Memory and Straw

by Memory

Rachel persuaded him to confront things, even by silence. And she persuaded him by doing so herself, for it was part of her nature. Of her being.

  She always remembered how shocked she’d been when her father told a lie right in front of her. They were at the park when they heard the sweet tinkling of ‘Greensleeves’ coming from an ice-cream cart which had stopped opposite the park. Immediately scores of children ran over to it.

  ‘It’s almost dinner time,’ her dad said. Then he smiled, took her hand and joined the queue.

  He bought four large cones.

  ‘Two for you. And two for me,’ he said.

  ‘One for each hand,’ she said.

  They walked homewards, licking the ice-creams.

  They could smell dinner as soon as they entered the garden gate. A stew. Her mum opened the door and looked at them. The speck of vanilla on Rachel’s lips gave the game away.

  ‘Have you been eating something?’

  ‘No,’ her dad answered. ‘She hit herself on the swing and I put a bit of cream on it at the chemist’s.’

  And her mum had believed him. Or seemed to believe him. Or believed in him. Though bit by bit Rachel began to realise that he would sometimes say one thing and do another, or do one thing and say another. It was never anything major: just that he’d eaten something when he hadn’t, that he hadn’t put sugar in his tea when he had, that he’d taken the dog out for a walk when he hadn’t. And she sensed that every little lie was like breaking a twig and that it diminished the forest. Trust. That was it, she supposed.

  For herself, she decided to experiment by never telling a lie. Even to herself. She had no idea how difficult it would be, but she stayed with it. How much easier it was to say that you weren’t tired and stay up an hour later, and how difficult it was to confess that you were exhausted and should go to bed, even though it was such a beautiful summer’s evening with the sun streaming in through the window, the rays dancing on the bedcover. How painful it was to lie there trying to fall asleep and listen to the other children playing outside, ring a ring o roses a pocket full of posies atishoo atishoo we all fall down. Horsey horsey don’t you stop, just let your feet go clippety-clop. And then it was suddenly morning, with the birds singing in the trees. But bit by bit she claimed the habit and it became second nature. The pain was always worth it, in the end. When the window was broken by a chuckie-stone at the school she confessed, though no-one had seen her flinging the stone. At a cat. Which moved so quickly that the stone hurtled through the void into the glass. So she was doubly punished by the Headteacher. First for flinging a stone at a poor defenceless cat, then for breaking a window.

  The principle of truth-telling became so fundamental to her that she could sense untruth a mile away. For lies are always recognised by knowing the truth in the first place. She could hear a twig snap in the far distance. And Magnus was as error-prone as the next man.

  ‘We’ll meet at five o’clock then?’ she’d ask, and he’d say, ‘Aye,’ and then turn up at quarter-past five and she’d look at him.

  ‘Sorry – the bus was late,’ he said.

  But then he’d tell the truth.

  ‘I just forgot. It was five o’clock when I remembered.’

  And truth-telling became a delight to him too. Like putting on a better coat. Which could have been a chore. The constant pressure to conform, to align, to match the prevailing wind. What did five minutes here or there matter? What did it really matter if he’d come by train or by bus, walking or running? What did it matter that the salmon Lord Berkshire had caught was 8lb, not 28lb as he’d claimed? Except that it seeped, like water in the thatch, drip, drip, drip, and before you knew it the rafters under the thatch were rotten and the house leaking and everyone damp and coughing, and who had money to pay for a doctor?

  And there were bigger things. He courted Rachel for two years before they were married, and during that time travelled between Berkshire and the Lake District when he could. They were glorious, snatched moments: out walking by Ambleside, hiring a small boat for the day and fishing on Windermere, going on an excursion out to the other market towns where they’d browse the shops. A beautiful little draper’s shop in Keswick where they bought embroidered handkerchiefs for each other, with the tailor stitching their twined initials on the corner of each handkerchief: MMDRSG. Magnus MacDonell Rachel Sarah Gilbank.

  He began to speak things to Rachel. Things that he didn’t know he wanted to say, or could say. None of them were earth-shattering or shocking: just things that mattered because they’d been unspoken. It was fine to be tender. The softer weather helped, for it was less harsh and unyielding. You could risk saying that it might be a fine day tomorrow because even if it rained it wouldn’t really matter, and it wouldn’t last all day. It wouldn’t be a gale force storm. You could be kind without fearing the consequences.

  ‘What a beautiful scarf,’ he’d say, not because it was the thing he ought to say, but because as she came walking up to him her chiffon scarf got caught in the wind and he could see the mauve and purple colours sailing in the breeze. He’d once seen a yacht in the Moray Firth with these colours on her sails. And as they kissed, ‘What gorgeous perfume. What is it?’

  Like Mrs Gould, he began to nurture delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and the suggestion of universal comprehension. He learned different quarters to the year: Lammas and St Peter’s Day and Candlemas and St James’s Day, rather than the old dispensations of Brighde and Beltane and Martinmas and Michaelmas. He learned to plant at different time. The appropriate time down here was St Barnabas’s Day. The 22nd of June. He learned the old rhyme as a new guide: Allus plant spuds on Barnaby-bright, longest of days and shortest of nights.

  They went to the pictures. Silent ones, black and white, but also the sung ones. They went to see Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo.

  ‘Did you like it?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘She was too thin,’ Magnus said.

  ‘Not her. The film, I mean. The story.’

  ‘I thought it was a bit long.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what you thought. Tell me what you felt.’

  That came as a shock to Magnus, for he’d never made the distinction.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Feeling’s what you really think, before you have time to mask it in words.’

  And they kissed. Properly. For the first time as if they were falling in love.

  Rachel forced him to choose between the past and the future. To drive around England working for Lord Berkshire was one thing. To love was another. He could find and fish all the pools in the world, yet his heart would still be elsewhere, in the past. Love demanded undivided devotion to the present.

  As he cleaned the stables in Berkshire he’d stop and smell the heather on the hills of Sutherland. As he drove through the Lake District in search of new fisheries what he saw were lochs: Loch Sheil, Loch Shin, Loch Migdale and all the other hundreds of little Highland lochs where the trout slept in the shade.

  Like sound, place disappears. It is ephemeral. The place he grew up in was not an object like a stone, which you can leave in a secret place and return later to find it still there, unmoved, just as you left it.

  Childhood does not remain in this world: it evaporates into silence. Magnus strove constantly to inhabit the silence. Sometimes he would stop at country churches and light votive candles against the dark. He would pray, speaking out the words so that he could hear the ancient rhythms filling the air.

  ‘There is no going back,’ Rachel said to him. ‘Or if there is, you need to go back there physically and reinvent it all. But if you are staying here, stay here rather than there. Invent this rather than that. I’m not going to turn into a pillar of salt.’

  That was all much later, well after the kippers.

  In telling Rachel about John, Magnus discovered things that he’d never known. She in turn told him things that shocked and startled and surprised him, until one day they both knew that they were properly in love beca
use nothing surprised them.

  They were out cycling when he asked her to marry him. A windy day, a country lane, the hedgerows in full bloom on both sides.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he shouted across. At first she thought he was asking her to carry him, so she laughed and said, ‘Yes – I’ve got broad shoulders.’

  They thought of returning to Scotland and getting married there.

  ‘At least the wedding?’ he asked, but she persuaded him that their future lay before them, not behind him; that to return to the Highlands to get married was a commitment to looking back, not forwards. So they discussed Windermere, but eventually took up Lord Berkshire’s offer to marry in Christ Church Cathedral where all his own family had been baptised, married, and buried for centuries.

  It was a grand occasion, right enough. Lord Berkshire lent them his coach-and-four for the day and the cathedral choir sounded heavenly. Though Rachel was no Orthodox Jew, a chuppah was erected inside the church for the wedding and the university Rabbi was present to do the Kiddushin. But the atmosphere was Anglican, with Lord Berkshire, resplendent in coat-tails, doing the great reading from Solomon’s Song of Songs – my beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair; thou hast dove’s eyes. The vicar asked for a moment’s silence after the vows and as they bowed their heads Magnus had a sudden yearning for the austere silence of Presbyterianism, but then the choir struck up with the Angelus and the moment was gone.

  After their marriage they were set up in an estate cottage by Berkshire and Rachel worked as a personal maid to Lady Berkshire until the first child came along – a boy they named Angus. Two years later a sister, Miriam, was born.

  Magnus was out working on the estate most of the week and Rachel agreed to Lady Berkshire’s request to send the young children to the same preparatory school as her own grandchildren, which was, for the boys, a nursery for Eton and, for the girls, a feeder for St George’s at Ascot. They had a wonderful education, boarding from the age of seven, and returning each end-term with new revelations about Cicero and Clive and cricket and hockey. Magnus would then remember some equally marvellous things his mother and John used to say about fairies and about India.

  ‘Can you speak sing-song?’ Miriam would ask, and Magnus would place Angus on one knee and Miriam on the other and say,

  ‘Well, I suppose I can,’ and his voice would rise and fall as he told his stories.

  His mother said that when she was a little girl she and a group of children had been out on the road opposite the houses when day gives way to night and, at nightfall, they saw many horses coming towards them from the east, a rider on every horse. They went westward. His mother and all the children stood watching them. And after a while she said the riders returned from the west, and the moon was shining, it was a fine moonlit night. So she and the others stood and watched the procession going past to the east, and the horse which had been in front when they were going west was at the end when they came east – it was a white horse.

  ‘Now,’ said his mother, ‘that was a year when the whooping-cough was widespread among the children. And we followed them east, and this is what we were saying to them, “Rider of the white horse, what cures whooping-cough?” And we followed them as far as the boundary of the townland.’

  But Magnus could not remember if the children got any reply from the rider of the white horse.

  The children were so different, inhabiting another universe. Angus was tall and dark-haired and athletic while Miriam acquired her father’s fairness, and was blue-eyed and artistic. Angus had his mother’s zeal for doing everything as well as he could, so it became less and less surprising as the years passed that he excelled at everything – science, rugby, rowing, and especially cricket where he became captain of every team all the way through the age ranges, from the Under-14s to the Under-18s. He also had the distinction of being the only player to have achieved four consecutive centuries for Eton in the great annual match against Harrow.

  Miriam, although equally talented, preferred not to take any leadership roles at St George’s, unless winning the Art Prize every year for six years in succession is counted. She also thrived in the Drama Department, invariably playing the leading lady in the yearly Shakespeare play which they performed at the end of the spring term. During school holidays she’d occasionally join her father out working in the estate gardens or setting the salmon nets on the river and recite the lines she was trying to learn to him as he snipped the hydrangeas or walked back from the river.

  ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,’ she’d say. ‘Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thought.’

  She spoke with a beautiful accent. It was so pure that you thought of gold when you heard it and couldn’t make out where in England she was from or what her background was, except that it was good. Angus was equally polished, speaking with such crystal clarity that any listener would have suspected royal pedigree. When home from Eton or St George’s they would sometimes listen with wonder and no small sense of shame to their parents speaking in their strange regional registers. Some Mancunian Jewish words would slip into their mother’s conversation and their father would answer with guttural imprecations before realising that the children were listening; then he’d switch to a fine lilting English that sounded like the stream at the back of the house trickling over the rocks on a summer’s evening.

  Dad became a diplomat. When he left Eton he went to Oxford where he studied PPE at Christ Church, which opened up all the usual channels into politics. He told me that he was offered a safe Conservative seat in the Downs but that he yearned to go overseas, so instead joined the diplomatic service and took a junior posting in Ottawa when it was offered to him.

  ‘There’s a sign out in the bush in Australia,’ he’d then say to me, ‘which they put up after the rainy season. “Choose your route carefully” it reads, “you’ll be in it for the next two hundred and fifty kilometres”. Same with a career, old boy.’

  I was never sure whether it was advice or a warning.

  He met Signe in New York when he was on assignment there. She was a violinist with the Philharmonic, and they met at a reception hosted by the British Ambassador. Her father was Swedish and her mother from Ireland, but she too had gone to a private school in England when her parents moved to London to work at the Royal Academy of Music. That common interest brought them together at the party and they continued to meet up regularly, marrying in New Mexico in a hot summer of love. Aoife was born six months afterwards and two years later, just before their divorce, I was brought into the world.

  11

  I HAD AN itinerant, delightful childhood. Born in the Lower East Side on the 15th of May. ‘Zodiac sign Taurus,’ Mom always chanted. ‘You’ll bear a lot with ease.’ After my parents separated, I would spend the weekdays at Mom’s and the weekend at Dad’s, or at least at wherever he happened to be any particular weekend. The one early constant was my Cuban nanny, Analena, who travelled with me everywhere and from whom I learned Spanish.

  I think music gave me a good ear. I’d listen to mother playing. Note after note, in perfect sequences. She’d practise for hours in the front room while I played next door with toys. Analena helped me set up a perfect railway track which took me from New York all the way across the Rockies to the west coast, when the line then went underwater all the way over to Great Britain. We had twenty cardboard tunnels and to reach London I’d crawl under this blue plastic sheet shouting ‘woo-hoo’ every so often. And every time I’d emerge, the violin notes were still there hanging in the air next door. The practice was regular, monotonous, and consistent. I realise now there was no improvisation: none of the notes ever changed, because – I suppose – she was playing them exactly, with a sort of strict Puritanism, the way they had been written. There was no room for manoeuvre or interpretation. For nuance.

  Like all kids, I had my own world in my room. These wer
e early console days, but still we had the Atari versions of Space War and Sea Wolf, later moving on to the more sophisticated Avatar and Dungeons and Dragons. No doubt Analena saved me from the darkest recesses of nerdom, though I always envied those other cool kids who skateboarded past me every day with aviator glasses and Sony headphones to die for. We could easily afford them, but I wasn’t allowed them.

  My father was a keen fisherman and would take me out on fishing expeditions every weekend – sometimes sea-fishing, but more often up to our cabin in the Catskills. I loved spending time there with him. I loved everything about it. The anticipation of waiting for Friday, the adventure of leaving New York City and heading north, that adrenaline rush every time we set our eyes on the Hudson, the perpetual thrill it always was to turn off up into the mountains and climb in the wagon through the scree until we caught sight of the log cabin nestling between the stream and Aaron’s Rock.

  Aaron’s Rock was our own private name for the high heap of stones on the far side of the river, ever since the weekend my friend Aaron came with us and scrambled up to the top in record time – in twenty-two seconds. Neither I nor my father could ever manage better than thirty, no matter how hard we tried. Or at least I did. Looking back on it now, Dad may never really have tried that hard.

  Sometimes we didn’t fish. When the weather was rough we’d just hang out inside the cabin, playing games. Dad would read to me – my favourite was The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We would play backgammon or Ludo or sizzle sausages over the stove. There was no television, but there was a magic old wireless we’d spend ages tuning to get a station, as well as a beautiful old wind-up gramophone on which we’d play Dad’s records – mostly classical stuff, though he also had some jazz and blues. Bill Evans was best. Things were invented there: you were never sure which note came next, and when it did, it was always surprising.

  Our favourite time was on the Saturday evening after being out fishing all day. We’d have a barbecue and then I’d lie on the floor and he’d allow me to move the wireless dial fraction by fraction while he kept his eyes shut tight, and he had to guess which station I’d found. Hilversum! Radio Moscow! The BBC World Service. Call sign KAAY from Little Rock Arkansas! WUBC from Boston! And he was right every time.