The Goldenacre Episode 34

AThere are rules, Zed. You know the rules. To only call in the event of life-threatening illness, or death

s a young man Charles Rennie Mackintosh had been a pupil at Glasgow School of Art. He would have travelled to Edinburgh, to see the Old Town, the shambles on the castle rock. Its layers and tunnels, dark overhangs and daytime shadows.

The young Glaswegian artist, moustachioed in those days, would have walked the New Town, its planned boulevards and avenues, its fenced private gardens.

He was of Glasgow: sooty closes, and a clanging river birthing giant ships, locomotives and boilers. Glasgow was then an engine of industry, with a swollen populace. Massive wealth squatted in the west and south, in townhouses and shady new housing, beside miserable poverty in the inner-city slums.

Mackintosh, in his first job at Honeyman & Keppie, the architects’ firm, had leaned towards the rational, the new. His lines then were restrained, conventional.

There was little evidence of the esoteric and the occult, the strangeness of his Art School days.

The Spooks, people had called them then: Mackintosh and his girlfriend, Margaret Macdonald, and their friends. They were regarded by their peers as slightly weird. Tending towards the secret and the gnostic.

There were symbols and signs and shapes in his and Margaret’s work that seemed to swell from somewhere other, somewhere troubling. The voices of the other side. Mumblings from seances. Words picked out by glasses on boards of letters. Theirs was a world of dreams and half-remembered images, glimpsed through daydream and gauzy halfthoughts. Watercolour memories, pale and fading at the edges.

Tallis looked at an image of the artist on his phone.

Who was this moustachioed man, Mackintosh? Who was his wife? He was more than just a maker of fine, uncomfortable furniture, and of severe and elegant buildings. There was something other, something elusive and ghostly, in his lines.

There was a whole tourist industry in Glasgow now dedicated to this misapprehended man. Some called it “Mockintosh”: fake jewellery and mirrors, trinkets and art deco tat. But he was not just some whiskery dandy, a fragile genius whose uneven career was cut short by failure and the shifting tides of fashion. There was something else there.

Tallis pocketed his phone, alighted from the bus and walked up the steep path to the top of Calton Hill. A short, nubbed hill at the east end of Princes Street, it was topped with monuments in grey and green: blocky memorials and fluted columns. He walked slowly up steep stairs. Tallis reached the top, and a sudden open view of the city, the capital laid out from the Pentlands to the sea. The old volcano, Arthur’s Seat, glowered behind. Tallis was out of breath.

As he recovered from the climb, the sea glinted like shook silver paper, and oil tankers glided on the light. Fife, across the Firth, was hazy, smoke rising from some refinery in the dim distance. Down below, traffic skittered to and fro.

Aunt Zed was sitting on a nearby bench, drinking from a takeaway cup. She waved.

Tallis sensed some kind of important conversation was about to take place.

Zed’s shoulders were tense, her smile thin. He sat down beside her and dropped his leather shoulder bag. She smelled of sweet honeysuckle.

“What a view from here,” he said. “Beautiful.” Zed sucked on her herbal tea. A waft of something organic and zesty drifted healthily from its lid.

“How is work?” she said, in a formal way. “It’s been interesting so far,” he said. She drank tea. She gulped.

“Any more from the police?”

“No, nothing.”

They sat in silence for a while. “Have you heard from your father recently, Thomas?” she said eventually. He felt his face blanche.

“Well, no,” he said.

“And they haven’t told you where he is?” “No. I have his number. I mean, it is the same number they gave me when he went away.”

“Poor Raymond,” she said.

“Poor nothing,” Tallis found himself saying.

Zed flicked a sharp stare at him. “Have you tried to contact him?”

“No. There are rules, Zed. You know the rules. To only call in the event of lifethreatening illness, or death. Or if something occurs that might endanger national security. That’s it. None of those things have happened.”

Zed turned to him. “Thomas. Raymond Thomas Tallis,” she said.

“That is, indeed, my name.”

He smiled. She didn’t.

The sunlight was gleaming on a halfbuilt monument behind her, what looked like a colossal copy of the Parthenon. It was ragged and unfinished and sad.

“You are probably going to be divorced,” she said, “and you may or may not shortly be in charge of your son and his only grandson. Named in your father’s honour.”

“Not in his honour. Every male in our family is Raymond Thomas.”

“You are being divorced, you may shortly be a single parent.”

“There’s worse things...”

“A single parent, and you are essentially homeless.” She emphasised the last word, and carried on. “You’ve left your job, a job you loved, in the galleries, to work in some hazy role for this dreadful British government. You seem miserable, Thomas.

“All these things: I just think your father should know, and would want to know. I think you should call that number and see what happens. I know Lydia – your mother – I know Lydia would be so, so worried about you right now. And you have never properly explained what happened at the Civic Gallery. It’s all very unlike you, Tom, and it’s been building up inside me, all these questions and uncertainties, and then the tongue... I feel I have to talk to you about it now, before it becomes something unsaid and awkward between us, and...”