An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful (12 page)

He moved his desk sideways to the open window, so he could turn easily from his books to observe the Bloomsbury streets below. He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out into the world. These past few evenings had been beautiful, hot, late-light stretches of time. But the heat rising from the street stifled him. The sky was cloudless, a brilliant blue, but for him all of the colour had been sucked out of it, out of the leaves on the trees, the flowers in the window-boxes. Drained of vibrant, bursting summer hues.

From his perch, he could view the tops of the heads of the
shirt-sleeved
patrons on the pavement outside the White Lion. But the chatter from the drinkers only made him feel worse. Such tinkling, clinking, mindless conversation. Imbecilic laughter. Especially the women with their casual shrieks about nothing. More than a week had passed since the trip to Brighton and he had not seen or spoken to Macy.

He then did what she had always forbidden him to do. He went down to the White Lion, pushed his way through the merry crowd and telephoned her. That damned housekeeper with the cool, haughty tones answered.

‘Miss Collingwood is no longer with us,’ he was told.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She has returned to the United States.’

The way the housekeeper said the name of that country made it sound like a fortress against him. His knees buckled at the news and he had to lean against a table edge. Beer slops soaked into the seat of his trousers.

‘That is not possible.’

‘I can assure you it is very possible, Mr Strathairn. She left by ocean liner yesterday.’

‘But she didn’t tell me.’

‘It was a last-minute decision. I was surprised myself. I was not allowed the time I would normally need to arrange the packing. All that washing, ironing and folding. Those duties require proper planning. Mr Collingwood was sympathetic, of course.’

‘Was there a message? A note? A letter?’

‘Not one word,’ she said. The tone was triumphant.

He bought six bottles of porter from the bar, returned to his flat. Lined them up along his desk like dark brown sentries guarding his heart, getting ready to move off duty one by one. This was what people did in the films, he thought. Or at least someone like Humphrey Bogart or Ray Milland, with their feelings buried deep beneath crusty exteriors. Turn to the booze. Such an
appropriate
word – ‘booze’ – starting hard before softening into its slushy sound. Booze. Rhyming with ‘lose’.

Each consumed bottle changed his mood, as if it were an
emotion
he was drinking and not beer. First there was anger. Then the hurt of rejection. The third bottle brought him a sense of loss. The fourth bottle introduced him to guilt, a feeling that lingered long as it chastised him over and over again until an overwhelming feeling of loneliness took him well into unit number five. Utter despair was what he felt last before stumbling over to the bed and drifting into drunken sleep.

He awoke late into the morning. His head felt as if it was filled with concrete, cracked in places to let only the slightest of thoughts emerge. There was an instant when he didn’t know what day or time it was – just like those moments of childhood innocence before he had been taught to understand the minutes and hours of the day, the days of the week. Those moments when the structures of the outside world had not yet imposed. And then he remembered Macy. Mid-Atlantic. Sailing further and further away from him.

He managed to heave himself out of his bed, drag on his
dressing
gown, stand over the toilet bowl. He watched with a certain detached awe the powerful stream of urine that seemed to go on forever. He made himself a pot of tea, drifted over to his desk, sat by the open window, lit a cigarette. The morning was hot but the sky was full of clouds. A clammy haze draped the city. The smell of stale beer hung over his room.

He stood up, moved over to the side of the bed, knelt down on the floor. He felt he was suffocating. His breathing came heavily, in deep uncontrollable gulps, trying to shift the painful knot of
emotion
tight in his abdomen. And heat. So much heat. Sweat pouring
out of him. His lungs finally pushed out a huge cry of release as he pummelled the mattress in a frenzy of self-hatred.

His landlady asked him politely to move out the following day.

Like the slow clunk of a grandfather clock, its pendulum grind somehow heavier in the moist heat, the hot summer dragged on for Edward in post-Coronation London, minute by lonely minute. Aldous had gone off to a rented cottage in Cornwall with Robert, leaving him the vacant possession of his flat until he could find new digs, but his heart wasn’t into any property hunting in Bloomsbury. Instead, he set himself the task of learning twenty Japanese
kanji
a day as a useful way of using up this dead time, but after a week he had even given up on that personal challenge. In a rare moment of creative enthusiasm, he knocked back a half decanter of Aldous’ whisky and tried to write fiction, but the pen scratched wearily in his hand until he fell asleep at his desk, his cheek resting against the cushioned nap of the unstained blotting paper. The next morning, hungover and despondent, he packed his bags, took the Tube to Euston Station. He would return to Glasgow to visit his parents for the first time in nearly a year.

His father had retired in the interim, a lifetime of total
dedication
to his shipping firm leaving him devoid of hobbies. He now moped around the house in the loose cardigan and worn slippers he usually reserved for Sunday slovenliness, spending hours on the crossword or in front of the wireless set. His paternal stature had somehow disappeared with the loss of the weekday suit and tie.

‘You’ve got to get that man out of the house, Eddie,’ his mother said as she stamped the steam iron on a shirt stretched tight across her board. ‘I cannae stand him under my feet a minute longer. Go on. It’s a beautiful day.’

Deep-seated in his favourite armchair, his father shook his
newspaper
noisily. But he put aside his reading and his pipe, reached for his jacket.

‘Come on, son. Let’s go out where we can breathe more easy.’

They walked through Kelvingrove Park, past the university with its Gothic spires, then further on to the Botanic Gardens. Mothers
and nannies were out in force with their batteries of prams,
couples
were smooching on the slopes. As if the outdoor heat wasn’t enough, his father took him into one of the Victorian glasshouses where the climate ranged from temperate to tropical to cater for the city’s famous collection of ferns. They found themselves an empty bench under a glass rotunda surrounded by palms snaking high for a grasp of the sunlight.

‘I often come here,’ his father said, picking out a plug of tobacco from a leather pouch. ‘This is my kind of climate. Not your usual wearisome
dreich
.’

‘Why did you never go somewhere warmer then? Your
company
could have posted you overseas.’

His father busied himself tamping down the greasy-black tobacco into his pipe bowl. ‘I just never had the courage, lad. Or maybe it was just laziness. Bit of both, probably.’

‘But you volunteered for the Front. That took courage.’

‘That wasnae courage. That was just patriotic stupidity. If I’d known what I was letting myself in for, I’d never have gone. In the end, it was pure luck that got me through.’

His father had received a shrapnel wound in his left arm early on, sent back from the trenches before the real tragedies at the Somme, Arras, Ypres and Amiens had begun. The wound had never
properly
healed but with the Clydeside shipyards in full swing by then, it hadn’t been difficult to be assigned a job at one of the shipping companies. And that was where he stayed for nearly forty years. The stiffness in the arm remained too. Edward could see it now as his father lit a match, drew it awkwardly to the bowl.

‘And how is life in London?’ The first clouds of smoke hung in the humid air, the aroma sickly sweet and heavy.

‘It’s all right.’

‘All right? Is that the best you can muster from my brother’s legacy?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

His father sucked noisily on the whitened stem. ‘There’s not a lassie involved, is there?’

He didn’t reply.

‘Well, just remember what I told you.’

Edward did remember what his father had told him. Almost nothing. He had been sixteen years old when his father had sat him down in the front room, asked him if he knew the Facts of Life. Being one of the youngest in his class, he had already gleaned from the older boys what he felt was enough knowledge to avoid the conversation. He had nodded to his father’s question, and the man had sat back relieved in his armchair, lit his pipe in the same patient manner as he had done now. ‘Good,’ his father had said. ‘Just don’t get anyone in the club before you’re married.’ And that was it. The only advice his father had ever given him. Except to dry thoroughly between his toes after a swim in the Corporation baths.

‘Anyway, I’m glad I’ve got a few moments alone with you,’ his father said. ‘There’s something I want to say.’ Another few sucks on his pipe until a young couple had passed by, pushing a pram with a sleeping bairn tucked up inside. ‘It’s about your mother.’

‘What? Is she ill?’

‘I wouldnae say that. At least, not just yet. It’s just that she’s become awful forgetful. It may be that she’s always been like that and I’ve just never been around to see it.’

‘Isn’t being forgetful a part of getting older?’

‘Aye, maybe. But it’s not just about forgetting to lock the back door or bringing back a pouch of tobacco from her shopping. It’s just things you wouldnae imagine anyone not remembering.’

‘Like what?’

‘Simple things. Dates. The other day she couldnae remember her birthday. And simple arithmetic. I caught her with a box of matches spilled out on the kitchen table. She was counting them out as if she was testing herself. You know, two add another three equals five. She kept repeating the exercise. I heard her talking to herself. Sometimes she got it terribly wrong. It was the smaller numbers that seemed to bother her. Fours and fives and sixes. Not the larger ones as you might expect.’

His father’s eyes glazed over and Edward noticed how the
colour
had drained out of them. They used to be such a vibrant brown, like leather freshly polished, now they had faded down to a pale
dun, worn-out by the years. The shaving wasn’t clean either with a few patches of stubble forgotten by the razor. Tufts of hair grew out of his ears and nostrils. The shirt collar hung loose around his neck.

‘Anyway I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye on her while you’re here,’ his father said. ‘See if I’m mistaken.’

His mother made a similar request about his father. She had called Edward upstairs to where she sat on her bed with an opened shoebox on the quilt beside her.

‘It goes under there, back in the corner by the shoehorns,’ she said, repeatedly wringing at the knuckles of one of her fingers. ‘Just so you know.’

‘Just so I know what?’

‘Where the few things of value are hidden.’ She plucked her silver evening-watch out of the box, began to polish the glass with a corner of her apron. ‘My mother’s wedding ring is in there too. And that miniature sword from Japan.’

He sat down on the bed beside her, picked out the sword, ran his fingers along the carvings on the ivory sheath. ‘Will you stop talking like this? There’s a long life in you yet.’

‘It’s your father. He’s got me awfully worried, Eddie,’ she said. ‘He gets these pains in his chest. The doctor’s given him tablets for it. He thinks I don’t notice when he takes them.’ She reached out, stroked the back of his hand. ‘Why don’t you keep that,’ she said. ‘You were always fond of it. Play with it for hours, you would. Like it was the most precious thing on earth.’

‘You remember that?’

‘Aye. It’s funny the things that stick in the mind. Anyway, watch out for father. Make sure he doesn’t overdo it, always wanting to lift things, drag the furniture around when I’m cleaning.’

For the rest of his stay, Edward was on a constant worried vigilance over the two of them. Previously, he had always thought of them as one entity. A single operating unit bound by the vows of marriage and the birth of a son. A bundled package. The Strathairns. His parents. His ancestors. Who looked after him, fed and clothed him, gave him his bus fare, took him on holidays, dabbed his spots with calamine lotion, told him when to get his
hair cut, signed off his homework, wrote him letters, bought him birthday presents, kissed him goodnight, came to wave him
good-bye
. Now they were like separate countries with a shared border, and he was some kind of spy running the checkpoint between them. The onus of care and responsibility had shifted from them to him. And it made him feel both resentful and compassionate at the same time. Resentful for the loss of this taken-for-granted haven that had always been behind him, supplying him, backing him up. Resentful that the son had been forced to become the father of this man and this woman. Compassionate for their vulnerability and vincibility in the face of death.

When he left three weeks later, they came to see him off at Central Station. He held the grip of his father’s hand longer than usual until the man’s fearful gaze strayed away to the station clock. He tried to seal up the memory of his mother’s perfume as he kissed her powdered cheek. He boarded the train, took out his notebook and wrote all the way back to London.

It was hard for Edward to believe Aldous could have had a father and a mother. It was as if the man had arrived on this earth
self-contained,
self-opinionated and totally developed at the age of forty without the need of a childhood or adolescence. Never younger and never to grow older. Continuing on his merry way, impervious to the slights and slurs of others, exhibiting only the very thinnest cracks of hurt at some of the childish yet sadistic actions of Robert, who this morning had stormed off back to Manchester all because his eggs had not been cooked just right. Or some other petty excuse. Leaving Aldous tied up with rage, quivering lips barely containing the fury backed up behind them, standing by the light of the window in his silk dressing gown, paintbrush attacking the canvas on the easel. It was not easy to assault a still-life painting. Fruit bowl, silver candlesticks and a stuffed pheasant on the sideboard. Absolute realism. No wonder Aldous couldn’t get on with Macy.