Easter Fintry and Wester Fintry were adjoining hillside farms. The farm-houses, both facing bleakly north, lay within two hundred yards of each other. Originally each farm had comprised approximately the same modest acreage, and the houses must have been almost identical, like the labourers’ cottages which were disposed at a respectful distance from them. Nowadays all the land went with Wester Fintry, and Wester Fintry had in consequence taken over Easter Fintry’s byres and steddings. Conversely, Easter Fintry’s farm-house had been enlarged by building on at the back, so that it was now a fairly commodious dwelling, surrounded on three sides by somebody else’s cattle and hay and implements. This, although it didn’t make for elegance, had been to the advantage of Mungo (who might have been facetiously described as the young laird of Easter Fintry). Throughout his childhood there had always been something going on, and acquaintances to make, more or less outside the windows.
In those days both the Fintrys had been in the occupation of Guthries, although apparently they hadn’t been related to each other. But the Wester Fintry Guthries had departed long ago. Mungo had never asked how the Easter Fintry house had come into the possession of his aunt, or when it had shed its land, enlarged itself, and so become the rather indeterminate place it was. This wasn’t at all because he had an unenquiring mind; it was because he had early discovered that such questions elicited replies which were much less interesting than answers he could make up for himself. At least the changes must have happened quite long ago, since the new bits of the house now looked as old as any other part of it.
Just across the road, and now Wester Fintry property, were the traces of an artificially levelled patch of ground which had clearly once been a tennis court. This surviving token of leisured life had all the air of an antiquity, and it, too, Mungo preserved in his mind as a small enigma. He peopled it with gentlemen in straw hats and ladies in bustles and trailing skirts playing a kind of pit-pat game across a drooping net. What was commonly to be viewed there now was a tethered Wester Fintry goat.
Mungo’s was a large attic room, with dormer windows at each end. To the south he looked across the Muckle Burn (extravagantly so named, although it grew a little larger before joining the Findhorn) and straight into Darnaway Forest, an enormous darkness of fir trees fading to the horizon. To the north was the abandoned tennis court (particularly ghostly by moonlight, which made even the bustles eerie), and then Hardmuir. As Hardmuir was nothing less than Macbeth’s blasted heath itself, any ordinary vista would have been proud to close on it. But Mungo’s stretched further. First there was the Culbin Forest – which had slowly and magically raised itself, seemingly out of the sea, in the course of his childhood. There was, of course, a prosaic explanation: the Culbin Sands had been afforested. But the Culbin Sands were themselves magical. They had simply appeared – thousands of acres of them – during a stormy night in the year 1694. Beyond the Culbins lay the sea: first the Moray Firth and then, between guarding promontories which were seldom more than pencilled delicately on a faint horizon, the narrow passage to the sister Firth of Cromarty. On two or three days in the year, perhaps, this remote prospect extended itself to Mount Morven in Caithness. More distant than that there was only the North Pole. And this was why, round about midsummer, the small Mungo had been able to read his book until he dropped asleep in the small hours, without the customary necessity of hiding an electric torch in the bedclothes.
Such was Mungo’s kingdom or habitat. It comprised almost everything he was thinking of when he had once told Ian there were things he could hardly bear to leave behind him on coming to Oxford. But when he awoke to their repossession on the freezing morning of his return he didn’t manage to leap out of bed and embrace them. Instead, he drew the eiderdown up to his nose and meditated his divided condition. He missed the respectable old person who, at Stradlings, had brought him a cup of tea; he even missed the college scout who would burst in, let up the blind with a bang, and offer an unnecessary appraisal of the weather. But these were only symbols of what he’d broken away to. Even Oxford itself, although he supposed it to be the most beautiful work of man he had yet encountered, was no more than such a symbol, an uncertain correlative to what, gazing through his schoolroom window at a sensuously meagre and unfurnished scene, he had cloudily but sometimes fiercely known he must go for or perish entirely.
Mungo continued to lie in bed for a time, elaborating this solemn line of thought, fishing around for words for it, even trying out a cadence or two on his inward ear. He wasn’t too confident about the whole spiel as authentic Mungo Lockhart. Too much had rubbed off on it from Stephen Dedalus. Yet why not? In previous ages plenty of people had worked themselves out in terms of Byron’s Childe Harold or Goethe’s Werther. (Or was it Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister? He hadn’t yet got round to German Lit. There was too much English Lit. and French Lit. to make it practicable.) Every age needed its clarifying myth.
Having reached this satisfactorily large conclusion, Mungo got up and shaved with the electric razor that had come to him on his eighteenth birthday. It was beginning to have a gratifying amount of work to do.
After breakfast he wrote the proper letter to Ian’s mother. Dear Lady Robert. It looked odd on the page, but he didn’t suppose he could start Dear Elizabeth. Following this he thought he’d write a Christmas letter to Ian. It turned out to be a high-speed, enormously long affair, and although about everything it had too much impetus to be called rambling. He had never written anything like so long a letter before, and he wondered whether he was addressing it to Ian simply because he couldn’t very well address it to Anne. For a moment he entertained the startling notion that brother and sister weren’t all that distinct in his head. But this wasn’t so. And with Ian, he told himself inconsequently, he was one up on Stephen Dedalus, who made whetstones of his friends. Ian definitely wasn’t a whetstone.
Getting these letters into the post was like making sure of his lines of communication. He spent the rest of the day in a relaxed pottering around, arranging books and notebooks, doing odd jobs that pleased his aunt. The next morning he began his reading, and it wasn’t until tea-time that he got restless. He mustn’t be a recluse, he thought; and it was time he renewed a few contacts outside the Fintry ring-fence. So he went to the telephone, rang up the lawyer’s office in Elgin, and boldly asked to speak to Mr McLeod. There was a short delay, and
Mr McLeod was produced.
‘Roddy – it’s Mungo. I’m back.’
‘Aye.’ Mr McLeod seemed reluctantly to be admitting that this must be so.
‘Have you still got the motor-bike?’
‘Aye.’
‘Then come over to supper. Will you?’
‘It’s a long road, and maybe it’ll be a dirty night.’
‘Och awa’, Roddy! The main road’s fine. Only mind our brae. There may be just a bittock of ice on it.’
‘I’ll come. Only don’t talk in that daft way, Mungo Lockhart. I’ve no mind to take supper, or anything else, with Harry Lauder.’
‘Then that’s splendid.’ Mungo was abashed. ‘Come as soon as you can.’
‘I’ll come as soon as I get clear of my coloured knittings.’
‘Of your what?’
‘What you call red tape in the south. I tie up people’s deeds and wills with it. I’ll make you a will, Mungo, if you like.’
‘I don’t like. But I won’t say I shan’t consult you.’
‘I shan’t say I won’t consult you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You must be careful of your wills and shalls north of the border.’
‘Idiot! And just you hurry up.’
Mungo put down the receiver, pleased but frowning. He had almost forgotten how much he liked Roddy McLeod. And that sort of forgetfulness wouldn’t do at all.
Miss Guthrie, too, was fond of Roddy. Mungo regarded him as clever, and she regarded him as steady. He therefore ranked fairly high in her list of good influences upon her nephew. This fondness was reflected in the quality, and indeed quantity, of the supper, and in the general agreeableness of the conversation following it. It was quite late before the young men got away to Mungo’s attic, so that Roddy was soon talking of taking the road again.
‘Roddy – do you know?’ It was on one of his sudden impulses that Mungo took this plunge. ‘I believe I’m like Tom Jones.’
‘Lecherous but good-hearted.’ It was among Roddy McLeod’s qualifications for Mungo’s society that, although not of a literary turn of mind, he had perused a surprising number of the novelists.
‘Not that – or at least not both.’ Mungo grinned happily, and then was serious again. ‘A foundling.’
‘A foundling?’ Not unnaturally, Roddy stared at his friend. ‘Tom Jones wasn’t a foundling, exactly. He turned out not to be, anyway. And just what blatherskite are you talking?’
‘Harry Lauder!’
‘Then what nonsense is this?’
‘Well, I don’t really know that I had any parents—’
‘You must be dotty. Are you imagining you’re the Second Coming or something?’
‘Don’t be profane, Roderick McLeod. You know what I mean, perfectly well. I don’t remember my parents, and so I have to take people’s word about them.’
‘I suppose you’ve heard of the General Register House? And I suppose you possess a birth certificate?’
‘I have a birth certificate, all right. It’s not all that informative.’
‘It’s as informative as the law deems expedient.’ Roddy said this with gravity. And it was with gravity that he went on. ‘Mungo, I don’t like this. What has put it in your head, man?’
‘I get money from what pretends to be some charitable trust, but nobody has ever heard of it. And on my twenty-first birthday a communication is to be made to me. By the S.S.C. I’ve told you of – Mackellar. What do you make of that?’
‘It sounds to me something to be let alone. And certainly not anything for you to build one of your fairytales on.’
‘I see.’ For a moment Mungo was checked by this. ‘But that’s exactly it!’ he then went on triumphantly. ‘I just want to know the plain truth, and then I can forget about it. For instance, I’d like to know when my parents were married.’
‘Then, for the Lord’s sake, why don’t you ask your auntie? She’s probably got your mother’s marriage lines shoved away in a drawer.’
‘I don’t like to. There’s a kind of reticence between us on such things. And that’s significant in itself, wouldn’t you say? Could you find out for me, Roddy?’
‘Of course I could. There’s no need to send to Edinburgh. It must be in one of the parish registers here-about. And I’m set to go poking about in them often enough. It’s a change from addressing the envelopes and licking the stamps.’
‘And tying up the coloured knittings.’
‘That too. But I think you’re just havering, Mungo. And it’s a bad thing to be imagining not decently about your parents.’
‘One ought to know these things.’ Mungo was obstinate. ‘And Scottish marriages can be very queer, can’t they? A man and a woman can just stand up and say they’re married – and married they are.’
‘I don’t think it’s quite like that now.’ Roddy, who was going to make a good lawyer, was at once cautious before his own ignorance. ‘There was surely a new law came in a good many years back. You must be living with a woman a long time, and the neighbours calling you man and wife, before there’s what’s called an irregular marriage. And even then, you need a decree of declarator – whatever that may be, Lord save us – from the Court of Session itself. But I’ll find you what you want, if it’s only to stop your silly gob. And I know your birthday, anyway. Do you mind your tenth, Mungo? I brought you ten cigarettes for it. And we were both sick in this very room.’
Then that’s fine.’
‘It’s no such thing.’ Roddy was almost angry. ‘You’re in an unco confused state of mind, man. And if that’s all England can do for you, you’d be better coming home again.’ Roddy stood up. ‘And now I’ll be on my road,’ he said.
Mungo went to bed thoroughly unhappy about himself. As he bloody well deserved to be, he thought. He couldn’t see that what he was after was indecent, although Roddy plainly thought it was. It was just that Roddy’s parents were alive, whereas his own had, in a sense, never been alive at all. They were mere intellectual constructs to him. For some moments Mungo, a slave to words, took comfort from this idiotic expression. Then he returned to swearing at himself. It was true that he knew surprisingly little about his parents, and that his aunt had always been undeviatingly silent about them, the bare facts of their accidental death apart. So he had been conscious for quite a long time of something which could be called a mystery, and Mackellar S.S.C. had given that consciousness a fresh nudge. But all this was no reason for turning his oldest friend into a kind of private enquiry agent. What would emerge, he now knew intuitively, would be some small circumstance of an embarrassing sort, such as most families have the good sense to tuck away and forget about.
The intuition was confirmed a few days later, when a note came from Roddy. It stated, bleakly and without comment, that Mungo’s parents had been married in Forres just five months before he was born. That Roddy still thought poorly of having been made the instrument of this not very significant discovery appeared in the fact that he made no suggestion for his and Mungo’s getting together again before Mungo went south.
And now all this left Mungo bewildered over what could possibly have been happening to him. Mackellar’s mysterious trust, even if it was an ad hoc affair established for Mungo’s benefit alone, could perfectly well have been set up by some wealthy person of a charitable disposition, who had been touched by the story of an infant suddenly bereft of both parents, and who had the habit of doing good by stealth. Very probably what was to come to Mungo at twenty-one would be some such recital as this. And what he had made Roddy dig out was irrelevant.
Having got so far, Mungo now went all the way with Roddy in censuring his own curiosity. It is possible to commit an impiety even towards parents you have never seen. He’d done just that. But at least he’d never do it again.
Mungo locked up his typewriter – viewing it, for the moment, as a symbol of the perils of the imagination as Ian had extracted them from Rasselas. He then plunged furiously into his vacation work. Since at Oxford he was reading English, this plunge was almost entirely into the reckless imaginings of other people. But it was too late to consider whether this constituted a wholesome education. In three weeks he had read quite enough to surprise his tutor.