I am thinking of a particular night seven months after Jenny was killed, and just a week after Elsie and I had our moment of truth, if that’s what it was, in the bedroom upstairs. The occasion was a dinner party at Amelia and Gregor Wishaw’s. Amelia had phoned me. ‘Gideon,’ she’d said, ‘we all want to see you again. Yourself, not the Reverend. I know it’s hard, but you need to do it. Come and have dinner on Friday and share some good company with us. Nobody intimidating, nobody you have to put on airs for, just a few friends.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Gregor and myself, and John and Elsie. Can you handle that?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Yes, okay.’
‘I thought I’d ask Nancy Croy to make up the numbers,’ Amelia added smoothly. ‘You get on well with her, don’t you?’
‘Well enough,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re not matchmaking, Amelia.’
‘Of course I’m not.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘It’ll be fine, I promise.’
Elsie and John were already there when I arrived. Elsie greeted me as if nothing had happened between us. I detected no fear, no resentment, no shame and, worst of all, no residual smouldering passion in her gaze. Her smile was the smile of an old friend. John, too, was his usual self, both to her and to me. He and Gregor were drinking beer and beginning to compete with each other at jokes and stories. I did not want to be part of their game. I chose to drink red wine.
Nancy joined us a few minutes later, wearing a short tweed skirt and an olive-green silk blouse. I tried to think of her as a woman I might want to be with: she was bonnie, intelligent, kind, active, enthusiastic, creative; she was dedicated to the children she taught and the causes she espoused; she was liberal-minded and a Christian. But, try as I might, I could not find it in my heart to lust after her.
In the Wishaw household it was Gregor who did the cooking. Amelia was far too busy as a GP, or rushing from one conference to another, to have the patience for it. Gregor on the other hand was obsessive about meticulous preparation and artistic presentation. Each of the five courses he served us looked beautiful and tasted momentarily delicious, but there wasn’t much substance to any of them; and I cannot now remember what they were.
As the drink flowed, we all became more voluble, Gregor and John especially. There were a few differences of opinion over politics (John Major’s Tory government had, against all our expectations, won the General Election in April), the rumbling crisis of UN arms inspections in Iraq following the Gulf War, and the state of the National Health Service. We had reached the coffee when in a lull in the talk Nancy looked across the table at me and said: ‘I’d like to raise a glass to absent friends. One in particular. We all wish she was here. Here’s to Jenny.’
There was an awkward silence, as if Nancy had done something exceptionally gauche, but she was only articulating what we were all feeling: that Jenny’s ghost was at the feast and we were ignoring her.
‘Thank you, Nancy,’ I said. ‘I appreciate that, and so would she. Here’s to Jenny.’
Everybody joined in the toast. I smiled at Nancy and then at Elsie. She smiled back, unabashed. I thought about lying naked on the bed beside her. It probably looked to everybody else as if I was thinking fond thoughts of Jenny.
‘I mind the first day we met her,’ John said, ‘as if it was last week. Do you mind that, Gideon, in that café in Forrest Road?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘We met Elsie too.’
‘She was reading the Guardian,’ John said to the others. ‘Jenny I mean, not Elsie. We sat at the same table and got talking to her. Then Elsie came over, she was the waitress, and we got talking to them both. Didn’t we, Elsie?’
‘A right pair of patter merchants, I bet,’ Gregor said.
‘No, they were hopeless,’ Elsie said. ‘It was quite touching actually.’
‘I can see her now,’ John said. ‘A red jumper and that lovely hair of hers. Remember, Gideon?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s as if she’s still there. I imagine we could walk into that café and she’d be in the same seat. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes, it does,’ Elsie said.
‘You must miss her so much,’ Nancy said.
I shrugged. ‘I catch her out of the corner of my eye sometimes, or I hear her telling me something. But other times I can hardly remember what she looked like.’
‘That’s sad,’ Nancy said.
‘It’s normal,’ Amelia said. ‘It’s completely normal. Real. It’s what happens.’
There was a brief silence, as if we were all trying to picture people – parents, grandparents, lovers, friends – whose faces were fading or already gone from our memories. And into this silence John’s voice came again.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I think we don’t lead real lives any more. Do you ever think that?’ He didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular.
‘No,’ Gregor said. ‘Never. My life is intensely real. Trying to teach thirty wee shits stuff they don’t want to know about five days a week is very real. And you’re just down the corridor from me teaching a different set of wee shits, so I can’t imagine it’s less real for you. What do you mean?’
‘Well, us, here, round this table,’ John said. ‘Forget the wee shits for a minute. Our daily lives are so much less physical than they would have been a generation or two ago. Not just us – most people in this country, at this juncture in history. Hardly any of us do real jobs any more – I mean hard physical labour. We don’t get a grip on the world – a hard, sweaty, actual grip on it. We don’t feel it. I’m not trying to demean the work any of us does but it’s not how it was fifty or even thirty years ago.’
‘Not true,’ Gregor said. ‘There were teachers then, and doctors and ministers and librarians. They didn’t do the physical labour. Other poor bastards did it, but as soon as technology and more disposable income and upward mobility and all that made it possible, they stopped doing it too. Now it’s poor bastards on the other side of the world that do the hard labour.’
‘All right,’ John said, ‘maybe the lack of physical work is only a symptom. I just feel that we’re not connecting with reality any more. I mean, when we went to war last year, when they were bombing Baghdad, it didn’t feel like you were watching a real war, it looked like a film, a computer game. Nobody feels, nobody cares any more. There are no causes left. Even Scotland doesn’t feel like a cause anybody’s going to get angry about. How else could a man like John Major have won the election, for fuck’s sake? Did he bore us into not caring? I mean, we don’t even believe in God any more, most of us. Well, do we, Gideon?’
‘Maybe not in this room,’ I said, ‘but all the opinion polls tell us the majority of people still believe in him. And in the rest of the world, well, there are plenty of folk out there creating misery and mayhem in God’s name. He’s a lot less popular than he used to be, though, which is probably no bad thing.’
Nancy looked shocked. ‘There are plenty of people doing good work in God’s name too,’ she said. ‘You should know that, Gideon. You’re one of them.’
‘Good and bad don’t come into it,’ John said, before I could answer her. ‘It’s historical change, you can’t stop it. But we still have to make sense of our lives. If we don’t do it through politics or religion we have to do it some other way.’
‘Oh, and how’s that?’ Gregor asked.
‘Film,’ John said. ‘I think we think of our lives as films. Movies. Moving pictures. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking – or you hear someone saying – “Oh, mind when that happened, it was just like that scene in such-and-such.” If your life is like a film it gives it a kind of framework. I think we imagine our lives as movies because that’s the only way left to understand them.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Gregor laughed. ‘You’re talking mince, John.’
‘Actually I don’t think he is,’ Nancy said. ‘You’re saying films, John, but it could be fiction, it’s the same thing. When I think of all the novels I’ve read, I do wonder if it’s been a sensible use of my time. Why would I fill my head with all those made-up stories if it wasn’t to try and understand my own story? Every month my book group discusses a novel and its characters as if they were real people making real choices. Life is a story. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a book or a film, it’s still a story.’
‘Maybe that’s why everybody thinks they have a novel in them,’ Amelia said. ‘Every bloody game-show host or model or has-been politician or weather forecaster for God’s sake seems to be writing a novel these days.’
‘It’s a refuge from confusion,’ Nancy said. ‘If they can just tell a story where all the loose ends tie up, the whole world will make a lot more sense.’
‘Aye, but with a film it’s visual,’ John said, the only person at the table, as far as I was aware, who was writing a novel. ‘Your head is filled with images without you having to be literate or without you having to make the effort of reading. You just sit in the cinema and it washes over you. Imagine what it must have been like the first time you went to the pictures, back in the silent era, when you had no experience at all of film. You’re in the stalls watching a huge train hurtling towards you. There’s a woman tied to the tracks. There’s a chortling villain, but you can’t hear his laugh, you can only imagine the sound it makes. You know the train must be making a hell of a noise, but you can’t hear it. And the woman’s screaming but you can’t hear her either, you just see her mouth opening and shutting and you know she’s screaming. There’s a pianist bashing out dramatic music to go with the pictures. You’d start screaming yourself. How could you not be caught up in that? How could you not imagine your life differently once you’d had that experience?’
‘You’re talking shite,’ Gregor said. ‘I don’t know about novels, but cinema, film, TV make things more real, not less. It’s true now and it was true in the silent era too, as you’ve just eloquently proved.’
‘Aye, right, Gregor,’ John said.
‘You can’t deny it,’ Gregor said. ‘The camera brings you face to face with stuff that you might otherwise never experience or know about. Think of that footage of the concentration camps being opened up in 1945. Horrible, horrible, horrible images, but utterly real. One of the reasons people know all that happened is because we have the pictures, we have the evidence on film.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ John said, but Gregor had more to say.
‘I’ll tell you what’s real,’ he said. ‘When I was a kid, my two brothers and I used to have this thing about who’d use the loo first in the morning after our dad had been in there. It was hellish – basically, his shit stank.’
‘Gregor!’ Amelia said.
‘Oh, come on, we’ve finished eating. It was unbelievable, at least it was to us wee boys whose bowels were still unadulterated by bevvy and middle-age. Going in after him was a kind of endurance test. We’d have a right laugh about it, holding our breath and everything. Then I guess we grew up and forgot about it. And one day recently I was in the bathroom having a crap and I went back in five minutes later, and the smell hit me. My dad’s smell. The exact same. You know how your sense of smell can take you back decades in just a split second? I was eight again, holding my nose. And I thought, Christ, if even your shit smells the same as your father’s, what chance have you got? Against your genes, I mean, your inheritance. No chance. Now that’s real.’
All six of us present that night were well into our thirties, and at the time it didn’t look like any of us were going to pass our genes on to anybody. I thought of my father and realised that I had no recollection at all of what the toilet had smelt like after he’d been in it. The same for my mother. I tried to think of my father’s ordinary, everyday smell, and came up with nothing. I imagined it as dry, bookish, but I was remembering the study, not him. If film was evidence of existence, so was smell. I had neither photographic nor olfactory evidence that my father ever lived. The best proof I had of him was myself.
At the end of the evening, when I stood up to go, Nancy said that she too must be off. Her house was on the way back to the manse. It would have been churlish, indeed impossible, not to offer to walk her home.
It was about one o’clock, and although there were few clouds and many stars in the sky it was a warm night. Amelia and Gregor lived just round the corner from Catherine Craigie, and Nancy a couple of streets beyond. My visits to Catherine were well established by this time. Her house was all in darkness as we passed. Nancy said, ‘Do you know what they’re saying about you going to see Miss Craigie so often?’
‘They?’ I said.
‘Peter Macmurray and his friends. They say it’s the ungodly communing with the godless.’
I laughed. ‘Which is which, I wonder. I really don’t care what they say.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all nonsense, of course.’
A little further on she said, ‘I hope you didn’t mind me mentioning Jenny.’
‘Not at all. I meant it when I thanked you.’
‘And did you mean what you said about belief in God?’
I knew at once what she was referring to, but pretended otherwise.
‘What did I say?’
‘That it wasn’t a bad thing that God wasn’t so popular these days.’
‘It’s a fact of life,’ I said. ‘A lot of people just can’t accept the idea of God any more. It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s because intellectually they can’t. I don’t think it makes them worse or lesser beings. It’s like what Amelia said about Jenny. It’s normal. People are forgetting what God looks like. Sometimes he’s still there, but often he’s not. It’s a natural process.’
‘That makes it sound as though it doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, it matters all right. It causes all kinds of anxieties. But to individuals, to human beings. I don’t think it matters to God.’
‘Oh, Gideon, that’s a terrible thing to say, that God doesn’t care. How can you say that? “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.”’
‘Don’t quote Scripture at me, Nancy, it’s far too late for that. Anyway, I didn’t say he didn’t care, I said it didn’t matter to him. There’s a difference.’
She didn’t reply. We reached her garden gate and came to a stop.
‘Do you want to come in for a coffee?’ she asked.
‘No, thanks. I’ll just head for home, I think.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at church on Sunday then.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Yes, tomorrow.’
We both hesitated. If I changed my mind, she would let me come in. I was tempted, but only for a moment. It wasn’t Nancy that I wanted.
‘Good night, then.’
‘Good night.’ She opened the gate and went through it. I looked up into the night. Countless stars winked down at us and didn’t give a damn what we believed.
‘Gideon,’ she said, as I turned to go.
‘What?’
‘God cares,’ she said. ‘I know he does.’