Be Near Me

by Andrew O'Hagan

  The door banged again and I heard it split. None of my teachers came into the room. No mother. No saving grace. The only person in those moments was my oldest acquaintance—myself—waiting as usual for a creak on the stairs, the feel of the cotton against my ear drawing me back to the sound of my own blood turning. I watched the bright window for another moment and then closed my eyes and drowned in a perfect solitude of prayer.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Echo of Something Real

  MR MCNULTY FAILED TO REACH the landing before the police came in and dragged him out of the house. I opened my eyes to find the familiar young officer standing in polished shoes. 'Father, I think you should let us take you out of here,' he said. 'There's a mob outside and I don't think you want to hang about any longer.' He bit his lip and seemed to scan the room for superior advice. 'Have you a bag you can pack?'

  'I don't want to leave all my things,' I said.

  'You'll have to,' he said. 'Between you and me, there are total bampots out there. You're not safe here. Idiots, you know. Have you somewhere else to go?'

  I could hear a drum. 'Has the Orange band arrived?'

  'One of their drummers,' said the officer. I stood up from the bed and walked to the window. 'I really think you should leave.'

  'How absurd,' I said. 'I don't believe this is happening.'

  'It's happening all right,' he said. 'There's dozens of press people out there, so everything's by the book. I suggest you pack some clothes.' I asked him if I could drive away in my own car.

  'I'm sorry, Father,' he said. 'They've totalled it.'

  Coming down the stairs, I ran my hand over the wallpaper. I think I knew I would never see the house again. The banister was warm. It brought to mind the old house in Heysham. The hall carpet was covered in splinters from the broken door, and, seeing them, I wanted again to know the person I had been when I lived in the house unwatched. Who was the person who ascended the stairs each night, the priest in the house alone with a book and a candle by the bed? The noise out there, the shouts: it seemed to come from a place much deeper than I could ever know. The policemen pushed me into the van, a sheet over my head.

  'Child molester! I hope ye burn in hell!'

  I sat in the van with the darkened windows flashing silver with cameras, my head down, and then a man shouted again. 'I hope you burn in hell for what you did.' The van moved away from the chapel and the crowd opened up, and I dwelled on the man's voice and wondered again if I knew it from the confessional.

  My mother and I played cards each night and drank the best part of a 1962 Armagnac, the sound of her low black heels across the floor an echo of Morningside habits, the routines of comfort and sense. She has always been a great advocate of the hot bath and the stiff drink. Especially in a crisis, my mother knows how to behave like a good analyst, someone who feels your desertion was always part of the deal. She never tried to promote her own version of who I ought to be and she was careful never to mechanise the impulses of childhood. She had no smallness in that way.

  Some people understand the need to be more than one person. That is one of her strengths and one of the things that shows my mother to be rather superior. She has been many people herself—the wife, the adventurous mother, the romance-seeker, the lady novelist—and during those days in Edinburgh she began by seeking no explanations. She introduced me to several new creams intended for the relief of stressed skin. She made a salade Niçoise with things from Valvona & Crolla. Every day in life she would go to her desk and work like a person expecting a cessation of talent or the final demise of her opportunity. She favours the notion that work defines one's moral worth. She said she was writing a rather windswept tale about the Viking invasion of Largs. And so, each evening, without a care for the modern world and its horrors, she'd return from her desk with colour in her cheeks, ready for olives and a glass of the old Marcel Trépout.

  I'd go to the bathroom to be upset. It was a very moving room, her Guerlain perfumes lined up on the shelf, their perfect labels, their beautiful bottles with rounded shoulders, together telling a story about my mother's ventures in the years since my father died. Above the towels she kept a photograph of me on the Indian elephant, and there, against the window surrounded by strings of sparkling beads, one of Conor and me on Magdalen Bridge with sunglasses and ice creams. The room was a delicate mausoleum. The room was a shrine to self-sufficiency and it made me long for my own dear things and the Ayrshire garden of knots.

  Four weeks before the trial, it felt like the horizon was clearing. I knew it couldn't be—the worst was yet to come— but I decided to honour the feeling. I put on a new shirt fresh from a Jenners box and combed my hair and walked into my mother's study. The communal gardens looked busy with children and bees, the city just visible through an old sash window. T want to talk about it, Mother.'

  'By all means,' she said. 'Take this armchair.'

  'How's the book?' I said.

  'Oh, rather coarse,' she said. 'It involves a quantity of devastating emotion on the headland. You know the sort of thing. My readers wouldn't have it any other way.'

  'The books are great. Heaps of life.'

  'You're very sweet,' she said, putting a pencil into a pot. 'I'm trying to create an innocent girl in a plaid wrap. She may or may not be carried off on a longship by a horny-helmeted gentleman.'

  'Excellent,' I said.

  'They'll love it in France,' she said.

  'Is there sex?'

  'Oh, buckets, my dear. It all happens by torchlight. The usual idea, I'm afraid. One seeks to make all the sexual encounters obscurely invigorating of the national cause.'

  'Perfect.' She said what she said with a smile on her lips, bringing her hands together in a pleased and accomplished way. My mother has long since come to be at home with her nature and the manner of her talent. In conversation, she takes it for granted that many people are better than her, which, to my mind, almost guarantees that few are. She actually works very hard at her books. Spread on the desk in front of her, I could see pictures of gold ingots and reams of notes in her best handwriting. Her room had the wealthy atmosphere of a place where imagination has lived and where tidy thoughts accumulated over the years.

  'They are entertainments,' she said.

  'That is the best we can hope for.'

  'I don't believe it,' she said. She gestured towards a bookshelf lined with foreign editions of her own books. 'These little productions have worked very well for me, but I think you could do better. Something more searching, my dear. I'm afraid I don't have a great deal of what your old friend Proust called "ascending power".'

  'You give yourself too little credit,' I said. 'None of us could do what you have done. I'm afraid I have used up all my circumspection on old hymns and riotous living.'

  'In that order?' she asked.

  'I hope so.'

  A wasp was failing to scale the height of the window. It just crawled up for a while and then lost stamina and dropped back down. 'I heard a fly buzz when I died,' my mother said to herself as she opened the window. From the rear I saw her grey hair was still flattened from bed, though her lips when she turned showed a stain of lipstick. Sitting there, I thought it possible that people lost parts of themselves with age: the back of the head was a place for young people, was it not? 'It's a bit of a performance, getting ready every morning,' she said.

  'It's getting to sleep that's hard for me.'

  'Perhaps one day you'll write something,' she said. 'Ever since you were young you have looked at things with feeling. Not oddly. Just that you see the shape of things very nicely. When you opted to become a priest, I remember thinking it was that quality that might serve you well. But we're talking about writing. It's customary for writers to be made by their parents, in one way or another. With us it was the other way round. I'm sure I became a novelist to keep up with you.'

  'Not true,' I said. 'It's your own gift.'

  'I see you're keen to avoid responsibility for these excited
tracts,' she said. 'But I'm afraid you may be to blame. My parents didn't equip me for such a life: they made me happy, made me want to marry a happy and moral man. That's all. It was you who added the spice.'

  'Oh, silly.'

  'Well, I don't care what you say. I'm rather proud of the fact that my outer child gave my inner child a job.'

  'You're off your head,' I said. She laughed and took a drink from a bottle of Highland Spring by her desk.

  'I'm too old and too grand to care,' she said.

  For a minute I thought it might be perfect never to leave that civilised room and the assurance of my mother and her pretty paperweights. She had pinned postcards of seascapes, stones and Rembrandts to the wall; for a minute I wanted to dwell within the compass of her neat capacities, the dailyness of artistic effort. Her face grew serene. She looked at me with a level and levelling gaze. 'What happened?'

  'Well, I didn't tell you much on the phone.'

  'Go on.'

  'I let the past catch up with me.'

  'How?'

  'These young people. I got involved with them. One of their fathers was depressed and he told me stuff about himself and I guess he wanted to take it back.'

  'Go on.'

  'The boy's name is Mark. He's very young. I tried to kiss him one night. It was just my own stupidity. I don't think the boy cared that much, but his father has a score to settle and it's all quite sad.'

  'You kissed the young man?'

  'Yes. I got drunk with him. We took other stuff. I definitely kissed him and held his hand. He must have told his father. I don't know how it came out but the poor man hasn't worked for years. He's taking a stand. And the whole parish wants to kill me. They want some sport.'

  'Don't be dismissive, David,' she said. 'You knew what kind of community it was down there, for a Catholic priest.'

  'And they say I'm English.'

  'Oh dear,' she said.

  'And they think I'm posh.'

  'And you're now up on some molesting charge?'

  'It's not called that, but yes: sexual assault.'

  'Oh dear,' she said. She looked into the wood of her desk as if to imagine the possible outcomes. 'You'll have spoken to that nice advocate, Hamilton? You intend to fight?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'For your career?'

  'No,' I said. 'That's gone. I know that now. And perhaps it should have been gone a long time ago. Or never begun.'

  'But what about your friend—your God?'

  'You're so mercilessly practical, Mother,' I said. I watched her eyes and hoped they wouldn't stop me. 'You won't like me for saying this, but I believe God is present in all this too.'

  'I see,' she said. 'Well, that's the sort of thing you people say. He's never caused anything but trouble in the world before now.'

  'Shush,' I said. She shook her small head in a private way and pulled out a drawer of her desk.

  'Let's smoke,' she said, handing me a Consulate. 'Of course you are right to fight,' she said. 'These words are grotesque.'

  The smoke appeared to make her room even cosier.

  'And what does Hamilton say?' she asked.

  'He said the boy is a thug. He says it was a kiss of affection, a way of saying goodnight.'

  'And you can go with that?'

  'I don't think so,' I said. 'I want to tell the truth.'

  'Well,' she said, 'this is Scotland. That might seriously hamper your chances of getting a fair hearing.'

  'Be serious,' I said.

  'You want to tell the truth?'

  'If I know it, yes. And if I can.'

  'Well,' she said, 'let me ask you something. Would you have gone to bed with that boy if he'd said yes?'

  'Almost certainly.'

  'But you want to say that you didn't assault him?'

  'Precisely,' I said. 'I don't mind saying I fell for him. I don't mind saying I would have slept with him. I admit to being the most stupid person on earth. But I am not a paedo-phile or anything of that sort and I won't agree to it being called assault.'

  'In this area, the law is not built for subtleties,' she said. 'Or, at least, the public nowadays is not minded for subtlety. It may be difficult. But I'd hang onto Hamilton if I were you. He'll follow your instruction with more dedication than you could yourself.'

  'Yes,' I said. 'I'm guilty of something—of many things, perhaps—but not of what they say.'

  'The times are hysterical,' she said.

  'Thank you for noticing.'

  'It's my job to notice such things,' she said. 'I know it is within the habits of your cult to feel guilty, but you must be very clear about where any possible wrong existed. Don't feel guilty about feelings. Don't feel guilty about thoughts. Just look to what you actually did.'

  'Thank you, Mother.'

  'Just try to keep calm.'

  'My actions were minimal,' I said. 'It's all the other stuff that matters. My vocation has run its course. I need a new life.'

  'Or an old one.'

  'Perhaps.'

  'But the court won't bother with that. They will be dealing with the image of a lascivious priest.'

  'I know,' I said. 'The very least of it.'

  'Not in their eyes,' she said. 'Speak to Hamilton. The town will be baying for blood. They've watched a lot of television, one presumes?'

  'Some very good people live there,' I said.

  'I'm sure. But every small town loves a scapegoat.'

  'They've been seeking scapegoats in that town for five hundred years,' I said.

  'Well, they've got one now,' she said, stubbing out her cigarette and taking a sip from her glass. 'And he went to Oxford.'

  They burned the ground floor of the rectory that night. Father Michael from Irvine called me the next morning with the news. The fire was apparently so fierce the smoke had blackened the walls of the church. My mother had gone to the National Library, and I sat against the bathtub all morning with my head on my knees and a cold silence around me. The police found a cider bottle on the garden path and said it was half filled with petrol, the fire most probably the work of more than one person. I thought of the flames bursting through Mrs Poole's well-ordered cupboards, consuming the dust on the jars of spices and boiling the pickled onions.

  He said the sitting room was gutted. The fire must have spread over the carpet and up the sides of the piano. And did it make a sound as it burned? Was there any of the old music? I know the Chopin recordings must have melted into one another, as they do in the mind. They must have fizzed at last into non-existence on the shelf, and then, perhaps, the shelf itself collapsed and the Italian etchings burned along with the blue and white volumes of the Scott Moncrieff, the only books I had taken from Balliol after Conor died, when my calling began, when the start of life was over. I thought of Marcel in his Paris bedroom as the fire in the grate drew over a pile of twigs, the smell reminding him of being lost in books at Combray and Doncières.

  'What have you lost?' my mother asked.

  'Everything and nothing,' I said.

  My things were gone: the books, the wine. Only ideas were left, the fire gone out on the west coast but the twigs still burning in Marcel's hearth. That evening, I wanted to spread into the sky over Leith and join that body of imagined beings in the heart of Midlothian. In the warm Edinburgh night I began to survive my own losses, knowing the city out there was a glory of invention, a glory defying the blunt reality of the rock it stood on.

  We went to the Usher Hall. My mother wanted to get my mind off things, so she had bought two tickets for us to see the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a programme of Messiaen. I remember sitting down within the buzz of the dressy crowd. I could smell my mother's perfume and could feel the weight of everything behind me. God knows how conscious I was of some old song now ended, and my heart was sore when I thought of the rectory, but I stared at the stage and willed it to produce something grand and new.

  'It's like poetry,' my mother said. 'Like Wallace Stevens.'

  'Yes,'
I said.

  'Celestial.'

  Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques became a wild aviary of earthly things struggling to wing the imaginary sky.

  'Birds were the first musicians,' I said.

  My mother nodded and placed a mint in her mouth. I looked through the crimson dusk to see the words in the programme.

  'Messiaen spoke of the sovereign liberty of birdsong. The earth's birds never learned harmony and counterpoint.'

  The percussion exploded into a passion of discordant nature and I turned over the page. 'Messiaen was taking over from Debussy;' it said. I felt the sound was more real than birds. My mother reached over and touched my hand as the music ended, and I set my eyes on the programme again. '"What is left for me," said Messiaen, "but to seek out the true, lost face of music somewhere off in the forest, in the fields, in the mountains or on the seashore, among the birds."'

  We walked along Princes Street to the Café Royal. My mother took my arm and we spoke to each other in the pretty light of passing buses. She asked me the name of the second piece we had heard.

  'Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine.'

  'They were very young, weren't they, the singers?'

  'They were lovely,' I said. She squeezed her arm further through mine and sniffed against the cold wind, making as if to close the gaps in her coat and take in the smell of the buses' diesel.

  'I think I preferred the birds one.'

  'Me too,' I said. 'It was more religious.'

  She smiled. We stopped beside the Scott Monument and my mother went into her bag to find her gloves. 'This is like something by George Gilbert Scott,' I said. 'The man who built the Martyrs' Memorial outside Balliol.'

  'Clever man,' she said. 'Your Roman friends certainly made mincemeat of those poor Oxford heretic buggers.'

  'No need to look so amused,' I said. She took time to pause and enjoy our exchange.