‘The point’s a nice one, Tom.’ The same deep soft voice sounded from the depths of the black leather chair. ‘Take the parallel case of our local theology. God and the Devil are locked in perpetual conflict, but Dr God never manages to wipe Lucifer out. Just as well of course, or the world and all of us with it, moon too, sun and stars, would snuff out and be done.’
‘I don’t see why the world should do that,’ Jerry grumbled. It was obvious he disapproved of this conversation but couldn’t resist trying to retake the high ground. ‘Get rid of the Devil and the world should turn back into Eden.’
‘I seem to remember, Brond,’ the Professor addressed the man hidden from me in the chair, ‘you inclining to the opinion that Satan made the material universe in a series of feints, weavings and subterfuges as he defended himself against a vengeful Creator.’
‘I’ve never been persuaded,’ the hidden speaker said, ‘that God would not dispose of evil at once – if He could.’
‘Oh, great!’ Jerry said harshly. ‘So God’s a loser as far as you’re concerned. What happens then if Satan wins? Have you a theory for that?’
‘That would be absurd,’ the soft voice said dismissively.
‘For a man who wants to limit the divine power, Brond,’ the Professor said, ‘it hardly seems sporting to argue its omnipotence in the next breath.’
‘You misunderstand me,’ the voice said pleasantly. I could not see his face, but I imagined somehow that he might be smiling. ‘It’s my idea that defeat is what Satan is after, not the destruction of souls and all that melodrama.’
‘The Devil wants to be defeated? But you’ve already said that he has the power to prevent God from doing that. Isn’t there a contradiction there somewhere?’
‘Not really. Satan sets out to torment and so God, who is good, is compelled to encounter him – when required. God has no choice, however weary He may be of the game. Satan has to be defeated – but never is entirely. In which case, we owe roses and sunsets,’ the white hand tapped upon the black leather of the chair, ‘to Satan’s pleasure in being mastered.’
‘It’s the wine Prof Gracemount serves that does the damage,’ Donald Baxter said and belched. ‘Cheap wine, cheap theology. If I could find a church that served Château Lafite for communion, I’d become a convert.’
He lifted his pint and took a long slurping draw on it. I had to lean forward to hear what he was saying; the downstairs bar of the Union was crowded and everybody was yelling over the Country and Western.
‘You look awful,’ he said. ‘You’re sweating like a pig. Gracemount’s wine has poisoned you.’
‘I didn’t feel like going home.’ My lips were thick and rubbery. ‘My digs, I mean. Not home. Long way from home.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I don’t despise you,’ I said. ‘For being a conscientious objector. That’s your business. And anyway the war’s over a long time. That’s the way I look at it. I don’t believe in wars myself – or violence. I’m a pacifist.’
Baxter looked offended. ‘I’m not a bloody pacifist,’ he said. ‘Never have been.’
I tried to get him into focus but his face ran like white fat melting against the smoke.
‘What about – what about all that stuff about being in a camp? What about all that crap about getting beaten up by the guards?’
The oldest student in the world scowled at me. ‘I refused to join the army. But it wasn’t because I didn’t believe in fighting for my country. Only I’ll pick the country. Do you understand?’
I shook my head. The movement hurt; waves of pain came and went. ‘I don’t get a bloody word of what you’re on about.’
‘I could believe that,’ Donald Baxter said. ‘That’s why I don’t explain any more why I didn’t let them call me up. Who would know what I was talking about? What’s the use in this country?’
Before I left the Professor’s, things became a little blurred. I seemed to remember Professor Gracemount talking about being in Czechoslovakia. He had been in charge of some examination – for the British Council? did that make sense? – and a young Czech girl had come to see him. My brother has to pass this exam, she had said to him. It’s very important to the family. It’s very important to me. We would do anything to make sure he passed. I personally would do anything to make sure he passed.
I could see that girl. She was wearing a long cotton skirt with the kind of bright pattern a peasant in a movie might wear. I could see the way she licked her tongue over her upper lip when she murmured ‘personally’.
Had the Professor told that story? Was that the kind of story he would tell?
I wasn’t sure.
Yet I could remember everything the Irish lecturer from Stirling had said. He had started just after the Professor finished. It had been a long speech, but he had delivered it with great gusto.
‘What size was Shakespeare’s London or Plato’s Athens?’ he had asked rhetorically in a rolling brogue. ‘Or take Kierkegaard who was followed by jeering children through the streets of Copenhagen. Isn’t it wonderful that a philosopher should be as public a figure as that? But it’s not astonishing if you get the scale right. Those places weren’t conurbations. They had nothing to do with the nightmare cities of twenty million inhabitants we’ll have by the end of the century. Why, Stirling at the moment has more of a population than Oslo had when Ibsen was scribbling. Yet I don’t expect to find some kilted Henry Gibson clutching a manuscript of A Doll’s Hoose when I drive back tonight. Not a hope, not the measliest little chance of it. Why? Because you need not just a town – although you do need that – a town with its human scale – but a town that’s also a capital with a capital’s sense of bearing a place in the scheme of things. The human scale Joyce going to George Russell’s door at midnight to knock and talk philosophy at him as an introduction. Or encountering Yeats – and Joyce, remember, young and unknown – and telling him, ‘You are too old. I have met you too late.’ Dublin in 1903, you see, was a small town. But it was a capital too – and that’s the point. In Europe’s eyes, a provincial town; but in the eyes of a sufficiency of its citizens, a place where a nation’s destiny was being reforged. In 1903 who would have imagined that Dublin might be of more significance than London or—’
At that, however, Jerry, who had given up showing people his copy of Cocksuck and grown morose, twanged loudly, ‘Talking of Dublin reminds me of a joke. Do you know what happened to the Irishman who tried to blow up a bus? Do you, eh? Anybody? He burned his mouth . . . on the exhaust pipe, do you see?’
‘In Ireland,’ the Irishman said, ‘we have Kerry jokes. If it’s joke time, I’ll tell you a Kerry joke. A Kerry man got on a boat and as they sailed across the blue blue sea there was a cry, “Man overboard! Man overboard!” And then the captain shouted, “Throw over a buoy!” So the Kerry man picked up a boy and threw him overboard. A two-legged boy that was, do you understand? a human boy. The captain rushed down from the bridge and shouted at him, “You damned fool, I meant a cork buoy!” “Alannah! captain dear,” said the Kerry man, “and how was I to know which part of Ireland he was from?” ’
He told the joke very slowly and in a flat monotone quite unlike the animation of his earlier manner, but when there was practically no response he didn’t seem at all disturbed. Only as the pause lengthened uncomfortably, at last a little smile broke at the corners of his mouth.
‘It is odd, isn’t it,’ Dennis Harland intervened, his Midshipman Ready blue eyes twinkling, ‘how every community chooses a butt for its jokes? From a little piece of research I did recently, I discovered that most of the jokes about Scotch meanness were originally jokes told by other Scots against the Aberdonians.’
‘Or the Poles in America,’ someone else said. It was the man hidden from me in the black leather chair. The deep soft voice had the same effect as before. Effortlessly, it made you pay attention. ‘The Irish joke and the Polish joke – when I was in America, I decided they were interchangeable.’
Since I didn’t recognise him, I took the excuse to lean forward and touch Margaret Briody on the arm. ‘Who is he?’
‘He’s from the Institute for Defence Studies in Aberdeen.’ Her voice though musical had a touch too much carefree volume. ‘He’s a friend of the Professor’s.’
I subsided as the Professor looked in our direction.
‘I’m not really per – persuaded by this seductive argument about Joyce and company,’ the Professor stammered dismissively. ‘It smacks more of ecology – of politics – “small is beautiful”, that kind of thing – rather than corresponding to any reality in the history of culture. As I recall, Joyce got out of Dublin as soon as the going was good, and Ibsen didn’t spend much time in Oslo, you know.’
‘I think that’s absolutely true,’ cried Dennis Harland loyally. ‘The Dublin that inspired Joyce wasn’t a capital, and since Southern Ireland has become independent I don’t think there’s been much cultural activity.’
‘I wouldn’t say that was entirely so,’ the Irishman said reasonably.
‘There are probably more writers and poets in Scotland just now,’ cried Dennis, warming to the job. ‘They don’t seem to be handicapped by being a region of a larger country. It suits them perhaps. It’s an interesting idea.’
This seemed to catch the Canadian’s attention. He levered his weight up from the wall. ‘I don’t pretend to know anything about culture,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you straight – the independence some people in Scotland claim to hanker after is just a no-go option from a strategic point of view. They want to forget about their poets and history and stuff and just get out a big map and catch up on the geography. This is a useful piece of real estate and if things hot up the Russians are going to grab it. And if they do, the Americans just aren’t going to have any option. They’re going to have to blow it away.’
Other people talked then, but that bit isn’t clear. I am almost sure that most of them had Scots accents, and that there was a kind of competition among them to take the point. They were very reasonable people. They could see how this idea of their country being independent must be unwise or unnecessary. Some of them provided their own reasons why it was probably immoral. Certainly, it seemed unlikely. I didn’t disagree with them. What the Canadian had said seemed sensible to me. It was just that, for some stupid reason, I felt embarrassed for them. They embarrassed me.
At that precise moment, in the way these things sometimes happen, everyone stopped talking. We looked at one another and listened to the silence. That is always a mistake; no one wants to be the one who breaks it. It was a relief when someone laughed.
‘I can’t think where else in the world I could enjoy such a conversation,’ remarked the deep soft voice of the man hidden in the depths of the black leather chair. ‘You don’t appreciate how unique you are.’ He chuckled. ‘The only comparison which comes to mind is of those unfortunate monks in the Middle Ages who took melancholy to the excess of desperation and committed suicide. The medieval Christians disapproved of that very much. Not just of the suicide – but of the despair. The theologians called it acedia, the despair of salvation. Some of them believed that this was what was meant by the sin against the Holy Ghost. Isn’t that right, Tom?’
Professor Gracemount nodded and laughed. In response, the man who had been sitting in the black leather chair got to his feet and, turning from the fire, stretched as casually as if he were in his own home.
‘Tell me,’ he asked holding us all in his glance, ‘do you think it possible for a nation to be guilty of that sin against the Holy Ghost?’
Now I saw him plainly, the man whom the Professor had called Brond: the deep chest, the one-sided stance as if his weight were taken on the left foot. It was the man I had seen on the bridge. I heard in the stillness the crack of sticks breaking.
There is only one moment for denunciation. The possibility recedes at the speed of absurdity, twice that of light. Before Brond had finished lighting a cigarette, the identification had emptied like clothes dropped from a ventriloquist’s dummy. I seem to remember my first clear thought was, It can’t be him – he isn’t even wearing glasses. Whatever the first thought, the one that mattered was – it can’t be him; he’s a friend of the Professor’s.
How could I have any confidence that I had seen him once before?
‘He wasn’t even wearing glasses,’ I mumbled.
‘Who?’ Donald Baxter asked, floating his moon face across the table at me. ‘Are you going to be sick? If you’re going to be sick, go away. What’s this about glasses?’
All of that was too complicated to explain, and so I told him about the Canadian and his geography lesson, but heard myself adding, ‘He’s a friend of the Professor’s too.’
‘Gracemount has some strange friends,’ Baxter said. ‘It comes from having been a spy. Have you never read that all the bright students get recruited at Trinity Hall for one side or the other?’ He laughed at the look on my face. ‘Don’t worry. M.I.— five or six and a half or something. He was on our side.’
I tried to tell him what the others had said after the Canadian but I couldn’t remember it very well and my throat ached from talking against the noise in the bar. It didn’t matter though. It seemed as if Donald Baxter had heard it before.
‘What could happen in Scotland that would have any significance? Decisions are things that happen somewhere else. The nationalised industries moved all the R. and D. south and took the steam out of James Watt’s kettle. Adam Smith got himself a transfer to Head Office in St Louis. Bright chap young Smith.’ It was impossible to tell if he was angry or playacting. ‘Real things happen in the real world. Here in never – never land all you can do is beat your wife or batter a stranger senseless against a wall.’
‘That sounds real enough to me,’ I said. ‘You’d think it was real enough if you were the guy against the wall.’
‘What do you know? You’re a country boy. A clown. You don’t know anything. That stuff doesn’t matter. It’s only personal.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. To be sociable, I said, ‘Happy is the country that has no history.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said.
I didn’t have to stay there and be insulted. I started to get up, but lost my balance and staggered back. I turned to find a beefy face above a rugby tie glaring at me.
‘You spilled my beer,’ Beefy Face said.
It was true. I could see the back of his hand where it held the glass was wet, and some of the liquid had given a dark edge to the white cuff of his shirt.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘That’s not good enough.’ Beefy Face had a nice voice. You could tell that Daddy had paid to send him to a good school.
‘Can’t say any better than sorry.’ I wanted to go home and lie down and go to sleep. ‘I’ll buy you another pint. What is it you’re drinking?’
‘Tell you what. I’ll let you have it. And you can guess.’
As he finished, he turned his wrist and poured what was left of the pint down the front of my jacket.
I don’t often lose my temper. It frightens me. I must have hit him for he had fallen down. He collapsed so fast I went down too and landed on my knees beside him. That was all right. It made it easy to keep hitting him. Something in his face broke against my fist.
Hands grabbed me by the shoulders and I resisted until someone got a handful of my hair and dragged me backwards off him.
‘You bloody madman!’ someone panted in my ear. ‘You’d better get out of here! Fast!’
Choking on my rage, I saw Donald Baxter staring down at me.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘A homicidal pacifist!’
To the plaintive tune of his reproach, a white moon lost its shape on a drift of smoke.
Some uncertain time afterwards, the lock in the Kennedys’ front door had
turned upside down. Cunningly I upturned the key and marrying it with the lock brought things to order.
Foxy Muldoon, least favoured of my fellow lodgers, was on his head on the bottom step of the hall stairs. If this shape was delirium, it should waver and give to let me pass through. Closer, it resolved into a great arse in chorus girl’s knickers and under it a face inverted yet too malignant not to be part of reality.
‘You look awful,’ Muldoon said. In some complicated manoeuvre, he reversed himself upright. He stared and exclaimed, ‘Christ!’
‘You called, my child?’
‘You’re sweating drunk. You look awful.’
‘Father, I have sinned – or I would have if she’d given me the chance.’
‘You shit!’
He began to crab up the stairs backwards, fixing his tiny malevolent eyes on me.
‘What shop did you get your knickers in?’
‘Double shit!’
‘Whoo!’ I made a poke towards the shadowy bulge of his trousers and then was lying on the stairs.
From this new angle, I saw the knickers went down to his ankles. Pyjamas! it was a revelation – pyjamas and his suit jacket on top! – and one I shared with him at once.
‘Why are you creeping about, little Jesus, in your jammies? Has Jackie been giving you holy communion?’
There was a crepitation as of skull plates. Inevitably, when I rolled over, the bookie’s clerk, Jackie’s husband, muffled out of the night with his key in his hand hung over me chewing his cheeks. I found my eyes watering and looked away.
I caught Muldoon’s exotic tail vanishing.
Behind me, a door closed and Kennedy was gone. Had he been there at all?
When I wakened, I struggled to get out of bed until I realised I was already on the floor. It was black dark; but then, if the curtains were drawn, they were of heavy velvet. Mornings I had lain in bed thinking it was the middle of the night, only when I had opened these curtains to be blinded by the sun. I crawled to check and when I came to the wall I felt a velvet hem and at full stretch stroked another. It was night. I erected myself. At first country dark, an accident of housebacks and the run of the hill, it sieved out into gable ends and a lightness of shifting cloud. To insult a man in his own house was a terrible thing. What right had I to call her Jackie? That had always been a bad joke. And ‘holy communion’ – if there was a God, I’d slipped up there.
Brond Page 2
