One Good Turn Read Free Page B

in the class made Martin feel sick with nostalgia for a place he hardly knew. His mother was a native of the city, and Martin had spent the first three years of his life there when his father had been stationed at the Castle. One day, he thought, as Dorothy rattled on about form and content and the necessity of “finding your own voice,” one day he would go back to Edinburgh and live there. “And read!”she exclaimed, opening her arms wide so that her voluminous velvet cloak spread out like bat wings. “Read everything that has ever been written.”There were some mutinous murmurs from the class—they had come to learn how to write (or at least some of them had), not to read.
    Dorothy seemed dynamic, she wore red lipstick, long skirts, and flamboyant scarves and wraps that she pinned with big pewter or silver brooches. She wore ankle boots with heels, black diamond-print stockings, funny crushed-velvet hats. That was at the beginning of the autumn session, when the Lake District was decked in its gaudy finery. By the time it had descended into the drab damp of winter, Dorothy herself was wearing less theatrical Wellingtons and fleeces. She also had grown less theatrical. She had begun the session with frequent references to her “partner,” who was a writer-in-residence somewhere, but by the time Christmas loomed she wasn’t mentioning the partner at all, and her red lipstick had been replaced with an unhappy beige that matched her skin.
    They had disappointed her too, her motley collection of retirees and farming wives and people wanting to change their lives before it was too late. “It’s never too late!” she declared with the enthusiasm of an evangelist, but most of them understood that sometimes it was. There was a gruff man who seemed to despise them all and who wrote in a Hughesian way about birds of prey and dead sheep on hillsides. Martin presumed he had something to do with the country—a farmer or a gamekeeper—but it turned out he was a redundant oil geologist who had moved to the Lakes and gone native. There was a girl, a studenty type, who really did despise them all, she wore black lipstick (disturbing in contrast to Dorothy’s beige) and wrote about her own death and the effect it would have on the people around her. There were a couple of nice ladies from the WI who didn’t seem to want to write at all.
    Dorothy urged them to produce little pieces of autobiographic angst, secrets of the confessional, therapeutic texts about their childhood, their dreams, their depressions. Instead they wrote about the weather, holidays, animals. The gruff man wrote about sex, and everyone stared at the floor while he read out loud. Only Dorothy listened with bland interest, her head cocked to one side, her lips stretched in encouragement.
    “All right, then,” she said, sounding defeated. “Write about a visit to or a stay in the hospital for your ‘homework.’ ” Martin wondered when they were going to start writing fiction, but the pedagogue in him responded to the word “homework,” and he set about the task conscientiously.
    The WI women wrote sentimental pieces about visiting old people and children in the hospital. “Charming,” Dorothy said. The gruff man described in gory detail an operation to remove his appendix. “Vibrant,”Dorothy said. The miserable girl wrote about being in the hospital in Barrow-in-Furness after trying to cut her wrists. “Shame she didn’t manage it,” muttered one of the farmers’ wives sitting next to Martin.
    tin himself had been in the hospital only once in his life, when he was fourteen—he found that each year of his teens had brought some fresh hell. He had passed a funfair on his way back from town. His father was stationed in Germany at the time, and Martin and his brother, Christopher, were spending the summer holidays there on leave from the rigors of their boarding school. The fact that it was a German funfair made it an even more terrifying place