The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I was the same as him, I thought it was what I should do. Take myself off my mother’s hands. He was the first man to ask me, and I knew he’d be the last, so I said yes. He looked like a frightened rabbit, just for a moment, but that was enough for me. I’m a timid soul, I thought, but I’ll never be as frightened as that. We were married in June, and you arrived nine months later. I never saw that face on him again, and do you know something, I never wanted to.’

  She picked up her teacup and drank from it with a soft slurp. There was a calmness about her, an absence of nerves, that was new.

  ‘That’s what he didn’t like about the Americans. They showed their feelings too much. And he feared for you in case your mind wasn’t strong enough, in case it would be blown hither and thither by your feelings. He wanted you to succeed, you see. He didn’t worry about me, because my mind wasn’t good enough in the first place, but he feared for you. And then there was the manse, and being a minister, a respected man, not a wealthy one but not poor either. He had a good childhood in Glasgow, but he saw so many poor people there, children and women and men struggling to survive, and he always thought it was just the width of a wall away, it could come back in a moment. He was a strong man, Gideon, but he was full of fear.’

  Then she turned to Jenny. ‘Do you remember when you came to stay with us, dear? It’s the only time we’ve met, of course you remember. He told you that happiness was a false god. I saw how that shocked you, it must have been such a hard thing to hear when you were coming to meet us for the first time. But I’m afraid he was telling the truth. Happiness is nothing. It has no substance in itself.’

  ‘Have you been happy, Mum?’ I asked. ‘Were you happy with Dad?’

  ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?’ she said. ‘Your father and I were suited. This life isn’t about happiness. It simply isn’t important.’

  I looked at Jenny, and she was looking at me. We gave each other a smile, to reassure ourselves that it wouldn’t be like that for us. But some deep and unspeakable part of me sensed that my mother was right.

  It turned out that my father must have worried about my mother a little, because he’d been making provision for her for years. He had taken out two insurance policies and had saved enough money to enable her to buy a small flat in the village. Then there was the Kirk’s Widows’ Fund, which would keep her in reasonable comfort. All this meant there wasn’t anything for me, but I considered not having my mother on my hands a generous legacy. In that long speech she made at the kitchen table she was the most articulate I’d ever heard her, as if her mind had been suddenly liberated, but soon after she left the manse I began to notice that her sentences were tripping her up, that she was becoming forgetful, and confused by the simplest things. She found it difficult, almost impossible, to adjust to normality. Within a short time she began to lose her mind.

  We helped her to move to the flat, taking the opportunity to replace some of her ancient furniture with new things, and we emptied the manse of my father’s presence. I packed several boxes with his theological books – now that I was going to be a minister they had a new relevance – and put them into storage until I had somewhere with space for them. (I took the Waverley Novels back to Edinburgh with me, but I never reread them.) By the end of that summer the Ochtermill congregation had selected its new minister and he and his family were preparing to move in. To an outsider, it must have been as if my father had never existed.

  I passed my English exams and was awarded a 2:1, which satisfied the requirements of the Faculty of Divinity. I graduated in July, and soon after that the George Mylne Foundation offered me a bursary. In September Jenny and I got married. I would have waited, and gone through with a church wedding in order to keep her parents and my mother content, but Jenny was adamant that we should get it over with quickly and quietly in a civil ceremony. ‘I couldn’t face a big wedding,’ she said, ‘and if we don’t control it that’s what we’ll get. My mum and dad will insist on paying for everything and they’ll want a hundred and fifty guests, St Mary’s Cathedral, a three-course meal, a cake, a frock, bridesmaids, the works. Do you want all that? I can’t stand the thought of all the fuss. And we can use your father’s death as an excuse not to have it.’

  ‘They’ll say he wouldn’t have approved of a registry wedding,’ I said.

  ‘What do they know?’ she said. ‘They never met him. Would he have married us in his church, knowing the bride was a fraud? I doubt it. He might actually have respected us for not being hypocrites.’

  Jenny’s parents were upset at being deprived of the chance to spend thousands of pounds on their daughter’s ‘big day’, but they deferred to our wishes. They were English, middle-class and polite, and I think they were a little afraid of my Presbyterian inheritance and that I might explode into righteous anger at them. And they had another daughter, after all. We were married at the registry office in Victoria Street, with John and Elsie as our witnesses, and afterwards we went to Spain for a week. When we came back, we rented a one-bedroom flat in Gorgie and there we lived for the next three years, frugally but, I suppose, more or less contentedly.

  We told John and Elsie about our longer-term plans. John said he’d known something was afoot when I prevaricated about applying for Moray House, the education college, where he was going, but he’d never suspected I was intending to enter the Church.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘You’re not religious. You don’t believe in any of that stuff.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘Or maybe my mind was always made up, but I was fighting it, kicking against the pricks. Like Saul on the road to Damascus. He was blinded by a light and he heard the voice of God saying, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”’

  ‘Sounds painful for the pricks,’ John said. ‘So what happened, did you hear the voice of God?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  He looked totally unconvinced. I said, ‘It’s all right, I’m not going to change. I’ll still be the same Gideon and I promise I won’t try to convert you. Listen,’ I said. ‘Fuck, bastard, bugger, shite, cunt. See? I won’t embarrass you. I won’t become some ghastly born-again evangelical praising the Lord and saying hallelujah every five minutes. It’s not like that.’

  ‘What is it like then?’

  ‘It’s like Pascal,’ I said, ‘only when you toss the coin and call heads you know that’s how it’s going to land.’

  He shook his head. ‘What about you, Jenny?’ he asked. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s going to be fine,’ she said. ‘It’s an adventure, really. I’m with him all the way.’

  ‘I still don’t understand it,’ John said.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Elsie said, ‘but actually I’m quite impressed, Gideon. I like the idea of someone doing something different and nonconformist.’

  ‘It’s hardly nonconformist,’ John said, ‘being a meenister. Especially if your father was one before you.’

  ‘Aye it is,’ Elsie said, ‘in this day and age. How many other people do you know who are going to be ministers?’

  ‘Elsie, thank you,’ Jenny said. ‘You’re such an optimist.’

  ‘I have to be,’ Elsie said, and cocked a thumb at John. ‘I’m with him.’

  By the end of those three years – years of lengthening dole queues, war in the Falklands, splits in the Labour Party and a second Thatcher election victory – we’d all moved on. John was a teacher working in a fierce inner-city school in Dundee, being made ever more cynical by the hopeless task of instilling some enthusiasm for history into teenagers who cared nothing about the past or, for that matter, the future. Elsie and he were married, and she was working in the Dundee city archives. They’d had a church wedding, the cause of some gentle mockery on my part. As best man, I made a speech notable for its impeccable balance of spiritual uplift and risqué humour. Jenny had left her council job in Edinburgh and was working for a law firm in
Charlotte Square, which paid better but was just as boring. And I had graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity, was a licentiate in the Presbytery of Edinburgh, and was looking for a probationary post in one of the city’s charges.

  I’d been one of the best students of my intake. I’d worked hard, but I’d enjoyed it too, the biblical analysis, the theological arguments, the history of the Christian Church: my brain was stimulated by the greatest story ever told and the greatest philosophical and metaphysical questions ever posed. I believed none of it, but intellectually I had thrived. It was generally assumed that I would soon be an assistant minister, and that at the end of my probationary period I would be ready for my first calling.

  XVIII

  One evening in the summer of 1988, when I was an assistant minister in Leith, thirty years old and still looking for my first sole charge, I came home to Jenny with the news that I had found the ideal place for us to go. I’d been in Leith for more than four years, much longer than anyone expected, because the minister of my church there had been seriously ill, and I had effectively taken his place. Now he was back, and I wanted my own parish. That day I had learned that the incumbent minister of Monimaskit was retiring at the age of seventy.

  ‘That was going to be my news,’ Jenny said. ‘Elsie’s just been on the phone. She said I was to tell you, in case you hadn’t heard.’

  John and Elsie had been two years in Monimaskit by then. John had had enough of Dundee and had seized the chance to escape when a vacancy came up in his old school’s History department. The head of department was a crusty dame of fearsome reputation called Miss Craigie, who had terrified him as a pupil but had also, he said, been the best teacher he’d ever had and the reason he’d studied History at Edinburgh. He was still in awe of her, but reckoned they could work well together. If they did, he anticipated her job coming his way before too long, for she was not in good health. So he went back to his home town, and Elsie found a part-time job at the local library. We’d been going there regularly for months, helping them do up the run-down cottage they were converting, and we liked what we saw of Monimaskit and the surrounding area. I’d even met the retiring minister, Mr Cathcart, who remembered my father – ‘Formidable, formidable,’ he kept saying – from encounters at the General Assembly. Cathcart had talked about his retirement, and how he planned to go when he reached his threescore years and ten. And so, when the vacancy was announced, I applied and in time was called to preach to the congregation.

  What did I preach? Was I safe? Yes and no. I was safe by being unsafe. I didn’t think mere safety would win me plaudits. If you opt to spend your Sunday mornings in a church, you want a bit of stimulation in return. This idea, of course, was not original to me. Thousands of ministers have thought the same thing. But it happened that I’d recently finished reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair trilogy. In the second volume Chris Guthrie’s new husband Robert Colquohoun, the minister of Kinraddie, is trying for the kirk in the mill town of Segget. On the day he is to preach, Robert is tempted to butter the congregation up, just to get their vote, but decides instead to give them a good-going sermon from the heart, socialism in biblical dress. So he does, and though the Segget folk don’t rightly know what he’s talking about, he comes top of the leet because they like how he sounds. I took a leaf out of that novel, fancying myself a bit as Robert Colquohoun and Jenny as Chris, and the ploy worked for me too.

  Throughout the 1980s a nationwide argument had raged over the retention and development of British nuclear weapons, the presence of nuclear submarines in the Firth of Clyde, the deployment of American Cruise missiles at Greenham Common, and so on. My text was the passage from Psalm 27: ‘Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident. One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.’ I preached on the utter immorality not just of the so-called first-strike capability, but of the possession of nuclear weapons at all. There were no circumstances, I said, when their use could be justified. The Psalmist was challenging us not to be afraid, not to fear the Soviet host encamped against us. The Russians might be atheists and Communists, but they were as nervous as we were, as trapped by the false logic of nuclear deterrence as we were. It was a fatal error to fix our stare on their fixed stare and see who blinked first. That was why the Psalmist set his mind on God. The Lord’s temple was the world he had created, whole and not divided by ideology, the world in which we all lived. Contemplation of the beauty of God, inquiry into his temple, freed our imaginations from the futility of the nuclear stand-off. I didn’t, I said, expect everybody to agree with me, but this was where I stood, and these were the things I would say from any pulpit.

  I genuinely did hold these views, but Robert Colquohoun, for all that he was a character in a novel, was a man of far greater moral courage than I. The Kirk’s General Assembly had passed motions condemning nuclear weapons, and many other churches were speaking out against them, so I wasn’t exactly a lone voice in the wilderness. Nevertheless, I don’t think the congregation of Monimaskit had heard such a sermon in decades. When I started there was an audible insucking of breath all round the old building, a creaking of pews as folk sat up in them. These were good signs. I had their attention, something the genial, gentle Mr Cathcart probably hadn’t had for years.

  There were two other candidates for the charge. Both were men in their late fifties whose age, I felt, would count against them, for surely the vacancy committee wouldn’t want to go through this process again in just a few years. I was young, and though I might express strong views on great matters, I also showed myself, after the service, to have a sense of humour. A man, a local farmer, accosted me at the door and said, ‘I enjoyed your sermon, Mr Mack, but there’s a flaw in your argument. The Russians dinna hae meenisters like you preaching against their nuclear weapons, and the reason is they’ve shot them all.’ ‘Ah, well then,’ I said, ‘if I get the job, you’ll just have to bring your guns to kirk with you and keep the safety catches off.’ He roared with laughter, and I knew the story would go round the whole congregation.

  It was a pushover. By the beginning of January Jenny and I were installed in the manse, and John and Elsie were helping us to remove the old décor. The Cathcarts had retired to their home town of Kilmarnock, and I wasn’t sorry to see them go. I didn’t want my predecessor’s shadow following me as I went about my business.

  Monimaskit is like many towns in this part of Scotland: its centre somewhat run down, its edges pushed out by new housing and industrial estates where half the units are empty and nothing much seems to happen, its traditional shops hit by competition from supermarkets and retail parks in Dundee and Aberdeen, its older people proud of the past but uncertain of the future, its younger ones bored, and envious of anyone who comes from anywhere else. There is a Monimaskit entry in the online Gazetteer of Scotland* which I downloaded some days ago:

  MONIMASKIT

  A market town and fishing port on the east coast, Monimaskit has been a burgh since 1403. It has associations with William Wallace, who as a boy, according to legend, killed three English soldiers there after disputing with them the ownership of a bannock; and with Sir James ‘the Black’ Douglas, who destroyed the now vanished castle and its English garrison in 1311. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries Monimaskit’s modest prosperity was based on the export of wool, skins and fish to the continent, and it was also a market for the surrounding fertile land, particularly after widespread drainage and other agricultural improvements carried out by Sir William Guthrie of Keldo in the 18th century. The North Sea herring boom caused the town to expand rapidly in the early 19th century, and it was subsequently a centre for fish-curing and -processing, although today the fishing industry has all but disappeared, and only a few small vessels operate from the harbour. New industry related to North Sea oil, t
ourism and food-processing are important sources of employment in the area. The town has a secondary school which also serves the surrounding villages, and two primary schools.

  Historic buildings of note in or near the town include Monimaskit Old Kirk (CoS) dating from 1565, Keldo House (16th century, largely reconstructed and enlarged in the 1760s), the Corn Exchange (1860, now the town museum) and the Municipal Buildings (1876).

  The area is rich in ancient monuments, including souterrains, hill forts, cup-and-ring marked rocks and, most notably, twelve standing stones, all of which are within a five-mile radius of the town.

  Augustus Menteith, the folklorist and mountaineer, was born in Monimaskit in 1853 and after studying at Aberdeen was minister at Myreside before translating to Monimaskit Old Kirk in 1883. He wrote the definitive History of the Parish of Monimaskit, published in 1887, and Relicts and Reminiscences of Old Monimaskit (1892). He died in a climbing accident in the Alps in 1895.

  Four miles west of the town the Keldo Water flows through an impressive geological formation known as the Black Jaws, a narrow chasm with cliffs some one hundred and fifty feet in height.

  Population (2001): 4650

  National Grid Reference: NO 999578

  The Old Kirk* is a five-minute walk from the High Street, but on the other side of the Keldo Water. In the early nineteenth century the town centre was moved from south to north of the river in a grand plan of improvement, leaving the kirk and its more recent, Victorian manse marooned in what is now a quiet residential area. The once bustling harbour a few hundred yards away is used more by pleasure craft than by working boats. At night, especially in winter, you can sit in the manse and hear nothing of the world outside, as if you are deep in the countryside instead of a short stroll from pubs and chip shops, buses and cars, and groups of listless teenagers. After Edinburgh, it felt to Jenny and me as though we had stepped back thirty years.