Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Any homework?’ she asked. ‘Well, get it done then – before you start any nonsense.’

  I cut myself a slab of bread, spread it with jam and bit a half moon out of it. I started my Maths. Hugo sat, still in the same position. He looked as if he was waiting for his tea.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked from the corner. I held up the book to show him. He came over to the table and looked at the problem. I have always found integration difficult. He sat in the chair beside me and guided me through the exercise in half the time I would normally have taken. Crumbs gathered in the spine of the exercise book and I blew them away before closing it. He proceeded to help me with my Latin, French and Physics homework, always explaining and illuminating.

  He turned out to be quiet and thoughtful with a great sense of the ridiculous. He spoke in a thick regional accent, almost always self-deprecatingly. When he laughed it wasn’t a guffaw like Paul’s, the head thrown back. Actually his head bent forward onto his chest and he shook quietly as if suppressing a laugh. I have consulted Roget on this point and cannot find a suitable word to describe Hugo’s laugh. Words for quiet laughter carry with them associations of sleaziness – ‘snigger’, ‘snicker’. Roget also gives ‘giggle’ and ‘titter’ but these are frivolous. ‘Chuckle’ is the nearest but it is so inaccurate as to be almost useless. So I must content myself with ‘laugh’.

  It was shortly after he arrived that I saw it demonstrated. Paul was beginning to worry about being flabby and out of condition and had invested in a book on Yoga. My mother had looked at the pictures in the book and had kidded him that he wouldn’t be able to do a single one. After tea Paul, Hugo and I went into the parlour to see if we could do some of the poses. I was able for some of them, probably because of my age and suppleness, but Paul rolled about the carpet grunting and gasping and twisting himself. Finally with some help from Hugo, who pushed his legs into position, he managed to complete ‘the plough’. He was lying on his back with his legs, at the ankle, touching behind his head. The seat of his trousers was taut and shining. Paul, in a strangled voice, gasped to me to go and get my mother. She came, drying her hands on her apron, to see the feat. By this time Paul’s face was almost purple, clamped as it was between his ankles.

  ‘Bet you can’t hold it for another thirty seconds,’ my mother said.

  ‘I can,’ gasped Paul. Everyone waited, watching him. Then suddenly and quite distinctly he farted, a small piping accidental note. Laughing deafeningly his body sprung back and he lay exhausted and convulsed on the floor. Mother was screeching mock horror and abuse at him. Hugo fell into the armchair, his chin on his chest, and shook helplessly. When we had all recovered, my mother wiping her eyes with the tail of her apron and Paul shaking his head in disbelief that it should have happened to him, we noticed Hugo still laughing silently and uncontrollably in his armchair. This started us all off again. Even at supper-time Hugo was seen to be still laughing uproariously into himself.

  About two months after this someone called at the door for Paul and I ran upstairs to the bedroom to see if he was in. He wasn’t but Hugo was sitting in the middle of the floor in his underpants in the position of complete repose, index fingers and thumbs joined, hands relaxed and upturned, legs crossed. His head was bent down and he seemed to be barely breathing. I tend to move quietly about the house and he did not notice me. I said nothing to him and went back down the stairs to the door.

  I have looked long and hard at this early period to try and read something into it of the tragedy that was to follow, but can find nothing. No prefiguring whatsoever. The only thing, looking back on it with hindsight, I took to be an indication of his state of mind – and even this is scientifically suspect – was the nature of his sleep.

  Our last remaining bank clerk, Harry Carey, would occasionally decide to go home for the week-end. That would leave a bed free in the room with Paul and Hugo and I used to plague my mother to let me sleep with the boys. At first she steadfastly refused, then one day Paul overheard me asking, when Harry had gone home, and he persuaded her.

  ‘Sure. Let him sleep in our room if he enjoys the crack,’ he said.

  ‘Well then, if you don’t mind. It’s just for one night now. It’s not to be a regular occurrence.’

  But it was. Every time that Harry went home I moved in with Paul and Hugo and would lie awake until they would come to bed – even if they were out at a dance – and listen to their talk far into the small hours of the morning. Paul would sit up wearing no pyjama jacket and smoke in bed. In the dark each time he drew on his cigarette his chin and nose would be lit by a red glow. The room smelt great and grown up.

  ‘That blonde had her eye on you, Qugo,’ said Paul.

  ‘Which one?’ said Hugo. Apart from the implied self-aggrandisement in the remark it seemed there had been a shapely blonde whom Hugo had tapped on the shoulder and asked to dance. When she turned round she had a terrible squint.

  I heard the crackle of sweet papers mixed with Hugo’s wheezing laugh. He asked me if I’d like one. Paul struck a match and by its light I caught the sweet thrown to me. Between crunchings Hugo tried to answer the question Paul had just put to him. What would he look for in his ideal woman? Often I fell asleep to the sound of his voice.

  One of the nights I slept with them I was awakened for some reason and could not get back to sleep again. Suddenly I heard a noise which terrified me. A mixture of grating and squeaking, a wild sound, not loud, which created a nausea in me as a sharp tin edge scraping along marble or brick. The room went quiet again. I thought the sound came from the direction of Hugo’s bed. It came again, this time louder. I crept from bed trying to trace the sound. In the dark it came again and again. I switched on the bedside light and looked at Hugo’s face. A knot of muscle gathered at the elbow of his jaw and vibrated, then his whole lower jaw moved slowly from side to side and the noise came. Hugo was grinding his teeth as he slept. Flints in a slow rub of terrible pressure. It was a sound quite unlike anything I have heard before or since. He looked pale and unrecognizable without his glasses, his hair tousled. It was only after what seemed like hours that he stopped this gnashing and I was able to sleep.

  He told me later that he had very bad teeth, half rotten he said, but seemed pleased that Joyce had suffered from the same complaint.

  It was at about this time that Hugo began to help me to conquer my stammer. My mother had sent me to elocution and speech therapy but it had done little good. I still got stuck. I hated the woman who taught me, with her red mouth pulsing like a sea anenome.

  ‘Watch my lips. Now say oo . . . oo . . . oo.’ She wore thick scarlet lipstick. I did not want to do things well for her so I failed.

  I was hoovering the stairs one day and singing at the same time. Even though I got pocket money for it, it was a task that I enjoyed. The hoover created a two tone base note, one when idling, the other a fraction higher when the sucking end was pressed into the carpet. Around this base I would sing songs. One that was accompanied pretty well was ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ from the Messiah and I was singing it at the top of my voice, which incidentally was just beginning to break, when Hugo came up behind me. He mimed applause over the noise of the hoover when I had finished.

  When the cleaning was over he asked me what was the first line of the aria I was singing.

  ‘N . . . N . . . N . . . I know thu . . . thu . . . that my Redeemer l . . . le . . . le.’

  ‘Y’see,’ he interrupted me. ‘You can sing it perfectly but you can’t say it.’

  I was embarrassed. No one had ever said this to me before. Only my mother and my speech therapist ever spoke openly about it. Everyone else waited or, what was worse, helped me out. I got up to try and leave the room.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Hugo called after me. ‘C’mere.’ I stopped.

  ‘If you’re going to be a man of ideas you must be able to articulate in some way. At the moment, with the stammering, you’re only giving yourself half a chance. I know it�
�s not your problem but you know these people who tell you that they’re full up to here of something, ideas, emotions, feelings. Ask them to put a name on it and they just shrug and look intense. You must be able to speak it or write it – and if you can’t it’s not a thought. It’s an urge – like dogs have. Look at Paul,’ he said and went into kinks of laughter, ‘he can speak from both ends. So, lad, we must get you speaking.’

  He treated my problem simply and openly and told me he had devised a therapy which might help me. He claimed that he was trying to cure me by the ‘rhythm method’, which he seemed to think funny. Firstly he got me to sing the line. Then he would get me to establish a slow rhythm by tapping my finger on the table and breaking the words up into syllables which corresponded to the beat. Gradually I would speed the rhythm and the word would come with it. Later in these lessons, in which I showed considerable improvement, I dispensed with beating on the table and would secretly tap my foot as if to music. As the months went by my performance became more and more presto. Then all outward signs of rhythm disappeared and by the following Christmas I could talk for long periods without stoppage – two or three sentences at a time, even though they sounded monotonous and had little cadence. Even today when I am nervous before giving a lecture to my students I take several deep breaths and behind the secrecy of the tilted lectern establish a tapping rhythm with my finger, then I start.

  Let me pause for a moment, now that I have my story launched, to try and explain both what I am trying to do and why I am doing it. For a start, it is not a story. What has happened cannot in the truest sense be said to be fiction, but the telling of a life, which is biography. At this point I must admit to having had great difficulty writing the foregoing pages. I have never experienced this before in writing but then I have never tried to write anything like this. When I sit down to write a critical article or a lecture the words seem to flow from my pen. Indeed my first job is to limit them. To enshrine my ideas in as few words as possible is my aim. Here I am doing the opposite, trying to swell a few fragments into something substantial. I am not entirely new in this field of course. My publication on Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788–1846) is biography of a sort, but there the family gave me access to all the papers, letters, diaries and unpublished poems. Now I have nothing but some memories to work on.

  One of the most difficult adjustments I have had to make is with regard to the way I write. I find it awkward to attenuate my normal style. For me to write simply is unnatural and as arduous as thinning a forest.

  Why should I write it at all? Perhaps to show something of my respect, perhaps to assuage my guilt. I owe it to Hugo. If it had not been for the novel he had written I don’t believe I would be trying to articulate what I think.

  I know what a doubtful quality sincerity is when I find it in a piece of literature. The critic in me screams, ‘It is unimportant’ – now a voice in me says equally loudly, ‘If I am not sincere what I am doing is worthless.’ Similarly in literature adherence to the truth, the facts as they actually happened, is of no value and yet I intend to be as close to truth as my memory will permit. I must be honest.

  One day when Paul and Hugo were studying for their final exams they decided to take the afternoon off and go for a walk. When I asked them they agreed to take me along, telling my mother it was no bother. We walked over the Cave Hill which dominates the town, a forested place, and the two men talked. Then after a while Paul turned to me and said, ‘And what are you going to do with your life? They say you’re a boy genius.’

  ‘I d . . . d . . . don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I want to go to you . . . you . . . university.’

  ‘Ah, but what will you do? Which particular branch do you intend to honour with your presence?’ I was a bit embarrassed by the way he spoke to me but I answered him nonetheless.

  ‘I think I want to do something in . . . in . . . the Humanities. I’m curious . . .’

  ‘You’re mad. Science is the only thing with any future. Like it or not, boy, in the world you’ve got to earn your living,’ said Paul. ‘And the best way to do it is with a BSc under your belt. If you have curiosity how could you be anything but a scientist?’

  ‘I will wait and see what subjects I do well in. I’m doing ‘A’ le . . . le . . . le . . .’

  ‘Levels,’ said Paul.

  A bird sang in the wood ‘ch . . . ch . . . ch . . .’ mocking me.

  ‘In English, L . . . L . . . Latin, Physics and Chemistry – so I can still shoose.’

  ‘Who’s that fella to say. Don’t heed him,’ said Hugo. ‘Science looks at the surface of things. If you have any real curiosity read Philosophy or Literature. Paul, there, has a headful of cells – mine is slightly different,’ and here he laughed. ‘Besides, the academic world of Science can be very vicious and narrow-minded. They’d cut your throat to publish a paper. I’ve seen them at work.’

  ‘Where would the world be today without its scientists?’ cried Paul.

  ‘You’re not often right, Paul,’ said Hugo, ‘but you’re wrong this time. Look at those trees.’ The sun tilted into the depths of the forest to our right, flecking the ground with yellow and brown. The remains of bluebells covered the forest floor with a film of petrol blue. ‘Just look. A scientist can tell us about phloem and xylem and tap roots and chromosomes but he can’t tell us what it looks like or feels like. This is rubbish anyway. There is no argument between the Arts and Sciences. That’s over long ago. What we’re talking about is the lad here. What is best for him. Which subject are you happiest at?’

  ‘I thought you were a pharmacist,’ I said to Hugo.

  ‘So I am.’

  ‘Then why do you talk as if you knew all about the Humanities?’

  Paul answered for him. ‘Hugo has a lot of skeletons hanging in his cupboard.’ Here he cupped his hand over his mouth and hissed, ‘Qugo reads books.’ When Paul wanted to tease him he pronounced his name with a Q. Hugo responded by ignoring him.

  ‘Literature is the science of feeling. The artist analyses what feelings are, then in some way or other he tries to reproduce in the reader those same feelings. How much more subtle an experiment than overflowing an oul’ bath. How many feelings are there to reproduce, d’ye think? Is there a periodic classification of feelings? Nuances. That’s the secret. The lines in the spectrum between pity and sympathy. Literature is the space between words. It fills the gaps that language leaves. English has only one word for love and yet how many different types of love are there in Literature?’

  Paul laughed and put his arm around Hugo’s shoulders as if offering him to me.

  ‘This is Hugo at his best,’ he said. ‘Take him or leave him. There’s not another idiot like him.’

  When Hugo had been talking his face had been serious and intense. He kept adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Now when Paul presented him he laughed and the conversation turned away from my future to something else.

  In all the time I knew him Hugo never collected books. He had no bookshelf – no, that is wrong – he had a bookshelf but it contained only his pharmacy textbooks, great thick volumes honeycombed with benzene rings with their pendant NH2’s and their off shoots of OH’s and HPO4’s. Afterwards I discovered that the public library was the source for his vast reading. It was rare to mention a book he had not read. Sometimes, when I was tracking down something for an essay not available in our own university library I would see him ensconced in a corner of the reference section, reading. I made it a point of always going over and having a few words with him.

  It was shortly after the conversation in the woods that we discovered that Paul had failed his finals. Hugo had passed with high commendation. There was a palpable atmosphere of depression pervading the house. It was the first time I had ever seen Paul gloomy. He sat in the chair, his handsome face unshaven, smoking and staring out the kitchen window at the tip of the backyard wall. Hugo had to control his elation at doing so well, but he was genuinely sorry for Paul. I had just finished
my ‘A’ levels and felt confident of doing well.

  ‘Next year for sure,’ Hugo said to Paul.

  ‘That’s what gets me – doing that boring stuff all over again.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Hugo.

  ‘Failing stinks,’ said Paul. ‘When I saw that board my guts just fell on the ground. It’s almost as if it’s personal. They’re saying you’re not good enough. Christ and I worked so hard.’

  ‘I know – but there’s worse things you could fail at,’ said Hugo.

  ‘I don’t know what they are.’ Paul paused to bite his nails. ‘But it’s great about you. I’m really pleased for you. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Taggart says he’ll keep me on, so I have a job. I think I’ll stay on here as well and give you a hand next year.’

  I ran out excited to tell Mother that Hugo and Paul would be staying on a further year.

  On reading over what I have written so far I feel I have created a false picture of Hugo. Because I wanted to record, as exactly as I could remember, what he said I give the impression that he was talkative and gregarious. This was not so. For long periods – weeks on end – I would never hear him say a word, apart from what was required by good manners. He would seem morose, eating his meals and disappearing into the bedroom or going out for long walks on his own. At times like these I noticed that Paul left him alone, would talk if required but would not initiate any conversation to resurrect Hugo from his mood. During the year after he passed his finals this isolation happened with increasing frequency. Paul told me, many years afterwards, that this was when Hugo was working flat out on the novel. My mother even began to remark his taciturnity.

  ‘That lad hasn’t a word to throw to a dog, this weather. I’ll be glad to see the back of him when he goes.’

  She hadn’t long to wait because the following spring Hugo announced he was moving out. Now that he was earning he had managed to get himself a mortgage and he had bought a house, not too far from where we lived. He said that he was bringing his family there to live. I was surprised at him having a family because he had never really mentioned them. It was something with which I hadn’t really associated him. When he left he bought Mother a pearl necklace and she took back all that she had said about him.