The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

  ‘Teach,’ I said.

  She looked at me. I said it again, to show I was sincere. ‘Teach.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know. That’s what you’ve always said.’

  ‘Don’t you think I mean it?’

  ‘You know yourself you don’t mean it,’ she said. ‘It’s in your eyes. You don’t want to teach, you never have.’

  ‘That’s good, coming from you. Rushing off to that office every day with such enthusiasm.’

  ‘That’s how I know,’ she said.

  ‘I do want to teach,’ I said weakly.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s wait and see what happens.’

  We kissed for a while. I was thinking of having to go to our separate rooms, and whether I would dare to creak across the landing and into her bed. I pulled away.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jenny, putting you through this. Do you want to just head off first thing?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to see him in action in church. Anyway, we said we’d stay. It wouldn’t be fair on your mother. We’ll go after lunch, like we said.’

  ‘What do you make of her?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s nice,’ she said. ‘But she’s sad.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she is, isn’t she? He did that to her.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. I think she’s always been sad.’

  XVI

  I didn’t slip into Jenny’s bed that night, I didn’t offend my parents by missing church in the morning and I didn’t go to America the following summer. Instead I stayed in Edinburgh and got a job in the city’s tourist accommodation office matching visitors and their budgets to hotels, guest houses and B&Bs. I didn’t realise it at the time, but from the moment Jenny and I walked down the brae to the bus-stop I was moving towards a life in the Kirk.

  It was a year of change, and not just for me. On 1st March 1979, a referendum had been held, asking the Scots whether they wanted a devolved Assembly in Edinburgh. The result was a resounding maybe, with roughly one-third of the population voting for devolution, slightly fewer against, and the rest, the biggest proportion, abstaining. I confess that on the day of the vote I managed to represent all three of these positions.

  Jenny, John, Elsie and I had discussed the subject at length. John was the most nationalistic among us, and although what was on offer fell far short of complete Scottish independence, he thought it was a step in the right direction. We all felt, Jenny included, that the country needed to be better governed, that something was preferable to nothing, and that an inadequate Assembly could be built on and strengthened, so on the day we all went out and voted in favour.

  At least, we said we did, and I’ve no reason to doubt the others. It was the first time any of us had been able to vote for anything more than a local councillor or a student representative, so there was at least that excitement on a day that seemed strangely muted. But at the last minute, standing in the polling-booth, I felt a sudden queasiness in my stomach. What was I actually voting for? Would it really be an improvement? And what if we were starting something we couldn’t stop? My left hand hung in the air, clutching the stubby pencil. I thought, I’m not ready for this. But I could not vote against. I panicked for a second, before putting one X on the paper in the ‘yes’ box and another in the ‘no’ box, thus invalidating my vote. Then I fled from the booth.

  A clause had been inserted into the devolution legislation which required at least forty per cent of the registered electorate to vote in favour in order to bring the Assembly into being, and the ‘yes’ vote fell some way short of that hurdle. We were furious: Scotland had been cheated. I was as vociferous in my outrage as the others. I admitted nothing, but I almost came to believe that I’d been duped into spoiling the ballot paper against my will.

  This depressing debacle was followed a few weeks later by a General Election which saw the Labour government swept from office and the arrival at 10 Downing Street of Mrs Margaret Thatcher. At least I didn’t vote for her. But I was on safer ground by then – it was clear that the Tories were going to win without my help. Meanwhile I continued on the road to the Kirk, and perhaps my moment of humiliating self-denial in the polling-booth made it easier to contemplate that future. If I could be so false-faced when it came to a vote on the future of my country, why should the fact that I didn’t believe in God debar me from the ministry? Not only might faith be unnecessary in a modern minister, it might even not be desirable. There was so much talk about how churches needed to connect with people who had lost their faith or never had any: perhaps what the Kirk needed was an influx of faithless ministers. And if faith was essential, I would find out. I would be found out. It was in this frame of mind that, midway through my fourth and final undergraduate year, I began to explore the option of staying on at Edinburgh to study Divinity.

  Because of my first degree, I would be able to complete the Bachelor of Divinity with Honours course in three years. This was the usual academic training for anyone wanting to be a minister in the Church of Scotland. The question, though, was how I would maintain myself as a student for three more years. I investigated further, studying the prospectus for the Faculty of Divinity and looking up various directories and manuals at the library in New College. I found an obscure fund, established in the 1860s, the George Mylne Foundation,* which existed solely to provide financial support for the sons of ministers of the Kirk who were themselves training for the ministry. The trustees of this fund were named as a small firm of solicitors in Greenock, and I duly wrote to them for further details.

  I sensed, from the slightly surprised tone of the letter I received in response, and from the rust on the staple holding the application form together, that mine was the first such request for some time. The conditions were stringent – the father of the applicant had, for some undisclosed reason, to be more than forty and less than seventy years old at the commencement of the training, the son had to be an only child, born and wholly educated in Scotland, and there were various other strange clauses of inclusion and exclusion the rationale for which eluded me – but I read through them, ticking them off as I went, and found that I was a perfect candidate. Indeed I suspected I might be almost the only person in the country eligible to apply for a George Mylne Foundation bursary. There was even a codicil which stated that, should the recipient bear the same initials as the founder, he would be entitled to an additional sum representing five per cent of the award. As the bursary was worth £3,000 per annum, being named Gideon Mack would earn me a further £150. Bizarre though this seems, it was true, and I have since learned that such oddly constructed bequests and funds exist the world over, each with their own idiosyncratic requirements which must be met before anyone can benefit from them.

  I did not discuss my plans with anyone except Jenny. We plotted my new life – our new life – in secret, keeping it hidden even from John and Elsie, as if it was something to be ashamed of. In truth, I was ashamed, but I was also excited. That I might actually become what my father was, be so like him on the surface yet so different beneath it, appealed to me like a smutty joke. It seemed a kind of revenge.

  It was at this time that I started running again, for the first time since I was about seventeen. At school I had run in cross-country competitions against other schools, and I had joined a club in Stirling and gone running with men twice my age along the roads and through the fields, woods, farms and industry of much of central Scotland. But during my first three years at Edinburgh I took virtually no exercise at all. Now, as life with Jenny became more routine and settled, I felt the urge once more. I didn’t want to compete, I just wanted to run. I slipped back into it without any difficulty, finding routes along cycle tracks, canal paths and old railway lines that liberated me from everything but myself. Within a week I was managing five-mile runs. After a month I was running ten, twelve, fifteen miles, three times a week. And while I ran I thought about being a teacher, and not being a teacher, and I thought about being a minister. Minister, min
ister, minister, minister. The word ran round in my head like a locomotive. I would be able to do it with my eyes shut, I was tailor-made for it, and there was a bursary with my initials on it waiting for me. A sign from God? No, I did not think so. But I knew there was a glut of teachers of History, English and the other arts. The education authorities wanted teachers of Maths and Science, not of literature. The Kirk, on the other hand, was desperate for people to become the next generation of its flockmasters.

  I made an appointment to see the Dean of the Faculty of Divinity. My father’s name was known to him, but it took a little effort to persuade him that I was James Mack’s son, not his grandson. After half an hour the Dean stepped out of his office and returned a few minutes later with a colleague. Coffee arrived. I engaged them with my intelligence, my understanding of the realities of modern Scotland and the world, and my deep-seated Christian convictions. I was quietly evangelical, moderately and modestly political; my heart was Christ’s but my feet were on the ground. I was just the kind of young man – of the Kirk but not blind to its problems and the challenges it faced – they were looking for. We shook hands, and I left New College with their enthusiastic farewells ringing in my ears.

  The next day I applied to study Divinity, and the day after that I sent off my application to the George Mylne Foundation.

  XVII

  My father’s second and fatal stroke occurred in June, on the day of my last exam, which meant that I didn’t get the message from my mother until I came in, very drunk, that evening. It was too late to go home even if I’d been in a fit state, but the next morning, with a sore head and an upset stomach, I took the train to Stirling and met my mother at the infirmary there.

  She had found my father lying at the bottom of the stairs in the middle of the afternoon. His head was badly bruised and cut where it had collided with the banister’s cast-iron newels. He couldn’t tell us what had happened, for he had quite lost the power of speech. We sat on either side of his bed, almost as mute as he was. The ward was hot; I was sweating out the alcohol of the night before. I probably didn’t look much healthier than my father.

  His greyness had drained away completely, and he looked shrunken and dry and horribly white apart from the stormy bruise on his forehead and the crusty blackness of the wound. Various tubes and wires were attached to him, and he was on a drip. His mouth was slightly open and crooked, and his breath came in short rasps that sounded like somebody inexpertly sawing logs in the distance. His head didn’t move, and although his eyes were open they didn’t seem to see anything. They were still blue, but had finally lost their brightness. I found myself counting the white hairs sticking out of the top of his pyjama jacket. I’d never seen his bare chest before, had had no idea if it was hairy or smooth. The hairs didn’t seem real. My flesh was his flesh, yet I felt no connection between us.

  My mother kept on her wool coat in spite of the heat. She’d had that coat for years but now seemed too small for it. Her neck stuck out from the collar like a tortoise’s. Like my father she had shrunk. But I noticed also that the collar was shiny with wear and dirt, and that the hem, dragging on the floor, was frayed. She looked not just tired and worried, but poor.

  There was a constant background muttering of visitors at other bedsides, the scraping of chair legs on the floor, and somewhere out of sight a door banged loudly and often. My father’s breathing got under my skin like an itch. I needed to speak, to scratch it out.

  ‘I’ve not had time to tell you,’ I said. ‘I’ve been accepted to study Divinity next year at the University.’

  My mother frowned. ‘But you’ve only just finished,’ she said. ‘You’ve just sat your exams.’

  ‘I’m going back to do another degree,’ I said. ‘I’m going to study for the ministry, Mum.’

  She stared at me. I could not read what was in the stare, whether she was pleased or horrified or simply couldn’t comprehend my news. Her head turned from me to the slumped body of my father.

  ‘Tell him,’ she said. There was an urgency in her voice, a ferocity even. ‘Tell him. I don’t know if he’ll hear you, but if he can hear anything he’ll hear that.’

  I leaned over the bed until my face was just a few inches from his. I tried to focus on the glimmer of light in his eyes, as if I could get the words in that way.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you were right all along. I’m going to follow in your footsteps. I’m going to be a minister in the Kirk.’

  His breath rasped in and out at me, curiously odourless. Nothing. Nothing in his eyes, nothing from his mouth. I sat back again.

  ‘I don’t think I got through,’ I said.

  My mother exhaled, something between a sigh and a laugh, and her shoulders sagged as if she had let out a lifetime of wondering the same thing.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ she said.

  He died the next day without – I was going to write ‘without regaining consciousness’ but perhaps ‘without becoming unconscious’ is more accurate. His eyes stayed open all the time, but I could only detect in them a fleeting movement, as if someone was roaming the empty rooms of his mind, someone whose presence at the windows I was forever just missing. When the breathing stopped, and then the pulse, and the doctors and nurses began to switch things off, my mother patted the great veiny hand at the end of the arm on her side of the bed, and said, ‘Good night, James. God bless you and keep you. Amen.’ Then she turned to me. ‘So you’re taking your father’s place, Gideon. Will we go and get a cup of tea?’

  At the funeral she was quiet and reserved, buttoned up for those inhabitants of Ochtermill who attended the funeral. My father was only sixty-eight when he died but latterly he had looked older even than the octogenarians who came to pay their respects. A good number of elderly parishioners gathered like a circle of crows round the grave as we lowered him in on a hot June afternoon, peering over each other’s shoulders as if curious to see how far down their ex-minister would go. Afterwards they were served tea and sandwiches in the church hall, where I had to endure many questions about my future – questions to which I gave vague, evasive answers – and then Jenny and I took my mother back to the manse.

  We sat round the kitchen table, drinking more tea. I realised that my mother, though she knew many people to nod and say hello to, did not have a close friend in the world. Jenny fluttered about like a butterfly in a box made for a moth, finding biscuits and spoons and plates, and I tried to imagine her as the minister’s wife, my wife, in a manse of our own. My mother sat with an elbow on the table, and her head resting on her hand.

  ‘Are you all right, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Gideon, I’m all right. I just have to get used to it, that’s all.’

  ‘It’ll be hard,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ my mother said. ‘It won’t make much of a difference to me.’

  And then, for the first time in my presence, her life with James Mack gushed out of her. For the first time, she told me about my father.

  ‘He was a very strong man, Gideon, but he had a great weakness. No, I know what you’re thinking, the football. That was about as important to him as sucking a sweetie. His weakness was that he was afraid of himself, his own feelings. Feelings lead you into fallacy, he told me, early on. They get in the way of the purity of thought. I watched that fear for ten years before he asked me to marry him. He’d sit in our house and talk of the Kirk and the troubles of the world, and there was a great passion in him for truth and justice and faith, but his own feelings, well… I used to watch his tea getting cold, willing him to drink it, and then when he did his lip curled up as if he didn’t really want it anyway. His feelings had gone cold, like that tea. But it wasn’t really his fault.

  ‘It was the war that did it to him, I’m sure. I didn’t know him before it, but I think he must have been different. He was away the whole time, seven years. Of course most of that time the men were just preparing, waiting. But then the waiting was over, they were over there
in France, and I think he saw some terrible things. He didn’t talk about it much, but a lot of men were like that when they came back. They couldn’t talk about it. They had rooms in their heads where they kept the things they had done and the things they had seen. Your father’s room was a cellar. There was a cellar in a town in Germany somewhere, near the Rhine. He only told me about it once, in the middle of the night. He kept it locked up after that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Too awful,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he even meant to tell me.’ Her mouth clamped up for a minute. Then she went on again.

  ‘Your grandmother thought the world of him, it was embarrassing the way she pushed me forward every Sunday after church to shake his hand, as if I would be a great catch, when in her eyes he was the catch. She thought his coldness made him more of a saint. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good man, but he was no saint. He didn’t want to be a saint, he was a human being cursed with the sin of Adam, and he didn’t want a saint for a wife either. I wonder sometimes why he wanted to get married at all, but he thought it was what he should do, and in a funny way if he got married to me he would never have to worry about his feelings – those feelings – again. He wanted someone who would look after the house and be obedient, and that’s what he got. I knew he would ask me years before he did, I just had to wait, there was nothing else I could do, there was nothing else I was waiting for, I couldn’t have run away even if I’d wanted to. He asked me as he was leaving the house one night. It was March, a cold evening, my mother had gone in but I’d come down to the gate with him and he turned suddenly and took my hand, grabbed it really, a thing he’d never done before, and he asked me, and I said yes.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Did you want to get married? Did you love him?’