Flashback Forward by John Cairney

Author:John Cairney [John Cairney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775531791
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’D BEEN HAVING a Saturday after-lunch read in the conservatory armchair, and I must have fallen over and had this dream. It was a terrible dream. A grave had been dug, and Jem was in it, playing her piano, and I was sitting with her when people started filling the grave and I couldn’t get out. I woke up sweating. I needed a drink. With a single malt in my hand I was able to think more clearly. I took a sip, and the dream slowly faded. But I couldn’t help thinking about poor old Jem. And I thought about how, at Uncle Jack’s funeral, Auntie Babs had got a little tipsy and had gone on about Jem so that, at last, I learned the full story. It was years ago now, but I can still remember it clear as day.

It seems Babs and Jem were at school together, and both of them were good at art, but Jem, being of a well-to-do family, was able to go to Paris to study, while Babs, having poorer parents, could not. When Jem returned a year later, she brought with her a French suitor, Jean-Paul, but her father wouldn’t let him over the doorstep because he was a Catholic. So the Frenchman went to board with Barbara’s family, and, according to Babs, he fell in love with her. Jem made a fuss and Jean-Paul went back to Paris. Defying her father, Jem followed Jean-Paul, only to find he was about to marry his childhood sweetheart. Jem came back to Glasgow then, but her father refused to speak to her, so she spoke only French in the house to annoy him. Things got so bad that she ran away again, from Kirklee to Hyndland, where Papa took her in to act as a governess to me because I couldn’t go to school.

Auntie Babs had let that story embitter her for all those years, and she seemed glad to have unburdened herself at last. I asked her if she had loved Jean-Paul.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very much.’

‘Then why did you marry Uncle Jack?’

‘He was there,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I was plain, not like her, so I had to take what I could get.’

Poor Babs. She went back to their big house in Pollokshields after the funeral, and died within six months. Jack was not allowed to rest in peace for long. Poor Jack, poor Babs, poor Jem. Three of them gone, and all of them unlucky in life — and in love. How lucky I’ve been, I thought, never to have loved anyone. Except my parents, of course. And Grace.

And Lagavulin. I’d time for just another wee one.

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