Click, Double-Click

by James Calum Campbell

  ‘Listen, Caitlin. A lot of this will have to come out. Tell them all about the bullying. Tell them about your proposed assignation. Perhaps there was a tussle, I don’t know. You pushed somebody into a swimming pool and then it all went pear-shaped. Things got out of hand. Yes you were angry, maybe you were so tormented that you didn’t quite know what was happening. All of that. But … but … what you said just now. Don’t say that. Do your hear? Francesca’s going to be all right. We can manage this whole thing in-house.’

  Caitlin didn’t say anything.

  ‘One other thing. You are wrong about these texts they sent you. You think the upside down exclamation mark is your scar. But it isn’t. It’s your oboe. These girls you hang out with – they are afraid of your oboe, and of your talent as an oboist. They are afraid because it is the thing that marks you out, that separates you from them. They seem to have everything, these so-called friends of yours. Money, background, connections, prospects. But in reality, they have nothing. They are utterly dull. They are utterly wretched in their poverty. In a few years they will all be married to utterly dull young men who work in the City and together they will fuck up some utterly dull progeny who will come back to this school and start the cycle all over again. They aren’t even pretty. They are pug ugly. Already you can see them laying down the lines of smug complacency, condescension, vanity, self-centredness, and bitchiness. They are pug ugly, and they know it. And they are frightened of you, because when you play your oboe, you express something utterly alien to them.’

  Caitlin said in a remote voice, ‘I was thinking of giving it up.’

  ‘Then they will have won. And they will have destroyed you.’

  The day Francesca came back to school, Caitlin was excluded.

  There were no more texts.

  XVI

  On Sunday I went for a run; but it was no good. Spottiswoode, The Meadows, Middle Meadow Walk past the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and into university land. You know that archetypal recurring dream where you are being pursued by something and you can’t get your limbs to coordinate … I lurched down George IV Bridge, disarticulated, and thought, I’ve forgotten how to run! I’ll take it as far as The Royal Mile and if I can’t get my scampering thoughts to settle down into a rhythm I’ll go back. Well, Forbes, I went flying and nearly got wiped out, I’ve endured all that scraping and scrunching in the Queen’s Hall, and I can’t say I’m enjoying this much either. I’ll hang a right into the High Street, right again at South Bridge and go back past Old College.

  I pulled up 100 metres behind the unmistakable figure of Whangie Horton. She was wearing a rather severe dark blue belted Burberry trench coat and a matching beret. I felt as if I were tailing somebody in the French Resistance. She went into St Giles. I followed.

  I was just in time for a very early morning family service taking place in a sequestered south-west corner of the cathedral. The meeters and greeters were men in their middle forties casually dressed in open-necked shirts and chinos. The shirts weren’t tucked in. At least I didn’t completely stand out like a sore thumb in my tracksuit, but I sat in an obscure corner at the back, under the frowning pilasters, beside a substantial plaque on the black stone with a relief of Robert Louis Stevenson, and a grace, which I could only scan, piecemeal, in the gloom. ‘… grace … courage … the quiet mind … strength … peril … tribulation … wrath … down to the gates of death …’

  The men with the shirts outside their trousers (why did I find that so irritating?) began to construct a screen that obscured the communion table. I suddenly realised I had come to church, here in this last chance saloon, to ask what Jesus would do.

  The first hymn was of a happy-clappy nature. The purpose of the screen up front became clear. The words of the hymn were on PowerPoint. No hymn books. Even the High Kirk had gone paper light. I had a notion I had stumbled into a special service, that this was not the normal bill of fare for St Giles. If you don’t have a hymn book, you can clap. Some of the men with shirts outside trousers were even making extravagant gestures with their arms.

  Next, a children’s address. I always hated them as a child. I hated being patronised. But the presenter was Whangie. I sat up. Oh God. Once more, like Dickens’ Monsieur Manette, Recalled to Life. The agony of the ice breaking up after the long Russian winter. With the trench coat and beret gone she was wearing a rather ecclesiastical long brown gown secured at the waist by a rope. It might have afforded her a dowdy, even a frumpish look, but the effect was quite the opposite. Novitiate chic. The bells of golden hair danced about her shoulders. And she had a way with the kids. There was plenty of audience participation, a bit of origami, and a guitar. Whangie had everybody’s rapt attention, for one reason or another. The kids were mesmerised; the men were entranced; the women sat up stiffly with pursed lips. The origami was all to do with a topological mystery – the Möbius strip. I should have paid more attention but I found myself wondering if the Hortons were churchgoing. Surely not. Sir Douglas would be rational – deeply secular. This would be Whangie’s private passion, her means of escape, her assertion of her own identity. ‘So you take the end – you join it to the beginning and hey presto – a false bottom.’ Meanwhile the mummy fascists let their babies yell but no-one seemed to mind.

  The lessons were both from the New Testament. Something about Zacchaeus, skulking up a tree. And Nicodemus, visiting Our Lord by night. I had a kind of fellow feeling for Zacchaeus and Nicodemus. They were shadowy figures. They blended in. They lurked on the periphery of life. They were viola people.

  The sermon rather took me aback. It was a hand-wringing exercise about homosexual clergy. The minister, following a short preamble, announced that he was going to make three points, and he headlined them. They were alliterative. Actually they were doubly alliterative. I had the suspicion that he used this format week in week out, and that the Kirk Session moaned about him behind his back.

  The promise of redemption. The perplexity of rancour. The peace of resolution.

  Fancy having to refit this straitjacket every week. He would be in a lather on a Saturday night, hunting for synonyms like a crossword compiler working to a deadline. The burden would always have the same shape. It would essentially be the same sermon. A beatific vision, some sort of fly in the ointment necessitating suffering and a journey, and finally a destination. If you rehearsed it often enough, it would become more and more meaningless. I started counting stone flags. Then I started making up my own alliterations.

  The perpetuity of reductiveness. The peregrination of relativism. The pedestrianisation of Ravelston Dykes.

  After twenty-five minutes I could sense he was beginning to wind it up. It’s a common failing, this inability to stop. Indeed, it’s almost hardwired into the mistaken notion of how to teach. First you tell ’em what you’re gonna say, then you tell ’em, then you tell ’em what you’ve said …

  The predestination of razzmatazz … the pontification of Rumpelstiltskin … (I’d lost it.)

  And so on. Closing hymn. The computer crashed and the screen went blank and we were left to clap and lip-sync. Surely you go to church to absent yourself for a while from the ghastly apparatus of modern life. Personally I blame the men with the shirts outside their trousers.

  Bit of a disaster? Not entirely. What would Jesus do? He would invite himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’ place. He would drop down off the High Street through some dark narrow stair-well into another realm of existence.

  I was back in Thirlestane by midday and switched the radio on. Private Passions with Michael Barclay on Radio 3.

  And there he was again. The familiar voice set my teeth on edge. Why did he keep turning up in my life like a bad penny? It was all I could do to keep the radio on. In fact periodically I switched it off. Then I would switch it on again, responding to an itch, challenging myself to identify some gobbet of the repertoire. For somebody self-professed as tone deaf, I didn’t do too badly. Here was the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I
knew it was played by Glen Gould (I could hear him crooning away in the background), I knew it was the 1981 and not the 1955 recording, and I even knew it was the da capo rendition that closed, rather than opened, the performance. Horton was lecturing the country on ‘the sublime’. It gave rise to a discussion on religious feeling, and Barclay ventured the suggestion that music was religion. If that were so, then I was truly lost. I was Job, covered in boils, cursing God. Horton droned on. Everything was ‘sublime’. Well, maybe it was. But did we need Professor Sir Douglas Horton to tell us so? He was at pains to point out that, although both opening and closing arias match one another note for note, the experience is not the same. After everything we have been through, the culminating rendition seems to carry an extra dimension of meaning that is truly sublime. (Horton was really fond of the word sublime.) He didn’t seem to realise that what he was saying was cliché. It might have been true; but it was truism. You can get away with any piece of turgid pomposity on air if your accent is posh enough.

  Next, Britten’s Lachrymae. I was unreasonably affronted that Horton should have chosen MacKenzie’s Naxos recording. He got off sublime and got on to something he called ‘pellucid limpidity.’ It was the most precious tosh you’ve ever heard.

  Bit of Mahler, bit of Strauss (Richard), bit of Schubert. Then Shostakovich. (I have to say Horton never managed to surprise me.) The scorching second movement of the tenth symphony.

  And finally opera. I just knew he’d be an opera buff. It was Das Rheingold, a bleeding chunk from Act II – The Nibelungen and their anvils. I suddenly felt I had an insight into the character of Professor Sir Douglas Horton. It was the Herbert von Karajan recording. DA-da-ra DA DA DA DA! An unalloyed expression of sheer naked power.

  I looked up Douglas Horton in the phone book. It was a New Town address. Ann Street. I decided to go over. I wasn’t going to be pushed around.

  I got there at dusk. It was a beautiful town house on four levels undivided and entirely unspoiled. With many period features, the Savills brochure would say. Or perhaps Retties. It would easily command a seven figure sum. Parking was a nightmare. The elegant Georgian Street was littered with Mercedes and BMWs. I gave up and dumped mine on the pavement and marched up to the big slug-black door and banged the knocker without preamble. There was a tremendous commotion inside as the dogs went mad. I could hear Lady Horton reasoning with them.

  ‘Baxter! Eustace!’ I waited patiently. ‘Take the dogs, you two.’ Now the jangle of the door chain being released, and the door opened.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Lady Horton?’

  ‘Yes?’

  I grinned at her. ‘I’m Dr Cameron-Strange. Is the Professor at home?’

  ‘He should be back any moment. Is he expecting you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I took a piece of paper from my inside pocket and waved it vaguely in the air. ‘Just a piece of college business. Shouldn’t take five minutes.’

  ‘You’d better come in.’

  I looked dubiously past her at the dogs. They were being restrained by the Horton progeny.

  ‘Put the dogs in the rumpus room. Whangie, show Dr Cameron-Strange into the drawing room.’ She didn’t stumble over my name. I suspect access had been so easy precisely because I have a double-barrelled name.

  We foregathered in the gracious high-ceilinged living room, delicately and exquisitely furnished. There were logs blazing merrily in the open fire. Beside it, the Christmas tree was substantial and heavily bedecked with decoration. Even so, there was no sense of clutter. In the deep recess of the bay window there was a grand piano, a Blüthner. A diminutive television was showing Fiona Bruce anchoring Antiques Road Show. It was an old set. Big flat screen TVs are the iconography of the lower classes. An expert was examining a figurine off somebody’s mantelpiece. It looked like a piece of junk to me.

  ‘Do you like it? No? If I were to tell you it’s worth fifteen thousand pounds, do you like it now?’

  Politely, Lady Horton switched the programme off. ‘We were just having a cocktail. Will you join us?’

  ‘That would be very nice.’

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Would you have a gin and tonic?’

  ‘Of course. Dumyat, there’s a bottle of Tanqueray … Oh by the way, the twins … my son Dumyat –’

  I gave him a brief gesture of salute. He waved back.

  ‘My daughter Whangie.’

  Fancy saddling your children and burdening them all their lives with fantastic names. Had it been her idea? Probably Sir Douglas’. Two gentle Scottish lowland walks. If he had been a Munro-bagger he could have made it more unobtrusive. Ben and Hope. Whangie held her hand out to me and gazed at me levelly as if challenging me to laugh at her name. Maybe she was Susan Whangie Horton. Surely her father would have had pity enough to offer her that get-out clause. She was tall like her mother but whereas Lady Horton was thin, Whangie had one of these luscious exuberant bodies so curvaceous that it is difficult to stop staring. She was wearing a shapeless caramel-brown single-piece dress which ended about four inches above the knee – maybe Sunday was her brown day – and, so far as I could see, very little else. I wondered if she continually dressed down in a vain attempt to divert attention from her shape. No jewellery, no tights, nothing on her feet, apart from dark blue nail varnish. Caitlin uses the same – must be a trend. I held her gaze, smiled directly into her eyes and shook her hand.

  ‘G’day.’

  Blue eyes, candid and challenging.

  ‘Australian?’

  ‘New Zealand.’

  ‘Oops! Sorry.’

  ‘Actually only half Kiwi. Thanks.’ I took the gin and tonic from Dumyat. We all raised our glasses. Lady Horton was on Harvey’s Bristol Cream, Whangie had a glass of white wine, Dumyat a pint of lager.

  ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Slàinte.’ The G and T was ice cold and had ice and lemon. It was very strong. I had the car. I would just take a few sips.

  We all sat down. I poured the rest of the Fever Tree tonic from its small bottle into my glass. I began to develop a strong sense of the ridiculous. We would have to indulge in small talk. My cover would begin to run. Better take the initiative.

  ‘Are you at university?’

  Whangie nodded. ‘Dum’s at Cambridge, I’m at Oxford.’

  ‘Really? Which college?’

  ‘Gonville and Caius, and Brasenose.’

  ‘What do you read?’

  ‘Maths and English.’ Whangie smiled. ‘Respectively.’

  ‘You’re the mathematician?’

  ‘Oh God no. I’m allergic to numbers.’

  ‘That’s all right sis. I can’t read.’ Dumyat took a pull at his lager and nestled the pint glass under his chin. ‘What’s your field, doctor?’

  ‘Medicine. I bet you, though, Whangie can do maths perfectly well. It’s like men not multi-tasking and women not map-reading, a kind of role-play.’

  Whangie laughed. ‘I can assure you –’

  Lady Horton frowned. ‘We don’t have a medical faculty at Clerk Maxwell …’ The doorbell rang in a ferocious and insistent manner. She raised her eyes to the Georgian frieze. ‘Your father’s forgotten his keys again.’ Dumyat went to the door. The dogs had started up from the bowels of the rumpus room. I took a more generous pull at my G and T, and sat it out.

  ‘You must be with PAMs.’ Lady Horton furrowed her brow. She suddenly found she couldn’t place me.

  ‘PAMs?’

  ‘Professions Allied to Medicine.’

  ‘Oh yes. PAMs. PAMs indeed. Yes indeed.’

  The living room door flew open and the great paterfamilias force entered.

  ‘You!’

  I rose from the deep recess of the sofa.

  ‘Frances, phone for the police.’

  ‘Is anything wrong my dear?’

  Horton took four strides across the room to the blazing open fire and clasped in his right hand a stout poker from the brass companion set on the hearth.

&nbs
p; ‘Douglas – what is it?’

  ‘I warned you. I told you, you snivelling little nobody, that if you persisted in your madcap charade, I would break you. Not only have you persisted, you have the audacity to enter my house on some grotesque pretence at an errand. Not only will I break you, I will destroy you. You dare sully, you dare defile my hearth and home …’

  I took the copy of The Bottom Line and extended it to him.

  ‘But it is not a pretence, Professor. It is real. See for yourself. Evaluate the evidence.’

  He blinked. I just don’t think he had ever had the experience of somebody arguing with him. I don’t believe I have ever seen a man as angry in my life. I wondered if he was going to take a stroke. He was absolutely incandescent with rage. Frances and Dumyat looked suitably alarmed. Whangie was flushed; her mouth was open and her breathing was a little rapid.

  He did his one-handed crumpling act again – I thought he looked a bit absurd with a ball in one hand and a poker in the other. He looked like the exponent of some kind of bizarre racquets game out of Imperial Rome. This time he threw The Bottom Line in my face. I caught it automatically and pocketed it. It crossed my mind I might be in immediate physical danger. The pitch of his voice had escalated through several levels. He sounded like a Dalek in falsetto.

  ‘Get out of my house! Get out! Or I’ll set the dogs on you.’

  The big black door got slammed abruptly behind me. I stepped back out into the dark street. It was raining, the sort of very fine rain that soaks you through in a minute. Why did I resist the temptation to run back to the car? I was trying to maintain a dignified nonchalance for any audience I might have. I stopped and turned and glanced back down Ann Street. There was nobody there. The street smirked at me. I heard it pass a barely audible derisory remark. Why did I keep thinking somebody was walking right behind me?

  Here’s the car left where I abandoned it on the pavement. I got in behind the wheel and closed the door behind me. I sat for a few minutes and stared blankly at the little rivulets of water running down the windscreen.