The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

  ‘Quite. Now, let’s talk about something else. And I need you to prepare my pain relief ciggies. And let’s have another dram.’

  XXVIII

  Although I still ran three or four times a week, I’d given up marathons a few years earlier when my right leg had developed a muscular weakness in the thigh that became unbearably sore if I ran for more than twelve or fourteen miles. I remember the day I was forced to acknowledge this as a permanent injury: I had to limp the last two miles home after going out on a deliberately long route to test it to the limit. With each step, what felt like a shower of red-hot sparks shot through my leg. And then, for the last mile, my left arm began to jerk and swing, as if jealous of being usurped. It was raining lightly as I hobbled into town, and I must have presented a sorry sight to the few people who were about. Is this it, I remember thinking, as I dripped sweat and rainwater the last few yards to the manse. Is this when the body parts start to rebel and refuse to function?

  So I’d learned to pace myself. In the same way, as the year progressed, I willed myself not to run in Keldo Woods, as if by not going there I could manage the Stone, keep whatever it signified at bay, possibly even make it disappear. Loops of thought went round in my head as my shoes beat the earth and the tarmac: when nobody sees the Stone is it there, is it there when anybody is present but me, has it always been there but visible only to some, is it there at all? Then, after avoiding the route for two or three runs, I would have to go back to check on the Stone. And there it would be, and I would be compelled to go and touch it. It was a comfort – a cold, wet comfort often enough, but that was how it felt, comfortable. Sometimes I’d lean with my back to it and close my eyes. Once I even fell asleep like that for a few minutes. It no longer felt alien or unfriendly. I liked it. And – there is no other way I can put this – I felt that it liked me.

  Meanwhile John and I never managed to arrange a time when we were both free to go to Keldo Woods. It was January, then February. The days were still short, he was in school Monday to Friday and I was busy at the weekends. No doubt if I’d really tried we could have fixed something up, but there was another factor: I didn’t want him there. I didn’t want him not to see the Stone, and thus disbelieve me, but neither did I want him to see it. My attitude had shifted. It was my Stone.

  I still wanted proof of its existence though, for myself if for no one else. Maybe for Catherine, who couldn’t physically get to the site. The only person I wanted now actually to see and touch the Stone was Elsie, but I had to be sure before I took her there. This was why I took up Catherine’s suggestion about photographing it.

  I’d forgotten I possessed a camera. It was Jenny’s originally. We took it on holidays and days out, used it at some of our charity events. We’d had no need for family snaps, evidence of children growing, ourselves changing, so it recorded places we’d visited more than people. Since her death I’d not touched it, but I knew where it was: in a cupboard in one of the spare bedrooms, along with a backgammon set, packs of cards and some board games. I’d had no use for any of those things since her death.

  The camera was an old Kodak model, with three settings for the light – cloudy, fair and bright – and a detachable flash bulb. It was virtually an antique but it had one thing in its favour: it didn’t need a battery. It still had a film in it too, a 24-shot cartridge with eight exposures still to be used. I’d no idea if the film would still be usable, but I didn’t see why not. It had lain undisturbed in the camera, in dry darkness, and there was no obvious sign of deterioration. My father’s parsimony came out of the shadows at me and told me just to get on with it. Getting the Stone on film was all that mattered. I only needed a couple of successful shots. On a sunny but windy day when I had no other pressing business, I got in the car and drove to Keldo Woods.

  There was nobody about. I had put on my outdoor jacket and boots, but the ground was hard and dry, the paths thick with pine needles. I found myself walking briskly, as if to a meeting, and the closer I got the quicker I walked. The east wind was chilly and pushy, and I did the last hundred yards at a trot. I knew I was behaving irrationally, that my impatience and excitement would be foolish in a child, let alone a man in his forties. But I couldn’t help myself.

  The Stone looked like an old friend waiting for me. I put my palm against it. Nothing had changed. I carefully inspected the ground round about. No sign of disturbance, no sign that anybody else had been there. I felt pleased about that.

  I took the camera from its hard plastic case and stepped back far enough to fit the whole Stone into the frame. I moved slightly so that a patch of sky, rather than a solid rank of trees, was behind it, and pressed the button. The wind in the tops of the trees gave a gusty roar of approval. I wound the film on and took another picture from the same angle; moved round a bit, stopped, snapped again. I did a complete circle, taking six photographs all together, then went back to the path and took two more from there, to give a better sense of the location. The camera seemed to be fine. If the film was no good, I’d buy another and come back.

  I drove home, picked up some letters for the post, took the film out of the camera and walked across the river with it to the High Street. I recognised the woman at the photography counter in Boots: she’d been at the watchnight service on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Haven’t had one like this in for a while,’ she said, taking the film. She caught my eye and looked mildly embarrassed. ‘Oops. You could have said the same about me at Christmas, couldn’t you?’

  I made light of it, since she had. ‘Not at all. You’re one of my regulars. Only once a year, but very regular. Can you still develop this kind of film?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s mostly digital stuff and disposables these days, but we can do this no bother. Looks a bit old, though.’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘Eleven, twelve years, something like that. Think it’ll be all right?’

  She looked doubtful. ‘The colour will have faded,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to be prepared for the quality to be quite poor. But there’s no reason why the pictures shouldn’t come out. Could be a few surprises in there, eh?’

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping,’ I said.

  She gave me a puzzled look. ‘Do you want it done today? I can have the prints ready in a couple of hours.’

  ‘That would be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back later.’

  She wrote my name on an envelope, dropped the film in and handed me the tear-off collection slip. ‘Any time after four then, Mr Mack.’

  I walked along the street to post my letters. Lorna Sprott was coming out of the post office just as I got there.

  ‘Oh, Gideon,’ she said. ‘I was on my way to see you. I’m parked just along here. Perhaps I could give you a lift home? Actually, I’ve got Jasper in the car. I don’t suppose you’d like to go for a walk?’

  This was always her way. Hesitant questions that meant she needed to talk about something. I weighed up the terror of getting into Lorna’s Fiesta against her coming to the manse and staying for hours, and managed to quell the terror.

  ‘How about the beach?’ I said.

  We reached the beach car park, half a mile away, without incident, and let Jasper out. He immediately started to dash about as if he’d been in prison for years. The wind was colder and stronger here, whisking the tops of the waves and sending a succession of miniature sandstorms across the beach. There were only a few people out, mostly walking dogs.

  It is not a very beautiful beach. There is always a fair amount of debris, and the sand is gritty, more brown than golden, but you can walk for a mile and a half before black, slippery rocks jutting into the sea prevent further progress. I’ve always liked its bleakness, its inhumanity. When you walk that space between land and sea, you get a proper perspective on your own insignificance.

  Lorna, Jasper and I had walked it dozens of times. The dog never tired of it, and I never tired of seeing him rush about from one smell to another, snorting and snuffling around every st
one, every bit of driftwood, every scrap of feather, empty crab shell and bleached gull bone, hoovering information from the ground with a frantic urgency, as if all the walks in his life were never going to be enough to take in and decipher the world and its mysteries. Watching Lorna’s dog tearing around at full speed just for the fun of it, for the release of all that excited energy and unfocused marvel at the world, gave me great pleasure. There was no method, no calculation in it. Jasper would gallop along the beach and plunge in and out of the sea, fetching the same thrown stick countless times from the crashing waves, not because there was any point or meaning but because his nature obliged him to. Such stupidity, such mindless pleasure in life: I loved to watch it, but it made me envious.

  ‘Gideon,’ Lorna said, or rather shouted above the wind, ‘do you mind if I confide in you?’

  I’d been half-expecting this. ‘No,’ I shouted back. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Somebody’s asked me for some advice,’ she yelled, ‘and I wanted to ask you what you thought before I spoke to them. That’s pathetic, isn’t it? I mean, somebody needs some help and support from a minister, and the first thing the minister does is run and ask another minister.’

  ‘Mutual support,’ I said. ‘Nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘good point. Anyway, I did in fact try to help them, but I don’t think I did very well, and I need to go back and speak to them again. Sooner rather than later, probably. And I’m up to high doh about it. Why do I always get into this kind of mess?’

  ‘Because you take it all too personally, Lorna. When somebody comes for help, they don’t always expect an immediate solution. Just having someone who listens can be a huge relief, and you’re a good listener. What’s it about anyway?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, what’s it all about?’

  ‘Oh,’ she shouted. ‘It’s that usual dilemma of deciding what’s best – keeping quiet or telling the truth.’

  ‘Do you want to be more specific?’

  ‘You know what I mean. We’re always supposed to be truthful, but sometimes the truth doesn’t help much, can cause complications, damage. So is it better to leave it unspoken?’

  ‘What kind of damage?’

  ‘Hurt. Emotional damage. Damage to a friendship. You can’t unsay things once they’re said.’

  ‘What kind of truth are we talking about, Lorna?’ I asked. ‘Family secrets? Past crimes? Hidden desires?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you could say that. Hidden desires. Acknowledging them. Nothing wicked, you understand. Feelings. Powerful feelings.’

  We were striding into the wind, with the dog some distance ahead of us. When we spoke the wind whipped our words inland, and I imagined them being trapped miles away, caught in the branches of trees like plastic bags. I thought of the trees beside the Stone.

  Lorna and I kept our heads lowered and didn’t look at each other. This suited us both. I knew what this was about. It was about Lorna. She was too embarrassed to look at me, and I didn’t want to catch her gaze in case it provoked something, tears or a lunge in my direction. We soldiered on across the sand.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you have a person who’s got this dilemma. To speak or not to speak. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s pretty much it.’

  ‘And if they speak, it might all be okay, but it might go horribly wrong. And if they don’t speak, it’ll just continue to gnaw at them, and they feel time slipping away, and they can’t concentrate on anything else until they’ve sorted this out.’

  ‘That’s it, Gideon, you’ve summed it up perfectly. You’re so good at this sort of thing.’

  ‘It happens all the time. The same old issues.’ I decided to push things a little further. ‘But why have they come to you about it? That’s not a question of faith, that’s about – well, what is it about? Is it a marital thing?’

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ she said, a little too hastily. ‘There’s no one else involved.’

  ‘Then let me hazard another guess. We’re talking about a minister. One who’s single.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She still wouldn’t look at me. ‘Yes, we are. And if you’re a Christian, if you’re a minister with a minister’s responsibilities, you have to ask yourself: is this all a diversion from one’s work? Shouldn’t one exercise some self-restraint? Sublimate these feelings into higher things? Especially if the other person, the other person, is, well…’

  She staggered as a particularly fierce gust knocked her off balance, and I instinctively reached out an arm and caught her. I regretted it immediately, as she grabbed it and held on tight. It was my reward for being cruel, perhaps.

  ‘Is what?’ I shouted.

  ‘The same,’ she said. ‘If the other person’s the same.’

  Suddenly I was less confident of my diagnosis. By ‘the same’ did she mean, if the other person was also a Christian, or a minister? Or was she talking about the same sex? Maybe this wasn’t, as I’d presumed, about Lorna and me. Maybe it was about Lorna and somebody else. Or maybe I was completely wrong and it was just about somebody else.

  I felt somewhat ashamed. I really did not want to hurt Lorna’s feelings. ‘What have you suggested so far?’ I asked.

  ‘Prayer,’ she said. ‘That seemed an obvious place to start.’

  ‘I’d have thought they’d have thought of that. Being a minister, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, they had, of course they had. But it wasn’t working. They kept praying for help and it wasn’t working.’

  ‘No reply?’

  ‘Lots of replies. One minute this, one minute that. Conflicting answers. No answers. Just more questions. Oh, Gideon, look at that!’

  She let go her hand from my arm. We were a hundred yards from the rocks, and a huge white wave had just broken over them. Jasper was trotting happily towards this mayhem, barking with enthusiasm.

  ‘Better call him back,’ I said. ‘He’s daft enough to try to go out into that.’

  We shouted and clapped and whistled for half a minute until we caught Jasper’s attention. He came bounding back towards us, and Lorna went down on her hunkers to greet him.

  ‘Gideon called you daft,’ she said, hugging his neck. ‘You’re not daft, are you? You’re just a bit too brave for your own good.’

  We turned our backs to the wind with some relief. It was as if we’d moved behind a wall, the way the noise dropped and my face began to lose its stiffness. The sea pushed long fat tongues of foam far up the beach, and the lowering sun gave them a lovely pinkish tinge. The two or three figures ahead of us, and beyond them the roofs and spires of Monimaskit, seemed to hover in the light.

  ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ I said.

  ‘Fabulous,’ Lorna said. ‘Thanks for listening, Gideon.’

  ‘I hope it was some help,’ I said. I didn’t think I’d been any help at all, but Lorna said, ‘Oh, yes, you always help. Would you say, then, that the best advice I could give this person is to keep on praying? The answer will come eventually, won’t it?’

  ‘Keep on praying,’ I said. ‘Well, that certainly won’t do any harm.’ I was hoping that the discussion might be at an end, and indeed for a few minutes she was silent. Then she spoke again.

  ‘Prayer’s a wonderful thing, Gideon, isn’t it? But you have to be careful with it. You have to really listen to what God’s telling you, not what you want him to tell you. But sometimes they’re the same thing.’

  It was the kind of thing I used to hear from Divinity students in the library café. There was something very comforting in such an innocent approach to religion, and I played along with it – up to a point.

  ‘Head versus heart,’ I said. ‘That’s another old dilemma, for human beings and ministers. Maybe Jasper has got it right. Doesn’t give a damn so long as it smells interesting. But then, he won’t go to heaven.’

  ‘Oh, he must,’ Lorna said. ‘I’m not going to heaven if there aren’t any dogs there.’

  ‘Lorna,�
� I said, ‘look at him. He’s already in dog heaven. It doesn’t get any better than that.’

  We followed Jasper back to the car park, and she drove me back to the High Street and dropped me off outside Boots.

  The woman at the film counter gave me a mournful smile when I presented myself. ‘Oh, Mr Mack,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t gone too well, I’m afraid.’

  She flipped through the box of envelopes until she found mine. It felt rather thin when she handed it over.

  ‘You’ll see on the negatives that quite a few are just blank, or black anyway. There’s no charge for those because we haven’t printed them. The ones that have come out have lost a lot of colour. I’m very sorry.’

  I’d started to open the envelope, but something in her tone made me stop.

  ‘Och well,’ I said, paying her what I owed. ‘Not your fault. You did warn me. I’ll have a look at them when I get home.’

  ‘That’s probably best,’ she said, and again, ‘I’m very sorry.’

  I hadn’t been a widower all those years without becoming alert to the look of pity, the sympathetic tone. She’d seen the photographs. She knew who was in them. It simply hadn’t occurred to me, in my keenness to get the Stone on the film, what might already be there.

  I went home and spread the photographs out on the kitchen table. We’d gone away for three days that November of 1991, after she’d confronted our failing marriage. It had been a quiet, gentle time. A lot of walking, a lot of talking. The weather had been mild and dry. And there we were, faded but still recognisably the Reverend and Mrs Gideon Mack. Jenny in Glencoe. Me in Glencoe. Jenny at Fort William. Jenny in front of Ben Nevis. Ben Nevis on its own. Jenny at Glenfinnan. Both of us at Glenfinnan (the only other visitor at the monument, a German, had insisted, when he saw me taking Jenny, that we let him take us together). Me trying to look manly in front of the Commando memorial at Spean Bridge. Jenny at Loch Ness. She was wearing a black coat and a red tartan scarf, and her thick black hair was tucked in under the scarf and the upturned collar of the coat. The colours were tired, she looked tired, and her smile was a little forced, but she was trying.