The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

  XV

  After that Christmas party, John and Elsie were one item, and Jenny and I were another. As soon as this was established, it seemed as if it was how things had always been going to end up.

  I did not love Jenny as I should have: I was not capable of doing so. Walking through Edinburgh that night I should have felt delirious happiness rather than relief. But if there was a raging passion waiting to be released in me I did not let it out. I kept myself clamped down. And Jenny, too, seemed to adapt easily enough to our new life. How deeply did she love me? How do you measure love? It was as if we woke up and found that we’d been together for longer than we could remember. It was – or it seemed – very, very simple.

  And yet I made a complicated lie of it. She asked me why I’d blanked her signals, and I said I hadn’t even seen them, that because I’d thought she wanted me just as a friend I couldn’t have seen them. Had I not fancied Elsie, she wanted to know? No, I said, she was the one I wanted to be with; I just hadn’t allowed myself to hope I ever could be. I don’t know why I said these things, except that it was easier than telling the truth.

  To outsiders we must have seemed a pretty boring foursome. The changed relationships didn’t seem greatly to reduce the amount of time we spent together as a group. We had other friends, but none with whom we shared so much of ourselves. The next summer we saved up enough money to go on holiday to Greece, the first time I’d ever been abroad, and the fortnight we spent there reinforced our self-sufficiency as a group. We were mutually supportive, we liked our own company, we laughed a lot, we felt secure. What more did we need?

  One of Elsie’s flatmates moved out that summer and Jenny took the empty room. John and I still had two years of study left, but the girls had finished their courses and found themselves jobs. Elsie worked in a bookshop and Jenny had some incredibly dull job with the local council – I never did understand exactly what it was, nor did I care much. John and I moved out of student halls and into a flat. Jenny and I were sleeping together, of course, and hardly a night went by when I wasn’t at hers or she wasn’t at mine, and the same was true of John and Elsie. It seemed so exciting and new, and for me it was also rebellious. How feeble that sounds now. Some rebels had Kalashnikovs and revolutionary manifestos; others were into punk rock and anarchy. I had a girlfriend who was on the pill.

  I was taken to meet her parents, and that went smoothly enough; I found them boring and insular, but I was, as ever, adept at concealing my true opinions. The trickier introduction was always going to be the one between Jenny and my parents. I put it off for as long as I could, but finally, one cold weekend in November, we took the train to Stirling and then the bus to Ochtermill. My father was by then sixty-six but seemed twenty years older. He’d offered to come to Stirling for us in the rust-eaten Morris Minor, but I’d said we weren’t sure which train we’d be on: I couldn’t bear the thought of being driven by him. As Jenny and I trudged hand in hand up the brae to the manse, my heart sank a little; a lot in fact, and at least as much for my sake as for hers.

  We would have to endure separate, freezing bedrooms, grace at the start and end of every drab meal, no alcohol, and church on Sunday morning before we left – the general threadbare discomfort of my upbringing; all these things Jenny was prepared for. No amount of preparation, however, would make my father any easier to meet for the first time.

  He was still entirely grey, except for his hair and collar, which had both turned a yellowish white. His speech had become even more deliberate – not because of the stroke, now long in the past, but as if, in protest against the speed at which everybody else lived, he’d chosen to put the brakes on his own existence (and, by extension, on my mother’s). You had to listen carefully for the full-stops in his sentences, otherwise you found yourself interrupting him, your own words sandwiched between two portions of whatever he was saying. I found all this infuriating: it seemed wilful and antiquated and purposeless. Now, in retrospect, it makes more sense. He saw himself tramping up the narrow path to salvation, while in the opposite direction godless humanity rolled down the highway to destruction.

  ‘She seems very nice, Gideon,’ my mother said, as I helped her take dishes through to the kitchen after dinner on Saturday night. She’d made a real effort – a chicken casserole followed by apple pie with cream. The cream was thin and had tasted slightly off. My father had taken Jenny through to the drawing room, where, astonishingly, a fire had been lit in her honour. I was nervous about leaving them together for too long.

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said. ‘She is very nice.’

  ‘Your father thinks so as well,’ she said, though I couldn’t see when they’d had a chance to discuss it. ‘Level-headed,’ she added. ‘And bonnie, too, not that that matters.’ Jenny had put on a longish skirt and not too much make-up or jewellery, so as not to alarm them. It appeared to have worked.

  We took a tray of tea things into the drawing room. My father had put more coal on the fire than he would usually get through in a week, and the room had actually reached a reasonable temperature. I sat down on the sofa next to Jenny and she took my hand. My father from his armchair spotted this at once but said nothing.

  ‘Your father’s been telling me about what you might do after you graduate,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘How the Church is still an option,’ she said, fixing me with a smile. I had more than once dismissed this possibility in Edinburgh.

  ‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘I suppose it is. We haven’t talked about it for quite a while, though, Dad. I still intend to teach.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, as if this were a childish whim of mine, not to be taken too seriously. He set his cup and saucer on the chair arm. ‘But, as we said before, one starts best from a position of doubt. You feel you want to be a teacher, but you haven’t ruled the Church out. That gives me confidence that you may yet end up in the ministry.’

  No doubt as he intended, his presumption made me angry.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why do you keep thinking that? I’ve told you, I’m not cut out to be a minister.’

  ‘Cut out,’ my father said, as if he’d never heard the expression before. The way he said it made me think of paper ministers in a chain. ‘I thought the same of myself,’ he added.

  ‘Gideon has always been headstrong,’ my mother said to Jenny. Her hand was trembling, making her cup rattle in the saucer. ‘He goes his own way.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve always tried to please you.’

  ‘I hope I never taught you to go through life trying to please other people,’ my father said.

  ‘“Honour thy father and thy mother,”’ I said. ‘It’s one of the ten commandments, you’ll recall.’

  ‘Your wit is beneath you,’ he said coolly, and I was stung, because I knew he was right.

  ‘He refused to go to Scouts when he was twelve,’ my mother continued, as if oblivious to these exchanges. There was something like pride in her voice. ‘He said it was trivial. He’s always been a serious boy.’

  ‘I’m nearly twenty-one, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘He’s like his father,’ she said.

  ‘I could wish he were more so,’ my father said.

  This was intolerable. I felt trapped, sitting there beside Jenny, with my parents batting me back and forth like a ping-pong ball. I decided to throw something of my own into the discussion. It was an idea that Jenny and I had talked about, briefly and indecisively, but which now suddenly became a fully formulated plan in my head.

  ‘I’m thinking of going abroad again this summer,’ I announced. ‘Jenny too, but she would only be able to come for a couple of weeks. She’d join me over there.’

  ‘Over where?’ my father asked. He’d shown no interest in the Greek holiday whatsoever: if one journeyed to other lands it should be to work, to preach the Word, or for some other necessary reason like war, not in order to lie on a beach. As for the sexual adventures that might occur during a f
ortnight in Greece, my parents must have barred them from their minds.

  ‘America,’ I said. ‘You can get work in these summer camps they run for kids over there. They pay for your flight and your accommodation, then you get some time at the end to go travelling.’

  The American Child: Is He a Monster? The ads were headlined like this, and I had sent off for the information. I didn’t fancy working with children much, monstrous or not, but if it got me into the USA and gave me time to hitchhike over to California and back, I thought I could thole it. It was nothing more than a vague idea, but at that moment all I wanted to do was retaliate.

  ‘America,’ he said. ‘A-mer-i-ca.’ He looked sadly at Jenny, as if to say, look what you have landed yourself with, young lady. ‘Gideon’s weakness is an infatuation with America.’

  ‘Your weakness is an infatuation with America,’ I retorted. ‘Nothing American can ever be any good. Nothing good can ever come from America.’

  ‘Broadly speaking, I would concur with that,’ he said.

  ‘Narrowly speaking would be closer to the truth,’ I said.

  ‘We seem to have touched a raw nerve,’ he said.

  My mother’s teacup rattled again. Jenny looked my father full in the face.

  ‘You obviously have strong views about this,’ she said. ‘What is so wrong with America?’

  My father didn’t usually sit in the drawing room – nobody did – and he didn’t fit comfortably into his armchair. He was all angles and jutting limbs, and his cup and saucer threatened to crash at any moment. Now he placed these on a side-table and unfolded himself on to his feet. ‘What is so wrong with America,’ he repeated, as if it was the title of a lecture. As indeed it was. He stood in front of the fire, blocking the heat, hands clasped behind him, and I could hear the back of one slapping into the palm of the other as he answered Jenny’s question.

  ‘The Americans sentimentalise anything they touch,’ he said. ‘And because they dominate the world, they have done their best to sentimentalise our understanding of it. This will not do. It enfeebles the intellect. It gives the most banal aspects of human existence a spurious significance purportedly on a level with, or surpassing, the great truths of revealed religion.’ I glanced at Jenny: her wide eyes were threatening to pop out of her head altogether. ‘Stupidity is rife in this world, and its wellspring is the United States of America. This stupidity and this sentimentalism derive from a document which says that humans have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.’ He paused, as if to see if there was anybody in the room stupid or sentimental enough to defend the Declaration of Independence. ‘They don’t. The chief end of mankind is to glorify God.’

  ‘An end and a right are different things,’ I said. I don’t know why I spoke, it was only going to encourage him.

  ‘Yes, you’re correct, but the Americans have obliterated the difference, and so, in turn, infatuated by America, has the rest of the Western world. They have turned the pursuit of happiness into an end in itself. Happiness! What is happiness but the flicker of a struck match in the vast expanse of God’s creation? It is nothing. You cannot measure it but by false measures – a well-paid job, a nice house, a new car, a loving spouse.’ He held up a finger, as Jenny seemed about to interrupt. ‘Wait. All these can be taken from you in an instant. Where is your happiness then? You cannot sentimentalise the valley of the shadow of death, but the Americans do their best, and what they fail to sentimentalise they brutalise. How else could Thomas Jefferson have written those words and yet owned slaves? Ever since Jefferson the Americans have blundered on, pursuing happiness, though it may lead to the destruction of the planet, the starvation of millions, though it means war and crime and incalculable waste and misery – they will pursue happiness to the ends of the earth. But they will find only wormwood and gall, because happiness is a false god.’

  In the aftermath of this outpouring the only sound came from the fire hissing and cackling behind my father. My mother’s mouth hung open in the way it often did in kirk. Jenny looked as though she’d received some terrible news by telegram. Eventually she managed to say, ‘That is certainly a very powerful argument. It doesn’t hold out much hope for us, does it?’

  My father gave her one of his long, unblinking stares. ‘There is no hope,’ he said, ‘without Christ. You are English, Jennifer. Did your parents give you a Christian upbringing?’

  ‘Yes, they did,’ she said.

  ‘In the Church of England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dad…’ I said, but he ignored me.

  ‘You’ve been in Scotland only seven years or so, is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And to what church do you now belong?’

  ‘Dad, this is outrageous,’ I said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Cross-examining Jenny like this.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I want to know. You brought her here so we could meet her, didn’t you?’

  ‘I wish we’d stayed in Edinburgh,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you didn’t. You’re in Ochtermill now, and I am the minister of Ochtermill. Is it not perfectly reasonable in the circumstances to ask my son’s friend to what church, if any, she belongs?’

  ‘Yes it is,’ Jenny said. ‘But the answer is, I don’t go to church any more. My parents are in the Episcopal Church now. They go to St Mary’s Cathedral, but I don’t go with them. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe it any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ my father said, ‘although not surprised. You’re young, though. I had doubts when I was young. I came through them.’

  I facetiously wondered if he was going to suggest that she enter the ministry too, but said nothing.

  ‘It’s more than doubts,’ Jenny said, with a great deal more honesty than I’d ever demonstrated. ‘I simply don’t believe any of it. I don’t wish to offend you, Mr Mack, but you did ask.’

  ‘Yes, I did. Well, I am not a monster, despite what Gideon may have told you. I’m not going to throw you out of the house for being truthful. And I hope you will still come to our service tomorrow. You may not think it worthwhile, but I do. There is nothing more terrible than that you lose your faith.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ I said. ‘You can lose your humanity. That is far more terrible.’

  ‘Fine words, Gideon,’ my father said, ‘but they mean nothing. You go to America, and that is what they will tell you there. It won’t help you when you have to confront your own immortality.’

  Jenny and I glanced at each other, but we’d heard correctly: immortality was the word he had used. I have never forgotten that phrase. Of course it has a resonance now that it did not have then. This is what the last few months have been about, and what the rest of my days will be for: confronting my own immortality.

  My father excused himself after this relaxing post-dinner conversation and went off to his study, saying he had to put everything in order for the morning. I thought his retreat cowardly, but was also glad to see the back of him. My mother left us shortly afterwards, and Jenny and I sat on the rug in front of the fire, cuddling, and talked over the evening. She was remarkably calm about everything, but then one of Jenny’s qualities was that nothing ever seemed to disturb her.

  ‘So you’re going to be a minister,’ she said.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Your father thinks you are.’

  ‘He can think what he likes.’

  ‘And I agree with him,’ she said.

  I screwed up my face at her. ‘Come on, Jenny, I’ve no more faith than you have.’

  ‘Oh, you do,’ she said. ‘You might deny it, but it’s in you, deeper than you think. Anyway, I wouldn’t mind if you did become a minister.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Yes, I am. It would be okay. It might even be fun.’

  ‘Fun?’

  She laughed. ‘You see, you’re shocked. You’re just like him.’

  I shook my head. ‘But you don’t
believe any of it. And neither do I.’

  ‘So you say. But even if you don’t, times have changed. Why do you have to believe in God to be a minister?’

  ‘I expect it’s still an essential qualification.’

  ‘In this day and age? Why? A minister’s a kind of social worker with an extra qualification in rhetoric. You could do that. You’d be better at it than teaching.’

  ‘Away you go.’

  ‘I mean it. You don’t like kids very much. All that stuff about going off to Camp America – you’d hate it.’

  ‘You still have to deal with kids if you’re a minister.’

  ‘Yeah, but not all the time, every day, dozens of them.’

  ‘You can’t just walk into the Church of Scotland and say, I want to be a minister, give me a job. They check you out. They’d soon see through me.’

  ‘I very much doubt it. You’re one of them already. You could convince them. They need young blood like yours.’

  ‘Aye, but why? What would be the point?’

  ‘A job for life,’ she said. ‘Not many of them around these days. A roof over your head. The chance to help people, make their lives better. You wouldn’t have to convert them, all you’d have to do is be a decent human being. All right, not a great income, but not poverty either. It could be an interesting life. You could make it interesting. We could make it interesting.’

  ‘I can’t see you as a minister’s wife,’ I said.

  ‘Is that a proposal or a rejection?’

  ‘Neither,’ I said. ‘But can you?’

  ‘If I can see you as a minister, I can see me as your wife,’ she said. ‘But we wouldn’t be like your parents. We’d be ourselves. If we ended up in a house like this we’d do something with it, make it our own. I’m fantasising,’ she said, ‘but what else are you going to do?’