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Authors: Alexander McCall Smith
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poem he had once read: It is a long disease this separation of brothers … He had forgotten that, but there were words that haunted us and came back out of context, for no particular reason: lines of poetry, of song, of childhood prayer could do that. Dear Matthew, Mark, Luke and John: Please bless this bed I lie upon; the childish request so deeply embedded in the recesses of memory, and now emerging unbidden. Or the line from a poem he had once read—words that had stuck in his mind and kept returning: It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry …
The queue started to move. He picked up his own bag, and then glanced back at the two young men. The one saying goodbye had started to leave, but turned round at that precise moment and waved. But his friend, caught up in the crowd, did not see him.
He looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the great railway station. It was indifferent to parting, he thought. And then he thought: the architecture of farewell. The architecture of love. The architecture of loss.
THE TRAIN MOVED SLOWLY AT FIRST. PEOPLE settled in their places, began the activities that would divert them during the few hours to New York. Books were opened, computers switched on, eyes were shut, with relief, for sleep. He sat unmoving—and stared out of the window. He was thinking of the scene he had just witnessed. People talked of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that—there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.
He closed his eyes, but did not want to sleep. He wanted to think. He wanted to allow memory to make its own journey, just as he was doing now, travelling from one place to another. First meeting; the long friendship; parting: a journey with saliences and stations of its own.
It’s easy to be foolish, he thought. It’s dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there’s no point and when you know, too, that it’s just going to make you unhappy. It’s better to be stoic—to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something that they know from experience is going to cause unhappiness. Or is it? There were people who chose that, and seemed to do it successfully, but weren’t they filled with regret? Inside, where nobody could see, didn’t it hurt them to think about what they never had? He thought there were, and that was one thing that he had never suffered from. He had no regrets about this, because what he had had was so important to him that he would never have wished that it had not happened.
WHEN HE WAS YOUNG THEY USED TO GO FOR SIX weeks in the summer to a small town in Maine. It was not one of those fashionable places, popular with politicians and the wealthy, places that could be reached from New York within a couple of hours. This took much longer to reach, and was, as a result, less sought-after as a place for retreat. There was a bigger town nearby that had an airfield, served by a daily plane from Boston, but most people who went there in the summer drove long distances up the coast until they reached the harbour village with its single street of shops and its deserted canning works. There was nothing much else, really, apart from a rickety sawmill that still employed three men and that whined and coughed its way through the lumber that was brought down from the forests in the hinterland.
Their house was one of the last houses in town. Beyond them was an orchard, left to decline and now overgrown with rioting Boyne brambles, a home forscurrying wild creatures. A little way
The queue started to move. He picked up his own bag, and then glanced back at the two young men. The one saying goodbye had started to leave, but turned round at that precise moment and waved. But his friend, caught up in the crowd, did not see him.
He looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the great railway station. It was indifferent to parting, he thought. And then he thought: the architecture of farewell. The architecture of love. The architecture of loss.
THE TRAIN MOVED SLOWLY AT FIRST. PEOPLE settled in their places, began the activities that would divert them during the few hours to New York. Books were opened, computers switched on, eyes were shut, with relief, for sleep. He sat unmoving—and stared out of the window. He was thinking of the scene he had just witnessed. People talked of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that—there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.
He closed his eyes, but did not want to sleep. He wanted to think. He wanted to allow memory to make its own journey, just as he was doing now, travelling from one place to another. First meeting; the long friendship; parting: a journey with saliences and stations of its own.
It’s easy to be foolish, he thought. It’s dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there’s no point and when you know, too, that it’s just going to make you unhappy. It’s better to be stoic—to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something that they know from experience is going to cause unhappiness. Or is it? There were people who chose that, and seemed to do it successfully, but weren’t they filled with regret? Inside, where nobody could see, didn’t it hurt them to think about what they never had? He thought there were, and that was one thing that he had never suffered from. He had no regrets about this, because what he had had was so important to him that he would never have wished that it had not happened.
WHEN HE WAS YOUNG THEY USED TO GO FOR SIX weeks in the summer to a small town in Maine. It was not one of those fashionable places, popular with politicians and the wealthy, places that could be reached from New York within a couple of hours. This took much longer to reach, and was, as a result, less sought-after as a place for retreat. There was a bigger town nearby that had an airfield, served by a daily plane from Boston, but most people who went there in the summer drove long distances up the coast until they reached the harbour village with its single street of shops and its deserted canning works. There was nothing much else, really, apart from a rickety sawmill that still employed three men and that whined and coughed its way through the lumber that was brought down from the forests in the hinterland.
Their house was one of the last houses in town. Beyond them was an orchard, left to decline and now overgrown with rioting Boyne brambles, a home forscurrying wild creatures. A little way
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