The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

I wondered if she ever got round to that. The old man was dead within a month. January 1965, a Friday afternoon, brain haemorrhage in The Coach and Horses during a drinking game with some American GIs.

  My brother and I did what was expected. We drank too much and played endless Duke Ellington records. We talked about the old man, already shaping the myths, joking about who was going to inherit the fedora. We called him a silly old bugger for getting into drinking games at his age and said the usual stupid thing about going the way he would’ve wanted, as if anyone wanted to go at all.

  Looking around that house, where copies of Playboy were idly scattered and Patchouli an ever-present scent, where the living room had been newly arranged to bordello chic and the ghost-guests of a thousand parties still offered their air-kisses and casual slanders, where the Moroccan-style white and aquamarine tiles of the bathroom had spellbound many a stoned wanderer, looking around I realised that without our father there would have been none of it.

  Later, as I read a statement to the press pack outside, I thought about all the stories we tell about ourselves and others, liquid and shifting as a murmuration of starlings. What if I veered away from this man of great energy who will be truly missed and talked instead about how families are dictatorships and we are all the bastard offspring of someone else’s failed ambition?

  I didn’t.

  No talent for the ad-lib, I heard the old man say, again so disappointed. Shoulda let your brother do it. But beside me Duke was lost in his own failings, immaculately drunk, swaying to a private breeze.

  Duke instantly took to the fedora. It didn’t take to him. The old man’s head was bigger than his and the brim slipped almost to Duke’s eyes. I saw a photo in a paper a couple of days afterwards.

  The Duke, the Lady and their Grief, the caption said.

  Duke was walking along a street; black raincoat, shades and fedora. His face was angled skywards, a picture of contemplation. A few steps behind, Anna was a picture of concern, effortlessly à la mode in white boots and black mini-dress. It was extraordinary to contemplate where she’d come from and where she now was, her appearance like an ongoing farewell.

  Yet the photo looked so staged it infuriated me. Leo told me to calm down but I went over anyway.

  Ellington was playing, of course, blaring out from the fifties Wurlitzer installed in the living room. My brother was sprawled on the purple velour couch. White shirt open to the waist, sunglasses on.

  ‘You still listening to this?’

  ‘It’s called grieving.’

  ‘I saw the photo by the way. The Mirror? What’s with the hat? You’ve taken the piss out of that hat for years.’

  ‘I defer to my earlier comment.’

  ‘You defer?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He sat up suddenly and reached for his glass on the low coffee table. ‘I defer to my earlier comment.’

  ‘Where’s Anna?’

  ‘Out shopping? I dunno. Why are you so concerned?’

  ‘I’m concerned about you. And her.’

  ‘Course you are. You’ve always been so concerned about her.’

  ‘I have no idea what that even means.’

  ‘Course you don’t.’

  I sat down on the seat opposite him. We said nothing for a long time. ‘You didn’t even like him, Duke.’

  He threw back the whisky and pointed at me. ‘You. You, little bro, are a cold-hearted bastard and—’

  ‘Can’t say I liked him too much myself.’

  As Duke leapt to his feet so did I. Before he said anything, I slapped him hard across the face. The sunglasses flew off. Two shocked and bloodshot eyes briefly contemplated me before he sat down again.

  I stayed standing. ‘Just don’t, Duke, don’t. Wear his fucking hat but don’t give me any more of this shit.’

  * * *

  It was a private funeral but they came anyway, hundreds of people despite the driving rain of cold February. Men with hats in their hands and women in black lined the steep road up to the church on the heights. We drove slowly past them behind the hearse, up to the old congregational church, stubborn as Calvin himself in the face of the storms that had battered it for a century.

  I remembered frozen Sundays. Frightening sermons and tuneless singing made all the more unsettling by the one voice, a wavering soprano, that could hold a note. I would look round for that voice but never find it, the rise and fall like a bird flitting across the dark pews before vanishing.

  No bird sang at the old man’s funeral. Duke, Leonid and I sat in silence, several cousins murmuring hymns as anonymous as their faces, which I hadn’t forgotten but simply never known. Anna whispered the words so quietly that it might have been the Kaddish or Wee Willie Winkie.

  Why not? The old man who would cross the street to avoid a minister was having a last laugh, on us.

  We chewed our way through Bread of Heaven and listened to a eulogy so far off the mark it would need McKeever’s lighthouse to guide it home. Then into the rain and ashes to ashes, mud to mud, a slapstick routine begging to happen. Alas, there was no whee-plop as the minister slipped and fell into the grave. It was disappointing. Final proof, I felt, that there is no God.

  It was only when I got back to the car that shame at the absence of affection for my father hit me. I guiltily watched the mourners who were still lining the streets down to Inveran, who had stayed out in the rain as the funeral took place and again bowed their heads as we drove past.

  I glanced round at Duke, sitting behind me on the back seat. Shades and silence. Was he as grief-stricken as he seemed? Why not? It was clearly a time of absurdities. I looked away from him, to Anna, who offered a smile I could only describe as offbeat. That’s the problem with absurdity. Once you notice it you start seeing it everywhere. It’s infectious, and far too easy to indulge.

  ‘He spent his whole life waiting for an audience like that,’ I said, and tossed another piece of driftwood on the bonfire. The salt-soaked timber began to spit, a counterpoint to the hissing of heavy rain on hot ash.

  We were sitting in our Mackintoshes in the same huddled row as when we lit the fire, hours ago. It was full black now, pulsing embers, the sea a presence only in waves I could hear but not see.

  I had been the one who wanted to come here after the wake at The Clachan, a need to clear my head of those endless tributes. Yet the memories followed us to the shore, the fire lighting a way back to the ones he once built every midwinter, a wink for his boys and an apologetic shrug for our mother, who disapproved of such pagan practices but always smiled when it was lit.

  ‘He’d have been mortified,’ said Anna.

  ‘Mortified? He’d have loved it,’ I said. ‘He would’ve made our lives miserable going on about it.’

  Anna smiled, rested her head on Duke’s shoulder, the smile becoming a frown as he shook her off.

  Duke lifted the whisky bottle and tipped it back. I took a shot and held it out for Anna, who placed it back in its hole in the sand. We went back to staring at whatever we each saw in the flames.

  ‘Can’t believe he put us through that service,’ I said. ‘Feed me till I want no more. The old bugger was gorging us all right, stuffing it down our throats. Four hymns, three prayers and two psalms.’

  ‘Five hymns,’ said Anna.

  ‘Five? No much wonder the minister looked pleased.’

  ‘Like Easter and Christmas rolled into one.’

  ‘Eastmas.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eastmas.’

  ‘Give it a rest, you two. Bit of respect, eh?’ Duke still stared straight ahead. ‘He’s not ten hours in the ground. Ten hours. I’m sure he thought it was worth it just to see all those people.’

  ‘C’mon, Duke, it’s—’

  ‘Did it never cross your mind that he wanted a funeral like that? Like he maybe, I dunno, came back to it.’

  ‘Came back to it? You’re having a laugh, right? He was having a laugh. We should have slung him on the bonfire. Proper Viking w
ay to go. He’d have loved that. You sure we found the right will?’

  He was suddenly on me, a smack on the side of the head as I tried to get up. He shoved me onto the sand and sat astride my chest, slapping my face again and again. I heard a wailing like the wind rising, which I realised was Anna. She was pulling at Duke’s arms, screaming at him. His body suddenly sagged and his arms dropped. He looked at me dumbly as I shoved him away and scrambled up.

  She came to me. Touched a finger to my lip. Looked at Duke with such exquisite sadness as he tried to get up and fell back on the sand, tried again and gave up, reaching instead for the bottle.

  That way she looked at me.

  It could have happened that night, after we put Duke to bed, standing in the doorway like concerned parents, or later on, in the kitchen, when we sat together, drank tea and said so little, her head on my shoulder which I didn’t shake off like my brother. Instead, it was the next day, after the walk to the Craigie Falls. ‘A beautiful morning,’ she said. ‘Leave him here to sleep it off.’

  We took the path behind the cottage, up towards Ben Chorain, beyond the shieling and east, the Sound below us, a silver shimmering become muted grey as the clouds shifted in front of a vague sun. The uncertainty matched the way I felt, one step after another and my heart beating harder, harder. Only the exertion, I told myself, not expectation, the same heat of effort I felt in Anna’s hand as I helped her up the last steep slope before the waterfall, her hand that did not let go as we walked across the smooth flat rocks, into the thunder and the icy spray.

  ‘I love you,’ I told her.

  Her reply was immediately lost in the waterfall and a long kiss that stripped any further consideration of what they might have been. Only after we shivered back into our clothes and lifted the Mackintoshes that had kept us dry from the wet heather did I again wonder what they were.

  To ask her was to misplace a gift, I told myself. And not to ask was never to be disappointed.

  Later, we stood at the kitchen window. Duke had gone for a walk. We were watching him in the distance, moving up hillside on the same path towards Ben Chorain. We said we can’t let it happen again.

  Then let it happen again.

  * * *

  1965 rolled on and London changed. I made an effort, for a while. I stepped in for the old man and Fatty, and I opened the Cannonball. Ironically, the club became renowned not for my father’s beloved jazz, but rock ‘n roll.

  The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and The Yardbirds all played early gigs there, the club becoming synonymous with what no-one at the time called Swinging London. Keith Moon made it his regular for a few months after he was barred from The Ship for letting off a smoke bomb. He had a walkie-talkie installed at his favourite table so he didn’t have to fight his way to the bar, through all the Peacock Mods strutting oblivious to the outraged cries of a fedora-wearing ghost.

  My generation never fitted me that well either. Take my clothes, the drainpipe trousers too long, runkled at the foot, bringing attention to the winkle pickers that bent up absurdly at the toe, making my legs look like two hockey sticks. Or my manner. I had the air of a policeman in a bad disguise. I tried to let my awkwardness become eccentricity and told myself I was part of the scene when everyone knew I wasn’t.

  Yet in time the commentariat lumped me in with the counterculture. These labels are usually retrofitted. The Spectacle assimilates. We all want to belong, deep down. We want to be persuaded that this is what we were truly looking at, back then, that we really were trying to change the world.

  Sometimes, though, I glimpsed it. A genuine freeing of possibility, a decoupling from what had gone before. But there were a lot of Bobs and few Dylans out there. The Cannonball, all the parties, they were filled with so many others like me, who failed to find the fearlessness to truly let go. Maybe they too looked at clothes that weren’t quite right, wondering why they were there at all.

  Anna, that was why.

  I obsessed about seeing her but avoided Notting Hill. After what had happened, the thought of having to endure the loaded strangeness of her domestic life was beyond agonising. Every time I dragged myself along to a party, pub or band, it was in the hope of bumping into her.

  Not that we said much the few times we did meet, our awkwardness so apparent it could be bottled. She avoided my gaze, as if to look at me was to be compelled to talk about the waterfall. Then the getaway, the same good to see you, Johnny that always seemed like a final farewell.

  Then, one time, it was. She vanished from the scene.

  Once or twice I nearly telephoned her. One time I even made it to St. Stephen’s Garden, walking back and fore until I noticed a policeman was taking an interest and hurried back to the Tube station. This was 5th February 1966, the first anniversary of the Craigie Falls.

  It would be my brother rather than Anna who I saw next, months later. First, a telephone call from which I hung up in exasperation. Then a visit, from which I couldn’t, a rapping on the door on a Saturday morning.

  He stood on the front step, immaculately mod in a double-breasted silver and navy pinstripe boating jacket and matching trousers. Behind him, by his midnight blue Jaguar, stood a representative of a more vintage London style. Slick hair. A three-piece suit under a black Crombie.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Hello to you too. Who’s your friend?’ Slick stood very still with his hands clasped. Staring at me.

  ‘One of Dad’s.’

  ‘One of Dad’s what?’

  ‘One of his . . . I dunno, his men?’

  ‘His men?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘So you have men now?’

  ‘Yes. I have . . . Look, let’s just go inside.’ He pushed past me into the house. Straight to the kitchen.

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ I said, watching him disappear down the hall to the kitchen. When I caught up, he’d already found the vodka. He poured a stiff one and downed it. Poured himself a quick refill.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Don’t give me that rubbish.’

  I thought Duke meant me and Anna. Instead, he was incensed about Breda Pictures’ new film. His latest, Next Stop Victoria, had been mired in re-writes, delaying filming. This meant, firstly, that a breathless public had to wait for the masterpiece that was a playboy hiring some crooks to steal a hundred grand, and, second, that Journey to the End of the Night, the first production we made for MGM-British at Borehamwood Studios, ended up being released in the same week of October.

  ‘I told you on the phone,’ I said. ‘We kept to schedule. You’re the one who got delayed.’

  ‘So it’s my fault.’

  ‘I don’t know whose fault it is, but it’s not mine. Anyway, it’s not as if they’re competing with each other.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You should go and see it.’

  ‘Should I.’

  The reviews for Journey . . . were better than Wrecking Ball. The Express applauded Leo’s ‘chilly visuals’, while The Observer called it an ‘artful, if seedy, tragedy’ in which Captain Samson, cuckolded by his wife as he flies around the world, takes revenge not on her and the swinging London scene that rejects him but the passengers on the airliner that he crashes into the Channel.

  ‘Pretty decent dream sequence you might like,’ I said.

  ‘All they’re talking about is the Breda Boys crap. All over again. I was trying to transcend all that.’

  ‘Transcend?’

  ‘Piss off. Are you really that jealous that you have to undermine me? Is that what it’s come to?’

  ‘What it’s come to is that you’re paranoid. You should cut that out.’

  He had poured another, which hovered at his mouth. He held my gaze as he downed it. ‘Do me a favour.’ He was now pointing. A vague sway. ‘Tell me the next time you’re working on your hobby.’

  ‘You’re dressed like Roger Daltrey and making Dirk
Bogarde movies. You should work for me.’

  ‘What, you reckon you’re cutting edge now?’

  ‘Sharper than you.’

  Duke strode out of the kitchen. I waited hopefully for the slam of the front door which didn’t come. I knew how this worked. He wouldn’t come and find me. I could leave for an hour or a week or a year and he’d stay right here, waiting for me to go to him to be granted my apology.

  I found him in the living room, sprawled on the couch. I thought he was asleep. Then his eyes opened. A gentle gaze, as if he had left from one place and returned from somewhere altogether different. It was remarkable, the pendulum shift of his emotions, that astonishing ability to forget.

  ‘I’m sorry, Johnny.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Do you remember, all those shitty ferries, up and down the west coast? We’d have pissed ourselves laughing if anyone said we’d end up making films. What the hell am I complaining about?’

  ‘Sure, Duke.’

  ‘I mean it’s all just fallen into place. Folk dream about all of this. Couldn’t be better.’ He was looking at me but somehow through me, with a smile I could have reached out and peeled off. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘What?’

  He suddenly jumped up, arms wide. ‘I thought I could, but I can’t.’ His bewilderment seemed absolute.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I was getting better, you know. I haven’t had a drink for a month.’

  ‘Just tell me what—’

  ‘Can you be there for her? Can you tell her I’ll do my best? Do that for me, I’m so sorry.’

  With that, I knew Anna was pregnant.

  I stood on the steps in the rain, watching the Jaguar purr up the street. Then I was just watching an empty street. I suddenly understood how incredibly easy it was to drift along in a state of stupefied detachment from everything going on around you. While some might find a mindless bliss in this, my less than enlightened reaction when I got back inside was to punch a hole in the kitchen wall.