A Terrible Freedom

By Eric Linklater

First published in 1966, Eric Linklater's brilliant novel tells the story of a double existence.

Evan Gaffikin, sixtyish, grumpy and bored with his dull commercial success, discovers and develops his power to dream: to dream in such depth and in such glowing reality that he is able to escape his extraordinary existence. We learn of his double life as scenes from Gaffikin's real life alternate with his surrealistic, vivid, and often hilariously bawdy forays into the world of unreality. As his dream-world and its remarkable characters, gradually get the upper hand, the tension of the novel rises and the climactic sequence - in a yacht off the Hebrides - is mysterious and exciting.

A Terrible Freedom could, perhaps, be described as an idiosyncratic venture into the realm of science fiction; but it may be preferable to see it as a conventional novel built with classical composure of unconventional material. Either way it is a tour de force of imagination and narrative skills.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448207282

Eric Linklater

Eric Linklater was born in 1899 in Penarth, Wales. He was educated in Aberdeen, and was initially interested in studying medicine; he later switched his focus to journalism, and became a full-time writer in the 1930's. During his career, Linklater served as a journalist in India, a commander of a wartime fortress in the Orkney Islands, and rector of Aberdeen University. He authored more than twenty novels for adults and children, in addition to writing short stories, travel pieces, and military histories, among other works.

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A TERRIBLE FREEDOM

ERIC LINKLATER

Contents

1 A Long and Arduous Night

2 The Quiet Succession of My Days

3 A Curious Affair at Torquay

4 My Son Robert Comes to Dine

5 Ecstasy under the Ceiling

6 My Son William at My Club

7 A Very Old Story

8 Lilian

9 A Drastic Solution

10 My Dear Wife’s Little Escapade

11 The Drunken Train

12 I Meet the Good Brothers

13 When the Censor Slept

14 A Voyage to Cape Wrath

15 The Little Yacht

Postscript by William Gaffikin

Chapter One

A Long and Arduous Night

For two reasons—no, three—I resented the order bitterly. It was imperative, it came in a way that seemed to preclude any escape from the absurdity it commanded. It was anonymous, like most of the rules and ordinances that govern us, and though I hadn’t heard the man’s voice—nor indeed could I see him—I imagined it coarsened by vocational stupidity. And finally, it made stark nonsense when applied to me. To a man of my age, temperament, and figure!

But though unwilling, and more than a little frightened, I obeyed him, as did all who stood with me in the enormous, dark gymnasium. With shuffling feet and a convulsive, untidy movement we formed ranks, of a sort, and side-stepped to the left to make room for others who were still arriving. Many of those who stood near were no younger than I, and some who had already stripped—who wore only singlets and trousers clumsily belted with their knotted braces—showed the white and flabby arms of their desk-bound kind, and round basin-bellies that had been filled too often and too punctually. They were going to be under-engined and overburdened on the horizontal bar.

The gymnasium was a vast, echoing chamber, and very badly lighted. It was, I realised, an old abandoned hangar, hurriedly adapted for a sinister new purpose. The curious smell that pervaded it might be an amalgam of the ghostly odours of oil and petrol and the metal frames of Wellington bombers. There was also a smell of fear.

As in a great railway station—a station in war-time, an endless gloom full of whispering and menace and an indistinguishable multitude—the majority of those who had already come were invisible, or hardly visible, but I could see the movement of late arrivals and the shape of the interminable, narrow crowd, six or seven deep, that stood against a long wall of the hangar. The roof-lights illuminated only the centre of the building, and there, in a cone of shimmering radiance, were two men circling at the full extent of their arms, and in contrary movement, a horizontal bar. Behind them were others who somersaulted in procession over a gymnasium horse, and one who, on muscular stiff arms and with feet precisely pointed to the roof, marched slowly, upside-down, on parallel bars. In their white vests and navy-blue trousers they showed a strong family resemblance, if one could imagine a procreation of whalebone and steel and india-rubber; and I had immediately recognised them as sergeants from the Army School of Physical Training.

For the present they were demonstrating their strength and dexterity, and we were safe, huddled in the darkness. But not for long would we be allowed to stand and watch. At any moment now we would be told to fall in and follow an appointed leader. A barking imperative voice—a voice that might not be resisted—would issue commands, and we would follow, or try to follow, a leader who from a spring-board leapt with wide legs the brown length of the horse, and swung on iron wrists to this side and the other on the parallel bars, and jack-knifed for momentum to twirl impossibly round the horizontal bar.

I knew perfectly well that I could do none of these things. Even when I was young I had usually floundered and failed, and now—no, it would be stark folly to try! But there, in the immense gymnasium, I was one, and only one, of a multitude that had responded with perfect docility to an anonymous voice. A voice that I knew to be dreadful, though I had not heard it.

I spoke to the man beside me: ‘Did you hear what he said?’

‘It makes no difference,’ he answered. ‘If you’re told to come, you’ve got to come, and my advice is to make the best of it.’

For a moment, incredible though it must seem—incredible though it seemed to me—I was tempted to do just that. To yield to a general tide, and go forward on a gross current of unanimity. In their cone of light the agile sergeants made an exhilarating picture, and now the rhythmic movement of their lithe bodies was like an invitation to join a dance. Most of my neighbours were already responding to it. They were unfastening their ties, taking off their coats and their shoes, and making little bundles of their surplus clothing which they laid carefully against the long wall of the hangar. To the other smells in the building was added a strong smell of sweat.

More light flooded the hangar, as if luminous great daffodils were suddenly opening into bloom, and from somewhere came a compulsive, metallic music. Juke-box music, but not the sort one expects to hear from a juke-box. I have never had a good memorising ear, but I think—though admittedly I can’t be sure—I think it was Le Sacre du Printemps.

Some of my neighbours, who apparently thought it devotional in character, bowed their heads in a reverential way, and others stood self-consciously straight and still. Then the music stopped, the sergeants fell into line, dressing smartly by the right, and the tallest took up his position in front of them. The sergeants stood at ease, and in a silence that seemed unendurably long we waited—but waited for what?

Suddenly, in a voice that rang like a trumpet, the tallest of the instructors called the others to attention, a fanfare of trumpets shattered the heavy silence of expectation, and into the lighted centre of the hangar strode a woman of extraordinary appearance.

She was tall, massively built, and in an old-fashioned way was dressed—or partially dressed—for fox-hunting. She wore a top-hat and the curiously cumbrous skirt that was designed for women who rode side-saddle; but between hat and habit her body was encased in a long, black corset from Edwardian times, that very narrowly confined her waist and supported an ample bosom which rose above the rim of the corset in dazzling demi-lunes. Her shoulders and arms were bare, in what could only be called a splendour of nakedness, and it seemed perfectly natural for the tall sergeant to prostrate himself before her.

Whereupon she set one foot on his muscular back, hitched up her skirt to reveal a long, well-polished boot, and struck it loudly, two or three times, with her hunting-crop. Then she smiled at us, with what I thought a terrible confidence. Her handsome face—heavily fashioned but very handsome—disclosed a row of white and formidable teeth, and I realised that it was she who was going to give us our orders—and all but one of us were going to obey. My own brief impulse to enthusiasm, to join the common mood, had faded almost as quickly as it came, but my impressed companions in the hangar—there must have been twelve or fourteen hundred, men of all ages—were crowding forward, cheering and clapping their hands. Their minds had been allured by the muscular perfection of the sergeants’ display, and now were captive to that fearsome woman. Already they were volunteers in spirit. Gone was the gloom of the unlighted gymnasium, and the morose conscripts who had come slouching in, and stood dispirited under high walls, were shouting now in hoarse excitement.

I felt their excitement like a breaking wave that might smother and drown me, and my sudden decision was like the instinctive action of a swimmer who dives to escape the crashing fall of a wave. What persuaded me to go was not only my desire to escape the humiliation of failing to circle the horizontal bar, but my determination to evade the infection of a surrounding and stifling enthusiasm.

No one tried to prevent me from leaving. No one, so far as I could see, paid any attention to me; and I, for my part, made no attempt to escape attention. I want to make it quite clear that I didn’t run away. I walked away, quite slowly, with a purposeful tread and my head up. My only trouble was to find a door; and that, for some little time, I failed to do. I was beginning to feel rather worried, when a tall, well-dressed commissionaire stepped forward and said, in a very civil voice, ‘This way, sir.’ He opened a small wicket-gate in the dark wall of the hangar, and thanking him for his courtesy, I stepped outside. One has to make up one’s mind and take one’s own course, that’s the only difficulty, I thought; and a moment later was in the open air.

It was a light, bright morning—not sunny, but bright beneath high, blowing clouds—and I walked away in great contentment only partially flawed by the fact, of which I became aware after several minutes, that I didn’t know where I was. I was in a wide, open landscape—but where? I had no idea.

The turf under my feet was the close-cropped, springy sort—a thick coverlet of grass on shell-sand—that is known in the Western Isles of Scotland as machair; and I was forced to conclude that I was somewhere in the Outer Hebrides, and a very long way from home. But I had, I felt, no cause for complaint, though it was odd that I could not remember my journey. My memory, however, has been failing of late, and I had often observed its failure without much regret. A large, retentive memory is an overrated possession, and can, indeed, be a thorough nuisance.

I looked round, and the monstrous hangar had disappeared. A lark rose singing, and there was a smell of the sea and a scent of gorse in the air. An old black-faced ewe stood and stared at me with yellow eyes. Somewhere in the Hebrides—that’s where I was—and on rising ground before me were whitewashed farm buildings.

I walked towards them and was surprised, as I drew nearer, to see how extensive they were. Barns and byres, cart-sheds and stables, and beyond them a well-built house with crow-stepped gables: the home farm of some considerable estate, so much was obvious—but whose? I had no wish to be found trespassing, and I went a little slower while I tried again to remember where I was.

I went through a gate in a dry-stone dyke and realised, with some misgiving, that I must pass in front of the house. A dog barked, a man’s voice quietened it, and I saw that a large number of people stood waiting—but not for me, I knew that—in the lee of the whitewashed buildings. They made no movement, of welcome or dismissal, and some of them were very old. Very old, and dressed in old-fashioned clothes. There were men who wore Highland bonnets, and women in tartan shawls. But others—the majority indeed—were young and casually dressed in the holiday style of today. Girls in long trousers, girls in short trousers, and shaggy-haired young men in jerseys, anoraks, and coloured shirts. But young and old wore the same expression of grief; or, perhaps more accurately, of a grievous bewilderment.

There was a farm-cart, resting on the tips of its shafts, and beside it a well-groomed Clydesdale horse with great feathered feet was cropping the grass. On a long table, partly covered by a large and badly faded Union flag, lay an oak coffin with brass corners. It was empty, and the brassbound lid was propped against one end of the table. Lying casually about it were some handsome, white and scarlet wreaths.

I was about to ask the nearest old man for an explanation, when he pointed to something behind me, and turning round I was astonished to see, not forty yards away, a small roofless church.—How I had not noticed it before is quite inexplicable, unless my attention had been so captured by the strangely still and silent mourners that I had no surplus of interest for anything else.—However that may be, I now had eyes for nothing but the ruined church, and what hung there. From an upper corner of the west wall projected a long, heavily sculptured gargoyle—a leaping chimera—and in the noose of a rope tied to the chimera’s waist hung a man. His head lay askew on his right shoulder, he had fair hair, he was young—or had been—and despite the contortion of a violent death it was manifest that he had been beautiful.

His left foot hung lower than the other, for his right knee, as if caught in deadly cramp, was a little bent. His shoes had been taken off, and he wore yellow socks. The horror of the scene was aggravated, indeed, by the seemingly incongruous fact that he was neatly dressed in a well-cut tweed suit. His hands hung white and limp, and his arms seemed unnaturally long.

The old man beside me said, ‘No one knows why.’

‘But who is he?’ I asked.

‘He was good as well as beautiful,’ said the old man, ‘and he may be the price we had to pay. But that is only supposition.’

Now the mourners began to sing, softly but with a deep, astonishing resonance, and the words seemed to take on a solid shape like pigeon flying from a wood:

‘Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla.’

The dog barked again, and my sadness, profound though it was, lifted a little before a gust of annoyance. Why, I wondered, had no one warned me of what I was going to find? I wasn’t much surprised to meet a funeral party, for in recent months I had been thinking a great deal about death, and I had long since come to the conclusion that there were many worse things. I was, indeed, very pleased to see that the young man was going to have a funeral in the old country style, with his coffin in a cart and a good horse stepping slowly to the graveyard.—But surely, I thought, someone should have told me! I should have been given the chance to write a letter of condolence, to send a wreath, to make timely arrangements for joining the mourners.

I wanted, above all, to show the dead man some sign of respect, and in consequence of that desire I struck a rather theatrical pose; though in the circumstances—when one remembers what I had already gone through that morning—it was, I think, not unnatural.

With military precision I stood to attention, facing him, and gravely bowed. It was then—as my eyes changed direction and looked down to my legs and feet—that I perceived I was still wearing pyjamas. And not my own pyjamas. They were vulgarly patterned with broad pink-and-white stripes, and obviously belonged to a man much bigger than myself; though who he was, and where I had got them, remained a total mystery. I was deeply embarrassed, but had the strength of mind to conceal my feelings and remain, for a little longer, in my position of reverence. Then, turning smartly on my heel, I walked away, and as I passed the singing mourners I made little gestures of greeting with a composure—with a dignity, I may say—that was really quite remarkable when you consider how I was dressed.

No sooner had I left them than I felt a quite extraordinary relief—or release, I should say. I felt as if I had been set free. The sorrow, the dismay that had filled me when first I saw that poor young man, was now quite gone, and I was aware of a sober but exhilarating gratitude. I said to myself, ‘It will be all right now, at least for a little while.’ And I knew that I had not far to go.

It was easy walking, barefooted as I was, on the crisp, green machair, and half a mile away, beside a beach, was the motel where I had slept the night before. Now, of course, I knew where I was, and I remembered the pleasure with which I had discovered the motel. It was quite unexpected, on that lonely shore, and wholly unpredictable was the really solid splendour with which it was furnished. I walked more briskly, lured by tempting thoughts of a hot bath and a good breakfast.

A prosaic impulse, I admit, but after my gruelling experience in the gymnasium, and the emotional occurrence of the funeral party, a good, solid, prosaic sort of comfort was what I wanted. I went into my room, and found I had no time to waste. I must shave and dress as quickly as I could, for on my bedside table was a card that read: ‘Just to remind you of your promise to come to breakfast with us.’

That was another thing I had forgotten, but it was still early, and I had time enough if I hurried—and if I could remember the way. It was many, many years since I had seen Mrs. Armstrong, and I had been quite touched by her obvious pleasure when we met again, the night before, on my arrival at the motel. The extraordinary thing was that she had hardly changed at all. Neither she nor her daughters had changed, though I had first met them in 1920 when I, a young man in a wretched state of health, trying to recover from some very unpleasant experiences in that first and nastier of our great wars, had gone to Scotland—two years in succession—and been very kindly treated by the Armstrongs, who were people of some importance in their own district. But their district wasn’t a Hebridean island, it was a large estate on Speyside, and what they were doing here I hadn’t been able to find out. But that I’ll discover over the breakfast-table, I thought.

I had no trouble in finding my way, for as soon as I left my room I remembered that the Armstrongs were also staying in the motel. But I was surprised to discover how large it was, and I had no idea that a motel could provide such luxurious accommodation. That Mrs. Armstrong was still very well off became evident when I went into her sitting-room. It was a large room, handsomely furnished, with one or two good pictures, and I entered by a corridor on which were other doors to a bathroom, a couple of bedrooms, and a kitchen where her two daughters—or rather, her daughter and an older stepdaughter—were cooking breakfast.

Again it became clear that Mrs. Armstrong was genuinely pleased to see me, and what was charming and comical too was her protective attitude. It was as though she still saw in me the young man of rather frail physique whom she had known so long ago, and her manner—her whole presence indeed—retained that quality of the grande dame that I had once found a little alarming, and was now, by its persistence through the years, truly comforting. I saw too that I was going to be given an uncommonly good breakfast.

There was a table furnished with Spode china, old silver, little melons, and a huge crystal jug of orange-juice. There was a cold ham on the sideboard, and presently Mary and her stepsister brought in large platters of bacon and sausages and eggs, and silver ewers—they were as big as that—from one of which came the most delicious odour of freshly roasted coffee.

The serving of breakfast was a little delayed while the stepdaughter, to Mrs. Armstrong’s manifest amusement, attempted to fondle me. She was a handsome woman, but a woman of forty to whom maturity had come too decisively, and she wore a ridiculous long dress of green lace: long to the ankles and long to the neck, where a high collar was supported by bone stiffeners. I had no wish to be fondled by her, and I had some trouble in discouraging her attentions without obvious rudeness. What I wanted was to see more of Mary Armstrong, who was little more than half the age of her stepsister, and very pretty indeed. She was shy, however, and for most of the time contrived to show me only the back of her head; which was sleekly covered with hair as glossily bronzed as a chestnut. She would not sit down, but by her own wish waited on us; and it was she who was mainly responsible for the ludicrous conclusion to our breakfast party.

I like to drink my coffee out of a really big cup, and I was gratified to see that beside my plate was one as large as a basin. I was speaking to Mrs. Armstrong when Mary came with one of the great silver