‘I hate religion, I hate all churches, but I hate the Church of Scotland the most.’
I was, as I was supposed to be, thrown. This was what Douglas Sim’s smirk had meant. But it didn’t make sense. Had Sim got me all the way up there, knowing that my request would be rejected out of hand, just so that his boss could let off steam at me? And why had MacInnes agreed to see me at all? It had to be some kind of test, to see how I reacted.
‘I’m not so keen on it myself,’ I said. ‘But don’t quote me on that.’
He seemed barely to hear me. ‘I grew up in Wester Ross,’ he said. ‘A beautiful, bleak bog of a place. My parents were members of the Church of Scotland. Believe me, we were on the liberal wing of Christianity in those parts. Other folk thought we were worshippers of Baal. Not that you’d have noticed in our house – religion oozed out of the walls. We all had to go to church, of course, every week, me and my brother and sister. Sundays that went on for days. No escaping them.’
‘I can believe it,’ I said. I was about to say something about my own upbringing, but he spoke again.
‘Our minister’s name was Mackenzie. He was a miserable bastard. There were only two more miserable bastards than him in the whole district. Do you know who they were? The Free Church minister and the Free Presbyterian one. In Wester Ross there’s something like one sheep to every three acres of land. There are more fucking ministers to the acre than sheep, did you know that? Do you know how long the services go on there?’
‘A long time, I’ve heard,’ I said. Maybe I was wrong, maybe this wasn’t a test, there would be no donation and I’d been summoned just so that he could get this stuff out of his system.
‘If you started your marathon when Mackenzie entered his pulpit,’ he said, ‘it would be a close thing who would finish first.’
‘Is he still alive?’ I asked.
‘God, I hope not,’ MacInnes said. ‘Why?’
‘It’s just that the Moray marathon is on a Sunday, so if he was we could put your theory to the test.’
‘You’ll run on a Sunday?’
‘Why not?’
‘The Lord’s Day. It’s supposed to be sacred. A day of rest.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and that’s the way I prefer it. I don’t usually run on a Sunday, it’s true, but it’s a working day for me anyway. If I want to raise this money I’m going to have to compromise.’
‘That’s a very dirty word in some circles,’ MacInnes said. ‘You might find Wee Free ministers lying down in front of you.’
‘Not in Elgin, surely.’
‘They might be bussed in specially. You might have to tread on them.’ He made it sound like I’d be stepping in dung.
‘It would be painful,’ I said, ‘but I’d grin and bear it.’
He laughed. Quite a friendly laugh, as if he couldn’t be bothered trying to wind me up any more.
‘Nice image,’ he said. ‘I’ll treasure that. And you really are a minister?’
‘Guaranteed,’ I said.
‘That’s not fancy-dress you’re in?’
‘It is in a way,’ I said. ‘But yes, I really am a minister.’
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘you are, aren’t you? You’ve got that same burning light in your eyes as the ones that plagued me as a child. The same but different. How much of this £40,000 is going to your church?’
‘None of it,’ I said. ‘The other organisations keep half of what they’ve raised. We take nothing.’
‘My father died of cancer,’ he said. ‘Did you know that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘You didn’t check up on me first? I wouldn’t put it past you people.’
‘I don’t know anything about you,’ I said, ‘except that you own a successful group of sports shops and you’re based here in the Highlands.’
He looked out of the window again.
‘It was a bloody nightmare. Cancer of the arsehole. Can you believe how impossibly difficult and painful that is?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I cannot.’
‘It was the last time I ever tried to pray,’ MacInnes said. ‘Seven years ago. I’d sworn I’d never go anywhere near a church again, and I didn’t, but I prayed for my dad because he was in so much pain. I said to God, just make it hurt less for my dad, and I’ll believe in you again. That’s what I said. And my dad prayed too, because he still believed in God, and if my mum had still been alive she’d have been at it as well. Do you know what good it did?’
‘None at all,’ I said.
‘It got worse,’ he said. ‘The pain got worse. He’d be talking to you and he’d suddenly freeze up completely, go white. White as fucking Dulux. Sweat on his forehead. Tears springing from his eyes. Then it would pass. “Sorry,” he’d say. Sorry! I stopped praying then. I thought, well I always knew there wasn’t a God. Either that, or he’s a complete fucking cunt.’
‘I know how you feel,’ I said.
‘How can you?’ he said. ‘You’re one of his lackeys. You think he’ll make everything all right for you in the end.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m trying to raise the money for cancer research. We’re the only people that can make things better. Human beings, I mean.’
‘So you don’t object to me calling him a cunt then?’
I shrugged. ‘That’s your prerogative. I wouldn’t do it myself, but there’s plenty of folk who have good reason to.’
He looked at me for perhaps half a minute, an unblinking, searching stare. Thirty seconds is a long time to hold a stare like that. I thought, I bet he drives a hard bargain with his suppliers. I thought of his father, and I thought of my father, and I did not blink.
‘Five thousand pounds,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a hell of a lot of money.’
‘I’m running the marathon whatever you decide,’ I said. ‘And I’ll be selling the collar to somebody.’
‘You’ve got some bloody nerve,’ he said. And then: ‘I’ll think about it.’
He stood up. The interview seemed to be over. I stood up too. We faced each other across his desk.
‘One thing I’d like to know,’ he said. ‘Right to the very end, my father never wavered, he never lost his faith. Now why the hell would that be?’
‘Maybe it was all he had left,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ MacInnes said, ‘that’s what I thought too.’ He shook his head. ‘Bleak, eh?’
I nodded. I knew not to offer any platitudes. We did not shake hands. I thanked him for his time.
‘That might be all you thank me for,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know.’
He did, two days later, in a letter promising us £5,000 provided I completed the marathon in less than three hours. Also, he would only write the cheque out to the charity, not to the Church of Scotland. He kept his word, and came to Elgin to hand me the cheque in exchange for my dog-collar at the finishing-line, in front of a bank of press photographers. I held up my NessTrek shoes as I took the cheque. I’d come in in two hours and fifty-three minutes, the best time I ever did. I believe the dog-collar still hangs in a frame in their Elgin branch.*
Back at Monimaskit, when we had done all our sums, we found that, including the NessTrek contribution, we had raised £26,470 for cancer research. There were a lot of laughs and a lot of tears in our different groups when we announced that sum. I still remember how good it felt. Even watching Margaret Thatcher resign as Prime Minister a few weeks later didn’t match it.
XX
We spent the winter months planning our next campaign. After the success of that first season, more people and groups wanted to be involved, which led to a few logistical problems and some personality clashes. We set up a steering committee, to simplify the decision-making, and raised our target to £50,000. I pushed for us to choose an overseas charity this time, on the grounds that it would be beneficial to show our small Scottish town reaching out to the rest of the world. There was some dissent – ‘charity begins at hame’ being the commone
st objection – but we eventually settled for an organisation that builds wells and provides clean drinking-water in Africa. I sent off the forms to run in two more marathons, dates were fixed for other events, and we girded up our loins for the task.
By October 1991 we had raised £15,000 more than we had in the first year. The newspapers were full of us: headlines like WEE TOWN WITH A BIG HEART, MONIMASKIT KEEPS ON GIVING and MARATHON MACK HITS THE ROAD AGAIN. I lost count of the number of times I was interviewed for radio and the press. We received donations from all over the world, and unsolicited letters and phone calls from prominent charities wanting to work with us. It was invigorating and daunting at the same time. Nancy Croy and a couple of her friends were the stalwarts who kept going, even when fund-raising fatigue affected some of the others. I reassured people, as individuals and groups, that it was all right for them to take a rest, that nobody was obliged to go on year after year. But I’d started something that I, at any rate, couldn’t stop. And Peter Macmurray’s warning rings in my head now as I think of it. I was like a Munro-bagger who doesn’t stop to admire the view, but charges on to the next summit thinking only of the names he will tick off his list at the end of the day. I realise now that the money, the actual amount, became more important to me than the cause for which it was being raised.
Jenny had played much less of a role in the second year. She’d done some temping when we first came to Monimaskit, but by then she’d found permanent part-time work, three and a half days a week, as a receptionist at a dentist’s surgery. It gave her a life outside the manse, and we needed the extra income. It meant, however, that we saw less of each other, especially as I was out virtually every evening, either running or at meetings or on pastoral visits. Often she would be asleep by the time I came to bed, and one of us was usually up before the other in the morning. We talked, we looked after each other, we still laughed together, but more and more we led separate lives. I thought, if I thought about it at all, that this was normal, it was what happened when you’d been married for a while. Compared with my own parents, the Reverend and Mrs Gideon Mack seemed to be getting along fine.
One rare night when I wasn’t due to go out, after we had washed and dried the supper dishes together in what felt to me like an easy and companionable silence, I left Jenny in the kitchen, settling down in the Windsor chair with a book, while I went through to my study to catch up on some administration. It was November, about eight o’clock. I drew the curtains against the dark outside and put a match to the fire. In doing these things I was making a kind of subconscious statement to myself, that I would be there for some time, probably till after midnight. I had at least that much of my father in me: I would never light a fire just for an hour’s comfort.
I had an electric typewriter on my desk – it would be another year before I made the technological leap to computer – and a half-written response to some tedious bit of bureaucracy from 121 George Street was sitting in the machine. I read it over. It was the sort of thing I should have been catching up on, but I had neither the energy nor the desire to finish it. I looked at the shelves of books, so many of them my father’s, and I looked at the catching fire and the armchair beside it. I’d so often wondered what my father got up to in his study, night after night alone with all those books. Had he done what I was doing? Had he looked around and wondered what on earth was the point? Or had he been past doubting by then? I had dutifully preserved his books, thinking that they might come in useful, and some of them had, but others I’d never opened, not once. What was the point of all those millions and millions of words?
I sat down in the armchair and stared into the flames, reached forward to the basket of logs and put a couple on. I suddenly felt exhausted. I remember thinking, I’ll just sit here for a minute, close my eyes and gather my thoughts. Ten minutes. Then I’ll work.
I came awake when the door opened and Jenny entered carrying a mug of tea. She saw at once that I’d been asleep. She usually put the tea on a coaster on the desk but instead she brought it over to me.
‘Tired?’ she said.
‘Aye. A wee bit.’
She stood in front of me, looking down. For a moment her face looked odd, the face of a stranger, then it reassembled itself into its familiar shape.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Do you think this is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You and me. Like this from now on. You here in one room sleeping, and me in another reading but not really taking it in. Is that where we are?’
I didn’t know what to say. I began to mumble something about it being a phase, that we were both tired, but she stopped me.
‘Do you love me, Gideon?’ she said. ‘Do you really love me?’
I put the tea down on the hearth and made to stand up but she dropped to her knees in front of the fire and put her hands out to stop me.
‘Sometimes I wonder if you ever have,’ she said.
I started to protest, ‘Jenny, that’s a terrible thing to say,’ but she interrupted before I could shift the responsibility on to her. ‘Or if I’ve ever loved you,’ she said. ‘I mean, really and truly. Because whatever this is, it doesn’t feel like love.’
I couldn’t speak. She said, ‘Do you think we’ll get back to being lovers?’
It was the first time either of us had admitted the fact that we weren’t having sex any more; hadn’t made love for weeks, for months in fact.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said.
‘I don’t. Not until we stop living like this.’
‘Like what?’ I said.
‘Emptily. Our lives are supposed to be full and mine feels empty. And I think yours must be too. And I worry that it’s because of what you’re doing, what we’re doing. Because we’re not being truthful.’
‘We are, to each other,’ I said. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘You know what I mean. You’re not being honest now, saying that, you know you’re not. Can you be dishonest in one part of your life but not in another? Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.’
‘We can’t stop it now,’ I said.
‘We can,’ she said. ‘We can start again.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to give up the ministry?’
She gave a laugh that threatened to turn into a sob.
‘How can you give it up?’ she said.
‘You mean, how can I give up something that I don’t believe in
in the first place?’
‘No, I mean, how can you give up being a minister? It’s in your blood. It’s me I’m talking about. How can I be with you when this life is so false?’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Do you want to leave me?’
‘No, Gideon, I don’t.’
‘Well, then. I thought you were happy. I thought we were happy.’
‘You know we’re not,’ she said. ‘We’re just going through the motions. We’re living a lie, and it’s killing us. Gideon, I don’t want to lose you, but I think maybe I already have.’
I put my arms around her and she began to cry. ‘You haven’t,’ I said. ‘You haven’t lost me.’ But inside I felt a horrible queasiness, as if she’d found me out.
‘I don’t even know if I ever had you,’ she said through her tears.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t think that. We’ll be okay. I’m sorry, I’ve just been so caught up in everything. Please don’t cry.’
I got out my handkerchief and she blew her nose and wiped her eyes.
‘I need to ask you something,’ she said. ‘You’ll hate me for asking it, but I must.’
‘What is it?’
‘Will you be truthful? I don’t care if it hurts, but I want the truth.’
‘What do you need to know?’ I said. ‘Ask me, and I’ll give you a truthful answer.’
‘Is there someone else?’ she said.
I didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘Someone else. Is there?’
‘You mean, am I having an affair?’
‘Yes. Are you?’
‘Like who?’ I said. ‘Who would I be having an affair with, even if I had the time?’
‘I don’t know who, Nancy or someone.’
‘Nancy Croy?’
‘Why not? You see such a lot of her, you get on well, she’s nice-looking…’
‘She’s an elder.’
She puffed sceptically at that.
‘No,’ I said, ‘no, no.’ I started to laugh, stopped myself. ‘Jenny, I’m not having an affair. Not with Nancy, not with anyone. I swear it. You’re the only one. We’ve just drifted a bit, that’s all.’
‘The truth?’ she asked.
‘The truth.’
She managed a smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I was thinking it. I’m sorry I asked.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. I had a fleeting image of Elsie. Jenny carried on, cutting across that brief thought.
‘This has just been building up for ages,’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t have let it get to this.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry too.’
‘I mean, when was the last time we had sex? Either I’m asleep, or you’re too tired. We should have sex more.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, we will.’
‘I want to have a baby,’ she said.
We’d talked about it before, then let the subject slip away, and now it was back. We’d been together fourteen years, she was thirty-two, of course she wanted a baby. But if we had one everything would change. A little chill went through me, followed by a little hope. Maybe a baby would make it all right.
‘What do you think?’ she said.
‘Well, maybe we should. If you want to, we should try.’
‘But do you want to?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Aye, I do, why not? But there’s plenty of time.’
‘Not so much any more. Not for me.’
We stayed there in front of the fire till it died down, talking it through, apologising, and then, for the first time in weeks, we went to bed at the same time. We didn’t make love that night, we were both drained, but it felt like some kind of fresh start. But maybe it wasn’t, maybe we were just perpetuating a lie. Either way, we didn’t have much time left to find out.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 17