-something years.
His talk was witty, ironic and charged with nervous energy. As he darted nimbly from one subject to the next, he revealed an upper-class British background, but without the superficial polish. If he was the product of a system at all he was an errant one. He used words like salubrious with ease and relish, but he also peppered his speech with colloquial British expressions such as ‘naff’ and ‘bloke’ that gave it a tougher edge. Though his accent was English his features were somehow of a rarer breed or more ancient genesis. His long face, though lined, showed the youthful softness of a moist climate. His high, bony cheeks were shot through with the ruddy rose that comes from the chill of stone buildings in winter, and his greyblue eyes beamed steadily out of their sheltered hollows. When he laughed you could see the gold in his back teeth.
We sat together at the Catholic wedding service the next day, whispering expressions of impatience with the Latin. During the reception at the Capilano Golf Club John hovered, bringing me canapés and topping up my champagne. After the wedding some of us went out for supper at a noisy pub in downtown Vancouver, where we ate hamburgers and shouted and laughed over the din of the loud music. John pulled me on to the dance floor and we rocked and rolled, losing track of our party in the reeling crowd.
On Monday we took off for Denman Island to stay with Pippa’s older sister Anne on her organic apple farm. Our knees knocked together in the crowded back seat of Anne’s station wagon. We bundled up against the wind and strolled the rolling deck of the ferryboat. The next morning John and I were promptly dispatched on an outing with bicycles and directed towards the ferry to nearby Hornby Island. John, leading the way, wagged his tail at me like a happy dog and cast the occasional backwards glance as I strove to keep up. We found a sandy beach, went swimming in the cool blue bay, shared sandwiches and swapped travel stories.
‘I don’t like being a tourist,’ I told him. ‘Nowadays I tend go where I’m invited, either on business or as a guest in somebody’s house. It’s the only way to really get into the heart of a place.’
‘I just like exploring, without a fixed program,’ John rejoined -^ much as we were doing that day, cycling down unknown roads without a map, without a guide. We had both spent time in Spain on business. We discussed the Spanish character, and that famous cliché, mañana. Did their use of the word really mean that they could put something off indefinitely, I queried, or, on the contrary, that it was urgent? John thought it meant they could put it off. In my experience it meant that it was urgent. Perhaps our sense of the Spanish character simply served as a mirror of ourselves. John’s instinct to put things off and my sense of urgency meant that in this case we almost, but not quite, missed the last ferry back to Denman.
That evening after supper, sitting around the picnic table on the porch of Anne’s self-built island farmhouse, Anne asked John about ‘the Guynd’, his family home in Scotland, which she remembered visiting as a child.
The Guynd, I learnt, was an agricultural estate that John’s family had owned for the past four hundred years. ‘Guynd’ in Gaelic means ‘a high, marshy place’. The Guynd rhymes with ‘the wind’, and as it blew into our conversation the residual gaiety of the wedding weekend was swept away like a summer shower on a picnic. No longer the convivial traveller, John’s expression darkened; a flood of concerns and irritations surrounded and enveloped him. He had resumed the role he’d left behind in Scotland, that of the reluctant incumbent to a sadly run-down estate.
Since his mother’s death three years earlier the mansion house had stood empty, except for a single tenant, a young artist from Glasgow, in a basement flat. John’s father had been dead some twenty years. John’s younger brother, Angus, had left his wife and three children and fled to Canada back in the 1970s. John himself had been residing at a safe distance, in London, for the past several years. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he had been caught up in the ferment of the 1960s, gave up a career in the oil business and never looked back. From then on, between roaming South America with a girlfriend, boat building in Majorca for a rich American and flat renovating all over London, he discovered sex, marijuana, garlic and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man and decided he was a new man. Meanwhile he continued to make regular forays to Scotland, knowing that the house would someday be his, as the elder son, to carry on. For no matter what experience he had acquired elsewhere, and what attractions they held, his identity was still shaped mainly by that role and that place.
‘When are you going to move back?’ asked Anne.
‘I get up there quite a lot,’ John answered defensivly. “Anyway, Stephen’s in the West flat. He’s always there.’ The question bothered him, I could tell. It was clear that his inheritance was a mixed blessing, that as much as he was devoted to the memory—or myth—of its glorious past, the reality of its present condition was discouraging at best. The appearance of the light traveller with his rucksack, the breezy cyclist who just liked to explore, concealed an unusually heavy load of baggage that weighed him down wherever he went. Although we shared first cousins, and my mother was born as English as his was, we were of very different cultures.
From an early age I had travelled widely in Europe with my family, and we never failed to schedule a stay in England. I have fond childhood memories of visiting my cousin Judith in her long, low-ceilinged cottage in the Kent countryside, of climbing the cherry trees and walking the fields with her dogs. I remember staying at the Norfolk Hotel in South Kensington, riding the double-decker bus to Covent Garden and feeding the ducks in Hyde Park. In school, for some reason, my eyes watered and my voice choked when we sang ‘Jerusalem’. But what did building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land have to do with me? Now I knew, as I listened to John, that I had only skimmed the surface. He had a depth, a kind of worldweariness that is the privilege of Europeans—especially Europeans with baggage—that I could hardly touch.
The scene he described in Scotland was like something out of Country Life. I recalled the magazine arriving for my mother once a month in a brown, tightly rolled overseas bundle, and I would peruse the front pages with its aerial views of vast manorial estates hidden deep in the English countryside, or thatched roof cottages that might have been the setting of a Thomas Hardy novel. To John the scene was not that of a book or a magazine; it was real, it was today, the characters were living and he was one of them.
Anne had assigned me to a bedroom upstairs, and John to a mattress on the living room floor. But that night I crept downstairs. My plane was leaving mañana, in a matter of hours we would be separated by thousands of miles, and there was no time to worry about propriety. Besides, as I slid under the covers beside John, I could tell he was expecting me.
The next afternoon John saw me off from the little island airfield, promising to write and to call, and to plan our next meeting. But where? John was eager to come to New York but I was hesitant to see him there just yet. He seemed to be a man trying to escape his past, and I was not sure I was prepared to play host to his flight. Better, I thought, to see him first on his own turf, to know what he was running from. We agreed to meet at the Edinburgh Festival in late August. That way, if our precipitous, longdistance romance proved a fizzle, we could always lose ourselves in the darkness of the