Naming the Bones (9 page)

‘Aye, aye, just a minute.’

Professor James’s voice was cracked with age and sharp with irritation. Murray thought of Macbeth’s porter, provoked by the knock at the castle door, comic in his anger, the moment of calm before the discovery of horror.

James fumbled with a set of keys and his sigh was audible through the locked door, but it was only when the professor pushed it wide that Murray realised how badly he’d aged. It was almost twenty years since they’d met, but somehow he’d still expected to see the stern-faced lecturer who had approached the lectern like a United Free Church of Scotland minister about to deliver a sermon to a congregation set on damnation. Pipe-smoking, bespectacled and bad-tempered, his stocky body packed into an old tweed jacket, James had been everything that Murray, fresh from a comprehensive school staffed by corduroy-clad progressives, had desired in a university professor.

James shook his hand. ‘Come away through.’

The professor had never been handsome, but he’d been a vigorous presence, with the barrel chest and bullet head of a pugilist. Old age had shrunk his body and bent his spine, rendering his face oversized and jutting. The edge of his skull was decorated with a patina of freckles and grave spots. The effect was grotesque, an ancient, nodding toddler with an eager grin.

‘This is a rare treat. Two names from the past in one day.’

Murray followed James down a small hallway decor­ated with photographs of the professor’s children and grandchildren. The glass front door had presumably been designed to let in light, but perhaps the house faced the wrong way, or maybe the day was too dull to extract any brightness from, because the hall was dark, the smiles in the pictures cast in shadows.

‘Two names?’

‘You and Lunan, outstanding students the pair of you.’

It was strange, hearing himself coupled with the poet.

‘My student years certainly feel a long time past.’

‘You’ll be part of a million pasts by the time you’re finished. Teaching confers its own brand of celebrity. You get hailed by folk you’ve no memory of. My tip is allow them do the talking and don’t let on you’ve not got a clue who they are.’ James led Murray into a burgled-looking sitting room. He lowered himself gently into a high-backed armchair and nodded towards a chintz couch. ‘Shift those papers and make yourself comfortable. As you can see, I’ve reverted to a bachelor state.’

Murray lifted a pile of handwritten notes and placed them on top of a stack of library books.

‘Ah, maybe not there. Helen’s coming round later to return those for me and if they’re hidden she’ll miss them.’ James scanned the room looking for a suitable berth amongst the books and documents crowding the room. ‘Why not put them . . .’ He hesitated while Murray hovered uncertainly, papers in hand. ‘Why not put them here?’ He nodded to the floor in front of him. ‘That way if I forget about them they’ll trip me up and the problem will be redundant.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It would be a suitable ending for an aged academic, tumbled by words.’

Traces of James’s dead wife clung to the house. Professor James would surely never have chosen the floral curtains that screened the small window in the hall, nor the sets of figurines gazing unadored from behind the dull glass of the china cabinet, but the tone of the place had shifted from a respectable family home with a feminine bent to an old bachelor’s bed-sit.

The kettle was in the sitting room, where it could be easily reached. An open packet of sugar, a cardboard box spilling tea bags and a carton of suspect milk stood next to it. The coffee table was stacked with books, each of the piles tiled together with the precision of a Roman mosaic. A smaller occasional table at James’s side held a glass of water, a selection of medication and yet more books. Murray noted a copy of Lunan’s
Moontide
on top of the pile, within easy reach of James’s right hand.

They parleyed a little about the department, but Murray sensed that the older man’s questions were merely form. The part of himself he had given to the university now occupied the books and papers that scattered the room. Murray’s presence was a brief distraction, a meeting on the shore before the tide of words dragged him back.

Murray reached into his rucksack, placed his tape recorder on top of one of the piles between them and pressed
Record
. James cleared his throat and his voice slowed to lecture-theatre pace.

‘I’ve only ever kept an appointments diary, so I’m afraid you won’t get any great insights from me, but I did look up the year in question and found a reference to a meeting I had with Lunan immediately after he was told his presence on our undergraduate course would no longer be required.’ James produced a daily diary stamped 1970, opened it at a bookmarked page and passed it to Murray. It had been a hectic week. James’s lectures were marked clearly in black ink, but the rest of the page was scattered with scrawls in several different colours, black battling blue and red, pencilled scribbles and underlinings. ‘He was a Tuesday appointment, afternoon of course. I don’t think Archibald Lunan was ever a friend of early mornings.’

Murray saw
AL 2.30
jotted in the margin of a busy day. He asked, ‘How did Lunan react to being sent down?’

‘Sent down?’ The tone was mild. ‘I wasn’t aware we were in Oxford or Cambridge.’

‘No.’ Murray leaned back in his chair wondering how, for all his preparations, he could have forgotten the pedantry that lay behind James’s smile. ‘Was he upset?’

‘He may have been. But as far as I can recall, he took it like a man.’

‘Standard procedure would have been to send Lunan a letter. Why did you feel the need to inform him personally?’

‘I asked myself exactly the same thing when I saw the appointment in my diary.’

James’s manner shifted and Murray realised he’d hit on a question that interested the old man. He remembered this pattern from his undergraduate tutorials, the professor’s initial impatience set aside as he got into the meat of the matter, as if the verbal barbs were self-defence against boredom.

‘Let’s just say, whatever it was, I wouldn’t have trusted Lunan to anyone else in the department at that time. Even I could see we were a bunch of stuffed shirts.’ James moved slightly against his cushions as if trying to settle his bones. ‘Perhaps it says something about my own prejudices, but Archie looked belligerent. Long hair, cowboy moustache, scruffy clothes . . . there’s a particular leather coat that sticks in the memory.’ James gave a scholarly chuckle. ‘Ten years later teachers and lecturers had adopted the same look, with the exception of a few diehards like myself, the tweed jacket and suede shoes brigade. But back then, in Scotland at any rate, that kind of image still had counterculture connotations. So couple it with Lunan’s poor attendance . . . I was possibly worried he might get the stuffing knocked out of him. Despite his posturing, Lunan always struck me as delicate.’

‘In what way?’

‘He was sensitive, not a prerequisite for poets as you no doubt know. He looked the part, as I said, the leather coat, the ready fists, the all-too-frequently cut lip and black eye, but he wasn’t as robust as he made out.’

Murray asked, ‘How do you mean?’

James paused and looked at the ceiling as if searching for an explanation in its shadowed corners.

‘In those days I had a little group who used to meet once a month and discuss their own verse.’ James was being modest. His ‘little group’ had fostered a school of writers whose reputation had spread far beyond the literary circles of their city. Some of its members had later helped define their nation to the world. ‘The first poem Lunan presented was plagiarised. It was badly written enough to be the work of an undergraduate so there’s a good possibility I wouldn’t have rumbled him, if I hadn’t had a poem published in the same back issue of the journal he’d lifted it from.’ James shook his head in wonder. ‘Amazing.’

‘What did you do?’

‘My first instinct was to ask him about it in front of the group, but I resisted. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was already aware of Archie’s vulnerability. I simply took him aside and told him I knew. I think I expected that would be the last we saw of him, but for all he was weak, Archie was tough too. He came to the following meeting, this time with his own work. I must have been curious because I agreed to read it.’ James grimaced. ‘The poems he gave me were good. Not perfect, but original.’

Murray nodded towards Lunan’s book, perched on top of the pile at the professor’s elbow.

‘Did any of the poems he showed you appear in
Moontide
?’

‘One of them. “Preparation for a Wake”. It was revised and tightened up by the time the collection was published, of course, but the concept was there at the start: the raising of the dead man, the play on words between a wake and awake, the horror his drinking companions feel when their dead mate sits up ready to join in the merrymaking. The lyricism of the language wasn’t as successful as it was in the published version, but it was still remarkable.’

‘What did the rest of the group make of it?’

‘I don’t recall any particular debate. You have to remember it was a long time ago, and we were privileged to be at the birth of many remarkable pieces.’

James looked Murray in the eye. It was like a door slamming.

‘How did Archie get on with the group in general?’

‘Okay, as far as I remember. But as I said, it was a long time ago.’

Another door shut.

James gave the kind of smile favoured by American presidents on the stocks, but the professor’s teeth were yellowed, his gums pink and receding.

‘What about your own response to his work?

‘My own response?’

The professor made the question sound preposterous.

Murray smiled apologetically.

‘What was your initial reaction when you eventually got to see his writing?’

It was a sunny day outside, but the sitting room windows had taken on the smoky taint that glass acquires after a year or two’s neglect and the pair were stuck in murk and shadow. The dust that coated the air was formed from James and James’s wife, decayed and merged. Murray wanted to brush them from himself, but instead he smiled and waited.

James moved a hand against the arm of his chair, as if trying to make his mind up about something. When he spoke his voice was dangerously gentle.

‘Are you asking if I was jealous of Lunan’s ability?’

Murray hesitated, surprised by the revelation in the old man’s question.

‘Your professionalism is beyond reproach.’

James lifted the copy of
Moontide
from the table next to him and looked at Lunan’s Rasputin face. Somewhere a clock ticked.

‘I was jealous, of course, but I was jealous of others too. Maybe we were all jealous of each other, beneath the comradeship. I honestly don’t think I ever let it affect my dealings with him, and then . . . well . . . how can you be jealous of a dead man?’ He put the book back on the table and smiled at Murray. ‘But I am, of course, every time I read his poems.’ He laughed and gave the chair a slight slap as if rousing himself to business. ‘The strange thing was that the filched poem he’d presented was way beneath the standard of what he was capable of creating. That’s what I mean about a vulnerable streak. Archie was over-sensitive, lacking in confidence and yet at the same time burdened with an exaggerated ego.’

‘Not the most attractive combination.’

‘No, but Lunan could be attractive. He had the gift of the gab and a sense of the absurd. When he was in the right frame of mind, he was good company.’

‘And when he wasn’t?’

‘Morose, sarcastic, inclined to drunkenness. I had to ask him to leave the session on two separate occasions. If he’d been anyone else I would have told him not to come back. There were precedents: at least one drunken writer had been barred.’

‘But he was too talented to dismiss?’

James leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling again. It was a theatrical gesture, a pause that preceded a point to be underlined.

‘Talent’s an odd thing, essential of course, but no guarantee of anything. To be perfectly frank I doubted he had the discipline to succeed. I thought he was more in love with the idea of being a writer than with the need to create.’

‘What made you think that?’

‘Partly, I suppose, because I’d seen it before. We never turned any sober customers away from these get-togethers, you know. We didn’t advertise them, of course, it was strictly word of mouth, but from time to time you’d get romantic heroes wafting in. They couldn’t play an instrument so they thought they would wield a pen. It’s a very powerful image – young Thomas Chatterton, Percy Shelley, Jack Kerouac – the disaffected writer battling the world before dying young and beautiful.’ He laughed. ‘Well, maybe not so beautiful in Kerouac’s case, killing yourself with alcohol tends to be a bit bloating, but you get my drift.’ The professor sighed. ‘Working with young people for as long as I have, it’s inevitable that one is going to encounter untimely deaths, a car crash, an overdose, a climbing accident.’ He paused. ‘A drowning. It’s a cliché to say it’s a waste, and yet what else is it? A bloody waste.’ There was another pause as if he were silently mourning the young people who had died before their span. ‘So, to answer your question, yes I was aware of his talent early on, but I thought it squandered on him. Remember the poems I saw had potential, but they weren’t there yet.’ He grinned. ‘And there was I with my reservoirs of discipline and hard-won knowledge unable to create the magic that he could.’ James shook his head. ‘My God, I was ripe for some Faustian pact.’ His eyes met Murray’s. ‘But I wasn’t the only one.’

The professor laughed and a taint of decay scented the dead air of the darkened room. Murray cleared his throat then asked, ‘So how did he take his expulsion?’

‘I told you: stoically.’ The old man shook his head. ‘No, not stoically, casually. Shook my hand and wished me well. I was keen for Lunan to repeat the year, and he said he’d think about it. But I got the impression he was humouring me. It was infuriating. I remember I smelt beer on his breath and thought that if I were his father I’d knock some sense into him.’ James gave a second chuckle, though this time it sounded hollow. ‘That was the way we thought in those days. But we’d been brought up by men who’d gone to war, and gone to war ourselves.’ James sighed. ‘Lunan was like a man squandering an inheritance. He had the brains to do well, but he wasted them, the same way he wasted his talent and ultimately his life. He let that slip from him as casually as he idled away his university career.’ Professor James looked up at Murray; his too-big head grinning like a Halloween mask. ‘I’m glad you’re doing this book. Those of us who were left behind could have served his work better. Debts owed to the dead seem to grow heavier with time.’