Crossed Lives

By Ron Duffy

CROSSED LIVES

"My grandmother died of cancer on 25 March 2008, after a long and painful illness. You probably never heard of her. She lived in the shadow of her husband, the Ulster-born, British novelist, Paul Kirkpatrick. Him you would have heard of. Of that I am sure. Even if you never read any of his dull, moralistic books, novels that became so inexplicably popular, even if you never read any books at all, you must remember the media attention lavished on his infamous Last Will and Testament, made public after his suicide in 1988. Almost every penny he possessed—and he was a wealthy man— and every royalty payment still to come from his published books he left to Oxfam, Greenpeace and the Salvation Army in equal measure. To his wife, Estelle, he left only their house and its contents. No money to her, though she had plenty of her own. She neither needed nor wanted more. And not a penny for his only son, Wesley, who did want more. He wanted everything. Nothing for his granddaughter, Estella. Nothing for the second grandchild he knew his daughter-in-law Celia was carrying when he changed his original will. Yet he bequeathed five thousand pounds to a cleaning lady, who came to his house only a few times after he ordered his wife out of it. And what filled newspaper columns for several days, he bequeathed a complete set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That you must remember. The tabloids feasted and slobbered over that one like hyenas on a dead antelope. I believe Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, sportingly accepted the set of books and donated it to the library in Nether Chiddington, the village in Buckinghamshire, where Paul Kirkpatrick had lived.

Then there was the oft-repeated question: why did a world-famous novelist like Paul Kirkpatrick, still at the peak of his career, stop writing, hit the bottle, separate from his wife, and commit suicide? In an obituary in the New York Times, Aaron Goldblatt, that austere, Jewish-American critic of English literature, referred to this vexing question, with extravagant hyperbole, as 'one of the great mysteries of twentieth-century literature.' To his credit, Goldblatt wrote that before my father, Wesley Kirkpatrick, contested his father's will, and the story of Paul Kirkpatrick's last few months of life entered the public domain. It stirred up a ripe stew of controversy.

What the media publicised with such brouhaha at the time was only part of the story. Now I can make the full story known and wait for another media feeding frenzy."

So wrote Jane Kirkpatrick, the novelist's granddaughter, a PhD candidate at Queen's University in Belfast, in her introduction to a biography of a doomed man and a history of a doomed marriage. Like a good researcher, she assembled her sources—press cuttings, letters, Kirkpatrick's diary, his wife's notebook—and copied them onto her computer as she would the chapters of her PhD dissertation, ready to send to Kirkpatrick's former editor. In Crossed Lives you may read Jane's unedited compilation and watch the steady disintegration of a great novelist through drink, depression, and "conversations" he claimed to have had with a disembodied voice that called itself Lucifer.

Crossed Lives was a nominee in the Whistler Independent Book Awards competition and received an Honorable Mention at the New York Book Festival,

both in 2012.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Duffy
• Release date: Feb 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201975142

Ron Duffy

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Ron Duffy spent three years “on the road”, mostly by bicycle, travelling extensively in both western and eastern Europe, with “working sojourns” in Norway, Austria and England.  HisMy adventuring over, he settled down to studies, and obtained a BA in Geography from the Queen’s University of Belfast. He then emigrated to Canada, took an MSc in Biogeography at the University of Calgary and studied for his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. In Montreal he started a long career as a university lecturer in geography. Duffy’s writing career began when he started publishing mostly travel and history articles in numerous Irish, British and Canadian newspapers and magazines. In 1988 McGill-Queen’s University Press published his non-fiction book, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War which was based on his PhD thesis. In 1988 his play, Hearts and Minds, won first prize in the novice section of the annual Alberta Playwriting Competition. Another play, Loved and Left, was given a staged reading by Theatre 80 in Calgary. Retired from lecturing, Duffy turned to writing full-time. In the Whistler Independent Book Awards competition in 2012 his novel Crossed Lives was a nominee, and his historical novel O’Hanlon received an Honourable Mention. He has also written a trilogy of Irish novels, The Unquiet Land, In Turbulent Times, and A Further Shore, since published independently in one volume, and a World War Two novel Brandt.  As a companion volume to the Ulster trilogy he wrote Until The Troubles Started: A Brief Political History of Northern Ireland.

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CROSSED LIVES

PART ONE: JANE

INTRODUCTION

––––––––

My grandmother died of cancer on 25 March 2008, after a long and painful illness. You probably never heard of her. She lived in the shadow of her husband, the Ulster-born, British novelist, Paul Kirkpatrick. Him you would have heard of. Of that I am sure. Even if you never read any of his dull, moralistic books, novels that became so inexplicably popular, even if you never read any books at all, you must remember the media attention lavished on his infamous Last Will and Testament, made public after his suicide in 1988. Almost every penny he possessed—and he was a wealthy man— and every royalty payment still to come from his published books he left to Oxfam, Greenpeace and the Salvation Army in equal measure. To his wife, Estelle, he left only their house and its contents. No money to her, though she had plenty of her own. She neither needed nor wanted more. And not a penny for his only son, Wesley, who did want more. He wanted everything. Nothing for his granddaughter, Estella. Nothing for the second grandchild he knew his daughter-in-law Celia was carrying when he changed his original will. Yet he bequeathed five thousand pounds to a cleaning lady, who came to his house only a few times after he ordered his wife out of it. And what filled newspaper columns for several days, he bequeathed a complete set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That you must remember. The tabloids feasted and slobbered over that one like hyenas on a dead antelope. I believe Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, sportingly accepted the set of books and donated it to the library in Nether Chiddington, the village in Buckinghamshire, where Paul Kirkpatrick had lived.

Then there was the oft-repeated question: why did a world-famous novelist like Paul Kirkpatrick, still at the peak of his career, stop writing, hit the bottle, separate from his wife, and commit suicide? In an obituary in the New York Times, Aaron Goldblatt, that austere, Jewish-American critic of English literature, referred to this vexing question, with extravagant hyperbole, as ‘one of the great mysteries of twentieth-century literature.’ To his credit, Goldblatt wrote that before my father, Wesley Kirkpatrick, contested his father’s will, and the story of Paul Kirkpatrick’s last few months of life entered the public domain. It stirred up a ripe stew of controversy.

What the media publicised with such brouhaha at the time was only part of the story. Now I can make the full story known and wait for another media feeding frenzy. Who might I be who am able to tell the full story of Paul Kirkpatrick’s last months on Earth? I am the great novelist’s granddaughter, the one referred to above as Estella, though I don’t call myself that now. I call myself Jane, plain and simple, though I myself am neither. I am quite pretty, in fact; twenty-four years old, working on my PhD in Geography at the Queen’s University of Belfast. Going to Belfast successfully pissed off both my parents, Wesley and Celia. They wanted me to apply to Oxford, where they had both been students, and leap into the pig sty of politics, waving my first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Taking Geography was bad enough in their estimation, doing so in Belfast made the awful inconceivable. Neither of my parents has a good word to say about Belfast. They consider it to be the tribal capital of the United Kingdom. The city has certainly had its Troubles in the past, but wow! it is heaven to be young and alive there today. The city that gave us, Kenneth Branagh and Siobhan McKenna, James Galway and Van Morrison, C S Lewis and Brian Moore—OK, and Paul Kirkpatrick—must have something going for it.

My mother christened me Estella, which is typical of her. ‘Estella’ sounds upper-crusty, a name for the kind of high-class debutante featured at coming-out balls in Jane Austen’s novels. Or in the modern Tatler. Oh God, spare me all of that. My mother, the Celia also referred to above, has envied those people, those upper-crust society ladies into whose Rolls-Royce-and-rose-petalled company she tried to force me. No way. She tried to wheedle her own way into that company by marrying Wesley Kirkpatrick, only son—only child—of the great Paul. Wesley Kirkpatrick, my father, is a man of Uriah-Heepish ambition, insincerity, and cloying obsequious-ness, born to scale the anaerobic heights of the backbenches of British politics.

Yes, those are my parents: Wesley Kirkpatrick and Celia Vessey. They deserve each other. But my grandmother, Estelle, did not deserve to be married to a repressed Belfast Presbyterian like Paul Kirkpatrick. I loved her. A genuine gentlewoman, a daughter of the landed gentry, one of the Kingswood family of Lavenwick Park in Gloucestershire, she exuded class naturally, as her birthright, such as my mother could never hope to attain. Well, she could hope all she wanted, I suppose, but it would always elude her. My grandmother Estelle was a real lady, well-bred, talented, selfless, spirited —before she met Paul Kirkpatrick—and devoted to the man for whom she sacrificed everything that should have been hers. Grant MacCarron, Paul Kirkpatrick’s editor for a hundred years, wrote to me at the time of her death:

Looking at your grandmother, it occurred to me that in all the years I considered myself her close friend, I never really knew her. Only after Paul’s death did I begin to get to know this quiet, strong, resourceful, independent woman. Even Paul himself, who was married to her for thirty years, I don’t believe ever got to know her.

There are no words, at least not in my limited vocabulary, to convey how much I loved and admired that woman.

Now she is gone, cruelly cut down by a painful cancer at the relatively early age of seventy-one. British women have a right to live for eighty-two years these days. Why not my grandmother?

Before she died, she summoned me to her deathbed in her home in Painswick. Not the summons one would wish to receive. I shall never forget how shrunken she had become—and she w0as a small woman to begin with. The cancer had sucked all the substance from her body but not that spirit that had ably sustained her through adolescence, maturity, marriage, widowhood, and re-marriage. She sat in her bed, propped on two pink pillows, her hair boyishly short and thin, growing in again after the ravages of her cancer treatment. She smiled when I came into her bedroom. Her eyes were dull in a discoloured rim of loose flesh, but the skin was taut across her cheekbones and almost shiny. I had never noticed her cheekbones before. And yet she smiled, and in doing so her face glowed like that of a woman on her wedding day. I thought of her then as walking to meet Death with her arms outstretched and that same smile on her face. And Death was not the dark, devouring Darth-Vader figure of popular conceit, but one dressed in shining white who took her by the hand, turned her round, and walked back with her into the vanishing point of history.

OK, that was a flight of Victorian fancy, a Sunday-school-book illustrator’s vision. You know I don’t believe it one bit. But anyway, there I was in my Grandmother Estelle’s penultimate resting place, talking to her for what turned out to be the last time. She was quite lucid and unexpectedly calm. I wondered how I would feel in the same situation, knowing that I was lying in my penultimate resting place. Maybe I would be calm too. I’d like to think so. Maybe we all would, having been mentally conditioned to accept death after crossing the psalmist’s threshold of three score years and ten. I’d like to believe that too.

‘How is your work progressing, Estella?’ She spoke distinctly, concentrating on each word, like someone speaking a foreign language.

‘It’s going well, Grandma. Lots of fieldwork.’

‘What is it you are studying? I’ve forgotten.’

‘Peat bogs and climate change in Ireland and Scotland.’

‘Oh, that is light-years beyond my reach. Way beyond my ken, as Grant MacCarron would say.’ She paused, then pointed with a long, thin, bony finger at a box on the bedside table. ‘Would you pass that box to me, please?’

‘Yes, of course.’ I laid the box on the flowered eiderdown in her lap, a plain Clark’s shoe box. She opened it, drew out two identical, hard-backed notebooks and handed them to me.

‘Those books could be worth a fortune one day,’ she said. ‘Well, the top one could at any rate. I wouldn’t be so sure about the second. The top one, the valuable one, I was going to give to Grant MacCarron after your grandfather’s death. The last work of Paul Kirkpatrick. It’s not at all like any of the books he ever published. Good gracious, no. But publishers would pay a high price to get their hands on it. Especially now that the rich mother lode of Harry Potter’s gold has gone cold.’

‘What is it?’ I asked, lifting the hard, green cover.

‘A diary your grandfather kept during the last months of his life. I saw him writing in it in his study in Viburnum Cottage, but he would never let me read it. Kept it locked away. That was unusual because he always let me read and comment on whatever book he was working on. But not that one. And now I know why.’

‘And this one?’ I asked, bringing the lower notebook to the top.

‘That is something I wrote myself,’ she replied with customary modesty. ‘I found Paul’s diary after he died. I showed it to no one. When I read it I was prompted to write my ... what should I call it? ... my filler to Paul’s diary. My coda, perhaps. If I can use a musical term. My concluding section. It gave me something to do, lying here, day after day. Unlike Paul’s, my own creative energy ...’

‘Your own suppressed creative energy.’

‘Please, Estella. I wish you wouldn’t say things like that in that tone of voice. I don’t like the barely concealed implication.’

‘You still defend him, Grandma.’

‘And will till I die.’ There followed not exactly a pregnant pause—though it might have been that too—but a poignant pause before Grandma continued, ‘I loved him, Estella. I loved him dearly. Even to the very end. That awful end.’ Tears slid down her hollowed, alabaster cheeks. She dried them with a Kleenex from the sleeve of her nightdress. ‘I’m a sentimental old fool.’

‘What do you want me to do with these, Grandma?’

‘I really don’t know, my dear. I never knew what to do with them myself. If Grant MacCarron hadn’t taken himself back to the inaccessible Isle of Mull, I would suggest you talk to him about them. Your grandfather’s publisher, Frank Gallagher, sold out to Harper-Collins or some such monster book-producing business. They would pay a lot for Paul Kirkpatrick’s diary. Grant wouldn’t edit it, I’m afraid. He’s over eighty now and hidden away in the Scottish highlands. But Paul’s former agent, Roger Foxe, might be interested. Watch him though. He is known as a self-interested, self-promoting character. Still acting as a literary agent, though he’s the same age as me. Anyway, they are yours now. I was going to assign them to you legally in my will, but I’d rather no one but you knew of their existence. Not even Wesley or Celia. Much less your brother Jared. They are yours, my precious Estella. I wanted to give them to you ahead of time, to make sure they came to you and not to anyone else. You can decide what to do with them. Maybe they should be locked away for fifty years. Hide them away in the National Archives at Kew.’

I held a notebook in each hand, looking at them in uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Something about the books, and about Grandma’s words with respect to them, made me feel that I would rather she had given them to someone else.

‘You’re saying nothing, Estella.’

‘I don’t know what to say, Grandma.’ I raised my eyes from the notebooks to her pain-exhausted face. ‘I’m honoured that you have entrusted these to me. I’ll treasure them.’ I wasn’t being entirely truthful. I didn’t really want them. Well, that’s not strictly true. The one she wrote herself, I would treasure. My grandfather’s diary, which Grandma considered to have such a high value attached to it, I could easily do without.

We talked about a lot of other things: family matters, my studies, my plans for the future, my life in Belfast, my sputtering love life. But I need not bore you with the details. I just wanted you to know how the last work of that old-fashioned stuffed-shirt, Paul Kirkpatrick, came into my possession, along with the manuscript, beautifully penned by that saint of a woman he married and then heartlessly cast aside. Heartlessness came easily to Paul Kirkpatrick; he didn’t have one.

The MacCarrons

In the summer of 2009, after my grandmother’s death, I was doing fieldwork in Scotland. Having a few free days, I took the Caledonia MacBrayne ferry from Kilchoan to Tobermory on that ‘inaccessible Isle of Mull.’ (I can still hear my grandmother saying that.) Grant—he insisted that I call him that—and his sweetheart of a wife, Helen, welcomed me like a daughter to their stone-built, book-filled house on Argyll Terrace with its magnificent view across the town and ‘over the water’ of Tobermory Bay and the Sound of Mull to the Morvern Hills. Yes, the town from which cometh Tobermory whiskey. ‘From which cometh my strength’ was what Grant said. Helen is forever trying to stop her incorrigible husband from drinking it, but he always finds places to hide his bottle from her. A funny, cartoonable competition between these two old lovebirds. Whiskey hasn’t done Grant any harm. He is seventy-eight years old, bald as a marble, very much overweight, but still able to walk down to Tobermory’s brightly painted Main Street every day, spend time around the colourful, photogenic waterfront and harbour, where every fisherman and ferry-boat worker knows him, and return home, back up that hill that might leave a much younger man—or woman—breathless. His wife looks at least fifteen years younger, but in his diary my grandfather wrote that she was actually a year older. I find that hard to believe, looking at her barely lined face and smooth complexion. It’s the slim, girlish figure that does it, helped by hair that is dyed a light reddish blonde with paler streaks and stylishly coiffed. Who would have thought you could find a hair-dresser—a hairstylist—with that level of competence in Tobermory? Or am I doing Tobermory a big-city girl’s injustice?

I left the notebooks with Grant, changed from anorak and shorts and bog-trotter boots into shirt, slacks, running shoes and sweater, and off I went to explore the town: the An Tobar Arts Centre, the palette of shops along Main Street, and, of course, the distillery. I brought a bottle of the single malt back to the MacCarrons’ house. I was afraid that Helen would be angry with me, order me to pack my rucksack and catch the next ferry back to Kilchoan, but she was too much of a gentlewoman for that. Besides, I think she enjoys her little game of Hide-the-Bottle that she plays with her irredeemable husband. She knows that nothing will change him now. And why should it?

After supper, with a glass of whiskey each, Grant and I talked in big comfortable armchairs in front of a blazing fire, while Helen sat in a century-old rocking chair, knitting a sock from colour-stripy wool. The evening outside was cool and showery.

‘I hope you’re not like your grandfather, Jane,’ was Helen’s only comment. ‘He and Grant would sit up into the wee small hours until the bottle was empty.’

‘This bottle was half-empty to begin with,’ Grant said in self-defence.

That didn’t mean that we didn’t sit up into the wee small hours and wholly empty it.

Grant quizzed me about my change of first name. ‘So you don’t call yourself Estella anymore.’

‘Only on official documents. I don’t like the name.’

‘Forgive me for saying so, but aren’t you showing some disrespect for your grandmother? You were named after her, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, but with an a on the end instead of an e. And brought up to be a lady, like Estella Havisham. That’s not me. Besides my grandmother didn’t like her own name: Estelle. Especially since that black English, hip-hop singer came along. Grandmother said she was foul-mouthed.’

‘We wouldn’t ken anything about her,’ Grant said. ‘So you’re doing a C S Lewis.’

‘What do you mean, Grant: doing a C S Lewis?’

‘He was christened Clive Staples Lewis but demanded that everyone call him Jack. And that’s what his family and friends called him: Jack.’

‘Is Jane your middle name then?’ Helen asked.

‘No. That’s Vessey. My mother’s family name. She didn’t change it when she married my grandfather. She claims that Vessey is old, historic and not very common and she wanted to keep it. It came to England with the Normans.’

‘That’s old enough,’ Grant said.

‘My mother wanted me to be called Vessey too, but that was considered going too far by my grandfather. He never got used to my mother retaining her maiden name. In fact he hated her for it. And hated isn’t an exaggeration.’

‘I can vouch for that,’ said Grant.

‘Since we’re on the subject, my full name, believe it or not, is Estella Vessey Margaret Kirkpatrick. Margaret was my maternal grandmother’s name. She would be the Miss Havisham to my mother’s Estella. A bitter, disappointed, old woman, forever railing against her husband for dying early and leaving her.’

‘She must have been deeply in love with him,’ said Helen.

‘Far from it. She treated him like a houseboy. He was meek and weak and lived a life of domestic bullying by his wife and then by his daughter, my mother. I think he died just to get away from them.’

I don’t know how this last, uncalled-for remark went down with Grant and Helen who are both, as they say in Belfast, ‘good living’, meaning that they are strong in their Christian faith, not vegetarians or exercise freaks. They glanced at each other but made no comment. Polite hosts to the end.

‘So why did you choose to study in Belfast?’ Grant asked. ‘That’s another link with C S Lewis. He was a Belfast man. And a popular one these days.’

‘It just appealed to me,’ I replied lamely. ‘I wanted a complete break from my parents and their Oxford traditions. Besides, I have two aunts, an uncle, two more uncles by marriage, and several cousins in the city. I stayed with my Uncle Jim and Aunt Audrey when I first went to Belfast. Then I found a place of my own closer to the university. I love it. I’m very glad I went there. My grandmother loved Northern Ireland but never got to go there as often as she would have liked. Poor Grandma Estelle.’

Then, to change a subject he thought might be heading in a direction he didn’t wish to go, Grant pointed to the shoebox on the coffee table. ‘I want to thank you, Jane, for giving me the opportunity of reading those two notebooks. What you have there, lassie, though you may not realise it, is an unexploded bomb—if that is not an overstatement.’

‘That’s why I wanted your advice, Grant. What should I do with those notebooks?’

‘Jings, I’m not sure what advice to give you.’

Jings. I hadn’t heard that one before.

‘You could pass that material to one of two people. Roger Foxe or Everett Perkins.’

‘My grandmother gave me a kind of warning about Roger Foxe. She said he was self-interested and self-promoting.’

‘Well, yes. There is that mercenary side to him. He likes money, but even more, he likes VIPs. He likes rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. He’s rich himself, but not as famous as he has always craved to be. But he’s a considerate man, too. Quite generous in his own way. And he was a good friend of your grandfather.’

‘You had a falling out with him, didn’t you, Grant?’ Helen said.

‘No we didn’t have a falling out. Just a wee tiff over some of Roger’s careless gab. It didn’t last long.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Roger and I were reminiscing a bit after Paul’s funeral. He went back to the time when your grandfather had just started going out with your grandmother. Look Back in Anger was the rage then. Have you seen the play?’

‘No. I saw the old movie on TV once. Richard Burton, I remember. Don’t know who his leading lady was.’

‘Grant wouldn’t either, Jane,’ Helen said.

‘Anyway, Roger happened to mention that some of the chaps gave Paul a bit of a ribbing about being another Jimmy Porter, a carpenter’s son from Belfast, going steady with the daughter of a wealthy, well-connected, long-pedigreed country squire with a feudal estate in Gloucester-shire. I said that that was unfair, and wrong as it turned out. Paul and Estelle were happily married for thirty years. I couldn’t imagine any husband and wife being further from Jimmy and Alison Porter than they were. Roger insisted that in the beginning, when he first met them, the resemblance was there. Paul was a scholarship student from Belfast. I was beginning to get angry.’

‘Too much whiskey,’ Helen said.

Grant gave her a brief but pungent glance. ‘I reminded Roger that Paul was a brilliant student. You don’t win scholarships to Cambridge for nothing. He agreed but wouldn’t give up entirely. Paul was still the son of a carpenter, he said. Working class, compared to Estelle. I argued that Paul never tried to hide his working-class origins; he was in fact, inordinately proud of his father. Roger fell back on the Fifth Commandment: Honour thy father and all that. I was getting fashed, Jane.’ And to Helen he added, ‘And it wasn’t the whiskey. It was Roger.’

‘You never really liked him in any case,’ Helen said.

‘Oh, he was all right,’ Grant conceded grudgingly. ‘I argued that it had nothing to do with the Fifth Commandment. Paul was proud of his father because he believed his father deserved it. Roger is the type who could not comprehend how a builder’s carpenter could be deserving of pride. He’s a bit of an elitist.’

‘As the Scots say, Jane, Roger Foxe is fantoosh,’ Helen said. ‘He’s swanky. He dresses to impress. Savile Row suits, Church’s shoes, silk cravats. Something of a dandy. Smokes long cigarettes in an amber holder.’

‘You should talk to him sometime,’ Grant said. ‘He has published a biography of your grandfather that has sold very well. He could update it, using information from that diary. Not all of it, mind you. That would stir up a stour of controversy in the literary supplements, believe me. Everett Perkins has been working on a rival biography for the last twenty years. I doubt if he’ll ever finish it to his satisfaction. He’s an academic perfectionist with high literary ambition but low self-esteem. He’s a tenured and highly respected professor of English Literature at Ann Arbor, Michigan. He moved from LA to Chicago to Ann Arbor. We still correspond on a fairly regular basis. You might want to contact him yourself. Do you do any writing?’

‘Creative writing? No, I’m afraid not,’ I replied. ‘Academic papers in environmental science. I’m not a literary type.’

‘But if you were to pen a non-literary introduction to what’s in those two notebooks, I could give you an introduction to Fraser Maclean, an old friend of mine, born and raised here in Tober-mory. He owns the An Tobar Press, a small publishing house in Edinburgh. Something like what you have there could bring a lot of much-needed cash to Fraser, though he’s doing quite well as one of the few remaining independent publishers. The SNP people like him.’

SNP: Scottish National Party

‘I think I would like him too.’

Grant chuckled. ‘I thought you would. There’s a streak of anti-corporatism in you, young lady. Like your grandfather.’

‘You noticed, did you?’

‘It jumped right out and bit me.’ Grant shifted his weight in the armchair and reached for his glass of whiskey with a glance at his wife that plainly said, Forgive me this time, Helen. I’m just being sociable with our guest. Then he turned to me and said, ‘Your grandfather’s diary could not be published in its present form. No doubt about that. It would harm too many people. It would have to be severely edited before publication. Those unflattering references to your father, for example, would serve your father ill at the next election. He’s making a name for himself in the Conservative party now. Possible future Cabinet candidate, as no doubt you ken yourself. And the horrific Philip Kessler story in your grandmother’s book would have to go. He’s Sir Philip Kessler QC now. A leading London barrister. The story your grandmother tells about him and her rape could never be published. No publisher would take the risk. Kessler’s son is Symington Kessler, a so-called industrial magnate. President of SK Industrial Properties Inc. Or something like that. Both very powerful men. They’d sue a publisher to destitution if your grandmother’s story was ever published. But with judicious editing, those notebooks could make a well-deserved fortune for Fraser Maclean. I could do the editing, as I still do for most of Fraser’s writers.’

‘You’re still working then?’ I sipped the whiskey, felt it slide down like a small, swallowed flame. ‘My grandmother said you had stopped.’

‘Not a bit of it. I enjoy it too much even to call it work.’

‘I presume Fraser Maclean posts the manuscripts to you.’

‘Or they come in as files attached to emails. As a geographer, you would have heard of the death of distance. There’s a good example.’

‘So you’re au fait with the cyberworld.’

‘Och ay, as they say here.’

‘He’s become quite proficient on the computer, Jane,’ Helen said, without looking up from the sock she was knitting. ‘Grant is no Luddite Paul Kirkpatrick. If you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Not at all.’ I raised my glass. ‘Guid an ye, Grant.’

He smiled. ‘We’ll have to do something about that Scottish accent of yours, lassie. Maybe you should bide here a wee while longer.’

‘Nothing I’d like better, Grant, but I have only a five-day ticket on the ferry, and I have work on pollen analysis to do in Belfast.’

‘I remember those pressures myself,’ said Grant. ‘So be it. But remember, Jane, you are welcome here anytime.’

‘Thank you, Grant,’ I said with more feeling than I showed. ‘Thanks to both of you.’

‘If you must hurry away ... ,’Grant began, then paused and asked, ‘How did you get to Kilchoan, by the way?’

‘I have my car,’ I replied. ‘My little Austin Mini. I left it at the ferry terminal in Kilchoan. Coming here on foot saved me thirty pounds on the round trip.’

‘Sounds like there’s a streak of Scottish thrift in you too.’

‘Student thrift. Making a little go a long way. Or as far as I can stretch it.’

‘That’s a good lesson to learn when you’re young,’ Helen said.

‘Yes indeed,’ I replied, if only to break a brief pause in the conversation. Then I looked at each in turn and raised another subject. ‘Both of you knew and loved my grandfather. Do you still hold him in high regard after the way he treated my grandmother?’

Grant said, ‘Yes’ and Helen said, ‘No’ simultaneously.

‘I agree with Helen,’ I said. ‘I never knew my grandfather. I was only three years old when he died. But after reading his diary, I lost the respect I might have had for him, not as a famous writer, because I don’t really care all that much for his books, but as a human being. As my grandfather. You’ve read that diary now, Grant. How can you still have the same regard for him?’

‘Putting me on the spot, lassie,’ Grant said. ‘Well, let me give you an answer, as best I can.’ He shifted his weight to a more comfortable position in the armchair. ‘Your grandfather, Jane, became a sick man. Mentally or psychologically sick, not physically. How he behaved during those last six months of his life was completely out of character. Paul lost the two most crucial driving forces, the two most essential supports, in his life: his ability to write and his strong Christian faith. He was known as a Christian writer, deservedly so or not. But he was certainly a Christian man. He once paraphrased Evelyn Waugh by saying that, had he not been a Christian, he would scarcely have been human. And without his faith, or when faith began to lose its grip on him, he slipped over the edge. And none of us could pull him back up. We knew he was a deeply troubled soul, and you ken from the diary that we tried to save him from himself. But to no avail. It was a tragedy, Jane, a real, heart-rending tragedy.’

Grant placed his now half-empty glass on the coffee table, pulled himself out of the armchair, and padded like a bear out of the room. Helen and I looked at each other but said nothing, believing he had gone to the toilet.

But he had gone to his study. In a few minutes he returned and before he sat down he handed me a photograph album and an envelope in which I could feel a letter.

‘Those should go with the notebooks,’ he said, lifting his glass and sitting again in the armchair. ‘Especially that letter. I received it from Paul when I was in the States. I was lecturing on modern British literature under a special arrangement with Stanford University. A couple of years before that, Stanford had swelled my susceptible ego by awarding me an honorary doctorate.’ He smiled at me in self-deprecation. An endearing, enchanting smile I’d pay to see again.

‘The photograph album is more of a Paul Kirkpatrick scrapbook. You can take it with you and photocopy anything you want from it. But I want it back. And Jane, I want you to promise to bring it back in person.’

I glanced at the album, feeling a bit emotional. ‘Thank you, Grant. I will. In fact, I’ll bring the whole whiz-bang lot back, complete with my non-literary introduction, and you can send it, edited as you please, to Fraser Maclean. How’s that?’

‘It’s a deal, Jane. It’s a deal.’

Press cuttings

Having sat up late into the night—or early into the morning—and having given Grant a helping hand in turning his bottle of Tobermory’s best single malt from half-empty to wholly empty, I was in no condition to catch the 7.20 a.m. ferry back to Kilchoan. I could have left at eleven o’clock but I wanted an early start on the road from Kilchoan. And besides, it was raining heavily. So I decided to stay one more day. I joined the MacCarrons in their warm, cosy living room after breakfast. Grant, wearing rimless glasses low down on his nose, was reading The Times Literary Supplement; Helen had picked up her knitting again, about to turn the heel on the stripy sock. I curled myself up like a puppy-dog in the big armchair and, with rain streaming down the window panes and a fire burning in the grate, I opened Grant’s album. It was an old one, with shiny, dark-blue cardboard covers, embossed with oak leaves and the word Photographs in Gothic script. Black laces tied the covers together and allowed you to add more of the heavy, black pages if you needed them.

In addition to actual photographs of my grandparents—mostly of my grandfather on his own—many were cut from newspapers and magazines, including clippings of reviews and readers’ letters. I unfolded one newspaper article from The Scotsman, dated 2 July, 1988.

THE LAST NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELIST

The Scotsman’s literary editor, Morag Magnusson, talks to Everett Perkins after the memorial service to Paul Kirkpatrick who died on 21 June, 1988.

A graduate of the University of Nottingham, Everett Perkins burst into Paul Kirkpatrick literary territory with a brilliant PhD dissertation at the University of California at Los Angeles. In doing so he staked a claim that the world of letters has recognised as his. Perkins is currently working on a book called The Moral Dilemma in Modern Fiction and plans to write a biography of Paul Kirkpatrick. I met Perkins for the first time at a reception in Cripps Hall at Queen’s College, Cambridge, a starched English travesty of an Irish wake. Perkins is short, slim, prematurely balding, and wears horn-rimmed glasses with lenses as thick as the base of the bottle of Coca Cola which he pours into his rum and ice cubes.

MM: You have called Kirkpatrick the last nineteenth-century novelist. But his appeal was to a wide twentieth-century readership, wasn’t it?

EP: Because he penetrated to the very roots of the human psyche. Not sex. Not that execrable Freudian pulp that modern human beings are so overstuffed with that they are gagged by it and can only make unintelligible mumbling noises.

MM:  If not sex, then what?

EP: Truth and beauty. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Paul Kirkpatrick presented to his readers an overall vision of human destiny that radiated with the luminosity of Truth. You believed him. You laughed, you suffered, you felt yourself wrenched apart, but you understood why. There was rightness, rather than righteousness, in everything he wrote.

MM: I like that. Rightness, rather than righteousness. Kirkpatrick has been shackled—undeservedly, don’t you agree?—with a reputation as a Christian writer.

EP: Yes, but one still finishes a Kirkpatrick novel in a state of spiritual exaltation. Not just uplifted in the ephemeral religious sense, but fortified and strengthened. In mind and heart and spirit. You want to rush out and shout at the Fates and the elements and all the powers in the universe, ‘I can take it. Go on, do what you like to me. I can take it all and more and stay on my feet with my head held high.’

MM:  Triumph.

EP:  Triumph. Exactly. Triumph was the key element in a Kirkpatrick novel. The triumph of the human spirit buffeted by the winds of adversity. Yet without the gushing sentimentality of happy endings. And he could be so exquisitely sensual without being explicitly graphic. That was the beauty in Paul’s work. He put poetry back into human relationships. He restored truth to true love. He gave us energising, visceral writing. He gave it to us with style. He was a reflective, introspective, ethical thinker. He answered all of our questions with a resounding affirmative and made us feel good inside.

MM:  Yet he became depressed and killed himself.

EP:  Yes. Yes, he did. What a tragedy. What an utterly unnecessary tragedy. And the question remains: why? Why on God’s good Earth would a man like Paul Kirkpatrick take his own life?

MM:  Depression obviously. It is not uncommon. But his reputation is secure, surely.

EP:  Without doubt. Six or seven of his best novels will ensure him a position of eminence in European literature for a long time to come.

MM:  Amen to that. Which of those six or seven of his best novels do you consider his very best?

EP:  I consider The Darkest Day to be his highest achievement. Would you agree?

MM: Yes. Undoubtedly a masterpiece. The hero of the novel is an exceptional portrayal.

EP:  Tom Gannet. Paul loved that character.

MM:  Everybody loves that character.

EP:  Yes, that’s true. People who know nothing about Paul Kirkpatrick know Tom Gannet. Even in the States.

MM:  He made a lot of money and won a lot of public adulation from his last half dozen books. And yet, I don’t believe he cared very much for either money or adulation. Did he?

EP:  No he didn’t. He was wealthy enough not to need the one, and too shy and retiring to enjoy the other.

MM:  He was really a very modest, private man.

EP:  Exactly. He was never obsessed with his status as a great and famous author. He was a creative artist who lived only for his writing. He once told me that he was a mere spectator of human beings, but that he had no desire to reform the human race. He claimed to be a man without loyalties, except to his own religious principles. He was interested in nothing, he said, but writing the truth as he saw it. And then ... Well, we’ll never know, will we?

I refolded the page from the newspaper, with the feeling that I wouldn’t like Everett Perkins should I ever meet him. In that interview he sounded like a snivelling, sanctimonious sycophant. I really don’t know why exactly he came across like that. I’d have to read the interview again.

Grant, hearing the rustle of newsprint, looked up from his magazine. ‘I hope you won’t finish going through that material today.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want you to take it away with you and, as I said last night, bring it back with you. Helen and I want to see you again.’

‘Don’t worry, Grant. I’ll come back. And that’s a promise. Girl Guide’s honour.’

‘Mull is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, Jane,’ Helen said. ‘I just wish it was a better day today. We could have gone for a drive.’

‘You don’t feel isolated here, Helen?’ I asked. ‘My grandmother called this the inaccessible Isle of Mull.’

‘We may be isolated,’ Helen replied. ‘Literally we are, I suppose. And we may be more inaccessible than lots of other places. But I love it.’

‘We’re not as cut off from the rest of the world as we used to be,’ Grant said. ‘April last year, Loch Lomond Seaplanes began a new service from Glasgow to Tobermory. That cuts the travel time from Mull to Glasgow from five hours by ferry and car to thirty-five minutes.’

‘But you pay for it,’ Helen said. ‘Ninety-nine pounds one way or a hundred-and-seventy return.’

‘I’ll stick to my Austin Mini and the Kilchoan ferry,’ I said. ‘So you don’t miss the city, Helen?’

‘Heavens no. I was born and raised in Borrowdale in the Lake District, in the village of Stonethwaite. You can’t get much further from the city than that. Forty years in London was quite enough for me. I like it here.’

I turned my attention back to Grant’s album and came upon a short piece from the Observer Magazine of 21 June, 1998. The article was illustrated with a coloured photograph of my grand-father, standing in his beloved garden with the apple trees in full bloom behind him, his dog at his feet. He looked so contented back then.

REMEMBERING PAUL KIRKPATRICK

On the tenth anniversary of the death of Paul Kirkpatrick, Grant MacCarron, editor-in-chief at the Oakworth Press, remembers his close friend of twenty-five years.

I am writing this in my home in Tobermory on the isle of Mull, looking out eastwards through my study window across the water towards the Morvern Hills. A decade ago I was looking out westwards through my twelfth-storey office window across the roofs of London towards the Chiltern Hills. In those more populous English hills Paul Kirkpatrick lived in an eighteenth-century house, surrounded by gardens and fields and old, old woodland. Vibumum Cottage, he called it.

Standing by the window here in Tobermory, I think of times I spent at the Kirkpatrick house just outside the Chiltern village of Nether Chiddington. Happy times. Like childhood memories. Long, scented, bee-drowsy summer days. We’d be sitting on the stone terrace at the back of the house, four, five, six of us maybe, talking as always, drinking something homemade. Strong reflected sunshine glaring from the honey-coloured stone of the walls and from the white-sash-barred windows in their dark brown frames. Roses rambling round the door. Clematis hanging purple flowers like garlands round the ground-floor windows, almost reaching the sills of the windows above.

I want to remember only the contented, easy-going Paul Kirkpatrick I had always known. And Paul was never more content than in his garden. His traditional English cottage garden, one he converted with typical Kirkpatrick thoroughness, industry and patience from a former horse paddock. What boundless energy that man had. He should have lived till he was a hundred.

He led you through his garden with pride and pleasure, naming every growing thing and telling you where it came from. First time I ever heard of plants with pedigrees. It looked as though Paul had given little thought to the layout of his garden. The impression was that he had strolled down the path past the apple trees and the gooseberry bushes, his arms loaded with dozens of different flowering plants and seedlings, vegetables and shrub cuttings. All of these he tossed to left and right with joyous and confident abandon. He simply let them grow where they landed. The result was a horticultural donnybrook. Flowers and vegetables, bushes and trees, tangling, tumbling, trailing and twining; a chaos of colours and scents in a gordian snaggle of greenery.

Paul loved his garden. More than anything else in the world, besides writing.

‘l dipped my hands into a large barrel labelled LOST,’ he once said. ‘And holding it tightly as I dared, I drew out this garden. I planted it here for safekeeping and I’ve cared for it like I’ve cared for nothing else in my life. It must never be lost again. Far too much of old England has finished up in that barrel. And no one has bothered to reach in and rescue it. Too much trouble for people these days.’

He and I were following his harrier bitch down the path. The colours around us were almost too startling. The air was almost too heavy to breathe, with the scent of rosemary and lavender and, I don’t know, maybe scores and scores of different flowers. Paul could name them all. Lupins and nasturtiums, poppies, pansies, petunias and periwinkles. Those I remember. Around the bend by the currant bushes and under a trellis arch overgrown with climbing roses, we entered a more formal part of the garden. This is where we sometimes had tea on Sunday afternoons: Paul and his wife Estelle, my wife Helen and I. Lawns smooth as green baize. Borders of roses and herbaceous plants. Small trees that Paul had chosen for their flowers, their berries, their autumn colours. And uncommon shrubs, their names long ago lost to me, except for Paul’s favourite viburnums.

That’s where I like to remember Paul Kirkpatrick. Not in his library, where he was usually photographed for the Sunday supplements, but in his garden. Standing with the old Bramley apple trees in full blossom behind him; an inch or two under six feet; slim of build; his curly, dark-brown hair turning grey; his moustache neatly trimmed and shaped; a shy, disarming smile on his face. He had become what he always wanted to be: an English country gentleman. They say that the English who settled in Ireland became more Irish than the Irish. Paul Kirkpatrick was an Irishman who settled in England and became more English than the English. My God, how he loved this country. Or perhaps more correctly, he loved his idea of this country, the England that his Ulster father and uncles had helped to fight for and save, the England that we then allowed to end up in a barrel labelled LOST.

‘I like this, Grant.’ I held the newspaper clipping up so that he could see what I had just been reading.

‘The Observer didn’t ask me to do another one on the twentieth anniversary,’ Grant said in his usual self-deprecatory way.

‘Maybe Paul has been forgotten already,’ Helen commented.

‘Maybe they’re waiting for the twenty-fifth anniversary,’ I said.

A brief pause, then Helen asked, ‘You never saw the garden at Nether Chiddington as it was in your grandfather’s day, did you, Jane?’

‘No. I haven’t been there in years. But as you know, my grandfather left an endowment to the Buckinghamshire Horticultural Society to be spent on maintaining his garden. Mr Comerford, who bought Viburnum Cottage, is the president of the Society, and he organises volunteers to come and work in it and keep it as it was when my grandfather died. They have erected a sundial in that formal part of the garden you describe in the article, Grant. It has a plaque To the memory of Paul Kirkpatrick, novelist and gardener, 1937-1988.

‘Well I’m glad to hear that,’ Grant said. ‘His garden has been saved from that barrel labelled LOST.’

‘Some twit suggested placing my grandfather’s urn of ashes on a pedestal in the garden, but that crackpot idea was shot out of the air.’

‘I’m surprised it got to fly at all,’ said Grant.

‘Mrs Comerford and her two daughters have opened a small teahouse in Viburnum Cottage. They sell local handicrafts and copies of my grandfather’s books, hardback and paperback. There’s also a plaque on the wall beside the front door of the cottage saying: Paul Kirkpatrick, novelist, lived here 1983-1988. There was talk of putting up a memorial in the village green at Nether Chiddington. A fountain in the corner by The Swan, but nothing has come of it.’

‘Viburnum Cottage and the garden are memorial enough, I would say,’ Helen remarked.

I closed the album, placed it on the broad arm of the chair, looked out to see that the rain was still pelting down, then removed the letter from the envelope Grant had given me and unfolded it.

The letter

l4th March, 1988.

Dear Grant,

I have just enjoyed a long afternoon in the company of Everett Perkins, sitting in the solarium surrounded by greenery and the rank growth of ideas. Do ideas take root in our minds, Grant? Do they spread from one of us to the other like strawberry plants, binding us together in one culture? Or are they free-floating entities, existing in the air like germs to which some of us are susceptible and some immune? Do we catch ideas—evolution, socialism, racism, justice—in the same way as we catch, or remain immune to, or inoculated against, influenza or smallpox? Something to think about in the hot sun of California.

Everett says he met you there. He paints an improbable picture of you in a deckchair by a swimming pool, large white body and large bald head immovably in the shade of a huge umbrella, a glass of sixteen-year-old Tobermory in one hand, William Trevor in the other. He says you looked as permanently fixed as a Tennysonian lotos-eater and he swears he heard you mutter, ‘Eat your heart out, Somerset Maugham.’ I must admit, I cannot recognise in that picture the industrious old Western-Isles Scotsman I thought I knew.

Everett hasn’t entirely lost touch with his native land. He made some remark about cutbacks in funding for the arts here. When I said that the new order in Britain has little time for the arts, he remarked that the English never had. A sentiment I know you share, which is why I’m telling you this. Besides I have to write something. Everett rails against ‘the congenital anti-intellectualism of the English’—his expression. He says I should have left England twenty-five years ago. Philistinism—his word—is a major feature of English society. That’s one of the things that has allowed the contemporary values of ‘materialistic selfishness’—also his words—to flourish. Who else do we know would use words like that? In Everett’s view—and here we’d both agree with him—the arts develop and enlighten all our minds. They suggest new possibilities to what we know, and are, and may become. That’s why they’re resented here in England, and it’s because we don’t, or won’t, face up to this national characteristic that our arts are failing. I think he’s right, and I’m sure you’d agree. In all our history since we emerged from the Dark Ages we’ve never had such a philistine government as the present lot.

Maybe we’re on the verge of another Dark Age.

Everett is planning a book on ‘the moral dilemma in modern fiction.’ Graham Greene will be in there, of course, with The Heart of the Matter and, I think, The End of the Affair. He wants to give me a chapter, with A Rougher Sea and Guilty Splendour. No doubt he talked to you about it. Has he asked you to try to convince me to appoint him my official biographer? He dropped a few hints to the effect that you favoured his candidacy and qualifications for that thankless role over those of Roger Foxe, whom I know you don’t very much care for. Everett is talking about an interim book called Paul Kirkpatrick: A Portrait which he says Frank is interested in publishing if I give him the go-ahead. But I’d rather Roger did it. My association with Roger goes back a long way. He placed my very first novel with Frank even before we left Cambridge. A few years before you came and took over from Hugh Satterford as senior editor.

Anyway, as I see it, Everett Perkins is too academic to write the kind of biography I’d want people to read. If it comes to Paul Kirkpatrick: A Portrait, Roger is a more colourful writer—I know you disagree—and I’d rather have a portrait painted in colour with competence and personal style—maybe even flare—than the impersonal black and white photographs of the kind that appear on dust jackets. And for all his enthusiasm and erudition, I’m afraid that a dust-jacket picture is the best that Everett could come up with. It would be Paul Kirkpatrick: A Photo With Footnotes.

But then I’ve often disputed the merit of writers’ biographies. Isn’t it true that an author’s work is all we need? Everett argues that readers who love books want to know more about the people who write them. He says—and maybe he has a point—that there is always the possibility that the