Disloyalties

My great grandfather was a ladies’ man, people in my family said. They offered it with admiration even if it must have surely on occasion been a source of pain for my great-grandmother. I was seven when she died and my great-grandfather had passed before I was born, and yet such stories supposedly didn’t wait for her passing before they were conveyed. It was part of the family history, and my father said that his granny would on occasion augment the stories herself, even if there was never a moment when she looked like she would leave her husband. I had long since thought about this odd magnanimity, perhaps found some sort of answer while reading a history of Scotland, and wondered too if while we are all unavoidably part of history, some people are more involved in it than others.

This seems so obvious a point that I should clarify. Who is to doubt that Victoria, Churchill, Disraeli, Napoleon and De Gaulle are central to history as many of us are not? But from a certain point of view my great-grandfather's womanising ways were also historically pertinent. Maybe some people are deemed to make history (Churchill, and Napoleon), while some are so made by it that we can understand an aspect of the historical as readily through them as through the figures who make it into the history books. By escaping becoming a statistic, my great-grandfather instead symptomised a moment.

2

Throughout my teens, I would hear numerous stories about his dalliances and maybe I was told them more often than others because according to my grandmother I was beginning to look a litttle like him. Though I had seen a couple of photographs from the thirties, she said that black and white didn’t do him justice; that Jim’s black hair, his red lips, his easily-tanned skin, benefitted more from life than from images, and certainly couldn’t quite be found in monochrome when he was so colourful in every sense. She would say I hadn't his charm and ruffle my hair when saying so, adding that she didn’t believe I had the makings of a rogue. I was too honest for that, she insisted. 

From what she told me, what my father said, and what other relatives occasionally offered, I built an idea of this man that became a story in my head but not a reality I believed I myself would wish to pursue. Jim was born at the end of 1900 and the war had ended days before his eighteenth birthday. He had been preparing to go, had seen friends leave months before, and was both relieved and frustrated that he wouldn’t have to fight. An uncle and a cousin returned with missing limbs, and a friend several years older than my great-grandfather returned with a face as if split down the middle. The man was in his early twenties when he went off to war; before it, he was known as the most handsome man around. It was a monicker Jim would take on in his place, and Jim might have wondered whether it would have come to him anyway as he was a grown man after the war and but a boy during it, or whether it took shrapnel to lodge itself into the man’s visage to dislodge him from his perch as the one whose looks everybody would talk about. 

They of course talked about those looks all over again but in terms of shock rather than awe, and he was known as one of the broken gargoyles of Glasgow. This friend of Jim’s, who was in some ways more like an older brother, even a young uncle before the war, would take Jim fishing, and Jim remembered him talking after it about those times and said that before the fighting he would see women and fishing as similar activities: you were just waiting to reel something in, he said. After the war, Jim and this friend still went fishing but this time it was Jim who could reel in the women and not just the fish. For the friend, fishing had become consolation. He spent most days sitting with the line; he was on a full pension of forty shillings and rented a two-room flat for around six shillings. He had money, time, and a home far less cramped than many. Not only could he eat, he could eat well and he meant this as a pun. Other soldiers he knew with facial disfigurements had lost half their mouths; he was lucky — he could see out of both eyes and could eat without difficulty. Only his breathing was sometimes troublesome as the shrapnel had cut through his nose and slammed into his forehead.  

3

This friend of Jim’s killed himself five years after the war and, before doing so, he would often joke about how he could do himself a favour, and save the British State some money, by doing himself in. My grandmother told me about Jim’s friend only once, perhaps to counter the constant joking tone everybody had always taken towards my great grandfather’s womanising, but also to insist that she thought it was at the root of his behaviour, as though he saw in his friend a man who could see the fickleness of the opposite sex (and no doubt his own), in the solitary existence the man was expected to lead when his looks had been blown away. It was the only time my great-grandfather’s behaviour was given a broader context, except for one other conversation I had with my father. Usually, we discussed it as a running joke that could have taken place in any family, in any generation, but that chat with my grandmother, the disclosure of my father, seemed to suggest another perspective. By the time his friend took his life, Jim was already married to my great-grandmother, and according to my father he heard that Jim had only started cheating on her after his friend died; others that he had started doing so right from the beginning of their marriage. The thing is, hundreds of thousands of Scottish men went to war and more than a quarter of them lost their lives. Numerous others came back injured. If my great-grandfather might have been a catch at the best of times, this was the worst of them, but what I couldn’t work out was whether my great-grandfather was the worst of men, and the several scenarios I run through my mind when thinking of him, and what was said about him, none of them seem honourable even if the family at no stage ever spoke badly of him. 

Perhaps he did start sleeping with others early in the marriage and did so because the opportunities were there. Many women were now widows; others would have lost their boyfriends, and still others would have been single as there were only so many men now to go around. Many women were no doubt in need of affection and there were far too few men to offer it, so my great-grandfather took advantage of the terrible consequences of the war for his own sexual benefit. If he remained faithful to my great-grandmother until after his friend’s death, did he start sleeping with others to avenge him, to show that he could sleep with women because his face hadn’t been broken up in war? But whatever reason I could offer for his actions I couldn’t see how there wouldn’t be an aspect of self-loathing in his behaviour. Yet, nothing of this seemed evident in the way the family described him. Surely he must have sensed that his status as a lothario was partly predicated on the deaths of numerous men that left so many women without partners, and I sometimes wondered if he did so with the complicit agreement of my great-grandmother, who accepted that as long as he never left her he could see who he liked.

4

I found myself thinking a lot about this over the last couple of years, and again more recently when I read a story about a husband of two who left his wife for a Ukrainian refugee living in his house, and while thinking again about incidents in my own life that resembled just a little the story I had read about. In the newspaper story, a father, married with two kids, took in a young woman escaping from Lviv and within a fortnight they had fallen in love and deserted the family home. I didn’t know whether the woman had left a boyfriend fighting in the country but surely had relatives who were still in Ukraine defending their homeland. How could she have felt not just going off with another’s husband but also doing so after the wife had welcomed him into her home, and with relatives back in Ukraine at war? 

It seemed the husband was contrite but not so much that there weren’t photographs of the couple hugging and kissing and I wondered what would have made them willing to expose themselves to the tabloid press. Their love seemed to be shameful rather boastful, and even if we accept that they couldn’t stop themselves from falling in love with each other, surely they could have desisted from showing to the newspapers their affections.

However, that might just be my own carefully delineated morality trying to locate the wrong in the exposure rather than in the deed, as if this very story is an attempt to distinguish different types of behaviour which could be seen to resemble each other.

While reading the story in the paper I found myself thinking a little of the children and a great deal about the wife. She was devastated, the papers insisted, and against this despair was the new couple, as if winners of one of those reality TV love shows where the winning pair get an agent and a public profile.

5

But I was also thinking of a couple of my own affairs a decade earlier, when, a year apart from each other, I was involved with someone from Argentina, and the following summer someone from Turkey. I was invited over to Mar del Plata as a young filmmaker whose first feature won two prizes in a British festival of modest import, and while there I was treated with more respect and admiration than I deserved and found for the first time that women gave me attention that my usually retreating demeanour couldn’t provoke. It was as if the film were a prosthetic confidence and I think there is in the style of it an assertiveness that is absent from my personality. In the film, four seventeen-year-olds, in their sixth year at school, arrange a weekend party where they invite fifty others. They secure a castle around twenty-five miles from Edinburgh through one of their older siblings. The castle sleeps officially sixteen but has room enough for many more, and the four boys insist it will be a weekend to remember - many more from the school sign up to go. They manage to hire buses, access vast amounts of alcohol and generally show the resourcefulness teenagers are capable of when seeking a good time. The weekend is a great success, none of the parents knows that it happened, and the main character, whose older brother arranged things, feels like he is moving towards adulthood already having mastered the logistics of maturity. But then, a day after, he hears that one of the kids at school has gone missing, one of the girls who was at the castle, and he is not sure if she returned after the weekend. It seems people assumed she was in one of the other mini-buses and so might not have been in any of them. Nobody finds out what happened to her and months later, as the film ends, her body still hasn’t been found. The central character, who expected the party to be the making of him, slowly disintegrates as he feels a mixture of guilt and fear, that if her body were discovered on or near the castle premises he would be held responsible. He had arranged the party. It is now late September and the film’s closing shot shows him arriving at university. The story wasn’t based on my life but on a story my partner, Jemma, told me about a long weekend that people at her school arranged without anybody’s parents knowing. One of the girls went missing but reappeared several days later. Jemma said she understood that need to disappear.  

6

Critics maybe liked the film, which I made in the early 2000s because it was made in two distinct forms. The first half was energised, with lots of cuts and music over the top of the scenes, while the second half, after the disappearance, offers long takes, and relies much more on ambient sound. Critics said they really didn’t think that they were going to like it after the first period, but admired my ability to shift not just the story but the very form of it. Anyway, it meant that I was invited to various festivals and one of them was on the Argentine coast. I was there for a week and for the first three days, there were a couple of screenings where I presented the film and took questions and answers afterwards. I had no Spanish and the translator worked very hard to make sure that what I had said in English was accurately rendered. On several occasions, it was as if we were in a private dialogue with each other as we half-ignored the two hundred people in the audience, and too the host asking the questions, and discussed the intricacies and nuances of certain words. It wasn’t rude (we kept apologising) but it started to feel exclusive, and after the second screening Natalia and I agreed that we would go to the bar afterwards; if anybody had further comments they should please join us. People came up and asked questions but nobody lingered, as if seeing a developing intimacy between us that they didn’t wish to interrupt but with enough enthusiasm for the film that they felt keen to enquire about it. 

I was of course flattered by the attention of the audience but even more enamoured by Natalia, who over the evening told me where she had learnt such fluent English; that though she had studied for a year in Ireland she had never made it to Scotland. I said she should visit, and she said for the moment I should see more of Argentina. She had no translation duties for the following two days, and we could drive along the coast as far as Valeria del Mar. It was where her childhood summers were spent as she told me she was only in Mar Del Plata for the festival: she lived in Buenos Aires, not too far from Palermo. As we were talking, the bar filled and emptied as screenings finished and started. The screening had been at five, and now it was eleven. I was suddenly hungry and when I proposed we order from the bar she said that there was a grill a hundred metres away that would serve meat a lot less chewy. She supposed she should be promoting the venue that was nice enough to host some of the films, but since I was in Argentina only for a few days I should at least eat some decent flesh. She used the Spanish word carne and made it sound cruel and callous, saying she thought I might have been vegetarian. So many British people were, and my central character in the film has a scene where he comes across an animal in a trap near the castle. He intricately removes it from its incarceration but it is long dead, and she wondered if this was me making a statement about our treatment of animals. I said I didn’t know what the scene said about me but it was there I suppose as a precursor to the young woman going missing, an early hint (it was halfway through the film) that all was not right, that the viewer could expect further despair before the end. I said as we ate at the nearby diner that the animal was of course a rabbit. I thought of having another character find it in the trap and take it back to the house to cook it. But that would be for a film that would have turned murderous and in mine I only wanted a character to go missing. I supposed I wanted the mood to seem bleak not cruel: I wanted meat and not carne.

As we finished up, she laid out the itinerary for the following day and asked if I could meet her at the hotel foyer for ten thirty; that should give us plenty time to explore the region and be back by the evening. The next day we stopped off at various beaches along the road to Valeria del Mar. It was November and the weather was warm but windy, and when we stepped out of the car to walk along the beach the bluster reminded me a little of the wind on the West coast of Scotland. Here we were facing east but the sea was the same, and I’ve always thought something was frightening about the Atlantic ocean. It may be much smaller than the Pacific, deemed far less dangerous for ships than the South China Sea. But it has a far higher incidence of shark attacks, even if I were to set a film around it the fear I would wish it to generate would be more abstract than that. As we walked I said to Natalia that I at last I had the reverse shot. She looked at me puzzled and I added that I had often enough looked out at the Atlantic from the West coast and here I was looking at it from the East. Perhaps I would set a film using these two places (Scotland and Argentina) and offer probably the most pronounced reverse angle, geographically, in the history of cinema. That is ambition, she said, and we walked for a further thirty minutes along the coast before finding a cafe a hundred yards inland. As we stepped inside and closed the door behind us it was as if a hush had descended, and there was no noise inside to counter it except that of the coffee machine and a couple of waiters talking. It was still out of season. I thought if I were to set a film by the coast it would be when there were few tourists. 

Later over dinner, I asked her why she travelled and she said to see things, to have new experiences. I wondered if she needed to see things with others or would her own company suffice. She said that when she was travelling around Europe on her own five years earlier she met people along the way of course, and sometimes had a small group of friends in one hostel or another. But she wished that she could have shared more of those experiences, yes. I said I wasn’t so sure if I needed that, though I was so happy to be with her here, venturing along the coast. But I sometimes wondered if for me travelling was scouting; that I was unconsciously looking for locations I could turn into filmic images, that such a search robbed me of loneliness when I travelled, aware that no matter how solitary I happened to be that the images I would perceive could later possibly be shared. She asked if these needed to be images that I had to experience and, when I wondered what she meant, she told me why she thought my film had interested her so much. It was a film about disappearance, she said, about disaparecido, about people going missing. 

She said that her uncle was a student and maybe a radical back in the mid-seventies. Friends of his had disappeared. He was worried that he might be next — many people thought they would be, which of course was part of the climate the government cultivated — and so he left Buenos Aires and only her parents knew where he was. He was staying she said in Valeria del Mar, in the town we would soon be visiting. As a young child she didn’t know where he was but she knew there were a couple of years when they didn’t go by the seaside. Along with her brother and sister, she complained that other friends were going to the seaside for the summer, why couldn’t they? They told them the house was under renovation and that they would go the following year. This continued the next year and the three children threw enough tantrums for their parents to take them instead to the mountains, and to a lake in Patagonia. Natalia remembered it was one of the most joyful of holidays but could tell it was expensive. She recalled saying to her parents that she hoped it would take years and years for their holiday home to be renovated, and she recalled a fretful look on her mother’s face after she said it. 

Watching my film, Natalia found the parallels were of course almost non-existent but still resonant as she thought for a while after the viewing why it was so disturbing. It was the not knowing. It wasn’t that the central character was guilty; it was that he didn’t know if he was, didn’t know how culpable he should feel for someone who disappeared. Perhaps it was an opportunity to escape abusive parents, perhaps she took her own life or drowned accidentally. She then asked if I filmed a scene, or at least wrote a scene, where I revealed what had happened. I said that I hadn’t done either, and though I had been tempted it seemed like tempting fate: that even if I were then to remove the scene, it would have been there, somewhere as an explanation. Certainly, if I had put it in the script, then the actors would be acting with this knowledge, so even if I were to have later taken it out, there would have been a trace of this meaning in the actors’ expressions. She said that maybe if the disappearance had been explained, she wouldn’t have responded so strongly to the film, but the absence recalled what had happened in Argentina in the seventies.

As we got back in the car and drove out to Valeria del Mar we talked more about her uncle and she said that the following summer after the Patagonia trip they were back by the sea and realised how much they missed it. They saw again friends who were locals or had holiday homes there, and while she remembered herself and her siblings were happy, her parents and especially her mother were not. Natalia was once building a sand castle with her brother and she looked up and saw her mother in a deckchair sobbing. She got up and went over to her and asked what was wrong. Her mother said they were tears of happiness, that she was pleased to see her children once again playing in the sand. It would have been ten years later when she found it why her mother had been crying that day: her brother who had vacated the place a couple of months earlier so the family could once again use their holiday home had been arrested in a friend’s place in Buenos Aires. Her mother told her this when various figures of authority during the years of the military junta were on trial, and how guilty she felt that she had asked her brother to find somewhere else to stay. She never did find out what happened to her brother after he was arrested, but she was sure he would have been safe had he stayed at Valeria del Mar. 

7

By then, we were pulling up outside the house. It was a couple of hundred metres back from the sea, along a street of similar bungalows, and it was only when we were inside the house that it seemed distinctive. Everything was painted white or green, the floors were tiled and the ceilings had exposed roof beams, and all the furniture looked hand-made and oak. She said that the house hadn’t changed since she was a young girl, and here she was twenty-five years later, in her early thirties, still returning. She sometimes thought it was a place of safety for her because it had been a place of safety for her uncle, and then Natalia started to sob, saying that her childhood determination to come and build sandcastles by the sea cost him his life. 

We were by then sitting at the kitchen table, a mate between us that we passed back and forth, like a joint, and I wasn’t sure if I should have got up and given her a hug or remained where I was. Sensing my indecision, she put her hand on mine and said with a smile that it was all my fault; that if I hadn’t made my film and shown it in Argentina, she wouldn’t be sitting there in tears. 

That night we didn’t go back to Mar Del Plata, and for the next two nights we slept together, ate together and walked along the beach as the winds battered our conversation often into silence. As we drove back to the film festival she asked if I had a partner. I said I did and I asked if she had one as well. Yes, she said, and it was as though we offered this fact as a way of extricating ourselves from the intimacy we had created; by saying that there could be no hard feelings when we parted because those feelings would belong to the people we had betrayed. At no stage did I tell her that it was Jemma’s story that provided the source for my film. I had the sense that this wasn’t the first time she had cheated in her relationship and while it might have been a first for me it was to become enough of habit to lead to my breaking up with Jemma six months later. 

8

I had two further encounters at festivals in the UK where my film was shown, before a week-long affair at a festival in Istanbul. It was on my return from this trip that I told Jemma in recent months I hadn’t been faithful. It hadn’t happened before and it hasn’t happened since; I haven’t lied or cheated outside that six-month-period and perhaps this story is a partial explanation of why I did — and why retrospectively the self-hatred, such as it has been, is greater than any self-aggrandisement at the time. After a couple of one-night affairs at those two British festivals, I went to Istanbul perhaps with a sense of expectation, with the idea that I might once again enjoy the pleasure of someone’s company who wasn’t my long-term partner. It was there that I met Hatice, a fellow filmmaker who was showing her first feature documentary, a film about Kurdish immigrant workers employed in summer jobs along the Turquoise coast. One of the film’s three subjects had escaped with their mother and sister after their father had disappeared in Saddam’s Iraq, and they were living in a village eighty miles inland, though for the five months of the tourist season, the son worked in Kas. While all three of the film’s subjects were of great interest (otherwise why film them?), it was this son of a father he could hardly remember and whose disappearance he could never explain that became the soul of the documentary. When she came to see my film, she said as we talked in a cafe across from the cinema, that our films, which appeared so different, seemed to have a common theme. 

She said she made her film as a way of discussing what she couldn’t quite address for reasons that were both personal and political. If she had made it about her grandfather the Turkish authorities probably wouldn’t have helped fund the film and might not have allowed its release. She also wasn’t sure if she wanted to involve her family in a film about her grandfather, both for the trauma it might generate and the attention from the Turkish government her family could receive. It wasn’t of course that she then found an analogous story and made that; it was more that when she was making the film she realised that the project she would have liked to have made about her own experiences perhaps didn’t need to be made after all. She found a variation of it in the lives of others as the documentary first came into existence after a week’s holiday with a couple of friends in Kas. 

          They were in a cafe, it was late at night, and after they had ordered drinks she watched as the waiter walked away and she noticed how much tiredness seemed to exist in his body. The next morning, while the others were swimming, she went again to the cafe bar to see if the waiter was working once more. He was and she asked when he finished the previous night. He said it was almost three in the morning. Hatice asked when he had started; he said 730. He would hope to get some rest between 3 and 5 in the afternoon and would then be working again until at least midnight. The cafe bar stayed open later if there were customers, and Hatice and her friends had arrived at 1130 and stayed for two hours. By the time he and his colleague had cleared up, it was after 230. She apologised and he said it wasn’t her fault, and the owner would have been very angry if they were turning away customers. He explained he worked seven days a week and had one full afternoon off, when he usually just slept. He worked he supposed fifteen hours a day but others worked just as hard. She asked about these other workers and he said that they were from all over the country but especially they were, like himself, Kurds. She talked to him about her own background for a couple of minutes before he attended to customers who had just arrived but they talked again for a few minutes an hour later, and the next day she went back saying she would like to make a documentary. She went to Kas again the following summer and intermittently travelled down from Istanbul to film Kamir and the two other workers during the tourist season. The viewer could see over the film’s ninety minutes how exhausted they became from the beginning of the season to the end of it. 

It was then I asked Hatice if she had cheated, if she offered false chronology in her film. She looked at me with a smile and said yes and what she had told me she preferred not to talk about in the film’s Q and A unless someone specifically asked. She wouldn’t lie in person because she didn’t believe that she had lied in the film even though some might think it was a lie. Hatice may have told me she made the documentary partly based on the similarities between Kamir’s family history and her own, and yet it wasn’t till the end of the film, at the end of the season, that Kamir revealed details about his father’s disappearance. She admitted he told her this not at the end of the season that she filmed but the previous summer, and she asked him if it was okay, as he started to talk, if she could film it. It is partly why the film used a lower-grade camera than she would have chosen when returning the next summer — but she wanted the footage she filmed with the camera she had available, to be consistent with everything else filmed when she went back the next year. She thought it would have been hard on Kamir to get him to repeat what he had already said, two years running, and wouldn’t have been so good for her film if she had announced it at the beginning. What mattered to her was that she respected Kamir’s pain while at the same time believing partly why he revealed the story about his father was because by the end of the season he felt exhausted, a little broken and quite vulnerable. It was as though, she admitted, she wanted to see in his revelation not only that his life had been difficult but that it still was — and that this past trauma could be offered partly due to the present predicament. 

She asked me how much cheating was involved in my film and I said it was fictional; I could cheat as much as I liked. She laughed and said that was too convenient and told me that I had cheated with the audience’s expectations and that the film was all the better for it. The viewer was led to expect a film of energetic cynicism, youthful oblivion, and, by the end, it was permeated by a maturity the characters perhaps still couldn’t understand but that was conveyed to the audience. Yet there was no condescension she said, no sense in which the viewer was brighter than the characters, just that the film’s framing indicated a sense of loss and trauma that it might take the central character and perhaps some of his friends many years to comprehend. She imagined the film, though set in the present and with no flashbacks, was emotionally contained by the future that was looking back on the past but where I had found a way of suggesting this, especially in the second half of the film, even though there was no voiceover. For her, the framing increasingly revealed the conscience of someone who was aware of an ever more expanding retrospective guilt. I proposed that her interpretive skills were greater than my imaginative faculties and I suppose all I wished to indicate was the change from enthusiasm to reflection, from teen exuberance to a sudden enforced maturation. 

9

As we talked, I asked if she wanted to continue the conversation on foot: I felt I’d been sitting ever since I got on the plane back in Scotland, apart from a six-hour sleep that was no more active. She said she could do with walking as well but where did I have in mind? I said like everybody else I’d like to see Sultan Ahmet, and she reckoned that would be a very decent walk. I admitted I had no idea how big Istanbul happened to be and to give me a sense of its size, and its importance, she said, was to realise that it was a city that crossed two continents; that it was many times the size of Paris, and that to get to the mosque we would have to cross a river that was next to the most strategic strip of water in the world. She said that there was no way out of the black sea except via Turkey and boats had to pass through the Bosphorous and then again through the Dardanelles strait to get into the Aegean. The width of the Bosphorus strait was at most 725 metres wide and only 40 metres deep, and he said he hadn’t really thought about it, but it would explain Turkey’s place as an empire. Didn’t most empires have strategic ports and hadn’t Napoleon said that “if the world was only one country, Istanbul would be its capital”? 

   She didn’t know the quote but thought that if you looked at the history of the city as Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul, you couldn’t deny its immense importance over many centuries. They talked as they walked, crossing the Galata Bridge, and arriving in the midst of a muddled beauty that he could first see as they crossed over to this part of the city. It was now 830 in the evening, and there was no sight-seeing to be done except by looking at the Blue Mosque’s exterior and seeing nearby the Mosque Sofia as well. Hatice said that they were thinking of converting Sofia back into a mosque after many years as a museum; when Ataturk wished for Turkey to be seen as a secular nation. Before that it was a mosque but only because it had been turned into one after it was built by the emperor Justine some centuries earlier — she couldn’t remember when exactly. 

She admitted that her next documentary might be on the city, that in recent months she had been amassing information about it, and she had just become increasingly fascinated by a place she had lived in since she was ten. I said I loved the way facts can open up thoughts and that one of my reservations about quizzes is that they stay with the fact. To know what century the Sofia Mosque was built, or when the city was first called Constantinople, was an exercise in retention and revelation but didn’t seem to have much to do with thinking. But just knowing that fact about the width of Bosphorous, and how important it was strategically, was making me think of the Ottoman Empire for the first time. She said that was it; how to make a documentary that wouldn’t be a series of facts; that the detail of the Bosphorus could open the film up into a world as the Bosporous and the Dardanelle Straits opened up the Black sea to the Aegean, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.  

That evening Hatice and I slept together and, afterwards, I told her I had a girlfriend in Edinburgh. She said it was alright, though she would now feel guilty about the part she had played in my cheating on her. I wanted to tell her there was no need; that there had been other occasions but while I might have alleviated her guilt I would have exacerbated the insult, even if she said that it was a relief to sleep with me, that five months earlier she had parted from her boyfriend and wondered what it would be like going to bed with someone else. She felt a little emancipated, she said, and that was perhaps all she needed for the moment. During the five days I was in the city we ate together, walked together, made love and, by the end of the trip, I knew that the affair for me had been a love affair; that when I would get back to Scotland I knew I would tell Jemma that we must part. 

10

That was a few years ago and I suppose the affairs came to mind partly because of the story about the family adopting the Ukrainian woman and where the wife sees that no good deed goes unpunished. Here we had the terrors of war meeting the pleasures of the flesh. But I have been thinking of those affairs especially because of the recent film I have made and how Jemma less directly influenced this one.  It was after reading the book on the history of Scotland, the idea of making a film about the immediate post-WWI years came to me, and I was trying to find an angle on the period when I came across another historian discussing the number of Scottish men who lost their lives in WWI. 557,000 enlisted in the services and 26.4 per cent died. More than a quarter of the Scottish male population of a certain age were now dead, and then, according to another source, there was across the UK twice as many injured as those who were killed. This would have left relatively few healthy, able-bodied men for the numerous still-living women to marry, and no doubt many spinsters could never find men after the war, nor the numerous war widows left without husbands. And there was my great grandfather, a good-looking man, with both his arms, both his legs and no broken-gargoyled face, not even suffering the trauma of war since he was too young to fight. There he was growing up in the decade after it and seeing innumerable opportunities. He must have felt a bit like a bloke who arrives in a nightclub and finds that most of the clubbers are women and the men who are present haven’t the body parts to get up and dance. It is the sort of image that might sound insulting to the contemporary reader, but it may register just a little the pragmatics Jim presumably lived by and the luck he would have deemed himself to possess.

What I am not sure about though as I tried to write the script about this period, based on a character not unlike Jim, was whether to view his numerous affairs as opportunism or magnanimity: did he sleep around purely for pleasure or was he a little like a doctor of love making house calls to the lovelorn and grieving, determined to put a little light into the lives of those who might not have had a man about the house but would at least have someone popping round now and again? I remembered asking my grandmother whether I didn’t have a handful of unknown relatives and she said my great-grandfather was a careful man: while the pill might have been a modern invention, basic male contraception had been around for a very long time. She said this with both abruptness and embarrassment, which surprised me and made me suspect that she didn’t want to think about the brothers and sisters she may have had and never knew. While working on the script I thought a lot about this; during his many affairs there must have been women who would have asked if he might be willing to father a child and I moved from the image of a young man in a nightclub to a bull in a paddock. A typical bull could service around fifteen cows during a two-month period, and I thought surely the latter image rather than the former would have shown far greater magnanimity, giving a generation of women in his immediate vicinity a child they would struggle otherwise to have. 

When my family boasted about my great-grandfather’s exploits they almost never contextualised it within the parameters of the war and I found myself wondering if I wanted to do so to give the film a bit more weight — and probably knew it was more likely to get funding. British films are too often obsessed with the World Wars and of course about how honourable the British were in fighting them. Yet I very much wanted the film to be about its aftermath, about loss and at the same time about energy and vigour as my hero womanised his way around the city. It had to be about love not war but enough about war, I admitted, so that the funders would be attracted. But I also wanted it to be troublesome, as if saying that for all the unequivocal significance of Napoleon, Churchill and others, there are many who, while unlikely to be regarded as making history, nevertheless are the products of its consequences. Yet I didn’t want to make my great grandfather’s friend the focus, to make a film about his heroism in war, the injuries sustained in it, and the difficulties in finding love after it. That would be a story about misfortune and the assumption that the man was a victim of history as he undeniably was. But what interested me was someone who was a historical victor and not a victim, someone who benefitted enormously from history but at the same time wasn’t a profiteer even if he does profit. There have been plenty stories about those who during the Occupation in France made good money out of selling goods to the Nazis, and other stories of how in Poland and Germany people would move into the houses made vacant by the Jews sent to their deaths. 

These are of course important stories to tell, and often have been, but where did my great-grandfather fit? He was neither an obvious hero nor an obvious villain, and yet perhaps now he would be seen more troublesomely not because his actions had changed, (how could they?), nor even that new information has emerged, (it hasn’t), but because our perception of behaviour has shifted. I might not have known how much if I hadn’t been working on a script where it seemed very difficult to make him sympathetic if I gave him the sort of agency and control he would have in the stories I was brought up with, where he slept with others for pleasure and wore protection to save himself from unwanted pregnancies. But now should I see him as a predator and an opportunist, someone no different from a tobacconist who raises enormously his prices during times of scarcity and rationing? I thought again about my father’s story, about how he believed his grandfather slept with women who wouldn’t sleep with his friend, as though as an act of vengeance for his friend’s suicide. That would hardly make him sympathetic now or then but it does make him seem like a man aware of his place in history and no less aware of his friend’s. 

11 

This film was my third. After the one about the school kid who disappeared, I worked for a year on a script partly about my break up and why it came about, and how badly I had acted and how awfully I had treated a person who loved and trusted me. But I couldn’t finish it; I could never find a way in that didn’t leave the central male character in a state of self-pity. I then started writing it from the wronged person’s point of view, yet felt I was appropriating her experience without understanding it. I left it alone, and instead co-wrote a film with a friend that became my second feature. It wasn’t as successful as the first but it went to a few festivals, though unlike the first it won no awards. 

I wonder now if I spent so long on and eventually failed to finish the project about my own life because I was unaware that sometimes our stories are not the ones we have to tell but equally other people’s are not ours to divulge until they coincide with thoughts and feelings of one’s own that can simultaneously contain and reveal a world, that can speak for us but only through others. If it weren’t for my experiences with Natalia and Hatice, and those other brief acts of infidelity, I don’t think I would have been able to tell my great-grandfather’s story, to find in it anything other than a tale of a handsome young man having fun in Glasgow, with a wife who turns a blind eye while he busily eyes up and beds whoever shows an interest. It would probably have been a comedy and needed to be funnier and broader than I would have managed, while the film I have now made is I hope close to my first film, in the liveliness of its tone in the first half and the darkness that encompasses the second. In it, the character isn’t initially friends with a ‘broken gargoyle’ but befriends him in the second half as they happen to meet when both are fishing at the same river. A friendship develops and the friend says that before the war he enjoyed the company of women and now he settles for the solitude of fishing, and the companionship of others who are casting a line as well. The central character seems increasingly to view his skill at womanising as nothing that he can claim as his own. His good looks are down to genetic luck and the choice of women available down to national misfortune. By the end of the film, he finds in fishing a purpose, in the broken gargoyle a male friendship he had never known before, and in the final scene returns to his wife asking for forgiveness. She knew of his affairs, she says, but with three children what was she to do? At least he came home every night, made sure there was food on the table and kept the roof over their heads. She tells him that in times of such scarcity, she couldn’t hope for much more even if she might wish for it. Initially, she is pragmatic but as she sees how contrite he appears to be, how aware he has become of the accidental good fortune that had turned him into a lothario, she realises how much he seeks her forgiveness. Will she give it, or will they live as husband and wife for the practical reasons she had a little while earlier insisted upon? The film ends, the only shot/counter shot in the film, as they look back at each other. They say nothing. The early evening light has faded and she is in semi-silhouette as we can’t discern her expression. His is full of light but his face is troubled. It is as though aware that after comprehending the contingency of his looks, and the contingency of the numerous deaths that left many a man who wasn’t injured or deformed by war, a catch, he was reliant on his wife to redeem his soul.

12

The film premiered at a festival in the UK and there were three further festivals in which it appeared over the next six weeks. It won prizes at two of the four, and I sent a link to the film to both Natalia and Hatice. I hadn’t been in contact with them for years and had no idea whether the contact I had for them was still valid. I would have sent a copy to Jemma too, but I know after we parted she requested no contact and changed her email address and also her phone number. I heard as well that she was no longer in contact with her family and the few friends she had. She has become perhaps as missing as the young woman in my first film. Yet I hope, somehow, somewhere she will see the new one. I hope against all likelihood that she will tell me what she thinks of it, and, more impossibly still that she forgives me for the pain I caused. Both Natalia and Hatice replied, thanking me for the film and revealing they had both seen my second, but that this was a work at least as fine as my first, and easily a superior work to the follow-up. They spoke about it in a technical way, understanding aspects of the craft that the typical viewer would have missed. Yet while I was very pleased they liked the film, that they had replied to my email, and could see what I wanted to do with the work in its form as well as its content, I would have wished most of all for Jemma to have seen it, and to have seen her watching it. I would have wished to know how she would have responded to the ending as I couldn’t help but see, in my central character's face, my great-grandfather's, and also my own. Watching the film at the premiere, whatever it was as a work of art, I knew it was also a type of pleading. On its general release, I watched it again, and after it I went home alone, thinking of Jemma's remark all those years earlier when she said she understood the desire to disappear. Perhaps I made the film hoping it would allow for her reappearance, or at least allow her to see the limits of being a ladies' man.   

© Tony McKibbin