Hame

by Annalena McAfee

  —

  “Arthur, she’s not who we thought she was. She’s not a lawyer,” said Jean Turner. “She’s setting up that ridiculous museum on the island.”

  He lowered himself slowly into a leather armchair and I found myself wondering how this desiccated pensioner once beat McWatt in a duel for Jean’s hand.

  “So, no news on the will?” he asked.

  I repeated that McWatt had left most of his estate to the people of Fascaray and that the purpose of my visit was to interview Jean about McWatt’s life for the museum and archive.

  He exchanged a look of astonishment with his wife.

  “The old scoundrel,” he said. “We should have known better than to have had expectations. He gave you nothing in life. Why should that have changed in death?”

  I tried to use their disappointment to my advantage, steering us back on course with the narrative.

  “I can imagine you’re dismayed,” I said, “considering the important role you, Jean, played in his life.”

  “His early life,” she said. “There’s no denying it. Though I never got any thanks for it.”

  “But you were an undeniable inspiration. An early muse.”

  She laughed bitterly and shook her head.

  “Really? If I was, it hasn’t done me much good, has it?”

  Their patience was waning. I had nothing to lose. I went for a direct question.

  “Tell me, how did you meet? You and Grigor?”

  She frowned, then looked over at her husband. Now they were both laughing, as if I was an idiot.

  “I suppose that would be down to our parents…” she said finally.

  Arthur’s laugh had turned into a hacking cough.

  I persevered: “Family friends then?”

  “Yes, family. But friends? I think it’s plain we weren’t friends.”

  This was getting nowhere. I pressed her further.

  “When did you start…courting?” I hoped the coy word, used by my parents, might be less offensive to her. She was not offended. Jean Turner was giggling like a teenager.

  “Courting? Me and Geoffrey?”

  Arthur’s cough became a spluttering laugh.

  “Another misunderstanding,” said Jean. “A day of misunderstandings. Maybe a lifetime of misunderstandings.”

  “But the elusive ‘Bonnie Jean’?” I asked. “His lost love and muse? It’s all part of the myth—the legend—of Grigor McWatt.”

  She shook her head.

  “I did see some magazine story about him once. He’d got himself a couple of fancy women, they said. That came as a surprise to me. In fact I didn’t believe it, to be honest. They make that stuff up, don’t they? I could never see him as a ladies’ man. Was one of them called Jean? It didn’t register. I mean it’s not exactly an unusual name, is it? Not like yours. What is it again? Maori? Myree?”

  She had composed herself, her mirth was replaced by cold anger, and she began to talk. For the second time in a week, my assumptions about Grigor McWatt were overturned.

  “You call it a legend. I call it a lie,” she said. “Grigor McWatt for a start. His name is the least of it. You ask me why I call him Geoffrey? Well, that’s because Geoffrey, Geoffrey Watkins, was his name. Before my marriage to Arthur, I was Jean Watkins. I wasn’t the poet’s ‘lover’ but his sister. Geoffrey Watkins was no more Scottish than me. Like me, he was Surrey born and bred. As English as cream teas and cricket.”

  Pechs There the Loon

  Pechs there the loon wi saul sae deid,

  Wha niver tae hissel hae said,

  This is ma ain, ma native laund!

  Whase hert hae niver in him burn’t

  As hame his fitstaps he hae turn’t

  Stravaigin oan a furrin strand?

  If such there pech, ye mind him well;

  Fur him nae Makar’s raptures swell;

  He micht hae titles tae impress,

  Ayebidin wealth an aw the rest;

  Despite the gowd o aw high heid yins,

  In him the basest metal rins,

  Alive he’s but a cowrin ootcast,

  An deid twice ower he’ll sink fast

  Tae putrid smurach whence he came,

  Ungreet’t, gunkit an unthrain’t.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter Walter Scott, 2013*

  * * *

  * That’s Me Awa, Smeddum Beuks, 2013.

  11 December 2014

  I caught the sleeper back to Scotland yesterday in a daze. I didn’t leave England entirely empty-handed. I came away from Acacia Crescent with an envelope containing three photographs and two letters. They are Jean Turner’s gift to the museum, and her curse on it. She handed me the small haul of memorabilia saying: “Take it. Most of our old family stuff was lost in a fire at our previous house. That’s all that’s left. I’ve neither use nor space for it.”

  As I stretched out on my narrow bunk in the train I felt a crushing despair. I’ve just diligently researched myself out of a job. The book’s finished. We can’t go ahead with the museum. McWatt—Watkins—was an impostor. The whole enterprise, the poetry, The Fascaray Compendium, and now the museum, has been built on the deception of a crazy fantasist. I have to resign and hightail it off the island with my daughter, back to New York and an uncertain future, in disgrace, a figure of ridicule. It will be hard for Marco not to gloat. If our positions were reversed, I’d do the same.

  Jean Turner’s photographs and letters bear out her story. The earliest picture, cracked and faded with age, shows two chubby toddlers with severe haircuts standing before a floral clock in a municipal park. They are wearing oversized coats and holding two small Union Jack flags. Another black-and-white snapshot is of a boy aged about nine standing by a bicycle whose wicker pannier, attached to the handlebars, is filled with books. In the background is a corrugated-iron building, single-storey with a narrow spire—a bizarre architectural hybrid, somewhere between a shed and a church. On the back of the photograph is a handwritten note identifying the boy and the building: “Geoff outside Woking Library, in the old St. Dunstan’s Church, Percy Street, 1930.” You can see in the boy’s high forehead and faintly suspicious gaze the face of the old man he would become. The same boy, taller, and two years older, stands at a picket gate in school uniform: an old-fashioned blazer, cap and short pants. It’s easy to read pride and self-importance in that straight back and uplifted chin. “Geoff’s first day at grammar school,” reads the note on the back.

  There is one letter from Jean to Grigor—I still find it hard to think of him as Geoffrey—and one from him to her.

  At first, Jean Turner told me, once she tracked him down to the island, she wrote to him using his real name. All her letters addressed to Geoffrey Watkins had been returned unopened.

  “Ridiculous. He actually went to the length of changing his name by deed poll. An insult to our parents. To me,” she said.

  “Eventually, when I urgently needed to get in touch with him after the death of our mother, I backed down and addressed the letters as he wished. But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to wipe out his past. He didn’t even stir himself to come down for our parents’ funerals.”

  The siblings, she told me, had been born eight years apart (he was the older) in Surrey to an assistant bank manager father and a full-time mother, intelligent but under-educated, who channelled her thwarted energies into raising her children, running her home and active involvement in the Women’s Institute. The siblings were sent to the local Church of England primary school until they were eleven, attended church services every Sunday, and were brought up to be polite and neat.

  “I can see, from Geoffrey’s point of view, it wasn’t exactly an exciting life,” Jean said. “Not the best grounding for a poet, perhaps. We were well provided for. No complaints. And poets need something to complain about, don’t they? But Geoffrey was always a bit odd. He never fitted in. Never had friends. Never settled to anything.”

  Unlike Jean, he passed the entrance exam to the local gram
mar school. “He never let me, or anyone else, forget it.” He was always a keen reader—“Lost himself in books. Fantasies, adventure stories…”—and his passion for verse irked his sister. “He memorised poems obsessively and would stand up and recite them at every opportunity. Our family holidays in Dad’s Morris Minor were blighted by Geoffrey droning on in the back seat about ancient mariners and highwaymen and rolling English roads. You couldn’t shut him up. It was just another form of showing off, really.”

  He left school, and home, as early as he could and moved to the north London suburbs where he got a job working in a small branch library.

  “At the outbreak of war he joined the services and ended up training in Scotland,” Jean continued. “He came back to see us after the war, just the once. He was very secretive about what he was doing and made no effort to keep in touch after that. I tried, for our parents’ sake. Tracked him down to that wretched island. He didn’t want to know.”

  At this point, Arthur intervened, addressing me.

  “I really don’t see the point of dredging up all this. You’ve made it plain—there’s nothing in the will for us. Another slap in the face. Why do you need to know more? He’s dead now. What difference will these details of his life make to anyone now?”

  “It makes quite a difference to me,” I said. “And to Fascaray. To our cultural identity…To twentieth-century Scottish history.” I was conscious that I was parroting Gordon Nesbitt and the Auchwinnie Board.

  “The Scots can stuff their history,” said Arthur, his face reddening alarmingly. “They want independence? They can have it. The sooner they break away, the better. What about independence for England? We’ve been carrying the burden of those lazy Jocks for years.”

  I didn’t want to be sidetracked. I turned to his wife.

  “He’s a figurehead, your brother. There’s an entire industry built around him. Around the myth of him. It will have to be dismantled, if what you say is true.”

  “Of course it’s true!” Arthur shouted.

  His wife, clearly used to these outbursts, told him to calm down.

  “Remember your angina. What the doctor said…”

  Then, as an afterthought, she asked me: “Will there be much of a fuss, do you think? When the truth comes out? In the papers?”

  “You could say that, yes.”

  The press, particularly the English press, will love it. Famous Scots Poet Exposed as English Fraud. The myth will be publicly demolished and with it my job, my life…

  “Oh no. I don’t want to get involved with the press,” said Jean, suddenly panicky, her hands fanning at her face. “I don’t want reporters camping on my doorstep.”

  “Look,” Arthur intervened, “we just want a quiet life. That’s all we’ve ever wanted. If there’s no money in it for us, let’s forget it. We don’t want to be dragged into this, especially at our age. Let’s just agree this conversation never took place. My wife’s done without a brother for more than seventy years. There’s no point in raking all this up now.”

  And that’s when Jean, not-so-bonnie Jean, stepped in, getting to her feet and shoving the brown envelope in my arms.

  “My so-called brother was dead to me for years before they actually buried him. As far as I’m concerned, I never want to hear another word about him again.”

  —

  The first letter she gave me is from her, to her brother, dated 25 February 1967.

  Dear G,

  The latest cheque arrived, and I must say we were a little disappointed. We had hoped for something more substantial this month. You might be prepared to live in an unheated hut but Arthur suffers with his chest while I, as you know, feel the cold bitterly. This last winter was harsh and central heating is a necessity not a luxury for us.

  I’m delighted to see Grigor’s continued success—we watched the White Heather Club at the New Year, where they sang the song three times!—and I trust it brings Geoffrey substantial financial rewards. It would be nice to think that he remembered his family down south, the family that brought him up and then complied with his wishes to keep their distance and stay silent about the awkward fact of their existence.

  Tah-tah for now, Jean

  The second letter is from Grigor to Jean, dated 14 August 1973.

  Dear Jean,

  Will this do? You may not be aware but I do have other financial commitments, which I’d rather not go into.

  Please see this cheque as full and final settlement of whatever arrangements there may have been between us. I am returning your letters, and will return all future letters I receive from you. I was happy to revoke my claim on our parents’ financial estate in your favour. As your older brother, the likelihood is that I will predecease you. I have written my will and when I am dead you will find that its contents reflect the full extent of my historic obligations and loyalties.

  Until then, I would appreciate it if the distance—and silence—between us is maintained.

  G.

  Alane

  Frae bairnhuid’s oor Ah havnae been

  As ithers were; Ah havnae seen

  As ithers saw, didnae draw oot

  Ma passion frae a common spoot.

  Frae likesome source Ah havnae taen

  Ma dule; Ah couldnae wauken

  Ma hert tae joy at their refrain

  An aw Ah loued Ah loued alane.

  —Grigor McWatt, efter Edgar Allan Poe, 2013*

  * * *

  * That’s Me Awa, Smeddum Beuks, 2013.

  12 December 2014

  I must tell the development board, scrap the museum, spike my book, blow up the whole bogus enterprise, chuck in my job and move away. So many people to disabuse and let down, Agnes among them. And Fascaray? The only hope for retaining its status as a cultural centre would be to rebrand it as the scene of the biggest literary fraud since 1760, when James Macpherson passed off his cod epic poetry as the ancient Gaelic verse of Ossian. But I’m not sure you could build a business model round that. Defining the issue as one of identity politics—the fact that McWatt identified as Scots, just as transsexuals identify with genders they weren’t “assigned at birth”—isn’t going to help here; Canadians and New Zealanders won’t make Fascaray a way station on their diasporic pilgrimage once McWatt the Scot is revealed as English Watkins, and the island will sink back into obscurity, becoming the butt of jokes for metropolitan types in the know.

  There’ll be another wave of economic emigration from the island, the population will dwindle further and the school will face closure, the Bothy and the Watergaw will shut down, the gift shop and tea shop will close, the Lusnaharra distillery will pack up before it has a chance to get going, and the holiday homes—number 19, the kirk—will stand idle, fall derelict and eventually subside into the earth like Hector’s home in Killiebrae.

  As for the Heritage Centre and Museum, some Internet entrepreneur from Edinburgh might be persuaded to buy the freehold sight unseen and commission a young architect to turn it into a streamlined weekend bolt-hole—an energy-efficient box of triple-glazed UV-filtered glass, exposed brickwork and recessed lighting whose clean lines, empty splendour and unimpeded sea views might feature in an issue of Architectural Digest before the owner, deterred by the weather, the inconvenience of the journey and competing attractions in warmer, drier and brighter zones, will put it up for sale. It will, of course, fail to find a buyer and within a year the building will regress to its former state, reverting to a derelict herring-packing shed, albeit one with triple-glazed UV-filtered glass and recessed lighting. And for the island as a whole, with no fishing industry and little tourism, the best the Fascaradians can hope for in an uncertain world is that the market in ditsy etherealism continues to expand and the Balnasaig Sanctuary is anointed as the Vatican of the New Age.

  Winter is the fierce and unforgiving season in which daylight appears but briefly in an endless night, as the swift clang o a dungeon door. Colour has fled the land, heather flowers are sere and the surviving
red beads of rowan have been picked by departing birds. We wake in darkness and by noon the brief gloaming of the day is already fading into darkness again. This is the time of demonic storms, when the wind pummels our frail homes, moans in the chimney, howls at the door and rattles the windows, encrusting them with sea-spray salt. Fences are flattened and fence posts whirl in the wind like matchsticks; slates are whisked from the roof and hurled through the air like autumn leaves.

  This is the time of ceaseless rain, unrelenting floods and impassable bogs when the burn in spate rips away the roots of trees and funnels mercilessly through the land, wrecking bridges and sweeping boulders down to the sea as if they were pebbles. All this water—the rain, the sea, the angry burn and the loch battering its banks—creeps into the soul. One is always damp, wringing out clothes, vainly trying to dry sodden boots, constantly wiping the eyes as if overcome by grief. In these blackest of days, one looks for light and warmth in a glass of whisky and a fire, whose quivering flames tell a thousand diverting stories.

  In this island, protected by the Gulf Stream, snow does not often fall. But when it does it means business. There are no pretty scatterings of flakes but blinding, annihilating blizzards. The burn freezes, the well freezes, organ-pipe icicles hang from the roof and one stirs from one’s bed, breathing dragon clouds of steam, and looks out onto a bleached world of lilac shadows and silence.

  —Grigor McWatt, 2013, The Fascaray Compendium

  13 December 2014

  Such good cheer and diligence. The scene in the museum puts me in mind of those old Soviet propaganda posters depicting the wholesome joy of collective labour. Eck Campbell and Kenny MacLeod are up on ladders finishing the paintwork, Lori from the Watergaw is on her knees sorting out the electrics, Chic McIntosh whistles as he washes windows, Reza and Iqbal are wiping down the cabinets, which Jamie carefully fills with letters, manuscripts and first editions of the poetry collections. I go through the pantomime of choosing and setting out The Fascaray Compendium notebooks in three separate display cabinets while Margaret Mackenzie, in floral apron and yellow rubber gloves, cleans the bathroom. Dot arrives from the Watergaw with a tray of mince pies and makes more tea. I can’t bear it.