She hung the pot in a wire basket. There at the window in Hugh’s old room. The blinds had gone, a breeze came in from the peaks of Arran, and the whole day long we worked together, hands filled with plaster and soil, like two young newly-weds making their house. Margaret stood on an Ottoman chest. Her face had the light of the day. With one slim hand she traced the flow of the veins on the leaves. I took her other hand in mine, and traced the flow of the veins on her.
‘Why don’t you come away from here, Granny,’ I said.
‘We’ll be grand here,’ she said. ‘We will all be grand.’
I clamped a flower-box to the window’s ledge. You could see for miles. The town and the sea, the cars and the people. We were high as any hill out there. Margaret pressed the soil in about the plants. A many-nodding-headed campanula: its blue flowers ringing the morning, drinking the light.
‘At the nursery there,’ she said, ‘they don’t call this a bluebell. We used to call it that, or a harebell. Now you all call it by the other name, campanula.’
‘Do you think they’ll be able to live this high?’ I said.
‘We can try them,’ she said. ‘I’ll turn them and water them. If they don’t like it here, I’ll take them down to the park, and start them again.’
She stuffed the edges of the box with heather. You could smell sweet muck in the tangle of its needles. I brought her a cup of tea. She blew on it and drank it.
‘There is work to do,’ she said.
She watched me up on the metal steps. My basin of Polyfilla; laying it into the holes. Every punch in the plaster was filled. She sat on the Ottoman and started to cry.
I went over and took both her hands in mine.
‘Come away from here, Granny. You could come down south.’
‘This is my life,’ she said. ‘My life is here.’
‘It doesn’t have to be,’ I said.
‘I know well enough,’ she said. ‘I’m not wanting a sheltered house, or somebody’s back room. And you have your own life, Jamie.’
She put her hands into my hair. The tears came down, but her voice was strong. She whispered to me. She whispered in a long-ago voice.
‘Believe in things, son. Away you go, and believe in things. And live.’
I packed all Hugh’s papers into boxes. I labelled them all for Liverpool. Margaret told me to take every bit: the old plans of Glasgow; architects’ drawings; photographs from the air; his mother’s letters. A bag of old clippings and pamphlets.
‘Take them with you,’ she said. ‘They’ll be good to look back on one day.’
In the cupboard we found a bag of old prints. We wiped off the dust and spread them over the bed. A region of colours, undertones.
‘These were mine when I was a girl,’ said Margaret. ‘Some of them I brought down on the bus from Muir of Ord.’
One of the prints showed a girl in a set of blue beads. Her lips were red, without caution. Her eyes were black. There was green and blue and yellow on her face. Her hair was a stroke of brown paint. The lady seemed like a champion of the world. She looked up at us, as if to say something …
As if to say, ‘I have always been here.’
The print, of course, had never seen paint, never been touched by a brush or a knife, and only the layers of old dust were there. And yet it looked wet, and lay there as fresh as the morning. In another print the background was deepening black. At the dead centre was a red chair. Sat on the chair was a blue jug.
An orange, a lemon.
Underneath, it said: ‘Cadell, “The Red Chair”, circa 1920.’
Margaret looked at the pictures; she caught her own tiny breaths. Much of what she said she said to herself. She pushed back her loose grey hair. She bit her lip like an easy young lassie.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ she said. ‘These are the very best pictures I ever saw. You can’t get over them. Look, Jamie. These are the pictures that brought me south. I wanted to see these things, these modern things.’
‘Let’s put them up,’ I said.
The prints were just loose. We pinned them up with tacks. Ladies in red hats, with teacups. Smears of chimneys and boats. Children at play in a yellow garden. Cogs within cogs, wheels within wheels; a Cubist church in a drop of rain.
‘Oh we thought they were so modern,’ said Margaret.
Some of the prints were of people like machines.
‘My teacher would talk of these,’ said Margaret. ‘These ones.’ She pointed to the black-and-white ones, the abstract lines, the botched machines. ‘These were to show art and science coming together. They are very good. I remember that teacher reading Hugh MacDiarmid in the class. Art was to be modern. Look at that one – pure sense it seemed. Pure sense.’
The one she lifted was called: ‘Gethsemane’. A thirties man in a rough wool suit kneels in a clearing, surrounded with trees. His hair and moustache are clipped to the day. His boater is there by his side. The shadows are long and dark at the trees. There’s a hint of coming wind. The man wears brogues. A group of disciples, like college students, snooze on the verge at his back. In their weakness they sleep. They can’t stay awake for their master’s agony. And just in the distance there’s a smattering of Glasgow.
A church spire. A mound of dwellings. The time of day in a spark of light.
Margaret stood beside me and looked at the picture.
‘Hugh always said your man there was an engineer. He looks like one. An angel in the garden. It looks like Glasgow – like Bellahouston Park.’
‘Why is that one the only one framed?’ I asked.
‘Hugh did that,’ she said. ‘He made it his favourite. And look on the back.’
I turned it over. The back was a scribbled-on board.
‘The Glasgow engineers,’ it said in Hugh’s pencil. ‘Done accordingly.’
Someone else’s writing was underneath. I didn’t know it. And yet I had a memory of those loops and curves, a memory of another person, a memory of me. The words written out were not my words. They were copied out. There was something of play in the way they cavorted across the back of the picture, the way they cartwheeled under the string. The picture was strange, the words were a stranger’s.
‘There are ruined buildings in the world,’ it said, ‘but no ruined stones.’
Margaret hung it above the bed. The bed where Hugh had lain those months. The place where my grandfather had stared in the bloodless dark, the wending trail to the Scottish night, his head-oils sunk in the pillow, and his every breath going out to the world with a story of love.
About the Author
Andrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone’s/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, was published in 2003 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In January of that year Granta named him one of the 'Best of Young British Novelists' and in April he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He lives in London.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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All rights reserved
© Andrew O’Hagan, 1999
The right of Andrew O'Hagan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible m
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ISBN 978–0–571–26834–4
Our Fathers Page 26