Skinner's Mission

13

Bob Skinner sat on the low stone wall of his cottage in Gullane, looking out across the lamplit Goose Green. It was just after nine, but the rain and cold of the previous evening had been driven away by an unseasonably early warm front, and he was perfectly comfortable in his jeans, and a denim shirt.

Not much moved in Gullane after dark, other than in the constantly busy main street. The Green was still and silent, as silent as the house behind him. He looked across it and thought of long-gone summer days, his first in the village. He remembered sitting in the sun, on the same piece of wall, with Myra beside him and with their newborn daughter asleep in her pram.

He smiled in the dark as he remembered the outrage of the new parents when the August funfair had set up on the Green, with the loud music which accompanied its carnival rides, and his attempt to force them to turn down the volume which they feared would disturb their child.

The showmen had been pleasant and understanding. They had turned the volume down a notch and had promised that they would stop before darkness fell. ‘But you wait and see, Mister,’ they had said. ‘After a couple of days your baby won’t even notice that we’re here.’

Of course they had been right. On the second evening of the fair, Baby Alexis had slept through the cacophony as if it had been a lullaby. In years thereafter, the showmen’s arrival had been one of the highlights of her summer, and the carnival people had become welcome visitors and good friends. Bob smiled again, and if anyone had been there to see they would have called it wistful, as he recalled their shock on the day that they arrived to learn of Myra’s death a few months before. The reality of their grief and the depth of their sympathy were still fresh in his mind. Had he accepted, all of his and Alex’s rides on their swings and roundabouts would have been free that summer, but he had insisted on paying their way.

He looked across the Green, through his memories, and counted four cars mounted on its verge outside the rear entrance to the Golf Inn Hotel. That had always been a popular parking spot for patrons. When the Skinners had first arrived, those cars, almost invariably, would disappear after closing time, but after only a few weeks of their residence, once word had spread that the eyes of the law were upon their owners, most would still be there in the morning.

In fact, Bob had always mentally put away his warrant card as soon as he had driven into his home village, but his presence there, especially as he had risen through the ranks, had seemed to ensure that the patrolling constables were always on their toes. Now, as he sat in the dark and the silence, he saw a man emerge from the pub’s back door, climb into one of the cars and drive away, up the Green and out, towards Erskine Road. He wondered to himself if standards had slipped since he had become, in the main, a weekend resident. He wondered too how long it would be before the village’s sharper eyes and tongues would note that he was back among them permanently. Already that evening one pair of eyebrows had risen, a moustache had twitched, and a mental note had been taken when he had wandered alone into the Mallard and ordered a pint of Seventy Shilling and a bar supper.

Abruptly, he stood up from the wall, stepped clean over the garden gate, walked up the path to the grey-stone cottage, turned his key in the lock and stepped inside. As it had when he had arrived earlier that evening, still reeling mentally from his explosive confrontation with Sarah, the house seemed to greet him like an old friend as he switched on the lights.

It had seen most of the pivotal moments of his adult life. It was the home he had shared with Myra; the home to which he had returned after her death to try somehow to break the news to a four-year-old; the home which he had made for Alex as he had raised her to womanhood, for many years devoting himself to her to the almost complete exclusion of anything resembling a personal life.

Eventually, it was the place to which, with his daughter grown and gone to University in Glasgow, he had brought Sarah; the place where they had first made love, where he had made love in the truest sense of the word for the first time in more than fifteen years.

Sure, there had been the occasional date, the occasional invitation to dinner parties ‘to make up the numbers’, and on training courses, trips to conferences and on holiday in Spain - always far away from Gullane and his home with Alex - the occasional midnight encounter, flawed, fumbling, unsatisfactory: but mostly there had been nothing, save for parenthood and policing.

Although it might have been understandable, it would not have been true to say that Bob Skinner had walled himself up with memories of his late wife. There had been a block between him and the detail of those recollections, a barrier which lately had been smashed and swept aside. Of course he had grieved for Myra: he had missed her more than he would or could admit to himself. But he had looked at the past as if though a mist, as he had put everything from his mind but his work and the raising of his daughter. In each of the two pursuits, in anyone’s judgement, including, unashamedly, his own, he had been outstandingly successful.

Now he stood at, or near, the pinnacle of his career. His daughter was secure too, her adult life mapped out before her. With his new wife and child, and with his power to do good through his work and his rank, he should have been the most privileged and contented of men.

Except for the memory: the razor-sharp recollection conjured by Kevin O’Malley’s therapy from his subconscious, the picture that his mind had taken in that ravaged car, but which shock had blocked it from developing, and with it his certainty that Myra had died because someone had set out to kill him.

And with that memory had come all the others, in which he had been unable or had refused - even now he did not know the truth of it - to indulge himself. Recollections of his time with his first wife, thrusting themselves uncontrollably into his consciousness, intimate memories invading intimate moments. It was as if a spirit was demanding to be put properly to rest.

He had a chest full of ghosts in the attic.

After Myra’s death he had gathered together those of her personal effects which had not gone to her mother or directly to Alex, most of their photographs and personal memorabilia, and many of the teaching papers from her teaching career. Each item he had packaged, and put away in his old cabin trunk.

Finally he had come to the diaries which his wife had written, completely privately but assiduously, every day for as long as he had known her. Not once, while Myra lived, had he ever looked inside, and in death he had respected the only privacy which she had ever sought from him. So he had put them away too, all of them in the trunk, unread and unreviewed.

He had intended that one day he would give the collection to Alex, so that as an adult she could discover the mother she had never really known. But somehow, he had never quite got around to it, had never quite found the right moment. Since Myra’s death, he had opened that treasure-chest only once, then closed it again, very quickly, as if he had been afraid a genie would jump out.

He climbed the stairs to the attic room. He switched on the light in the small, dusty store-chamber, and he saw it. It was a broad, grey canvas-covered box, with a leather handgrip at either end. Two wooden bindings ran round its circumference, securing the box by their steel grips, which could be padlocked but now were not.

It had belonged to his father, and once a year it had been crammed tight with clothes for the family holiday. When he was a child, and it was packed and stood on end, it had seemed huge. He had a vivid memory of standing before it and looking up, for at that time it was taller than him. Now it was just an old grey trunk.

He yanked the metal catches apart and raised the lid, hesitantly, as if he expected the box to give a sigh, or perhaps a snarl. It did neither; instead the dust rose up from its lids in clouds. Coughing, he looked inside. The contents were packed in boxes and brown envelopes. He scanned them quickly, until he saw a grey cardboard shoe-box, jammed against the side wall on the right, and slightly crushed. Carefully, he lifted it out and took off the lid. It was full of rolls of 8mm cine film, with their ends neatly tucked away.

One Christmas his father had been given a cine camera, projector and screen, by a well-meaning old aunt. Having no interests other than golf and bridge, he had passed the set on to his fourteen-year-old son. Bob had used it from that time on until video cameras of manageable size had become available. All of his later films of Alex had been transferred to video, but the shoe-box, this long-hidden cache, held all those he had shot of Myra.

He looked into a corner of the attic and saw the projector, in its box, and the screen in its cylindrical case. They too were covered in dust. Once Sarah had asked him about the trunk, and what was in it. ‘Stuff of Myra’s,’ he had said, ‘best left alone,’ inviting no further enquiries. She had shown no interest in the cine equipment or screen. They had not been touched in years. Now, closing the trunk on the rest of Myra’s life, Bob Skinner picked up his projector, blew some of the dust away, and carried it, the screen and the box of films downstairs.

He was concerned for a moment that the old apparatus might have rusted, but when he set it up on the dining table, and switched it on, the machinery turned as smoothly as ever and its bulb cast a bright rectangle, first on the white wall then on the screen as he unrolled it and clipped it in place in its frame.

He picked a roll of film from the many in the box, and looked at its label. ‘Teacher Training College Graduation’, he read. He put it away, took out another, and another, and another, seven in all until he found the one for which he was searching. ‘Corfu Two’, he read softly.

He fitted the film on to the upper arm of the projector, then fed it through the bracket, past the bulb, and wound its end into the receiving spool. Finally he turned off the dining-room light, and switched the motor on.

The screen flickered white at first, as the blank early frames went past. Then suddenly, in an instant, an image appeared, in close-up and in perfect focus.

One thing that he had never forgotten was how beautiful Myra had been. He could see it mirrored to an extent in her daughter, although essentially Alex’s looks were a blend of her parents’ features. He stopped the projector and she smiled at him from the screen. Her dark hair had been cut short for that holiday, and swept back. Highlights from the sun glinted in it. Her body was tanned honey-gold, and her skin shone with health. She was smiling at him, through the lens and through the years, with her full red lips, and with her eyes, her huge, brown, wide, tell-it-all eyes.

They were her best feature; the weathervane of her moods, an infallible printout of whatever was on her mind at any waking moment. Looking at her, even if he had not remembered, Bob would have known beyond doubt what was on her mind back then, in Corfu, on their honeymoon.

He flicked the switch and the film rolled on. The scene widened as the zoom unwound and the cameraman backed off. They were on a terrace balcony with high walls on either side, and nothing in front but railings and the clear blue sea. On the deck were two white sun-loungers with blue cushions. Myra was spread on one, half-seated, half-kneeling. She was naked. He stopped the film again and gazed at her, feeling his tears come. The sun, high in the summer sky, gleamed on the Ambre Solaire which he had rubbed into her full firm breasts with their upward-tilting nipples, into her flanks, into her back, her legs, her flat, firm belly . . .

He flicked the switch again. In a single supple movement, she rose from the lounger, and turned, stepping towards the rails as if to lean over them. She was the same honey-gold colour all over, and her oiled buttocks bunched as she moved.

She turned again and came towards him, laughing as she approached, mouthing silent words, and sending even stronger signals with her eyes. Then a hand reached up - but not too far, as Myra had been five feet ten inches tall - and took the camera.

There were a few wild frames as the lens swung round, until at last a young man came into shot. He was tall, and tanned as deeply as she. Sun-oil gleamed on him also, on his forehead, his strong, straight nose, his high cheeks, and on his wide shoulders. His fair hair was cut short, and his blue eyes were creased by his smile. He looked as happy as anyone Bob had ever seen. He remembered. He had been.

The camera began to pan downwards, slowly, over his chest with its mat of tangled bleached-blond hair, over his tightly muscled stomach, past his slightly protuberant navel. The camera began to zoom in and the shot went out of focus, but not so badly that it was impossible to make out the big hand as it flashed up to clamp over the lens.

The screen was dark for a few seconds. When it lit up once more, Myra was seated on a high stool, at an open-air bar. She was clothed this time, but only just, in a short, clinging yellow dress with a halter-fastening, from beneath which the tops of her breasts bulged, as if trying to break free. She was still smiling, and her great brown eyes were still beckoning, beckoning him now as they always had.

The stillness in the room was eerie. The whirring of the projector cut the silence like a knife paring off a layer of butter. Above the soft sound he could hear the sound of his own breathing, slightly fast and rasping. And then, gradually, he began to fancy that below it, within it, he could catch the whisper of a second breath in the darkness.

He stared hard at the screen, and as he did the hair on the back of his neck began to prickle. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, and when he opened them everything had changed.

He was still staring at Myra, but suddenly she was three-dimensional; Myra and Sarah mingled together as the film of his first wife seemed to shine and move around the form and features of her successor.

‘I came out here to talk, Bob.’ Sarah/Myra said coldly. ‘To try to persuade you, to try . . . oh I suppose, to try and fight for you!

‘Bad move, huh? Now I can see what I’m up against.’

He stood there, rooted to the spot, with his heart pounding heavily in his chest like a hammer. Struck dumb, he shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut once more. When he opened them, Myra was alone and two-dimensional once more.

In her Seventies honeymoon dress, she stepped down from the barstool and walked, smiling, lustily, towards him once more, as she had done in the scene on the terrace. As her image grew, and as Bob’s confusion, his emotions, and his memories combined to overwhelm him, he fancied, but without certainty, that he heard the soft click of the front door, closing.