He got up and laid the cup on the table.
‘Is Mr Gordon still alive?’ he shouted. Mr Gordon was his old English teacher.
‘Speak up, I can’t hear you,’ she said, her large bulging face thrust towards him like a crab.
‘Mr Gordon?’ he shouted. ‘Is he still alive?’
‘Mr Gordon,’ she said. ‘Yes, he’s alive. He’s about ninety now. He lives over there.’ She took him over to the window and pointed out a house to him. ‘Oh, there’s the Lady,’ she said. ‘He’s always sitting on the wall. He’s there every day. His sister died, you know. She was a bit wrong in the head.’
He said goodbye and she followed him to the door. He walked out the gate and made his way to where she had pointed. The day seemed heavy and sleepy and he felt slightly drugged as if he were moving through water. In the distance a man was hammering a post into the ground. The cornfields swayed slightly in the breeze and he could see flashes of red among them. He remembered the days when he would go with a bucket to the well, and smelt again the familiar smell of flowers and grass. He expected at any moment to see the ghosts of the dead stopping him by the roadway, interrogating him and asking him, ‘When did you come home? When are you going away?’ The whole visit, he realised now, was an implicit interrogation. What it was really about was: What had he done with his life? That was the question that people, without realising it, were putting to him, simply because he had chosen to return. It was also the question that he himself wanted answered.
Ahead of him stretched the moors and in the far distance he could see the Standing Stones which could look so eerie in the rain and which had perhaps been used in the sacrifice of children in Druid times. Someone had to be knifed to make the sun appear, he thought wryly. Before there could be light there must be blood.
He made his way to see Mr Gordon.
5
Gordon recognised him immediately: it was almost as if he had been waiting for him. He came forward from behind a table on which were piled some books and a chessboard on which some pieces were standing, as if he had been playing a game.
‘John,’ he said, ‘John Macleod.’
John noticed that standing beside the chair was a small glass in which there were the remains of whisky.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Gordon as if he hadn’t had company for a long time. He was still spry, grey-haired of course, but thin in the body. He was wearing an old sports jacket and a shirt open at the neck. There was a slightly unshaven look about him.
‘I play chess against myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which of us wins.’ His laugh was a short bark. John remembered himself running to school while Gordon stood outside the gate with a whistle in his hand looking at his watch impatiently.
‘I suppose coming from America,’ he said, ‘you’ll know about Fischer. He’s about to do the impossible, beat the Russian World Champion at chess. It’s like the Russians beating the Americans at baseball – or us at shinty,’ he added with the same self-delighting barking laugh. ‘He is of course a genius and geniuses make their own rules. How are you?’
‘Very well. And how are you?’ He nearly said ‘Sir’ but stopped himself in time.
‘Oh, not too bad. Time passes slowly. Have you ever thought about time?’ Beside his chair was a pile of books scattered indiscriminately. ‘I belong to dozens of book clubs. This is a book on Time. Very interesting. From the point of view of physics, psychiatry and so on.’ He pointed to a huge tome which looked both formidable and new. ‘Did you know, for instance, that time passes slowly for some people and rapidly for others? It’s a matter of personality, and the time of year you’re born. Or that temperature can affect your idea of time? Very interesting.’ He gave the impression of a man who devoured knowledge in a sterile way.
John looked out of the window. Certainly time seemed to pass slowly here. Everything seemed to be done in slow motion as if people were walking through water, divers with lead weights attached to them.
‘Are you thinking of staying?’ said Gordon, pouring out a glass of whisky for his guest.
‘I don’t know that yet.’
‘I suppose you could buy a house somewhere. And settle down. Perhaps do some fishing. I don’t do any myself. I read and play chess. But I suppose you could fish and do some crofting. Though I don’t remember that you were particularly interested in either of these.’
‘I was just thinking,’ said John, ‘of what you used to tell us when we were in your English class. You always told us to observe. Observation, you used to say, is the secret of good writing. Do you remember the time you took us out to the tree and told us to smell and touch it and study it and write a poem about it? It was a cherry tree, I recall. We wrote the poem in the open air.’
‘I was in advance of my time,’ said Gordon. ‘That’s what they all do now. They call it Creative Writing. But of course they can’t spell nowadays.’
‘And you always told us that exactitude was important. Be observant and exact, you said, above all be true to yourselves.’
‘Drink your whisky,’ said Gordon. ‘Yes, I remember it all. I’ve kept some of your essays. You were gifted. In all the years I taught I only met two pupils who were really gifted. How does one know talent when one sees it? I don’t know. Anyway, I recognised your
