Lament for a Maker (29 page)

The generosity of Mr Anson extended not only through my years of undergraduate study at Adelaide but through the long, lean and often fatal period that waits on the young specialist. He made Richard Flinders; and it was partly an impulse of piety, of which I cannot find it in me to be ashamed, that made me decide, when the time came, that Richard Flinders should not die.

It was in my final year. I was walking one spring afternoon from the medical school to my lodgings, which lay some two miles away beyond the park lands that encircle the heart of the little city. A horse-tram drew away from in front of me and I became aware of a little crowd of people standing about a draped pedestal. They were unveiling a statue to some Scottish explorer – it may have been McDougal Stewart – and at the moment that I looked there came a skirl of bagpipes.

I walked for some yards as if in a great darkness and then I saw before me, like the tour de force of an illusionist, the figure of my brother Ranald. I saw him standing on some eminence, gazing over the endless bush. And I heard him recite, with all the dark passion of his thwarted poet’s nature:

‘From the lone shieling on the misty island,

Mountains divide us and a waste of seas;

Yet still the blood is strong…’

Voice and picture faded and I walked on with no more knowledge than before. But that night, as I looked out over the city drenched in moonlight in its lovely setting between hills and sea, I found veil after veil slipping from my mind. I knew that I was Ian Guthrie and I knew that, whatever accident had befallen, in the face of that bush fire Ranald had deserted me.

Inquiry revealed that by the death of our elder brother’s children and by my own supposed death Ranald had inherited Erchany. I had always been the rudely healthy member of the family; the indecisions that mark the neurotic personality and which distinguished Ranald are unknown to me; and I remember it took me just two hours to reach my resolve. I was conscious of injury and injustice but did not think that these feelings should weigh with me. I had no desire for the life of a Scottish laird; I was already planning almost in full technical detail the steps of my medical career; I had no confidence in Ranald’s honesty and I saw only vexation and distraction in the possibility of a contested claim. Australia had already given the world the Tichborne Case and I told myself ironically that in it there had been sufficient of that sort of thing for a couple of generations. In addition I had my affection for Mr Anson, who was planning with me my career as an Australian surgeon. And I saw that it must be all or nothing; if I admitted my survival a score of embarrassments would appear and almost force me to claim the headship of my family.

So it was that I came to live out my life as Richard Flinders – mostly in my adopted country but sometimes in England and once for a long period of time in the United States. I have never been the wealthy man that the regular practice of surgery would have made me; most of my own earnings, together with a generous bequest from Richard Anson, have been devoted to the costly business of radium research. I do not know that much of the world’s money is better spent. And my policy of letting no thought for my own future interfere with a possible benefit to knowledge has been amply justified. A few days ago I received a notice of a great honour; I have been elected as emeritus fellow of an American foundation I had the privilege to serve years ago. I shall live in California. It is the climate for a green old age, and I want ten years for the exploration of fields that have been almost closed to me during a busy life in science. My work is over – in a sense even is rounded off in achievement – and my retirement from medicine, as from society, will be complete. In the course of my career I have had occasion to get a grip of many languages, and the literature of Europe is the right study for a man whose every second thought must be of the grave.

Only as my life’s task slips from me into the hands of younger men the thought of Erchany comes back. And with the uprising of sentiment the rule of reason slackens; I am conscious again of past injustice and deprivation; I have an impulse to give Ranald a fright. If ever that impulse realizes itself I shall know my second childhood has come.

But there is the call of the place. Fives in the moat, the tower, the thrill of the parapet walk at night, the gallery where we used to enact the exploits of those ancestors who looked down on our play from the shadows. The snows on Ben Cailie, the mists on the loch, the leaping and leaping again of the salmon at the falls… Still the blood is strong. Perhaps I shall see Erchany in more than dreams before I die.

Sydney, NSW

St Andrew’s Day, 1936.

Timor Mortis conturbat me…
My brother has been chanting that – strangely, for it is I who am to die. I have myself very little fear.

Having pen and the liberty of my limbs I take this narrative – brought to Erchany for Ranald’s information – and add to it what I can. If I hide it in some cranny of these ancient walls it may escape his vigilance and tell its story at some future time. I would have it told, dark page though it be in the long and chequered chronicle of the Guthries. All my work has been for knowledge: I believe in honest records.

I record then, that my present pass is my own responsibility and fault. I have been childish and vindictive. And – what I fear irks me more – I have been a poor analyst of the mind.

In a sense vindictive, but in a sense I have cast a distorting charity over the past. I had come to feel that Ranald played me a mean trick, that he failed to play the game, and because of that I would give him a nasty jolt before going into my retirement for good and all. How childish the impulse – and how far out of the estimate of what lay between us! In running away, horses, water and all, in that crisis Ranald had betrayed himself – as a Guthrie, as a brother and as a man. And he had lived since in the eating consciousness of that betrayal, his life dominated by one shameful memory. I had fished him, a hysterical and grateful adolescent, from Fremantle harbour and a plentiful society of sharks; a few months later my blood was on his head in the bush. And the issue, to be played out in this lonely Scottish keep, is strangely tuned to the central truth of the greatest of Scottish tragedies,
Macbeth
. There is a blood guiltiness from which there is no turning back, no way out save forward through blood. Ranald remembers not a mean trick but a betrayal and a crime. Year by year the element of deliberation in his panic desertion of me has been more evident. Year by year the dynamics of guilt have taken firmer hold of his mind, straining and finally disrupting his personality, so that in any fix he will at once envisage himself as the trapped and ruthless man. Convinced – through my own melodramatic folly, no doubt – that I was coming like some wild Guthrie of the past to execute an absolute revenge, he laid his own plans at a level of uncompromising violence – though violence tempered by some elaborateness, some intellectually satisfying subtlety, to which I feel I have by no means penetrated. My spectre has overshadowed Ranald’s whole existence. Now that I have returned as if from the dead he has found some peculiar release in imposing a new perspective on my life, making the sacrifice of it no more than a move in some complicated game of which he is master. My death in the bush overwhelmed and destroyed him; my death at Erchany he will control and exploit. It is a ‘life line’ of some interest to mental science.

I wrote to him from Australia, giving some account of myself but saying nothing of my intentions – yielding to the foolish satisfaction of concocting vague menace out of reticence. He must have had ample time to lay his plans; to isolate Erchany, to dismiss servants, to secure the help of the creature Hardcastle. Ranald is being driven by years of abnormal development and I cannot find that I very much wish for justice against him. But Hardcastle is assisting at murder for pay. I hope they will get him.

I wrote once more to Ranald and told him that Dr Richard Flinders would arrive secretly on the night of the twenty-third of December. This will seem wanton and melodramatic enough, and its melodrama played with a nice irony into the hands of Ranald’s own melodramatic fantasy. But there was some sense in it. I did not intend that Ian Guthrie should come to life again and the hour would make it easy for my brother to arrange a wholly confidential meeting. Moreover there was implicit in the choice a hint of sentiment and reconciliation. In our boyhood we had held a regular tryst at this midnight, a tryst at which we discussed what the next midnight – Christmas Eve – would bring to our stockings. This implication, clearly, Ranald was in no state to catch.

The unexpectedly heavy snows presented me with a problem. But I have long been accustomed to sking – I doubt if the world knows that there are excellent snow-fields in Australia – and skis were easy to come by at my hotel in Dunwinnie: it is a centre, crowded at present, for such winter sports as Scotland is beginning to contrive. I reached Erchany somewhat hazardously by the shores of Ben Cailie.

I was received by Hardcastle with just the caution that I expected and taken straight to this tower. And here he and Ranald between them overpowered me. That is all. It is simple, astonishing and – if only because Ranald and I are brothers – curiously horrible. This little bedroom might have been designed as a prison; may have been a prison hundreds of years ago. I have done what I can. Several of the Erchany rats, bold and sluggish creatures, I have succeeded in catching and sending out as messengers: I think it likely that they have the liberty of the whole crannied building. And I have tried as good an imitation as I can manage of the Australian
cooee,
one of the most penetrating calls in the world. But the height of this chamber, the thickness of these walls, the gale and the muffling snowfall outside make it unlikely that the sound will be heard, or if heard thought to be other than an owl or a trick of the wind. Nor have I any evidence that Erchany is not deserted except for my brother and his man.

I have been given a book:
Experimental Radiology
by Richard Flinders – I must count myself lucky that Ranald has this sort of fantastic, rather than some downright sadistic, streak. It is clear and tidy, and has pleased me as well as another book. And medicine brings me to a final record. Ranald is not mad. His thoughts and actions are logically directed to certain realizable ends…

JOHN APPLEBY

Mr Wedderburn drew a long breath as I laid down the unfinished narrative. ‘Fratricide,’ he said. ‘And Miss Mathers was right. My interpretation of the facts came nowhere near the measure of Guthrie’s ingenuity. Ian’s murder by Ranald was to be read as Ranald’s murder by Lindsay. He killed his brother and incriminated his niece’s lover. It is madness.’

I nodded. ‘In the face of any moral order it is madness. And yet it all abounds in logic. He was very skilfully fulfilling needs and achieving ends.’

Sybil Guthrie stirred from the immobility in which she had listened to Ian Guthrie’s testament. ‘
Why
?’ she asked. ‘What drove him? What was his motive in such devilry?’

I considered. ‘There is a network of motive. You can work back in various directions, and dig down to various depths, and keep finding motives. There was what Ian saw: Ranald’s life lived under the shadow of that crime in Australia; all the massive feelings of guilt that abound in the neurotic crystallized on it; a resulting fearful certainty that Ian was coming for absolute vengeance; the conviction that Ian must be outwitted and destroyed. At the same time there was some deeper symbolism at work. Ian’s death in the bush had got on top of him; at Ian’s second and veritable death he would be on top.’

Noel Gylby clapped his hands like a child. ‘On top by several hundred feet…on top by the height of the tower!’

‘Exactly. And a psychoanalyst would find a symbolism yet deeper. I was thinking of it earlier today. When a man throws himself from a height he is taking a symbolical leap from danger – the perilous
above
– to safety – the secure
below
. In hurling Ian from the tower Ranald was achieving just what he had failed to achieve in Australia.
He was rescuing Ian
. In fact his crime was a stroke of wit – of the dark irony of which we have a good deal of evidence in Ranald.’

Wedderburn exclaimed: ‘Wit!’

‘In the Freudian sense. A reconciling of violently opposed desires at a verbal or symbolical level. The desire to destroy Ian: the desire to rehabilitate himself, to prove his own manhood, by rescuing Ian.’

There was a silence in which we could hear, behind the wainscoting of the gallery, the dragging movement of a poisoned rat. Wedderburn took out a handkerchief and passed it across his forehead. ‘I prefer,’ he said, ‘to encounter these abysses of the mind in text-books. And in medical text-books, not legal ones.’

‘They are bound to figure sometimes in both. But we are far from having exhausted the network of motive yet – nor have we all the materials. Somewhere there is a strong motive of fear, horror, hatred against Neil Lindsay, whose destruction was worked with such diabolical skill into the greatest of all the jigsaws. That we must investigate. What is clear so far is the whole picture in relation to Ian. You can think of much that fits in. The passionate shutting-up of this gallery, for instance, when Ranald inherited.’ I let my torch circle the portraits on the wall. ‘The Guthries of Erchany! The tradition Ranald had betrayed. A wild, dark lot they may have been. But fratricide, of which Ranald had virtually been guilty in the bush, was outside the family scope.’

Wedderburn nodded. ‘According to my friend Clanclacket they were distinguished for sticking together.’

‘And then the passion of impatience at the opening-up of the gallery. He had got his idea and he must see the family portraits again to assure himself of its feasibility; to reassure him that Guthries really have the strange characteristic, occasionally observable in old families, of being remarkably like each other.’