Brond (3 page)

‘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.

The blasphemy decided it. I would go and apologise to the man, and had started to dress when I found I was, and the stairs ran under my feet as effortlessly as an escalator.

I knocked on the closed door, and then leant my head against it for coolness.

‘Ohahah!’ Jackie Kennedy cried on a sweet apprehensive note as my poor head fell through the open door into the cloven warmth of her bosom.

‘Are you an entire eejit?’ she asked, with something more than an idle curiosity.

I stared sadly at her as she removed herself from me.

‘Are you all right? You’re a hideous colour.’

‘Oh, I’m well. I’m fine. Would you call my landlord, please?’

‘Dear God! Your landlord? It’s five o’clock in the morning.’

‘It would only take a minute.’

Suddenly tired beyond tiredness, I nodded forward on to her breast. Upright, I might have slept in its musty comfort like a baby if one hand needing support had not fallen astray just as the
inner door opened. The restful glow of the lamp was split by a white finger stretched from Kennedy to our tableau of innocence.

Terrified by the muscles of his cheeks in profile, I called out, ‘Don’t be upset, dada, it’s only me your own little gossoon Oedipus,’ and fell backwards out of my own
poor mimicry of a Belfast accent, overtaken until I could feel falling no more.

TWO

N
ot that I had ever been in anything you could call doubt about the nature of my own true father. Careering in slow motion up in bed, on impulse I
checked to see if he had changed out of his boots before coming to town to visit me.

‘Whit’s up? Ye’re no tender still?’

‘Not at all. I was just easing myself.’

He stared down at his feet as if he had been reading my thoughts. If he had been wearing his boots, they would have carried an edge of dried sharn in each welt as a souvenir from the byres of
Trailtrow.

‘Aye . . .’ he said without looking up. ‘Ye’re over it then?’

‘Fine. I’m fine.’

There was a pause.

‘Well. That’s fine.’

He sighed.

‘Looking after you all right?’

‘Oh, sure. They’re . . . fine. No problem. If you have to be in hospital, this must be as good as you’ll get. On the National Health at least.’

‘I’ve never been in hospital,’ he said, changing the subject. It was a rule of my father’s not to discuss politics. I had never asked him why he had that rule. There had
been a time when I had been wee and you did not question your father’s rules; and a time when I had been older and learned to keep the questions to myself; and there had been a time when I
did not care why he had made one rule or another for himself. Shifting up in one piece to hold straight the clamp of stitches on my belly, it occurred to me the time I was in now was the one where
I wouldn’t ask in case he told me politics were not for the likes of him.

‘Lying in your bed at this time o day’s no for the like o me,’ he said grinning companionably.

‘Oh, Christ!’ I groaned.

‘Whit’s up?’ he cried in alarm, starting out of his seat.

Visitors all around looked at us. The man in the next bed, a saturnine barber with varicose veins, said something out of the side of his mouth. A girl laughed, but she was at the far end of the
ward and it must have been about something else.

‘For God’s sake, faither, sit down!’

He subsided without altering his unmasked concern.

‘Something’s wrang wi ye or ye widnae hae made that noise. I’ve heard a pig dee happier. Ye’d a pain that time, tell the truth.’

‘A wee pull on the stitches when I moved. Nothing to worry about.’

‘I wouldnae just take that for granted.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Times they’re careless devils in hospitals. They wouldnae hae left one o the wee dichtan
cloots in ye?’

‘A swab!’

‘Just that. One o the wee cloots. I’ve heard o that. It could be inside ye festeran away.’

‘Come on, faither, don’t be daft.’