Part 12 (2/2)

'I suppose so, but it comes to the same thing. One religion is quite enough, it seems to me, without thinking up other ones.'

'Is that why you don't come to church any longer ....?'

'Yes, it is. I've said I won't and I won't. Not if they beat me.'

'But they wouldn't do that!' I cried, horrified although I knew perfectly well that university professors don't tan their daughters.

'No but they can be beastly.' Janet suddenly looked at me round-eyed. It was only now that she recognised me. 'Sorry,' she said. 'I didn't mean to be rude about your belief in Jesus that sort of thing.'

'I haven't any belief in Jesus.' I was now wildly excited, and I had said this so loudly that a couple of women nearby turned and looked at me disapprovingly.

'Then why do you go to church, and listen to all that s.h.i.+te about rising again on the third day?'

'I say, have you tried The Man Who Died?' It seemed to me that this was a brilliant diversion. 'It's smas.h.i.+ng Lawrence. Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more so cuts out.' I was particularly pleased with myself for thus being able to quote verbatim from a letter. 'So he goes-'

'No, I haven't. And you're not answering my question.'

'But I'd like to. Only it will take a little time. Look will you come and have tea somewhere?'

I had again uttered unbelievable words. Had I known Janet well, I might have said, with reasonable Edinburgh propriety, 'Can you come home with me to tea?' But the notion of a schoolboy entertaining a schoolgirl in a teashop was (or so I imagined) an extremely daring one. I was in my last term at school, but I was dressed, except for long trousers, exactly as I had been dressed when seven or eight: in a blazer and cap with bold identifying badges of a spuriously heraldic order although the cap, indeed, I tended to keep in my pocket. Janet, who was of course younger, conformed to the same general pattern except that hers was a straw boater with a hideously striped ribbon, impossible to conceal anywhere. I think I had a weird idea that we might be turned away from a teashop just as we should be from a pub.

'Are you the painter's son?'

'You're not answering my question, Janet Finlay. But, yes, I'm Lachlan Pattullo's son. My name's Duncan. I'm called Dunkie.'

'Dunkie?' It sounded as if Janet was amused. 'Yes, let's have tea.' She frowned, since this left a necessary point unsettled. 'n.o.body has ever invited me out to tea before. What fun!'

She meant, I supposed, that no young man had done so. I felt panic partly because I hadn't stopped to ask myself if I had more than a couple of s.h.i.+llings in the world. I slipped a hand cautiously into a trouser-pocket; there were half a dozen coins, and an exploring thumb-nail revealed them as having milled edges; this meant that I was rich enough for anything. But we were not in very good teashop territory. Those nearby were poky places, and might give, I felt, a clandestine flavour to the occasion. I wasn't going to have that for hadn't I something to display with which I could have walked proudly into the Palace of Holyroodhouse itself? (Moreover, Oxford was ahead of me, where I was to be John Ruskin Scholar and, no doubt, President of the Union, and everything else as well.) 'We'll take the bus down to Princes Street,' I said with decision.

So we sat on a balcony in mild summer suns.h.i.+ne, with the Castle in front of us, and around us prosperous gossiping women eating oatcakes and drop-scones. I recklessly hoped that my headmaster would turn up at the next table, or at least one of my schoolfellows in attendance on his mother. Not that this sort of self-consciousness lasted long. I became absorbed in the girl beside me.

It would have been a reasonable bet on a wise person's part that what we were in for was an hour's constraint and anticlimax. But nothing of the sort happened. The eternal-moment effect went on. I wasn't to know that, on rare visits to Edinburgh years ahead, I should be unable to look up at this balcony without a stab of pain; should be glad, even, when it disappeared as a result of some hideous developing of the site.

That we talked very coherently about religious faith and doubt is improbable. We were too much children of our time for such matters to have real import for us. We were also children suddenly launched upon a strange ocean. The surge and swell of it made me deliriously happy. I didn't only believe that I was in love with Janet Finlay. I also believed that she was going to be in love with me. I wasn't entirely wrong.

But lying awake that night, I gave myself all sorts of cautions, armoured myself in all sorts of second thoughts. For I wasn't only wary of happiness; I was afraid of it. This was not from any adult knowledge that it is the most vulnerable of human conditions, but rather from a feeling which could fitly have been examined by Janet and myself in the course of any theological discussion we did have. It must have been as an inheritance from my Calvinist forebears that what I had often felt, but now felt more strongly than ever before, came to me. That s.e.xual pleasure pursued as an end in itself is sinful was something I was one day going to believe Tony Mumford had been taught at Downside. I think it may be not untrue, and that a wise humanism can say something very like it. But what lurked in me almost as if I had been my uncle Norman's son and not my father's was a sense that all pleasure, that happiness of any sort, speaks of danger, ought to be treated as a warning that one is approaching at least the antechamber of Auld Nick. I couldn't remotely have articulated this evil doctrine, and it would be misleading to suggest that it had more than a dim and ghostly existence in recesses of my mind. So it was much more another kind of magic that prompted some of my thinking before I went to sleep: the kind of magic that says things won't happen if one forces oneself to expect them to happen. I had embarked, I told myself, on a boy-and-girl affair of the kind that comes to nothing, that one lives to laugh at, that is followed by others of the same sort, that is just part of the ignominy of growing up. Ninian had gone through several such episodes. And although he had been without the temperament to treat them lightly or see them as ephemeral, ephemeral they had been in the end. Janet and I were just kids, and we hadn't a chance. And it seemed to me that this necessitated my being very pure of heart in my love for her.

I fell asleep at last, and it seemed almost at once that I had a dream. It was a very simple dream, but I think not one that a psychiatrist would have predicted so soon after such a radically new experience as that day's. I was in bed with Janet, and we were making love. We had made love; the wet dream was over; I woke up. And as I woke up I heard Ninian's voice say, 'That won't ever happen, Dunkie.'

Of course I had not really come awake not till seconds after. Ninian and I didn't even share a room. But his voice often came as an admonishment or a challenge inside my head, and I rose to it now.

'Yes, it will,' I said aloud into the darkness. And I went to sleep again.

Whether it would or wouldn't had no more been a calculation of mine during our balcony tea than, presumably, it had been of Janet's. The unsensual character of early love (on which Plot was to prove an authority) made all the going. I wanted, above all things, to know about Janet to know her, indeed, but not in the queer sense of the word that sometimes cropped up in the First Lesson during church on Sundays. I think she had an answering impulse, but got less chance to exercise it. All through our tea I held the initiative, being buoyed up by my astounding achievement in the public library. There was no information at all that I didn't want to have. I must have asked a score of absurd questions whether, for example, she preferred cats or dogs as well as others more pertinent. For I was in the grip of that desire to possess in totality which no doubt represents the predatory side of love. My father, absorbed in some vista of glens and lochs and mountains with a blank canvas or sketch-book before him, was the type of the lover his son was that afternoon.

I questioned Janet about her family. She seemed surprised but pleased rather than offended at my not knowing her father to be the university's professor of clinical neurology. She plunged rapidly, vehemently, and even with a kind of pa.s.sion which puzzled me into family history. Both her parents came from Skye. Both came from humble crofting backgrounds. ('So does my father,' I said quickly, since establis.h.i.+ng anything in common with Janet was precious to me.) They had been unable to marry young, since her father's struggle for a medical degree had been hard and long. Her mother had become a schoolteacher on Raasay, and had sent him her pay secretly, since it would have been held an improper thing, if known. I noticed that Janet seemed to regard this as having been to her father's discredit, a point on which I should have thought it sensible to keep an open mind. We made common ground although, indeed, most of my friends regularly announced such impatient feelings about the stuffiness and sn.o.bbishness and conventionality of our native city; we had even got hold of the word 'provincial' for it, which was not really an accurate term. But Janet had her att.i.tude to this bound up with her att.i.tude to her family in a way I had not. Perhaps I had an advantage here. My ears and neck would have been cleaner sooner if either of my parents had been brgerlich in the slightest degree, but for the same reason I had largely escaped the exhausting business of being a rebel in the home.

Janet was a rebel but chiefly, it seemed, against her father rather than her mother. She criticised him as given over to foolish schemes of social aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. She was reluctant to disclose (even amid all this frankness, which I was certain wasn't her habit with new acquaintances) that she lived in the very grandest part of the New Town which she scoffed at as 'all those draughty parallelograms'. This told me more than that she had read Stevenson as well as Lawrence. And although it seemed in a way to make allies of us, I had an obscure sense of being in the presence of something that might work against me.

'Well,' I demanded, 'what do you like?'

'A lot of things.' Justifiably, Janet resented thus being indicated, by implication, of too much discontent. 'But going home for the holidays, mostly.'

'Going home?' I repeated blankly.

'Home to Skye.'

'Oh,' I said 'You have a house there too.'

'We haven't. But my uncles have. They're crofters there. And fishermen.'

'I see.' Perhaps thinking of Uncle Rory and Uncle Norman, I judged the possession of relatives even of that degree of consanguinity an inadequate reason for claiming to have a home in distant places. 'Janet!' I said in sudden dismay. 'You're not going to Skye in these coming holidays?' We were already near the end of the summer term.

'But I must!' As she said this, Janet looked at me with a divinely uncalled-for remorse which more than made up for what seemed a senseless vehemence. It was as if China tea (a very sophisticated thought, this had been) and currant baps (more native fare) were being acknowledged as having established a bond between us. I was suddenly and most wholesomely overwhelmed by my consciousness of Janet's beauty. My head swam. 'Don't you' she asked and it was almost accusingly 'ever get away from home?'

'Yes, of course.' I was a little stiff at the suggestion of being childishly attached to ap.r.o.n-strings. 'My brother and I sometimes go to relations at a place called Corry.' I said this guardedly, having an instinct that it wouldn't do hastily to claim kins.h.i.+p with members of the Scottish aristocracy, if that was what Glencorry of that Ilk was to be thought of as belonging to. 'It's right in the Highlands,' I added hopefully thereby no doubt revealing how lowland and urban I was. 'We're sent to run wild in the glens,' I amplified this with a humorous intention which didn't seem quite to come off.

'Hasn't your father,' Janet asked at a tangent, 'got pictures in the National Gallery?'

'Yes, there are two there. And, of course, you can see him every year at the Academy.' This was the inst.i.tution of which my father was so soon to become President. 'And I've got one at home myself, which I want to show you. It's a watercolour, with Ninian and me in it as young Picts. But we're lying in whins, so that all you can see is our heels, really, and our bottoms in anachronistic kilts.' I must simply have babbled this, for the great waters were now sweeping over me.

'I like the National Gallery,' Janet said. 'I like the Millet and the Israels.'

'They're very fine,' I agreed stoutly although these sombrely sentimental evocations of peasant life in fact held no great appeal for me. 'Let's go there now.' The severe Doric building which is the Scottish National Gallery, perched on the Mound, was on view from where we sat.

'We'll go another day. I must go home now. I've got a lot of rotten homework. What else do you like, Duncan?'

'Dunkie.' I was determined to a.s.sert this ultimate intimacy.

'All right I'll always call you Dunkie.' Janet had taken the point. 'But what else do you like?'

'I think I'm going to like going to Oxford. At least I hope so, because otherwise there won't be much point in it. I've won a Scholars.h.i.+p.'

'A kind of bursary?' Janet was obviously ignorant of the glory of an Open Scholars.h.i.+p which got one's name put up in golden letters in our school hall. 'Isn't your father very wealthy?'

'Of course not.' I was almost as horrified as amused. 'We never seem to have a penny.' I felt that this was an awkward overstatement, since I was standing the tea. 'Or say a five-pound note. Painters don't make money, or not for ages and ages.'

'I didn't know.' Janet appeared mollified. 'Once you go to England, I suppose you'll stay there. And paint state portraits of the King and Queen.'

'What a daft idea!' It hadn't occurred to me that Janet might take it for granted that in the modern world painting was a hereditary affair. 'I can't draw a line.'

'Then what are you going to do?'

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