‘You’d better read it,’ Catherine said.
‘Who is your lawyer, by the way?’ I asked.
‘Mr Stewart in Montrose,’ she said. ‘A sound man. I recommend him if you ever need a lawyer. His details are there too.’
I read the sheet she had typed out. It was quite a read. I shall come to the details of it at the appropriate place in this narrative, but Catherine’s words described a funeral like none that had ever been held in Monimaskit.
‘I’ve told you about my trip to Mexico in the sixties, haven’t I?’ she said. I nodded. She’d gone there in 1962 after finishing her teacher-training, to take part in an archaeological dig and visit some of the Aztec and Mayan ruins. ‘That’s where this comes from,’ Catherine said. ‘Some of it, anyway. Mexico made a huge impression on me. Everything there is loaded with symbolism, weighed down with it. The ancient ruins loom over the whole country, or at least they did for me. I went to Chichen Hza and Uxmal and Palenque, and seeing those places changed my life. Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant. I got a sense that everybody in Mexico understands that in some deep way. We were there on the first of November, when they celebrate the Day of the Dead. It was unforgettable. I gather it’s become something of a tourist attraction nowadays in certain areas, but back then we knew we were watching something special, this weird mixture of Indian and European, pagan and Catholic, ancient and modern, life and death. It was spectacular and powerful and strange but it wasn’t dressed up for foreigners, it wasn’t for us. We were privileged to see it. Mexico was pretty rough and ready in 1962, especially for a young girl. The people were delightful, but desperately poor, except for the landowners, who were horribly rich.’
She’d told me all this before. Each time I heard it I was envious of what she’d experienced.
‘Basically, Gideon,’ she said, ‘I’d like a bit of Mexico in Monimaskit when I die.’
‘It will cause some tongues to wag,’ I said.
‘Let them wag,’ she said.
‘It might upset a few people.’
‘Fine.’
‘And get me into trouble.’
‘It’s possible. Do you care?’
‘Not really. It would probably be remembered for a long time.’
‘Good. That’s why I want the children there, so that they grow up remembering it, so that they remember it when they’re old and grey and about to die themselves. But I want them to enjoy it. I don’t want them running amok, but it shouldn’t be a solemn occasion, it should be fun.’
‘Yes, I see that.’
‘I’ve always liked graveyards. They’re peaceful, unrushed places. The pace of change in a graveyard is very gradual. I’ve never thought of graveyards as gloomy, and I don’t like the idea that they’re places one should only visit out of a sense of obligation, or when there’s a funeral. People should be able to go and sit or sleep or read a book in a cemetery without being thought odd. I’d like people to have picnics in them if I thought they would behave properly and not leave their litter behind, but I’m afraid that’s a forlorn hope.
‘When I was physically able, I used to spend a lot of time wandering about graveyards, reading the stones, but I talked to the people under the ground too. That didn’t come from Mexico, that was in me from a very young age. I’ve had some excellent conversations with the dead, and I’ve learned a lot from them. I don’t think people should creep around them as much as they do, do you?’
I laughed, waving the paper. ‘This certainly isn’t creeping.’
‘I hope you don’t think it’s silly. It’s not intended to be.’
‘No, not at all. It’s an attractive idea. I’ve just never considered such a thing before. Graveside entertainment.’
‘Perhaps you should have it debated at the General Assembly,’ she said drily. ‘The entertainment, as you put it, is in the hall cupboard under the stairs. There’s quite a lot of it. My home help kindly put it away, and I haven’t been able to go through it. The perishable items aren’t there, of course, they’ll have to be bought at the time, and Mr Stewart will reimburse any expenses. I bought the kites from a catalogue that came with one of the Sunday papers. I’d be grateful if you would try one out. It would be a bit of a flop if they didn’t work properly.’
‘I’ll take one when I leave,’ I said. ‘The weather may be a factor, of course. Or the school holidays, or something else quite unforeseen.’
‘Oh, have a little more faith, Gideon. Monimaskit won’t let me down. It’ll be fine. Splendid, in fact. I wish I could be there to see it.’
‘That’s the trouble with funerals, isn’t it? One of the biggest days in your life and you can’t be there.’
‘Not if you think like a poor benighted Scot. Think like a Mexican and you never know, you might make it.’
‘You sound almost as though you’re admitting the possibility of something beyond the grave.’
‘That’s not a possibility, that’s a certainty. All the dead are still here. But are they conscious of it? On the available evidence, in spite of what I’ve just said, no. Evidence, Gideon, hard evidence. You may think I’m turning into someone who believes in ghosts and fairies, but I’m not. I believe in the dead. I believe in history.’
We sat in silence for a minute. It was after ten o’clock, and I began to think I should go home. But it was good just sitting there with Catherine, saying nothing. For all that she ribbed me, I felt that we understood each other.
‘You’ll notice,’ she said, ‘that I haven’t mentioned your mysterious stone.’
‘You have now,’ I said. I’d hoped she might have forgotten about it, but Catherine forgot very little.
‘That’s ghost and fairy stuff,’ she said.
‘How do you know, you who’ve not even seen it?’
‘I just know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps because I haven’t seen it. But I also know you, which does make me wonder just a little. Did you take any pictures yet?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve not managed.’ Which wasn’t a complete lie. ‘The thing’s still there, though. At least, it was a couple of days ago.’
‘Hmm. Well, humouring you for a moment, perhaps your friend Winnyford is responsible. Perhaps it’s another of his installations, but one he hasn’t finished yet. And you’re part of it. You’ve probably been recorded running past it, touching it, staring in amazement. I hope you haven’t been doing anything too embarrassing. Sprinkling it with holy water, that sort of thing,’ she added with a grin.
‘I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,’ I said. ‘But in any case, it isn’t an installation. It’s not made out of cardboard or polystyrene and there aren’t any sound effects. It’s a piece of solid rock.’
‘If you say so,’ she said. I felt aggrieved that she had raised the matter only to dismiss it again, but I wasn’t sorry to let it go at that. I had become protective of the Stone. It was no longer a mystery. It was my mystery.
I left Catherine’s that night carrying a red and yellow kite in a clear plastic case. It was, as I discovered the next morning when I assembled it, a traditional diamond-shaped kite with a long tail. I tied the string to two hooks on the cross-spar and took it out into the garden to test it. There was enough lawn for me to get a run at launching it, and enough wind to give it some height. I don’t know whether anybody was paying attention to the sky above the manse that day, but I like to think that somebody noticed the red and yellow diamond twisting and diving like a swallow in the breeze. Maybe they even smiled to themselves and thought, ‘Ah, that must be the minister playing with his kite.’
Kite-flying is a double-edged experience, at once liberating and a reminder of your earthbound nature. The kite is a part of you and yet not a part of you, it is like having your soul on a long string tugging at you, attached to your body and yet with a life of its own. The temptation, of course, is to let go.
XXXII
In writing all this down, I have hardly
touched on my parish activities: given what has happened to me, they seem unimportant in the scale of things. Yet I have been a busy and conscientious minister for most of my time at Monimaskit, just as I was at Leith. It is only in the last year or so, since the advent of the Stone, that I have been less thorough in the performance of my duties. Until that time, I fulfilled my parish obligations, attended, as far as I could, to the spiritual needs of my congregation and made myself available to the wider community, as is requisite of a minister of the national Church. I performed baptisms and administered Holy Communion; I prepared people, young and old, to become communicants; I married couples and buried the dead – all with an acceptable dignity and expression of faith, however disengaged my heart may have been. Funerals, as any minister will tell you, are difficult and draining events both for the family of the deceased and for the minister; and you cannot schedule them to fit with your other commitments. I once conducted five in as many days and I have heard of a minister who did thirteen in one week. It is hard to preach the life everlasting to distraught people whose only sure knowledge is that their loved one is gone for ever; doubly so when you yourself don’t believe what you are telling them.
And then, on top of this work, came the bureaucracy and constant round of committee and group meetings that characterise the Presbyterian system of Church government. I attended Presbytery and Session regularly, of course, and three times I have gone to the General Assembly, that gathering of ministers and elders in the spring that I’ve always thought must, from the air, make the Mound in Edinburgh look like a gigot of lamb swarming with bluebottles. All this reminds me of how demanding these years have been, and how tired I became latterly. The charity work, it is true, gradually fell by the wayside, till the amounts raised were just fractions of those early sums: our steering committee was shrunk by resignations, our army of helpers dwindled, those of us left simply didn’t have the energy we’d had at the start, and – predictably, perhaps – as Monimaskit became a more prosperous place in the late 1990s, so the willingness of the people to give their time and money to good causes seemed to decline. I used to think that most people were instinctively charitable towards the less fortunate. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps charity is simply a way of putting distance between yourself and misfortune. Perhaps Peter Macmurray was right all along, and a collection box proffered without love is an empty shell of a thing, no matter how much money is put into it.
In other respects, the work-load of my ministry remained constant, or grew. I felt increasingly isolated – a situation largely of my own making. And another factor in my tiredness was that in 1997 my mother came to live with me in the manse. She was then nearly eighty, and had been a widow for seventeen years. In that time she had become increasingly wandered in her mind. Her neighbours in Ochtermill kept an eye out for her and had my phone number, but she was always a source of worry. Jenny and I tried to visit her every fortnight, but it was hard to make the time, and often Jenny ended up going herself because I was too busy. After Jenny’s death, I regret to say, I took to telephoning her instead.
Her senility was curious. Some days she could be reassuringly lucid, conduct a normal conversation and appear to have reasonable control of her everyday life. Other days she would phone six times in the space of an hour to ask me something I’d already told her. She would also talk to me as if I were my father, which I found difficult: at what point do you interrupt your mother to tell her that the husband to whom she imagines she is speaking has been dead for years? I can’t imagine that they’d ever had a phone conversation in their lives: I used to wonder if she pictured him at the other end of the line, or if she simply forgot she was on the telephone and saw him beside her. It became obvious that she could not go on living on her own. She was becoming a liability to herself and to her neighbours. Finally they had to call out the fire brigade because she’d forgotten to take her dinner out of the oven.
I packed up her things, sold off most of the furniture and put the flat on the market. She’d been to stay in Monimaskit a few times when Jenny was alive, but not since then. She came to me in September, not long after Princess Diana was killed and the Scots voted, decisively and overwhelmingly (I among them), for a Parliament in Edinburgh. My mother was only ever sporadically aware that these things had taken place. I’d hardly settled her in one of the spare rooms when she began seeing Jenny everywhere – in the garden, on the stairs and especially in the kitchen in the Windsor chair. Sometimes we both saw her simultaneously. At first I didn’t mind this. It made for interesting three-way conversations. But after a while I resented it. I resented my mother for seeing Jenny more than I did, and I resented Jenny for not being there to help look after her.
I am not proud of myself. I went to the Monimaskit Care Home, where I was a regular visitor, and special-pleaded my mother to the top of their waiting-list. I did in fact have a case: I was in and out all day and often at night, and she wasn’t fit to be left alone. I would come home on a chilly winter’s day, and all the windows would be wide open, or I would find that she had bolted the doors and gone to bed. She wasn’t capable of making an edible meal, so I had to cook for both of us. Latterly we existed almost entirely on oven-ready meals – they were safer and easier. I did my best to keep her out of the kitchen, but lived in constant fear that she would burn the manse down. After nine months of this, my nerves were in ribbons.
Then one day a place at the home became available. I took her in that week, and she went without a word of protest. The care she got there was better than anything I could provide, and visiting her four or five times a week, as I did at first, seemed like a luxurious saving of time. She was still quite lucid and articulate some days; on others, as one of the staff remarked, she didn’t know if it was Tuesday or the tatties. Gradually my visits shortened and reduced in number. As I say, I am not proud of myself. I think of her as Tantalus, unable to drink from the waters of one reality and with the grapes of another always just out of reach.
Enough, however, of these past troubles, which seem so diminished now. I must write of the events of the autumn months of this year 2003, the year of the Stone. Other events distracted the world in this year: the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces, and all the dreadful consequences of that misguided policy; but I cared about such matters less and less. The seasons moved on from spring into summer, and still the Stone was mine and mine alone. If anybody else had discovered it, they said nothing to me. And I said nothing to anybody else. I went to see it now, as a matter of course, once a week, on a Tuesday or a Thursday in the late afternoon. It never changed, which was a source of reassurance. Madness, terror and devastation scarred other parts of the world. Deep in the woods of Keldo the Stone was more permanent, and seemed more real, than the shifting turmoil of human affairs.
I had not seen anything of Elsie and John for some months. John’s visits to the manse had become very sporadic, and there’d been occasions when the doorbell had rung, and I hadn’t answered it, suspecting it would be him. Then he did not come at all. I do not know why I thus shunned my oldest friend: guilt, I suppose, because of the desire I still felt for his wife. But nor, from March to September, did I see Elsie. They didn’t invite me for a meal, and I didn’t bump into her on the street. I drove or ran past their house often enough, but either there was no one there or I did not care to go in. I was astonished at myself: I had always been able to play the hypocrite so well. I suspected the Stone’s influence. It seemed somehow to have changed us all, even though only I had seen it.
And then, one Saturday morning, I saw Elsie at last. It was the first week in September, and William Winnyford’s exhibition was finally ready to open. I had received an invitation, and when I arrived at the museum at eleven o’clock the entrance hall was already crowded. Orange juice, apple juice and wine were being served; there were tiny oatcakes adorned with fish paste, greasy vol-au-vents and sausages on sticks. I made my way around the hall, shaking hands and having my ears dinned by the
usual aimless chatter of such occasions. There were only a few noticeable absentees. One of them was Catherine Craigie, who had certainly been invited – I had seen the card on her mantelpiece – but who had declined, whether on grounds of incapacity or of ideological opposition I did not know.
From a podium squeezed between the reception desk and the postcard stand, the museum director Alan Straiton made a speech. The museum, he said, could not and would not have missed the opportunity to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the granting of Monimaskit’s royal charter, and originally the plan had been simply to stage an exhibition of the town’s history. But there was a problem: the museum’s permanent exhibition, housed in the main or inner hall, was the town’s history. Some extra dimension was needed to mark such a special occasion. And so the unique talents of the conceptual artist William Winnyford had been enlisted. Mr Winnyford, known for such works as Steam Ghosts at the East Midlands Rail and Road Museum, See Out 2 Sea at various locations around the Humber Estuary, and The Monkfish of Burntisland, was the leading, possibly the only true exponent of mythohistoriographical art, and he, Alan Straiton, felt proud and privileged to have collaborated with him. Bill Winnyford then spoke, using many superlatives, of the huge personal satisfaction he had gained from working in this wonderful community: he only hoped that the artistic experience that was about to be unveiled would be equally satisfying to the people who came to see it. Finally, the convenor of the council, a tiny woman weighed down by the chain of office that sat on her shoulders, was called upon to declare Echoes: 600 Years of Monimaskit Memories open.
People began to move through to the exhibition space, and the crowd thinned considerably. A photographer from the local paper was taking pictures of the three speakers. I saw Winnyford look in my direction and give me a wave. A few minutes later he bounded up to me.
‘Gideon, so glad you’ve come, marvellous turn-out, have you seen any of it yet? You must have a quick look at the Black Jaws. Won’t be able to see a thing of course but just a glance tell me what you think.’
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 26