There were days within those few that Francis and I shared that were yet more perfect: even as we lived them, they stood alone, outside everything, unreachable in their simple sweetness. We rented a cottage miles from anywhere. It was semi-derelict, really, with pink sea thrift flowering on its turf roof, a rough slate floor like something thrown in by the sea, thick walls set with tiny windows overlooking the beach. By then, even the capricious Highland weather had come around to our side, and filled our days with basking heat, white rocks, limitless skies. The nights were only Francis and I.
Soon, I’m with him again, although even in my dreams, it seems, I’m denied a recollection of those perfect days in our cottage by the shore. It feels like many empty years now since I’ve reached them. Instead, we’ve left and have headed south and the weather, looming as if in sympathy with what I imagined was just the finish of a holiday but was in fact the end of almost everything, had turned cold, grey. We’re at the Gulf of Corryvreckan, which, unlike the many wonderfully-named places we’ve talked about but never quite reached, we do at least get within sight of. The waves are roaring and crashing, sending up high curtains of green as we cycle to the end of the rutted track where the tumultuous sea begins, and the sky is low already; dense and angry as the gulf boils and swirls between Scarba and Jura’s desolate northern coast. The boom of water grinding rock—far away and yet deep down; as if it’s part of the earth and the sky and your bones—is like cannon fire, and the high fine spray that rises and drifts is like smoke. A Viking fleet had been lured here and destroyed, or so Francis tells me. An iron merchantman had been torn to shiny talons of scrap. Mere flesh was simply dragged under by the anvil force of these waters, toyed with, stripped of its bones…
Standing there with Francis as the sky darkened and the first heavy drops of rain began to hit our faces with the strength of thrown gravel, I finally realised what Europe was about to be consumed by. And Francis, his eyes fixed on that swirling horizon, his jaw set and the muscles of his neck and shoulders tensed as he leaned against me—he was already a part of it in a way that I never could be. It drew him in. Even the taste of his mouth when we turned and kissed alone in that roaring empty land was strange—or has become strange in my dream. There is caustic earthy taste to my Francis, who was usually so lemony and sweet. A sour mixture of shit and mud.
Further north, further west. The clouds thicken dutifully, bringing rain.
Peering through the Ladybird’s uselessly thwacking wipers, a handkerchief in my fist, blood-pinkened from the stuff I’ve been coughing up all morning, I follow a new road that isn’t on any of the maps. It runs beside the concrete posts and barbed wire of an endless fence, across an endless moor. The land on the far side is mountainous and damp, huge and maliciously innocent; it looks like all the rest of this landscape. And then—somehow, I missed its approach—an enormous tank comes thundering out of the earth behind me.
An hour later, I take refuge in a pub. The peat in the fireplace smokes and spits as I shiver in a corner, studiously ignored by the locals. Their accents are light, the conversation soft; it’s as if there’s something sleeping they fear to waken. I know, as I put two tablets on my tongue and lift my glass of cloudy beer with both hands to swallow, that I have truly reached a strange land. John Arthur’s face above the bar is my only anchor. I’ve given up asking if I’ve finally reached the North West Highlands. Such a place no longer exists—my maps confirm it. It has folded over on itself in the way that places sometimes do in history, and has left no trace.
Things here are no different from the way they were at my acquaintance’s old house, which was purchased from the Relocation Board within weeks of my first visit by a family much like the one that had been expelled into nowhere, except that they had two boys instead of girls, and weren’t part-Jewish. The broken windows were soon re-glazed, the flower borders were replenished, the trampled front lawn was rolled and mowed back to its customary stripes, the smell of piss in the porch was washed away. The whole sad memory was disinfected.
The rain, the awful beer, this pub, my own sickness and pain; they all disgust me. I think of Francis, his cock in my mouth, my forehead resting against his tautening belly, and of all the things that one must do in life until everything is spent and there is nothing left to face but the turning tides, the great grinding grey engine.
The sheep huddle for shelter as I drive on and the road winds along the hillsides until a white finger of sunlight suddenly presses down on the landscape as if to staunch a wound and the rain begins to clear. I park the Ladybird at a passing point and wander across the sodden heather. This landscape, seemingly so eternal, scars easily. Just ahead of me in a small dip of the land, the tracks of many vehicles have been scrawled across it.
A small lough flashes, and the air is suddenly sweet and clear. The grouse that the laird will be blasting from the air call Go-back, Go-back. Roughly centred in the scarring of the tracks, a wide concrete foundation shines like a shield in the new sunlight, and the undergrowth—heather, tiny brownish bilberry, sharp yellow-spangled gorse that gives off a smell of desiccated coconut—is tangled with litter. Old-style packets of Craven A. Newspapers that the sun and the rain have browned to anonymity. A woman’s headscarf. A child’s Start-Rite summer sandal. The few soft white clouds that are left in the sky turn and billow as I wander across this empty place, and their playful shadows charge across the valley.
A Fry’s Chocolate wrapper. Washed-out cigarette ends. An old dishcloth. The top of a set of false teeth. The foundation in the middle of this bowl in the hills is neat and clean; all the signs of this building have been removed. It was clearly some kind of stopping-off place, but whatever has happened here has finished, and as the wind picks up once again and the sky begins to darken, I decide that this was probably nothing more than a resting place for conscripts on their way south or north.
Something catches my eye as the sun goes out and I begin to trudge back across the moor towards my surprisingly distant Ladybird. It’s just another scrap of litter flowering in the undergrowth but, despite my weariness, I sink and clamber across the boggy ground and disentangle it from the heather as the first heavy drops of rain start to thud against my head and shoulders. The fragile paper remains legible despite having swollen to the thickness of blotting paper. The colours still have a gloss and a glow. It’s a travel poster really, the kind of thing you end up staring up at in every kind of waiting room. A family, pictured from behind but with their smiling faces turned back towards us, are striding down a winding road that leads to a glittering sea. The father is grinning, beckoning us to join him. The mother holds the hands of her two daughters, who are chattering and skipping excitedly, their pig-tails dancing in mid-air. The ocean beyond the shore to which they are heading is a maze of light. Set within it, more hinted at than actually revealed, yet clearly the focus of the picture, lie a scatter of small islands. Looked at closely before the rain thickens and the paper collapses in my hands, they blur to nothing—just a few clever brush strokes like a Japanese print—but they suggest hills and meadows, wooded glades, white beaches and pretty shingle-roofed and whitewashed houses; a warm and happy place to live. The caption at the bottom reads: RELOCATE TO THE SUMMER ISLES.
9
MY HOLIDAY WITH FRANCIS ended on the 4th of August 1914, when Asquith stood up in the House of Commons to loud cheers and announced that, as a consequence of a treaty signed in 1839 guaranteeing Belgium sovereignty, Britain would be at war with Germany from midnight. The final declaration of war had become so inevitable—that ultimatum that Kaiser Willy would reject as a scrap of paper—that I can’t actually remember how we finally heard of it. We’d certainly left our cottage on the shore far behind, and had cycled on from the Gulf of Corryvreckan. I do remember, though, the pub that Francis and I were in that evening, the wild sense of excitement and relief. Suddenly, we were no longer strangers to these wary, courteous people, even though we were English and could hardly understand what they we
re saying. And the women were in the bar that night, too, drinking beer from jugs as their children whooped and charged up and down the road in the wild darkness outside. It was as if we had all craved this moment; at last, a chance to forget our differences and belong. Suddenly, after years of trying, we could love each other and hate the Germans. Politics and diplomacy seemed trivial compared to the raw certainties of war.
“I’m going, you know,” Francis yelled to me from across a table as a huge-breasted woman tried to kiss him. “I’m not waiting, Griff. I need to go straight back…”
I nodded and swallowed my beer. It was no use arguing. And I, too, was elated—it was impossible not to be. Soon, we were dancing in the crowd. Francis even kissed me. That August night, nobody cared. We were all one mass of hope and humanity.
We arranged to have our bicycles delivered back to Ballachulish and our return tickets changed, and ended up spending what was to be our last proper night together in a ridiculously smart hotel in Inveraray as we competed for priority with everyone else who suddenly needed to travel. I had had time by then to ponder how little I really knew about Francis. For a start, he’d always been deliberately vague about his upbringing. I didn’t even know where he’d been born and brought up.
“That’s never bothered me,” he said when I finally raised it with him. “So why should it bother you?” We were together in our plush double room with bathroom en-suite. We were both a little drunk. We had stopped worrying, in this new wartime world, about prying eyes and we were naked already, lying on the bed with the windows open and the sound of carriages clopping by in the street. Without ceremony, he began to kiss me. It was a good way to stop a conversation. But I sensed that it was too late to get my Francis back—the real Francis, as I thought of him—because so much of him had already left.
Even without the war, our love wouldn’t have lasted, I already had too many questions. Where, for example, had Francis acquired all his sweet proficiency in all the skills of homosexual love? How was it that, with me aged 34 and him just 19, I was the pupil and he was the teacher? A part of me doubted that Francis was wholly committed to spending his life being touched only by men. In truth, I was already well on the way towards becoming that perennially dreadful specimen; the jealous older lover.
On our journey south from the Highlands, following a more complex route than the one we had taken up—and without access to a sleeping carriage—I did my best to talk seriously to Francis. I wanted to fix as much of him in my mind as I could. But he remained teasing about his past. Yes, I went to school but it was just a place. How do you think I learned? Do I have a brother?—well, you tell me. Go on, you know what I’m like, so guess… It was a game we’d played before, but now it was harsher, more hurtful.
As we waited on swarming platforms and changed trains and searched for seats and stood in crowded corridors rattling down past Motherwell, Selkirk, Hexham, Darlington, I ended up telling Francis about myself instead. It had never struck me before that there was much to say, but then I had my book, of course, which already had more to do with me and my own frail hopes and ambitions than it had to do with the study of history. And there was being the way I am—a phrase I’d often used in my head but had never been able to speak out loud to anyone. I even told Francis about my dream of Oxford, which seemed like the most intimate thing I could ever tell anyone.
“So, Griff,” he smiled and secretly touched my hand as we leaned against a corridors windows and the sleepers raced by. “You want to be a Professor?”
I couldn’t answer. It was so much more than that.
“Have you ever even been to Oxford?”
“It would spoil the dream.”
“Still, I doubt if it’s all that it’s cracked up to be. People can be thick and snobbish and still tell each other jokes in Latin, you know. But it’ll be different after the War, Griff. You’ll see. Things will change…”
I smiled back at Francis’s hopeful face as the train rocked us towards our separate destinies, wondering if this wasn’t another small thread in the missing pattern of his life. A cold middle-class childhood—perhaps in Suffolk or Norfolk—then some small public boarding school, followed by expulsion for a sexual misdemeanour? Attempting Responsions at Oxford; perhaps even passing, but not quite well enough to get into a college…?
Despite my willing them not to come, Birmingham’s Snow Hill Station and then Lichfield City arrived soon enough. It was one of those overcast days that you often seem to get when you return from somewhere, new union jacks were drooping from many of the shops and churches and there was a chilly restlessness in the air like the snatching of some minor breeze, but otherwise everything about Lichfield seemed much the same. Francis and I parted by a wall outside the station without touching, or even saying very much. I think Francis’s last words to me were “Cheerio then,” and mine were, “Well, thanks anyway.” Something like that. I stood and watched him walk off past the almshouses with that quick gait of his, then lugged my mother’s old suitcase down towards what I still thought of as her house. I was almost looking forward to solitude, a good cry, then back to my book by mid-evening.
A Recruitment Fair was in progress in Saint Martin’s Square. A brass band played as men queued up to join the Staffordshire Regiment on a be-ribboned stage beside the statue of Doctor Johnson. Jolly as a works outing, talking and laughing freely in the way that we British so seldom do, they beckoned me to join them. I shook my head and explained that I was a schoolmaster, and much too old. The way things were then, there was no animosity—it was looked upon as my loss. The same Fair must still have been in progress later on when Francis went down and signed away his life to the King.
That evening, I find another pub, its walls blazing white in a late spasm of sunlight amid the drystone fields. I get a curious satisfaction from gouging a line of bare metal along the Ladybird’s passenger side as I turn around the gatepost.
A woman in curlers in the tobacco-browned bar sends me up the stairs, then left and then up the next left again. After wrestling with the tricky geometric problem of getting the suitcase through the door into my slope-ceilinged top floor room, and, feeling sick and sweaty, I collapse on the bed and let the wheezing springs rock me like a sea. Then I’m doubled up, retching and gasping.
A blank period follows. When I awake, my chin is wet, my head throbs and slippery pools of piss and mucus lie around me. But I’m too weary to get up, or even burrow down into my suitcase to find another tablet. A warm angel fans my face, whispering of better things beyond the pain. I sense that, outside the window, through ripples of mist and grey long-angled sunlight and the laughing whoops of children, the summer twilight of this or some other day is fading.
A fist bangs at my door. Intent on not moving—on not doing anything apart from concentrating on the difficult business of breathing—I murmur a useless reply.
What passes for night in these high latitudes floats in. The sky at my window fades from pink to pale blue, then glows pink again. At some point, I manage to drag myself off the damp coverlet and actually climb into bed. I’m conscious for a while that I still have my shoes on. Voices murmur. A pain hardens inside me. Twisted the way I am, and in the hen-clucking light of what I suppose must be morning, I can see the spines of two books lying on the dusty glass-topped bedside table. The Bible, and John Arthur’s Collected Speeches, Volume IV, 1933–4.
There’s sunlight at my window. From downstairs, I can hear someone singing, pots banging. There is the faint smell of burnt fat and bacon frying; the smell, too, that comes from the leakage and dissolution of my body. At some point, I begin to cough again. This time, I am able to watch from a blessed distance as my pillows are rained with blood. I remind myself of who I am. At least, who I think I might be. My mind turns the worn-out gears of my unfinished book. Figures—no, wasn’t it Fingers?—of History. The pages wait. Now, where was I? There’s Napoleon, striding beneath baroque ceilings along the brass and velvet lines of nobodies at one of tho
se ceremonies which the French love almost as much as the English. And there I am, waiting. The knife beneath my robes. I cough again. The knife twists. The moment falls. My hands are bloody.
Inner darkness, even when it finally seems to beckon, comes less easily than I’d imagined. Like some plate-spinning acrobat, I struggle from one blazing window of my consciousness to the next, trying hard to pull down all the shutters at once and get away from this place forever. But the shutters keep flying up, and the landscape beyond them is hurrying, roaring as the telegraph lines rise and fall, rise and fall. And there are voices, too. Little eeeks of disgust and the clatter of a mop bucket before I am prodded and tugged. I am lifted and dropped. My jaw is parted wide. Something long and thin is pushed past it.
When I finally awake, I discover that a nurse is leaning over me amid high green walls, echoes, and the smell and the cool crinkle of a rubber mattress. She smiles. Her pin-on watch and her EA badge wink in the light from a tall window.
Time passes. My nurse goes and comes again. Her blouse has short sleeves and I notice, as she plumps up my pillows and does painful and unaccountable things to bits of me, the golden wheatfields of down that lie across her arms, and her warm human scent as she leans over me. Smiling, she takes the tube that runs down my throat and gives it a playful wiggle. I’m sure that she truly loves me.
“You’re lucky to come through,” says my nurse as she sits beside me soon after the doctor, who has also assured me how lucky I am, has continued his tour of the wards. “Five years ago, Mr. Brook, there was no hospital here. They’d have had to have taken you all the way down to Stirling or maybe up to Inverness.” She smoothes the pleat of her skirt in the morning light. “I doubt you’d have made it.”
“I’m dying anyway. I have cancer.”
My nurse looks at me. “We don’t talk like that here. Haven’t you ever heard of remission?”
The Summer Isles Page 10
