The Conditions of Unconditional Love by Alexander McCall Smith

Author:Alexander McCall Smith [McCall Smith, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The next day was Saturday, a day on which Isabel and Jamie often took the boys for a walk up Craiglockhart Hill. Family walks with small boys were slow affairs, kept from being at all brisk by the limited pace that Magnus could manage at his age, and by Charlie’s tendency to walk in circles. That had puzzled Isabel, and she had contemplated seeking advice on whether there was some internal compass problem. Jamie, however, assured her that it was entirely natural at that age. “There is so much to be looked at when you’re that close to the ground,” he said. “That’s all he’s doing—inspecting things. It’s all relatively new to him, remember. And besides, when I was small, I think I did it myself.”

Craiglockhart Hill was one of Edinburgh’s seven hills, rising in the south-west of the city, not more than a mile or two from the street on which Isabel and Jamie lived. Over the years, housing had crept up to its edges, but the hill itself, with its relatively steep sides and broad, grassy top, was protected against development. To its immediate south, an encircling golf course provided a further green buffer. From the summit, looking north over the rooftops of the city, one could just make out the three bridges over the Forth—the rust-red cantilevers of the nineteenth-century railway crossing, the mid-twentieth-century road bridge, and the latest way across the firth, a construction of delicate white pillars, tiny at this distance. To the south, beyond the golf course and the final suburbs, were the Pentland Hills, the watchful beginnings of a hinterland that stretched off towards further ranges of hills and the upper reaches of the Clyde River. That way was Glasgow, and a whole different world, even if only forty miles to the west.

On the lower slopes of the hill was a large nineteenth-century building, reached by a long sweep of driveway. This was Craiglockhart House, now a university building, but until the late nineteen-hundreds an outlying part of the city’s hospital system. During the First World War it had been used by the army as a place to which soldiers suffering from shell shock were sent. These damaged men, tormented by a condition that even some of those treating them refused to believe existed, dreamed their nightmares in the quiet wards of the long, low building, and in the daytime wandered round the wooded grounds of the hospital.

“I can imagine them,” Jamie once said, as they made their way along the path up the hill. “I can imagine Owen and Sassoon right here, having walked over from the hospital, standing here, where we are right now, waiting for the inevitable order to go back to the trenches and to die all over again.”

Isabel had looked down at the two boys and thought of how those men had once been small children, just like her two. Was it for this the clay grew tall? Owen had written. And it was happening, all over

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.