Be Near Me (26 page)

'They are entertainments,' she said.

'That is the best we can hope for.'

'I don't believe it,' she said. She gestured towards a bookshelf lined with foreign editions of her own books. 'These little productions have worked very well for me, but I think you could do better. Something more searching, my dear. I'm afraid I don't have a great deal of what your old friend Proust called "ascending power".'

'You give yourself too little credit,' I said. 'None of us could do what you have done. I'm afraid I have used up all my circumspection on old hymns and riotous living.'

'In that order?' she asked.

'I hope so.'

A wasp was failing to scale the height of the window. It just crawled up for a while and then lost stamina and dropped back down. 'I heard a fly buzz when I died,' my mother said to herself as she opened the window. From the rear I saw her grey hair was still flattened from bed, though her lips when she turned showed a stain of lipstick. Sitting there, I thought it possible that people lost parts of themselves with age: the back of the head was a place for young people, was it not? 'It's a bit of a performance, getting ready every morning,' she said.

'It's getting to sleep that's hard for me.'

'Perhaps one day you'll write something,' she said. 'Ever since you were young you have looked at things with feeling. Not oddly. Just that you see the shape of things very nicely. When you opted to become a priest, I remember thinking it
was that quality that might serve you well. But we're talking about writing. It's customary for writers to be made by their parents, in one way or another. With us it was the other way round. I'm sure I became a novelist to keep up with you.'

'Not true,' I said. 'It's your own gift.'

'I see you're keen to avoid responsibility for these excited tracts,' she said. 'But I'm afraid you may be to blame. My parents didn't equip me for such a life: they made me happy, made me want to marry a happy and moral man. That's all. It was you who added the spice.'

'Oh, silly.'

'Well, I don't care what you say. I'm rather proud of the fact that my outer child gave my inner child a job.'

'You're off your head,' I said. She laughed and took a drink from a bottle of Highland Spring by her desk.

'I'm too old and too grand to care,' she said.

For a minute I thought it might be perfect never to leave that civilised room and the assurance of my mother and her pretty paperweights. She had pinned postcards of seascapes, stones and Rembrandts to the wall; for a minute I wanted to dwell within the compass of her neat capacities, the dailyness of artistic effort. Her face grew serene. She looked at me with a level and levelling gaze. 'What happened?'

'Well, I didn't tell you much on the phone.'

'Go on.'

'I let the past catch up with me.'

'How?'

'These young people. I got involved with them. One of their fathers was depressed and he told me stuff about himself and I guess he wanted to take it back.'

'Go on.'

'The boy's name is Mark. He's very young. I tried to kiss him one night. It was just my own stupidity. I don't think the boy cared that much, but his father has a score to settle and it's all quite sad.'

'You kissed the young man?'

'Yes. I got drunk with him. We took other stuff. I definitely kissed him and held his hand. He must have told his father. I don't know how it came out but the poor man hasn't worked for years. He's taking a stand. And the whole parish wants to kill me. They want some sport.'

'Don't be dismissive, David,' she said. 'You knew what kind of community it was down there, for a Catholic priest.'

'And they say I'm English.'

'Oh dear,' she said.

'And they think I'm posh.'

'And you're now up on some molesting charge?'

'It's not called that, but yes: sexual assault.'

'Oh dear,' she said. She looked into the wood of her desk as if to imagine the possible outcomes. 'You'll have spoken to that nice advocate, Hamilton? You intend to fight?'

'Yes,' I said.

'For your career?'

'No,' I said. 'That's gone. I know that now. And perhaps it should have been gone a long time ago. Or never begun.'

'But what about your friend—your God?'

'You're so mercilessly practical, Mother,' I said. I watched her eyes and hoped they wouldn't stop me. 'You won't like me for saying this, but I believe God is present in all this too.'

'I see,' she said. 'Well, that's the sort of thing you people
say. He's never caused anything but trouble in the world before now.'

'Shush,' I said. She shook her small head in a private way and pulled out a drawer of her desk.

'Let's smoke,' she said, handing me a Consulate. 'Of course you are right to fight,' she said. 'These words are grotesque.'

The smoke appeared to make her room even cosier.

'And what does Hamilton say?' she asked.

'He said the boy is a thug. He says it was a kiss of affection, a way of saying goodnight.'

'And you can go with that?'

'I don't think so,' I said. 'I want to tell the truth.'

'Well,' she said, 'this is Scotland. That might seriously hamper your chances of getting a fair hearing.'

'Be serious,' I said.

'You want to tell the truth?'

'If I know it, yes. And if I can.'

'Well,' she said, 'let me ask you something. Would you have gone to bed with that boy if he'd said yes?'

'Almost certainly.'

'But you want to say that you didn't assault him?'

'Precisely,' I said. 'I don't mind saying I fell for him. I don't mind saying I would have slept with him. I admit to being the most stupid person on earth. But I am not a paedo-phile or anything of that sort and I won't agree to it being called assault.'

'In this area, the law is not built for subtleties,' she said. 'Or, at least, the public nowadays is not minded for subtlety. It may be difficult. But I'd hang onto Hamilton if I were you. He'll follow your instruction with more dedication than you could yourself.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I'm guilty of something—of many things, perhaps—but not of what they say.'

'The times are hysterical,' she said.

'Thank you for noticing.'

'It's my job to notice such things,' she said. 'I know it is within the habits of your cult to feel guilty, but you must be very clear about where any possible wrong existed. Don't feel guilty about feelings. Don't feel guilty about thoughts. Just look to what you actually did.'

'Thank you, Mother.'

'Just try to keep calm.'

'My actions were minimal,' I said. 'It's all the other stuff that matters. My vocation has run its course. I need a new life.'

'Or an old one.'

'Perhaps.'

'But the court won't bother with that. They will be dealing with the image of a lascivious priest.'

'I know,' I said. 'The very least of it.'

'Not in their eyes,' she said. 'Speak to Hamilton. The town will be baying for blood. They've watched a lot of television, one presumes?'

'Some very good people live there,' I said.

'I'm sure. But every small town loves a scapegoat.'

'They've been seeking scapegoats in that town for five hundred years,' I said.

'Well, they've got one now,' she said, stubbing out her
cigarette and taking a sip from her glass. 'And he went to Oxford.'

They burned the ground floor of the rectory that night. Father Michael from Irvine called me the next morning with the news. The fire was apparently so fierce the smoke had blackened the walls of the church. My mother had gone to the National Library, and I sat against the bathtub all morning with my head on my knees and a cold silence around me. The police found a cider bottle on the garden path and said it was half filled with petrol, the fire most probably the work of more than one person. I thought of the flames bursting through Mrs Poole's well-ordered cupboards, consuming the dust on the jars of spices and boiling the pickled onions.

He said the sitting room was gutted. The fire must have spread over the carpet and up the sides of the piano. And did it make a sound as it burned? Was there any of the old music? I know the Chopin recordings must have melted into one another, as they do in the mind. They must have fizzed at last into non-existence on the shelf, and then, perhaps, the shelf itself collapsed and the Italian etchings burned along with the blue and white volumes of the Scott Moncrieff, the only books I had taken from Balliol after Conor died, when my calling began, when the start of life was over. I thought of Marcel in his Paris bedroom as the fire in the grate drew over a pile of twigs, the smell reminding him of being lost in books at Combray and Doncières.

'What have you lost?' my mother asked.

'Everything and nothing,' I said.

My things were gone: the books, the wine. Only ideas
were left, the fire gone out on the west coast but the twigs still burning in Marcel's hearth. That evening, I wanted to spread into the sky over Leith and join that body of imagined beings in the heart of Midlothian. In the warm Edinburgh night I began to survive my own losses, knowing the city out there was a glory of invention, a glory defying the blunt reality of the rock it stood on.

We went to the Usher Hall. My mother wanted to get my mind off things, so she had bought two tickets for us to see the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a programme of Messiaen. I remember sitting down within the buzz of the dressy crowd. I could smell my mother's perfume and could feel the weight of everything behind me. God knows how conscious I was of some old song now ended, and my heart was sore when I thought of the rectory, but I stared at the stage and willed it to produce something grand and new.

'It's like poetry,' my mother said. 'Like Wallace Stevens.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Celestial.'

Messiaen's
Oiseaux exotiques
became a wild aviary of earthly things struggling to wing the imaginary sky.

'Birds were the first musicians,' I said.

My mother nodded and placed a mint in her mouth. I looked through the crimson dusk to see the words in the programme.

'Messiaen spoke of the sovereign liberty of birdsong. The earth's birds never learned harmony and counterpoint.'

The percussion exploded into a passion of discordant nature and I turned over the page. '
Messiaen was taking over from Debussy
;' it said. I felt the sound was more real than
birds. My mother reached over and touched my hand as the music ended, and I set my eyes on the programme again.
'"What is left for me," said Messiaen, "but to seek out the true, lost face of music somewhere off in the forest, in the fields, in the mountains or on the seashore, among the birds."'

We walked along Princes Street to the Café Royal. My mother took my arm and we spoke to each other in the pretty light of passing buses. She asked me the name of the second piece we had heard.

'Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine.'

'They were very young, weren't they, the singers?'

'They were lovely,' I said. She squeezed her arm further through mine and sniffed against the cold wind, making as if to close the gaps in her coat and take in the smell of the buses' diesel.

'I think I preferred the birds one.'

'Me too,' I said. 'It was more religious.'

She smiled. We stopped beside the Scott Monument and my mother went into her bag to find her gloves. 'This is like something by George Gilbert Scott,' I said. 'The man who built the Martyrs' Memorial outside Balliol.'

'Clever man,' she said. 'Your Roman friends certainly made mincemeat of those poor Oxford heretic buggers.'

'No need to look so amused,' I said. She took time to pause and enjoy our exchange.

'His grandson built Liverpool Cathedral,' I said.

'A beautiful thing.' Her lips moved as if she was going to say more about Liverpool, but she halted and looked up at me. 'Did you love that boy?' she said.

'Which one?'

'The one in Ayrshire.'

'I don't imagine so,' I said, then hesitated. 'Perhaps I've been lonely for a very long time.'

She stretched up and kissed my cheek.

'That business is never easy. Not for anyone,' she said.

We crossed the road and disappeared into the darkness of a cobbled street, ready to enter a warm room with napkins and wine glasses and a dozen oysters from the depths of Loch Fyne.

The lights in the tower blocks on the other side of Ayr harbour seemed to glimmer with unknowable life. A young man shaved at a bathroom mirror with a rose light over his head, and I saw him turn at the sink and shout through to a pair of children in yellow pyjamas who bounced on a bed in the next room. As it grew late, the harbour was dark and seagulls swooped down to an abandoned barge.

I had never been bored in my life. Not even during those long evening Masses in Rome or endless mornings of confessions, listening to old ladies dote on their sinful lives. None of it bored me, not the long liturgies nor the screed of petty crimes, but the afternoons in the harbour flat at Ayr were spent in a fanfare of ennui. Perhaps it was the waiting. Perhaps there is nothing more tedious than self-doubt. But that rented apartment had no discernible breath in its furnished rooms, except for the central heating, a warm drone that clicked all day and itched my conscience.

'Thank you, Mother,' I said on the phone.

'You don't have to be there,' she said. 'You were fine here. You might do better to keep your distance.'

'I won't,' I said. 'Too late now for that.'

Junk mail clattered on the mat. Free newspapers. Sometimes I'd wander round the harbour, passing the public swimming baths that were situated behind my building. I didn't go in, much as I liked the coffee machine and the sound of voices echoing off the tiles. The staff were trained to stare at you oddly, so I walked past and occasionally stopped for a second to look through the huge window. Old ladies in the afternoon would be swimming in twos, as if grateful for the water, their painted nails gleaming as they smoothed back their hair. One could see children up on the diving boards, and I walked away, thinking their chlorine hours must appear to last for ever while they are happening.