He spun round to face her again. “Demanding so much of people? Demanding so much of people! I’ve never had anything!” Then he turned and, this time, punched the wardrobe with all his might.
Judith stood up and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Until you stop seeing every little thing that doesn’t go your way as a personal slight, you’re not going to develop one jot — and I know you don’t want that.”
But there was no assuaging him at this time and he stormed out of the room. She followed, but by the time she’d got downstairs he’d gone. Temperatures of around minus five had been forecast, so Judith took the minibus and searched the only available road, stopping every hundred yards to holler Dickens’s name across the pitch black moorland. After a fruitless twenty minutes, though, she drove back, relieved not to have found him if she were honest.
Three days later Hamish came back and Ryan returned to the student quarters, where he encountered absolute carnage. All the computer monitors had been smashed, wash basins and pipes torn from walls — flooding the wash rooms — while every book in the recreation loft had had its pages torn out and strewn across the pool table, its blue felt in shreds. A discarded Old Holborn tobacco packet betrayed Dickens as the culprit and explained why Judith hadn’t found him on Christmas night.
Everyone wanted to report Dickens to the police, except Ryan and Danny. The youngster — viscerally opposed to the authorities — wanted to hunt him down and dispense his own justice, while Danny pleaded for some understanding on behalf of the homeless orphan, whose vandalism he perceived as the honest expression of a powerless man.
“Can anyone of us here begin to imagine the sense of rejection and exclusion that poor man must be suffering? I can see no practical purpose in sending him back to prison. The man needs a family. Perhaps we should be that family? Perhaps we should take him in and forgive him, like a mother or a brother forgives when a close one goes berserk — as so often happens — smashing household objects out of hurt.”
This was a step too far for the others, so a compromise was reached and Dickens went unreported.
Danny postponed the students return until February, by which time the byre had been restored to its former glory. Unfortunately, one of the lads — Mucky Tea from Castlemilk — got embroiled in a gang fight during the interim period and ended up on remand at a youth offenders centre. A month later he received a six month jail sentence — something for which even Danny struggled to forgive Dickens. Mucky Tea’s place in the byre was soon filled though, by one of the local students who had trouble at home with his father.
CHAPTER 13
By summer, Gairloch College was back on track. The art students were exhibiting their work at the village hall and Ryan was due to sign a publishing deal, thanks to Angie, who’d sent sample chapters of his work to her mother to distribute among the London literati. It had been the first time she’d contacted her family in over four years and Judith admired the way she’d swallowed her pride to help others.
An even more miraculous event occurred after Ryan’s celebratory meal, when he ended up snogging Belinda. This wasn’t the sudden phenomenon it might have seemed. The morning after their spat at the dinner table, Ryan had taken advice from Danny and sent her some flowers as an apology, bringing them onto speaking terms for the first time. Thereafter, his teaching sessions helped develop the situation from one of polite diplomacy to mutual respect, before literary success finally wooed her.
Judith was delighted to see Ryan and Belinda’s relationship flourish, but Danny expressed reservations about the whole thing. Remembering how he’d been distracted from painting by Ingrid, he worried that Ryan’s contentment might have a harmful effect on his writing. He claimed that, in his experience, love narrowed perceptions, shrinking the universe from a chaos of infinite stimuli and possibilities until it became just one person. Single track minds, he argued, rarely produced interesting art.
In what seemed like no time at all, Gairloch College was enjoying its first anniversary dinner, where freshly shot grouse was being washed down with Chateau Haut-Brion at one-hundred and twenty pounds a bottle. This wasn’t as profligate as it might seem. Before a single cork had been popped, Danny had treated his students to a wine appreciation course and legitimised the expense as part of their education. He reckoned that if the kids knew what decent booze tasted like then they would aspire to better things in life than Buckfast and Special Brew, when they eventually returned home.
It was a bright, muggy evening so the front door had been left open. What with the party atmosphere, no one noticed a woman walking into the kitchen, carrying a small child in her arms. Judith was only alerted when, one by one, students suddenly stopped talking and stared towards the door. She looked up to find Ingrid, suntanned and beautiful, staring across at Danny, sitting halfway along the table, beneath his mother’s portrait on the back wall. Wearing those perennial blue overalls, he was too busy tucking into a grouse and slurping on red wine, to realize that the love of his life had just entered the room. It wasn’t until complete silence reigned that he eventually looked up, by which time Francesca — Ingrid’s less attractive sister — had arrived too. As his eyes darted from Ingrid’s to the child in her arms, his face grew pale. He sprang up and rushed round the table towards her.
“Ingrid? What’s going on?”
“We need to talk,” she asserted arrogantly.
Danny gestured towards the lounge then followed the hip swaying actress in her white, diaphanous trousers and matching silk, strapped summer top. Meanwhile, Hamish gave his seat up to Francesca — who was now holding the child — while Judith took advantage of the distraction. She slipped out into the sticky evening, ostensibly to have a cigarette, but mainly to eavesdrop at an open, front window. Blowing smoke, she stood with her back to the rugged, grey-stone wall, while Ingrid’s spoilt voice filtered through the net curtain.
“It makes no odds whether I informed you at the time or in the next century, your Lawrence’s father — end of.”
“How do you know he’s not Bob’s?”
“Because we hadn’t had sex in years…we were never really a physical couple.”
There was a contemplative pause before Danny’s next question.
“Why have you only seen fit to tell me about Lawrence now?”
“I was a psychological mess…coming down off years of coke and booze. My meagre energies would have been denuded even more if I’d had to deal with you as well as Lawrence, and that would have benefited no one. I thought it more practical to concentrate on getting myself fit.”
“There’s that ‘practical’ word again…your euphemism for being a selfish bitch!”
“Like your use of ‘sacrifice’ you mean, whenever you shirked responsibility. I mean, where’s your sense of sacrifice now?”
“What?”
“Can’t you see that missing my pregnancy and avoiding Lawrence’s first sixteen months was a sacrifice worth making, so that he wasn’t damaged for life. We’d have been arguing, just like now, and that can really screw newly born babies up — forever.” There was a brief pause. “I needed time to get my head straight, ok?” At this point, the actress’s voice quavered a touch too emphatically for Judith’s liking. “Part of the reason I never told you was because I was on the verge of having an abortion… then I nearly gave him up for adoption. If I hadn’t had the space to resolve my psychological problems, we wouldn’t have even made it through the pregnancy together. It’s from this point now that you have to start being Lawrence’s father…now’s the time for you to start applying your morality to practical purposes, like raising our son.”