My father, however, although in general uninterested in his family connections, had a very high regard, as well as deep affection, for Uncle Norman. Years afterwards, I was to learn from family papers that, when himself still extremely poor, he had supported his brother during his theological studies with money earned by anonymous and demeaning labours as a commercial artist. He must have thought his efforts amply rewarded, since he judged it a great thing to become a minister. And although before his death he had pictures hanging in many of the great galleries of the world (and incidentally become, to his considerable amusement, Sir Lachlan Pattullo), he never had any doubt about who was the real credit to the family. My own pride in my father (which I hope appears) was to some extent a reflex of his pride in Norman.
It was this distinguished connection that made my father, somewhat surprisingly, a church-goer and one who insisted on church-going children. We weren’t, indeed, haled off to worship every week, but our attendance in our parish church was sufficiently regular to have satisfied Uncle Norman himself that we were not ‘sitten-up’ − an expression applicable in Aberdeenshire, if not in Edinburgh, to those who are culpably neglectful of their religious duties. When we stayed away the fact was bound to be remarked, since we rented our own pew, with my father’s name on a card set in a little metal frame by way of intimation that none but Pattullos might lawfully worship there. This curiosity of the devotional life lingered longer, I believe, in Scotland than in England.
My mother had no objection to the Established Church of Scotland, and a considerable fondness for showing off her handsome husband and, as she conceived them, handsome sons. So she always came with us, taking satisfaction in the hymns and metrical psalms (which she sang loudly and erratically), and spending the sermon-time, which could be inordinately long, in studying the hats of the well-dressed women who frequented our rather fashionable conventicle.
Whether Ninian ever believed a word that we were told in church I don’t know. I certainly did not. It all seemed the greatest nonsense to me: for the most part merely boring, but occasionally − as in the lugubrious hymning of Gethsemane and Calvary and the Crucifixion which led up to the Lord’s Supper − revolting as well. For a time, indeed, the star preachers of the Scottish Kirk did occasionally sweep me away with a torrential and essentially Gaelic eloquence which seemed endlessly at their command. Such a flow of words, and words on top of words, was exhilarating. But when I came to listen more analytically it was revealed to me that no one thing they said hitched intelligibly on to another. The preachers were in an advanced stage of what I was one day to think of as Junkin’s Disease.
The girl whom I knew to be called Janet Finlay sat in the pew behind ours. It was, in fact, the Finlay pew, with a card saying Professor Alasdair Finlay at the end of it. Janet sat invariably in the place immediately behind what was equally invariably mine − so that Ninian, sitting next to me, was in a marginally better position to catch a glimpse of her than I was. But it wasn’t easy for him either. Looking round in church was perfectly permissible. (As our pew was in a species of transept, my mother could thus rake the whole nave with unviolated propriety.) But turning round − attempting to rotate one’s head through 18o° in order to remedy the defect of not having eyes in the back of it − was bad manners.
Both Ninian and I must several times have been in the same room as Janet, but I doubt whether either of us had ever spoken to her. Already some way behind us was that phase of development in which children’s parties give place to young people’s dances, and to dances we didn’t much go − nor were we much invited to them, since our social contacts, although variously enlarging themselves, were as a matter of family conditions and assumptions apart from such things. Janet must have been about sixteen before we were really aware of her, and it was Ninian who admitted being aware of her first.
‘She’s very beautiful,’ he told me − gravely, dispassionately, and with what happened to be an unjustified sense that my attention had to be directed to the circumstance. ‘Those Finlays come from Skye, but it’s not a Highland beauty at all. Ancient Skyros would be nearer the mark. It was where Achilles hid among the women − and I expect he knew what he was about.’
‘So you’ll be going after her?’ I asked − at once sarcastically and with a feeling less easily identifiable than the diffused jealousy Ninian could commonly rouse in me. But I knew that the question was an idle one. Ninian clearly felt that Janet was inadmissibly young for him. He had a strict sense of honour about his conquests. But there was something beyond this. He was now, while awaiting call-up, at the university studying law. It was already apparent, to the confounding of our headmaster’s predictions, that he was going to sweep the board clear of every prize and honour available to him. Emotionally − sexually, rather − he had in consequence dropped into a curious period of belated latency; and this was to continue until, a few years later, he startled us by getting married. He was going to be the youngest Senator of the College of Justice that the records of the Scottish bench disclose − and that was that.
So it was now I who was alert to − who actually trembled at the sight of − Janet Finlay, the girl who merited a Homeric hero as her lover. This made it unfair that every Sunday (for I had begun to urge my parents to unremitting piety) it was Ninian who had that slightly superior opportunity to catch her in what was no more than a connoisseur’s glance. I was myself pretty well confined to the few moments of arrival and departure. One didn’t kneel in our church (it would have been regarded as a papistical action) but at the end of the service one did bury one’s nose and pray. One then stood up, and while the congregation was skailing (which would have been Uncle Norman’s word) one was free to stare around as one chose. As there was a gallery at the back of our transept, I could always turn round as if to look up at it and identify acquaintances whom I might later join outside. But the timing of this was tricky; I couldn’t prolong the stance, and if I embarked on it too soon Janet’s prayers might still be continuing when it was necessary to abandon it, so that I’d glimpse nothing but the top of her hat.
All this must seem an absurd prelude to what was to be a serious matter. I was physically clumsy in these manoeuvres in a fashion that must have represented an externalising of interior confusion. I was in love. I was in love with a girl, not a snub-nosed boy − and, moreover, with a girl I had never spoken to. I didn’t really know this then. But Ninian knew it. He never teased me about Janet Finlay; rather he preserved what might be called a holy silence in face of the whole phenomenon. For a long time I was to draw comfort from this, the severity of my brother’s attitude somehow validating what was going on.
It will be evident that what was going on was as yet no sort of spiritual communion. I have had occasion to speak of Charles Atlas’s young wife as so pretty that I hoped to be placed beside her at Mrs Pococke’s luncheon-table; of Mrs Pococke herself as having been a notably handsome woman in her prime; of Mabel Bedworth as owning a soft motility of feature making for beauty. This does no more than distinguish me as a man who notices such things; and these several instances are of little consequence. Janet Finlay was beauty’s self, and my love assuredly began as eye-love of the sheerest sort. It was a long time before it so much as occurred to me that she must have a voice. This may have been because of the circumstances of our first contiguity; we were two devout (or supposedly devout) young people, comporting ourselves properly at church. But Janet seemed to take this decorum to an extreme. I never detected her as murmuring a word either to her father on her left or to her mother on her right. Nor did she (and it might have struck me that this was odd) either sing the hymns and psalms or audibly repeat the Lord’s Prayer.
She stopped coming to church. For a couple of Sundays I was disappointed but not alarmed. Then I began to wonder whether she was ill, or had suffered an accident. I lacked the courage − and, indeed, in that rather stiff society, the title − to make a bold inquiry of her mother. My father treated Professor Finlay as a stran
ger, and I had no idea whether they had ever met; it was quite probable that they had, but that my father took as poor a view of Janet’s father as he did of that other professor of the university, Ranald McKechnie’s.
Then a dreadful thought came to me. Totally overestimating any effect I could have made on Janet, and remembering all my clumsy goggling at her, all those gapings up at the gallery with the corner of my eye elsewhere, all those twists and turns so ineffectively dissimulating my fascination: suddenly remembering these things, I decided that I had offended her, and that this was why she was staying away. When our eyes had met, she had dropped hers − not before giving me a steady glance, and certainly with nothing of the suggestion which somewhat similar behaviour on Mrs Bedworth’s part was to occasion so long afterwards. But at least the action had been quite definite enough to make it clear that she had no disposition to exchange meaningful looks with a strange young man. My agony upon thus imagining that I had driven her away was extreme. I even hinted the possibility to Ninian.
‘Jesus, Dunkie! Why should she go to the place?’ Ninian’s reaction was robust and immediate. ‘Why should we? I’m blessed if I know.’
I knew why I went. I also knew one reason, again not wholly edifying, why Ninian went: if he was going to make his way in our native city a good many wise conformities would be required of him. But it was, furthermore, a matter of being dutiful children, or at least of our having for our father an immense respect which made us decently amenable to those Sunday kilts (not that we hadn’t by now exchanged them for honest grown-up trousers) and devastated hours. If my father, incidentally, had noticed my behaviour he made no reference to it; and he certainly couldn’t have regarded as censurable any impulse to contemplate a beautiful woman − or beautiful landscape, which he would have thought of as much the same thing. My mother did notice, and was a little tiresome as a result. She was given to the spinning of facile romance, and would have dearly liked to see me standing up in a ballroom with such a girl as Janet Finlay and treading a measure like young Lochinvar. She was even not above regarding Janet’s absence from the Finlay pew as a matter of a maiden’s coy retreat from her swain.
And then I ran into Janet in the public library on George IV Bridge.
I literally ran into her, having dashed into the building for some urgent purpose which I now forget. A book she was carrying went to the ground, and I had picked it up and apologised before there dawned on me the apocalyptic thing that had happened. I also recognised the book. It was The Plumed Serpent. Janet appeared to be on her way to return it to the desk.
‘Did you like it?’ I asked.
This was an eternal moment, for I had done something I couldn’t − until the words were spoken − have believed myself capable of. And it had never occurred to me that Janet Finlay might read books.
‘No, I didn’t!’ Janet replied instantly, and with a vehemence apparently unconnected with any just sense of outrage she might have felt at being addressed by me. ‘That woman Kate. She watches her husband murdering people, and their blood being sprinkled on a sacred fire. And it makes her “uneasy”. Just that! Not mad with horror, or crazed with some daft religious ecstasy. “Uneasy” − and “gloomy” too. I’d be gloomy! But I suppose it’s all deeply true.’
‘I don’t think it’s anything of the sort.’ Although my admiration for Lawrence at that time was fathomless, I felt it should be made known to Janet that a line has sometimes to be drawn in him. If she thought I was necessarily, because a man, at all like Don Cipriano or Don Ramon, I just didn’t see how she could be made to put up with me.
‘And all that idiotic inventing of a new religion’
‘It’s meant to be the reviving of an old one.’
‘I suppose so, but it comes to the same thing. One religion is quite enough, it seems to me, without thinking up other ones.’
‘Is that why you don’t come to church any longer ….?’
‘Yes, it is. I’ve said I won’t and I won’t. Not if they beat me.’
‘But they wouldn’t do that!’ I cried, horrified although I knew perfectly well that university professors don’t tan their daughters.
‘No − but they can be beastly.’ Janet suddenly looked at me round-eyed. It was only now that she recognised me. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude about your belief in Jesus − that sort of thing.’
‘I haven’t any belief in Jesus.’ I was now wildly excited, and I had said this so loudly that a couple of women nearby turned and looked at me disapprovingly.
‘Then why do you go to church, and listen to all that shite about rising again on the third day?’
‘I say, have you tried The Man Who Died?’ It seemed to me that this was a brilliant diversion. ‘It’s smashing Lawrence. Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can’t stand the old crowd any more − so cuts out.’ I was particularly pleased with myself for thus being able to quote verbatim from a letter. ‘So he goes—‘
‘No, I haven’t. And you’re not answering my question.’
‘But I’d like to. Only it will take a little time. Look − will you come and have tea somewhere?’
I had again uttered unbelievable words. Had I known Janet well, I might have said, with reasonable Edinburgh propriety, ‘Can you come home with me to tea?’ But the notion of a schoolboy entertaining a schoolgirl in a teashop was (or so I imagined) an extremely daring one. I was in my last term at school, but I was dressed, except for long trousers, exactly as I had been dressed when seven or eight: in a blazer and cap with bold identifying badges of a spuriously heraldic order − although the cap, indeed, I tended to keep in my pocket. Janet, who was of course younger, conformed to the same general pattern − except that hers was a straw boater with a hideously striped ribbon, impossible to conceal anywhere. I think I had a weird idea that we might be turned away from a teashop just as we should be from a pub.
‘Are you the painter’s son?’
‘You’re not answering my question, Janet Finlay. But, yes, I’m Lachlan Pattullo’s son. My name’s Duncan. I’m called Dunkie.’
‘Dunkie?’ It sounded as if Janet was amused. ‘Yes, let’s have tea.’ She frowned, since this left a necessary point unsettled. ‘Nobody has ever invited me out to tea before. What fun!’
She meant, I supposed, that no young man had done so. I felt panic − partly because I hadn’t stopped to ask myself if I had more than a couple of shillings in the world. I slipped a hand cautiously into a trouser-pocket; there were half a dozen coins, and an exploring thumb-nail revealed them as having milled edges; this meant that I was rich enough for anything. But we were not in very good teashop territory. Those nearby were poky places, and might give, I felt, a clandestine flavour to the occasion. I wasn’t going to have that − for hadn’t I something to display with which I could have walked proudly into the Palace of Holyroodhouse itself? (Moreover, Oxford was ahead of me, where I was to be John Ruskin Scholar − and, no doubt, President of the Union, and everything else as well.)
‘We’ll take the bus down to Princes Street,’ I said with decision.
So we sat on a balcony in mild summer sunshine, with the Castle in front of us, and around us prosperous gossiping women eating oatcakes and drop-scones. I recklessly hoped that my headmaster would turn up at the next table, or at least one of my schoolfellows in attendance on his mother. Not that this sort of self-consciousness lasted long. I became absorbed in the girl beside me.
It would have been a reasonable bet on a wise person’s part that what we were in for was an hour’s constraint and anticlimax. But nothing of the sort happened. The eternal-moment effect went on. I wasn’t to know that, on rare visits to Edinburgh years ahead, I should be unable to look up at this balcony without a stab of pain; should be glad, even, when it disappeared as a result of some hideous developing of the site.
That we talked very coherently about religious faith and doubt is improbable. We were too much children of our time for such matter
s to have real import for us. We were also children suddenly launched upon a strange ocean. The surge and swell of it made me deliriously happy. I didn’t only believe that I was in love with Janet Finlay. I also believed that she was going to be in love with me. I wasn’t entirely wrong.
But lying awake that night, I gave myself all sorts of cautions, armoured myself in all sorts of second thoughts. For I wasn’t only wary of happiness; I was afraid of it. This was not from any adult knowledge that it is the most vulnerable of human conditions, but rather from a feeling which could fitly have been examined by Janet and myself in the course of any theological discussion we did have. It must have been as an inheritance from my Calvinist forebears that what I had often felt, but now felt more strongly than ever before, came to me. That sexual pleasure pursued as an end in itself is sinful was something I was one day going to believe Tony Mumford had been taught at Downside. I think it may be not untrue, and that a wise humanism can say something very like it. But what lurked in me − almost as if I had been my uncle Norman’s son and not my father’s − was a sense that all pleasure, that happiness of any sort, speaks of danger, ought to be treated as a warning that one is approaching at least the antechamber of Auld Nick. I couldn’t remotely have articulated this evil doctrine, and it would be misleading to suggest that it had more than a dim and ghostly existence in recesses of my mind. So it was much more another kind of magic that prompted some of my thinking before I went to sleep: the kind of magic that says things won’t happen if one forces oneself to expect them to happen. I had embarked, I told myself, on a boy-and-girl affair of the kind that comes to nothing, that one lives to laugh at, that is followed by others of the same sort, that is just part of the ignominy of growing up. Ninian had gone through several such episodes. And although he had been without the temperament to treat them lightly or see them as ephemeral, ephemeral they had been in the end. Janet and I were just kids, and we hadn’t a chance. And it seemed to me that this necessitated my being very pure of heart in my love for her.
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