The Goldenacre

Episode 26

Six months ago, it had all fallen down. Tallis had been curating a show at the Civic Gallery. He had come home to a note and an absent child: Astrella had written she was going to France for a while, to see her parents in the Ile-de-france. Ray was with her. They were gone a month, and when they returned, something – mysterious and grave, tender and light – had gone.

The air between them was no longer freighted, no longer waiting for movement towards a centre. Just air, and two human bodies with no connection or desire to connect.

Ray was still growing, and thriving at school, they kept going in their own lives.

Tallis was consumed with work, and, in the end, a series of calamities. Astrella was also busy again: with concerts, with recordings. Everything was numb and numbed. The home was clean and provided for, and Ray was happy in his myopic world of toys and TV, food and play. He would still come into their bed at night, a warm bolster between indifferent bodies.

It was no one’s fault, Tallis thought. It was like a collapsing cliff. Or a forest fire. A lightning strike on an exposed peak. The turn of the tide on a green beach.

“It’s not my fault,” he found himself saying.

He looked up again: a crucifix hung from the high rafter. Christ hung in agony. His blood, bright varnished paint, his skin, varnished bright paint. The nail in his pinned feet as long as Tallis’s arm.

Hung nearby was an icon of Mary, holding the Christ child. Underneath it was skeletal black ironwork, holding small candles. There was a black iron box with a slit in its lid, for coins. He wanted to light one, and pray now. But he did not know what he would pray for. For himself, or for others. He moved to them anyway.

The candlelight shook on the face of the mother of Christ. The divine baby’s hands were around her body, clasped over her bending neck. He knew there were messages in the icon, in the way the hands were splayed, in the folds of the clothes, in the eyes, and in the position of the fingers.

But he did not know what they were, or how to read them.

Someone was in the higher end of the cathedral. There was a movement and a noise. There was a faint smell of new flowers and released perfume. Like roses. The roses of Mackintosh.

A great sound suddenly rose in the cathedral. Tallis almost jumped. Someone was practising on the organ. A great chord rang out. Major and plangent, like the sea, it suddenly filled the vast spaces. It rose and fell.

He thought of The Goldenacre, and its creator. Mackintosh had spent his final days dumb – the cancer had silenced him.

A doctor in London had cut his tongue away, and the great artist had spent his last days denied speech, conversation, music. So he had painted The Goldenacre as a last message. As a vision of the world to come: an enclosed field, spirits in robes, birdsong and distant mountains. A deep silence sunk in the urban grass. The lengthening shadows of what men had built darkening the trees, the flowers, the animals. A warning, then – and a vision, held forever in watercolour.

Tallis looked to the icon and the candles. They burned on, flickering eyes of fire. 10.54pm

Remember the time when I was allowed to visit you in Cyprus? I must have been twelve or something. It was so hot, I had never been so hot. In the back of the car that picked me up from the airport at Larnaca, my legs sticking to the seat. The flamingos standing in the salt flats: I had never seen flamingos before.

Arriving at that empty house, with the swinging metal gate, the silent cleaner who made my dinner and breakfast. Until you showed up.

At that beach club, with you and your espionage friends. Making your awful jokes about Greeks and Turks and Jews. You pointing out to me a big white hotel on the Larnaca front, which was full of Russians and call-girls, you said. You would know.

It smelled of bad suntan lotion and cheap beer and bad burgers. Red-faced squaddies’ shoulders. Endless empty days on that penned-off beach. Listening to rock music on my Sony Walkman. Alone.

There was that day, though, in the mountains, in the Troodos Mountains. We walked in the trees and you gave me a paper bag full of figs. They were full of maggots. Walking in the high ranges, pine needle path under cool pines, with your man walking ten steps behind.

Then on the yacht – do you remember? – your drunk, one-eyed friend’s boat. The white yacht on the blue sea and in the blue sky. Dropped anchor off those white stucco cliffs.

You took that long rifle and began shooting fish in the bay. You and your hairy friend. You handed me the rifle and told me to kill a fish. I held it wrong and I fired and the rifle recoiled into my eye.

Terrible pain. Blood and bruises. I took the military plane home, with all the knackered soldiers. My eye was black and swollen for days. Lots of headaches, and a day in the sanatorium. Hairline fracture of the orbital bone.

Dreams, I still have, of you leaning away from me, a gun at your shoulder, killing creatures in the blinding blue sea.

All these memories will die with me. Do you have any of mine?

Good night.

The Goldenacre as a last message. As a vision of the world to come

Over breakfast, with light filling Zed’s kitchen, Tallis read the documents from the Melrose family. The Goldenacre had been profiled in various publications, magazines, websites and books. But it had never been shown in an exhibition – the general public had not seen it. Even when Denholm House was open to visitors, The Goldenacre had been out of view.

In the Melrose document, printed on thick paper, there was a poor photograph of the work. It seemed to have been taken down from the wall. It was lying on a bed. It was a strange, unprofessional image. It was murky. The clean watercolour paints looked blotchy and mottled. Mackintosh’s brilliant eye looked deranged in this instance – gentle tonal contrasts were made savage and clumsy.

More tomorrow.

Philip Miller lives in Edinburgh. An awardwinning journalist for 20 years, he is now a civil servant. The Goldenacre, published by Birlinn, follows his previous novels, The Blue Horse and All The Galaxies. His latest novel, The Hollow Tree, is to be a sequel to The Goldenacre.