‘Can I tell you something, Noodles?’ he said one day. ‘I never felt like I had much of a self. Not really. Not a proper adult self that gets things done. I got it together as a young guy, and I was somebody then.’
I didn’t miss a beat. ‘You’re still somebody, Tully.’
‘It’s okay. I accept it. I had a better life than I expected. I met Anna. I just have to control the end, and that might be hard.’
He was obviously talking a lot to Fiona. He was more like his sister than he knew, as the sea is sometimes like the sky, and reflective of it. He had grown closer to Fiona and her husband as the years went by and their kids grew up. When he got ill, he reached out for her, initially because she was a nurse, I think, but also for a more profound reason, to do with memory. His sister knew his original vulnerabilities, his aches, the ones before cancer, and, alone with a few of his old friends, she knew the world that had existed before Woodbine’s death, and he craved that sort of familiarity.
Fiona made trips to speak to his doctors. She read all the notes and the charts. I felt she brought decorum, a well-rehearsed tolerance of life’s unfairness, and she wrote to me as if something was still salvageable – from the past, or by God. Fiona and Scott weren’t Bible-bashers, but they were that more persuasive thing, quiet believers. We were never in cahoots, but had distant respect. She used the word ‘dignity’ a lot and began to show me, by a certain silence, that she agreed with her brother’s estimation of how it should end for him. I found myself yearning for Barbara’s advice, though I knew she wasn’t giving advice any more. I made a plan with Tully to go and see her before the wedding. She had no idea what was happening to him.
As the last things fell into place, he was slightly tense, like the guy ropes holding up a marquee. He hated to think he was being exploited by wedding companies. One day, he asked me to join a conference call he and Anna were set to have with a man who ran a limousine company. The man was soon describing white Daimlers with champagne holders in the back. ‘Excuse me,’ Tully said. ‘I don’t mean to be cheeky. But do people actually like this shite?’
‘Well, yes, sir. A car is a very important feature. We’re talking about the happiest day of your life.’
‘The most expensive day of our lives.’
‘Well, not necessarily, sir …’
I could hear Tully revving up. His exhaust was dragging along the ground. ‘It’s all pish,’ he said.
‘Em, thank you very much,’ I interrupted. ‘That’s quite a lot to think about. We’ll get back to you once we’ve considered all the options.’ I zapped the call and then rang Tully on his mobile. ‘What the fuck?’ I said.
‘Well, no wonder. What a capitalist dick. Why would I want to ride around Pollok in a fuckan bridal hearse? Talk about the opiate of the people. These pricks spend their lives selling junk to brainless neds who think they’re on Love Island. I’d sooner walk to the wedding or go on the bus. I’m only doing it for Anna. I’m not being drafted into some hellish Bing Crosby scenario just because these creepy bastards say so.’ I was entertained all morning by that, and then he phoned back in the afternoon. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘coming on all Nutso McNutjob with the limousine guy, but it was good to get it out there. I actually quite liked the idea of the Humvee with the condom machine and the vodka fountain. A man could snuff it quite happily in a vehicle like that.’
17
The wedding was set for a Saturday in November. A few days before, I got the train to Carlisle, picked up a car, and drove across the border. A scattering of white cottages and low cloud brought a powerful notion of home, and then, as I was driving towards the coast, a deer escaped out of the forest and stopped right in front of me, its antlers glowing in the headlights as the snow fell over the Solway Firth. I was on my way to Wigtown. The book festival was over but they’d asked me to do an out-of-season event, to mark the centenary of a First World War battle in which six local men died. They wanted a lecture on the war poets, and what I’d written was stored in my bag.
A song on the stereo – ‘Primitive Painters’ – filled the car as snowflakes stuck to the windscreen. I stopped at a passing place. It was freezing when I got out, there was wet wool snagged on the barbed-wire fence, and you could make out the sea at the far end of the field, through the salt marshes, beyond the trees. This was the place where Robert Burns took treatment at the close of his life. He waded chest-deep in the sea, under the same cold light, and tried to shock himself back to health. In a last letter to his brother, he wrote that he was dangerously ill and not likely to recover.
‘God help my wife and my children.’
Caerlaverock Castle. Bridge of Dee. Gatehouse of Fleet. Carsluith.
The car plashed into Wigtown.
Backstage, the organiser was telling me about the town’s war memorial. ‘We cleaned it up,’ she said. ‘With the hundredth anniversary and all that, we wanted it to look spruce.’ I peeped through the curtain. The hall was a ceilidh of coloured scarves, the floor wet with slush. The people huddled in a hum of low voices. Soviet winters came to mind: the smell of damp scarves and the fog of breath, the fear of unrewarded effort.
I shuffled the pages of my speech. Verse lovers require language that will help them live their lives, and when I stepped out on the stage I could see their eagerness to be reassured, their wish to believe in the war poets as commanders of pity and understanding, pitched in the national key. Looking up at a square of skylight, the snow falling, I felt something go out of me, and all those lyrics by doomed youths and bright officers appeared to melt that evening. When I looked down, the pages in front of me seemed totally blank. This had never happened to me before, and my senses plummeted and I couldn’t think, but I relaxed into the failure. I folded away the notes and began speaking without them. ‘There is another story of this centenary,’ I said, ‘not foreign to poetry, but remote perhaps from the idea that young death is an Olympic sport.’
‘Shame!’ shouted an old man in his medals. He was sitting in the front row and I found myself saying the poets’ disgust didn’t go far enough, there was no glory in any of it, that to die young was always a waste. I felt an ebbing of pride in the hall. They wanted Owen and Sassoon, they wanted passing bells, demented choirs, and bugles calling from sad shires, but the swell in those poems seemed too much. I fashioned a whole new lecture out of the cold, thin air, and argued against sacrifice. I spoke about Kandahar. I told them about the child jihadis who blew themselves up and hated countries whose names they couldn’t pronounce. I spoke of immigrants unable to reach the other coast, and drowning for want of safety or a job. ‘Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,’ I quoted from Housman. ‘But young men think it is, and we were young.’
‘But people die in war!’ the old soldier shouted. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That’s what it’s all about. War and Peace tells us many small things and one big one, that war is a catastrophe.’
‘Every death is a catastrophe, son,’ he said. ‘But it was nice listening to you.’
The gentleman marshalled his sticks and began to move from his seat as the audience softly applauded, more in politeness.
The skylight was covered with snow.
*
‘That was something different,’ a woman said. ‘I came out thinking I’d hear the stuff they taught us at school.’
‘It’s the old poems that stick,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Oh, definitely,’ she said. ‘I had a passion for rote learning.’
Then, when the hall was almost clear, a person stepped forward, holding a glass of whisky. It was Scott, Tully’s tall, optimistic brother-in-law, with Fiona behind him. I’d spoken to her on the phone, but I hadn’t seen her in years, and she had the same vivid face, the same welcoming eyes. I stood up to hug them. ‘We saw it in the paper that you were giving a talk,’ she said, ‘so we drove down the bypass.’
‘A bit of light entertainment for a
Wednesday night,’ I said. They laughed and Scott spun his car key on his finger. ‘Tully would’ve loved the way you tried to turn it away from the whole anniversary-celebration thing.’
Fiona looked at him sharply and linked her arm into his.
‘He would love it,’ she said. ‘He’s still here.’
‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘A hundred per cent.’
At the pub, Scott accepted a pint and a whisky. The place was crowded and a fire was burning in the grate. Fiona had a quiet determination to be heard, as if years had passed in which she’d said too little. She wanted to do the right thing for her brother and that had been her priority. She reminded me she’d been a nurse, just like her mum, and said she was glad she’d been able to speak to Tully about his treatment and its side effects. I knew this already via Anna, but she said they thought his body had reacted well to the first course of chemotherapy. The second would start right after the wedding. ‘It’s really hard. You’ll have noticed the depression.’
‘Will he be able to cope with the weekend?’ I asked. ‘The reception and the guests and the dancing?’
She shrugged and shook her head. ‘He’s determined,’ she said.
‘Yes, he is – always that.’
I could see in Fiona’s expression that she wanted to be careful, to watch her words. Although we hadn’t seen each other, or discussed it during the phone conversations we’d had recently, I felt she knew that Tully had put each of us in a strange position when it came to Anna. ‘We want to support her in every way we can,’ she said in the pub. ‘Whatever she needs, Jimmy.’
‘I think she needs the wedding to be great,’ I said. ‘And I think she needs him to be less secretive about what he wants to do.’
She ignored the second part, for now.
‘The wedding will be great,’ Fiona said. ‘People are coming from everywhere.’
‘Do you know what Tully said to me? He said he wants the wedding on Saturday to show everybody he had a life.’
‘Well, he did. He does. You know that, Jimmy – a great life.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
Above the fire hung faded Edwardian prints. A few drinks came along the bar from people who’d been in the audience, and I raised each glass to eye level, thanking them. The prints were grouped around an old pub mirror. They would have been strongly coloured at one time, and they showed fly-fishermen casting from the banks of the Esk, the Cree, the Nith, or the Annan, men solid and moustachioed. Inside the frames, under each print, were glued what I took to be proper flies, with violet or emerald plumes, their tails curling into hooks. Maybe it was the event I’d just done, or the vague sense of religious belief coming from Fiona and Scott, but I found myself saying something about Graham Greene and his awareness of the struggle to live a complete life. ‘In one of his novels he wrote that people who share your childhood never seem to grow up.’
‘That’s so true,’ said Fiona.
‘That’s the story,’ I said. ‘But with Tully it’s hard. He’s one of those people. We struggle to accept he’s not twenty. Him not being twenty means that none of us is twenty. Him dying means we all are. That’s what gets everybody – he was always first with everything and now he’s showing us how to die.’
‘Absolutely,’ she said.
I thought I would try again.
‘You and I have discussed it before, Fiona. How he wants to end his own life. It seemed to me you got the point of what he was saying.’
She took her time. ‘It’s so difficult,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t really done it properly, hasn’t set it in motion with Anna, and she doesn’t want it. Of course she doesn’t. She wants him to live for as long as possible.’
‘But he’s exercising a right,’ I said, ‘and you’re his next of kin.’
‘Anna will be his next of kin from this weekend,’ Fiona said. ‘She’ll be Tully’s wife and that’s a brilliant thing.’ She looked at the fire. ‘He’s relying on you to sort it out, but it doesn’t really work like that, does it?’
‘They have to make the decision together,’ I said. ‘And at the moment he’s making it a pact between himself and his friends. Well, me.’
‘Just let it play out,’ Scott said.
‘But he’s building his hopes on it, he’s made me promise, and this thing with Dignitas is taking time to organise. I’ve applied to them.’ The insects above the fireplace seemed set to fly as the light danced over them.
‘He has to talk openly to Anna,’ Fiona said. ‘But we can only take instructions from him. That’s the bottom line. I feel the same way about his treatment: if he wants to discuss the details with me first, I won’t be asking for anybody’s permission before I respond. I’ll just do it. It’s his life, and, when it comes to … what he chooses to talk to you about, you’re right to go ahead.’ She pulled out a fresh tissue from her pocket. ‘I think you know where I stand, Jimmy.’
‘But can he do it without her?’
‘I think he just might,’ Fiona said. ‘He’s got you, he’s got us, and for some reason he doesn’t want to ask Anna to speed this on and help him die.’
‘To ask her … the person he’s in love with … it would probably feel like an offence against what they have together,’ I said. ‘But there’s something more – I think the defiance is bringing him back to his best self. He’s taking control of his life. And if you remember Tully in his prime, that was his mission.’
‘Control,’ she said. ‘First of life and then of death.’
Scott nodded. ‘But he can’t make a secret of it, conspiring with an old pal, or with his sister, because he has a responsibility to Anna.’
‘I think we all know that,’ Fiona said. ‘It’s not a conspiracy. We want to help him out of a desperate situation. Anna’s bright, she wants to fight with everything she’s got to keep him alive, and that describes their relationship perfectly. Just as what we’re doing describes ours. Nobody’s wrong.’ She breathed hard. ‘I just hope it doesn’t, you know … A wedding is hard enough without all this.’
She looked away as if she’d momentarily lost faith in everyone and everything. She appeared to wade through her own thoughts, then she turned back to us. ‘You know something? It was quite strange growing up with Tully. I mean, being in a family with him, with the kind of parents we had.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, he was always treated like a foundling in a fairy tale.’
‘Like someone with talent?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t remember it, but Dad saw it, too. He just loved playing football with him when Tully was tiny. He loved the way he ran at the ball, like a born champion, the look on his face. You got the impression life was a little brighter around him. For a wee while, even Dad got brighter. When you all came to the house as boys, I know it was nice for my mum. She always said those were the best years, when Tully was young. But there was a downside, and it involved feeling lonely when the theatre emptied out.’ She checked herself. ‘Here’s me talking about him in the past tense as well.’
‘Being young is a kind of stardom with some people,’ I said.
‘Until they’re no longer young …’ She took another breath. ‘Few people saw how sad and depressed Tully could be.’
‘He was very upset about your dad,’ I said. ‘His first heart attack, the week we went to Manchester … Tully didn’t know how to feel. I saw it a few times, but especially that weekend.’
‘I know it’s an obvious comment to make,’ she said, ‘but I think he’s always been looking to get back to the earliest feeling he had for our parents, before life got complicated. Who isn’t, at the end of the day?’ Fiona’s face showed a willingness to say more, to say everything, but it flickered and then it was gone.
I looked into the fire and saw pictures in the red-hot coals. The whisky warmed my tongue but I said nothing for a moment and looked on as Scott’s eyes filled up. He offered a sentence and the sob that followed it was lost in his tumbler. ‘He’s h
eading for a life everlasting in a world greater than this one.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked.
He smiled and the answer was there. It was there for both of them. They had faith and they believed Tully was going to another world. ‘It’s been my good fortune to share a story with him,’ I said, ‘and that’s all we’ll ever have. There’s no more. Earth is all the heaven we’ll ever know.’
‘No, Jimmy,’ Fiona said with quiet force. ‘You’re totally wrong about that. After all this, we’ll see him again.’
I smiled to show them I greeted their hope with friendship.
Later, when I left them on the street, I felt they had revealed to me in one evening the deep resources of their marriage. Scott kissed his wife’s hand and turned to me, walking backwards.
‘Hey, Jimmy,’ he said, quite drunk. ‘It was magic seeing you. Remember the Gospel …’
‘Right, come on, you,’ Fiona said. ‘Jimmy’s got his bed to go to.’
He turned to her with his finger raised and a sad look on his face, but his words were firm as they walked away.
‘Set your minds on things that are above,’ he said, ‘not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ.’ The town was quiet when they drove off and I stood on my own beside a lighted puddle, watching the snowflakes fall like ashes and melt on the water.
18
The next morning I drove to his old house. Tully had arranged for us to meet there on our way to visiting Barbara. He said he had to pick up some mail and that the house was as good a rendezvous point as anywhere. I arrived a bit early, so I stood looking up at it, the street still dark and empty, and the house, too. From the frosted pavement, it was smaller and greyer than I remembered. Unlit, it was part of another world, but the streetlights at the gable end burned as if nothing in life had changed. Snow lay untouched on the garden and melted and dripped on the wet council fences. I looked up at Tully’s bedroom and thought of a hundred nights, laughing in the glow of the stereo. Standing there, I could fill that black window with the colour of past summers, the garden in flower that July, the sound of lawnmowers, while inside the room a pair of boys made their plans for Manchester.
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