“You understand, Griff,” he said to me once as we stood to catch our breath amid the cows beneath a dripping tree. “I can work these things out when we walk together.”
My heart ached. I could only smile back at him.
The idea of our cycling trip to Scotland seemed to evolve naturally, gradually. That was probably a good thing, for if I had planned that Francis and I could be on our own, sharing thoughts, ideas and boarding house rooms for a whole fortnight, I am sure that love and terror would have prevented it from ever happening. But somehow, I found that we were checking maps and timetables on the basis of a vague hypothesis and an agreed love of discussion and exploring the countryside—playing with the whole idea, really—until suddenly we were talking proper dates and actual bookings and the thing had miraculously come about. And I was to pay. That, too, slipped easily under the yawning bridge of my uncertainties. Francis, bless him, probably had a far clearer idea of where he was leading me, and what was to come. But for all of that, for absolutely everything about him, I am eternally grateful.
Whatever sexual fantasies that I might have entertained about Francis were easily subsumed in the actual and amazing fact of our holiday—the first proper one that I had undertaken as an adult. I stared wistfully at my books and clothes as I packed them into my old suitcase, knowing already the treasures of memory and closeness they would soon become. Thank God, the idea of two men travelling together on holiday raised few suspicions in 1914.
We ate a meal in the dining carriage as the train pulled out of Birmingham in the rain, studying guide books and maps. The rain stopped somewhere around Stafford and the evening had become glorious by the time we changed for the overnight sleeper at Crewe. Yet we went to bed quite early, I recall, filled with that soothed, tired feeling that only a long railway journey brings.
In our narrow compartment, I tried to busy myself unselfconsciously with the contents of my suitcase on the lower bunk as Francis, chattering as he always chattered, began to undress beside me. Fully naked and with the curtains still open, his body looked both thinner and broader than I had imagined. Such was the arrangement of the mirrors that I got a vivid glimpse in this plain but shifting light of his balls and penis as, still talking about God knows what, he stepped into his pyjamas.
Trembling, alone in the compartment as Francis headed up the corridor to wash, I drew the curtains across the window and changed rapidly myself, ripping a hole in the arm of my pyjamas in the process. I felt weak and sick and angry. Looking down at the half-erection that, absurdly, was still trying to nudge its way out of my night-clothes, I cursed myself for my stupidity in ever falling for the idea of this holiday.
Francis eventually returned, his hair wet, smelling of Colgate’s Tooth Powder and Wright’s Coal Tar soap, his eyes glistening. I mumbled something with my back towards him, and shoved my way past.
I took my time at the sinks and in the toilet. On the way back, I pulled down a window and watched the fields burn with sunset as the telegraph wires rose and fell, rose and fell. Steam billowed past me, trailing into the thickening dusk as I breathed in the salt-and-country air. By the time I finally returned to the compartment, the flashing landscape had become a grainy patchwork; the glimmer of a lake; the clustered lights of villages; stars over dark hillsides; a rising moon. Francis was up in the top bunk with the light on, reading News From Nowhere. Muttering about how tired I felt, I climbed in below.
I stared up at the shape his body made against the bars of the bunk through the mattress. It truly was both soothing and odd, this motion of the carriage, the steel clatter of the wheels. Eventually, when Francis turned off his light and wished me goodnight, I felt ready for sleep.
Darkness. Motion. The whoosh of another train. Lights; the shape of the carriage window shifting quickly left to right across the curtains. Clatter, tee tee as we cross points. When, about half an hour later, Francis began to shift down from his bunk, I simply imagined that he was heading off on a final trip to the toilets. Instead, he climbed into the tiny bunk beside me.
His pyjamas shirt was already undone and he smelled of its cleanness, and faintly of the soap and the toothpowder, and beneath that of the warmth of this own flesh, like burnt lemon. “This is what you want, Griff, isn’t it…?” he said. Then he put his arms around me. He kissed me, and nothing else was ever the same.
Clatter, tee, tee… Then as now, the onward rush of the train. That sense of the wild summer night passing. On these tracks, it must have happened. Almost on these very rails. Lying prone on this mattress with the dim shape of the empty bunk looming above me, held in a space that, even in this luxurious carriage of the future, I can easily span with both hands, I wonder how we ever managed to lie together, let alone perform the acts of love. But we did. We did. I am sure of that. As we crossed the Scottish Border, Francis and I entered a new world.
8
CHANGE AT GLASGOW. THERE are new authorisations to be collected in the fresh early morning, and the buildings look much cleaner than I remember them as I pass the time along Sauchiehall Street. The policemen wear tartan sashes. Guttural snatches of Gaelic and lowland Scots have appeared in shop windows and road signs. There’s haggis and Angus beef at the meat market, fresh trout and salmon in the fishmongers, whilst the bookshops contain nothing but Scott, Stevenson, Crompton Mackenzie, Burns. Some arcane ceremony is being rehearsed in Renfrew Square to the skirl of bagpipes, the clang of scaffolding.
The Post Office on Union Street opens at nine. By quarter to ten, my freshly-stamped papers are in order, and my journey and its purpose have been approved by a charming dark-haired lass who inhabits a small office behind the stamp machines. SEE BRITAIN BY TRAIN, says the poster above her—a stylised painting of Arthur’s Seat like stained glass caught in the sun—FOR A DAY’S OUTING OR A LONGER JOURNEY.
Needing to top up my early breakfast on the train of Arbroath Smokies and clayey white bread, I head back towards the tearoom at Central Station, relaxed and purposeful as I swallow only my second tablet of the day and study the somewhat distant coverage The Scotsman chooses to give the start of the Olympics at Wembley. Over a second pot of tea and a dry currant bun, I spread out my old maps and new passes, planning the best and least dangerous way to explore my past, whilst finding at the same time what might have happened to a part-Jewish family.
Francis leans over beside me.
We could go here, Griff, or here. His finger is tracing contour marks, jagged intersections of sea and land. What a lovely name. I’m sure we could manage that in a day…
Scenery rears up around me as I travel north. Ben Nevis’s peak shines with snow. Startled deer run up hillsides towards dark new plantations of spruce and fir. A mother tells her daughter about Robert the Bruce and his famous spider as we share a couch in the curved glass observation carriage and the white Highland sun pours over their blonde hair. Falling into conversation, I tell them the stories I have picked up over the years about the wanderings of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Then, just as everyone else seems to have done over the centuries, I make up a few more of my own.
They are both exceptionally beautiful, this mother and child. Their blue grey eyes rest on me, promising forgiveness and understanding. The little girl’s father, a Black Watch Major who’s risen through the ranks on merit in the way that people only can in real conflicts, is on active service on the ever-troublesome India-Afghanistan border. The mother tells me she sleeps with his and John Arthur’s photographs under her pillow. I smile as their faces shine back at me and wish them a good holiday, all the luck in the world.
I spend my first truly Scottish night at Oban, which is just as it was when Francis and I were here, barring the new school and the new bus station. Here, everything always was neat and clean. The woman in the B&B along Shore Road is so wrinkled that I can’t tell if she’s the same creature who saw to Francis and me all those years ago. Of course, we took little enough notice of her then; our newfound love was just too strong. But these, I finally
decide as I inspect my room, probably are the same curtains, the same wallpaper, the same boingey mattress. Everything is so salt-and-sunlight faded that it could have been here forever. But it was no great night of passion for us here at Oban, any more than were many of our other nights at these places. Showing a wisdom far beyond his years in these matters that I found both re-assuring and disturbing, Francis had warned me about keyholes, peepholes, boarding house fingers inspecting the morning’s crumpled sheets. Even then, the penalty for sexual acts between consenting males was ten years imprisonment—more, seeing that Francis was still strictly a minor. There’ll be other places, he said, laughing and then briefly kissing me when he saw my face. Look at that scenery—go on, Griff (his hands on my shoulders, his breath on my face, the miracle, still, of his touching me)—look out of the window. It’s all ours!
The train carries me next towards Ballachulish and the end of the Caledonian Line. The track here runs beside sea and mountains between cloud-chasing shadows and glorious sunlight. The conscripts I share my carriage with have flat Lancashire accents and are heart-breakingly young. A fresh pain rumbles in my body as I talk to them about Oxford (where’s that, then, mate, near London?) whilst the sea flashes and sparkles outside. They seem to care about nothing but the state of the local NAAFI and the ever-changing moods of their sergeant. They call John Arthur The Old Man; a God-like figure to be admired, feared, obeyed. This scenery, the circumstances of their being up here on some fucking exercise or other—the very fact of their lives. It all passes them by.
Ballachulish always was a nothing-place, greyed with slate quarries and mountainous spoil heaps. We laughed about it, then, did Francis and I; too happy to believe in bad omens. Nowadays, motor traffic rumbles along the main road beside the shore, raising quarry dust on the wind as Bristols and Ladybirds, great tank transporters, troop trucks and green-tarpaulined wagons bearing the ponderous shapes of field guns blunder past through a twilight of their own making. They all seem to be heading south.
The proprietor of the White Forge Garage where Francis and I once hired our bicycles wipes his hands and stares at my papers in his grubby office, squints at me, then stares down at my papers again. I’m certain they’re all in order, with this year’s blue identity card, the initial Oxford authorisations for my journey and the travelling-on-through stamps, sub-passes and clipped-on appendices.
“We don’t get many come to hire a car.”
“But you do have one? It was arranged…”
He shrugs. He has a thick body, a thick face. A small tuft of hair is growing on the end of his nose. Mae West, faded and ancient, smiles down at us from a poster for Blue Angel as I wait for him to rummage in a filing cabinet for the extra scraps of paper he must add to my collection. His skin is rough and pale—he looks like a fisherman deprived of the light—and it’s clear that he doesn’t care much for me with my lowland clothes, my fancy passes, my Sassenach accent. In a nation filled with over-caution, over-courtesy, the sideways look over the shoulder before anything is implied, I find his frank antagonism reassuring.
“You know,” I say, clearing gritty mucus from my throat, “I always wondered what happened to the people who were sent up here.”
“Up here?” He turns to me.
“I remember the newspapers about—oh, five years back. They always used to speak of the North West Highlands when they mentioned the Jews. I mean, their relocation.”
His eyes narrow at the word Jews. He shifts his stance bullishly. “The North West Highlands, you say? Here at Ballachulish, we’re still what you call the South West. The North West Highlands, they don’t really start until you get up to Fort William at least. Past the Great Glen.”
The correct papers finally found, the necessary rubber stamps extracted from a rattling heap in a desk drawer and supplemented by inky blue fingerprints, I’m shown to my car. I’d expected some characterful wreck, but it turns out to have made the journey up from Oxford, just like me. It’s a black Morris Ladybird, the people’s car.
I sit hunched on the cramped seat as the engine throbs, holding the wheel and trying to affect a familiarity that my few lessons five years before hardly justify, whilst the proprietor leans in on his elbows and points out the controls. It’s the very latest model, with less than 2,000 miles on the clock and the new automatic indicators that flip out from each side. An EA cross points purposefully towards tomorrow on the squat bonnet. The car even smells of the future; of plastic and petrol, rubber and metal.
“I’d use those,” says the proprietor, nodding towards the complimentary Automobile Association Road Map of Scotland on the dashboard shelf, then to my old touring map, “not that old thing you’ve got there. This land’s changed a lot since then. New roads. New signs. New names. Places you can’t go…”
I nod. Another quarry truck rumbles by between the petrol pumps and the sea, shaking the dusty air.
“You’ll probably lose them up past Mallaig,” he says; meaning the lorries. “You could try the Duke Of Prussia up there if you’re looking to stay the night. Ross Edwards is a sour old bastard, but he’ll charge you fair.”
The Ladybird’s engine thrums a little harder. Grey powder settles on my face and hands. Licking my lips, I can taste it like soil, like sulphur. I want to get away from here so I work out how to drive this car and find out what Mallaig and all the rest of the Highlands are now like. A grimy place, I imagine Mallaig is now, a mixture of building site and military camp—and the Duke of Prussia is probably a suitably dour location to abandon my Francis memories, my Francis dreams.
The proprietor nods what I take to be farewell, and my hand slides down to feel for the Ladybird’s handbrake. Then he hesitates and leans back into the car again as more of the traffic pours by.
“At least it’s quieter here in the nights now,” he says as I stare back at the little carpet on the end of his nose. “You get to sleep pretty easy. But three, four years ago, I used to hear the trucks go past. Tall things, they were, with slatted wooden sides, like the farmers use to take stock to market—only always at night. One of them got a leak, pulled in here, and some lad with a rifle woke me up and ordered me to fix it. A bad smell came off the truck and I could hear movement inside. I thought it was just animals. But there were voices. And you could see their eyes… Bairn’s fingers poking out of the slats.”
He steps back from the car window. My foot slips, and I stall the engine.
“Petrol cap’s on the right side,” he says. “And if you see Ross Edwards, tell him I sent you…”
I restart the engine and I struggle with the wheel, pulling out close to the maw of another thunderous quarry truck.
Thus I travel north, grating gears, screeching the Ladybird’s dry wipers, passing through waves of time and memory. The new Automobile Association map shows many grey-shaded areas. NO PUBLIC ACCESS. New roads, blue and red like broken capillaries, strike purposefully off only to stop in the middle of nowhere. The Duke of Prussia is as satisfyingly dour as I’d imagined, and the man I take to be Ross Edwards tells me that, no, he’s never heard of this part of the world being called the North West Highlands. At least, not by the people who live here.
That night and other nights, alone in yellow-lit rooms with great empty wardrobes, riding the creaking seas of hollowed-out double beds, I study my maps, both old and new. Somehow, like the ghost-ache of a lost limb, Francis is still there beside me, his chin cupped in his hand and bare feet in the air, laughing at something, humming to himself, twiddling his toes, always at ease and in movement at the same time. Then he lays a hand across me and pulls me closer with a touch that is both warmly sexual and at the same time has nothing to do with sex at all.
Francis had loved the place names as we journeyed across Scotland. Mellon Udrigle. Plockton. Grey Dog. Poolewe. Smearisary. The Summer Isles. He’d run his finger along some impossibly contoured and winding route that the pedals of our basket-fronted Northampton Humbers were supposed to carry us, chosen entirely to incl
ude as many of those wonderful names as possible. As is the way in the Highlands, we discovered that the villages and towns were generally disappointing—and that the scenery was beyond our wildest dreams, cast down to stand before us from the craggy glory of some other, better, world.
My eyes blur as I stare at the sheets of these maps and the muffled sound of voices drifts up from the television downstairs in the William Wallace Lounge in—where am I now?—is it Fort Augustus? Or was that yesterday? Swordland. Mhic Fhearchair…The names on that old map dance before me, and I can no longer remember with any certainty where we did actually go. And driving is an effort for me, too, despite the generally fine nature of these widened Highland roads, my Ladybird’s obliging engine.
Something rustles in the corner of the room, and I see that Francis is with me again. He’s sitting reading the Daily Chronicle that he insists on buying every day, absorbed as he follows the international posturing that has followed the assassination of some Archduke in Serbia a month before. This is real history, Griff, he said to me once when I expressed amazement that anyone should care about what happens in the Balkans. How can you pretend to be a historian and then let all this pass you by?
I undress clumsily and swallow my tablets with a gulp of dusty water. I climb down into acrid over-starched sheets. Oh, Francis, Francis, why do we even have to have history? What possible need does it fulfil? Couldn’t people just live their lives and die when their time comes without all these empires, this newsprint, these terrible marching armies…? And why can’t we still be together?
The Summer Isles Page 9
