‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m not making this up. Would you come and have a look at it with me some time, just so you can see what I’m talking about?’
‘Well, all right, if you insist,’ John said. ‘When?’
‘Later in the week. I’ve got two funerals on Tuesday. I need to spend time with the families tomorrow.’
‘From what you’re saying,’ John said, ‘this stone’s not going anywhere. Give me a call during the week and we’ll go for a walk in the woods.’ He slipped into a detective drawl for a few seconds. ‘See if this preacher guy’s story checks out. Meanwhile, how about another dram?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m going to head off. The road’ll be getting icy.’
‘Stay and eat with us,’ Elsie said. ‘Stay the night.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, trotting out the old lie, ‘but I need to get back. I’ve got stuff to do.’
XIV
I went to Edinburgh and became a student in the last four years of the seventies, the fag-end of the post-war consensus, when Scotland was a land of unwashed jeans, rotten beer, heavy industry creaking at the joints and endless arguments about something called devolution, and the United Kingdom as a whole was stumbling towards the tender arms of Margaret Thatcher. In Edinburgh I became friendly with a History student, John Moffat, who came from Monimaskit, a small town on the east coast I knew nothing about; and with him and others I, who had never drunk alcohol, smoked a cigarette or eaten a meal in a restaurant, set about catching up with the life that had been waiting for me. I took to it with astonishing ease: it was like picking up a new mask and putting it on. We sampled the pubs and cafés of Rose Street and the Royal Mile, the student haunts of Greyfriars Market and Better Books, and the sardine-tight parties of Marchmont and the Southside. We arrived at these all-night affairs carrying as our passes bottles of ‘vino collapso’, the cheapest wine we could find, foul vinegar with which you could have cleaned drains. If we gained entry, the next task was to scrum our way into the heaving throng. The windows would be streaming with condensation, the air thick with tobacco and marijuana smoke, sweat, alcohol fumes and a mist of assorted cheap perfumes. I couldn’t stand these parties now, but at the time I reckoned I’d passed on to a higher plane of being.
John, early on in our friendship, had adopted an avuncular concern for my wellbeing. He found it difficult to accept that someone of my background was not only able but happy to misbehave as he did.
‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ he asked me on one of these nights. ‘I mean, don’t you have pangs of guilt or anything?’
We had teamed up with another History student called Colin, who had taken us to a party in a flat somewhere off Leith Walk, a part of town we didn’t know. The atmosphere was wilder than we were used to. There’d already been a fight in the kitchen, a man in a frock was asleep in the bath, a drinking competition requiring participants to climb on each other’s shoulders was in progress in the hall, and in the front room, where we were, half a dozen roaring men in beards were circling a very drunk woman and encouraging her to do a striptease. If I was going to have guilt pangs, this was probably the place to have them.
‘Why, do you?’ I shouted back at John over the racket.
‘No,’ he said, ‘why should I? But you’re different.’
‘No I’m not, I’m the same,’ I said. ‘I stopped being guilty years ago. I don’t believe the reward for enjoying yourself is eternal hellfire.’
‘What?’ he shouted.
‘I don’t believe in hell,’ I screamed. ‘And I don’t believe the reward for not enjoying yourself is a place in a celestial choir. If I’m wrong, well, I’m wrong. I’ll have a good-going argument with God about it, though, before he casts me into the pit.’
‘Pascal said if the choice is heads God exists, tails he doesn’t, you’re as well to call heads,’ John shouted back. ‘If you’re right, you hit the jackpot. If you’re wrong, you lose nothing. But you’re calling tails. That’s a risky option for a son of the manse.’
‘Same for me as anyone,’ I yelled. ‘Anyway, there’s a flaw in Pascal’s strategy. Do you think God would be fooled for a minute if you called heads but you didn’t really believe in him?’
He shook his head and pointed at his ear to indicate that he couldn’t hear properly. I called to Colin, who was standing in a bemused stupor on the other side of John.
‘How do you know these guys anyway? Who are they?’
‘I don’t,’ Colin shouted. ‘I just met them in the pub. They’re Divinity students. Everybody says they’re the worst. They’ve got to do everything they want to do before they graduate. After that they have to be good for the rest of their lives.’
I could see the logic of their position. I studied through the week, but the weekends were what being a student was for. That first term I only went home to Ochtermill once, and after that I didn’t go at all. There, I would have been obliged to eat my mother’s tedious meals and go to church to watch my father chiding his ever-diminishing flock. I wouldn’t have had even a sniff at a drink. In Edinburgh, I could spend Sunday mornings in bed if I wanted, go to the pictures in the afternoon, go to the student union in the evening. Nobody – not my father, not ghostly Jesus, nobody – was looking over my shoulder.
I, who had never experienced a kiss that didn’t take place on the page of a novel, lost my virginity in freshers’ week, in a clumsy grapple with a girl whose name, I’m ashamed to say, I cannot now remember. I decided that this didn’t count and set out to lose it several more times during the rest of that year. Each time the sense of disappointment grew. I suppose the girls I slept with woke up disappointed too, because any post-coital relationship always fizzled out after a week, or a day, or an hour. John Moffat’s sex life was equally sporadic, but a desperate anxiety not to miss the next opportunity kept us turning up to every party we heard of. Sometimes we went to three or four in one night.
But we didn’t meet Elsie and Jenny at any of those parties. We met them in a café on Forrest Road one Saturday at the start of our second year. It was one o’clock, the place was busy, and the only spare seats were at a table already occupied by a dark-haired girl, our sort of age, in a red polo-neck sweater, who was reading a book with an empty cup in front of her. A copy of the Guardian was folded on the table under her elbow.
‘Anybody sitting here?’ John asked.
She hardly glanced up. ‘Go ahead,’ she said.
The waitress came over and we ordered bacon-and-egg rolls and mugs of tea. The waitress looked about twenty too; she was tall and shapely with short blonde hair and an open, smiling face. When she’d written the order down on her note-pad she said, ‘Do you want another coffee, Jenny?’
‘That’d be great, thanks,’ the girl in the red polo-neck said. This time she looked up properly to smile at the waitress, and I saw her big brown eyes beneath a mass of black curly hair. They were attractive, but so too were the retreating buttocks of the waitress. I turned back to the girl’s eyes, and she caught me and held my stare for a second, then went back to her book. I clocked it: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, not an item on any of my course reading lists.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ John said, ‘but could I get a borrow of your paper? If you don’t mind.’
‘Go ahead,’ she said again, in the same careless way. She had a very soft voice, an English accent.
‘Thanks,’ he said. He picked up the paper, turned to the sports pages and started reading the previews of that day’s football. John was into football, knew infinitely more about it than me, but he later confessed that he only asked for the paper in order to speak to her. So there we were, me staring after the waitress’s backside, John eyeing up the girl with the Guardian. Strange how things work out.
The hot drinks arrived first. John did a complicated set of signals with his finger, pointing at the newspaper and then the coffee, and said to the waitress, ‘Just put it on our tab, will you?’
‘No, no, it’s all right,’ the gi
rl protested.
‘Just the second one,’ John said, making an attempt at an easy laugh which came out as a squeak. He was trying to be magnanimous and hold on to his pennies at the same time. ‘Fair’s fair,’ he said. ‘Jenny, is it?’
The girl nodded, embarrassed. The waitress raised one eyebrow, and a swift look passed between them.
‘She’s not paying for it anyway,’ the waitress said. She bent down nearer to John. ‘But don’t tell the boss.’
John looked disappointed. ‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Oh, what a shame,’ the waitress mocked, but her tone was friendly, motherly almost. ‘Pay for it if you want. If it’ll make you feel better.’
‘No, no,’ John said quickly. ‘Eh, what do you mean anyway, make me feel better? Do I look that bad?’
‘As a matter of fact you look terrible,’ she said. ‘Heavy night last night, was it?’
‘How about leaving the teas off the bill as well?’ I said. I liked her style and thought I could be equally arch.
She looked at me dismissively. ‘Chancer,’ she said. This pleased me greatly: I’d never been called a chancer before. I tried to make something of it.
‘That’s a fine thing to call your customers,’ I said.
‘Och, wheesht,’ she said, ‘your patter’s rotten.’ She turned back to John. ‘And anyway, what time is this to be having your breakfast?’
‘How do you know it’s our breakfast?’ John said.
‘Because I do,’ she said. ‘I’ll just away and fetch it.’
Her name was Alison Crichton, but everybody called her Elsie. Her friend was Jenny Watson. Jenny was waiting for Elsie to finish her shift so they could go shopping on Princes Street. Elsie worked in the café every Saturday from eight till two, and the rest of the week she was doing a course in librarianship at Napier College. Jenny was doing a secretarial course there, but she didn’t seem to care about it very much. Her family – her mother, father and a younger sister – had moved from the south of England when she was thirteen, and she lived with them out at Blackhall, off the Queensferry Road. Elsie was in a flat in Canonmills, and Jenny often stayed with her at weekends. We established all this information over our late breakfast, talking mostly to Jenny and occasionally to Elsie when she passed by, and by two o’clock all three of us were waiting for Elsie’s shift to end so we could take them for a drink before they went shopping.
It developed from there. We used to meet at the café and spend Saturday afternoons wandering around the boutiques on Cockburn Street, where you could get a ten per cent discount if you showed your matriculation card. Then we’d walk through Princes Street Gardens or explore the Old Town, stopping for a drink in old-fashioned bars where hard-faced men eyed us suspiciously over their whiskies and fags. These men merely tolerated John and me, but they always liked the lassies. Sometimes we’d split up and arrange to meet later. If any of us had heard of a party to go to, we’d share the information and meet there. When we did, it was as if we hadn’t seen each other for weeks.
Elsie was the more outgoing, warm, carefree one. She could light up any room with her friendliness. She was practical too, a good cook, a swift and efficient worker whatever the task: always on the go, full of energy, never settling. She was training to be a librarian but didn’t really have the patience for books. She dipped in and out of them, lost interest, started something else. She preferred conversation to reading.
Jenny was quieter, more pensive. She wasn’t as tall as Elsie, she wasn’t fat but was rounder, cuddlier. She had the most beautiful, unblemished skin, and thick black hair, which in those days she wore in a perm. Later she let it grow out and it fell naturally around her face with the kind of haphazard grace that a stylist would charge a fortune to create. There was a sleepy comfortableness about her that everybody found endearing. Her quiet, dreamy English voice was very easy on the ear. She read everywhere and all the time – newspapers, books, magazines – and seemed to be able to enter and leave the imagined world of a novel from one minute to the next without any difficulty or irritation. I couldn’t imagine her as somebody’s secretary. I used to think that she and Elsie had somehow got mixed up, that each should be doing the other’s course.
This easy four-way friendship went on for several weeks. Somehow John and I managed not to spoil it by making a wrong move. Like me, John was fed up with unsatisfactory brief encounters: there was something about Elsie and Jenny that made us wait, without either expecting or hoping too much. Nothing happened, and then, in December, Elsie and her flatmates decided to have an early Christmas party before everybody went their separate ways for the holidays.
There’d been a mood in the air for days beforehand, a kind of awkwardness with the girls, a difficulty of communication that was quite new. Early in the evening, before many people had arrived, I found myself alone in the kitchen with Elsie. She was wearing a black dress and looked stunning. When I leaned close to her, I could smell her skin under her perfume.
‘What are you going to do about Jenny?’ she asked abruptly.
‘What am I going to do about her? What do you mean?’
‘You know.’ She smiled teasingly and touched my arm.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You do like her?’
‘Of course I do. I like you too.’
‘Aye, but Jenny. She’s lovely.’
‘She is,’ I said. I felt something slipping from me: Elsie in her beautiful black dress looking at me with great tenderness, slipping away.
‘She’s waiting for you,’ she said. ‘She’s all yours if you want her.’
I felt a thrill, excitement and disappointment mixed in equal quantities. I didn’t want to be set up with Jenny, not by Elsie, but I knew that she was telling the truth. I wondered briefly if she was toying with me. Jenny was lovely. And yet…
All night I was on the move. I kept my distance from Jenny, and when she wasn’t looking I watched her and the men hovering about her. I saw how they wanted her, and how she didn’t want them, but I held back in case I’d misinterpreted Elsie’s meaning. I didn’t want to commit myself – I wanted the possibility of something else.
At one point I found myself standing next to a man I didn’t know, whom I’d never seen before in fact. Elsie and Jenny were in a group across the room, talking and laughing. John was with them. I noticed the body language between him and Elsie. Unmistakable. I thought, how have I missed that before? And just then the man beside me spoke.
‘Nae chance there, eh?’
I turned to him. He was tall, thin, hollow-cheeked and with a moustache that trailed down either side of his mouth. He could have stepped out of a Western.
‘What was that?’ I said.
He lifted his beer-can, indicating Elsie. He didn’t look at me.
‘She’s spoken for. Nae chance there. Better going for the other lassie.’
‘Eh?’ I said. ‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’
‘I’m just making an observation. If it was me, like. I’d hae the dark-haired lassie. Otherwise I might end up without either of them.’
I was furious and embarrassed that he had been watching me watching the girls. If I’d been drunker I might have hit him. But he looked very tough, and I did not want to be responsible for spoiling the night. I said nothing, knowing that he was right. He drank the dregs from his can and left the room. I never saw him again. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined him.
At the end of the night, when there were just half a dozen folk still standing, and the music was down to the last, slow track on the first side of Rumours (it was the age of punk, but that winter it was Fleetwood Mac that was playing at most of the parties I went to), Elsie and John started to dance, and as they danced they started to kiss, and I knew that there was no longer any hope of my being mistaken. Then she took him off to her bedroom and the door closed, and I wondered if I’d blown everything, if Jenny would decide that I’d had my chance and lost it. We stood there awkwardly, Jenny and I and a cou
ple neither of us knew, and the needle clicked on the innermost groove of the record. One of the others moved to take it off.
‘Well,’ Jenny said, ‘looks like my bed may have gone for the night.’ She shared Elsie’s room when she stayed over. ‘Do you feel like some fresh air?’
‘Aye, okay,’ I said.
‘Going to walk me home then?’ she said.
We put on our coats and headed out into the cold, clear night, walking past the colonies and through Stockbridge and Comely Bank, holding hands and talking, and not talking, until under a streetlamp on Craigleith Road we stopped and turned to each other and I kissed her.
That kiss went on for a long time. Wonderful though it was, even as it was happening a voice in my head was telling me that it was not what I really wanted but it was the best I could hope for. The voice was that of the moustachioed man at the party and it spoke with great conviction. I did not challenge it.
Afterwards Jenny and I didn’t say much. I took her home and we kissed again. I watched her let herself in and then I was faced with the long walk to the halls of residence on the other side of town. It was about four o’clock when I left her, and I didn’t get back till nearly six. I can see myself walking even now. The occasional taxi went rattling over the cobbles, there were a few late wanderers, the streetlamps and the stars, but mostly it was just me and Edinburgh.
Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Everything is familiar, and everything strange. It’s as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal. We had only kissed, Jenny and me, we hadn’t fondled or seen each other naked or had sex, but we had started something that wasn’t going to stop after the weekend. I was dog-tired by the time I got into bed but what I felt more than tiredness was relief. Things had been decided for me. I thought of kissing Jenny and it felt good. If there was disappointment in there I managed to minimise it. It wasn’t hard to convince myself that what we had started could be sustained, and that it would be enough.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 12