‘Well, as long as it’s making you better.’
‘I did something bad to you, didn’t I?’
‘It doesn’t matter now, Papa. Everything’s fine. You’ll be all right.’
‘All the righter, for a writer. Send me a photo, sweetness. That’ll make me well — I’ll be able to look at you every day.’ He fell back in his armchair again and closed his eyes.
There was a polite cough behind me and I turned. Dr Lustenburger had arrived silently to take me away. My father was fast asleep so I kissed his forehead and followed Dr Lustenburger down to his office where he explained something of his methods to me. They practised ‘somnitherapy’ at Cloudsley Hall. Dr Lustenburger was convinced that all aberrant and antisocial manias came from unhappy memories. Deep sleep, profound sleep lasting many days, was, he believed, the way to suppress the power of these memories. ‘And in your father’s case,’ he went on, ‘all these memories originate in the Great War.’ He smiled confidently. ‘However, slowly but surely, we are erasing them.’
Greville drove me to a pub just off the London Road, the Grenadier, near Gravesend, where we each had a whisky and soda. I expressed some optimism about the visit.
‘Did Dr Lustenburger mention anything about the drugs, et cetera?’ Greville asked.
‘Papa did say medicines — but he wasn’t specific.’
‘It’s a drug that makes them sleep so long. Knocks them out for days.’
‘Sounds wonderful!’
Greville gave a knowing smile. ‘It’s called “SomniBrom” — a mixture of a barbiturate and a bromide.’
‘Maybe not so wonderful, then. How do you know about all this?’
‘Darling — “deep sleep therapy”. DST. It’s so fashionable. Anxiety removed by narcosis.’ He made a face. ‘With the help of a few electric shocks while you’re snoozing.’
‘My God! No!’
‘My God, yes! Are you surprised he can’t remember anything, anything at all? Electrodes attached to the head and all that. But you don’t feel a thing. Quite benign, I suppose.’
‘Poor Papa. .’ I felt suddenly sad, thinking of my father. ‘It was the war, wasn’t it?’ I said vaguely. ‘The war did this to him.’
Greville agreed with my platitude and we talked on, ordering another round of whiskies and soda. As he brought our drinks over the thought came to me that, as we sat there in a booth in the corner of the saloon bar of the Grenadier, somebody coming in and glancing casually over at us chatting away so earnestly might have thought that we were a couple, out courting.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I walked over to Inverbarr — a good two-mile hike — for lunch with Calder and Greer McLennan, my best friends on the island. It was a fresh, breezy day, the wind tugging at my jacket and hat, the sun unusually brilliant, almost alpine in its clarity, when it appeared between the ranks of clouds. As well as going for lunch I was returning a book Calder had lent me called The Last Year: April 1944–April 1945 by Dennis Fullerton. It was an account of the war in Europe during its tumultuous endgame and I was trying to chart my own progress through those twelve months and had been somewhat enlightened. At least I now had the big picture to go with my small precise one — where my meandering journeys had fitted into the great march of military history.
I walked up to the hogback ridge that connected Barrandale’s two biggish hills, Beinn Morr and Cnoc Torran, that formed a crude spine to the island and, once on the ridge, could see Inverbarr below me, set back on the edge of its small cove with a view of the southern tip of Mull and the hammered silver plate of the Atlantic beyond.
Greer welcomed me at the back door, gin and tonic in one hand, cigarette in the other. She was a handsome tall woman whose snowy white hair was cut in a severe bob with a razored fringe that brushed her eyebrows. She was ten years younger than me but her white hair sometimes made her look older, I thought. She and Calder were retired academics from Edinburgh University. Calder had been a professor of economics while Greer was a cosmologist, ‘of no eminence at all’, she would add. Calder — small, wiry, bearded — was an overactive adult and a hiking, hill-walking obsessive. Greer was more sedate and was writing a book on molluscs, so she claimed. An odd job for a cosmologist, I had remarked when she told me. She had smiled and said simply that she felt the urge to focus on something closer to home.
Calder had pretensions as a cook and we ate a pearl barley broth and a peppery venison stew. We had coffee and cigarettes in the library. I spotted a large atlas on a low shelf and asked if I could borrow it. The atlas was too cumbersome to carry home on foot — as big as a paving stone — so Greer offered to drive me back round the island to the cottage. She had things to pick up in Achnalorn, she said.
In the village we parked outside the small supermarket and I took the chance to buy a newspaper, the Glasgow Herald, and two packs of cigarettes. Greer had done the same and we sat in the car park and smoked, flicking through our newspapers, watching the fishing boats come and go in the small harbour.
I pointed to a story on the front page of the Herald. A new galaxy had been found at some far corner of the known universe.
‘Make your heart beat faster?’ I asked.
‘Not really my field,’ Greer said. ‘I was concentrating on what happened before the Big Bang. When there was nothing.’
‘Stop right now,’ I said with a laugh. ‘I can’t understand these concepts: “Nothing”, “Infinity”, “Timelessness”. My brain won’t go there.’
‘That’s why I retired early,’ Greer said, with a rueful smile. ‘I realised that what I was doing was meaningless to the entire human race apart from about six people in distant universities.’
‘I need boundaries,’ I said. ‘I can’t get to grips with “nothing”. That once upon a time there was nothing and time didn’t exist and that “nothing” was infinite. .’ I smiled. ‘Or maybe I’m just stupid.’
‘That’s why I’m studying small molluscs in tiny rock pools,’ Greer said, tossing her cigarette end out of the window and exhaling. ‘We’re just a certain kind of ape on a small planet circling an insignificant star. Why should I be fretting about what might or might not have happened thirteen billion years ago?’
‘A certain kind of ape. I like that.’
‘So I decided to chuck it in. It just seemed pointless, all of a sudden.’
‘Good for you,’ I said, then added, with more feeling than I meant, ‘It’s not as if the here and now isn’t problematic enough.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, starting the car and pulling away.
‘Talking of which. How’s Alisdair?’ Alisdair was their son, a diplomat, recently messily divorced. Two very young children involved and a bitter ex-wife.
‘He’s being posted to Vietnam,’ she said dryly. ‘That should keep him out of trouble.’
‘Vietnam,’ I said, not thinking. ‘Well, it got me in serious trouble.’
Greer looked at me sharply.
‘My, you’re full of surprises, Amory,’ she said. ‘You dark horse. When were you in Vietnam, for Christ’s sake?’