by William Boyd
Donald Verulam lived in Barnton and once or twice a month, if he had been working at home and was going into town to dine at his club, or attend a University Photographic Society meeting, we would encounter each other on the station platform in the afternoon. It was Donald—not my father, not Oonagh—who told me about my mother.
“You have your mother’s nose and eyes,” he said once, a singular expression on his face. He pushed my fringe back. “Yes.… She always wore her hair back.” He made a slight pursing movement of his lips; his Adam’s apple bobbed.
“A gentle spirit, Johnny.… A terrible, terrible tragedy. You’d have—” He broke off and looked suddenly out of the window.
He often had his camera with him, in its stout brown-leather, velvet-lined box, and sometimes buff envelopes of photographs and plates. He would tell me of the elementary principles of photography, of the carefully registered exposure of light to light-sensitive paper. And one summer evening as we rattled through Blackhall, he unpacked his camera, extended the lens on its leather bellows and allowed me to look through the viewfinder. I stood by the window, the bulky instrument heavy in my hands, and looked at the world through a camera for the first time. It was only the back gardens and allotments of Blackhall, a view I had observed innumerable times, but something about the mediation of the lens, the constriction of the frame, changed all that. It no longer seemed the same. It looked strangely different, somehow special, instinct with some potential.… The gardens and houses chased past before my eyes.
“Go on, press,” Donald said. “It’s easy.”
Which moment would I choose? I hesitated. Click. That instant frozen in time. My fate decided.
A week later when he came to dinner, he gave me the print. A skidding blur of houses, light and shade, a tepee of runner beans, a diamond spangle from a greenhouse.
“Not bad,” he said. “Good impression of speed. You’d think we were going fifty miles an hour.”
I showed the photograph to Oonagh. She turned it over; her tongue bulged her cheek.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s my first photograph. I call it ‘Houses at Speed.’ ”
“It’s no very good. Cannae see much.”
For my tenth birthday I asked for a camera. I was given a tiny Watson’s Bebe, a hand or detective camera, as it was known. My father, happy to see some kind of interest growing in his son, gladly purchased it. I took very few pictures, from choice, not necessity (Donald’s darkroom was always available). This parsimony of image making seemed to suit me. I would go out and about in Edinburgh with my camera and often return home without having removed it from its box. So, what pictures did I take? I photographed a cabman’s shelter in Balcarres Street, decorated with two stuffed marionettes. I photographed the lugubrious, mangy camel in Corstorphine Zoo. I took a picture of my father, in full academic dress, shaking hands with Queen Mary when she and George V visited Edinburgh in 1911. I caught Thompson dozing on a sofa in a sunny room, his mouth gormlessly open, one hand cupping his balls. I took a portrait of Sandy Malcolm, a blind man who sold bootlaces on the Waverley Market railings. Round his neck hung a placard: “Please buy. Am blind from dynamite explosion in Noble’s works, Falkirk, 1879.” I snapped Oonagh with four other women and their children in the Canongate one day as they gossiped outside a milliner’s. They all wore tartan shawls, even Gregor, five years old and barefoot. I was not interested in landscapes, streets or panoramas. I took living things.
Our shared hobby brought me closer to Donald Verulam. In 1912 he showed two of my photographs (Sandy Malcolm and a stonemason at work) in the University Photographic Society exhibition in the Trade Hall on Leith Walk. On the evening after the exhibition closed, a Friday, and as a kind of reward, I spent a night at his home in Barnton. We planned to go out to Swanston the next day with our cameras to watch the haymaking.
Donald lived in a large stone semidetached house with a long neat garden at the back. I remember it as dark inside, with walls the color of brown paper and with hard carpets of deep maroon and navy blue. After his housekeeper had cleared away our dinner dishes we went into the library. Donald smoked a pipe. I examined his new Ross Panross stand camera with its patent lens tilt. Donald seemed thoughtful, vaguely melancholy.
“How old are you now, Johnny?”
“Nearly thirteen.”
“My God. Thirteen years. Is that right?”
My father never mentioned my age. I knew what Donald was thinking. He looked at me. He had not changed much in the six years I had come to know him, except that he was now almost completely bald.
“I should’ve shown you these ages ago,” he said. He got up and went to a glass bookcase and took down an indigo leather album. He handed it over. I opened it.
Pictures of my mother. Close-ups, studio portraits, casual snapshots. I looked at her as if for the first time, as if I were a groom in an arranged marriage contemplating his distant bride. I saw wavy fairish hair, a slim small-breasted woman with eyes and eyebrows like mine. She had a hesitant smile in the portraits, her top lip tensed rather over her teeth. The reason for this was revealed in a snapshot where one saw small white teeth set in a wide gummy smile as she leaped down from a pony and trap into my father’s arms. It was strange too to see my father with a woman, his face somehow decades younger, his posture more supple and limber.
Donald explained that my father had asked him to take my mother’s portrait. They had had several sessions, which explained the number of studio shots (he had used an empty upstairs bedroom as a makeshift studio, he said).
“You mean she came here, was in this house?”
“Many times.”
I felt an odd tautening of my spine. I looked over my shoulder. I tried to see my mother in this room. I felt strange. I turned back to the album. The other pictures came from excursions and jaunts they all three had taken as friends. There must have been fifty or sixty photographs in all. (Donald gave the album to me. It became one of my most treasured possessions and I kept it with me through all my travels and ordeals over the years, until a thief stole the suitcase in which it was contained from my hotel room in Washington, D.C., 1954.)
“I offered the album to your father after she …” Donald said. “But he didn’t—said he couldn’t bear to have it.” He smiled sadly.
I looked at him. I thought: Why did you make and keep an album full of photographs of my mother? Why? And how did I know then, aged nearly thirteen, that darkening summer evening in Barnton, that Donald Verulam had been in love with my mother? What made me sense that? How do children intuit these things? I have no idea. But I remind you I was no ordinary child. Already in those days my mind was working in distinctly personal ways. I cannot explain why this conclusion presented itself to me with such particular force, but as I flicked through the pages, contemplating this pretty young stranger who had given birth to me the day she died, I felt myself brimful of a new liberating certainty. I had divined something; I possessed my first adult secret. I nourished it and let it grow inside me, warm and exquisite.
This realization allowed me to cope with my father’s strange coldness towards me, of which I became more aware as I grew older. He was never unkind or cruel. His attitude towards me was one of irritated bafflement rather than antagonism. He saw his second son, somewhat small of stature to be sure, but fit, personable, polite, the thick black hair now neatly parted on the left, the face, before the imminent ravages of adolescence, agreeable, open, apparently intelligent and, from some angles, distressingly reminiscent of his dead wife’s. Yet this boy’s intellectual development seemed insuperably retarded. By age thirteen I could read and write, though my spelling was vile, but I appeared incapable of making any real progress with my other school subjects. “Bad,” “lazy,” “stubborn,” “plain stupid,” were the epithets that figured on my school reports. Except for one: arithmetic.
“It says ‘excellent’ here,” my father addressed me across the dining table. “Why?”
> “I don’t know. I just find it easy.”
“Well, why don’t you find anything else easy, for heaven’s sake!”
“I don’t know.”
“Latin: ‘no progress.’ Compositions: ‘unsatisfactory, makes no effort.’ Then I read ‘excellent.’ What am I meant to think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop saying, ‘I don’t know,’ idiot child!”
“Sorry. But—”
“You’re clearly not an imbecile. An imbecile wouldn’t get an ‘excellent’ for arithmetic.” He looked at me. “Spell ‘simpleton.’ ”
Ah. This I knew was a trick.
“C, i—”
“No!” His eyes thinned above his cheek tufts. He looked at me with what I can only describe as despair.
“If you don’t improve, John, I shall have to take steps to see that you do. I’ll not allow a boy of your age to bamboozle me.”
These “steps” had been referred to with increasing regularity over the last two years. I was not sure what he had in mind; I feared a private tutor or some sort of crammer. I hung my head with a suitable display of filial humbleness and left the room. I was not as perturbed as I looked. Since my discovery of Donald’s love for my mother, other complications had suggested themselves to me that made my father’s ire and hostility more comprehensible. What if Donald’s love had been reciprocated? In terms of attractiveness there was no comparison between the two men. I hugged my secret to me like a hot-water bottle. It protected me; it set a distance between me and my father. Donald Verulam and Emmeline Todd … it seemed entirely natural and likely.
Fancifully, I contemplated my face in the mirror. My mother’s eyes, her brows. In the looking glass I thought I began to see traces of Donald’s high forehead. I stretched my neck and swallowed, trying to make my Adam’s apple bob like his. Could there have been something more?
I tried to elicit more information from Oonagh.
“Oonagh, did my mother have many friends?”
“Aye, surely. She was a very popular woman. Much loved.”
“By who, exactly?”
“All sorts. Everyone. Family—brothers, cousins—always busy, always visiting, out and about.”
“Did my father go with her on these visits?”
“Well, he’s a busy man, ye ken.”
“I see.”
She was giving away nothing. But her reticence convinced me she knew or suspected more.
My father was still a busy man. His work at the infirmary kept him away from home almost all week. At weekends he often returned to the wards for a few hours to see how his patients were progressing. He kept a journal—a professional journal—and wrote up his observations every night.
He was always experimenting with new techniques of treatment, and these experiments were the only thing that formed a bond between us. It all started when I was about ten. One evening he came into my bedroom, a rare event.
“Johnny,” he said stiffly, “would you like to help me with something?”
I could hardly say no.
“This weekend, would you do me a favor? Eat nothing but apples and drink nothing but water.… I’ll give you half a crown.”
He explained what he was on about. He was alarmed at how many of his patients died after surgery. He felt sure that the key to their survival lay in the purification of their diet. A “complete cleansing of the system” was his aim. You have to give him some credit. Working in the days before sulfanilamides, penicillin and our modern antibiotics, and in the earliest days of sterilization, he had come across something that later generations would endorse. But he was working in the dark.
“It’s the sepsis, you see, Johnny, I’m sure. Somehow we’ve got to keep the system unadulterated.”
He had been most distressed by a recent case, a little girl who had pricked her finger on a rose thorn. The tiny puncture had become inflamed; poultices had been applied but to no avail. When she was brought in to see Father her finger—middle right—was swollen twice its size and a nasty plum color. Father was a follower of Pasteur and Lister. Scrupulous cleanliness was his watchword. Over the next few weeks, in such an environment, he first lanced the finger, relanced it, amputated it, then removed the girl’s hand, then her arm up to her elbow. He was contemplating whether to take her arm off up to the shoulder when she died.
“And all because she pricked her finger on a thorn. A tiny thorn …” There was a look of stunned incomprehension in his eyes as he told me this story. It was a real affront, cruelly illustrating his basic powerlessness, and questioning his calling as healer. Hence this new obsession and my role in it as guinea pig.
At first I was happy to comply. He had never taken such a close interest in me. I ate apples and drank water all weekend. My pulse and blood pressure were taken hourly, my urine analyzed and my stool examined.
“How do you feel?” he asked on Sunday night.
“Fine.”
“Any different from normal? Do you maybe feel a wee bit better than you did on Friday?”
I looked at him. His pale, clear blue eyes. Dad, I said to myself, I want to help.
“Yeeees …” I drew it out. “I think I do feel a wee bit better.”
“Good lad. There’s your half crown.”
And so, once every two or three months I would be called on to help with the great system-cleansing experiment. There was the bread and milk diet. The root vegetable diet. The meat diet. The salted-fish diet. I went on a week-long rice pudding diet—rice pudding for breakfast, lunch and supper—during the holidays, which earned me a guinea.
“How do you feel? Bit more strength?”
“I think I do … I feel … I feel a bit more lively.”
“Grand! Well done, Johnny, there’s your quid.”
During my regime I would let myself out surreptitiously and wander round to the Grassmarket and buy a couple of sticky buns from the baker. I felt no guilt. It made Father happy and it distracted him from my case, as it were, for a time. I feel very sorry now for those patients—the frail amputees, the feeble inmates of the isolation wards—upon whom I conferred the added discomforts of thrice-daily boiled turnips or constant salted fish as they struggled fitfully to convalesce.
By some standards I must have been quite a lonely child. Periodically, my father made an effort to integrate me into the social lives of his colleagues’ families, but none of the friendships that ensued seemed to last very long. I recall twin boys with whom I played fairly regularly for a year or two until one died of diphtheria. And there was a girl—Lucretia Leslie—to whose house I was often invited. I cannot remember much of Lucretia (a violet dress, a cute chubby face) even though we were fast friends for a good while, except that we definitely did not expose our private parts to each other. At school I was reasonably popular, but because I did not live in Barnton I was unable to extend my acquaintance with my school chums beyond classroom hours.
For a while I hung around Thompson, while he was in his mid-teens and I was approaching double figures. I was not welcome. He tolerated me, no more. Anyway, as he entered his final year at school his extracurricular activities took up much of his time. He was captain of his school debating society and was prominent in one of the quasi-religious, paramilitary organizations for boys (I forget which) that seem to proliferate in Scottish cities. He was a sedulous churchgoer for some years (my father was not) and I remember him going on trips to convocations or rallies. Once to Birmingham and once, I think, to Antwerp.
Looking back on Thompson’s indifference I wonder if it was a subconscious resentment of me, like my father’s. Thompson had been six when his adoring mother was taken away and replaced by a bawling baby brother. Did he, somewhere in his being, blame me for this crucial deprivation? My mother’s death was the start of all my misfortunes. Possibly it made Thompson what he was, and what he is today: a cold, selfish, conceited philistine without a drop of fraternal affection in his body. And very rich.
So I was left largel
y to my own devices: Oonagh, my rare friends, my hobby. I wonder what I did before I got my camera? Played with Oonagh, I suppose. She always seemed to be there with young Gregor—her last child, as it turned out. Should I tell you anything more about Gregor?… I treated him rather as Thompson treated me. In fact, Oonagh showed me more kindness than she did her own child. She called Gregor “snotty-beak”—he seemed always to be in the grip of a ferocious cold, summer and winter, his top lip glossy with phlegm. Gregor.… It seems hardly worth it. He drifted out of my life shortly after. Later I heard he married, joined the merchant navy. Is he still alive? Are you out there, Gregor?… Gregor need not concern us; he was around then, that was all, and he is one of the few people in my life to whom I bear no ill will.
Oonagh. Oonagh was the tender nexus of my universe, although I never reflected on it at the time. When I arrived home from school, breathless from the hike up from the station, it was into the kitchen that I turned.
“Here he is,” she would say and that would be it. I would sit down, my plate would be set in front of me and we would take up our conversation from where it had been left off.
Around the time I learned about Donald Verulam and my mother—the summer of 1912—there was a slight but discernible shift in the relationship between me and Oonagh. By then she must have been in her mid-thirties, still a handsome strong woman, her protruding eyes as restless and shrewd as ever. She moaned with more regularity about the cold, her back, the doings of her offspring. We had had the electric light installed in the apartment now, and what with Thompson and my father more often out than in, her duties were not onerous.