Old Men in Love Read online

  FOR

  ALEXANDRA

  One beginning and ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

  – At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction by Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar

  1 Tunnock’s Diary, 2001

  2 Citizens

  3 State Funeral

  4 Domestic Interior

  5 A Statesman’s Day

  6 At Aspasia’s

  7 Tunnock’s Diary 2002

  8 Prologue to a Historical Trilogy

  9 Tunnock’s Diary 2002

  10 In a Florentine Monastery

  11 In a Florentine Nunnery

  12 Somewhere in Rome

  13 Angus Calder’s Letter

  14 Tunnock’s Diary 2002-3

  15 Wee Me

  16 Early Sex

  17 Further Education

  18 My World History: Prologue

  19 Tunnock’s Diary 2004

  20 The Young Prince

  21 Lampeter

  22 From Br. Prince’s Journal

  23 Charlinch

  24 The Growth of The Spirit

  25 Stoke, Brighton and Weymouth

  26 The Abode of Love

  27 Hepworth Dixon’s Report

  28 Tailpiece

  29 Tunnock’s Diary 2006

  30 The Trial of Socrates

  31 Tunnock’s Diary 2007

  32 Socratic End Notes

  33 The Denoomong of the Imbroglio

  34 Tunnock’s Crossword Testament

  Epilogue by Sidney Workman

  A Note on the Author

  Notes

  eCopyright

  Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar’s Introduction

  We Sim-Jaegars are a widely scattered clan. Though born and educated in England I am now resident in Los Angeles with all the rights of a United States citizen. The Edinburgh Festival has twice drawn me to Scotland, yet I never dreamed I had a distant cousin there until a solicitor’s letter arrived “out of the blue,” as they say. It told me John Tunnock had died intestate, that I was his next of kin, and asked how I wished to dispose of his estate – some thousands of pounds in a savings account and a large terrace house in Glasgow’s Hillhead district. The current sale price of such houses was anything between half a million and a million. Furnishings, domestic appliances, ornaments, pictures and books had not yet been professionally valued, but a Glasgow agent of Christie’s (the well-known auctioneering firm) had written expressing interest in a stained glass panel representing Faith, Hope and Charity in the stairwell window, since records of the William Morris workshop indicated that it was designed by Burne-Jones. If I wished to view my cousin’s former property without residing in it (which was perhaps likely, given the circumstances of his death) I would easily find accommodation in a neighbourhood Hilton hotel.

  This letter had clipped to it a Herald newspaper cutting dated three weeks earlier. It said that John Tunnock, retired schoolteacher, aged sixty-seven, had been found dead at his home in Glasgow’s Hillhead district, and the police were appealing to the public for information about anyone seen entering or leaving his home before the morning of Saturday, 28th April. Attached to the clipping was a further note from the lawyer saying the police had taken all evidence the house could yield and no arrests would be made. He had ordered the removal of blood stains and the place was now thoroughly tidied and cleaned, all locks on doors were changed and a new up-to-date burglar alarm installed. He awaited my instructions.

  Well! God knows I have all the money I need but a businesswoman can always use more. My investments are safe because I work closely with my brokers and lawyers – not that I suspect them of corrupt practices, but when professional men’s judgement is at fault (and no financial arrangement is ever flawless) they sometimes automatically ensure that the cost is borne by inattentive clients. This canny attitude brought me to Glasgow against the advice of American and English friends who said I would be in danger of criminal violence, and pointed to my cousin’s fate as a warning. My omniscient insurance advisor disagreed. Glasgow, he said, certainly had the greatest density of European poverty, ill health and crime west of the former Communist empire – in one district the average life expectancy was seventeen years less than that of those living in the Gaza Strip before the recent Israeli-Lebanese war – but the murder rate was still three quarters of that in most United States cities. Statistics show that in Glasgow’s Hillhead area a woman is marginally safer than in Beverly Hills, especially if she does not wear bright blues or greens while watching television football in crowded pubs. These colours, that sport, such pubs do not tempt me. To Glasgow I came.

  Next morning at the Hilton hotel I had a business breakfast with the solicitor, Alasdair Gillies. He could tell me nothing directly about my cousin, never having met him. Legal documents in the possession of his firm, letters in the Tunnock family home had enabled him to trace me through a distant relation who had emigrated in Victoria’s reign. They had also revealed a family secret. John’s mother Griselda was youngest daughter of Murdo Henderland Tunnock, for many years minister of Hillhead Parish Church. Like her two sisters she never married. Unlike them she had left the family home, first becoming a typist in a local tax office before promotion in 1936 to a superior post in London. Four years later at the age of forty-one she gave birth to John, her first and last child. The birth certificate gives a line of unpronounceable consonants as the father’s name, gives his occupation as Polish naval officer, which seems improbable. Griselda brought her baby to Glasgow a week later, deposited him with her sisters (whose parents were dead) and returned to London. Soon after she too died, crushed by a falling wall while cycling to work after a night of heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe.

  John’s subsequent life with his aunts seems to have been unusually cloistered. He attended Hillhead Secondary then the University of Glasgow, both near each other and less than ten minutes walk from the family home. He trained as a teacher at Jordanhill College, a short bus ride to the west, after that becoming a teacher, then headmaster of Molendinar Primary School in Robroyston, a longer ride to the east. He never owned a car. Mr Gillies suggested that his aunts “kept him on a very short leash”. They were his housekeepers until 1977 when he took early retirement to look after them, helped by house cleaners and visiting nurses. Before then he had holidayed with them in hilly or coastal parts of Scotland. The last aunt died aged ninety-seven in 1998, after which he seems never to have slept outside the family home. On week days his social life was mainly evening visits to Tennants, a pub at a corner of Byres Road where the usual clients were students, academics, several long-term unemployed and a few owners of small businesses who avoided declaring their earnings to the Inland Revenue. Here John was well known though his quiet ways drew very little attention. His main acquaintance was Francis Lambert, a retired university lecturer and more robust figure with whom John Tunnock gossiped and discussed crossword puzzles. On Saturdays and Sundays John walked briskly to pubs elsewhere, some in the city centre or south of the river or further east, seldom drinking more than a half pint of lager in each, and stopping at cafés for cups of tea or snacks. His visits to these places were not exactly predictable, but regular enough for people he met to assume he lived locally, though most of the pubs were over a mile apart. None of those he talked to thought him interesting or unusual before they heard of his death.

  I brooded on this information, then asked if any of these pubs showed football matches on television? Had John worn noticeable colours? Mr Gillies understood more by my question than I kne
w it contained. The police had investigated that (he said) and found John Tunnock never wore team colours, supported neither Rangers nor Celtic, was neither Orangeman nor Fenian, Mason or Knight of Saint Columba. When asked what football club he supported Tunnock always said Partick Thistle, which in Glasgow is a code name for agnostic and might inspire contempt in Protestant or Catholic bigots but not murderous rage.

  “Had he no sex life?” I asked. Apparently none before 1998, said Mr Gillies, but his diary indicated he had then “lashed out a bit”. I asked what that meant. He said I should read the diary to find out. I said his silence on the matter suggested dealings with prostitutes, or homosexuality, or paedophilia – the last now so notorious that one fears to show kindness to any child anywhere. What had the police discovered? Gillies told me that the women who cleaned his house said he was “a nice wee man who wouldnae hurt a fly or say boo to a goose.” He seemed not to have visited any pub on the night of his death. His cleaners found the body next morning on a staircase landing and a forensic report indicated he had died suddenly of a fractured skull about ten hours earlier, the fracture caused by abrupt contact with a step. There was no alcohol in his blood, though the state of the living room upstairs, together with fingerprints on glasses and bottles, indicated some kind of party with several individuals, one a drug user known to the police. He (Mr Gillies) had been privately informed that the drug user had confessed to pushing John away during an amorous struggle on the staircase when she tried to leave, a push resulting in his fall. The Crown Office had decided not to make a respected citizen’s sex life public by accusing the girl of culpable homicide, especially when a jury would almost certainly bring a verdict of not proven. Only Scots law allows this, which a cynic has suggested means, “Go away and don’t do it again.” The most famous beneficiary of this verdict is Madeleine Smith, charged with poisoning an inconvenient lover in 1857.

  “Well,” I said, slightly disgusted with my cousin, “since you have the keys to his house please take me there.” I do not mention the address because houses tainted by suspicion of murder are harder to sell, but I found the surrounding architecture, gardens and parks pleasanter than many pleasant parts of London, because less grandiose. This did not prepare me for the interior.

  The only part of John Tunnock’s diaries I have read mentions a robbery that deprived his home of expensive bric-a-brac. I doubt if I could have faced it before that robbery. The clutter of dark mahogany furniture with dark, slightly threadbare upholstery, dark oil paintings in thick gilt frames, heavily ticking pendulum clocks, glass-fronted book cases full of bound sermons seemed pressing in to crush me. The day was overcast. We switched on electric lights with frosted glass shades that had been converted from ancient gas fittings. Over tables in the main rooms were chandeliers that could be raised or lowered by adjusting a central brass cone-shaped counterweight. The lavatory was the biggest surprize. I had expected Victorian plumbing to be primitive, but here it was palatial, complex and gloomy in a way recalling Edgar Allan Poe. The vast bath was housed in a panelled chest ending in something like a sentry box with its own little vaulted ceiling. It had a dozen big brass taps, each with a label giving temperature, angle and force of a different spray. Their position suggested a servant was needed to turn them, a detail that struck me as weirder than the death on the staircase outside. The water was heated by gas burners under a tank in a wardrobe-like cupboard lined with what must have been asbestos. A smaller wardrobe-like structure in the living room had no visible doors but something like a glass porthole at eye level. Mr Gillies said this was the house’s most modern article, being a 1938 television set manufactured by John Logie Baird’s company. It did not work of course. There was no other television set, no telephone or record player. There was an upright piano with an unusually thick case: a pianola or (as they say in the States) a player piano operated by rolls of perforated card. A player could work it in person using pedals and stops, or switch on an electric motor to play it automatically. A stand like a huge wine rack held about three hundred rolls of work by composers from Bach to Gershwin, as I could see from labelled disks at the roll ends. There was also a radio in a two-foot-square cubical wooden case.

  Despite my dislike of the place I saw it was a better example of nineteenth century interior decor than many in well-endowed museums. I considered offering it to Glasgow District Council to be maintained as a small local history museum, but Mr Gillies told me a similar house, more representative since not as opulent, was on show in a tenement near Sauchiehall Street, so Glasgow’s museum service would not want another. After careful consultation I decided to sell through Christie’s the Burne-Jones window and two dull landscapes I was told belonged to the Barbizon School. Through Sotheby’s I sold the most valuable furniture, including the Baird television set, the pianola with its rolls, and even the Edgar Allan Poe shower-bath. Through a local firm, West End Auctions, I sold everything else. Mrs Manning, owner of the firm, tells me the portraits of clergy and volumes of sermons will decorate a public house in Saltcoats called The Auld Kirk, in a building that was once indeed a Church of Scotland. These transactions will finally raise more cash than the million I expect for Tunnock’s empty eight-room-and-kitchen home.

  John Tunnock’s papers were now all that remained to embarrass me. After old letters, receipts and bills were destroyed I had a mass of typescript and a large desktop notebook two-thirds full of undated entries in tiny, clear, almost sinisterly childish calligraphy. It would have been heartless to discard all that as waste paper, but what else could I do? The typed pages were historical novels, which I detest. I also dislike reading diaries, even those written for publication, and a sample of John’s miserable confessions made me think them unpublishable – I now know this idea is old-fashioned and out of date. On Mr Gillies’s advice I put the lot in a suitcase and left it at the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Literature office, with a letter offering a donation to the department of a few hundred pounds in return for an honest assessment of the contents. Did anything in these papers deserve publication? I asked. Would a publisher consider them a commercial proposition if I paid for the printing? Or would Glasgow University, which in 1962 had awarded John an honours degree in the Humanities, find room for these papers in its archives?

  A fortnight later the head of the department, Alan Riach, sent a courteous and helpful reply. He thought the historical fictions well written and entertaining, but the one set in classical Greece lacked chapters connecting start and finish, the one set in Renaissance Italy was three loosely linked dialogues with neither beginning nor end, and the fictional biography of the Victorian clergyman had already been novelized by Aubrey Menen in a 1972 Penguin paperback called The Abode of Love. No reputable firm would undertake to publish such work by an author who was unknown, Scottish and dead. For the same reason no public archive would want them. If university and national libraries became repositories of unpublished fiction by unknown authors they would soon have no room for anything else. The notebook diary and notes for an autobiography were another matter. Their account of a life that had ended violently might interest a publishing house, especially if I paid part of the production costs and the book was introduced and edited by a known author. With my permission he would show the papers to Alasdair Gray, a writer who lived locally and, with some success, had edited and published the papers of a Glasgow public health officer.

  It was thus that I met Mr Gray whose response to all John’s papers was enthusiastic. The diary and personal notes and historic fictions should be published together (Gray said) thus casting light on what he saw as a major theme, men in love. Tunnock, like many of his generation, was an old-fashioned Socialist and had at first planned the novels as a trilogy with a name suggesting the Marxist theory of surplus value, but had then changed it to something more frivolous. A better, more eye-catching and more accurate title would be Men in Love for it would connect Tunnock’s love life with those of his heroes, and balance them. The patriarchs of Cl
assical Greece, Renaissance Italy and Victorian England loved their idea of truth or beauty or God more than any woman, but the women in Tunnock’s love-life had certainly ruled him.

  “If you can call it a love life!” I said grimly, “I have known many men, but none like John Tunnock. If you manage to get his diary published along with the rest I insist the book be called John Tunnock.”

  Mr Gray, not very graciously, seemed to accept this but said the final choice of title would probably be decided by the eventual publisher’s marketing department. He said that if I paid for the printing out of John’s estate the book, edited as he envisaged, would certainly be distributed by Bloomsbury Publishing of London, a highly successful firm that had done well out of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Mr Gray (who clearly has a high opinion of his own talents) said he would design and provide the book with decorative illustrations, “in colour, if the money stretches so far”. He indignantly refused my offer of payment for his editorial work because, “It is a privilege to be midwife to so unique a volume.” John Tunnock would never be a popular success (he said) but he would “claw back” something from Bloomsbury in royalties if I signed a paper granting him possession of copyright. This I was pleased to do.

  He differed from Alan Riach, however, by insisting that I write the introduction, because his reputation as an occasional writer of fiction often led critics to doubt the value of his serious work. But Lady Sim-Jaegar (he gallantly declared) was both known in United States business circles and remembered in Britain as the glamorous wife of a popular American ambassador. My introduction would publicize the book better than anything by him if I described my discovery of the material and his editorial method: he would use the undated diary entries to introduce and connect the fictions, thus annoying purists but making the book more entertaining. He had also found a verse among the papers that would give the book a cheerful end, and as editor, he would provide notes explaining details that some readers might find puzzling.