The New Confessions Read Online Free PDF Page B

friendships that ensued seemed to last very long. I recall twin boys with whom I played fairly regularly for a year or two until one died of diphtheria. And there was a girl—Lucretia Leslie—to whose house I was often invited. I cannot remember much of Lucretia (a violet dress, a cute chubby face) even though we were fast friends for a good while, except that we definitely did not expose our private parts to each other. At school I was reasonably popular, but because I did not live in Barnton I was unable to extend my acquaintance with my school chums beyond classroom hours.
    For a while I hung around Thompson, while he was in his mid-teens and I was approaching double figures. I was not welcome. He tolerated me, no more. Anyway, as he entered his final year at school his extracurricular activities took up much of his time. He was captain of hisschool debating society and was prominent in one of the quasi-religious, paramilitary organizations for boys (I forget which) that seem to proliferate in Scottish cities. He was a sedulous churchgoer for some years (my father was not) and I remember him going on trips to convocations or rallies. Once to Birmingham and once, I think, to Antwerp.
    Looking back on Thompson’s indifference I wonder if it was a subconscious resentment of me, like my father’s. Thompson had been six when his adoring mother was taken away and replaced by a bawling baby brother. Did he, somewhere in his being, blame me for this crucial deprivation? My mother’s death was the start of all my misfortunes. Possibly it made Thompson what he was, and what he is today: a cold, selfish, conceited philistine without a drop of fraternal affection in his body. And very rich.
    So I was left largely to my own devices: Oonagh, my rare friends, my hobby. I wonder what I did before I got my camera? Played with Oonagh, I suppose. She always seemed to be there with young Gregor—her last child, as it turned out. Should I tell you anything more about Gregor?… I treated him rather as Thompson treated me. In fact, Oonagh showed me more kindness than she did her own child. She called Gregor “snotty-beak”—he seemed always to be in the grip of a ferocious cold, summer and winter, his top lip glossy with phlegm. Gregor.… It seems hardly worth it. He drifted out of my life shortly after. Later I heard he married, joined the merchant navy. Is he still alive? Are you out there, Gregor?… Gregor need not concern us; he was around then, that was all, and he is one of the few people in my life to whom I bear no ill will.
    Oonagh. Oonagh was the tender nexus of my universe, although I never reflected on it at the time. When I arrived home from school, breathless from the hike up from the station, it was into the kitchen that I turned.
    “Here he is,” she would say and that would be it. I would sit down, my plate would be set in front of me and we would take up our conversation from where it had been left off.
    Around the time I learned about Donald Verulam and my mother—the summer of 1912—there was a slight but discernible shift in the relationship between me and Oonagh. By then she must have been in her mid-thirties, still a handsome strong woman, her protruding eyes as restless and shrewd as ever. She moaned with more regularity about the cold, her back, the doings of her offspring. We had had the electric lightinstalled in the apartment now, and what with Thompson and my father more often out than in, her duties were not onerous.
    What brought on this change? One day, one week, one month something was different, that is all I can say. She was more guarded, that is the best I can express it. Our easy discourse continued but now I seemed to sense a watchfulness behind it that had not been present before. Why? It was my growing older, I am sure. She missed nothing, and perhaps she sensed one moment the first adult glance I bestowed upon her, felt in my love for her the undertow of carnality. At thirteen I was