William Boyd - The New Confessions

“It’s easy. I can see what I’m meant to be doing.”

“My God.… Right! I’ll tell you what I’m doing with you. The straw we must clutch at is your unaccountable talent for arithmetic. I spoke to a colleague in the maths department. There is a man, a Mr. Archibald Minto, who runs a school for such wayward talents as your own. You will start there this September.”

This was not such bad news. “What’s the school called?” I asked.

“Minto Academy.”

“Can I get there by train?”

The one blessing would be an end to my constant commuting. My father smiled.

“Alas, no. You will be boarding. It is some thirty miles away. Near Galashiels.” He looked seriously at me. “You have brought this upon yourself, John. I didn’t want to have to send you away, but I refuse to allow you to indulge yourself any further.” He turned. “Oonagh! We’ll have that veal now.”

The next day I took the train out to Barnton. I had to talk to Donald. I have no idea what I thought this might achieve but I felt a strong need to see him, and I knew he would want to be aware of this decisive change about to affect my life.

I turned down the green avenue to his house. The blinds were half-lowered in the upstairs windows. In the front room I could see a housemaid dusting. I rang the doorbell.

“Is Mr. Verulam in, please? I’ve come to see him?”

“Sorry, sonny, Mr. Verulam’s away on his holidays. He’s gone to England.”

The rest of the summer passed with distressing speed. Minto Academy, I learned, had no uniform apart from the kilt, a garment I had never worn. Oonagh took me to Jenner’s in Princes Street, where I was measured for three kilts and chose the tartans. Two kilts were of a coarse heavy cloth for daily wear. The third was finer, a dress kilt for formal occasions. I had two sporrans bought for me, two short tweed coats with tweed waistcoats and a black velvet jacket with silver buttons. We also purchased oiled wool knee socks, stout ankle boots and delicate pointed lace-up dress shoes. For the first time I came face to face with the paraphernalia of my national costume.

“You look grand,” Oonagh said, when I tried the dress outfit on. I was not convinced. I was a city child; I felt I was being suborned by some primitive tribe.

Three days remained before I had to catch the train to Thornielee, near Galashiels. From there the school trap would deliver me to the Academy, a few miles up the Tweed near a village called Laidlaw. As seems to be the norm with disaster, the baleful day was heralded by a spell of brilliant weather.

I sat in my bedroom looking at my already packed traveling trunk, fingering my camera and wondering if I should risk taking it and my album to school. More darkly, I swore obscure revenge on my father and felt strangely betrayed by Donald Verulam’s untimely absence. I thought of leaving the apartment and Oonagh and my sense of self-pity overwhelmed me. I felt full of tears, like a sodden sponge — one slight squeeze and water would flow.

I think Oonagh sensed this separation as keenly. For all her irony and judicious affection, I had been her charge for thirteen years. I wandered in and out of the kitchen smiling weakly, morose, pondering my future.

“Here,” she said, “let’s go bathing tomorrow. We’ll take the bairn to Canty Bay. Just like we used to.”

Oonagh, Gregor and I caught an early train from Waverley. On arrival at North Berwick we walked through the village and along the stony cliff path towards the bay. The sky was a pale ice-blue. A few plump tough clouds hung up above, their shadows obligingly distant over the Forth. Coming over a rise I could see the uneven dome of the Bass Rock clear in the hazeless air. A very faint breeze rose up from the firth and below us stretched the bay. A few bathers and children congregated at the town and around the striped canvas bathing machines and a duckboard jetty where a long thin steam launch advertised CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE BASS ROCK — SIXPENCE. A small gnarled Gypsy tended three dusty donkeys for those who fancied a trot up and down the strand.

We trudged up the beach to the far end away from the crowd. We were surprised by a hale old man — elbows and knees a lurid pink — who emerged from the sea quite naked and who, with a blithe “Fine day,” strode fitly across our path towards his clothes. We found our picnic spot hidden in a gully between two high dunes. Paths wound in and out of the sand hills fringed with coarse grass, and disappeared into the gorse and whin bushes beyond. We spread a traveling rug, unpacked the picnic and found a cool spot for the ginger beer bottles. Gregor was stripped, hauled into a bathing costume and dispatched with bucket and spade to the water’s edge. I went behind a dune and undressed slowly. The radiant day could not lift my spirits. The excursion was so evidently an attempted antidote that I could not see beyond its ulterior motives. I tramped back to the picnic site enjoying the way the sharp dune grass cut at my bare legs.

Oonagh was halfway through changing. Her skirt and petticoat lay on the rug. Her swimming costume — a coarse woolen thing — was pulled up to her waist and she was now trying to work its bodice up beneath her blouse and camisole. I sat down with a histrionic sigh and picked moodily at a scab on my knee.

“Cheer up,” Oonagh said, impatiently removing her blouse. “It’s not the end of the world.”

“That’s all right for you to say.”

She dropped her blouse on the rug and came and knelt in front of me.

“Come on, Johnny,” she said quietly. “If you don’t like it tell your faither, an’ he’ll fetch you home.”

“That’s what you think.”

She made an exasperated face. “Well, I’m not going to waste my good time feeling sorry for you if you’re so set on doing it all yourself.”

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.