‘Are you sure?’
‘It would be a suitable ending for an aged academic, tumbled by words.’
Traces of James’s dead wife clung to the house. Professor James would surely never have chosen the floral curtains that screened the small window in the hall, nor the sets of figurines gazing unadored from behind the dull glass of the china cabinet, but the tone of the place had shifted from a respectable family home with a feminine bent to an old bachelor’s bed-sit.
The kettle was in the sitting room, where it could be easily reached. An open packet of sugar, a cardboard box spilling tea bags and a carton of suspect milk stood next to it. The coffee table was stacked with books, each of the piles tiled together with the precision of a Roman mosaic. A smaller occasional table at James’s side held a glass of water, a selection of medication and yet more books. Murray noted a copy of Lunan’s Moontide on top of the pile, within easy reach of James’s right hand.
They parleyed a little about the department, but Murray sensed that the older man’s questions were merely form. The part of himself he had given to the university now occupied the books and papers that scattered the room. Murray’s presence was a brief distraction, a meeting on the shore before the tide of words dragged him back.
Murray reached into his rucksack, placed his tape recorder on top of one of the piles between them and pressed Record. James cleared his throat and his voice slowed to lecture-theatre pace.
‘I’ve only ever kept an appointments diary, so I’m afraid you won’t get any great insights from me, but I did look up the year in question and found a reference to a meeting I had with Lunan immediately after he was told his presence on our undergraduate course would no longer be required.’ James produced a daily diary stamped 1970, opened it at a bookmarked page and passed it to Murray. It had been a hectic week. James’s lectures were marked clearly in black ink, but the rest of the page was scattered with scrawls in several different colours, black battling blue and red, pencilled scribbles and underlinings. ‘He was a Tuesday appointment, afternoon of course. I don’t think Archibald Lunan was ever a friend of early mornings.’
Murray saw AL 2.30 jotted in the margin of a busy day. He asked, ‘How did Lunan react to being sent down?’
‘Sent down?’ The tone was mild. ‘I wasn’t aware we were in Oxford or Cambridge.’
‘No.’ Murray leaned back in his chair wondering how, for all his preparations, he could have forgotten the pedantry that lay behind James’s smile. ‘Was he upset?’
‘He may have been. But as far as I can recall, he took it like a man.’
‘Standard procedure would have been to send Lunan a letter. Why did you feel the need to inform him personally?’
‘I asked myself exactly the same thing when I saw the appointment in my diary.’
James’s manner shifted and Murray realised he’d hit on a question that interested the old man. He remembered this pattern from his undergraduate tutorials, the professor’s initial impatience set aside as he got into the meat of the matter, as if the verbal barbs were self-defence against boredom.
‘Let’s just say, whatever it was, I wouldn’t have trusted Lunan to anyone else in the department at that time. Even I could see we were a bunch of stuffed shirts.’ James moved slightly against his cushions as if trying to settle his bones. ‘Perhaps it says something about my own prejudices, but Archie looked belligerent. Long hair, cowboy moustache, scruffy clothes . . . there’s a particular leather coat that sticks in the memory.’ James gave a scholarly chuckle. ‘Ten years later teachers and lecturers had adopted the same look, with the exception of a few diehards like myself, the tweed jacket and suede shoes brigade. But back then, in Scotland at any rate, that kind of image still had counterculture connotations. So couple it with Lunan’s poor attendance . . . I was possibly worried he might get the stuffing knocked out of him. Despite his posturing, Lunan always struck me as delicate.’
‘In what way?’
‘He was sensitive, not a prerequisite for poets as you no doubt know. He looked the part, as I said, the leather coat, the ready fists, the all-too-frequently cut lip and black eye, but he wasn’t as robust as he made out.’
Murray asked, ‘How do you mean?’
James paused and looked at the ceiling as if searching for an explanation in its shadowed corners.
‘In those days I had a little group who used to meet once a month and discuss their own verse.’ James was being modest. His ‘little group’ had fostered a school of writers whose reputation had spread far beyond the literary circles of their city. Some of its members had later helped define their nation to the world. ‘The first poem Lunan presented was plagiarised. It was badly written enough to be the work of an undergraduate so there’s a good possibility I wouldn’t have rumbled him, if I hadn’t had a poem published in the same back issue of the journal he’d lifted it from.’ James shook his head in wonder. ‘Amazing.’
‘What did you do?’
‘My first instinct was to ask him about it in front of the group, but I resisted. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was already aware of Archie’s vulnerability. I simply took him aside and told him I knew. I think I expected that would be the last we saw of him, but for all he was weak, Archie was tough too. He came to the following meeting, this time with his own work. I must have been curious because I agreed to read it.’ James grimaced. ‘The poems he gave me were good. Not perfect, but original.’
Murray nodded towards Lunan’s book, perched on top of the pile at the professor’s elbow.
‘Did any of the poems he showed you appear in Moontide?’
‘One of them. “Preparation for a Wake”. It was revised and tightened up by the time the collection was published, of course, but the concept was there at the start: the raising of the dead man, the play on words between a wake and awake, the horror his drinking companions feel when their dead mate sits up ready to join in the merrymaking. The lyricism of the language wasn’t as successful as it was in the published version, but it was still remarkable.’
‘What did the rest of the group make of it?’
‘I don’t recall any particular debate. You have to remember it was a long time ago, and we were privileged to be at the birth of many remarkable pieces.’
James looked Murray in the eye. It was like a door slamming.
‘How did Archie get on with the group in general?’
‘Okay, as far as I remember. But as I said, it was a long time ago.’
Another door shut.
James gave the kind of smile favoured by American presidents on the stocks, but the professor’s teeth were yellowed, his gums pink and receding.
‘What about your own response to his work?
‘My own response?’
The professor made the question sound preposterous.
Murray smiled apologetically.
‘What was your initial reaction when you eventually got to see his writing?’
It was a sunny day outside, but the sitting room windows had taken on the smoky taint that glass acquires after a year or two’s neglect and the pair were stuck in murk and shadow. The dust that coated the air was formed from James and James’s wife, decayed and merged. Murray wanted to brush them from himself, but instead he smiled and waited.
James moved a hand against the arm