Full Term, page 27
‘Yes, I have. It would be something to do with personal honour.’ Giles stopped, as if surprised by the absoluteness of his own words. ‘I mean, you know, not scoring a futile trick in a cold war, or anything of that sort. Something he felt as a personal and private challenge. That’s it.’
‘Mogridge would back that.’ I said this, I believe, with a sudden conviction matching Giles’s own. ‘You’ve read Mochica, I seem to remember?’
‘Yes.’ Giles stared at me. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘The Mogridge of Mochica wasn’t much more than a boy. But he took charge of men; organised them; persuaded or inspired or commanded them to endure incredible things. It was a thoroughly down-to-earth job in a way. But what enabled him to put it through was a high romantic imagination. And Mogridge would always respond to anything of that sort in another man. In short, Giles, I think he and your father might hit it off quite well.’
XXV
The activities of William Watershute, although still attended by mystery, had been certified to me as not disreputable. Indeed, since whatever he was up to had presumably exposed him to considerable personal hazard, he must be said to be displaying a hardihood which in itself was wholly admirable. I wasn’t very pleased that Mogridge had left it to Giles to admit me to an inside view (or at least glimpse) of the matter, but I accepted it as no doubt only an instance of the general obliqueness favoured in the peculiar world he operated in. What troubled me much more was a consciousness of the increasing awkwardness, as it seemed bound to be, of my position vis-a-vis my colleagues. It had been bad enough to be in possession, seemingly, of a more sinister slant on the thing than they were aware of. It was going to be even more tricky now that there had been an ironical reversal of this situation. Moreover, according to Giles, we were to suffer a factitious intensification of alarms and despondencies over Watershute’s supposed defection. For if Mogridge felt there had to be a further build-up, a further build-up there would assuredly be.
Thoughts of this sort possessed me on the following morning as I drove up the motorway to Scotland. I was to join Fish for dinner in Edinburgh that evening. By this time I had established Fish in my head as a kind of tutelary spirit – summoned from the vasty deep of the Indian Ocean or the Great Australian Bight to guide my steps through the regions of my nativity. I didn’t expect anything portentous to attend our forthcoming foray, but I had been so long expatriate, and during recent years my visits even to Ninian and his family had become so infrequent, that a lack of ease commonly assailed me as soon as the line of the Pentiand Hills came into view.
On this occasion the Ninian Pattullos were away on holiday, and I scarcely possessed a handful of acquaintances in my native city. Outwardly little would disconcert the memory; every street and building would be familiar, yet every street and building feel dispeopled; I would be beset as I went here and there less by specific recollections of this or that than by elusive states of feeling the long-past sources of which were lost to me. It was my awareness that I was heading into this that made me glad I was to have Fish as a companion.
We devoted our first morning to the Scottish National Gallery. Such places, and for that matter scenes of outstanding natural beauty, can hold a disheartening aspect if revisited after a long period of years. One may know more about the history of art than one did as a boy, one may now be able to compare what one views with Sunium’s marbled steep or the Bay of Naples. But what one remembers is a sharpness of aesthetic sensation which will not come back to one. I was aware of this in front of the Vermeer; I remembered, too, that it was in front of the Vermeer that I had first kissed Janet. Reflections of this sort made me moody; Fish, although more interested in the Raeburns and Wilkies than in me, observed the fact; he must already have detected me as feeling entitled to disturbed emotions on returning to the haunts of my childhood. He asked whether I had prowled around this building often. I made the dark reply that, apart from my father’s studio, I regarded it as having been the only place of education open to me in the city. Fish was amused, and promptly announced that we were now going to pay a visit to my old school. Although I didn’t judge that he was likely to gain much enlightenment from this, I fell in with the proposal, perhaps because the myth of the tutelary spirit was at work.
‘I’m as much under your thumb,’ I said, ‘as Dante was under Virgil’s in hell. It’s not wholesome, Martin.’
‘Of course it is – and that’s fine. So come on. And our mood being one of wild extravagance, we’ll take a taxi. If they’ve got beyond hansom cabs in this town, that is.’ Fish was indicating that gentle melancholy was not to be the keynote of our pilgrimage. We took a taxi to the verge of the New Town. And there the school was.
We stared at the severe Doric building through a gate – which was as near as I had got to it for many a year. Fish remarked that it must be an older foundation than Geelong. I said that this couldn’t be other than probable. Fish said that it looked the sort of place in which any sensible boy would get a good deal of education.
‘The grand old fortifying classical curriculum,’ I muttered, and continued to stare. Here was the birthplace, it might be said, of Ranald McKechnie’s learned career. It was also the deathbed of the first fantasies of the Secret Service Boy. Ninian, very usefully, had walloped them out of me. Or scrubbed them out of me. I could feel his knuckles on my scalp now.
‘I agree it doesn’t look quite like you,’ Fish said concessively. ‘Not exactly the cradle of a deft playwright, Duncan.’
‘It’s much more the cradle of deft lawyers, Martin. I’m sorry you’re not going to meet Ninian.’
‘Is his law deft?’
‘I expect so. He’s the most impressive person I know. But turning a bit on the grim side. He’s preparing to be something called the Lord Justice Clerk.’
‘I’m sorry I’m not going to meet that.’ Fish turned away. He wasn’t going to insist on our entering the pebbled yards around which I’d thwacked tennis balls with a wooden implement like a large flat spoon. ‘Am I going to meet anybody?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s clear to me we must go to Glencorry.
That’s where my mother was born. It’s approximately in the Highlands, and the Highlands are part of what you’ve come for. I’ve neglected my surviving relations there for longer than is decent. No Raeburns. But the place does have several Allan Ramsays.’
‘What did you tell me the place is called?’
‘Corry Hall.’
‘Fairly remote – so that you’d propose yourself for a stay there? I don’t think you can roll up, Duncan, after what appear to have been neglectful years, with a strange colonial in tow.’
‘You’ll get on very well with my uncle – if he happens to be sane at the moment. I thought we might go to a hotel – there’s a tolerable one, I believe, about twenty miles from Corry – and I could send a letter from there and see what happens.’
‘I have misgivings, Duncan.’
‘Rubbish! It can’t be as bad as the Inferno. And I must have my good genius at my side.’
‘Very well, since you put it that way. We abandon hope, and set off tomorrow.’
I knew that it was to my cousin Ruth that I must write, since upon the death of Aunt Charlotte she had become the mistress of Corry. Conceivably because of my failure to invite her to Oxford and surround her with returned warriors, Ruth had lived on into her thirties as a spinster in her parents’ house. Her elder sister Anna was established in some consequence at Garth, which was an estate of very much the same size as Glencorry. Neither property would have been impressive by merely squirarchal English standards, but in their own and indeed in a general local esteem their lairds were veritable Monarchs of the Glens. But Anna having married the heir of Garth (or, as she would have liked to say, the Master of Garth) was ahead of Ruth, who was only the unwed daughter of the Glencorry. Ruth’s life had thus become, one could suppose, a matter of mounting discontents – such as I might have foreseen as lying in wait for her when I knew her fresh from school. Eventually she had adopted the desperate measure of marrying the parish minister.
There had been nothing difficult about this in any doctrinal regard. The Glencorrys were episcopalians (it had never occurred to my mother to cease being one when she married a minister’s brother) but Corry Hall was a long way from any episcopal church, and for some generations they had judged it seemly to worship along with their presbyterian tenantry from time to time. So Ruth’s difficulties were social rather than ecclesiastical, her marriage being much the same sort of mesalliance as my mother’s had been. The minister, moreover, was a good deal older than Ruth, and a widower into the bargain; and it appeared that the mild indelicacy commonly imputed to a second marriage was regarded as much enhanced when the person concerned was a pillar of the Kirk. Ruth’s minister had crowned all this by rather promptly dying of a dim but distressing disease, leaving her in a manse which she was required to quit as soon as might be. Aunt Charlotte’s death had, in a sense, rehabilitated her, since she was back in Corry Hall and commanding it. But as she lived there alone with an intermittently demented father, aged and incompetent servants, and a slender budget, it didn’t seem wise to look forward to her company as invigorating.
Many years having elapsed since Ruth had heard more news of me than would go on the back of a Christmas card, I awaited her reply to my letter with misgiving. It turned out, however, welcoming after a fashion, although it did obscurely touch in what seemed intended as a ‘let all be forgiven’ note. I must come over and stay at Corry at once, bringing my friend with me. Her father had vague recollections of there being Glencorrys of a cadet order in Western Australia, and might be interested in meeting somebody from that part of the world. At the moment, he was in quite good health. The tailor had gone on holiday, but the hatcheries were a resource. Anna was now settled in the dower house at Garth, and I must go over and see her there. It was a dwelling of mean appearance (Ruth added with distinguishable satisfaction) and excessively inconvenient. At Garth itself Robin Petrie was behaving as might be expected.
Robin Petrie I supposed to be the elder of Fiona’s brothers, with whom she had gone on record as having a row. Who the tailor was, and what the hatcheries were, remained obscure. Nor did I feel any great stir of curiosity about them or anything else at Corry Hall – the Glencorry connection being something that had long ago ceased to hold much interest for me.
But here I was deluding myself. As Fish and I took a final turn through the heathery windings of Glencorry itself, and the whitewashed pepperpots and crenellations of David Bryce’s mansion came into view, I felt an unexpected excitement. Ninian and I as we grew towards manhood had affected to regard both the house and its inhabitants as absurd. But in our earlier boyhood we had been a good deal in awe of the Glencorrys and their home, and secretly proud of the feudal aspect of our ancestry that they represented. And this hadn’t entirely rubbed away. It hadn’t even rubbed away from Ninian, so soon to be Lord Justice Clerk.
Ruth received us in the hall: a gloomy chamber so festooned with stags’ heads (now sadly moth-eaten) and other trophies of the chase as to suggest an Aeaea in which a somewhat uninventive Circe had laboured for a long time. Ruth, however, was scarcely Circean. She had been a heavy girl (in this resembling Anna, whose heaviness when on top of me in the heather could come upon me as a physical sensation still), and as a middle-aged woman she was approaching the lumbering. But what I was chiefly aware of as I introduced Fish was the sharpness of the covert curiosity she directed on me. And this, if it wasn’t exactly resentful, was obscurely jealous. Was it possible, I wondered, that the ghost of an Edinburgh schoolboy lingered around Corry, and that Ruth was capable of recalling that, in episodes entirely juvenile and substantially innocuous, her elder sister had got ahead of her? I wasn’t confident that something uncomfortable in her attitude to me was to be accounted for in quite this flattering way.
Uncle Rory appeared, stringy within his knickerbockers as I remembered him. He welcomed Fish politely but vaguely so vaguely that I saw that here was a bewildered old man who would have been pathetic had there not been detectable in his eye still a hint of the sacred strangeness I remembered in him. He wasn’t ‘confused’ in the sense in which gerontology uses the term; he was bewildered because he hadn’t yet lost the saving knowledge that the world is bewildering.
‘Ah, Duncan,’ he said, ‘this is very timely. You will help me – and Mr Fish will too. Tinker is away, you know, so there is leisure to consider a little. To draw back and consider.’
‘Tinker is the tailor,’ Ruth said, as if this explained all.
‘Calls himself a court tailor,’ Uncle Rory went on. ‘Means he can put you into knee-breeches and so forth. But Tinker is a military tailor too. And that’s the point, of course.’
‘Of course, Uncle Rory.’ Light on this particular mystery had come to me instantly.
‘I wish, Duncan, we had your father here. I’m afraid he didn’t come to Corry very frequently. We may have been neglectful, I’m afraid. But he would be the man now. Which colour goes with which, you know. Just his line. We’ll go and look in a minute, and you’ll take your choice. But, Mr Fish, a little whisky first. Ruth, the Glenlivet. It’s our habit here, my dear sir, when a guest arrives. A mere dram.’
We had a mere dram (except that Ruth, when judging herself unobserved, had two). Uncle Rory, although punctilious over this observance, was impatient to carry us off to quarters peculiarly his own; he was like a small boy who, having a new toy to exhibit to friends in his nursery, is all eagerness to carry them away from the more formal apartments in which grown-ups are receiving them. Ruth, who had her own ritual requirements, insisted that we must first be shown our bedrooms: surprisingly distant chambers to which our suitcases had already been transported with a considerable appearance of effort by two octogenarian female retainers. But when we were reunited again downstairs, Uncle Rory immediately carried off Fish and myself to what I recognised as the old stable block in which Mountjoy had formerly had his quarters. Here there was a long narrow room down either side of which was ranged what I took at first to be an exhibition of waxworks. I then saw that they were tailor’s dummies of the shop-window sort, and all male. A few of them were unclothed, a circumstance which I registered to myself as a novelty. For it is surely a fact of experience that, whereas female figures of the sort are occasionally exposed to the public gaze in a nude condition, carelessness or whimsy never seems to achieve a similar effect with male ones: and in this there appears to be an inversion of the degrees of impropriety which convention severally assigns to the exhibition of masculine and feminine nudity respectively. By the time I had concluded this reflection I had realised that we were in the presence of a new phase in the creation of my uncle’s standing army. For all the clothed figures were in garments of unmistakably martial if often bizarre suggestion. The phase of mere sketches and designs of galligaskins and the like was long since over. Uncle Rory’s dream of successful rivalry with his neighbour the Duke of Atholl was a big step nearer fulfilment. And Tinker was the instrument – it must have been the expensive instrument – of this achievement. I was to learn from Ruth later that she (and Ninian, who now largely controlled the march of events at Corry) possessed medical authority for the view that this strange fantasy was to be indulged as of therapeutic value in my uncle’s case.
I had happened never to mention to Fish Uncle Rory’s persuasion that a lineal descendant of King Orry (or King Gorse) was entitled to a military establishment; and Fish, although a man quick in the uptake, required some minutes before orientating himself to the situation. Initially, he supposed that we had been conducted into no more than the sort of dusty collection sometimes to be found in provincial museums. When the true explanation came to him he at once engaged my uncle in a rational discussion of the comparative merits (regarded alike from an aesthetic and an active service point of view) of these brain-children of the Glencorry’s and Mr Tinker’s invention. And it seemed to me that Uncle Rory, although full of pride in what he had to display, was not without an underlying sense of embarrassment on the occasion. This particular foible belonged after all to one of his less commonplace phases, and at times like the present when he was being rather sane he seemed to be puzzled by the whole thing. So our lunch-hour, when it arrived, was a relief, and during the meal Fish succeeded in turning the conversation in the direction of cattle, sheep, and freshwater trout. Uncle Rory possessed, as I had discovered long ago, curiously little exact knowledge – so desirable in a landed proprietor – of these lores; and I was constrained to wonder who had taken over from the sexually aberrant and exiled Alec Mountjoy their superintendence at Glencorry. Ninian, no doubt, had arranged things as they ought to be.
Ninian had certainly created the hatcheries, the mystery of which was explained by the time we had arrived at the rice pudding and prunes. Sizable ponds had been created in the glen, fed by the Corry burn, and the trout were one day to effect a marked improvement in the economic viability of a sadly run-down estate. But here too, a therapeutic intention became evident. Uncle Rory had got hold of the cardinal point that if fish are to be farmed successfully they must not while reaching their maturity consume protein to as great a value as they will themselves eventually yield. Uncle Rory now spent much time netting and weighing trout, and parcelling rations of whatever they were fed on. It was arranged that he would provide his Australian guest with insight into this scientific pursuit on the following day.
Fish, I believed, had agreed thus to go off with Uncle Rory on the supposition that I’d myself want either a morning’s confidential chat with Ruth or an opportunity to visit other of my kinsfolk in the neighbourhood. In fact, of course, Fiona’s mother was the only such person there was. I had mixed (or even mixed-up) feelings about Anna, that heroine of the heather, but I couldn’t possibly do other than contact her. So after breakfast I rang up the dower house at Garth and asked for Mrs Petrie. A maidservant, whom I conjectured to be of the resigned all-purposes sort maintained by gentlewomen in reduced circumstances, replied with some satisfaction that Mrs Petrie was out.
