Eric McCormack - Cloud

“But disaster struck.

“One afternoon, he had to attend the university for a meeting.

During his absence from home, a massive thunderstorm engulfed Edinburgh. A bolt of lightning struck his villa and set it aflame. Because of fallen trees and flooding all over the city, it took the fire brigade a long time to arrive. They managed to pull the deafmute servant out of the basement alive. They understood enough from her frantic noises and pointing to hack their way down again into the basement. There they found both children already dead from smoke inhalation. The rest of the house was in ruins and the professor’s study and all his notebooks were incinerated.”

PROFESSOR ARTIMORE, Sarah told me, had subsequently been charged with numerous crimes, including human trafficking, kidnapping, unlawful confinement, and manslaughter. The deafmute girl testified against him by sign language and in writing.

The professor would say nothing, but through his counsel, pleaded guilty to all charges.

At the sentencing, this same counsel argued, in mitigation of his client, that his was by no means the first attempt at such an experiment. He cited the well-known historical precedents— even that king of Scotland. He also maintained that similar experiments were still being conducted by a variety of linguists in less enlightened parts of the world, where the concept of human rights for children wasn’t taken seriously.

He went further. Even in our own hemisphere today, members of various professions were permitted to subject children daily to horrific behaviour-modifying procedures. These were often druginduced and unproven, yet the practitioners garnered not the slightest disapproval from the authorities. His client, Professor Artimore, may have been misguided, but he was essentially a humane man. He’d taken every measure to ensure the children were well treated — aside from confining them in a basement and depriving them of language. In reality, it was a violent act of nature that killed them, not the professor’s research.

The judge wasn’t impressed. Artimore was sentenced to life in a maximum security prison. He was later transferred to Eildon House as a more suitable place of correction for a scholarcriminal to serve out his time.

At first, several of his former colleagues used to visit him. Before the fire, he’d apparently hinted to them that he’d made the most astonishing, groundbreaking observations on the origins of language. These colleagues now told him he still had a scholar’s obligation to publish his research and make his discoveries known for the benefit of linguistic science. Yes, his behaviour had been atrocious in the eyes of humanity, but what was done was done— publishing his findings would be a clear way to make amends.

The professor maintained his silence in the presence of these former colleagues, and soon all visits ceased.

“He’s been here now for ten years,” said Sarah Mackay. “He hasn’t said a word to anyone since he arrived.”

I’d been curious all along about those marks that looked like letters of the alphabet on the professor’s forehead. It was as though someone had rubber-stamped them there.

“You’re almost right,” she said. “When he was in the penitentiary they caught him in the middle of the night carving them into his forehead with a piece of broken glass. They’re the capital letters THGIR. It’s been speculated that he’d been trying to write ‘THE GIRLS’—you know, as in an inscription on a gravestone. But he didn’t have a mirror, so it could have been ‘RIGHT.’ Anyway, whatever it was he didn’t get it finished.”

Hearing about Artimore’s research had recalled Dupont’s work and his attempt to give an ethical justification for what outsiders might consider his criminal behaviour. That in turn reminded me of Sarah’s comment that my own line of work would have disappointed Miriam, in view of the “idealistic streak” she’d seen in me. So I smiled and tried to make some facetious remark on the irony of “right” the wrong way round.

Sarah Mackay didn’t smile.

“‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are words we rarely have much use for at Eildon House,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons it’s not easy for certain types of people to work here.”

AFTER THAT we just walked together, silent for once, along the corridors of Eildon House and were soon standing on the front steps. The sky was overcast, suiting my mood at parting with Sarah Mackay. She looked directly into my eyes.

“You can have no idea just how curious I was to see you after having heard about you so often from Miriam,” she said. “This visit really has been lovely. And it’s been a special treat for me to know how interested you are in what I do here. You really are a kindred spirit.”

I assured her that it had been a great pleasure for me to meet her and learn about her work. I was especially grateful for everything she’d told me about Miriam. Knowing the truth was a comfort to me, at last.

She seemed about to say something else, then decided against it.

So I thanked her again for seeing me and told her that she was a remarkable young woman. Miriam and Sam must have been the proudest of parents.

Her blue eyes became resolute. I could see she’d made up her mind to say whatever it was that was on her mind. In fact, I had one of those disorienting feelings of anticipating what’s about to happen, as if it’s happened before. Those questions she’d asked earlier about Frank, and about my relationship with him, flashed through my mind and I knew almost with certainty what she was about to say.

“Yes, they were proud of me,” said Sarah Mackay. “But Sam wasn’t my father. You are.”

THE DRIVE WEST was quite straightforward, though the weather again turned into a mix of rain and sleet. I had to keep my mind on the winding road, especially when passing trucks sent up a blinding spray. But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about that final revelation.

Sarah Mackay, my daughter! Apparently she’d been aware of that ever since she was a child. Miriam and Sam had believed she ought to know, and so they told her the truth. Miriam’s rejection of me hadn’t been based only on her belief that I wouldn’t be able to deal with her father. She’d also found out she was pregnant. Those two things together were, in her mind, too much to ask a young man — a boy, really — to put up with.

Over the years it had occasionally crossed my mind that Miriam’s final act towards me might have had something to do with what she felt were her obligations towards that old man. Never that she was pregnant. What an irony. As often as not it’s the man responsible for the pregnancy who runs from his responsibilities. In our case, Miriam knew I wouldn’t run — that if I’d known she was pregnant, I’d have insisted all the more on staying. So she’d told me nothing and driven me away. Though she was in love with me, she probably didn’t trust me to stay with her through thick and thin. She didn’t have the same kind of love for Sam, but she trusted him.

She’d made the hard choice and the right one.

That was exactly what I told Sarah after hearing this startling news on the front steps of Eildon House. I begged her to forgive me. She hugged me and told me there was nothing to forgive. We both had tears in our eyes as I got into my car and drove away.

AT THE AIRPORT, a heavy afternoon sea fog delayed all flights, so it wasn’t till well after four that we boarded the plane and took off. I had a window seat and glanced out from time to time, but my mind was still full of Sarah’s final revelations. By now, my feelings about what she’d told me had become more complicated. One minute I’d again start feeling sorry for myself: Miriam, by forsaking me, had killed my capacity for ever truly loving someone else. But the next minute self-loathing would take the place of self-pity: Miriam had realized, all too clearly, a basic truth about me — that I was really only capable of loving myself. And so it went, back and forth, endless variants and combinations of self-justification and self-condemnation.