One Good Turn

tourist in Venice. “He’s not going to sing, is he?” Julia whispered as they settled themselves onto the red velvet seat. “I hope not,” Jackson said. “I think you pay extra for singing.”The gondolier, in his striped vest and straw boater, seemed like a dreadful tourist cliche. Jackson was reminded of the punts on the river in Cambridge. Cambridge was where he had lived in the “before” time, it was where Julia grew up, it was where his own daughter was growing up now. Before, Jackson never really thought of Cambridge as home, home was (strangely) the army, or the dark place where he himself had grown up, a place where it was always raining in his memory, and possibly in reality too. Now, with the curse of hindsight, he could see that perhaps Cambridge had been a real home-a place of safety with a wife and a house and a child. Another kind of institution. Before and after-that was how he classified his life. Before and after the money.

The gondolier didn’t sing, and it turned out to be not such a cliche after all. Venice was even more gorgeous at night, the lamps glittering on the black water like soft jewels, and something unsuspected and beautiful to marvel at around every turn in the narrow canal-Jackson felt the poetry in his soul rising until Julia hissed in his ear, “You’re not going to propose, are you?” The thought hadn’t been in his head at all, but once she said that-in exactly the same tone as she had voiced her anxieties about the singing gondolier-he felt irritated with her. Why shouldn’t he propose to her, was it such a dreadful thing? He knew that these weren’t the circumstances in which you should kick off an argument (Venice, birthday, gondola, etc.), but he couldn’t stop himself. “So you wouldn’t marry me if I asked you?” he said defensively.

“Is that a proposal, Jackson?”

“No. I’m just saying, if I asked you, would you say no?”

“Yes, of course I would.”They’d hit some kind of traffic jam on the canal, squeezing past a large gondola containing a cargo of Americans. “Be reasonable, Jackson. Neither of us is the marrying kind.”

“I am,” Jackson said, “and you’ve never been married, so how can you know?”

“That’s a specious argument,” Julia said, turning her face away from him and making a show of looking up at the windows of some palazzo or other. The gondola rocked on the water as the gondolier finally maneuvered it past the Americans.

“So how do you see our relationship?” he persisted. He knew he shouldn’t. “Do we just see each other now and then, whenever you feel like it, fuck each other’s brains out, and after a few years you grow bored and it all peters out? Is that how you see it? I mean, goodness, Julia,” he said sarcastically, “this is the longest you’ve ever been with anyone. What was the record before-a week?”

“Crikey, you’ve really been giving this some thought, haven’t you, Jackson?”

“Of course I’ve been giving it some thought. Jesus, haven’t you?”

“Not in such lurid detail, apparently,” Julia said mildly. “Do you honestly think, sweetie, that being married would stop us from getting bored with each other?”

“No, but that’s not the point.”

“Yes it is. Stop it, Jackson, don’t be so curmudgeonly, you’re going to spoil a lovely evening.”

But the evening was clearly spoiled already.

He wasn’t sure that he did actually want to marry Julia, but he found her absolute negativity on the subject disturbing. He knew the topic couldn’t be introduced again, not without a huge row, a fact that festered in a way that he found surprising.

The One O’Clock Gun boomed over the town, and the tourists dutifully flinched and laughed. It seemed to have more to do with theater than timekeeping, a show for the Japanese and Yanks. And nothing to do with real gunfire. Real gunfire cracked and popped mysteriously in the distance or exploded so loudly near you that it blew your eardrums out.

He had a look in the building at the heart of the Castle that housed the Scottish National War Memorial. He was surprised by how beautiful it was inside-Arts and Crafts style, he knew that from Julia. She had a thing about William Morris, she said she had the right kind of hair for the period. Sometimes he found himself wondering if she cultivated eccentricity just for the sake of it. The names of the dead, so many dead, were written in big red books. He knew he had three great-uncles (three brothers, God help their mother) in those books somewhere, but he didn’t look for them. Scotsmen all over the globe building the British Empire and then dying for it. His own father hadn’t fought in the Second World War because mining was a protected occupation. “As if it were a soft option,” his father scoffed, “working a double shift in the bowels of the earth.” When he’d left school at sixteen, Jackson had gone to sign on at the pit, but his father said that he hadn’t worked all his life “in this filthy hellhole” just so that his son would have to as well. So Jackson joined the army, a Yorkshire regiment because Yorkshire was his home, not this place of gray stone and blasting wind. Francis, his brother, had worked as a welder at the pit, and his father had made no effort to stop him. But Francis was dead by the time Jackson was sixteen, and Jackson had become the only one of three children left to his father, and he supposed that had made him more precious in some way, not that the old bastard had ever shown it.

Jackson was left relatively unmoved by the ranks of the dead (death was so commonplace), by the plaques for the fallen, for the women, for the merchant seamen. Not even the verse from the Binyon poem-“At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them”-on the Women’s Services Memorial was able to touch him as it usually did, it was something else entirely that set off the emotion-a small relief carved into the stone at knee-height, depicting a cage of canaries and a little gathering of mice. THE TUNNELLERS’ FRIENDS, the inscription read. He blinked back the tears, coughed, and did some manly throat clearing to cover his emotion. Julia would have been on her knees next to it, stroking the stone as if it were an animal. Kissing it, probably. He could bring her to see it once her show opened. She would like that.

Outside, he stood across the courtyard and took a photograph of the building that housed the memorial, but he knew already that when it was developed it would just look like a building.

The camera had been his present to Julia last Christmas, a nice chunky Canon digital that had appealed to him as a piece of equipment. Their photos from Venice were still on the memory card, and while he drank his tea in the Castle’s cafe, he scrolled through the little colored pictures that looked like miniature paintings. There had been a perfect blue spring sky for the whole week so that through the viewer the photographs looked like tiny Canaletto backdrops with Julia or Jackson inserted into them. There were only two pictures of them together, one on the Rialto, taken by a helpful German tourist, and a second one taken with the camera’s timer-Jackson and Julia sitting up on their king-size bed in the Cipriani, toasting each other with champagne. It was taken just before they left for the gondola ride.

Julia was very photogenic, every time turning on the full beam of her lipsticky smile. She had a great smile. Jackson sighed, paid the bill for his tea and cake, put a big tip on the table, and left the Castle.

Crowds flowed down the Royal Mile like the lava that had once molded landscape out of fire, moving around obstacles in the way-the statue of David Hume, a mime artist, a piper, several student theater groups, people handing out flyers (lots of them), another piper, a man eating fire, a man juggling fire, a woman dressed as Mary Queen of Scots, a man dressed as Sherlock Holmes. Another piper. It certainly was a city en fete. It was strange to think that-far away in a country about which people knew nothing-there was a war going on. But then there was always a war going on somewhere. War was the human condition. War had fed, clothed, and paid Jackson in its time, so perhaps he shouldn’t be the one to complain. (Although someone should.)

He walked down to Holyrood Palace, bought a poke of chips, and walked back up the Royal Mile. Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times. Still, a little bit more interesting wouldn’t be such a dreadful thing to ask for. He remembered Honda Man and Peugeot Guy, it had been an interesting day for them. He felt a pang of guilt for not acting like a concerned citizen and reporting the Honda’s registration. He could still reel it off, he’d always had a good memory for numbers even though he had no feel for maths-one of the brain’s many baffling anomalies.

He must have looked as if he belonged because someone, Swedish or Norwegian, asked him for directions, and Jackson said, “Sorry, I’m a stranger here.” That wasn’t what you said, was it? “Stranger.” “Visitor” was the correct word. “Stranger” implied an outsider, a threat. “A tourist,” he added for clarification. “I’m a tourist too.”