The woman in Boots hadn’t wanted me to get upset in the shop. I felt a prickle of tears in my eyes, but I was thinking about Elsie. I should show her these pictures. They would make her cry. If she saw them they might trigger something else in her, just as had happened before.
I held the strips of negatives to the light. There we were in the Highlands, and there were the pictures I’d tried to take that afternoon. Darkness, darkness. Fuzzy haze, fuzzy haze, fuzzy haze, fuzzy haze. Darkness, darkness. The camera had kept Jenny all that time, but had failed to capture even a hint of the existence of the Stone.
XXIX
The phone rang one morning some time after this. ‘Gideon? Bill Winnyford here. Have you had any thoughts about our little project? Time’s wearing on, you know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was supposed to get back to you, wasn’t I?’
‘Can’t remember. No matter. I was speaking to a friend of yours, John Moffat up at the school.’
‘Is John doing something for you?’
‘He’s selected some passages from the burgh records, and we’ve recorded some of his pupils reading them. Fascinating stuff. Your name cropped up. Wheels within wheels. Thought I’d give you a ring.’
‘I don’t think I’ve a very good voice,’ I said feebly.
‘Perfect voice. Pulpit voice. Anyway that’s not the point, I want real people real voices not people acting. And you’re the link with Menteith. I presume he lived in the manse? The same house you’re in?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact he was the first minister here. The old manse was knocked down and this one built in its place in 1880.’
‘Perfect again,’ Winnyford said. ‘He must have written his books there.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You mentioned before that you have a study?’
‘Yes, all manses have studies.’
‘Would that room have been his study?’
‘Oh, yes. Apart from the light fittings and plugs, I don’t suppose it’s changed at all. The bookcases must have been put in when they built the house.’
‘Better and better. We could record there. How about that?’
There was no arguing with him. I decided to get it over with and asked him round for eight o’clock that evening. He was delighted.
‘Brilliant, Gideon, brilliant. I’ll look forward to it.’
‘Fine,’ I said. In spite of myself, I was beginning to like Bill Winnyford’s breezy idiocy. ‘I’ll see you then.’
He came at ten to eight armed with a compact but weighty DAT recorder, a microphone and a set of headphones. I’d lit the fire in the study and showed him in. He could barely contain himself.
‘This is wonderful, Gideon, wonderful. I mentioned the tableau I’m designing? I’ve only done sketches so far, but in my mind it’s this to a T. The fireplace the desk the books. Glad I didn’t see this before. Confirms my instincts are on the right track. The only thing that’ll be different is the window. Yours – lovely proportions, sash and case, overlooking pleasant garden. Mine – narrow, slanting, funnel into the pit. Let me set this thing up.’
He put on the headphones and played around with the recorder for a minute, making sure it was working properly, listening to the background noise. A log in the grate spat, and he asked if he could pile some more wood on. ‘Nice fireside crackle,’ he said. ‘Homely sound but hellish too. Now when you’re ready, off you go. Just speak naturally.’
The passage he’d selected was from the introduction to Menteith’s story, that is to say, it was in Menteith’s own ‘voice’. As I read, I glanced up occasionally and found Winnyford nodding at me encouragingly, a beatific smile on his face. This was one of his ‘conjunctions’, the present-day minister reading the words of his predecessor in the very room in which they had been composed. Except, of course, that we didn’t know for sure if Menteith had written his books here. I thought about that as I read: ‘The Keldo Water flows from these hills to Monimaskit, and, where it passes through the town and enters the sea, it presents a steady and stately face to the world; yet… a mere four or five miles upstream… and but two from Keldo House… it rushes and roars through a gulf of great depth known in the locality as the Black Jaws.’ The recorded voice always sounds different from how one usually hears it, and I wondered what I sounded like to Winnyford through his slightly ludicrous headphones; and then I found myself contemplating what Augustus Menteith would have sounded like, how broad or how refined his accent would have been, and what kind of man he had been. ‘It was once the supposed sport of town lads to traverse the gorge on the trunks of trees which, uprooted in winter storms, had fallen across it, but in truth these narrow and slippery bridges are so dangerous that few must have dared such an adventure, and certainly I have never heard of any boy in the present time who had courage enough to essay that dread crossing.’ He was a mountaineer who had perished, according to the online gazetteer, in the Alps. What dread crossing had he essayed? I read on to the end of the paragraph. ‘And this, perhaps, gave rise in former times to a story, which I might myself relate, but which, by good fortune, I am able to reproduce just as it was told to me in my youth by an old woman of the town, now long dead, whose stock of lore was as rich as she was poor, and whose imagination, perhaps, was as broad as her cottage was narrow.’
That was where Winnyford wanted me to stop. I waited while he held up his finger for a few seconds. Then he switched the machine off.
‘One take,’ he said. ‘You’re a natural, Gideon. I should come and hear you preach.’
‘You’d be welcome,’ I said.
‘I’d come for the performance, not the message,’ he said. ‘The performance is everything. Being a minister must be like being an actor, is it?’
‘There are certain similarities,’ I said. ‘People think we didn’t have theatres in Scotland for centuries because the Church suppressed them. Well, perhaps. But you could also argue that we had theatres in every town and village in the land: they were called kirks, and every week folk packed in to see a one-man show about life, death and the universe. But I want to ask you something. Why that passage? I can see that it’s where Menteith is writing in his own voice, but it stops just as the story starts.’
‘Precisely. The whole story would be too long to use, and it’s impossible to lift an extract that stands on its own. This passage is setting the scene, and that’s exactly what my installation is – scene-setting. There’ll be a direction to visitors to read the legend in Menteith’s book, if they wish. If they don’t, and let’s face it most won’t, they go away with a scene in their head – a minister’s study with a view into hell.’
‘Yes, I see,’ I said. Winnyford had more brains than either Catherine Craigie or I had given him credit for. ‘Look, if our work is done, do you fancy a whisky?’
‘That would be nice.’
‘Well, stay where you are, since the fire’s lit in here, and I’ll go and get some.’
I went through to the kitchen for glasses, some water and a bottle of malt, and carried them on a tray back to the study. Winnyford, naturally enough, had been looking at my books. He’d taken one down and was slowly turning the pages. ‘What on earth’s this?’ he said.
It was a slim blue book in a grey dustjacket, about six inches by eight. The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies by Robert Kirk.
‘Where did you get that?’ I said. I must have spoken sharply, because Winnyford looked startled and shut the book like a schoolboy caught reading something smutty. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It just kind of fell out. I was actually reaching for something else.’
He pointed out the space where it had been, wedged between two of my father’s leather-bound reference works.
‘That’s bizarre,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen this for more than thirty years.’ I reached out my hand, and Winnyford passed me the book. It was undoubtedly my father’s copy, the one I thought he had hidden away from me. But maybe he hadn’t: maybe it had
been stuck between those two great unopened volumes all this time, and I’d merely lifted them together from place to place and never spotted it. Maybe. But it seemed incredible that Winnyford should come across it so easily.
I opened it and glanced at a page or two: Their Bodies of congealled Air are some tymes caried aloft, other whiles grovell in different Schapes, and enter into any Cranie or Clift of the Earth where Air enters, to their ordinary Dwellings… And a little further on, no such thing as a pure Wilderness in the whole Universe. I read these words, and I remember them now, and they are a mystery and a strange comfort to me.
‘You didn’t…?’ I began. I was about to suggest that he had brought the book with him and set up his little scene as soon as I left the room. But that was ridiculous. It was my father’s book, complete with the inscription and the initials G.M.
‘I didn’t what?’ Winnyford asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said. I poured the drams, large ones, and put some more fuel on the fire.
‘That book,’ Winnyford said, ‘is ringing a vague bell in my head. Remind me who Robert Kirk was.’
When I was studying at New College I had come across a reference to Kirk, which had rekindled my interest, and a little research in the college library had yielded another edition of The Secret Commonwealth and a great deal of information about its author. I remember being mildly disappointed, unpacking his books a few years later, not to come across my father’s copy. I assumed that he must have destroyed or discarded it. Now I found myself telling Bill Winnyford, just as my father had told me, about Kirk’s Gaelic Bible, and about his interest in fairies.
‘My father was a very straight kind of man,’ I said. ‘He refused to discuss the fairies with me. He dismissed it all as a lot of nonsense.’
Winnyford had an eager, puppyish expression on his face. ‘What happened to Kirk?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t he disappear or something?’
‘That’s one story,’ I said. ‘The credible one is that he simply died.’
He laughed. ‘Well, don’t tell me that one!’ he said.
I couldn’t help but laugh too. ‘All right,’ I said, and I told him the legend of Robert Kirk as nearly as I could remember it, glancing occasionally at the introduction to the book for verification. He was the seventh of seven sons, a fact which he made something of, seventh sons being, as any student of folklore will tell you, strongly susceptible to magical influences. After twenty years as minister at Balquhidder, he transferred to Aberfoyle, his father’s former charge. It was there that he wrote The Secret Commonwealth, and there that in 1692 at the age of about fifty he fell into a dwam or swoon while walking on a little hillock, supposed to be a fairy-mound, near to his home. He was found stretched out on the ground, apparently lifeless. A funeral was held, and he was buried in his own kirkyard. His wife was pregnant at the time and she duly gave birth to the child. Shortly after this the form of the minister appeared before a cousin, saying that he was not dead but a captive in Fairyland. Only one chance remained for him to escape: at the christening of his new child, he would appear in the room, and a knife must be thrown over his head. This would enable him to be restored to society. If the knife was not thrown, he would be lost for ever. In the event he did appear, but the man entrusted with the knife was so astonished that he failed to throw it, and Robert Kirk was seen no more upon the earth. And it is said that to this day he is held a prisoner by the inhabitants of the fairy netherworld, who resented the fact that he had disclosed so much information about them in his manuscript.
Winnyford listened intently. He seemed to forget about his whisky while I was speaking, but as soon as I had finished he picked up his glass and knocked back the contents. I reached over with the bottle.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I thought I recognised the name, but I haven’t heard that story before. It’s odd, because I pick up tales and legends like that all over the place. It’s my trademark: the overlap of myth and history. Pity there isn’t some kind of specific connection with here.’
‘Or conjunction even,’ I said. ‘You could make one, though, couldn’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘You can’t make conjunctions, you can only reveal them. Menteith, the Black Jaws, you – that’s plenty to be going on with.’
In the firelight he looked a curious mixture of young and old, fresh-faced and haggard, puppy and old dog. I felt myself on the verge of telling him about the Stone, and how not a single one of the eight photographs I’d taken of it had come out. I’d tried to make myself believe there was a logical explanation – something to do with chemicals in the film – that the already exposed film had been preserved while the rest had deteriorated beyond use. I’d tried to persuade myself that with another film, or another camera, I could go into Keldo Woods and fire off a hundred photos of the Stone and they’d all come out. But I knew that, however reasonable this was, it would not happen. The Stone did not want to be photographed.
I no longer wished to share the Stone with anybody. Not Winnyford, not John Moffat, not Catherine Craigie. Elsie was the only one who might understand. I wished that I’d never mentioned it to anyone. And that night, while we sat and chatted about his work, his interest in legends and folklore and how people interpret them, and why communities remember or forget them, I said nothing about the Stone to Bill Winnyford.
XXX
I am thinking of a particular night seven months after Jenny was killed, and just a week after Elsie and I had our moment of truth, if that’s what it was, in the bedroom upstairs. The occasion was a dinner party at Amelia and Gregor Wishaw’s. Amelia had phoned me. ‘Gideon,’ she’d said, ‘we all want to see you again. Yourself, not the Reverend. I know it’s hard, but you need to do it. Come and have dinner on Friday and share some good company with us. Nobody intimidating, nobody you have to put on airs for, just a few friends.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Gregor and myself, and John and Elsie. Can you handle that?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Yes, okay.’
‘I thought I’d ask Nancy Croy to make up the numbers,’ Amelia added smoothly. ‘You get on well with her, don’t you?’
‘Well enough,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re not matchmaking, Amelia.’
‘Of course I’m not.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘It’ll be fine, I promise.’
Elsie and John were already there when I arrived. Elsie greeted me as if nothing had happened between us. I detected no fear, no resentment, no shame and, worst of all, no residual smouldering passion in her gaze. Her smile was the smile of an old friend. John, too, was his usual self, both to her and to me. He and Gregor were drinking beer and beginning to compete with each other at jokes and stories. I did not want to be part of their game. I chose to drink red wine.
Nancy joined us a few minutes later, wearing a short tweed skirt and an olive-green silk blouse. I tried to think of her as a woman I might want to be with: she was bonnie, intelligent, kind, active, enthusiastic, creative; she was dedicated to the children she taught and the causes she espoused; she was liberal-minded and a Christian. But, try as I might, I could not find it in my heart to lust after her.
In the Wishaw household it was Gregor who did the cooking. Amelia was far too busy as a GP, or rushing from one conference to another, to have the patience for it. Gregor on the other hand was obsessive about meticulous preparation and artistic presentation. Each of the five courses he served us looked beautiful and tasted momentarily delicious, but there wasn’t much substance to any of them; and I cannot now remember what they were.
As the drink flowed, we all became more voluble, Gregor and John especially. There were a few differences of opinion over politics (John Major’s Tory government had, against all our expectations, won the General Election in April), the rumbling crisis of UN arms inspections in Iraq following the Gulf War, and the state of the National Health Service. We had reached the coffee when in a lull in the talk Nancy looked across the table at me and sai
d: ‘I’d like to raise a glass to absent friends. One in particular. We all wish she was here. Here’s to Jenny.’
There was an awkward silence, as if Nancy had done something exceptionally gauche, but she was only articulating what we were all feeling: that Jenny’s ghost was at the feast and we were ignoring her.
‘Thank you, Nancy,’ I said. ‘I appreciate that, and so would she. Here’s to Jenny.’
Everybody joined in the toast. I smiled at Nancy and then at Elsie. She smiled back, unabashed. I thought about lying naked on the bed beside her. It probably looked to everybody else as if I was thinking fond thoughts of Jenny.
‘I mind the first day we met her,’ John said, ‘as if it was last week. Do you mind that, Gideon, in that café in Forrest Road?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘We met Elsie too.’
‘She was reading the Guardian,’ John said to the others. ‘Jenny I mean, not Elsie. We sat at the same table and got talking to her. Then Elsie came over, she was the waitress, and we got talking to them both. Didn’t we, Elsie?’
‘A right pair of patter merchants, I bet,’ Gregor said.
‘No, they were hopeless,’ Elsie said. ‘It was quite touching actually.’
‘I can see her now,’ John said. ‘A red jumper and that lovely hair of hers. Remember, Gideon?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s as if she’s still there. I imagine we could walk into that café and she’d be in the same seat. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes, it does,’ Elsie said.
‘You must miss her so much,’ Nancy said.
I shrugged. ‘I catch her out of the corner of my eye sometimes, or I hear her telling me something. But other times I can hardly remember what she looked like.’
‘That’s sad,’ Nancy said.
‘It’s normal,’ Amelia said. ‘It’s completely normal. Real. It’s what happens.’
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 24