I wanted to leave them to silence. Or to each other’s eyes. I went along the hall and into my room. It all felt like something that was happening outside of time: Hugh dying. The books and pictures stood out on the shelves. The piles of papers too. Monuments there, or stops on the road. Keir Hardie’s face, a mocking tea-brown complexion.
This imperfect room. This crumbling tower.
I had grown angry with weeping. I put pillowcases over the pictures.
Lying on the bed as Margaret’s voice came through. She was singing Hugh down to calmness. I have wondered since then if he asked her to sing. She never told me, and so I’ll never know if he asked for Robert Burns. Nevertheless her voice passed clearly through the wall. Hugh fell unconscious an hour after the song ended. He would never come back.
John Anderson my jo, John,
When we were first aquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonny brow was brent,
But now your brow is bald, John,
Your locks are like the snow,
But blessings on yer frosty pow,
John Anderson my jo.
John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither,
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither,
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson my jo.
The morning of his death I phoned Riccarton, the doctor. During the night the fear had come into me. I didn’t want him to die. Not like that. Not there. He lay splayed, unconscious, on his single bed, a frozen Annick Water morning, the winter light coming into the room the colour of milk.
The radio said that all the boats to the islands were off. A weather-plane had come to grief on the Tarron Rocks. Floodwater was rushing through the council estates of Paisley. The Black Cart had broken its banks. And none of this news was for Hugh; deep in his bed he heard nothing. There was neither blink nor sigh for the goings-on of the world. Only the thinnest breath came from him now. A smile lay over his peace-seeking lips. It was nearly finished.
Riccarton was a sly old bird. Small and contemptuous, he moved at one pace, filled with certainties and cold warnings, neat with advice, and all the while he stroked at the carnaptious whiskers of his beard. He was an Ayrshire doctor to the very bone. A drinking man, a Masonic general. His hair was a prosperous confection: dark brown and sprayed to a fix. And there was something hopeful in what he was wearing: a three-piece tweed, a pair of white trainers. He was one of the New Town’s old-time retainers. He knew everything about everybody. He knew about livers and breast-lumps and mid-life depressions. He knew about unwanted pregnancies and impotent fathers. He knew about heart trouble. He gave Valium to teenagers who’d unsettled themselves at raves. And with all this knowing came a sense of authority. People sensed it, and paid respect to him, a respect that Riccarton came to demand, having himself, over the years, gained an ever-deepening sense of his own importance. This was true of Riccarton when I was a boy. I could see it was even truer now. Margaret had told me the doctor now lived in a Victorian mansion in Ayr. He was married to a woman who taught the piano. They had a girl at the University of St Andrew’s. Riccarton drove around the town in one of those jeeps. He would go, said Margaret, ‘with the windows down, playing concertos at full pelt’.
‘Hello, Doctor,’ I found myself saying. It was good of you to come here so quickly.’
I’m rather content to be here,’ he said, ‘the cold being what it is. And you, James. Where on earth have you been hiding? I have it on the best authority that you’re something of a blaze in the southern parts.’
Margaret sniffed.
‘Actually,’ he said. ‘My Jennifer is one of your kind. She is bent on going ahead to Bristol, to carry on her research, you see.’
‘And Mrs Riccarton?’ I said.
‘Oh much as ever,’ he said. ‘In love with the back room and the garden. I’m afraid it’s more than I can manage to tear her away. We have girls in to do the cleaning, and I’m afraid it only adds to Sylvia’s load. She spends a great deal of her time now cleaning after them, you see.’
Margaret soon brought him some tea, with biscuits on a plate.
‘Very kind, Margaret,’ he said.
He stood in the hall. He dipped one of the biscuits into the tea and ate it in one. Then he drank the whole cup down.
‘You’ll remember how very pretty our town used to be,’ he said to me. ‘Very lovely, with the old shops, and fields, and so on. But now! I swear it. There are incomers – not yourselves, of course – but incomers, the Glasgow overspill, good Jesus, they’ve played the bigger part in turning us into a jungle. It’s all the drugs and so on. Do you know, James? Gone are the days when I could carry a prescription pad. Now it is only one prescription at a time. The addicts were robbing us. Three times I was mugged in my car. For the pad. Now it’s just one at a time. Then back to the surgery. You wouldn’t believe that now, would you? Of this town? I don’t dare to guess at where it will all end.’
I looked over at Margaret. Something in her face told me she had suffered this many times before. I felt my back stiffening.
‘Doctor Riccarton,’ I said, ‘could you go into the room and see my grandfather?’
He lifted another biscuit off the plate.
‘Now tell me, James,’ he said, ‘has he been showing signs of anxiety? You know. His name in the paper and so on. I, for one, can’t believe …’
I took the biscuit out of his hand and chucked it at the table.
‘He’s fucking unconscious in there,’ I said. ‘Go and look at him.’
The expression on Riccarton’s face suggested a suspicion had been confirmed. He stroked at his beard for a second. Then he lifted his case and went down the hall. We followed him. We could see him looking up at the holes in the walls as he lifted my grandfather’s wrist. He put a stethoscope to his chest. Then he turned to face us.
I’m sure you will object to this,’ he said, ‘but in my opinion this is not a fit place for Mr Bawn to die. And he will die soon. If you know anything about this building, you will know that the lifts are not always working. There is one lift working now. I can’t guarantee it will be working tomorrow. You might find the prospect of having your grandfather carried down these stairs in a chair bearable. I am bound to tell you I do not. Mr Bawn, I need hardly tell you, is a man of considerable dignity, and I would not leave him here. In any case he has long been in need of oxygen. I leave it to you.’
And with that – with a look of complete regret on his face – he packed his things away and moved to the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him.
‘We are all sorry, James.’
When he had closed the front door I took Margaret in my arms. ‘It’s what he wanted,’ she whispered.
‘But it’s not what we want,’ I said.
Riccarton was right. One of the faults of the high flats was the lifts. They couldn’t be relied upon; and, even when they were working, you couldn’t fit a coffin in them. It was a design fault: you couldn’t fit a coffin. Of all the people to go down the stairs in a chair! No. I wouldn’t allow it.
Margaret nodded with her eyes closed and her head down. I went out to the landing. Riccarton was waiting for the lift to come. Our eyes locked in that dismal space.
‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘would you send us someone to take him.’
I could hear the bleep as the lift door closed. He was using his phone to call the ambulance.
*
The Bawns had things in common. Each of us was a good liar. Each could inspire love, and yet feel unloved. Each of us ran away. We never found ourselves comfortably at home. Home was a problem for all of us. We spoke too much to ourselves, and not enough to other people. The only friends Hugh’s father ever had were the ones he died beside at Ypres. Hugh had heroes in place of friends. He had been easy to li
ke but difficult to know. No one had ever been allowed to help him. We were all a bit like that. I would later be shocked to find how lonely my father was inside his own life. It was years since anyone had shared a meal with him.
The men in our family had tired hearts. And they all had them young. I would often hope that the similarities had come to an end with me. I had broken the mould. What if my spirit could be large, like theirs, but not imprisoned, not lying poisoned at the centre of my days? I thought of how I might be different.
You’re different, Jamie, and that will bring its own troubles.
I’d believed in that too much. I thought I could move in the world of all possible lights, and breathe, breathe, breathe.
I went out to college to be smarter than them. I went to the gym to be stronger. I was not much different from Dr Riccarton. And, all in all, from moment to moment, I was not much different from the Bawns before me. I saw it most in our native duplicity.
Thomas Bawn
An angel of the fields, a man of fathomless serenity.
But he guzzled from bottles and broke his own heart.
He died for a country he didn’t understand.
Hugh Bawn
A master builder: one of the higher citizens,
who worked like a Trojan,
who gave life to people’s hopes, a social engineer,
a man who carried on his mother’s good work,
who knew the names of trees, the history of bells,
who altered the landscape of the place that he loved.
Lost himself in a welter of ambitions, unsafe buildings,
cheaper materials; he cooked the books to make more blocks.
Robert Bawn
An alcoholic, the kind that rages and mourns.
He never meant well, and he never did well.
And yet he found himself trying.
Hugh lay there dead in the hospital ward. Screens around us. His whole life passed in front of me; the lives of his fathers, his sons.
The hands moved slowly on the clock.
Hugh’s great second self, the one we had tried to protect him from: a truth-maker who turned his back on the truth; a high-minded pioneer who degraded his vision for the sake of expedience. He died without too much honour on his side. But he was peaceful now. And we knew more of him than that; we knew better.
Hugh travelled across my mind as I watched him lying dead. What would become of us all? I thought of my father lost in the wilderness. I thought of me. And Margaret sat on the other side. She laid down her head on her husband’s chest, and wept for mercy in the cup of his hand.
From the hour of his death Margaret became like the wife in one of her songs. She was almost mad with grief. She was soundless for all that. But her thoughts were racing mad. Confronted at last with that unyielding corpse, the electrical hum of the Luther Ward, my granny Margaret was gone from the world to a better place we know. She grasped at the only comfort she could trust, a comfort that lasted like a dwam for weeks, and she was lost for a time, at the funeral, and after. It was the comfort of her childhood; the solace of the ballads. I knew all the signs and the talk of them. And I knew Margaret better than she knew. Those old words had seen her through a year or two of pain. They would do for some time yet. And there was nothing for me to say then. I had just to watch over her. We had passed all need of ordinary speaking.
Meanwhile she consorted with the saints. Her white lips moved in holy supplication. There was a soft murmur to her voice, as a hush through the trees on Mount Olives. The clock on the wall kept firm. We could hear the seconds going off. And long hours she sat with her dampened beads. Her face flushed with its need of angels. And Hugh’s cold blood sank low in its vessels.
The priest had come and gone. Margaret sent for him in the afternoon. As my granny made ready with verses and prayers, with the time-dark customs she needed to live, an ordained man, a man I once knew, went round about my granda with oils and beliefs. Into the late hours we sat with our dead idol. The ward was dim. They let us be with him much of the night. We sat there in shadows. Old men slept around us. Margaret’s eyes glistened on in the dark. We had come to rest with our final feelings. Time grew still: a hope of salvation passed into the air, and out to the wards that smelled of soap.
Margaret went to sleep on his hands. The thought came back of the two as young lovers. Sailing up the Clyde with that smell in her hair. Her face coloured up like one of Cadell’s. The laughter of the typing pool. The boys and their beers. Some long-ago kiss on the promenade at Rothesay. And the immense future out in front. Hugh’s lovable plans for the way of the world. His modern ideas. The homes they would build together. The homes they would build.
And still I could see my grandparents, their arms entangled by a rock-pool, enjoying my knowledge of this or that shell, finding a plate in my small, green book. Up among the Carrick Hills I could see them too, holding hands, the grass full of stories, and the druid forts that told us stories. That was the sort of love they had: it drew out the history in one another; it made a pact with the land. They wanted to know about the world they loved in. They had wanted to see themselves clearly there. And knowing what they did, and being who they were, they wanted to break the mirror they held. They followed the seasons with avid eyes. They believed in renewal and progress. It was all of a piece with them. History and nature had offered its lessons: make it all new; bring on the future; revolve the world again and again. Feel the rain in the hills over Galston.
All of this grew from their love of each other.
My heart felt sorry for them. The two young people they had been.
I placed my hand among the grey curlicues of Hugh’s fallen chest. Nothing lived there now. An empty house. The pulse had gone from his small chambers. Yet I couldn’t believe it was so. Not just yet. The power that had lived there. It was not easy to deal with Hugh’s sudden absence. He had been too much in the world for that. His body was grave to a hundred notions. What could remain of his long life’s burning?
He lay motionless.
There was nothing of life any more. His face was strange. He’d gone into the dark with a look of dispute.
He’s an old man … You should try and not let it get to you so much. Hugh’s had a good life …
The corpse was a shadow of Hugh Bawn; it left us with none of him. And so, as the night wore on, the person in the bed grew to seem like someone never here, and never loud, or moved to action, and never loved by anyone. It seemed like a strange new collection of bones. No signature marks on this pointless cadaver. No record. The clock came louder. The story in the bed was well past the telling.
The night takes over your thoughts.
Hugh became an animal on his deathbed. A cold dead animal. A bird in the road with its feathers raised in shock. A liquid frog in its bed of long grass. A mouse. I once saw a tortoise dead on its back. He looked like that. Something sinister had come of his flesh. He was ominous. Like some small vertebrate that lived outside. I knew he would never speak words again. But in the early hours I had thought he might scratch at the air, or bristle, or scamper, or mew from the depths of his faraway pain. I thought he might hiss. Or bray.
Nothing happened. He lay soundless. A skinful of animal fibres, a dead-eyed old mule, or the last of some mortified rabbit, poor fleshly creatures now just like him.
Everything goes to nothing in the end. And just like this, under the moon.
I dreamed with my eyes open in the black. I dreamed I could hear his blood curdle. The noises of retreat. Every fluid of the old man was seeping away. Or going mineralhard again. His tears dried up. His semen atrophied. The saliva in his mouth grew thick and congealed. His stomach shrank to a stone. The cowl of his brain was a small arid bag. He was dead.
What was it about that room, making me think I could hear those noises?
Outside the curtains, oxygen oozed through sterilised tubes, sore men coughed and snored, the elevators shinned up their metal ropes, the nurses giggled on t
heir lighted island. And here lay Hugh’s stiffening corpse. The geology of death asserting itself. Time and pressure having their day
Carbon fruit. Mineral-hard.
I put my head on the blanket and felt him gone. This was no one now that I could know. He was dead.
I pictured his soul going out in the country. Over the rivers. Around the towers. Sloshing through puddles and pools of algae; ringing the bell of Alloway Kirk.
His rapid feet on the frozen soil; the fields in Mauchline and Ochiltree. He strolled in the harbours of Troon and Saltcoats.
I saw him over the Irish Sea, a smile about him; and then stopped for a second, or stopped for all time, with whisky and bread, on the graves of the people who gave him his name. I saw him bow to an ugly Virgin. All dispute gone from his face. I saw him raining bricks and mortar on the people of Clydebank. I saw him running up the Necropolis hill with a tattered flag of Scotland. His young hair and this old flag tearing away at the back of him. I saw him lying in the grass with a set-square and pencil. He had boy’s legs. He had child’s eyes. And sat there beside him was good Mr Wheatley. I saw them both. They looked on the city. They sat on these piles of books. The land was all shapes. The man and the boy were there. I saw them there, and they sat on the grass, and the day was white, and they disappeared.
The sky in the morning was warning-red.
I stood at the sliding doors of Crosshouse Hospital, my arm around my grandmother. The hedges and sky went on for miles. The Kilmarnock bus came through the trees with its tiers of golden light. We watched the people getting off. Quiet young men in plasters. Upset girls.
Margaret linked her arm through mine and we walked to the zebra-crossing. The car park was acres long. Hundreds of cars there, under the open sky.
‘All these cars look the same,’ said Margaret.
*
Hugh’s body was laid out in the old-fashioned way. The woman came with candles and incense and cloths. My granny presided, her antique words sounding grave and absurd. To me Hugh lay in his coffin. To my granny, and to the strange woman with the mortician’s eyes, my granda was ‘chested in the death hamper’.
Our Fathers Page 21