by Alan Clark
‘Can I do anything to help?’
He shook the tousled head. I headed towards the Merc. Then his voice called after me.
‘Answer me a question, yes?’
‘Of course.’
‘I do not wish to be rude, but I think you have been gay for many years now?’ he said. ‘I am just beginning. Tell me please. Is this all there is?’
I retraced my steps and stood under the lamp post.
‘I’m still trying to decide about that,’ I said. ‘I think it probably depends on who you are. And if you want there to be, then there can be.’
A Starbucks cardboard mug was rolling in the gutter. I scribbled my mobile number on it.
‘If you ever want to chat any time, call me.’
The handsome face wrinkled up, like he’d smelt something bad.
‘Gesu,’ he said, wheeling away from me and tearing off along the street.
‘But I didn’t mean …’ I shouted after him. ‘Really …’
*
I swung the car into the East Court with more luck than judgment and only just missed Faisal’s scruffy old Peugeot. Bugger. I’d not expected him back tonight. But then I felt pleased that he was. Lights blazed out of every window. I suddenly thought of old Marcus Leigh sitting in his flat behind the Connaught crying over the past and the Caravaggio cutie on the windy pavement crying over the future. Blearily I vowed that I would try to embrace my present and the possibilities that it offered, both for obliterating what had gone before and for creating the shape of things to come. I pictured Ms Prada clapping her chubby wee hands with glee.
Faisal was in the kitchen in his bathrobe, brewing his herbal tea. His father had been released from hospital, the accident much less serious than first thought. He gave me a cursory glance and made the correct diagnosis.
‘Black coffee perhaps?’ Faisal never ceased to be solicitous; it was a reflex action and mildly irritating.
‘Just took myself out for a drink. Was getting a bit claustrophobic.’
‘I see.’
‘Just a few beers.’
‘After which you drove the car. The behaviour of a thick teenager, not of a supposedly intelligent middle-aged man.’
Faisal thrust the coffee in my face. His rebukes were always delivered as serene statements of the blindingly obvious with which the guilty party must be moronic not to agree.
‘Yep. Sorry.’
‘Anyway, I was just leaving you a note. There’s a visitor waiting in the house.’
‘At this time of night? Who the fuck is it?’
‘No idea,’ said Faisal. ‘Vic phoned across. He said they’d be in the Red Damask Drawing-Room. Better go at once, if you’re capable; they’ve been there at least two hours.’
Faisal and his herbal tea headed towards the glass staircase.
‘And by the way, you stink. Of booze, sweat and, unless I’m mistaken, urine. I shudder to think why. I’ll be in the spare room.’
Oh dear. There were a couple of yellowish stains on my chinos where I must have missed the beer mug. Something told me I’d not be getting a ‘Partner Poem’ in the morning. I imagined him tucked up in the spare room flicking through The Man-Love Manual, in search of ‘scene addiction’ and ‘inability to commit’.
I let myself into the house, weaving my way through the scaffolding and the paint pots, the furniture in its dustsheets looming like icebergs. I stopped at the door of the Red Damask Drawing-Room. I could hear Vic’s mid-Atlantic drawl and a soft female voice I couldn’t quite make out. I opened the door. Vic and the visitor turned around.
‘Dearie me, Rory Blaine,’ said the visitor. ‘Just look at the state of you.’
On a richly gilded Napoleonic sofa, on which the Empress Josephine would happily have parked her arse, sat a slight elderly woman who looked like an extra from Dr Finlay’s Casebook. Her back was ramrod straight and her eyes pierced into me like the two knitting-needles clicking away in her bony fingers. Allow me to properly introduce Miss Elspeth Wishart; spinster, Elder of the Church of Scotland, retired matron of Glenlyon School, Perthshire and keeper of my conscience.
And sitting close to her was a large and exhausted suitcase.
SIX
He zoomed under the Clock Tower astride a lilac scooter. He was in full red leathers, about six feet six and constructed along the lines of a public library. He was much too big for the scooter and it scrunched to an erratic halt no more than a metre from Alma the cat, Miss Elspeth Wishart and me, sending a cloud of gravel-dust over the East Court. Alma fled, I leapt back, but Elspeth Wishart never flinched.
Under the helmet was a man in his mid-twenties with a fat sweaty face the colour of melting butterscotch.
‘Hello doux-doux,’ he boomed to Elspeth in a deep West Indian voice. ‘And how are we on this lovely spring mornin’?’
‘We’re covered in dust now laddie,’ she replied. ‘You should have dismounted at the main gate and pushed it.’
‘Pushed it doux-doux?’ the big man grinned and patted his mountainous crutch. ‘Don’t be wishin’ no hernia on me now.’
The initial Ol’ Man River impression was somewhat undermined by a distinctly camp demeanour. It was an odd combination.
‘What’s that name you’re calling me?’ asked Elspeth.
‘It’s a term of endearment back home in Trinidad,’ he said ‘I used it cos the moment I saw you I knew we was goin’ to get on like a friggin’ house on fire.’
I now noticed that the giant was carrying a human rucksack. A young girl unfolded herself from the back of the scooter. She was a beautiful creature, with a slim athletic figure topped by disproportionately big tits. Her thick spiky hair was black as Faisal’s against a pale white skin; her lips a tarty red to match her long fingernails. She wore high heels, a padded silk jacket and expensive-looking black pants. Men must have been stacked over her like planes waiting to land at Heathrow.
‘Who are you both please?’ I asked tersely. I had a bitch of a hangover.
‘The record shows that I was baptised Francis Albert Beckles, but my intimates call me Big Frankie and I hope you’ll soon be among their number. I met this pretty lady at the gates and gave her a lift. We are both here to be interviewed by a Mr Vic d’Orsay.’
‘I’m Dolores Potts,’ said the girl, flicking the dust off her trousers. ‘I’ve come for the position of landscape gardener.’
‘A gardener called Potts?’ I said. Never did a woman look less likely to wield a spade.
‘I’ve heard all the jokes,’ she replied in a husky voice with a strong hint of The Archers. ‘Are you Rory Blaine?’
When I confirmed it, her dark eyes swept over me with a bit more intensity than seemed appropriate.
‘And why are you here, Mr Beckles?’
‘I’m your new chef, boss,’ bellowed Big Frankie. ‘I’m dreamin’ last night I’d be the successful candidate and my dream scenarios are never wrong.’
I pointed to the door in a corner of the East Court where we’d set up an office.
‘You’ll find Mr d’Orsay in there. Good luck to you both.’
Big Frankie used his sleeve to polish the dust from his helmet and winked at me in a way that was slightly suggestive. He and the girl turned towards the office. He was surprisingly light on his feet.
‘In my day, chefs were usually delicate wee men with moustaches,’ said Miss Elspeth Wishart staring after him. ‘Can you imagine those hands making a trifle?’
‘I don’t imagine chefs of his age do trifles,’ I said.
‘Aye, you’ll be right no doubt. Over-familiar too, did you not think?’
I smothered a smile. Why do we assume people are likely to alter with the passage of time? ‘Oh he’s not changed,’ we say with surprise after a long separation. We’re amazed when they appear unmarked by the terrorist attacks of life. If we ourselves are among the walking wounded, we might reflect smugly that experience has taught them nothing, that they’ve not grown as we have. We rarely allow that
they might feel they’d learnt all the big truths way back when and simply stopped there.
Miss Elspeth Wishart was a supreme example of the species. Though we corresponded quite often, I’d not actually seen her since my last trip north nearly ten years ago. In that time, I’d have expected at least some superficial alterations. But Elspeth Wishart’s appearance and character seemed to have set like Superglue around 1955. She must be pushing seventy now, which meant she couldn’t have been much more than thirty-something when I’d first seen her. She’d been grey-haired even then; these days it looked like stuffing ripped out of an armchair and worried at by a terrier. The Calvinist jaw remained set firm against all forms of wickedness and the reed-thin figure still moved with the bustle of someone who believed that if you wanted something done well, it was best to do it yourself. And though you’d maybe not have called her masculine, she sure wasn’t very girly either, as if gender had passed her by, having taken a long look and deciding it wasn’t going to have much of a role in her life.
Whenever I thought of Miss Elspeth Wishart, it was in monochrome. She would always be flint grey walls against matching skies, rugby pitches and tepid showers, iron bedsteads and linoleum floors. Only her eyes had much colour; they were a bright limpid green and her smile, on the rare occasions when she bothered to use it, could light her up like Blackpool Tower.
Elspeth it was who’d long ago infected me with that streak of Low Church morality which came out like a rash at the least appropriate moments. Elspeth who’d switched off the dorm lights every night with a brisk injunction against ‘playing down below’. Elspeth whose door was never closed and who, when I’d needed it, had let me hide from the world behind those tweedy skirts. Ms Prada had decreed that Miss Wishart was of course a mothe-rsubstitute figure and asked if I ever thought about her breasts. I’d reacted with such disgust that Ms Prada had allowed herself a knowing smirk. I’d nearly taken my neuroses elsewhere.
This morning, Vic reported that Elspeth had been up since half-past six. None of the other bedrooms was habitable, so Vic had given up his and slept on the sofa in his sitting-room. He’d given her dozy directions to the unfinished kitchens and told her to help herself. When he’d eventually staggered down, she’d already cooked herself the full British Rail breakfast, mopped the floor and re-arranged the contents of the cupboards into a more logical arrangement which she claimed would reduce meal preparation time by up to twenty-five per cent.
In fact it’d been Virgin Trains that had brought Elspeth to my door. The line to Glasgow had been closed by a derailment. Knowing nobody else in London and genetically reluctant to pay for a hotel, she’d travelled up to Hampstead on the tube, then pulled her big suitcase on its little wheels half a mile uphill through dark streets in a city she didn’t know.
‘What are you doing in London, Miss Wishart? You’ve not been out of Scotland for years,’ I’d asked last night in the Red Damask Drawing-Room, trying to enunciate as clearly as possible.
‘I’ve been down to Brighton to visit Morag Proudie, my junior matron at Glenlyon. You’ll maybe not remember her now?’
Morag Proudie. Wow. The long-buried power of that name had flushed my cheeks even more. I’d once convinced myself I was in love with Morag Proudie.
‘Her husband’s got the biggest jacuzzi business on the south coast. Much good may it do her now, poor lassie,’ Elspeth had said. ‘Breast cancer. Five and a half-stone. I just wanted one last wee blether before … you know.’
I said how sorry I was and she reminded me, as she always had, that the Lord moved in mysterious ways.
This morning I was showing her round the house. She gave no sign of being overwhelmed; the High Anglican flamboyance of the Chapel evoking a pout of distaste and the comment that John Knox would turn in his grave. It wasn’t the best day for a tour. Less than three months from our projected opening, the workmen were everywhere; electricians, plumbers, stonemasons, roofers, floorers, painters, decorators, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Over the last two years Mount Royal, starved of attention for so long, had displayed a ravenous appetite for cash. Into its hungry mouth, I’d thrown the proceeds from Blaine Rampling, the sale of Devonshire Street and Granny’s liquid assets, though the last would hardly have paid for weeding the gardens. I’d also sold off some minor pictures and mediocre furniture. But it had been Vic’s seemingly limitless ability to write cheques full of zeros that had really made things possible. I’d begun to wonder if it was all, well, kosher. He’d hung out with Mr Sinatra after all.
But I’d been too hard on Granny; her house had been in better shape than it looked. The exterior stone was dire but the roof was fine and most of the state-rooms just needed delicate redecoration. The major headache was the creation of the new apartments on the upper floors, including twenty en-suite bathrooms. I’d soon discovered that we couldn’t so much as fart without permission from English Heritage. In return for a few spindly grants, they descended on us like genital warts, just a couple at first then you had dozens of the bastards; experts in stonework, woodwork, metalwork, in marbelling, panelling, gilding, in furniture, fabrics, tapestry and antique carpets. Male or female, straight or gay, they were prima donnas all.
By a stroke of luck however, the Obergruppenführer was a young aesthete called Robin Bradbury-Ross. By day, he’d be on all fours checking the wainscotting in the stately homes of England. By night, he’d be in much the same position, attached to a lead with a collar round his neck in the fetish clubs of Vauxhall. It was in the latter context I’d met him, during one of my sporadic expeditions to discover my sexual boundaries. Robin had praised my skill at dripping hot wax on his nipples and given me his card. It hadn’t really been my thing and I’d never called. But now my ten quid admission to The Sling turned out to be worth every penny.
Robin’s powers over what we could do at Mount Royal were vast but discretionary. In a trivial dispute, I’d let him have his way. If it were more important, we’d stare at each other across the architect’s plans and begin to haggle. There was a sliding scale. For an extra water tank, he got to toss me off. For a big new boiler, he’d been allowed a blowjob. But for the controversial installation of a lift, I’d had to bend him over a Sheraton table and provide the full Grade 1 seeing-to while calling him a cheap middle-class whore. Obviously I didn’t tell Faisal about this arrangement but nor did I regard it as unfaithfulness, merely as a business matter; though Robin undeniably had me, so to speak, by the short and curlies.
This morning as he gave Elspeth a Walter Raleigh bow, I realized how appropriate it was that she should, so unexpectedly, be beside me as Mount Royal came slowly back to life. It was only to Elspeth that I’d painted proud pictures of these extravagant rooms when I’d taken refuge in her spartan quarters at Glenlyon. Only to her that I might have betrayed how much I missed it. No doubt I’d bored her to death, but she’d let me rattle on while she’d knitted endless pullovers for the children of cousins she scarcely knew. When I’d stopped returning to London for the Christmas and Easter vacs, she’d never asked me why. She’d have been instructed that Rory Blaine was now sentenced to join the other sad souls, with parents far away, who were year-round prisoners. In the summers, I was sent on outward-bound courses or educational cruises to assorted ruins. Elspeth herself had always returned to the Isle of Bute, to the cottage her father had retired to when he’d left the manse. But wherever I was, I’d get a weekly postcard of some loch or ruined castle and a no-nonsense message.
‘Rory Blaine, are you behaving? Make sure you do. The weather here is wet. Miss Wishart.’
I’d loved those postcards. For years, I’d even kept them.
Today, we ended our tour up in the cupola. Elspeth gazed down on the vans and trucks in the carriage circle, the figures scurrying up ladders and across scaffolding. Bruce Willis, whom I’d hired in a moment of weakness as a permanent security man, was on his fat stomach checking under vehicles, presumably for incendiary devices. Vic was guiding Dolores Potts and Big Frank
ie Beckles around the grounds. Spring sunshine bounced off the latticed windows of the cupola; the skeletons of the oak trees would soon be shrouded in a becoming green, softening the constant cackle of our ASBO neighbours, the rooks.
‘You’ll be a happy man now, I’m thinking?’
‘And what about you, Miss Wishart? How’s life in your lovely cottage by the sea?’
‘Och, it’s a simple existence. I walk into the village twice a week though I hardly know a soul there now. All second homes, couples from Glasgow in those huge cars crammed with screaming bairns. They’d never even nod to you, let alone pass the time of day. But there’s still the kirk and teaching at the Sunday school. A woman minister now, would you credit it? A wee lassie, pleasant enough, black nail varnish. Not sure I’d want her holding my hand at the last.’
‘Miss Wishart,’ I said, taking my courage in both hands. ‘Excuse my asking, but are you okay?’
‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘Wee bit of arthritis in the fingers and a cataract in one eye means The People’s Friend is no longer the joy it was. Otherwise, fit as a fiddle.’
‘No I mean, um, money-wise. Because if not, I could, you know …’
‘Away with you, Rory Blaine,’ she said. ‘The thought is kindly meant, but misplaced. Besides, Elspeth Wishart has never taken a penny-piece without having worked for it.’
I doubted that my thought was misplaced at all. Her flat brown shoes were creaky and scuffed and Vic had whispered that the last time he’d seen a coat like hers it’d been on Ena Sharples. I imagined her pension from Glenlyon would stretch gentility till it screamed.
The rail line to Scotland was clear again. Elspeth’s taxi was due soon, but there was just time to show her the gardens. Alan Titchmarsh would still have wept, but the worst of the jungle had been cleared, the paths weeded and the grass re-sewn. The Great Fountain had been sealed and re-tiled, the Orangery fumigated of junk and long-dead plants. Elspeth and I sat down on a bench and contemplated the south front.
