by Louise Welsh
James moved a hand against the arm of his chair, as if trying to make his mind up about something. When he spoke his voice was dangerously gentle.
‘Are you asking if I was jealous of Lunan’s ability?’
Murray hesitated, surprised by the revelation in the old man’s question.
‘Your professionalism is beyond reproach.’
James lifted the copy of Moontide from the table next to him and looked at Lunan’s Rasputin face. Somewhere a clock ticked.
‘I was jealous, of course, but I was jealous of others too. Maybe we were all jealous of each other, beneath the comradeship. I honestly don’t think I ever let it affect my dealings with him, and then … well … how can you be jealous of a dead man?’ He put the book back on the table and smiled at Murray. ‘But I am, of course, every time I read his poems.’ He laughed and gave the chair a slight slap as if rousing himself to business. ‘The strange thing was that the filched poem he’d presented was way beneath the standard of what he was capable of creating. That’s what I mean about a vulnerable streak. Archie was over-sensitive, lacking in confidence and yet at the same time burdened with an exaggerated ego.’
‘Not the most attractive combination.’
‘No, but Lunan could be attractive. He had the gift of the gab and a sense of the absurd. When he was in the right frame of mind, he was good company.’
‘And when he wasn’t?’
‘Morose, sarcastic, inclined to drunkenness. I had to ask him to leave the session on two separate occasions. If he’d been anyone else I would have told him not to come back. There were precedents: at least one drunken writer had been barred.’
‘But he was too talented to dismiss?’
James leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling again. It was a theatrical gesture, a pause that preceded a point to be underlined.
‘Talent’s an odd thing, essential of course, but no guarantee of anything. To be perfectly frank I doubted he had the discipline to succeed. I thought he was more in love with the idea of being a writer than with the need to create.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Partly, I suppose, because I’d seen it before. We never turned any sober customers away from these get-togethers, you know. We didn’t advertise them, of course, it was strictly word of mouth, but from time to time you’d get romantic heroes wafting in. They couldn’t play an instrument so they thought they would wield a pen. It’s a very powerful image – young Thomas Chatterton, Percy Shelley, Jack Kerouac – the disaffected writer battling the world before dying young and beautiful.’ He laughed. ‘Well, maybe not so beautiful in Kerouac’s case, killing yourself with alcohol tends to be a bit bloating, but you get my drift.’ The professor sighed. ‘Working with young people for as long as I have, it’s inevitable that one is going to encounter untimely deaths, a car crash, an overdose, a climbing accident.’ He paused. ‘A drowning. It’s a cliché to say it’s a waste, and yet what else is it? A bloody waste.’ There was another pause as if he were silently mourning the young people who had died before their span. ‘So, to answer your question, yes I was aware of his talent early on, but I thought it squandered on him. Remember the poems I saw had potential, but they weren’t there yet.’ He grinned. ‘And there was I with my reservoirs of discipline and hard-won knowledge unable to create the magic that he could.’ James shook his head. ‘My God, I was ripe for some Faustian pact.’ His eyes met Murray’s. ‘But I wasn’t the only one.’
The professor laughed and a taint of decay scented the dead air of the darkened room. Murray cleared his throat then asked, ‘So how did he take his expulsion?’
‘I told you: stoically.’ The old man shook his head. ‘No, not stoically, casually. Shook my hand and wished me well. I was keen for Lunan to repeat the year, and he said he’d think about it. But I got the impression he was humouring me. It was infuriating. I remember I smelt beer on his breath and thought that if I were his father I’d knock some sense into him.’ James gave a second chuckle, though this time it sounded hollow. ‘That was the way we thought in those days. But we’d been brought up by men who’d gone to war, and gone to war ourselves.’ James sighed. ‘Lunan was like a man squandering an inheritance. He had the brains to do well, but he wasted them, the same way he wasted his talent and ultimately his life. He let that slip from him as casually as he idled away his university career.’ Professor James looked up at Murray; his too-big head grinning like a Halloween mask. ‘I’m glad you’re doing this book. Those of us who were left behind could have served his work better. Debts owed to the dead seem to grow heavier with time.’
Murray nodded, though he could think of no debt the old man might owe the dead poet.
The professor’s voice took on a lilting cadence and he recited,
‘My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!’
‘Archie despised poems that rhymed, but that describes him perfectly: a fragile light that burned brightly, but all too briefly.’
‘So you weren’t surprised to hear of his death?’
‘Surprised?’ James’s voice dropped an octave as if some of the shock still lingered on in his memory. ‘Of course I was surprised. I still remember discovering that he’d drowned.’
The old man’s head hung forward his mouth slightly open, a gleam of saliva wet behind the oxblood lips. The room sank into a long silence. Murray found himself watching the professor’s chest. It rested thin and unmoving behind the stains on his woollen pullover. When James eventually spoke his words were slow and measured, as if the old man had conjured up the past and was relaying events as they unfolded before him.
‘Valerie and I were going to watch our son Alexander play rugby. It must have been before he got his driving licence, because we were giving him a lift to the grounds. My daughter Helen was heading out on a date and Valerie was determined not to leave before her beau picked her up. She didn’t want them left in the house on their own, you see, worried about impropriety.’ James paused. Murray got the impression he was hesitating over a revelation, but then the professor continued. ‘The young man in question phoned to say he’d be delayed. So we were not a happy home that Sunday morning. There was Helen stewing because her mother didn’t trust her, Sandy desperate to get to the game, and Val finding tasks to delay our departure. Are you married?’
The question was unexpected and Murray stuttered slightly.
‘No, not yet.’
‘I recommend it, if you’re lucky like I was and manage to find the right woman, but it’s not all sunshine and roses. After a while you get an instinct for when to disappear and that morning was one of them. I made myself a coffee, lifted the Sunday Times from the kitchen table and sat in the car where I could read it in peace.’ There was a pause as James cleared his throat. ‘It was a tiny notice, just a few lines: “Man missing, believed drowned.” I’m not sure why it caught my eye. I’ve never been sailing unless you count rowing Val round Dunsappie Loch when we were courting, and I’m not particularly familiar with the part of the world where Lunan ended up, but for some reason I read it. I saw his name – “Archie Lunan, aged 25” – and knew then and there that he was dead.’
‘What made you so sure?’
Professor James hesitated.
‘I don’t know. I never considered Archie suicidal. Quite the opposite. I still think of him as someone with a keen appreciation of life. His nature poems are full of wonder at the world. Maybe it was just that he wasn’t the type for heroics. And the last time I’d seen him he’d been …’ James paused again, as if searching for a word that would convey Archie’s state of being without slandering him. ‘He’d been over-elated.’
‘Under the influence of drugs?’
‘I’m not sure I would have been able to tell back then. But I don’t think so. It was more like the kind of rapture you see on the faces of the recently convert
ed. Do you remember the Hare Krishna?’
‘Hare, hare, rama, rama?’
‘They were all over Edinburgh in those days. Helen was frightened of them when she was little. Too noisy, I suppose, with all their chanting and bells, but I liked them. They added a bit of colour to what was still a drab city. That’s what Archie reminded me of the last time I saw him, a freshly recruited Hare Krishna. One that hadn’t yet experienced living through a Scottish winter with a shaved head, wearing not much more than an orange bed sheet. Convention demanded I delivered my speech while Archie hung his head, but it was as if he couldn’t sit still. I remember he picked up a photograph of Helen and Sandy when they were toddlers and asked what they were called. I was so surprised, I told him. He nodded his head, as if to say “not too bad”, and then enquired how we’d managed to choose these particular names out of all the ones available in the world.’
‘Did you tell him to mind his own business?’
‘No, it was a poet’s question. Suddenly we weren’t tutor and student, but two wordsmiths. Maybe I already realised he was master over me in that realm. I told him they were family names. Archie laughed and said that would never be an option for him, but he didn’t sound bitter, just happy, as if he was anticipating a future in which he might father children and give them names that would help shape their future in turn.’ James’s voice faltered and he asked, ‘Do you mind if we take a break?’
He wanted to coax the old man on, but Murray closed his notebook.
‘Of course. Would you like me to come back some other time?’
‘Hadn’t you better get it all down before I pop off?’
He looked into the rheumy eyes and lied.
‘I’m sure you’ll be here for a while yet.’
James snorted.
‘I’m eighty-seven. My father died at eighty-six and my grandfather at eighty-two. I switch on the light in the front room at seven-thirty every morning and evening, it’s gloomy enough for it to show even in the so-called summer. If my opposite neighbour looks out and all’s in darkness, she has instructions to approach with caution.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s have a coffee. My taste buds are shot so, please, make it strong.’
Murray filled the kettle in a kitchen piled with dirty crockery. He noted the microwave, the discarded cardboard sleeves from consumed ready meals and recognised a scene from his own life.
James shouted from the other room, ‘Ignore that mess. Irene will be in tomorrow with her mop and brushes to put everything to rights.’
Murray brought the kettle back into the lounge, set it on the dining table and plugged it in, wishing he’d had the foresight to bring along a packet of biscuits.
‘Maybe I should get Irene’s number.’
‘It’s a closely guarded secret. It’d be less trouble for you to get married. Not that that would necessarily solve your domestic problems these days, from what I’ve seen.’
The kettle reached its peak. Murray poured hot water over the instant brown stuff he’d already spooned into their mugs.
‘Sadly not.’
‘Don’t try and ingratiate yourself with misogyny. Times have moved on, and for the better too. Look at your head of department and his wife, top-class academics the pair of them, though Rachel is the better scholar, of course.’ The old man looked at him slyly. ‘How do you find Fergus Baine as head of department?’
Murray wondered if news of his affair with Rachel had spread as far as here, the self-contained bed-sit in the heart of what used to be a family home. He took a sip of coffee. He’d put in too much of the instant powder and it tasted bitter on his tongue.
‘Very efficient.’
‘Yes, efficiency has a habit of propelling men to the top.’
Tiredness was slackening the professor’s face. If Lunan had been a bright, short-lived flame, James was wax, his features melting with time. Murray turned the tape recorder back on.
‘Tell me about Christie Graves. Did you see much of her?’
James sighed, as if disappointed to be abandoning the subject of Murray’s head of department.
‘Not at first, but pretty soon Christie became part of the package. She was Archie’s shadow, or maybe he was hers, who knows? She was very beautiful in a way that was fashionable back then: big eyes, pale skin and that red hair, very pre-Raphaelite. She’s always credited as being part of the group and, in a way, I suppose she was. She was certainly there a lot that year, but she never contributed anything, just sat there quietly with a Giaconda-like smile on her face. It irritated the hell out of me.’
‘She must have surprised you later.’
‘Oh, yes, Christie was a big surprise. Of course, in a way, Lunan’s death was the making of her. Maybe that’s a resurrection of sorts, though it didn’t seem so at the time.’ James took a sip of his coffee. The ancient goblin features drooped with the weight of memories. ‘There was no funeral. Lunan’s body was lost but somebody organised a wake in Mather’s, and someone else was mawkish enough to give a reading of “Preparation for a Wake”. Needless to say, Archie didn’t rise up like some thirsty messiah, ready to join in the drinking. Those that did attend got horribly drunk, myself included. Christie stayed away. I can’t say I blamed her. I only saw her once after Lunan drowned, quite soon afterwards in fact, walking down the Bridges. She’d cut her hair. I remember being terribly touched by that. She’d had such beautiful hair, been quite aware of it too. But it was gone, hacked off. I crossed the street to offer my condolences. She saw me, met my eyes and nodded, but she didn’t stop. I didn’t hear anything of her until a few years later when her book came out.’
‘What did you make of it?’
‘What could you make of it? It was good. A funny word to apply to a book like that, but it was. Terrible and good.’
‘Did you think any of it was based on fact?’
‘What does it matter? Would it make it a better book?’
‘Not necessarily better, but it’s an interesting question, from my perspective.’
James leaned back in his chair and raised his wilting features to the ceiling, showing the full stretch of his tortoise neck.
‘Authenticity … was it authentic? It existed, I held it in my hands and it impressed me. I think it had something better than authenticity. It had integrity, and that’s all the truth that we can ever hope for.’
James accompanied Murray to the front door despite his protestations that he could find the way himself. They shook hands on the doorstep and James asked, ‘Are you going to interview her? Christie?’
‘Apparently not. My requests have been turned down.’
‘A pity. Now that would have been a coup.’
He was halfway down the path when James called him back.
‘It’s up to you what kind of book you want this to be, but I think you have to find a way of seeing her.’
The older man was a head shorter. Murray looked down into eyes sparked with youth. He remembered James’s description of Lunan as an over-elated religious convert and thought it could also be applied to this elderly face brimming with conviction.
‘Easier said than done. She’s threatened to prosecute me if I try.’
Professor James snorted.
‘And you’re going to let that stop you?’
He shrugged and the professor shook his head in mock despair.
‘Let me tell you something. My father was an engineer at Barr & Strouds, a stalwart of the union, free with his opinions on everything bar sex. He only gave me one piece of advice in that area. A woman you don’t have to chase is a woman not worth having.’
Murray softened his voice with the respect due to dead fathers.
‘I’m sure he was a clever man, but that particular counsel is as out of date as mass industrialisation. Anyway, I want to interview her about a troubled episode in her past, not marry her.’
‘What if she’s simply playing hard to get?’
‘Why should she?’
‘I don’t know. Habit? She
set herself against talk of Archie for sound reasons, but time has passed and times have changed. Maybe she needs to be reminded of that.’ James put his hand on Murray’s arm. ‘You’re a bright lad. I’m sure you’ll manage if you set your mind to it.’
Chapter Nine
MURRAY SHOVED THE carrier bag of books into his rucksack, hefted it onto his shoulder and stepped out of the secondhand bookshop into Edinburgh’s West Port. He hadn’t found any reference to Lunan in the poetry journals the book dealer had phoned him about, but the bubbled capitals and monochrome type of the adverts for now defunct magazines and readings long past had provided a quick spark of connectivity to the poet’s era. Time travel through typeface. The thought made him smile.
He waited at the traffic lights then crossed the road, his mind turning towards lunch; maybe a bowl of soup somewhere in the Grassmarket where he could jot down a couple of points that had occurred to him while browsing the bookshelves. He remembered a quiet café where the service was slow and customers could linger. Perhaps he’d allow himself to continue perusing the journals he’d bought, before returning to the library. He might yet justify the leaden purchase by finding some passing reference to Lunan or his associates. The day was taking shape.
He was trying to remember where the nearest ATM was when he saw his brother’s girlfriend turning the corner. Lyn was wearing her work clothes: flat shoes, loose-fitting jeans and a T-shirt topped by a long-sleeved blouse. Murray recalled her joking that she would wear a burka to work if she could get away with it.
‘Except the filthy buggers would imagine I was wearing head-to-toe Ann Summers underneath.’
Jack had asked if Ann Summers stocked head-to-toe outfits and she’d given him a wink.
‘You’d be amazed.’
Lyn was too intent on talking to the scruffy man in an electric wheelchair who was rolling along beside her to have seen Murray yet. The bookshop was three streets since, the nearest turning a block ahead, but he was almost level with a pub. Murray stepped up his pace and slipped smartly through its door.