Am I Being Followed?

by G. M. Hutchison

  The night at the pub had helped to swipe away some of the mental cobwebs. There hadn’t seemed to be a glimmer of hope before I went out, but now, I felt strongly inclined to review the situation. Something had just occurred to me.

  *

  I had only met my Great Aunt Bethea once, or so I had been told, in my early childhood, although she had always sent me a Christmas card.

  She was important to me more than I was inclined to admit, being the last of my Grandfather’s generation. The family fortune, whatever that actually was, had devolved upon her and although there was apparently no valid reason why this should not have been so, my Aunt Grace had always thought it terrible that absolutely nothing had been passed down to me. She had, however, never suggested that the matter should become a live issue, or that I should give the subject too much thought.

  On the contrary, I had grown up with the idea instilled in me that it was best to forget about Great Aunt Bethea and that side of my family, having been assured by Aunt Grace, on this side, that they deserved no better in view of the hinted at and rather hazy withholding of funds, but mainly because they had no real interest in me, anyway. As far as she was concerned they were bloody relatives, not blood relatives, although she herself would never have put it that way.

  Because of this, Great Aunt Bethea had become a symbol, rather than a person, sometimes little more than a starting-off point on my occasional attempts to clarify, or was it to improve, my social standing in my mind’s eye.

  Unfortunately, describing my Great Aunt as upper middle-class seldom did much more for me than to suggest that I had gone down rather than up in the world. It certainly didn’t make me feel any happier about where I really belonged right now!

  To have failed to visit her over all those years and do so now with the object of borrowing money, didn’t seem right, which brought me to that point in my thinking where I felt that no one but Chopin could help. Reaching into the drawer where the works of the artist lay waiting for me, I took out a CD. I hoped that this man, whose soul must have been similar in texture to my own, would provide me with a means of escape from all this mental and emotional turbulence. It wasn’t that his music didn’t contain these, too, for it could stir up emotions just as strong and vibrant as those which took soldiers into battle, even if it was hard to put a name to them.

  As far as I was concerned, there would be no one better in his sphere than Chopin. What he did was of the highest order. I knew I was by no means the only person in the world who thought this, but I felt as if I was. His music could have been written just for me. In man’s search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, I had often thought fancifully, maybe I had stumbled on something and that being able to receive something from another world on the Chopinistic wavelength was a great privilege. The fact that his music didn’t make such a deep and lasting impression on everyone wasn’t something that bothered me, therefore. You either had a built-in receiver or you didn’t.

  With the piano, alone, as his chosen forte, Chopin’s works could be as majestic and complex as a symphony, while the excellence he achieved in combining melody and harmony was seldom to be equalled, far less surpassed. That the composer Liszt, who came a very close second with me and was also adored by millions, could think as highly of this towering figure as I did surely meant that I wasn’t just responding like a sophisticated fan of Elvis Presley.

  Having managed to separate myself from my problems at that point, ‘those earthly miseries that people drag around with them’, the effect of the nocturne ‘kicked in’ and enabled me to make an out of the body entrance into the higher world of knowledge, exactly as Beethoven had once said it would, of course making no mention of wavelengths and receivers, or even transmitters, and only with a very faint suggestion of a transporter.

  Unfortunately, as others had found before me, I didn’t understand what it was that I was being told by the music. Maybe Beethoven meant higher world of ‘being’ rather than ‘knowledge’. But I didn’t care, for I doubted if such knowledge could be of any practical use anyway, other than for the purpose it had just served. No longer was I completely overwhelmed by my problems, no longer overcome by them. Although they were all still there, Chopin had taken much of the venom out of them.

  I liked this flat and its half-way position between the two cities. The quality of the landscaped gardens gave it an upmarket look, beyond its true value, its only negative feature being the amount of the mortgage. Occasionally, I would catch a glimpse of one of my neighbours as our cars passed each other going in and out of the estate and a wave to and fro, which I took to signify a kind of mutual respect, would reinforce the foolish but not entirely unmerited feeling I had of living among the right kind of people.

  The wrong kind of people, easy enough to recognise, and seldom hard to hear, were better, if at all possible, to be kept away from, I had often concluded, so far to my great relief.

  Although it was good to have moved up in the world, it was unwise to make too much of it. Being common or good class were terms to be wary of, although once embarked on the upward journey there wasn’t much need to think about it too much. Going up, made whatever you were leaving seem less obnoxious than it was when you might, like me, be on the way back down. Moreover, if the people at the lower end of the social scale were not to be looked down on, then it was hard to understand the headlong rush, on the part of so many people, to get away from them. But the fact that whatever group you came from had to be below the one you ended up in was a popular sentiment I could appreciate.

  If I lost this flat then gone were the attractive, well-kept gardens, gone were the right kind of neighbours, and gone was the advantage of living in a secluded estate, where my privacy was ensured and I could stare out, as I was now doing, at a peaceful scene, undisturbed by suspicious looking passers-by or by noisy and arrogant youths wearing baseball caps and re-enacting scenes from their infancy.

  But was it realistic to think that Great Aunt Bethea would help me just because my grandfather had been her brother, or were my hopes no more than a manifestation of that not uncommon psychiatric disorder in which I saw myself as a dispossessed heir to a family fortune? I hoped not.

  Would blood really be thicker than water? Would she really care? Or rather, should she really care? I might be a Grant on my father’s side but what would my mitochondrial DNA say about me? With the so many different maiden names of my mother’s mothers, mothers and their ancestors I could be practically anyone. It was maybe just as well that family trees didn’t go back too far. If they had, for instance in the case of many of the Jews of Eastern European ancestry I had read about in the Collection, they might have found out that they weren’t Jews at all, but descendants of the Khazars, who adopted the Jewish religion in the 8th Century. Since this meant they were much more closely related to the Huns and the Magyars than they were to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, what might eventually be uncovered about my own point of origin, or anyone else’s for that matter? The Book Collection, and genealogy, could sometimes be a mine of a certain kind of useless information, depending on how you looked at it.

  But I hoped that Bethea would take me at face value and treat me like a blood relative rather than a hybrid of some kind and wouldn’t think too badly of me for asking her for a loan.

  I wondered how I should go about it.

  chapter seven

  This was Linda’s world not mine, I thought at first as I took my seat at the back of the Church although, in a certain sense, I felt I had a right to be there. Despite my dislike of church services, I no longer possessed that contemporary mindset which thrived on the often shaky assertions made in best selling books on ancient astronauts, ancient civilisations and a several billion year old universe. I definitely wasn’t one of those people who failed to occupy the empty seats around me merely because they thought the Biblical account of Creation was only a myth while the Theory of Evolution was a scientific fact.
Many of these absentees, according to the Pastor, had been mesmerised into believing that men came from monkeys just because they looked like them and, in spite of the fact, that there was no actual scientific proof of it.

  Just like the masses who had attended the Nazi Party rallies, he would go on, these people were happy for various reasons to soak up any suitable, half-baked ideas that came along, confusing as some evolutionists did for example, the development that takes place within a species with the alleged jump from one species to another and by allowing ‘mutations’ to convince them of how what still hadn’t been proved, after all this time, must have happened. No doubt greatly encouraged by the undoubtedly feeble response of much of the religious establishment, the Pastor had conceded, these unbelievers were only too willing to steep their minds in a teaching such as ‘The Survival of the Fittest’ put forward by Charles Darwin and others in the 19th century, even if they were unlikely to approve of the way it had in recent times been used in Social Darwinism to inspire and justify a long series of racial ‘horrors’ in which millions of innocent people – men, women and children, had been murdered by the Nazis.

  The biblical account of Creation was no more than a fairytale in this scheme of things, the Pastor would lament, not least because the atheistic world view had been adopted by many well-known scientists, too. But the opinion of a scientist wasn’t always a scientific opinion and even a scientific opinion wasn’t the same as a scientific fact, he would point out. These people had no right to declare that the worm slithering out of the primeval swamp was so important and should be given the credit for so much. Their claim that the creature man no longer had any need of a Creator, whose edicts might impede his progress and rob him of his pleasure was, in the final analysis, no more than wishful thinking, which of course might be said of people on both sides of the argument. The deciding factor seeming to be the product of the emotions rather than the scientific facts. Truly it might be said that the heart has its reasons that reason know nothing about, I felt I could add, in my often assumed role these days, as an amateur philosopher.

  And so I felt I had every right to be sitting there in the Church because, after listening to all this and giving it a lot of thought, I was beginning to direct the universal question, ‘How could you believe all that nonsense?’ at the unbelievers as well as the believers. Pastor Mackenzie had made a definite impression on me, even if it was only up to a certain point.

  In another sense, however, I felt I didn’t belong here in the Church. As I rose to my feet to sing the opening hymn, a glance at the first words of the first verse, which I couldn’t identify with, seemed to be apt evidence of it. The words, and having to stand up and sing them, made me feel like someone else, someone I didn’t want to be.

  I didn’t enjoy church music, or even music associated with other religions. Congregations bellowing out hymns on television, choir boys on CD singing like angels, and monks chanting in a minor key, all seemed to me to be missing the mark. Hadn’t someone in The Book Collection once said that people only painted pictures of Christ when they had lost the real and vital impression of him in their hearts, an observation which I felt quite happy about because I could it use an excuse for my wishy-washy outlook.

  To complicate things, although the difference between belief and unbelief didn’t ultimately seem to be an intellectual matter, it was still easy to cast doubts on much of what the Pastor had to say. According to him, only one person of stature in history had claimed to teach the absolute truth, to be one with God, and to prove his divine mission by doing works only God could perform. Wasn’t it highly unlikely, he would ask, that Christ was an imposter. How could he have got away with such an act for so long and on such a scale? And how could someone like him have been trying to deceive people anyway? What about the perfectly consistent holiness of his life? What about the unwavering confidence with which he challenged investigation of his claims and, not least, what about the fact that he staked everything on the result?

  But strongly impressing you with obvious but neglected facts like these was seldom enough for the Pastor. Wasn’t it a vast improbability, too, he would go on, that someone like Christ could have lived a lifelong lie in the avowed interest of the truth, and an even greater improbability that such deception could have brought such blessing to the world?

  Couldn’t Christ have been kidding himself, I had once clumsily suggested. But no. The Pastor had an answer for this too. If Christ was self-deceived it would argue a folly amounting to positive insanity, would it not, while his whole life and character exhibited a calmness, a dignity, an equipoise, and a self-mastery that were utterly inconsistent with this? Or perhaps, even worse, if he was self-deceived surely this would argue a self-ignorance and a self-exaggeration which could only spring from the deepest moral perversion, while the humility of his spirit and the self-denying goodness of his life would make such an assertion incredible.

  But surely all this, the parts I could digest, had been ably refuted in various ways for a long time. Hadn’t Hitler for example, even far outside his adoring immediate circle and outside his own country, according to one of the books in the Collection, been very successful in getting away with his act, too. In 1935 he had taken in the British Foreign Secretary, and the League of Nations Secretary. In 1937 he had taken in Lord Halifax, in 1938 the British Prime Minister, and in addition to these, a procession of distinguished visitors, including even the famous Lloyd George. Perhaps if he had won the war, posterity would have been taken in by him, too. Or was I stretching the comparison a bit too far, and even in a hopelessly inappropriate direction?, I felt obliged to ask myself.

  The Pastor also seemed to have assumed that Christianity had brought great blessing to the world.

  ‘What blessing?’ I knew the unbelievers could ask with ease. ‘I want nothing to do with organised religion in any of its forms,’ they would declare. It leads to nothing but wars, pain, and suffering.’ But they had got that wrong too, according to the Pastor. It was ‘religious’ people who had opposed Christ. And the unbelievers had missed the point about religion in general for where it had been dispensed with altogether, in recent times, a lot of people had become surplus to requirement, too. The Inquisition and the Crusades were bloody, but they weren’t in the same league as the atrocities committed by the atheist Joseph Stalin and others in more recent times.

  After listening to Pastor Mackenzie I now thought that these unbelievers were wrong. But they thought with equal enthusiasm, and often with higher IQs and degrees and doctorates, that they were right, whilst those who genuinely couldn’t make up their minds thought the practices of both believers and unbelievers were merely ‘life-scripts’ rather than absolute truths.

  Intellect certainly wasn’t what decided whether you believed what the Pastor taught or whether you didn’t. It seemed that the unbeliever and the Pastor could both say to each other, prove it, to equal effect.

  *

  Jim Robertson, the man at the dance, knew how to conduct a service. If he was a rival for Linda’s affections then he had a head start on me. He was good at something she liked and, if church people stuck together, as they were inclined to do, what chance did I have?

  As I entered the coffee room, her welcoming smile did little to raise my spirits for I knew it would look just as appealing to most of the people there. Was I sharing the smile with them, or were they sharing the smile with me?

  Her large brown eyes at once caught me in their spell and her well-shaped lips and faultless complexion did the rest. I hoped it was true that not all beautiful women preferred to be friendly with men who were equally as good to look at.

  Was being ‘quite’ good with women, which was the very best light in which I could see myself, going to be enough. Or, as a ‘quite’ man, was I hopelessly out of my class?

  “Where on earth have you been?” she asked me, at once further deflating my self-confidence, as she joined me at the t
able.

  “You mean …?”

  “Since you left.”

  “Nowhere special,” I told her weakly, taken aback by the boldness of her question.

  “Secret?” she asked, mischievously, which wasn’t like her, I felt.

  “No, uneventful,” was all I could manage at first.

  “Boring?”

  “Not boring – unpleasant or rather, unsuccessful.”

  She had taken the initiative, I could see. And worse, her manner was light-hearted, which unfortunately might mean that the matter wasn’t too important to her. But at least she wasn’t talking about the Church.

  “Unsuccessful at what?” she challenged.

  “At what I’ve been doing.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Sorry Linda, I know I’m being a bit vague, “I confessed, looking for a way to slow her down. I had come here to bring things out into the open, but not as quickly as this. Her questions were too direct. Finally I realised what should have been obvious to me from the start. I still owed her an apology.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was leaving,” I said, in a subdued tone.

  “You didn’t really have to,” she answered, avoiding my eyes, awkwardly.

  I struggled to find the best answer to this. Did her uneasiness indicate that her feelings for me had been such that my sudden departure had meant something, after all? Did it indicate that she thought there had been something important between us – or was she uneasy at my suggestion of this, because there hadn’t been?

  “Jim’s a good speaker,” I blurted out pointlessly.

  “A very good speaker,” she agreed, nodding in approval.

  “Is he a close friend?”

  “He certainly is. Well, in a way.”

  This wasn’t clarification – at least not the kind I was looking for.

  “We’re together quite a lot,” she added.