I WOULD OFTEN see Professor Falconer on the streets as he tipped forward into a blast of wind, a lonely man in a wrinkle of thoughts. A puzzled expression always bloomed when, face-to-face, I would say, “Good morning, Professor” or “It’s a lovely day!” I guessed that, as with many of his generation, the war continued to preoccupy him. His sky was still full of Messerschmitts and Junkers. The all-clear signal had yet to sound.
It did interest him that an American student should wish to focus on a Scottish poet who lived in Orkney, but it wasn’t easy to explain to him my enchantment. Falconer shook his head wearily one day when I was sitting in his office and said, “I hope you will find some manuscripts. A thesis must contain original research. Write to Mr. Brown. See if there are manuscripts. And go see him, if you can. I should think that’s possible. Research!”
That night I wrote to Mackay Brown in care of his publishers. Within a few weeks a letter arrived from Orkney in a strange crabwise scrawl on blue paper, and he said he was “brightened by” my interest in his work, although “humbled as well.” I should “most certainly” come to visit him. “I generally meet the ferry each afternoon, although I rarely know anyone who disembarks.” He gave me his telephone number and suggested I call “a few days before arrival in Stromness,” as he didn’t “require advance notice.” The letter was signed, quite simply, “George.”
Cheered by this response, I took pages of my thesis to Falconer, who continued to show little interest in my work. “Ah,” he said, “the thesis continues! The main thing is to continue, even with bad work.”
“Is my work bad?”
“No, I was just thinking aloud,” he said. “What I wish to say is, keep moving forward! Never retreat! I said this to the men aboard ship. Onward!”
That he had actually been in command of a battleship in wartime boggled the mind, and I couldn’t help but wonder about his private affairs. Rumor had it that he lived with his sister and had no real life. As it happened, I got to visit him at his house after a peculiar invitation.
It was a sunny afternoon in mid-November when I met Professor Falconer walking in the cloister under its ancient bell tower in the quad.
“I say,” he said, stammering, motioning me to draw near. “I s-say!”
“Hello, Professor. How are you?”
“M-may I have a word?”
“Of course.” I adopted a listening air.
“There is a young man, you see. I was hoping to introduce you.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Ah, good. Come to my house, number 2, Alexandra Place. Do you know it? Wednesday next. Teatime, what? Shall we say at four?”
“That’s fine. I’d like that.”
He smiled, seeming to fumble in his drawer of memory. “He’s an American, much like yourself. Interested in poetry, whatnot.”
I shifted from foot to foot as he dug into himself for more information about this young man.
“What’s his name?”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “His name is Jay Parini.”
“But, Professor,” I said, “I’m Jay Parini.”
His eyes widened. “Oh, dear. That’s too bad. Well, do come. Come anyway!”
Before he withdrew, he asked in a plaintive voice, “Do you have two jackets?”
This was such a good story I had to tell someone, and guessed it would amuse Bella, so I turned up at that evening’s meeting of the Poetry Society and waylaid her afterward. She laughed hard. She was also impressed by a couple of Alastair’s poems that I read aloud that night. “I’d love to meet him,” she said, and I suggested she join me the next day for tea at Pilmour Cottage.
This was going well, I told myself when I picked her up in my Morris Minor outside Hamilton Hall. The car, alas, didn’t quite impress her.
“I can actually see the road under my feet,” she said, lifting her knees.
My car was more like a mirage than an actual vehicle, and the floor was indeed paper-thin. But it carried us along.
Alastair was in a distracted mood when we arrived, having somehow forgot we were coming for tea. We sat in silence at his table for an awkward time. When finally he turned a long gaze on Bella, she was unable to look him in the eye. It was the first time I’d ever seen her fazed by anything.
“Bella,” he said, with a sidelong smirk. “Diminutive of Arabella?”
“Yes.”
“Ara means altar. Bella means beautiful. So you’re a beautiful altar on which someone might sacrifice himself one day.”
This visit was quickly slumping in the wrong direction. Already I regretted bringing Bella.
“My father tells me it means ‘yielding to pray.’ ”
“I would never yield to such a thing,” said Alastair.
I had told Bella about Alastair and Graves, and she launched straight into questions. Wasn’t Graves a better poet than a novelist? Why did he live in Majorca? Wasn’t The White Goddess a peculiar sort of book? The questions poured forth, delighting me: I had brought someone with a good mind into Alastair’s house, and he must appreciate that.
“Graves hates me,” he said. “I stole one of his goddesses. His wife was probably relieved. Anything to thin the pack.”
“Did he sleep with all of them?”
“Depends what you mean by sleep.”
Bella seemed to gather strength and, surprisingly, she held his stare in a way that impressed me. I could learn from her. “He wrote so many novels,” she said.
“Nobody knows them nowadays. Count Belisarius? Seven Days in New Crete?”
“I, Claudius is good. A perfect narrator for the madness of empire. I love the scene with Caligula, where he imagines himself a god while they’re hacking off his limbs.”
“Ouch,” said Jasper, who began to pick up the paper airplanes on the floor.
“Graves had a natural feel for the ruling classes,” said Bella.
“He’s a snob at heart,” Alastair said. “Public schoolboy turned army officer turned author. Not the best sequence.”
My flat-footed silence embarrassed me as Alastair and Bella continued to talk about the politics of the early decades of the Roman Empire. Inwardly I cursed my lack of knowledge, feeling jealous of Bella (whose British public school education had given her easy access to a wide range of information) and also of Alastair: would he, with his charisma and wild fluency in politics and literature, steal Bella’s heart not for me but for himself? Would he actually poach a friend’s potential girlfriend?
As they continued to chat, I knew that he would. And worried that Bella seemed enchanted now, excited by their back-and-forth.
Before long we sat on the floor before the coal fire: perfect for a Scottish afternoon as winter approached. Within moments Alastair came in with a tray of brownies, which he lifted high like the host at the altar—the kind of altar, I thought, at which even he might be willing to sacrifice himself. “A fresh batch,” he said. “Hash brownies.”
“I’ve never had them,” Bella said.
“They go well with wine,” Alastair told her. “Forget about tea.”
He passed around the tray, and we each took one, though I did so with a hesitation that must have shown in my expression. These were potent morsels, and I wasn’t sure how any of this might play out.
Bella took a tiny bite, chewed slowly, then took a larger bite. I allowed myself only a nibble and was relieved when the wine bottle appeared. I didn’t want to feel completely out of control, in part because I was angry with Alastair for the ways in which he’d coopted Bella, and I wasn’t sure how I might react if I got completely stoned. When you get angry, the other guy wins—that’s what my father had taught me. Given my portion, the effect of the brownies was slow in coming, taking the form of a mellowness that began in my knees and rose gradually to the top of my head.
Jasper whispered, “I like your girlfriend. She’s pretty.”
Bella, overhearing this, smiled. “I’m not his girlfriend. Just a friend.”
My skin tingled with shame and embarrassment.
Jasper made it easier, though. “You’re a girl, and you’re his friend,” he said.
“You’ve got me there.”
Alastair took me aside before we left, perhaps sensing my discomfort and confusion. “She’s splendid,” he told me. “Take her back to your place. The brownies will kick in nicely.”
“Really?”
“Do you have more wine at the flat?”
“A bottle of Beaune.”
“It will substitute for charm,” said Alastair.
As Bella and I stepped outside, both of us weaving slightly, I asked her what she thought of Alastair.
“He’s charming, though I always distrust charm.” This was, I thought, discerning.
“I have a good bottle of wine in my flat,” I said. “Come back?”
“Can’t, I’m afraid. I told Angus I would meet him for dinner. At his cottage. He lives with his godawful brother, Jack. I’d invite you to join us, but you wouldn’t have a good time. You’d hate it, actually.”
My normal reserve having been eroded by the hash, I asked, “Will you have a good time?”
“That depends. I’m easily bored. It’s a weakness in my character. I do like Angus, though not when he’s with his brother. He’s not often there, though, which is the best you can say about him.”
I didn’t know what to make of her attitude to Angus or his brother. This was a long way from Scranton, from the ways of being I had accepted as a given back in Pennsylvania. A long way from the comfortable presuppositions about how men and women behaved and what these assumptions meant for stability. In a weird way, I almost missed the certainties and simplicities of that safe if predictable world. But this was my new life, and I told myself to embrace it, to accept what came along, however strange or implausible or—at times—terrifying.