The New Confessions (2 page)

Ergo
, I did not love my father.… I do not know. Perhaps I did, in my own way. Certainly, it was a complicated enough relationship to do
duty as Love’s understudy. I know he never loved me, but that, as far as I am concerned, is of little importance. He did not love me because, quite simply, I was a constant reminder of his loss. As I grew older the correlation paradoxically reasserted itself. One of the last times I saw him—he an octogenarian, I in my forties—I caught his image reflected in the slightly ajar door of a glass and mahogany cabinet (I had turned my head to call for tea). There was a detectable flare to his nostrils, a quiet disgusted shake of his head. And I remember being particularly pleasant to him that afternoon, in spite of his appalling testiness. But at that stage of my life nothing—not even he—could disturb my own misanthropic calm. His last words to me that day were “Why don’t you get your bloody hair cut?” Hair. Very apt. Full circle. I almost told him I would if he would shave off his sodding cheek-bristles, said I would have seen a hell of a lot more of him in the last thirty-odd years if he had, but I kept my peace. I can see his pale-blue eyes, hard and clear, sandwiched between their hoary brows, upper and lower, and still hear his strong, metallic, precise Scottish accent (I had lost mine by then, another source of scorn). “Yes, Dad,” I said, “right you are.” Forty-seven years of age and still trying to please the old bastard. God help me.

Anyway, I digress. Let me tell you something about this enterprise upon which we have both—you and I—embarked. Here is the story of a life. My life. One man’s life in the twentieth century. This is what I have done and this is what has been done to me. If on occasion I have used some innocent embellishment, it has been only to fill the odd defect of memory. Sometimes I may have taken for a fact what was no more than a probability, but—and this is crucial—I have never put down as true what I knew to be false. I present myself as I was—vile and contemptible when I behaved in that fashion; and kind, generous and selfless when I was so. I have always looked closely at those around me and have not spared myself that same scrutiny. I am not a cynic; I am not prejudiced. I am simply a realist. I do not judge. I note. So, here I am. You may groan at my unbelievable blunders, berate me for my numberless imbecilities and blush to the whites of your eyes at my confessions, but—but—can you, I wonder, can you really put your hand on your heart and say, “I am better than he”?

My name is John James Todd. My father was Innes McNeil Todd, senior consultant surgeon at the Royal Infirmary and professor of
clinical anatomy at the University. When I was born he was thirty-seven years old, astonishingly young for a man in his eminent position, a rapid promotion brought on by his eagerness for experiment and innovation. He was a “modern” in the world of medicine, striving earnestly to free it from the tenacious hold of its medieval past (still alarmingly prevalent in the late nineteenth century). He sensed a lightening in the east and he wanted to be there to welcome the new dawn. He would try anything to advance its progress, such was his zeal, and some of his efforts paid off.

My darling mother was Emmeline Dale, the daughter of Sir Hector Dale, of Drumlarish, Ayrshire, a laird of vast acreage, little means and less intellect. My parents married in 1891. My mother was the fifth child of Sir Hector (his wife, her mother, died when she was five). She had four older brothers and a younger sister, Faye, who lived in England. My mother was by all accounts much in love with my father. They met when he came to cauterize an inflamed goiter on Sir Hector’s throat. In those days Sir Hector possessed an Edinburgh town house, in the New Town, Ann Street (which was shortly sold, alas), where the Dale family spent the worst winter months, returning to the big house at Drumlarish in the spring. Innes Todd married Emmeline Dale in St. Mungo’s parish church in Barnton, then a village outside Edinburgh, whence the Todds originally hailed. Sir Hector conferred on his daughter a modest dowry and the young couple moved into the enormous apartment my father had taken—for reasons best known to himself—in the unfashionable High Street where, again by all accounts, they lived in blameless happiness—until I arrived.

In 1892, some sixteen months after the marriage, my mother gave birth to her first child, a boy, my brother. Prior to his conception my mother had miscarried when five months pregnant. (A girl, I later learned. Ah, my lost sister, what a difference you would have made!) The new child was thus doubly anticipated and the anxiety attending his birth also multiplied. Not uncalled for, as it turned out. My brother’s proved to be a difficult, painful parturition and, although he was robust and healthy enough, my mother required several months’ convalescence. He was called Thompson Hector Dale Todd. Curiously, he was Sir Hector’s first grandchild (his four sons were all bachelors and deficient in all manner of areas) and this fact, and the suppliant nomenclature, earned my brother a lucky financial settlement from his grandfather’s dwindling estate (I was some years too late).

T.H.D. Todd, my brother. Thompson Todd. I believe some of his
friends actually call him Tommy, but, even since earliest childhood, I swear, I have been unable to call him anything else but Thompson. Names are important to me, almost talismanic. As a Christian name Thompson seemed (and seems—he still flourishes, the miserable bastard) absolutely perfect for him. The stolidity, the solidity, the thick consonants, the—from my point of view—utter impossibility of imbuing it with any tones of affection.

Go to Edinburgh. Stand on the esplanade of the tremendous castle, the gatehouse at your back. You are looking down the Royal Mile, the ancient High Street of the city, the spine of the Old Town. Ignore, if you can, today’s scrubbed stone and loving restoration, the bright tat and crass bustle. When I was born the Old Town was in a state of severe decay, the buildings black and scrofulous, dark already but darkened further by the smoke and cinders of a million chimney pots and the belching soot from the railway station in the valley below. The street itself was erratically cobbled; some of the stones were two hundred years old, round and worn like pebbles on a beach. In other places they had crumbled or subsided and the holes in the pavement were filled with sand and dirt. Here and there were pale-gray new cobbles of Aberdeen granite. On either side stood dark misshapen tenaces of shops and houses.

Turn now and look north towards the Firth of Forth. All of Edinburgh’s dignity and decorum has moved across the steep valley of Waverley Gardens to the neat elegant grid of the New Town. Its sunny leafy squares, its classical assurance, its perfect Georgian symmetry, stood in potent contrast to the narrowing foul descent from the castle on its crag to the palace of Holyrood and its modest park.

Now leave the castle’s esplanade and walk down the High Street towards St. Giles’s Cathedral. Stay on the left-hand side. Through the Lawnmarket and on. As you go, you pass low doorways, squat dark tunnels that lead down to chill terraced canyons. Let four or five of these doorways go by and you will come to an entranceway named Kelpie’s Wynd. Enter. Those of you taller than five feet eight inches will have to duck your heads. Pass through the tunnel and you emerge in Kelpie’s Court. Look up. The tall, stepped gables crowd in above, revealing a hedged, mean patch of sky. Only in midsummer are the old heavy flags of the courtyard warmed by the sun. This is where the Todd family lived. Second door on the left. Number 3.

These are curious buildings on each side of the Royal Mile. Imagine
the street as being set on top of a vast sloping ridge. On the south side the buildings clutter and tumble haphazardly to the Grassmarket and Victoria Street below. But on the other side, the north, there is an abrupt steep descent to the railway lines at the bottom of the valley. On the north side of the High Street a house with four stories at the front can have, because of the angle of the slope, nine or ten at the back. From Princes Street, across the valley gardens, these vast strict blocks face you like masonry cliffs seamed with narrow chasms. In those days they seemed prodigious edifices, embryonic skyscrapers, still growing.

Some of these old buildings contained up to twenty apartments, some small, some grand. Ours was one of the latter; I think at one stage, two had been knocked into one. There was a large drawing room, a library, a dining room, six bedrooms and a bathroom. A large kitchen with a pantry, a scullery and a sleeping closet constituted the servants’ quarters. There had been buildings on this site since the fifteenth century. From time to time they had fallen or burned down and new dwellings had been constructed on the ruins. The architecture on the High Street had the character of an antiquated stone shantytown. Houses had grown piecemeal, by accretion and alteration. Windows were all sizes—actually a pleasing diversity—and installing water closets and modern plumbing required real ingenuity.

The oldest part of the building was invariably the stairs and stairwell. Stone and spiral, they survived the periodic destructions. The steps were smooth, concaved by the stigmata of a million boots. The doors off were small—easier to defend, I suppose; or built for smaller, earlier Scotsmen. The well was always dark. A faint light drained down from a high window at the roof. Here and there a gas mantle hissed. There was a musty vegetable dampness about these stairways—like an old gloomy cellar: earthy, mossy, feculent.

Our apartment was on the first floor. Through the tiny doorway was a hall with wooden boards, empty save for a fireplace with a coal fire always burning there winter and summer, as if to shield our home from the stairs’ chill grip. To the right a door led to the kitchen; to the left, the living rooms. It was as if one moved not only from one climate to another but also to another era. From a world of stone and steel (the pocked handrail) to wood, paneling, paper, rugs and pictures. The drawing room had a fine molded ceiling, the library an Oriental silk carpet. The corridors were paneled in fumed oak, the bedrooms lined with hand-blocked printed papers. This was a legacy of my mother’s last, fatal confinement. After her death, the character of the apartment—which
had been tasteful, soft and comfortable—changed, so I was told. The house I grew up in was comfortable enough, but in a severe way. Few traces remained of my mother’s presence. Or rather, by the time I was old enough to notice them, they had been transformed by time: sun-faded platinotypes, damp-stained wallpaper, worn-flat rugs. My father did not believe in change for change’s sake. Thank God my mother had installed a water closet—at least we could shit in a civilized manner. There were still not a few apartments in the “lands” (as these great tenements were known in Edinburgh) further down the High Street where a housemaid collected chamber pots from every bedroom and emptied them down some infernal funnel set in the corner of the kitchen floor, where the excrement dropped a hundred feet into a communal septic tank, emptied once or twice a week by corporation night-soil workers.

We had an inspiring view from our drawing room windows. Princes Street, with its department stores and hotels, dense with pedestrians, omnibuses, tramcars and motors; the National Gallery, the Scott Monument, the Calton Hill; and below us the lush greenness and always busy pathways of the Waverley Gardens. They never seemed to be empty, these gardens; they were always populated by strolling families of Edinburgh folk, staring at the fountains, listening to brass bands, gaping at the humdrum flowerbeds. You would have thought they had never seen grass and trees before, so assiduously did they frequent the place. And yet the city is overwhelmed with views of the countryside, wherever you look. Stand on George Street and you have an unobstructed panorama of the Forth and across the wide water to the farmlands of Fife. Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags form a backdrop to the east. To the west the gentle Pentland Hills …

I used to be annoyed by the seemly traffic of the gardens. I always, from my earliest memories, preferred the Old Town—the uneven, black, friable descent of the High Street, dirty and reeking as it might have been. The most modest fall of rain had the gutters overflowing with mud. Farther down the hill, past the North Bridge, the gray water would foam past the haggard derelict lands, the grim pubs, the fetid coffeehouses and “residential hotels.” Here the drunks, itinerants and prostitutes lived, plied their trade and whiled away their time. A castle at one end, a palace at the other and a cathedral in the middle. It was the spine of the city but also its large intestine, as it were, stretched out, coiled around the linked vertebrae—bile mixed with bone.

*     *     *

The child accepts his environment, however bizarre, as a norm, unaware of alternatives. It was a long time before I thought of my upbringing as anything out of the ordinary. Was I happy at Number 3 Kelpie’s Court? I suppose I was, in that I never thought of posing myself the question. Thompson and my father were irregular companions, Thompson at school, my father at work. I grew up, almost entirely, in the care and charge of our housekeeper, Oonagh McPhie. She had a succession of scullery maids who helped in the kitchen, made the fires, swept and cleaned, and Oonagh’s husband, Alfred, looked in every day to bring up coal if the bunker needed replenishing. But everything was controlled by Oonagh. During the day between breakfast and supper it was her demesne and answered to her sway.

She must have been in her mid-twenties when I was born. She was a braw, buxom girl from the isle of Lewis. She had dull fair hair, always worn up in a bun, and big strange protruding eyes with heavy lids. She was illiterate but had a tough, sharp mind. Her husband was a French polisher and they lived not far away in the Grassmarket. She had three children, two boys and a girl, all school age, but they were never in our house. Oonagh would arrive at six in the morning and leave after dinner at eight. How did she run her own household? What happened to her children? We never inquired. Actually I did, from time to time, but she always deflected my questioning: “Oh, they’re fine. They can look after themselves,” or “Why do you want to see my tiny place when you’ve got this lovely home all to yourself?” I did not persist. I was not really concerned, to tell the truth; all that was important was that Oonagh should be there, at home with me. I never remember her taking a holiday.