Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

Murray saw AL 2.30 jotted in the margin of a busy day. He asked, ‘How did Lunan react to being sent down?’

‘Sent down?’ The tone was mild. ‘I wasn’t aware we were in Oxford or Cambridge.’

‘No.’ Murray leaned back in his chair wondering how, for all his preparations, he could have forgotten the pedantry that lay behind James’s smile. ‘Was he upset?’

‘He may have been. But as far as I can recall, he took it like a man.’

‘Standard procedure would have been to send Lunan a letter. Why did you feel the need to inform him personally?’

‘I asked myself exactly the same thing when I saw the appointment in my diary.’

James’s manner shifted and Murray realised he’d hit on a question that interested the old man. He remembered this pattern from his undergraduate tutorials, the professor’s initial impatience set aside as he got into the meat of the matter, as if the verbal barbs were self-defence against boredom.

‘Let’s just say, whatever it was, I wouldn’t have trusted Lunan to anyone else in the department at that time. Even I could see we were a bunch of stuffed shirts.’ James moved slightly against his cushions as if trying to settle his bones. ‘Perhaps it says something about my own prejudices, but Archie looked belligerent. Long hair, cowboy moustache, scruffy clothes. . there’s a particular leather coat that sticks in the memory.’ James gave a scholarly chuckle. ‘Ten years later teachers and lecturers had adopted the same look, with the exception of a few diehards like myself, the tweed jacket and suede shoes brigade. But back then, in Scotland at any rate, that kind of image still had counterculture connotations. So couple it with Lunan’s poor attendance. . I was possibly worried he might get the stuffing knocked out of him. Despite his posturing, Lunan always struck me as delicate.’

‘In what way?’

‘He was sensitive, not a prerequisite for poets as you no doubt know. He looked the part, as I said, the leather coat, the ready fists, the all-too-frequently cut lip and black eye, but he wasn’t as robust as he made out.’

Murray asked, ‘How do you mean?’

James paused and looked at the ceiling as if searching for an explanation in its shadowed corners.

‘In those days I had a little group who used to meet once a month and discuss their own verse.’ James was being modest. His ‘little group’ had fostered a school of writers whose reputation had spread far beyond the literary circles of their city. Some of its members had later helped define their nation to the world. ‘The first poem Lunan presented was plagiarised. It was badly written enough to be the work of an undergraduate so there’s a good possibility I wouldn’t have rumbled him, if I hadn’t had a poem published in the same back issue of the journal he’d lifted it from.’ James shook his head in wonder. ‘Amazing.’

‘What did you do?’

‘My first instinct was to ask him about it in front of the group, but I resisted. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was already aware of Archie’s vulnerability. I simply took him aside and told him I knew. I think I expected that would be the last we saw of him, but for all he was weak, Archie was tough too. He came to the following meeting, this time with his own work. I must have been curious because I agreed to read it.’ James grimaced. ‘The poems he gave me were good. Not perfect, but original.’

Murray nodded towards Lunan’s book, perched on top of the pile at the professor’s elbow.

‘Did any of the poems he showed you appear in Moontide ?’

‘One of them. “Preparation for a Wake”. It was revised and tightened up by the time the collection was published, of course, but the concept was there at the start: the raising of the dead man, the play on words between a wake and awake, the horror his drinking companions feel when their dead mate sits up ready to join in the merrymaking. The lyricism of the language wasn’t as successful as it was in the published version, but it was still remarkable.’

‘What did the rest of the group make of it?’

‘I don’t recall any particular debate. You have to remember it was a long time ago, and we were privileged to be at the birth of many remarkable pieces.’

James looked Murray in the eye. It was like a door slamming.

‘How did Archie get on with the group in general?’

‘Okay, as far as I remember. But as I said, it was a long time ago.’

Another door shut.

James gave the kind of smile favoured by American presidents on the stocks, but the professor’s teeth were yellowed, his gums pink and receding.

‘What about your own response to his work?

‘My own response?’

The professor made the question sound preposterous.

Murray smiled apologetically.

‘What was your initial reaction when you eventually got to see his writing?’

It was a sunny day outside, but the sitting room windows had taken on the smoky taint that glass acquires after a year or two’s neglect and the pair were stuck in murk and shadow. The dust that coated the air was formed from James and James’s wife, decayed and merged. Murray wanted to brush them from himself, but instead he smiled and waited.

James moved a hand against the arm of his chair, as if trying to make his mind up about something. When he spoke his voice was dangerously gentle.

‘Are you asking if I was jealous of Lunan’s ability?’

Murray hesitated, surprised by the revelation in the old man’s question.

‘Your professionalism is beyond reproach.’

James lifted the copy of Moontide from the table next to him and looked at Lunan’s Rasputin face. Somewhere a clock ticked.

‘I was jealous, of course, but I was jealous of others too. Maybe we were all jealous of each other, beneath the comradeship. I honestly don’t think I ever let it affect my dealings with him, and then. . well. . how can you be jealous of a dead man?’ He put the book back on the table and smiled at Murray. ‘But I am, of course, every time I read his poems.’ He laughed and gave the chair a slight slap as if rousing himself to business. ‘The strange thing was that the filched poem he’d presented was way beneath the standard of what he was capable of creating. That’s what I mean about a vulnerable streak. Archie was over-sensitive, lacking in confidence and yet at the same time burdened with an exaggerated ego.’

‘Not the most attractive combination.’

‘No, but Lunan could be attractive. He had the gift of the gab and a sense of the absurd. When he was in the right frame of mind, he was good company.’

‘And when he wasn’t?’

‘Morose, sarcastic, inclined to drunkenness. I had to ask him to leave the session on two separate occasions. If he’d been anyone else I would have told him not to come back. There were precedents: at least one drunken writer had been barred.’

‘But he was too talented to dismiss?’

James leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling again. It was a theatrical gesture, a pause that preceded a point to be underlined.

‘Talent’s an odd thing, essential of course, but no guarantee of anything. To be perfectly frank I doubted he had the discipline to succeed. I thought he was more in love with the idea of being a writer than with the need to create.’

‘What made you think that?’

‘Partly, I suppose, because I’d seen it before. We never turned any sober customers away from these get-togethers, you know. We didn’t advertise them, of course, it was strictly word of mouth, but from time to time you’d get romantic heroes wafting in. They couldn’t play an instrument so they thought they would wield a pen. It’s a very powerful image — young Thomas Chatterton, Percy Shelley, Jack Kerouac — the disaffected writer battling the world before dying young and beautiful.’ He laughed. ‘Well, maybe not so beautiful in Kerouac’s case, killing yourself with alcohol tends to be a bit bloating, but you get my drift.’ The professor sighed. ‘Working with young people for as long as I have, it’s inevitable that one is going to encounter untimely deaths, a car crash, an overdose, a climbing accident.’ He paused. ‘A drowning. It’s a cliché to say it’s a waste, and yet what else is it? A bloody waste.’ There was another pause as if he were silently mourning the young people who had died before their span. ‘So, to answer your question, yes I was aware of his talent early on, but I thought it squandered on him. Remember the poems I saw had potential, but they weren’t there yet.’ He grinned. ‘And there was I with my reservoirs of discipline and hard-won knowledge unable to create the magic that he could.’ James shook his head. ‘My God, I was ripe for some Faustian pact.’ His eyes met Murray’s. ‘But I wasn’t the only one.’