‘Perhaps. I don’t know why I came home. One day I was walking along a street and I smelt the smell of fish coming from a fish shop. And it reminded me of home. So I came home. My wife, of course, is dead.’
‘Many years ago,’ said Gordon, still holding the chess piece in his hand, ‘I was asked to give a talk to an educational society in the town. In those days I used to write poetry though of course I never told anyone. I was working on a particular poem at the time: it was very difficult and I couldn’t get it to come out right. Well, I gave this talk. It was, if I may say so myself, a brilliant talk for in those days I was full of ideas. It was also very witty. People came and congratulated me afterwards as people do. I arrived home at one o’clock in the morning. When I got home I took out the poem and tried to do some work on it. But I was restless and excited and I couldn’t get into the right mood. I sat and stared at the clock and I knew quite clearly that I would never write again. Odd, isn’t it?’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘Say? Nothing. Nothing at all. I don’t think you’d better stay here. I don’t think this place is a refuge. People may say so but it’s not true. After a while the green wears away and you are left with the black. In any case I don’t think you’d better settle here: that would be my advice. However, it’s not my business. I have no business now.’
‘Why did you stay here?’ said John slowly.
‘I don’t know. Laziness, I suppose. I remember when I was in Glasgow University many years ago we used to take the train home at six in the morning after the holiday started. At first we were all very quiet, naturally, since we were half-asleep, most of us. But then as the carriages warmed and the sun came up and we came in sight of the hills and the lochs we began to sing Gaelic songs. Odd, and Glasgow isn’t that far away. What does it all mean, John? What are you looking at?’
‘The broken fences.’
‘Yes, of course. There’s a man here and he’s been building his own house for ten years. He carries stone after stone to the house and then he forgets and sits down and talks to people. Time is different here, no doubt about it.’
‘I had noticed.’
‘If you’re looking for help from me, John, I can’t give you any. In the winter time I sit and look out the window. You can see the sea from here and it can look very stormy. The rain pours down the window and you can make out the waves hitting the islands out there. What advice could I give you? I have tried to do my best as far as my work was concerned. But you say it isn’t enough.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t your fault.’
John made his way to the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I shall have to call on other people as well. They all expect one to do that, don’t they?’
‘Yes, they still feel like that. That hasn’t changed.’
‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ said John as he left.
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
He walked towards the sea cliffs to a house which he had visited many times when he was a boy, where he had been given many tumblers of milk, where later in the evening he would sit with others talking into the night.
The sea was large and sparkling in front of him like a shield. No, he said automatically to himself, it isn’t like a shield, otherwise how could the cormorants dive in and out of it? What was it like then? It was like the sea, nothing else. It was like the sea in one of its moods, in one of its sunny gentle moods. As he walked pictures flashed in front of his eyes. He saw a small boy running, then a policeman’s arm raised, the baton falling in a vicious arc, the neon light flashing from his shield. The boy stopped in midflight, the picture frozen.
6
He knocked at the door of the house and a woman of about forty, thin and with straggly greying hair, came to the door.
She looked at him enquiringly.
‘John, John Macleod,’ he said. ‘I came to see your mother.’ Her face lighted up with recognition and she said, ‘Come in, come in.’ And then inexplicably, ‘I thought you were from the BBC.’
‘The BBC?’
‘Yes, they’re always sending people to take recordings of my mother singing and telling stories, though she’s very old now.’
He followed her into a bedroom where an old white-faced white-haired woman was lying, her head against white pillows. She stretched out her prominently veined hand across the blankets and said, ‘John, I heard Anne talking to you. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing.’
They were left alone and he sat down beside the bed. There was a small table with medicine bottles and pills on it.
‘It’s true,’ she said, ‘the BBC are always sending people to hear me sing songs before I die.’
‘And how are you?’
‘Fine, fine.’
‘Good, that’s good.’ Her keen wise eyes studied his face carefully. The room had bright white wallpaper and the windows faced the sea.
‘I don’t sleep so well now,’ said the old woman. ‘I waken at five every morning and I can hear the birds twittering just outside the window.’
‘You look quite well,’ he said.
‘Of course I’m not well. Everybody says that to me. But after all I’m ninety years old. I can’t expect to live forever. And you’re over sixty but I can still see you as a boy.’ She prattled on but he felt that all the time she was studying him without being obvious.
‘Have you seen the BBC people? They all have long hair and they wear red ties. But they’re nice and considerate.
