Upperkirkgate Chapter Two: Could He Dig Without Arms? Part 2

They proceeded up Upperkirkgate, past the bookshop. Jack stopped, and put a hand to the door, when she took his arm and propelled him past it. “I know it’s hard,” she said, “but there should be more to our lives than just books…” They walked past the Robert Gordon University’s student union, towards the Art Gallery. Jack found himself walking ahead of her, through the silently revolving doors.

  He made to offer his scarf to one of the statues standing by the entrance. Alison returned it to him. “But I thought he was the intellectual one,” said Jack. She shook her head as they climbed the stairs to the collection of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. “Life. Life is… what we make it,” said Jack, smiling at a reproduction of the Renoir painting Les Parapluies, showing a young woman surrounded by a crowd with their umbrellas up. “How free would you say you are now?” he asked her. She rolled her eyes.

     “I thought we solved that one.”

     “We need to seek beyond the existential veil, beyond the substance of the perceived potential…”

     “Hold it. Tell Hamlet, not to be so dreary, but go not to school in Wittenburg.”

     “Thou hast my dissertation much offended.”

     “I think the gentleman doth protest too much.”

     “If you’re really as free as you say you are, can you create any of the works you see here? Or destroy them? How do you know if you’re going to the next room?”

     Alison laughed at the caption underneath the William Dyce painting. “’An idealised portrait of Westburn’. To say the least.”

     “He moved King’s College just so it could be seen from there…” Jack was restless, confined. The varnished wooden floor seemed long yet restrictive, almost coming and going, his jailer pointing at different pictures, hemming him in, laughing, it all seemed a bad dream. The high windows appeared far away, an illusion of light to someone trapped in her Stygian world.

     Alison smiled, in a hard way. “Learning’s good for you.”

     “I think events have pre-determined I leave now,” he said, edging towards the stairs. She caught his arm, twisting him round towards the next exhibit.

     “We are free to learn, to assert ourselves, to work,” she said. He looked at the fire exit, saying ‘This door is alarmed’, and silently agreed with it. The next picture was Rosslyn Chapel, South Aisle. He reached out to the door depicted, almost hanging off its hinges, as if he could escape that way. “Good architecture, outdated practice,” said Alison briskly.

     “I want to get out,” he said quietly. Passing by Francesco da Rimini, it seemed the woman in the painting was passive, maybe slightly resistant to her situation as a man leaned over her. Jack stopped by Shirrapburn Loch. “That’s like the country where my relatives live, in the west,” he said.

     “Not actually the original setting… and not, in itself, the original title,” she said, reading the caption.

     “Such scope for misunderstanding… the work exhibited not as the artist intended… you know, I had to write an essay on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline once… the plot is something of a mess, a cross between Roman and Stuart history… some wonderful language, though… ‘Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweeps, return to dust’…”

     “Not for a while, if I can help it.”

     “Don’t you think there are limits to enjoyment… books fade, pictures lose their colour, even Leonardo’s The Last Supper…”

     “Actually, that’s what I like about the theatre,” she said abruptly. “The sense of time passing, that this is a one-off, here and now, make it real to me in ways that films don’t… Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, all about last chances, lost chances, things that will never happen again… on the stage, it’s electric.”

     “Some directors have slanted it towards comedy,” Jack remarked.

     “Oh yes, it all hangs on Charlotte, and the ridiculousness of Mrs Ranevsky’s brother,” she said. “But I see it as a might-have-been. She could still have saved the estate if only she’d acted sooner.”

     “I’ve always hated development,” he said, moving closer. “The sound of the axe at the end- shocking.”

     “Even more for Firs,” she said. “You don’t know if he’s dead or alive.”

     “I think he’s had it, along with the house.”

     “The grounds had had it anyway, that fruitless orchard all coming down. Once you kill a tree, it takes so long to grow another. The Californian Redwoods are so old.”

     “Give or take a few millenia. Do you remember every performance you’ve seen?”

     “No. That’s part of the point.”

     “Ephemeral, eh?” She sighed into his shoulder. “Will we go down?” They headed for the stairs, her arm firmly in his, leading, a petite brunette straitjacket. She led him down the broad marble steps. By mutual unspoken instinct, they gravitated towards the gallery’s coffee shop. “Not a patch on our own bookshop,” said Jack, picking up a tray at the self-service counter. “Still, it makes a change.”

     “I like the environment,” said Alison, stretching, cat-like, and smiling. The art gallery’s coffee shop was much smaller than the bookshop not far away, but this made it more intimate. She settled down at a table in a corner and watched him.

     In a minute he sat beside her, giving her a coffee, and one scone on a tray. She raised an eyebrow. “I was a bit short of money,” he said. “Needed to save it for the bus.” She took a knife and cut it in half, pushing one half towards him. He smiled and ate it. She watched him, not eating hers.

     “I liked the one of Dyce sketching in a gondola,” she said. “It wasn’t just the orchard that had potential…” Part of Jack’s scone went down the wrong way, and he choked slightly. Alison got up swiftly, banged him on the back, and it seemed to go down. “I wonder if he knew how talented he really was as a young man…” she mused as she sat down again. “Will you show me some of your poems?” He smiled and shrugged.

     “It’s a hard market… I tried to have them published before.” He looked at the door, wondered how it would be if he left her now… he had paid for it… Perhaps she had some sort of forcefield, a tractor beam, to draw him back… it was against common sense. He had a connection with her, almost against his will. She was looking at him intently across the table, seeming vulnerable, when… “I will arise and go now,” he said abruptly, rising to his feet. Unlike her, he had not removed his jacket. Alison looked surprised.

     “But it’s the wrong season for Innisfree,” she said to his back. “What if the ferry isn’t running?” He was almost outside already, pushing at the revolving doors, not seeing the procession of elderly women coming in, pushing the other way. Jack ground his teeth in frustration. “Oh, come on.” He did not dare look behind him. The pensioners seemed to take forever, the door moved so slowly… He pushed his way outside, ignoring the looks they gave him. Jack looked up and down the street, out on Schoolhill. He went against the tide, up onto Union Terrace, onto Union Street, towards Holburn Street. He needed time to think. All the way, he was haunted by thoughts of small, dark women.

                                                           ***

“I was hurt when you did that.”

     “I know my love, I’m sorry.” Alison picked up a torn second-hand paperback and threw it back on the pile, unread. Her hands were shaking.

     “How can I rely on you-“

     “I’m sorry, it was just I needed some air-“ Alison and Jack were circling round a table with broken crates, holding second-hand paperbacks, some in very poor condition. They were in the basement of a charity shop on Correction Wynd, between Schoolhill and Union Street. A flickering electric light cast shadows over the books in the corner. Jack kept one eye on the books, the other on her.

     “I never saw you over the weekend,” she said, looking down at the nearest crate and drumming her fingers on the outside of it.

     “Busy… notes to write up, you know.”

     “I heard there was a good show at The Lemon Tree.”

     “We must go sometime. Look.” He pointed at a tattered copy of A Tale of Two Cities. He held it out to her.

     “I’ve already got it. With a scholarly introduction, and proper notes. That’s just a popular edition.”

     “Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “You were showing me popular editions in Pirrips’, our bookshop, a month ago.” She turned away, as if she could not bear him. Light filtered down on them from the street above, through a narrow grille that did not look entirely safe.

     “I think we’re late for Bastille Day,” he said. “Let them eat cake…” He looked around for a way out, in more ways than one.

     “Jack. I’m serious. Why can’t you stay with me?”

     “I’m here now,” he said, hating the way she sounded so reasonable.

     “But you don’t want to be.” The dislike was burning him.

     “Of course I do. I like books… I like you.” She was gripping the edge of the crate, her fingernails white.

     “Do you really?”

     Jack looked at the carelessly assembled pile, and picked out a copy of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “’I commend to thee thy yellow stockings…’ That was an in-joke about the Spanish flag. I enjoyed a performance of it at the theatre… they had a member of the Flying Pickets as Feste. A good singing voice, as you might expect. I was once told, as a rough guide, tragedy in Shakespeare is about who wants to kill somebody, and in comedy, it’s about who wants to sleep with somebody.” He smiled, involuntarily. 

     The light from the street soiled down on Alison: he could not see her face very well. The naked electric bulb still swayed and flickered. “Why does no-one else come down here, they could be missing the bargain of the century…” said Jack. Alison did not move. “Ali? How are you doing, really?” Her voice came out hard and brittle.

     “I try to see things as you might, in a positive way.” He nodded carefully.

     “It’s been said the tragedies are “masculine” with themes of violence and war and death, and the comedies “feminine”, with themes of intuition, communication… maybe that’s why I’m still trying to make up my mind on Hamlet…”

     “My cousin had a friend,” she said suddenly. “Trained to postgraduate level in librarianship at RGU… ended up in hospital, heavy medication, maybe ECT, though I can’t be sure of that.”

     “There’s rosemary, for remembrance… so it’s not all fun and games down by the Deeside riverside?”

     “No, it’s not. She shivered. “He couldn’t get a job. Qualifications are relative, sometimes. There were the roses, but they withered all when his job prospects died. What do you think you’ll be doing a year from now, Jack?”

     “Well, maybe staying on for a Masters, just in case Guildenstern and Rosencrantz aren’t entirely dead… don’t know about a job.”

     Alison had moved back under the electric light. She was sorting through the pile of books in a random way. The bulb swung, like a pendulum. Jack wandered away from the table, sat down on the stairs after a moment’s hesitation. He saw her face best that way. “Do you remember that kids’ show Rentaghost, the dragon was always-“

     “in the cellar!” she finished, and laughed, putting aside What Katy Did.

     “Maybe this used to be a cellar… haunted by the likes of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch.”

     “How rude.”

     “Well, I’m afraid Will wasn’t writing for the convenience of schoolteachers or kids… he was up for a laugh, giving the masses their entertainment.”

     “How public-spirited.”

     “It’s true.”

     “How do you explain The Taming of the Shrew?”

     “How do you mean?”

     “All that- subservient stuff. Kneeling to the master, obedience, etc. What right had Petruchio to treat Kate like that?”

     “Well, I never really studied it…”

     “You told me you’d read them all at one point.”

     “Yes, well… perhaps it should be changed, for a modern audience.”

     “How?”

     “Having Petruchio respect her more, show her independence as an asset…”

     “Wouldn’t you lose a lot of the comedy that way?”

     “Maybe. How do you think Estella would fare in a modern novel, a cold little madam, an exercise in revenge, all built on false premises?”

     “Very well, I should think.” He rose from the stairs, dusting his jeans. She looked at him, smiling. “Time to go, then. ‘Go girl, seek happy days’…” She did not complete the quotation.

     The ground floor entrance of the shop was in much better condition. An old woman came fussing over. “You really shouldn’t have been down there, it’s not being used at the moment.”

     “Ah. We wondered why nobody joined us,” said Jack, beginning to sidle out of the door. Crab-like, Alison followed him.  She pointed towards Schoolhill. They wandered out of the shop in that direction, hand in hand, heading up left towards Union Terrace Gardens. They walked down the steps, Alison patting the head of one of the stone leopards representing the city in passing. “You never know.”

     The trees were in the later stages of shedding their leaves. A morose park attendant was raking them up with a grim determination. They sat down on a bench. Alison crossed her legs, plunged her hands deep in her pockets against the cold. She did not wear gloves. “I remember clowns,” said Jack. “Live Aid weekend, summer of 1985. The first wedding I was ever at, I was fat and had to wear red trousers. Too tight. I had difficulty believing in any of it.”

     “Now?”

     “As I said, it works sometimes. It did for my parents.”

     “Where do the clowns come in?”

     “My sister and I were deposited down here with an uncle while our parents went to the reception. There were clowns, games, human chess… great stuff.”

     “No way would anyone get me into a wedding dress, to obey any man who tried to tie me to all those conventions, like so many railway lines.”

     “Lines of enquiry… lines of communication.” The semi-ruined bulk of the Triple Kirks towered above them. Jack twisted round in his seat to look up at it. “You get the best view from the train, going north. I still have relatives there.”

     There was a granite square ahead of them, which could be adapted to various functions in the summer, empty now, leaves drifting slowly across it. The hum of traffic came from above them. “We’re in a sort of bowl…” he said, “a retreat from the noise above. Perhaps we’re a sort of salad.”

She smiled. “Would you like to serve the salad undressed?”

     “I’ve heard that one before. Never bettered since Laurel and Hardy. Ah, the smell of leaves…” said Jack. “I like bonfires. So efficient… autumn consumes the calories of summer, so converting it into fuel for the spring.”

     “How you waffle,” she said, and yawned elegantly.

     “If I were a potato waffle, would you eat me?”

     “Probably.”