On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  “Yes,” Chomley muttered.

  “What can I do for you, Trevor?”

  “I’ve been looking for you all over the place. They said you were at the lecture, so I went down there and saw your Mercedes – so I waited in the car park – then this gentleman came up just exactly when I was about to approach you – I followed you to the restaurant, but didn’t have the guts to go in – I went back to the car park and there was lots of people running round looking for your Professor Chomley – so I went back to the restaurant – this time I went in and blow me, this other geezer comes up and sits down – they let me stay and I waited for him to finish – well, here I am.”

  “They’re probably after your blood, Chomley,” said Hexham, without a trace of regret. However, there may well have been a suggestion that he would like to be left alone with his son. If there was, Chomley did not detect it.

  All three sat in silence. Chomley was curious, the young man clearly had something difficult to say and Hexham appeared to be in shock, but he was the first to speak: “This is a pleasant surprise, but I sense there is a reason. You’re not in trouble, are you?”

  Trevor visibly relaxed: “Not at all. Quite the opposite. Basically, I’m in love.”

  Lord Hexham would never have made such an announcement to his father, when he was in his teens, and here was this son he barely knew telling him about his intimate emotions. He was both repelled and attracted by this news.

  Trevor was now smiling innocence: “I have a picture of her.” He opened his wallet and took out a small photograph, which he handed to his father.

  Lord Hexham stared at it in stunned silence for at least a minute: “She’s very pretty,” he said, passing the photo to his fellow diner, “don’t you think, Chomley?”

  Chomley too seemed a little surprised or possibly bemused.

  “Where’s she from?” asked Hexham.

  “Chad.”

  “Chad? Very interesting. Pushkin’s grandfather is thought to have come from Chad.”

  Trevor pushed his confusion away and pursued the purpose of his visit. “We’ve a lot to celebrate. She has just got her Indefinite Leave to Remain.”

  Chomley was still examining the picture of a smiling young woman in European dress standing in front of a large building, probably an educational establishment. Forgetting the sound advice to keep quiet in all family situations, he allowed himself to say, “Another asylum seeker, then.”

  “And you have a problem with that?” Hexham boomed.

  “What the hell!” said Chomley, “you’re hardly the one to …”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to say, Chomley, but you’d better not say it. And if you’ll excuse me, I have a few things I want to say to my son.”

  He turned to his son and said, “This is fantastic news, Trevor. And it’s great that you felt you could tell me. You want some help – probably financial. I hope that’s what it is, because I can tell you now that it’s not a problem – not at all. Does she have legal costs?”

  “No, she got assistance on that, and we dealt with the rest. No, it’s nothing as serious as that. It’s just that I’d like to take her on holiday. I’d like to take her to Italy. I’ve always wanted to go, and she has had such a tough life. And for the last two years we couldn’t go outside London together.”

  “Is that all?” said the beaming Lord Hexham, “then I’ll write the cheque immediately.” Clearly delighting in his own generosity, he took out his chequebook and his fountain pen. His handwriting was laborious, contributing to the suspense that led up to the final flourish of his signature. He tore it off and handed it to his son, who stared at it in disbelief.

  “My God, that’s too much, Dad. We could stay in five-star hotels for a month with that.”

  “Then stay in five-star hotels,” his father laughed. “All you have to do is come and see us at our home when you get back. Bring your girlfriend. We’ll be delighted to see her. Don’t worry about my wife. She has known about your existence for years, and got over it long ago. She’s a good woman and she’ll welcome you with open arms. As will your brother. This is wonderful news.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Trevor.

  “Then don’t. Just get out of here. Have fun. And make sure you come and see us. You know that’s what I’ve always wanted. We want to see you both, remember. Go where you want, and have an adventure. And get the hell out of here, and don’t keep the lady waiting.”

  The boy left. The father watched him go all the way to the restaurant door, and then turned back towards Chomley. “Well, that’s a turn-up for the books,” he smiled.

  Chomley was glum and feeling excluded. More seriously he hadn’t understood the nature of the encounter he had just witnessed. “Lord Hexham, I can’t say there’s a lot of intellectual coherence in the way you live your life.”

  “Listen Chomley, that’s all very well but you can take your intellectual coherence and stick it up your arse. Has anybody told you you’re a monomaniac and a bore? I don’t care about what I used to say. I like this girl and I like her for a very selfish reason: she has brought me together with my son. He never asked me for anything before; that was always his mother’s fault. I had to go and see him – beg him – and he was sullen and distrustful. And now he’s come to see me of his own free will and he’ll come again if I play my cards right. I was wrong, Chomley; is that what you want to hear? What’s Chad to my sons? It’s just down the road. My father would have been angry if I’d married a Scot or an Irishwoman – definitely an Irishwoman. The world has changed and I’m just a silly old fool. I’m just a molecular biologist, a very good one but not God Almighty. What do I know? You think I’m a racist, because I said all those things about the intelligence of negroes. Well, you’re right: that is racism, but at least I said what I thought – more because of the weight of my upbringing than any intellectual thing.”

  “Am I interested in your family life?” Chomley asked with unfamiliar steel and his sarcasm underscored.

  “No, this isn’t about my family life any more; it’s about intellectual method. In those drab little books of yours with their quite unscientific methodology – if you don’t mind me saying – you fail to understand that in those areas of human thought we can only hope to organise our ignorance and give it a little shape. That’s a huge task, and the results have to be modest. What I do and Johnny does is science and the results are very concrete. In other areas of my life, theory is one thing and experience another, and experience has the upper hand. When he showed me the picture of that girl, I knew that I wanted to help her too. Maybe the relationship won’t last; young love rarely does, but I won’t be the one to drive her away and she’ll be the means by which I get my son into my life.”

  He stood up, gathered his things together, and smiled at Chomley: “I can be an arse, I know. You’ve had a rotten time. There’s more to life than a good lunch, and a good lunch is not primarily the food on the table; it is the sum of the relationships that surround it. Do you want me to pay the bill?”

  “No need for that.”

  Hexham practically danced out of the restaurant.

  Chomley paid at the desk near the door, lifted his coat from the rack and slipped it on as he stepped out onto the street. There was a fine drizzle which, given his mood, depressed him. Hexham, presumably, had found it refreshing.

  Bearing Up Life’s Burdens Merrily

  I woke one morning with an unusual zest for life. “We must go into town today,” I told my wife as I threw the tea bags in the bin – or rather, attempted to, because they missed and, on falling to the floor, stained the side of the target. “I feel that it could be something of an event, a memorable day in our life together. Too long have we let the grass grow under our feet; too long have we coasted through the months and years happily eating fried food and watching the TV; too long have we forgotten that life is an adventure and we’re here to feel and to test the exceptionality of our existence.”

 
“I agree,” she said and she usually did, “a trek is what we need, to give a special feeling to this day.”

  “I’m glad you agree,” I said – although I took her acquiescence for granted, I did not like to give the appearance of doing so.

  “However,” she added after some thought, “I don’t think we should be rash. Are you not of the opinion that it would be sensible to take the sofa as well?”

  “I do,” I said, quite surprised by my wife’s unexpected sagacity, “I think it would be a most judicious precaution.”

  Quite exhausted by our intellectual labours, we decided not to take the next bus, but wait for the 11.30. I made more tea and again failed to get the tea bags into the bin, even though I customised it long ago by ripping off the lid.

  “Darling,” I said – ever my uxorious self, “the bin is in the wrong position. You’re making me throw the tea bags on the floor. Tomorrow morning, could you please remember to shift the bin six inches to the right, and there’ll be no more problems with the tea bags.”

  “Of course, my love,” she answered absently, while spinning the tassel on a large ballpoint pen with pictures of apparently generic castles and cathedrals, which someone had brought back from Krakow.

  I handed her a cup of warm, milky tea and sat down heavily on the sofa. I smiled happily at my wife and enjoyed the splendid familiarity of our sofa’s soft cushioning effect. Nowhere else on earth could I have found such comfort as this, which was provided above all by the presence of my wife and my sofa.

  After an hour in the pleasant company of them both, it was decided that the time had come to set off on our adventure. We did discuss the possibility of another short postponement, but pertinacity won out and we set off with our sofa.

  When the bus came, we immediately encountered difficulty in getting the sofa on the bus. In this we were particularly hindered by the presence of a stainless-steel bar running vertically between the floor and the ceiling of the bus, presumably for people not good on their pins to grab hold of as they embark on and alight from the bus. I noticed that the bar was secured by three screws at each end, so I took out my screwdriver to remove the unnecessary obstacle.

  The bus driver started to protest, and I felt that he was taking a lot on himself. Actually what he said was quite shocking: “Ye’re no bringin’ that mingin’ auld trash aun ma bus.”

  This demonstrated the lack of common courtesy in our corrupt modern society. My father, whose blessed career I chose to follow in almost every respect, was also in the habit of taking a sofa on the bus, and the response was always much more measured, along such lines as “Excuse me sur, there’s a corporation directive that specifically forbids the conveyance of all items of furniture on corporation buses.” That’s progress for you.

  I returned my screwdriver to my inside pocket with the air of a man who had been prevented from doing his duty. “Clearly people around here have some very strange priorities,” I exclaimed with the joy of the outraged, “if this were a free country, then its citizens would be allowed to take their sofas wherever they want: museums, ancient castles, cathedrals, universities, football pitches – almost anywhere one would like to enjoy the pleasures of a comfortable seat and the occasional snooze. But it appears that in this country you cannot even take them on the bus.”

  For some reason the passengers already on the bus found all of this highly amusing, but I spoke in earnest – spoke from the heart.

  My wife, who is always my support, put her arm in mine and led me away from further altercation. We removed two legs of the sofa from the first step on the bus, and as soon as we’d done so, the ill-mannered driver threw the gear stick into first and rushed the bus away, even before the door stopped closing. We felt ourselves enveloped in a rush of damp, diesel-laden air that brought with it the cold admonition of the conventional.

  “There’s nothing for it,” I declared in part to my wife and in part to any bystanders wishing to hear my forthright speech, which potentially could rank alongside the Gettysburg Address or the Declaration of Arbroath, “we shall have to strive alone and neglected, we shall have to carry this burden in the name of liberty itself, we shall have to fight for the ancient Caledonian right to sleep in comfort wherever we should wish. There is no law of trespass in Scotland or on its buses.”

  Greatness is not given to every ingenious soul; greatness requires luck and, as luck would have it, my only audience was an irascible ram who, missing his daily dose of rain, was bothered by the pleasant April sun. He studied me with disdain and then furious at my intolerable presence, started to butt a wooden gate repeatedly in some vain attempt to break it and perhaps pursue me.

  With every blow, the metal hinges and bolt rattled loudly like a warning and my wife said, “I think perhaps we should get on with it.” She then lifted one end of the sofa to show her impatience.

  It’s a good three hundred yards from the bus stop to the centre of the town – well, I have perhaps exaggerated, more of a large village with a post office where you can buy milk and a newspaper. Such a feat of endurance should not be undertaken lightly, but understanding my wife’s apprehension, I decided not to linger and lifted my end too.

  I feel that before narrating further aspects of our adventure, I should inform the reader of what kind of woman was my consort and companion, for without her I would not have achieved all the great things I have achieved in life.

  Like me, she was in her mid forties and like me, she stood about five and a half foot in her stocking feet. But while I tended towards a slightly heavier frame, she was sylph-like, although some might have uncharitably said that she tended towards haggardness. Her hair was long, curly and prematurely white, some might have said dishevelled. Whatever some might have said, she was for me the woman most perfect in this world, and I considered myself the luckiest man in the world for as long as she continued to do what I asked of her and did it with a good grace.

  I think you’ll be surprised and somewhat impressed to hear that she was an admiral’s daughter. It’s true that an admiral is not quite as grand as it may sound. He was probably one of those sedentary admirals who stuck to his desk and never went to sea. One thing was clear: he was no judge of character. For reasons that are still unclear, he took against me and threatened to disown his daughter if she married me. Worse, he actually kept his word, in spite of the fact that she was his only child. When he died, he left all his fortune to St. Boswald’s Hospice for Injured Naval Officers, a charity so rich financially and so bereft of potential beneficiaries that it hands out sinecures to young men of good family. In other words, it doesn’t so much help naval officers fallen on hard times as unemployed and feckless public schoolboys. In spite of his nefarious behaviour and inability to perceive a true case of hardship when it appeared before him, we kept a photo of the rogue in our home, as my wife remained and presumably remains inordinately fond of him, and I liked to indulge her from time to time.

  In the picture, he wore a hat a bit like a ship turned upside down. I pointed out to my wife that he wasn’t wearing it in the proper position, but she explained to me that in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy they wear these hats “fore and aft” and not “across the beam” as do pirates and Napoleon. Clearly foreigners and ruffians cannot know the correct position for headwear. I was quite impressed by my wife’s knowledge of such terminology, but I doubt she knew the difference between a destroyer and a battleship. Women have difficulty with such concepts, but in those days I liked to spend an afternoon in the company of Jane’s Fighting Ships. I was probably more expert than her father, when it came to such fundamental matters, but I was willing to bend to their greater knowledge of sartorial questions.

  After a hundred yards of lugging a sofa, I was in a bit of a sweat. In my youth, I was considered an Adonis and my performance on the running track was well known to many, even in distant places like Glasgow and Edinburgh. But years of hard work and setbacks of all kinds had taken their toll. I was not the man I had once been, but insi
de the youthful flame of resolve and audacity still burnt.

  Still a hundred yards is a hundred yards, and so I intimated to my wife to lower her end of the sofa by dropping my end abruptly on the pavement. She sat on the armrest at her end, took out a packet of cigarettes and proceeded to smoke in her nervous manner, one puff quickly followed by another, as though she were blowing a balloon the wrong way rather than partaking of a pleasure. In the meantime I lay my head just below her and swung my legs onto the other armrest. Almost immediately my mind sank into a deep and luxurious sleep, such as only the virtuous can enjoy.

  When he was young, he painted and did so with a passion. When he woke in the morning his mind would start to buzz. He was not a great artist and possibly could never have become one. But neither was he devoid of talent, or at least that is what I am told by those who understand these things (as a narrator, I am as confused as you are: don’t read my jottings, if you want to know the absolute truth about anything, or how to live your life usefully and successfully; there are libraries full of that stuff, while all I want to do is deepen your sense of being lost in a maze you never wanted to enter, because you and I, reader, detest such puzzles and parlour games, particularly those in which there has to be a winner and loser, with the exception of chess, because there always has to be an exception; we like to deceive ourselves that life isn’t like these stupid games – that it is something nobler).

  So he was not successful, possibly because he insisted on painting with paint on a surface and producing images both figurative and abstract. If, on the other hand, he had dried tadpoles in the oven, dissected them and reconstituted them haphazardly in the shape of diaphanous butterflies, he would have been visited by a rich man who would have said, “I am a rich man, and I will make you rich and myself richer. We’ll found a new artistic movement and we’ll call it Mart-Art, which, if you haven’t already guessed it, is the art of the market – a sensitive being who thinks much more cleverly than all of us put together. A god-like creature, one might say.”