The New Confessions, Page 5

  As she talked she undid the buttons down the front of her camisole and shrugged it off. I looked up and for an instant saw her big white breasts with their brown nipples before she slipped her arms into the sleeves of her bathing costume and tugged the bodice up and over them. She pulled on her bathing cap and started stuffing stray tendrils of hair beneath it.

  “Are you too sad to go for a swim?” She got to her feet.

  I ran down to the surf beside her.

  I have a photograph of Oonagh taken later that day as she stood knee-deep in the green and spumy water. She is in midstride heading towards a wailing wave-doused Gregor. Her arms are raised to clear the next incoming breaker, which is about to crash against her canted hip. The sodden wool serge of her costume clings to her strong thighs and heavy breasts. Her mouth is open—part smile, part shocked anticipation of the cold wave. But she is not sufficiently preoccupied to forget the photographer and her big bulbous eyes are caught—bright and knowing—just at the moment she glances obliquely at me. The pose is at once guileless and natural but the glance, the posture, the full curves of her body, exude a robust coquettishness. As we swam and played in the surf I looked at Oonagh anew, touching myself, fast in the grip of her bracing carnality. For the first time I felt the rapt exhilaration of a pure sexual excitement. It seemed to catch at my chest as if my lungs were held by powerful hands. That perfect day at Gullane, Oonagh exerted an influence that has dominated me ever since. My God, Oonagh, when I think of you now … the terrible thing you did to me. But how were you to know? How is anyone to know? From that day on what excited me in the women I met and loved (except one, except you) was whatever element of Oonagh they seemed to echo and evoke.

  We ran up the beach from the water, gasping Gregor between us. Oonagh wrapped him in a towel and started to dry him, but he shook her off and went in search of other seaside diversions. Oonagh turned with the towel to me as I stood there, fists clenched, arms held out from my body, allowing my teeth to chatter, an idiot grin on my face. She hung the towel around me and began to rub my back and shoulders vigorously, warming herself through the effort. I looked at her wide face, her jaw undershot, her nostrils red-rimmed from the cold, the absurd cerise frills on her bathing cap.

  “There you go, Johnny,” she said. “There you go.”

  Was it the word “go”? Or the way she said my name? I wept. She held me to her, kissed my forehead, pounded my back, found me a handkerchief, fed me a stream of impossible reassurances. But I saw the swift knuckle at the corner of your eye, Oonagh, my darling, my downfall. You knew I was going away and nothing would ever be the same again.

  VILLA LUXE, May 12, 1972

  On this island where I have made my home for the last nine years we are in the grip of an unusual unseasonal drought. The April rains just simply did not happen this year and the brute sun has been blazing at August temperatures.

  I rent this old villa from Eddie Simmonette. It’s comfortable, if somewhat dilapidated, but it has the advantage of a swimming pool. It sits there before me: blue, enticing, empty. In March a crack developed in one of the sides and it had to be drained for repairs. Believe it or not, the roots of a fig tree, some thirty yards distant, had somehow managed to fracture the foot-thick concrete casing. And now, thanks to the drought, there isn’t enough water to fill it again, without a special dispensation from the mayor. I’ve applied and still wait for a decision. I stand on my pool terrace and look into that perfect dry rectangle of nicely variegated blue tiles and the heat seems to roar up palpably out of it. At my age the only exercise I take is a gentle swim at midday before I mix my first dry martini. There is a beach that belongs to the villa but it’s a good twenty-minute walk away, down a winding path through the pinewoods, then zigzagging down to the sea where the cliff face allows it. The Villa Luxe is set high on the edge of the cliff looking out over the Mediterranean towards Africa. It has a large garden with mature trees—mainly pine and carob—and rather too many cacti for my taste. The villa is quite remote, a half-mile walk from the village, down an unpaved track, which is why I like it and why I stay here.

  I wake early, breakfast, then I write letters and devote the rest of the morning to the organization of my papers. I work steadily through my archive each day—my many diaries, multitude of notebooks and memoranda, box upon box of correspondence and some fragments of memoir. I sift, I file, I collate. I’m trying to set them in some form of order, trying to discern some underlying pattern or theme amidst all that insignificance and muddle. It’s a good job for an old man with time on his hands. (Whatever wretched biblical sage decided to plump for threescore years and ten did none of us a favor. It is the most arbitrary watershed—why not fourscore years?—but once you pass it a fear is unleashed into your life like a ferret in a rabbit warren. It’s like being out in a war-torn city after curfew. You are out of bounds and it’s a good time to set your house in order, to pick through the fragments.)

  Around noon I break for my swim, then have a drink. Emilia arrives shortly after to prepare a simple lunch and clean the house. On her day off I wander up to the small café-bar in the village. On that day I usually take the local bus to a larger village some miles away where there is a bank and a post office. I post and collect the week’s mail. I try to deal with my dwindling resources and the increasing complications of my financial affairs. Once a month—maybe—I venture into our island’s main town, but less frequently in the summer because of the tourists. There are one or two people whom I know there—a journalist, a fellow Scotsman who runs a car-hire firm. Sometimes Eddie visits and sends a car to fetch me (he doesn’t come to the villa, at my request). I enjoy these reunions; we are old friends and he amuses me—and I him.

  It’s a quiet solitary life but I have no complaints after all that has gone before. A long way from Edinburgh in 1899. I look back on my childhood with the usual mixture of incredulity, pleasure and regret. In the context of this sad chronicle, my life here presents some aspects of an Edenic paradise. I have a routine, a home, no enemies, no persecution, no real worries.

  Outside the cicada’s metallic shirring reaches its noontide peak. I hear the gentle farting noise of Emilia’s scooter. I wish the pool were filled.

  * I met an anthropologist at some later juncture of my life (Paris, 1932, I think) and told him about Oonagh’s patent baby-quietener. He was not astonished. He said he knew of many primitive tribes and societies where such practices were very common. In fact, his mother, he volunteered, used to masturbate him as a child—every night in his bath—up to the age of eight. Jesus Christ, I thought, the poor man! What sort of snake pit seethes in that brain?

  2

  A Sentimental Education

  Archibald Minto welcomed me and the other two newboys with a genuine smile.

  “I’m a fair man,” he said at the end of his speech. He had a soft, cheery voice. “Some may say too fair.… But when I’m crossed, I flog. I rarely flog. I’ve flogged only five boys in the last two years. But when I do”—he was still smiling—“I’ll welt the hell out of you. Do I make myself plain?”

  “Yessir,” we said. My fellow newboys were three or four years older than me. They looked like men, and one of them wore a beard.

  “You’re welcome to Minto Academy and you’re all damned lucky to be here. Be sure and thank your parents.” He looked at the bearded boy. “I’ll allow a ‘tache, Fraser, but I can’t abide a beard on a boy. I think only of the filth it hides. Get it off at once.”

  “Sir,” Fraser said, looking surprised. I shared his reaction as Minto himself was bearded. No one made any comment.

  I do not know why it should have been so but Minto’s genial threat worked. He flogged only half a dozen boys in the years I was at school. By and large we behaved ourselves, and when we transgressed so arranged it that Minto remained in complete ignorance. In this we had the connivance of the senior boys. For all its strangeness it was a happy school.

  Minto Academy had once been a moderately l
arge private house. It stood in its own grounds on a rise overlooking the Tweed. From the main door terraced gardens—now grassed over—descended to a rugby pitch. The house itself was of a purplish brown sandstone that turned a dull murky mauve when wet with rain. There was a classical pedimented porch at the front with four fluted pillars, in the center of an elongated but elegant two-story facade. The top floor consisted of Mr. Minto’s apartments and those of the three masters the school employed. On the ground floor was an assembly room, a dining room, kitchens, locker and wash rooms and three large dormitories where the boys slept. It was a small school with never more than sixty pupils. Behind the house was a square stable block with a courtyard and clocktower. Two sides of the square had been converted to classrooms; the other two were still occupied with horses. To this day I associate school with the smell of horseshit. Above the classrooms and loose stalls lived the school maids and Minto’s handyman and factotum, Angus.

  The school had been founded by Minto’s father in 1865, specifically established to “cater for children gifted in mathematics and music.” After the Scottish Education Act of 1892, Mr. Minto, Sr., refused to relinquish control to the Galashiels Burgh Council and struggled thereafter to remain independent. In 1898 Archibald Minto returned from the University of Göttingen—where he had been studying mathematics under Hilbert—to take over the running of the school after his father had suffered a severe stroke. Under him the school prospered modestly. He sold off some land and advertised its special facilities further afield, implying that it welcomed not only mathematical and musical talents, but also anyone, so the brochure hinted, who could not fit into orthodox scholastic environments.

  Minto was a passionate rugby football enthusiast and he determined that the Minto Academy first fifteen should excel in this also. Accordingly, he granted “scholarships” to any strapping lad or nippy sprinter he fancied for his team. The school regularly triumphed in the local leagues, held up and down the Tweed Valley. This obsession explained the presence of the bearded Fraser—he was required for the second row of the scrum.

  We were a curious student body. There were genuine mathematical and musical talents, but, while I was there, there was only one prodigy. Then there were people like me whose vague gifts seemed to lie only in one or the other of these directions and whose parents were despairing of getting them educated. Then there were the misfits, encouraged by Minto’s all-embracing manifesto. Boys who could draw well, boys who “were good with their hands,” boys who could run fast. Some of these types verged on the freakish. There was a brilliant juggler; there was one boy with exceptional eyesight who could read a printed page at eight feet. There was another, a thin long-armed fellow, who could hurl a cricket ball well over a hundred yards. There was a prodigious high-jumper. And so on. This category was the smallest in the school, seldom more than a dozen all told at any one time. They made up a sullen edgy population (we called them black buns for some reason) who often lasted no more than a term or two. Outside the orthodox curriculum they were encouraged to develop their specialty under Minto’s eye. He believed passionately in excellence, and if that happened in an individual case to confine itself to cricket ball throwing, then so be it. And then there was the rugby team: local lads plucked from farm or mill (rumor had it Minto actually paid their parents), provided with board and lodging, offered the notional gloss of secondary education and throughout winter and spring as much rugby football as they could take.

  Most of us were averagely good mathematicians or musicians. Minto took us for maths; Mr. Leadbetter taught the musicians. The school orchestra was quite proficient and played regular concerts in council chambers and corn exchanges in the Tweed Valley, incidentally providing the Academy with another source of income. Two other teachers, forlorn-looking bachelors, a Mr. Fry and a Mr. Handasyde, made a stab at the other subjects necessary to have the Academy accredited by the regional school board. These two glum, wistful men seemed more fearful of Minto than we boys and we wondered what duress kept them at the school.

  Minto himself was a smallish man in his late forties. He had dark-ginger hair—close cropped on cheeks and chin, dry and wispy on his head. He wore round horn spectacles and had a friendly light voice with a trace of rhotacismus: “Weally vey good,” he used to say in approbation.

  Ostensibly there was nothing threatening about him. Any member of the rugby team could have knocked him flat, for example, but his discipline was unquestioned and would have done credit to an army barracks.

  After one of his rare vicious floggings I asked the victim (a twenty-year-old wheelwright from Kelso) why he had not retaliated. His crime had been to give cheek to Mrs. Leadbetter. He looked at me as if I were an idiot.

  “D’ye no ken aboot that Angus?”

  Angus was a big stupid man with pronounced pigeon-toes. It was his job to control the beefier pupils. He had killed a man with his bare hands in a public house brawl, so local legend had it. After his prison sentence (manslaughter) Minto had taken him on. From time to time, I was told, Angus had administered savage beatings to any member of the rugby team who questioned Minto’s authority.

  In spite of these deterrents—perhaps because of them—the school was a tolerant, tolerable place. Only once did I suffer at the hands of other boys, but it was an initiation rite that everyone underwent.

  This was a bonding ritual known as the “wax-bogey plate.” On his first night in the dormitory a newboy was obliged to consume a symbolic meal consisting of small balls—the size of shot—made up of earwax and phlegm. The other boys mined their orifices for the raw material, which they then diligently rolled into little balls. Collected on a plate, these were then presented to the initiate. They looked like a loose beige caviar. You had the choice of eating them individually or all at once. I selected the latter course. It was not so unpleasant. A swallow, a quick swill round the mouth with your tongue. Only the sour taste of earwax lingered for an hour or two.

  Hamish Malahide was the school’s only bona fide prodigy. He was a year older than I and had been at the Academy for two years. He was so good at maths that Minto gave him private tuition. I encountered him shortly after I arrived.

  One dark Sunday evening before chapel, a senior boy sent me over to the classroom block to fetch something or other. On my way back I saw a group of boys—six or seven—gathered round the railings at the rear of the house. Here there was a small basement well that led to the coal cellars and the boiler house—Angus’s responsibility and strictly out of bounds. As I approached I recognized the boys were all black buns. They were laughing with enjoyment and pleasure, holding their kilt fronts up and urinating into the basement well. I looked down and saw a figure trying to dodge the spraying streams with little success. Then he tripped and the arcs of piss zeroed in, pattering loudly on his clothes until he scrambled up again. The ordeal lasted only as long as the tormentors’ bladders held out. Soon the urinators gave up and wandered away. In the well the figure tugged fitfully at his damp clothes. I was struck by the fact that he had made no sound of complaint. He looked up at me.

  “I suppose you want to have a shot now.”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “Give us a hand,” he said as he climbed the steps.

  I grabbed his moist hand and helped him over the high railings. The gate was padlocked.

  “Thanks.” He explained how he had been caught by the black buns and had been hustled into the well.

  “Why did they do it?”

  “Who knows.”

  We walked in the back door. A maid came out of the kitchen and glanced at us curiously before walking away. In the light from the gas mantle in the corridor I took a closer look at the victim. At that stage I did not know his name, but I knew his face. Hamish Malahide had the worst acne I had ever seen, or have ever seen since. He had spots everywhere, from his forehead to his chin. They clustered thickly round his nose and below his bottom lip. His neck and jawbone were rashed with them. He even seemed to h
ave spots in his hair. His face looked so angry and sore, not to say repellent, that one wanted to flinch. I saw later the boils on his back, the large red buttons, the hard pink wens of incipient pustules.

  I did not flinch, in fact, but he would not have noticed anyway, preoccupied as he was with the state of his clothes.

  “I’ll have to change,” he said. “Bastards.”

  “Why don’t you tell Minto? He said we should report bullying.”

  He looked at me. “New rat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Minto would flog them, I suppose, but he always flogs the fellow who clypes as well.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not worth it. You’ll understand when you see how Minto flogs.”

  “Why does he flog the victim?”

  “Makes sense. He has a quieter life. He knows that when someone does complain it’s really serious.”

  He smiled. He had large uneven teeth. He had fair hair and a pale skin that somehow made his acne seem worse. He was an ugly boy.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Todd.”

  “I’m Malahide. Thanks for not slashing on me, Todd.” He paused. “I won’t forget it. Ever.”

  It was a strange thing to say. He smiled again and walked off. So began the most important friendship of my life.

  Mathematics. Why was I good at it and indifferent to poor in my other subjects? I believe that sort of skill or talent is something to do with the cast of the individual mind, innate, a priori. How could I, whose imagination was first stimulated by unknown stories in an incomprehensible tongue, have a talent for mathematics? The only answer I can supply is precisely because my imagination was stimulated in that way. I went to school clear-eyed, unformed. I remember my first arithmetic class. The rear wall was covered with charts of the multiplication tables.

  “Right, Todd. Six-times table.”