Sarah Mackay didn’t smile.
“‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are words we rarely have much use for at Eildon House,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons it’s not easy for certain types of people to work here.”
AFTER THAT we just walked together, silent for once, along the corridors of Eildon House and were soon standing on the front steps. The sky was overcast, suiting my mood at parting with Sarah Mackay. She looked directly into my eyes.
“You can have no idea just how curious I was to see you after having heard about you so often from Miriam,” she said. “This visit really has been lovely. And it’s been a special treat for me to know how interested you are in what I do here. You really are a kindred spirit.”
I assured her that it had been a great pleasure for me to meet her and learn about her work. I was especially grateful for everything she’d told me about Miriam. Knowing the truth was a comfort to me, at last.
She seemed about to say something else, then decided against it.
So I thanked her again for seeing me and told her that she was a remarkable young woman. Miriam and Sam must have been the proudest of parents.
Her blue eyes became resolute. I could see she’d made up her mind to say whatever it was that was on her mind. In fact, I had one of those disorienting feelings of anticipating what’s about to happen, as if it’s happened before. Those questions she’d asked earlier about Frank, and about my relationship with him, flashed through my mind and I knew almost with certainty what she was about to say.
“Yes, they were proud of me,” said Sarah Mackay. “But Sam wasn’t my father. You are.”
THE DRIVE WEST was quite straightforward, though the weather again turned into a mix of rain and sleet. I had to keep my mind on the winding road, especially when passing trucks sent up a blinding spray. But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about that final revelation.
Sarah Mackay, my daughter! Apparently she’d been aware of that ever since she was a child. Miriam and Sam had believed she ought to know, and so they told her the truth. Miriam’s rejection of me hadn’t been based only on her belief that I wouldn’t be able to deal with her father. She’d also found out she was pregnant. Those two things together were, in her mind, too much to ask a young man — a boy, really — to put up with.
Over the years it had occasionally crossed my mind that Miriam’s final act towards me might have had something to do with what she felt were her obligations towards that old man. Never that she was pregnant. What an irony. As often as not it’s the man responsible for the pregnancy who runs from his responsibilities. In our case, Miriam knew I wouldn’t run — that if I’d known she was pregnant, I’d have insisted all the more on staying. So she’d told me nothing and driven me away. Though she was in love with me, she probably didn’t trust me to stay with her through thick and thin. She didn’t have the same kind of love for Sam, but she trusted him.
She’d made the hard choice and the right one.
That was exactly what I told Sarah after hearing this startling news on the front steps of Eildon House. I begged her to forgive me. She hugged me and told me there was nothing to forgive. We both had tears in our eyes as I got into my car and drove away.
AT THE AIRPORT, a heavy afternoon sea fog delayed all flights, so it wasn’t till well after four that we boarded the plane and took off. I had a window seat and glanced out from time to time, but my mind was still full of Sarah’s final revelations. By now, my feelings about what she’d told me had become more complicated. One minute I’d again start feeling sorry for myself: Miriam, by forsaking me, had killed my capacity for ever truly loving someone else. But the next minute self-loathing would take the place of self-pity: Miriam had realized, all too clearly, a basic truth about me — that I was really only capable of loving myself. And so it went, back and forth, endless variants and combinations of self-justification and self-condemnation.
The plane had circled back over the Uplands before heading out towards the ocean. There was just enough light to make out beneath us the low hills streaked with snow and the patterns of ancient fields enclosed by walls of heaped-up rocks. In one of these fields, the earth seemed to have been combed into rows that were exactly symmetrical but with occasional protrusions. A lone man with a long-handled hoe jabbed at one of the protrusions, then picked it up and hurled it onto a pile nearby. It appeared to be a human leg, blackened and mouldering. The pile held countless other such decayed body parts.
The man’s eyes turned upwards towards the plane, searching for mine.
CONVENIENTLY, the clatter of the drinks trolley jolted me out of this vivid dream and I got myself a pre-dinner scotch. While I sipped I wondered, as I often did, whether there was any sense to be made of my dreams. Perhaps in this case it might have been spawned by the sensation of flying above the world at an immense height — something no animals except birds had ever been able to do. Surely this novel experience must have altered the way humans now perceived their world. In the dream, the geometrical structure of those fields far below had seemed to me like humanity’s flimsy attempts to scratch a semblance of order out of nature’s chaotic state. The fields themselves were only fertile because the soil was fed by the rotting flesh, just under the surface, of generation after generation of men whose brief lives were snuffed out in yet another piece of human ingenuity— those old mine tunnels that failed to hold up the weight of the earth. To walk in those fields was, therefore, to walk on the remains of the dead.
As for the man in the dream who used the long-handled hoe, I was having trouble making sense out of him. I didn’t like the look of him or the way he’d looked up at me. So maybe he was Death, warning me that even though I was flying high above with a glass of scotch in my hand, my own turn would come.
Altogether, this interpretation of the dream, though a bit on the melancholy side, was quite pleasing to me. Indeed the brief nap, the dream, the scotch, or all three seemed to have got rid of the angst I’d been feeling over Miriam’s choice. Instead I was now full of elation at the thought of two much more significant revelations: that she’d only done what she did because she loved me, and that her daughter — the astonishing Sarah — was my daughter, too.
Add to these two things the memory of that illuminating visit to Curator Soulis in his strange bell tower, and I’d more than adequate cause for celebration. So when the drinks trolley came by again, I ordered another scotch in their honour.
6
I got back to Camberloo in the early morning, slept till late afternoon, then phoned Frank. Naturally, he wanted to know all about my trip right away. I had to check in at the office for an hour or two, but I promised I’d give him a full account over dinner later that night.
So, around seven, we got together at the Library, a recently opened restaurant in what had originally been one of those big old Camberloo mansions. Only a few diners were there that night. Frank and I sat at a table in the bow window of the former library of the mansion. The room was still lined with impressive mahogany bookcases, but the books themselves had been replaced by a wallpaper of false book covers. As for the meaclass="underline" the tiny main course tasted all right but was so artisticlooking you felt like a vandal sticking a knife and fork into an oil painting.