Between the Bridge and the River (31 page)

The pain in his back had not gone away, in fact it was getting worse. Much worse. Before they boarded, George had snuck into the pharmacy at the airport and bought some aspirin. He had taken twice the recommended dose and they had absolutely no effect. An hour into the flight as they crossed over the border into Scotland, he was in agony and as they began their descent he finally confessed to Claudette.

“The pain is here,” he said.

She nodded as if she had been expecting it. She went into her handbag and brought out a heavy amber glass bottle and a dropper. She opened the bottle and sucked up a little of the clear liquid.

“Open wide.”

“What is this?”

“Morphine,” she said.

“Where did you get it?”

“Never mind,” she said, thinking how reluctant Alain had been to prescribe the drug for her.

He opened his mouth and she dropped the sacred liquid onto his tongue.

It felt like Communion.

George felt profound relief almost instantly, then he started to feel good.

Very good indeed.

Claudette had booked a rental car, and as she drove from the airport to the first stop on their itinerary she almost killed them both half a dozen times by driving on the wrong side of the road but George didn’t mind. He thought her driving was charming and was trying to concentrate on giving her the correct directions, which he found a little more difficult than he might ordinarily.

It took them less than an hour. Huge gray clouds hung low over the city like giant sheets of battered iron. They filtered out any warmth from the sun, allowing only cold, clear blue light and the threat of rain.

George’s parents were buried next to his grandparents on his father’s side in a family plot in the giant graveyard on a hill in the east end of Glasgow called the Necropolis—the city of the dead. They parked the car and walked up the hill past the ostentatious and Baroque soot-blackened tombs of the Tobacco Lords and the Victorian wealthy to the newer, smaller graves on the far side of the hill overlooking the nearby motorway. They stood in the shadow of a giant monument to John Knox, the founder of the Church of Scotland.

Claudette looked up at the statue of the austere bearded misogynist as they passed. “Who was this? He must have been very important.”

George told her, told her that he was no lover of Catholics or women and would be very upset that his fienian mother was resting among good Scottish Protestants.

“Perhaps he’s changed his mind. Perhaps he realizes it doesn’t matter.”

“Perhaps,” agreed George, but doubted it.

They reached the marker. A flat granite slab. It read:

INGRAM

Robert James Ingram, 1890–1963

Margaret Jane Ingram nee Brodie, 1894–1974

Elizabeth Margaret Ingram, 1923–1979

James George Ingram, 1928–1986

Susan Andrea Julia Ingram nee O’Reilly, 1932–1987

They stood in silence for a moment looking at the grave. A bitter-cold wind blew from the east and Claudette wrapped her coat tightly around her. George did not seem to feel the cold.

“Robert was my grandfather, I don’t remember him. Margaret was my gran—I called her Nana Peggy. She had a giant arse and always wore an apron, I seem to remember. She made chips—pommes frites— that had wee black dots on them, I think because she didn’t clean the pan often enough. She sang a lot. Elizabeth—Betty—my dad’s sister, sad wee woman, never married, died of some kind of kidney disease, and then my mum and dad.”

Claudette put her hand on George’s cheek. He turned and smiled at her sadly.

“There’s room for one more in the plot. Quite an honor to be buried up here. Doesn’t happen much anymore.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No,” said George. “I don’t want to be lying around this place with all these dead people. It’s depressing.”

She nodded.

“My mother used to drag me up here every now and again when I was a kid,” he said. “She thought it was comforting to know where you were going to end up. I just thought it was creepy.”

“What do you think now?”

George looked out at the thousands of graves, most of them broken down and forgotten, covered in weeds.

“I think they should get a bulldozer in here and knock all these fucking tombstones down. Build a swing park for kids.”

She smiled. “I love you, Georges.”

“Merci, chérie. Je t’aime aussi,”
said George, feeling gloriously European and windswept.

The pain in his back was becoming fierce again.

“Any more of that happy juice?”

Claudette drove the car to a nearby bus stop they had picked out on the way in to the housing estate. She sat in the car alone and lit a cigarette. She kept the engine running and turned on the radio to a local station. Radio Clyde. There was a phone-in competition; two listeners were competing for the prize of a night out at the Glasgow Pavilion to see a singer named Christian. Claudette wondered if he was Catholic or Protestant—that seemed to still be important in this country.

The door was open and George didn’t need his key, which was lucky because he’d thrown it away at a service station in the Lake District a few days ago.

Jesus, was that all? A few days?

He walked inside the house and heard Sheila pottering about in the kitchen. She was listening to the phone-in competition on the radio. She looked up as he walked in. She seemed angry. She walked over and turned off the radio and then folded her arms and looked at him.

“Hi,” he said.

He thought how far away she looked; he felt like she was someone he had known a long time ago and who he had lost touch with, which he supposed she was. She looked pissed off but she had always looked that way around him. He knew now, of course, that it was because she didn’t like him, and he guessed she had a point. He had never really showered her with affection or attention, he hadn’t made a fuss over her the way he would have if he’d been in love with her. When he was nice to her it was to calm her down or to stop her getting upset. Not very good reasons, he thought. He realized he’d been patronizing her for years.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” said Sheila. Her hair had gotten thinner since she was a teenager; George vaguely wondered if women went bald. She was still good-looking, though, dark brown eyes like a cow, and she was sturdy. She’d make a good wife for a farmer maybe.

He decided he was being cruel. “I’m sorry. I’ve been cruel,” he said.

“Not a note, not a phone call, nothing. We called the police and had them looking for you. Where have you been?”

“Paris.”

“Paris! What the hell were you doing in Paris?”

“Well—” said George.

Sheila butted in, “Let me guess, another woman?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You bastard. You never think of anyone but yourself, do you?”

“I’m sorry you’re upset.”

“I want you out. I won’t take you back no matter how much you beg. Who is it? Is it that slag Glenda from your office?”

“No. You don’t know her.”

“It’s over, George. This is the last straw. I can take your distance and your moodiness but I will not accept infidelity.”

“Yes, all right.”

“I have men approach me, George. Barry Symington at the leisure center has asked me out more than once.”

“The swimming instructor?” asked George, surprised. “I thought he was gay.”

“No, he’s not gay, and he’s got a fucking good body. I’ve seen him in his trunks.”

George nodded.

“I want you out. You can go back to Paris with your fancy woman for all I care.”

He nodded again. “I want to say something to you before I go. I want to tell you that I think you are a very good person and I want to thank you for our daughter. Thanks for putting up with me all these years, you deserved better.”

“You’re damn right I did,” she said. She had tears in her eyes.

“Good luck,” he said.

Then he walked over to her and kissed her gently on the forehead. She looked at him, sensing something was different.

“Everything is going to be okay. All is well. This is the right thing for us to do,” he said.

And somewhere deep down inside her, past the hurt and the pain and the humiliation and the anger and the pride and the resentment and the fear, she knew that he was right.

She couldn’t speak, so she just nodded.

He smiled.

“Thank you for everything, Sheila,” he said, then turned and walked out the door.

“How did it go?” asked Claudette.

“Pretty well, given the circumstances,” said George.

“This next will take longer,” she said. “My cell phone works in the U.K. Call me when it’s over.”

He said he would and she dropped him off at the school gates.

Our Lady’s High School had been rebuilt in the early eighties and looked even more like a factory now than it did the first time around. George marveled at the absolute insensitivity of modern municipal architecture. Everything was utilitarian, no art, no joy, why the fuck would anyone be in this building without getting a paycheck. This was, of course, exactly the view held by the vast majority of the student body.

Using Claudette’s cell, he had called Nancy on her cell phone and asked her to meet him outside the school gates. She had been in a double history with Mr. Johnson (a.k.a. The Bladder, Leaky McSqueaky, and Trouserman), a shambolic old duffer who seemed to always have a little urine stain on the front of his pants, nine times out of ten shaped like a map of Africa. The dark incontinent.

Leaky McSqueaky had been as happy as she was for her to go—she told him it was a family emergency—as he knew she had
absolutely no interest in the Covenanters. Christ, he could hardly keep awake himself.

Nancy worked hard at doing the gum-chewing teenage apathy thing as they walked along the side of the iron perimeter fence that surrounded the school. George was struck by how much she looked like his mother in old photographs. A dark-haired, green-eyed Celtic goddess in the making; soon the puppy fat would fall from her and she’d be grown. Boadicea in Banana Republic.

“You and Mum are getting divorced, right?” she said, feigning disinterest.

“Well, we’re certainly splitting up,” said George.

“It’s okay with me. You don’t get along very well anyway. Sandra Patterson’s mum and dad are split up and she says it’s better.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it is.”

“Is that all you wanted to tell me, ’cause we’re doing the Covenanters.”

“No,” said George. “Listen. I’m going away. Oh fuck, there is no easy way to say this, Nancy, I’m not lying to you.”

She was shocked. She had never heard her father swear in her life. She looked at him, her eyes wide.

As most parents have thought at some point while looking at their child, he could hardly believe that he was related to, never mind a parent of, a creature so beautiful.

“Nancy. I’ve got cancer. I’m dying. I got the same as your Nana and Papa died of.”

She looked horrified, all the color and cool drained from her in an instant.

She was a little girl again.

“No,” she said in a tiny voice against the inevitable.

“Yes. I’m sorry,” he said, instantly regretting telling her the truth.

She clung on to him, wrapped her hand around his neck the way she used to when she was four years old.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, no, no.” Her heart breaking a thousand times on every exhale.

George was shocked for a moment by the sudden intensity and grief that poured out of her. Save for a dream of a closed cathedral, he had not cried himself until this moment, and now he wept. They clung to each other to stop from drowning in a sea of tears.

Claudette knew she would have time to kill. She looked in the glove compartment of the rental car and found a tourist leaflet for Stirling Castle. It had been the site of sieges and battles and murders and atrocities down through the years, all the things tourists enjoy in a historical monument. She drove there, only ten miles, and walked its battlements and looked out over the surrounding green plains.

Rain began to fall and she went inside to look at the museum to the castle regiment. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. She wandered past battle standards and wall-mounted costumes and armor, past swords and muskets, all the equipment used in the forging of an empire.

She lingered by the exhibit on the First World War. There was an old sepia photograph of a young soldier with his wife and children before he marched off to battle. The shot was posed in the serious formality of the day but the family looked so real, so normal. Mum, Dad, and three kids, dressed for a Sunday. She looked at the soldier and was struck by how handsome he must have been, Lance Corporal Adam McLachlan.

At that moment, the one sperm of George’s that had survived its long and perilous journey stormed Claudette’s egg. It dug in like the battle-hardened trouper it had become, and together the new allies advanced on the uterine wall.

Hallelujah.

George and Nancy went to the City Bakeries tea shop in the town center. They had hot, sweet Earl Gray and cream cookies. They hadn’t done that in years. They talked for two hours. George told her what the doctors had said, what decision he had made about his life and how it would end, and then for some reason they started talking about family holidays years ago, when she was a kid. They got calm for a while, then
it was time for him to go. She begged him to stay but he said that he had to go, that apart from anything else he was not going to die slowly in front of her until finally he expired and was released from his agony and everyone would be relieved.

“Don’t be selfish, Dad,” she said.

“Don’t you be selfish,” he said.

The pain was returning, stronger and more urgent, and he wanted to get to Claudette and the magic bottle. He needed the genie.

They stood outside the little tea shop. She wanted to leave first.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye,” he said.

She turned and walked a few yards, then she looked back at him.

He smiled at her. “Help others,” he said.

She nodded, and ran off.

On the evening plane back to Paris, George slept, the morphine soothing his furrowed brow along with the cool hand of his love.