Whit

by Iain Banks

  'Isis,' Allan said leadenly. I turned to him, still with a sense that things were happening in some strange, slowing fluid that was all around me. 'I can't…' He took a deep breath. 'Look,' he said. 'I'll,' he glanced at the doors, 'I'll have a word with Salvador, okay? Perhaps he'll have calmed down a bit, later. Then maybe you and he could… you know, talk. You have to decide what you're going to say. I can't tell you what to say, but he is really really upset and… Well, you just have to decide what's best. I…' He shook his head, stared down at his hands clasped on the desk. 'I don't know what to make of all this, it's just… it's like everything's…' He gave a small, despairing laugh. 'We must all just pray, and to trust to God. Listen to Them, Isis. Listen to what They say.'

  'Yes,' I said, drying my eyes with my sleeve, and then with a handkerchief Yolanda produced. I straightened. 'Yes, of course.'

  Allan glanced at the office clock, high on one wall. 'We'd better give him till this evening. Will you be in your room?' he asked.

  I nodded. 'I may go for a walk first, but, later, yes.'

  'Okay.' He raised his flat hands from the desk's surface and let them fall back again. 'We'll see what we can do.'

  'Thank you,' I said, sniffing and handing my grandmother back her handkerchief. I nodded to her and we turned to go.

  Erin was still standing staring down at the desk by the door. I paused, dug into my jacket pocket and took out a roll of pound notes bound with a little rubber band. I placed the roll on the desk and added two one-pence pieces from a trouser pocket. Erin looked at the money.

  'Twenty-seven pounds, two pence,' I said.

  'Well done,' Erin said flatly. Yolanda and I left the room.

  * * *

  'I guess a lawyer wouldn't be appropriate,' Yolanda said as we went downstairs.

  'I don't think so, Grandma.'

  'Well, first thing we should do is drive to the hotel, or into Stirling at any rate, and have us some lunch. I need a margarita.'

  'Thanks, Grandma,' I said, stopping to face her as we got to the bottom of the stairs. I squeezed her hand. 'But I think I'd just like to… you know, be by myself for a bit.'

  She looked hurt. 'You want me to go, is that it?'

  I tried to work out how to say what it was I wanted to say. 'I need to think, Yolanda. I need…' I breathed in hard, gaze flickering over the walls, the ceiling and back down the stairs again until I looked at my grandmother again. 'I need to think myself back into the person I am when I'm here, do you know what I mean?'

  She nodded. 'I guess so.'

  'You've done so much for me,' I told her. 'I hate-'

  'Forget it. You sure you don't want me to stick around?'

  'Really, no.' I gave a brave smile. 'You go and see Prague; go and see your red diamond.'

  'Fuck the diamond. And Prague will still be there.'

  'Honestly; it'd be better. I won't feel I've disrupted your life totally too.' I gave a small laugh and looked around with an expression that spoke of an optimism I didn't feel. 'This'll all get sorted out. Just one of those daft things that comes along in a place like this where everybody lives on top of each other all the time; storm in a tea cup. Storm in a thimble.' I fashioned what I hoped was a cheeky grin.

  Yolanda looked serious. 'You just look out, Isis,' she told me, putting her hand on my shoulder and lowering her head a little as she fixed her gaze upon me. It was a curiously affecting gesture. 'It ain't never been all sweetness and light here, honey,' she told me. 'You've always seen the best of it, and it's only now you're getting the shitty end of the stick. But it's always been there.' She patted my shoulder. 'You watch out for Salvador. Old Zhobelia once told me…' She hesitated. 'Well, I don't rightly know exactly what it was she was trying to hint at, to tell the truth, but it was something, for sure. Something your Grandfather had to hide; something she knew about him.'

  'They were… they were married,' I said, falteringly. 'The three of them were married. I imagine that they had lots of little secrets between them…'

  'Hmm,' Yolanda said, obviously not convinced. 'Well, I always wondered about her heading off, just disappearing like that after the fire; seemed kind of suspicious. You sure she is alive?'

  'Pretty sure. Calli and Astar seem still to be in touch. I can't imagine they'd… lie.'

  'Okay, well, look; I'm just saying there might be more than one hidden agenda here. You will take care now, won't you?'

  'I will. I swear. And you mustn't worry; I'll be fine. You come back in a week or two. Come back for the Festival and I'll have everything running back on track again. I'll sort it out. Promise.'

  'There was a deal to get sorted, Isis, even before this, like we were talking about in the car today.'

  'I know,' I told her, hugging her. 'Just have faith.'

  'That's your department, honey, but I'll take your word for it.'

  * * *

  One night in November 1979 a fire destroyed half the mansion house; it killed my mother Alice and father Christopher and Grandmother Aasni and it might have killed me too if my father hadn't thrown me out of the window into the garden fishpond. He might have saved himself then, too, but he went back to look for my mother; they were eventually found huddled together in the room I had shared with Allan, overcome by smoke. Allan had escaped on his own.

  Grandmother Aasni died in her kitchen in the house, seemingly the victim of her own culinary experimentation.

  The fire engine called from Stirling that night could not be taken across the already holed and tumbledown bridge by the Woodbeans' home; the Community put out the fire itself, mostly, with some help later on from a portable pump brought over the bridge by the fire brigade. My Grandfather had always known that, with the number of candles and paraffin lamps we used, especially in winter, the risk of fire at the farm was high; accordingly he had always treated fire prevention with the utmost seriousness, had bought an old but serviceable hand-powered pump from another farm, and ensured that there were lots of buckets of water and sand stationed at various points throughout the farm, as well as carrying out regular drills so that everybody knew what to do in the event that a fire did break out.

  Fire officers came the next day to survey the gutted wreckage of the mansion house and to attempt to discover how the fire had started. They determined that the seat of the fire had been the kitchen stove, and that it looked very much as though a pressure cooker had exploded, showering the room with burning oil. Aasni had probably been knocked unconscious in the initial blast. Zhobelia - distraught, weeping, incoherent, hair-tearing Zhobelia - left off her wailing just long enough to confirm that her sister had been trying to develop a new type of pressure-cooked pickle whose ingredients included ghee and a variety of other oils.

  I don't remember the fire. I don't remember smoke and flames and being thrown from the window into the ornamental fish pond; I don't remember my father's touch or my mother's voice at all. I don't remember a funeral or a memorial service. All I remember- with a strange, static, photographic clarity - is the burned-out shell of the mansion house, days or weeks or months later, its soot-shadowed stones and few remaining roof beams stark black against the cold blue winter skies.

  I think Allan felt my parents' loss more; he was old enough to know that he would never see them again whereas I could not really understand this idea, and just kept waiting for them to come back from wherever it was they had gone. I suppose the nature of the Community itself made the blow less keenly felt than it might have been in Benighted society; Allan and I would have been brought up much the way we were even if our parents had not perished, our care, upbringing and education spread out amongst the many faithful of the Community rather than left solely to one binary nuclear family.

  I believe it dawned on me that my parents weren't coming back only as the burned-out mansion house was rebuilt during the following year, as though while the building's shell was still open to the weather and the skies my mother and father could somehow find a way to return… but as the roof was rebu
ilt and the new beams and rafters hoisted into place, the roof boards laid and the slates nailed down, that possibility was gradually but irrevocably removed, as though the wood and planks and nails and metal fittings that went to complete the house were not making a new place for people to live, but making instead a huge, too-lately-made mausoleum my mysteriously vanished parents ought somehow to inhabit, yet were forever excluded from.

  I have a vague, contrary recollection of thinking then that my parents were still there somehow, hanging around in a sort of ghostly, spectral way, snagged there, caught by all those fresh floorboards and shining nails, but even that feeling gradually slipped away over time, and the completed, refurbished house became just another part of the Community.

  I suppose, according to the more facile schools of psychology, I ought to have resented the mansion house, and especially the library, which survived undamaged but which for many, many years thereafter had about it the lingering odour of smoke, but if anything the effect was quite to the contrary, and I came to love the library and its books and its old, musty, smoky scent, as though through that faint aroma of the past I soaked up more than just the knowledge contained in the books as I sat there reading and studying, and so was still in touch with my parents and our happy past before the fire.

  I think that for my Grandfather the loss of his son was probably the worst thing that ever happened to him. It was as if there was a God of the sort he did not believe in: a cruel, capricious, closely involved God who did not just speak from some great, passionless distance, but moved people and events around like pieces in a game; a greedy, spiteful, manipulative, hands-on God who took as much as He gave, and - provoked, or simply to prove His power - fell upon the lives and fates of men like an eagle upon a mouse. If my Grandfather's faith was shaken by his son's death, he gave no sign at the time, but I know that to this day he still grieves for him, and still wakes himself from sleep every few months with nightmares of burning buildings and shouts and screams inside rolling flame-lit billows of black smoke.

  Things never were quite the same again; they are still good, and we thrive (or I thought we did), but they are good in a way that must be quite different from the way they would have been good had Alice and Chris survived, and Aasni and Zhobelia grown old together with Salvador. Instead, three of them died, and Zhobelia at first withdrew within the Community, and then withdrew from it.

  My great-aunt mourned prodigiously, extravagantly, epically; she tore her hair out by the roots, which you hear about people doing but I'll bet you never actually saw. Neither have I, but I have seen the evidence and it was not pretty.

  Zhobelia stopped eating, stopped cooking, stopped getting out of bed. She blamed herself for the fire; she had gone to bed that night instead of staying up with Aasni to carry on with their pressurised pickling experiment, and anyway felt that the accident would not have happened if she had ensured the pressure cooker had been properly cleaned; both she and Aasni knew that some of their earlier experiments had blocked the safety valves and caused dangerous pressure build-ups in the cooker. Zhobelia had been more concerned than her sister had appeared over the safety implications of this development, and blamed herself for not staying to make sure that Aasni did not put herself in danger.

  Zhobelia recovered, slowly. She started to get up and to eat, though she never again cooked; not even as much as a popadum. Calli and Astar, Zhobelia's daughters, moved smoothly and quietly into the gap left by their aunt's death and their mother's domestic secession, jointly taking over the mistresship of the kitchen and the stewardship of the Whit family. Zhobelia entered a kind of self-imposed exile within her own home, having nothing to do with its running and taking little apparent interest in its welfare; she existed there, but she seemed to have little to say to anybody, and nothing that she wanted to do. A year to the day after the fire she left High Easter Offerance without warning.

  We found a note from her saying that she had gone to visit her old family - who were now based in Glasgow - in the hope of effecting a reconciliation. We later heard that some form of rapprochement had been arrived at, but that Zhobelia had been looking for forgiveness and understanding only, and not a new home; she left there too, and, well, there seems to be some confusion over where she ended up after that. Astar, Calli and Salvador all seem vaguely sure that she is still alive and being well cared for somewhere, but the two sisters become sadly uncommunicative if pressed on the details, while Grandfather just gets tetchy.

  I think the fire changed my Grandfather. By all accounts the least important aspect of it was that he took to dressing in white, not black, but more importantly he seemed to lose some of his energy and enthusiasm; for a while, I'm told by those who were around at the time, our Faith seemed uncertain of its way, and a mood of despondency settled over the Community. Morale recovered eventually, and Grandfather rediscovered some of his drive and vitality, but, as I say, things were never the same again, though we have prospered well enough.

  I know the fire changed me. My memories begin with that vision of aching, empty blueness, the smell of dampened smouldering and the sound of my great-aunt's grief; the Gift of Healing came upon me two years later.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I have always had my secret places within and around the policies which form our lands; they are part of that private, internalised landscape every child imposes upon their surroundings, which sometimes survives into adulthood if we stay in the same place and the world does not change too much around us. Unlike the retreats of many children, mine had been havens almost for the sake of it, as I had had nothing at the Community to wish to escape from, unless it was too much loving attention.

  As children both Allan and I were pampered by everybody around us; children have a pretty good life in the Community anyway, revered as the product of two souls' communing and respected for their unblemished new soul, but my brother and I were given a particularly easy ride because of the tragedy of our orphanhood. Being a Leapyearian and the Elect of God, I suppose I had one increment of indulgence more even than my brother, though such was the obvious determination by all around to recompense us for the sadness of our plight through diligent applications of love and the gratification of all but our most outrageous wishes, that I doubt Allan ever suffered because of my superior rank, unless it was the self-inflicted pain we call jealousy.

  I think all this would have applied to any Community children who had lost their parents when they were so young, but certainly it can have done us no harm that we were grandchildren of the Founder, and that he transferred so much of his love for his son and his son's wife onto us, and took such an interest in our upbringing that any kindness extended to us was almost as good as a tribute paid directly to Salvador himself (in one way it was actually better as it did not smack of sycophancy).

  All this is not to say that any child may simply ran riot within the Community; far from it, but providing you are not seen as exploiting your privileged position with too ruthless a degree of opportunism and do not directly challenge adult authority, it is possible to live so well as a child at High Easter Offerance that when an adult tells you these are the best years of your life, you can almost believe them.

  * * *

  I sat on the rusted wreck of an old truck, its russet body lying perforated and submerged by grasses and weeds, surrounded by gently swaying young pine trees a couple of miles west of the farm. I was sitting on the old lorry's roof, gazing out over the brown, glinting back of the gently flowing river. On the far bank, beyond the weeds and nettles, a herd of Friesians cropped the green quilt of the field, moving slowly across my field of vision from left to right, images of unthinking contentment engrossed in their methodical absorption.

  I had seen Grandma Yolanda back to her car, still making reassuring noises and gently refusing her offers of further help. She hugged and kissed me and told me that she would be staying in Stirling that night, to be nearby in case I needed her. I assured her I wouldn't and told her to do whateve
r she had been going to do. She insisted this had been her plan all along, and that she would drive the few miles into the town, check in and then phone to leave the name of the hotel with the Woodbeans. I had not the heart to refuse her, so agreed that this was a good and helpful idea. She left with only a few tears. I waved her away and then returned to the farm.

  I went up to my room in the farmhouse. It is a small room with a single dormer window and sloping ceilings. It contained a hammock, a small wooden desk and chair, one chest of drawers with a paraffin lamp on it, and an old wardrobe sitting - slightly lopsidedly on the old, uneven floorboards - in one corner. Aside from these things, there were a few clothes (very few, as those being sent from Bath hadn't turned up yet) and one or two small souvenirs of my modest travels. That was more or less it.

  How little I had to show for my life, looked at from this perspective, I thought. And yet how rich I had always felt it was! All my life, all my worth and being were invested in the rest of the Community, in the people and the lands and the buildings and the continuance of our life here. That was what and where you had to look to find the measure of me; not at these few paltry personal comforts.

  It was a while, thinking about all this, before I realised that I hadn't got my kit-bag back; it had been left over in the mansion house. Well, there was nothing in it I needed immediately. I changed into a coarse white cotton shirt with a collar and cuffs that had seen better days and donned my one other jacket, an old tweed thing with worn leather elbow patches. It had probably been a fisherman's; when it had been brought back from the charity shop in Stirling for me there was a small fishing fly lodged deep in the corner of one pocket. I kept the leather trousers on; I only possessed the two pairs I'd taken with me on my journey and they were both - with luck - still en route from the hotel in Bath. I re-straightened the brim of my travelling hat and hung it up behind the wardrobe door. Then I went for a walk and ended up sitting on the roof of the old truck, a few miles up the river bank.