Aftershocks

by A. N. Wilson

  I only know about Pamela and Charles and Ella from Nellie, so I can’t tell you much about what was going on in their inner lives. As soon as they possibly could, they left Aberdeen and he took up his role as a High Court Judge in Carmichael. A few years later, we read that His Honour Judge Nicolson and Pamela Dobson, the distinguished company lawyer whose firm had relocated from Aberdeen to Carmichael, had, with the greatest regret, decided to separate. Like I say, I don’t know them. A friend of mine who does says that Ella, who’s in her early teens now, is anorexic and driving both parents up the wall with guilt and worry. But it’s not the main story here.

  Oh. And some of you will ask, what about old Penny Whistle? Something which makes us think he’s something paranormal, or supernatural – that he is left over from the eighteenth century – is that he is STILL THERE! Every day, his brown face and arms and legs, beneath the shorts, are to be seen in Argyle Square, jerkily moving like a marionette. His day starts with Morning Prayer – the Davidson Hall, next to the Cathedral, which is used for social gatherings, fetes and the like, has been kitted out as a church, and Penny Whistle is to be found there, coming in with the responses several beats before everyone else. Then, it’s a few swigs of coffee from his thermos flask, and out into the square. Only when Abel, the handsome sacristan who may or may not have been a mystic, died a few years after the Quake did we find out that they had been living together for years. It was Abel who had washed Penny Whistle’s tee-shirts and shorts, Abel who had made him his thermos of coffee, Abel who cooked him his evening meal. Only at Abel’s funeral did we learn Penny Whistle’s name – he is called Desmond Grainger, but everyone calls him Penny Whistle. His heart is broken, but on he goes. Now he lives on pizzas, but he still comes out each day. I heard him only this morning.

  Ae fond kiss and then we sever

  Ae farewell, alas, for ever!

  Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,

  Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee . . .

  But – back to the time in the aftermath of the shoulder-blade moment, the epiphany. On one of her daily Skypes – Nellie’s 7 p.m., Canon Digby’s 8 a.m. – her dad was saying,

  —I still can’t get over the Pontiff wanting to sell the Cathedral to this dreadful-sounding spiv.

  —Dionne and Brian have been very kind. They had me to stay – I could still be there if I’d wanted it. Their house was one of the few in Gloucester Street to be completely unaffected.

  —The sure foundation, lightly laughed her father.

  —Anyway, I’m fine. My flat was shaken up, but it’s perfectly habitable now. I’m much happier on my own turf.

  —You’re one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.

  —Deirdre says Wong is buying up land all over the city, sometimes in his own name, usually in the name of dodgy or defunct companies. We can have no idea how much he has already bought. Good old Evans and Cosh . . .

  —Oh, that shop is splendid! We so loved it, said her father, the real old-fashioned department store. Do you remember your mother buying that hat?

  —Well, Evans and Cosh moved the bulldozers in the very next day, after the Quake. And through all the aftershocks, they have been rebuilding. They reckon they’ll have finished in four months. They aim to make it exactly as it was before. It will be so reassuring when it’s finished. But I can’t tell you how desolate the middle of town is.

  —Your mother loved it all so much. The river winding through. The little bridges over the Windrush, and the Victoriany lamp-posts. And that lovely parade of shops – is it the Promenade?

  —It was the Promenade. You can’t even see where the Promenade was. All the outlines of the streets have disappeared. And it is months now – what? Four months, and hardly any new building or any clearing. It is as if we are all just getting used to life among the ruins. We are trying our best to come to terms with it all, but it’s as if we’ve had a sort of collective nervous breakdown. And there are so many complicated insurance problems – or so I gather.

  —Well, Lesley says you should just ignore the Pontiff and Wong and get on with the Cathedral rebuild.

  —Dad, that’s what I am worried about. We’ve had the meeting. We’ve had all the reports from the structural surveyor. There’s no way we’ll ever be able to rebuild the tower and the spire, but they should never have been built in the first place. But we could repair the nave of the Cathedral, and the sanctuary.

  —How much of all the lovely iron-work has survived?

  —Surprisingly, quite a lot of the rood screen. Of course, all the glass has gone, and the regimental banners, and all but one of the beautiful reredoses. But Atalanta is safe. She’s propped up in my hall . . .

  —Dear Atalanta. Send her my love.

  —I will. Course, we could repair, or at least the nave. We could.

  —Is it money?

  —It’s delay. It’s lack of will. Although I have executive responsibility for the fabric – in terms of the fittings and decorations – I’m not like an English dean. And the Chapter are not like an English chapter, which would be autonomous. If this were Winchester Cathedral, the Dean and Chapter would have sole responsibility for the rebuild. And obviously, there would be an appeal committee and all that – well, we’ve set that up here. But the ultimate decisions are to be made—

  —By the Pontiff.

  After a pause, the canon said,

  —You aren’t saying that the Pontiff would really be tempted to sell the Cathedral to Ricky Wong?

  —Since you last came here, Dad, the whole of one side of Argyle Square, the side opposite the Law Courts, is dominated by this SOCKING great American-style hotel. It all but abuts on the Cathedral. He must have had it proofed, because it survived the Quake. Of course – he’d love to get his hands on the Cathedral.

  —But why would she love to sell it to him?

  To that, there was no answer, or none that Nellie could give.

  She fell to giving an account of rehearsals for Trojan Women. In the middle of this description, I walked behind her chair, and the old canon exclaimed,

  —Who’s there?

  —Hi, Nellie’s Dad!

  I waved into the screen.

  Mum had told me she was perfectly capable of making supper for herself once in a while. She was making brilliant progress with the leg, but I had immediately raised a whole number of objections – what if she slipped on the kitchen floor and was left lying there?

  —Then I’ll lie there till you come back – a roar of laughter.

  —Hi! said the old man back to me. You could tell that it would have been more natural for him to say ‘Good evening’ – only for him it would have been ‘Good morning!’

  —I’m Ingrid, Ingrid Ashe.

  We all laughed – and while Nellie finished saying goodbye to her father – I could hear her saying,

  —No, it’s a chicken pilaf. It smells completely delicious. I don’t know, I’ll ask her.

  She called,

  —Do you use black cardamoms?

  —I could only get green.

  While I stirred, I could hear the canon’s well-modulated tones saying,

  —If one can get black, they are even more delicious. Do you remember Mr Chakrabati sold the most wonderful cardamoms in Smethwick? Oh, all the spicy smells of that shop!

  When she’d said goodbye to her father, Nellie returned to the kitchen-end of her large living room. So much for her resolution never to be alone with ‘the Girl’.

  Over our pilaf, which was damn good, even with green cardamom, she talked about losing all the books and papers.

  —You know, the funny thing is, it is a liberation. I backed up the Masks book, I have not really lost it. But I am not sure I want to write it any more. It’s really weird, I can’t quite . . . I can’t really put it into words, but . . .

  —Is it that you were putting two selves into two different compartments? That the Digby side was writing the book, but ignoring all the spiritual insi
ghts and gentleness of Eleanor? And Eleanor was clutching her copy of Four Quartets and safely rereading Jane Austen every year, rather afraid of what would happen to her prayer life if she allowed herself to think Digby’s radical thoughts?

  When I had blurted all this out, I felt embarrassed, because it implied I had been thinking about her so obsessively, and we did not, at that stage, in spite of the shoulder-blade moment, really know one another very well.

  —What a strange way of putting it, was all she had said.

  But when I’d said it we’d crossed over a border.

  We had spent quite a number of evenings together now. Sometimes, Nellie came round to see me and Mum, and Mum would usually leave us chatting in the kitchen or in the garden while she went to an early bed. (Mum had soon persuaded me that she would call me when needed, but that she did not need help putting on a nightie or getting herself to the loo. And she had resumed Island Breakfast, though getting herself to work in a taxi, rather than in Little Ingrid.) So, sometimes Nellie came to us, and sometimes I went to spend the evening with her, and usually, wherever we were having supper, I did the cooking. We’d usually drink a carafe of red wine between us, usually one of the delicious Island Pinot Noirs which Nellie says knock spots off nearly all the Burgundy she has ever tasted.

  During these evenings, which were quiet, and gentle, and loving, I used to be reminded of a Carol Ann Duffy poem which I really liked, ‘The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High’, in which two of the schoolmistresses, Miss Batt and Miss Fife, had supper together regularly twice a week, and Miss Fife played Bach on the piano while Miss Batt marked history essays. They loved one another but

  nights like this

  twice a week, after school, for them both, seemed enough.

  In the poem, Miss Batt and Miss Fife eventually go much further – become lovers – but Nellie and I had not reached that stage, perhaps never would. I loved her now more than I had ever thought it was possible to love another human being, and I think she loved me, but I did not want to broach the subject for fear that, in talking it over, it would be over. If necessary, I’d have been happy to go on seeing Nellie every week, several times a week, for the rest of my life, rather than having some sort of scene which she found embarrassing.

  There was no one with whom I could discuss it, not really. Mum would have been sympathetic, but I am not sure I wanted, or needed, sympathy. The only person I wanted to talk to about it was YOU, Nellie. And I couldn’t. One evening, which had been especially nice, I felt I was coming close to being able to say the three simple words, ‘I love you’ – and Nellie had begun to talk about Dionne. Somehow, the words ‘I love you’ did not come easily into a paragraph devoted to Dionne.

  We all need to let off steam about work colleagues, and Nellie was saying some of the things she did not like about ‘the Pontiff’: that she did not trust her; that she was self-important; that she was actually rather an intolerant person but masked it by blathering modern clichés, such as liking to begin all her sermons with the declaration that her diocese was ‘open and inclusive, to different ethnicities, and to different sexualities . . . we are open in my diocese – open to the gay community, open to the transsexual community, open to LGBTs and . . .’

  —It’s all humbug, Nellie had said with one of her laughs. And if Christianity were even half true, you would not need to SAY these things, since obviously, it is inclusive. That is its raison d’être.

  Nevertheless, I felt that deep down – and I’m like this, too, to this day – we both are – she did not want to have a label beginning with a capital L hung round her neck. I reckoned she was beginning to love me, but that she would have found it difficult to explain by Skype to the old man, because he was old-fashioned; difficult to explain to Dionne, because she would be so ‘understanding’ about it; and difficult to admit to Doug.

  That evening – the evening I cooked the pilaf with the green cardamoms – we talked a bit about Doug. She told me about the unfaithfulnesses, and finding the porn on the computer. She did not exactly spell out when the sexual side of her marriage fizzled out – I learnt that later.

  —Why don’t you divorce him? I asked.

  —That was truly, very delicious, she said, forking in the last bit of her second helping.

  I topped up her glass.

  —Oh, I don’t know, Ingrid.

  She looked across her little table at me. We stared and stared. She must have seen all the love in my eager, pathetically young eyes. And I did genuinely wonder whether she would reach across the table and take my hand, or whether we would even kiss passionately. But we just stared.

  It was about a month after that that she dropped her bombshell, on a perfect, unseasonably warm winter’s day, as we were rowing on the Windrush. Nellie was a very good oarswoman. That’s Oxford for you, I suppose. The original idea was that we would take Mum out for a treat in Little Ingrid, and Nellie, suddenly rather Christopher Robin, had turned up at our house for an early lunch, wearing white shorts, an aertex shirt and a sunhat and eau-de-nil Converse. Mum had been getting on fine with the leg and the wheelchair, and the physio and all. But when we’d had a nice lunch, of olives and cheese and salami and home-made lemonade, Mum suddenly said,

  —You know what? The old woman wants a siesta. You two go out on your own.

  There was no dissuading her. Afterwards, I wondered whether Nellie had tipped her the wink, and they’d decided a boat trip would be a good way of breaking the bad news to me.

  We’d all been on a high for the ten days since Trojan Women, which had been such a success. Although it was a semi-amateur thing, performed in a warehouse, we had got really excellent audiences. It had been reviewed in The Press. Nellie had written an article for the paper, explaining why it had been such an appropriate piece to perform in Aberdeen at this juncture. Hale Jackson – director of the Redgrave Theatre in Carmichael – came to the performance on our final night, and was really, really encouraging. She said there was every chance of developing the production professionally, and she asked me – Hale Jackson asked me!! – if I would consider taking the role either of Helen or Andromache, and if I’d also like to be involved on the production side. So we were all in a kind of dream of happiness. The city was still in ruins. The future of Aberdeen did not look especially bright. Deirdre seemed to think that all sorts of skulduggery were afoot – with Rex Tone and Ricky Wong – to quote Deirdre – ‘in it up to their elbows’. And we were a broken city, we were bereaved, we were wounded birds. Mum’s leg wasn’t going to come back, and the very fact that she was being so brave actually made it more poignant, not less. Nevertheless, we were all on a high – I was especially – which actually made that afternoon a particularly painful one on which to drop the bomb. But dropped it had to be, I could see that, as soon as it fell.

  She pushed out, with an expert shove of the oar, gave her little giggle – ‘Oh Lor!’ as the right oar wobbled a little in its rowlock, and then set out, with confident, clean strokes. I sat in the back of the boat, with my hair loose over my shoulders. I was wearing a stripy summer frock, and bare legs and sandals. Although it was June by now, it was warm as a summer day. Her blue-black met my pleading brown eyes and she smiled – pityingly, I now see.

  We left Harrow behind us, and were rowing out of town. It was too sad to visit the ruined city unless you had to. The banks were overhung with willows. Once past the industrial estates, which now doubled in the evenings as the city brothels – for the hookers’ quarter between the junctions of Davidson and Harcourt streets was now a pile of unreconstituted rubble – we came to allotments, little gardens, and then open meadowland.

  We talked of Mum’s leg – was she just being brave, or was real progress being made? We relived some of our old triumphs, dwelling on an exceptionally nice article about the play which had appeared in the monthly magazine Island Culture. And then we were silent, and my happiness, which had been as bubblingly irrepressible as it had ever been in its life, suddenly evapor
ated. I could see in her face that she was about to say something. And then she did.

  —Ingrid . . .

  One of the things which made me realize I was falling for Nellie in the first place was her impassive expression, which I (rightly) conjectured was a mask for a whole lot of intense emotions, interesting thoughts and . . . well, vulnerability. The Masks of God might have been destroyed when the tower came down. The Masks of Nellie were still in full operation. And I could not tell whether she was completely in control of herself and was actually suffering a lot, or whether she was cold as Christmas and was just worried about upsetting me. That’s how flipping mysterious she was. My first thought was, she is about to tell me she has got cancer.

  —Ingrid . . . it’s Dad.

  She stopped rowing, and allowed the boat to drift. Little drops of water fell into the brownish-green surface of the Windrush. Waterfowl scudded this way and that, blue duck and paradise shelduck. On the muddy banks, black stilts pecked for worms. Through the reeds, a creature swam with a sudden dart, too quick to be spotted, though I guessed it was a water rat.

  —What about him? I asked, suddenly sounding like a sulky adolescent.

  —Lesley Mannock rang me yesterday. Dad’s had a stroke.

  I wanted to punish her by pretending that I did not know who Lesley Mannock was; but of course I knew he was her dad’s best friend – Les Silences de Lesley Mannock and all that. Of course, of course, because I could remember every flipping word she had ever said to me, I could remember every glance, every accidental (or was it accidental?) touch . . . I was in it up to my neck.