Be Near Me (17 page)

'Listen to the way you talk,' I said. 'You didn't learn that from your husband.'

'I know,' she said, quite sadly. 'I learnt it from you.'

There's a way of feeling homesick, not for any house, not for any particular place, but just feeling homesick as a manner of being alive, every day a sense of existing in exile from
a place where you might belong. The Germans have a word for it:
Heimweh.
I sat in the chair and the chair was a momentary prison: Mrs Poole had her view of me now, and there was no way back to our jokes and our music. At last she put down my mother's book and smiled oddly.

'His name is Toby,' she said. 'My own son.'

She looked at the window, seeing something through the glass, I imagine, that none of us will ever see precisely the same way, not mere clouds and streaks of blue next to Arran but a vast and personal ether of possible rights and wrongs. She seemed to draw all confusion down from the sky and through the windows and into her lungs as she sat upright in the bed with her eyes shining.

'That's a fine name,' I said. 'Different.'

'I suppose you think it's very wrong,' she said, 'for a mother to give her child away to someone else. But Irene's a special person. I knew she would give him the life he deserves.'

'Everyone has their reasons,' I said.

'Yes,' she said. 'We do, don't we? I didn't save Jack or myself any unhappiness by it, but I think I saved the boy some.'

'Perhaps that's true.'

She looked at me. 'I had a great-aunt who did the same,' she said. 'She had a handicapped son. And she let my granny bring the boy up because she had a better husband. It worked out, but the boy never really knew his mother again, and that's how it goes.'

We sat for half an hour with our own thoughts, a nurse coming at one point to take a menu away. I washed my hands
again with the alcohol cleanser and sat back down with things to say but no way to say them. 'Families,' said Mrs Poole after a while. 'More than anything, I didn't want to have the same disease as Jack's mother died of. I really didn't want that. I wanted to show him I was better.'

'You are better,' I said.

She smiled. 'See how easy it comes to you, Father? You didn't even know the woman.' She patted the sound machine on the bedside cabinet. 'You're just like this,' she said. 'You sound perfectly natural but you are not natural at all.'

I bought the fish at a little shop in Troon. It all lay there in the window on hillocks of crushed ice—the clear-eyed perch, the pike, eels and carp, the shellfish heaped all orange and black—everything framed not like a haul from that morning's boats, not like a piece of reality standing at the centre of an actual day but like a picture of freshness invented and frozen behind glass: a still life with haggis. I took the credit card from my pocket. 'David,' my mother had said years before when she handed me the card and told me to sign the back. 'Spend whatever you have to in order to be yourself. I don't care about money.'

In the kitchen, I took out a small knife. I sliced the fish into slivers and cooked them in the pan with a dozen small onions. I crushed six cloves of garlic and noticed the clock. The voices in the next room were rising together in soft agreement, giving way to one another, allowing the room's atmosphere to expand into the music coming from the corner speakers, an attempt by Schumann at something blithe. The book was balanced on a perspex stand:
Les meilleures recettes de ma pauvre mère
by M. Huguenin, a first edition from 1936. I did as I was told and added the butter little by little, after the wine, and I shook the pan and watched the flame and thought of my father's meanness at games. He had that horrible habit of thinking card games were a wonderful test of human character: those evenings in Heysham, he laid the cards out like a man exposing his best instincts. I used to get nervous playing games with him. So did my mother. 'You don't keep your cards in good order,' he said. 'Tidy your cards. Then see.'

The supper was for Bishop Gerard. He sat at the table, using his hands, as usual, to weigh the words he spoke, fondling the air in front of him, shaping their rhyme and reason. He appeared to think all said things were over-said, and no sooner had he come out with something than his hands would knead the words down from their clear, high summit of expression. He would grab the words back, to leaven them, to limit their potential for damage. One imagines the little he spoke was measured well enough before he opened his mouth, but that was never the end of it: he continued to inflect those phrases with his fingers, as if it were part of the body's function, or a bishop's function, to protect the world from the motions of the mind. This was a delicate, parsimonious business, one made odd by the look of the hands themselves: in their ruddy plumpness they showed evidence of some gouging work on the part of his ancestors.

'Now, David,' he said, 'what is this you're giving us?'

'Burgundian fish stew,' I said. 'A favourite recipe. I'm afraid I'll have to insist on you all drinking the wine in the prescribed order. No mixing the wine in your glasses, either. I'm feeling very bossy tonight.'

I put His Lordship at the head of the table, and, on either side of him, two priests from the nearby parishes of Dairy and Irvine. I have to confess it was Gerard who preferred that I ask Father Damian, a young, untutored, patriotic fool, encumbered with a giant chip and a very broad sense of class merit, the latter facet owing everything to the impeccable miserableness of his origins. He was thought to put all this resentment to very good use in the former mining town of Dairy.

The other guests were charming. Father Michael was fifty-something, bookish, perfectly capable, and I noticed, while giving out the stew, that his eyebrows had been trimmed with scissors. Michael knew how to enjoy himself and I always found him generous. That evening, he spoke little and ate a lot, just as Father Damian ate nothing and spoke incessantly. At the other end of the table I put Mr McCallum, the headmaster of St Andrew's, wearing a blue pinstripe suit and a thin smile of alcoholic amity. I was very glad of him, though everybody else found him troublesome, and perhaps—with hindsight's unsparing clarity—I can see that it was unfair of me to expose him to the rigours of such a supper, where ambition and obligation tinkled with such menace among the bottles.

I imagined McCallum might do well next to Angela Path. She was one of those rather likeable, big-laughing women, redheaded and plastic-bangled and impatiently lipsticked,
cynical by experience and intrepid by temperament, one would have thought. At any rate, she was quite high up in the Dalgarnock social-work department. I saw her often as I went about my business, and I knew she liked dinners and liked saying all her monstrous things about men and oppression and so on. She made me laugh. She had a frightful tendency to use the word 'dichotomies'. She was into astrology and something in her manner suggested she mightn't believe anything she said, which is rather exciting in its own way.

She handed me a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. 'Right, listen,' she said. 'I've been keeping it since last November. Is that a mistake?'

'Il est arrivé!'
I said and kissed her on both cheeks. I remember taking her rather theatrical coat and putting the bottle in the fridge. I came back to the sitting room with a sparkling Burgundy, by which time Angela was already laughing gutsily with the Bishop.

After serving the fish stew, I opened an Aligoté from Meursault, a very nice Clos Vougeot and a Musigny. 'These two are from vineyards right next to each other,' I said.

'I'm not really a wine man,' said Father Damian. 'You couldn't manage a wee whisky?'

'Ice?'

'You're joking, man,' said Damian. 'We don't have ice in our whisky up here. This is Scotland.'

'Oh.'

'Talk about sacrilegious.'

Damian looked to the Bishop for confirmation and received it with a careful ghost of a smile. Then the young priest made a cradle of his fork and scooped up some peas,
while Gerard, I noticed, set about spearing each pea with his fork.

'A lovely glass of wine, that,' said Mr McCallum. 'Not too dry.'

'Each is from the same region as the recipe for the stew,' I said.

'Very nice,' said Mr McCallum. Then he blushed. 'You certainly know your way around a menu, Father David.'

'It was ever thus,' said the Bishop.

'It must have cost you,' said Father Damian.

'Oh,' I said, 'we don't discuss that.'

'It was ever thus,' said the Bishop, but again good-naturedly. I went to the cupboard and brought back a bottle of Laphroaig and sat it down in front of Damian. He sniffed as some people do when they feel they are required to make a polite response.

'That'll do,' he said.

'What a totally divine concoction,' said Angela, speaking of the fish stew. 'You can taste the sea. Is that not what they say, Bishop?'

'You'll know better than me, I'm sure,' he said. 'But it's interesting, you know, when it comes to the sea.' The Bishop put down his fork and began moving his hands. 'I've always been quite nervous of it. I don't like the sea one bit. Of course, the gospels have a great deal to say about the sea, and where would the human family be without it? I think of Galilee and the Apostles out there with Christ. I get the message of all that, of course, but I never liked the actual water myself. That's my own opinion. And I stick to it. I think the ocean is a very overrated thing.'

'Well, perhaps if you walked on it, Bishop,' said Angela. 'I don't know if you've quite got to that yet. Ha! But they say it's a nice stroll once you get used to it.'

A moment of cordial laughter curled around the table.

'I'm willing to see it as a family thing,' said the Bishop. 'My people came from County Monaghan. That's a landlocked county. We don't have a strong sense of the sea.'

'That's a pity, Gerard,' I said. 'The sea is a great fund of miracles. And we have crossed a great many seas to be where we are now.'

'That's true,' said Father Michael.

'And we are fisher priests,' I said.

'You need to beware what you catch,' said Father Damian. He laughed loudly at his own remark and Angela joined him, though there was something rather different in the tone of each person's mirth. I cast a look in the direction of the Bishop.

'Untoward, Father Damian,' he said.

'Sorry, My Lord,' said Damian. 'Just one of my wee jokes. You can't get far in this world without a wee joke, sure you can't.'

'Well, I grew up by the sea,' I said.

'In England,' said Damian, but I ignored him, addressing my remarks to the ruby-coloured cheeks of Mr McCallum.

'It enters your daily business,' I said, 'whether you work the waters or not.' I paused. 'I think perhaps people who grew up by the sea have a different feeling about nationhood. You have this country at your back, one's own country, and one is standing on it, but facing out to sea you tend to think of other countries. The world beyond.'

'And you like other nations, do you, David?' asked the Bishop.

I poured some wine for the others and myself. There happened to be a small element of criticism in Gerard's voice, and I would, in normal circumstances, have found it a natural part of the joshing that had existed between us for many years. But we call for extra loyalty from old friends when we have a new adversary in our midst. At that supper, with Father Damian smirking into his tumbler, the Bishop's words seemed mocking. I don't know if he was aware of it, but his hard words were made harder by the soft gesticulations of his fingers: behind the guard of seasoned camaraderie, he was giving licence to his neighbour, the young priest, who only took strength from the Bishop's prosecuting tone.

'Other nations?' I said. 'Well, I have cared for them a great deal in the past, Gerard, as you know. But one gets older. Perhaps one looks more inwardly as time goes on. In any event, I am sure I care much less about other nations than I once did.'

'Ha! That's a bit of a danger,' said Angela. 'You don't want to become complacent. We're in a strange place right now, with every country feeling their sovereignty matters above all others. I mean, we live in a time when an American life is taken to be a far more valuable thing than any other sort of life, especially a Muslim one.'

'Surely not,' said Mr McCallum.

'Every time,' said Angela. 'Now, you men like to talk about the sanctity of life...'

'Oh, heavens,' said the Bishop. 'Let's not get into that this evening.'

'Forgive me, sir,' she said, 'but you all talk about the sanctity of life. And so does the Christian Right in America. You want everything that can be born to be born, am I right? But when you're talking about actual lives—people already living—the Americans have a rather different notion. What notion of the sanctity of life informs the carpet-bombing in Iraq?'

The Bishop raised a finger to stall other contributions. 'The Church agrees with you,' he said. 'The Holy Father agrees. We are not always in a position to direct national feelings, but the substance of your comment is not offensive to a Catholic ear.'

Father Michael put down his fork. 'Things have changed,' he said. 'I'm sure it comforts a great many intelligent people to see America as the great enemy. But what progressive country didn't have an eye for its own interests? The country we are sitting in, Scotland, has been looking after its own interests since the beginning, as anyone who has looked into the colonial experience in India or Africa or Canada will tell you. Yes, our countries wish to be rich and they wish to be powerful.'

'Bravo, Michael,' I said. 'And when I was young...'

'When you were young,' said Bishop Gerard.

'Yes,' I said. 'When I was young, we were moved sometimes to oppose capitalism or whatever you want to call it. We hated Wilson.'

'You had a stomach for the game, then,' said Father Damian.

'You were a baby,' I said. 'And it wasn't a game.'

'It wasn't a game,' said Father Michael.

'Students,' said Angela. 'You're talking about being a student, when you all had your five minutes of thinking it was possible for people to live in peace and harmony.'