Misunderstandings

09/05/2024

 

 

 

1

He said he never wanted much from life but he did want to be understood. I thought of husbands who say their wives can’t understand them or artists who feel they never get the recognition they deserve. But I also thought that when many insist people speak in cliches is this the listener or the speaker’s fault? Had I left it at that, if I hadn’t enquired further, the stock phrase would have been evident and I would have been another who had misunderstood him.

I didn’t know Daniel at all but one Sunday around a dozen of us went for a walk out to the Pentlands, commencing from the Meadows and walking along the canal, out past Juniper Green and Currie, towards Threipmuir and then down towards an inn for lunch, before intending to go back into town along by Hillend. The walk would take most of the day but as we gathered at 930 on a June, Sunday morning, the weather was already warm, and the fear was more of sunstroke than rain. Several people were putting cream on their faces others asked their partners to apply it to their bare shoulders. 

The walk had become a yearly ritual, usually on the weekend of the longest day of the year, and friends of friends could come and join the dozen of us, most of whom I had known for some years. Daniel had been sitting on the park bench where we had all arranged to meet and asked as we were about to leave if he could join us. He had planned to go for a long walk that day; our route seemed as good as any he might have thought up for himself. We looked at his feet and saw he was wearing a good pair of walking shoes, with thick, strong, rubbery soles, that he was wearing too loose fitting cotton trousers that wouldn’t cause chaffing during such a long walk, and that he had with him a rucksack, a litre bottle of water and also a flask. Over the years, we did invite others on the walk, though they were people at least one or two of us knew beforehand. Why not a stranger we found sitting on a bench in the park? It wasn’t so much that anybody said yes; more that nobody quite had the will to say no, and couldn’t find a decent excuse in the refusal. 

2

For the first hour of the walk my girlfriend, Amelia, was talking to her closest friend amongst the women, Bea, and I fell into chatting with Bea’s husband, Jeremy. It often happened like this, on the walks we would do (and not only our yearly epic) or in restaurants, pubs and cafes. Jeremy and I didn’t share many affinities yet we knew that if we were both there, the basic social anxiety of getting stranded with nobody to talk to would be unlikely to happen. We never expressly stated that we would always look out for each other, making sure if we were in a bar and everyone else was immersed in chat that we would pull them into our conversation or go off and talk to them. However, I am sure he felt as I did, secure that the night wouldn’t be a disaster if I were present 

Equally, we probably didn’t enjoy talking to each other very much even if we did like each other’s company; a paradox easy enough to resolve if we accept there are those with whom we feel at ease but in whose company we rarely feel engaged. Jeremy and I often lobbed commonplaces back and forth with neither of us interested enough in examining the comments we made, the statements we proclaimed. Whether we discussed a football game, a political issue or a film we had both seen, we rarely followed up or called into question the truism the other offered. That morning we discussed a film we both saw the previous week on a streaming channel. The chat mainly consisted of commenting on the story and the acting, why we thought one of the actors was wrong for the role and yet we never discussed precisely why they were wrong. My thoughts on the subject were more intricate than I managed to express, and supposed Jeremy's were too. I said that the actor walked into too many roles because they were famous; that he was well-connected and his mum was an actress and his father a film director. Anybody who lands his first role when he is ten, in a second lead, has it way too easy. Most of his performances have shown him on auto-pilot I said. Jeremy reckoned he went into the family business where the next generation usually just vegetated on the success of the previous one, who did all the hard work. Today it isn’t only in cinema, he said, it is there in business, fashion, politics and other areas where money and fame are to be had without much hard work. Yet if I’d thought about it some of the best actors were products of nepotism. Hadn’t I read that one well-known actor's grandfather was a famous producer, his mother an actress, his father a poet laureate and his father-in-law probably America’s best-known post-war playwright? Another actor became well-known coming out of his more famous brother’s shadow after the latter died. Maybe he was the best actor in American cinema. I didn’t say any of this and neither did Jeremy, though we both watched a lot of films and he was probably as aware of these facts as I was. 

I could nevertheless have enjoyed well enough walking for the rest of the day beside Jeremy, as we threw the occasional comment back and forth, with each of us satisfied by the long silences. Around eleven thirty we stopped for a tea break and Jeremy sat with his partner and I with mine. After a couple of minutes, I saw Daniel was alone and was about to ask him to join us, yet I noticed in him not only what seemed a man content in his own company, but also a contemplation passing through his mind that suggested an invite may have been seen as an intrusion. His self-possession fascinated me; aware that if I had tagged along with a group of strangers on a long walk I would have been mortified to find myself sitting alone. Of course, I wouldn’t have been likely to propose joining strangers and that might have been the point. Daniel was comfortable enough on his own that he could feel no less comfortable proposing he join the company of others. It seemed a contradiction to me but wasn’t to Daniel, and I knew as well that if we talked at all it wouldn’t be because I found him interesting, and that I wished to talk to him. It would be because I felt socially obliged to ask him to join us (therein lay my confidence) or that he might choose to speak to me. 

We started walking again after a twenty-minute break and just as we started doing so, Daniel and I put a couple of items in a nearby bin at the same time. He said he had overheard me talking about a film I’d seen that he said he saw too. I am not sure if he said this to instigate a conversation or whether he had seen the film: we didn’t talk about it. But as we started up the steep hill towards Threpmuir he fell into step with me. Jeremy had joined my partner and his own up ahead. Daniel said he hoped people didn’t think he was intruding, that he often joined people’s walks rather than joining a walking club. He felt freer that way; sometimes he wanted to walk alone — other times with people. But better the other people be strangers to him, he said. Familiarity might make for settled nervous systems but often didn’t do much for energy and interest. I thought for a moment that he hadn’t only overheard my conversation with Jeremy but my interior monologue too. It felt uncanny and I was briefly embarrassed, aware that if he couldn’t read my mind maybe he had read my body language: that he could see I was at ease in Jeremy’s company but hardly stimulated by it. 

It was then that he said what he wanted from life was to be understood. For some reason, I asked, as I wouldn’t have asked Jeremy, my partner, or probably any of the others in the group, what he meant by that. He said fifteen years ago he started seeing a woman who had just broken up with her husband. Myra and her spouse had publicly parted a year earlier, she had a brief affair that ended before Daniel started seeing her (an affair that had commenced before the publicly acknowledged end of her marriage)and though there were signs she was still married, she claimed it was over. But after a year she admitted that she was still technically married, that divorce proceedings hadn’t started, and she suspected her husband would take her back. Daniel thought she may have been saying this to persuade him to offer more commitment but she also added that after the brief affair had ended she often stayed over at her husband’s place in the months between the end of her affair and the start of her relationship with Daniel. Myra and her husband didn’t have sex but they slept in the same bed, and for a while, it was as though they were back together. After all, they hadn’t had sex for well over a year before they broke up. There were degrees of potential awkwardness and revelation in his telling that I couldn’t imagine any of the others in my peer group offering. I looked at the backs of my friends up ahead of us, and I saw in their healthy hiking enthusiasm a lack of something. Here was a man who I’d started talking to twenty minutes earlier telling me not only about an ex-girlfriend but about an ex-girlfriend’s husband too. Daniel of course appeared indiscreet but also conveyed to me a respect for these people he was discussing as though in each instance he wasn’t talking about them; he was sharing in their predicament. 

I suppose why I liked Jeremy’s company more than Bill, Ben, John, James and also their wives, or present partners, Jill, Jane, Barbara and Briony, was that he didn’t talk ill of people. Sometimes when I was in conversation with the others, they discussed a colleague at work, a family member or a neighbour, as though the person were an object in the way, a subject to be discussed only as a means to vent their frustration. I remember on the walk last year I fell into step with Bill and he told me of a fellow academic who stole his work, who asked him if he wanted another pair of eyes on the paper Bill was working on and Bill stupidly showed him. A few months later a paper appeared in a journal Bill co-edited with ideas in it that were stolen from him. I didn’t insist on asking questions that may have helped Bill see the action in a broader context, didn’t ask if they were working in similar areas and that it may have been a coincidence. I was sure that wasn’t what Bill wanted to hear: he wanted me to nod in agreement at how terrible this person had been. There were similar moments with others and I often felt an odd loneliness in these conversations. I can only describe it as the loneliness of feeling that I too could have been thus described if any of the others had a reason to say they had a problem with me (and maybe they did). It was as if though when Daniel said he wished to be understood it wasn’t a statement but an invitation, and thus I asked him what he meant by this.

4

He didn’t answer directly but told me more about this relationship break up fifteen years earlier. He said that Myra’s husband was a geologist who often worked away and she initially told Daniel this as an explanation why she started an affair. He worked one month on

and one month off. What she didn’t initially tell him was how much money he earned — enough to have bought the flat they were living in within five years. She still felt it belonged almost as much to her as to her husband, and not only did she still have keys to the apartment but she admitted much later to him that she often stayed there when her ex was away in Norway. The flat was near the park where we set off on our walk, and much roomier than the flat she had moved into and never quite felt at home in on a side street about a mile away from Haymarket station, one moving out towards the prison. She never much liked this other apartment and often felt mildly frightened on Saturday afternoons when hordes passed below her window before three in the afternoon and passed again around five. She rather naively wondered why, until a friend who visited her one afternoon asked if she hadn’t noticed that most of the people passing coincidentally seemed to be wearing a scarf with particular colours. Myra looked at the friend still confused and she asked Myra if she had ever heard of a game called football. Myra laughed, and laughed at herself months later telling Daniel the story. 

She didn’t like Daniel’s place either, a flat he bought off the council after it was left to him by his mother. His granny died and there was enough money in her will to buy it for around £12,000. There he was having benefitted from his mother remarrying when he was eighteen (she moved into a house on the outskirts with her new husband) and getting left a flat and then a few years later his grandmother died and he got to buy it too. It wasn’t until Myra came around one evening a few weeks after they had started dating (they had always stayed over at hers) that he first saw it with eyes suggesting he was unfortunate rather than lucky. It wasn’t as if over the years girlfriends hadn’t slept the night but they were all from backgrounds similar enough to his own for them to acknowledge that they too wished they could live without rent so near to the city centre. The flat was not far from the parliament and on the third floor, looking out onto the Crags and Arthur’s Seat. Inside it had a kitchen large enough for a two-person dining table, a sitting room and two bedrooms, a double, and a single that he used as a study, with a sofa bed, a desk, a chair and shelves of books. 

Myra and Daniel had met when he gave a reading at a second-hand bookshop. It was promoting the launch of a new magazine which he suspected would have few readers but had editors canny enough to access grants. Most of the magazines he wrote for survived the same way and after the editors were paid there wasn’t a lot of money left over to pay the contributors. If he made a hundred pounds from a story; fifty from a book review he was happy. His main income came from offering conversational English to foreigners and teaching one morning a week at a language school. Myra said afterwards she liked the story he read out and said she didn’t realise Edinburgh could harbour such secrets. She asked if it was based on fact; he said it wasn’t. She asked if he was going to the pub afterwards. He said a few of them were. At first, he thought she was forward but later in the pub he reckoned she was lonely, the sort of loneliness that leaves someone the last to leave the pub and the least likely to say they must be going. The pub was off the Royal Mile and he said he’d happily detour and walk her home. He had earlier wanted to walk before going to the pub but thought it would be rude for one of the speakers to disappear for forty-five minutes and saw now an opportunity to take a walk in company. 

     He’d noticed Myra’s wedding ring and thought there was a story behind it which didn’t suggest a happy marriage but neither did he wish to take advantage of what he perceived was her unhappiness. What he didn’t know at the time was that she had put the ring back on after the heartbreak of an extramarital affair. Had he met her a week earlier she would still have been with the man and wouldn’t have been wearing the ring. He might have thought she was an available woman when instead she would have been in a relationship within a marriage. Now she had returned to marital status as a way of protecting herself against the loneliness of her lover’s parting. It was odd she supposed; she often didn't wear the thing ring through her marriage but felt the need when her lover wanted no longer to see her. 

As we approached the top of the hill, walking through the Pentlands, before looking down on Glencorse reservoir, Daniel told me that he didn’t wish to sound judgemental describing her character; it was more to suggest the complexity of situations and our capacity to misjudge them. That evening he walked her to what he assumed was her flat in Bruntsfield and said goodbye, unaware at the time that it wasn’t a husband she was returning to (he was offshore) but the apartment of her lover whom she wished to visit even he didn’t wish to see her. 

Daniel didn’t see Myra again for several months and it was when in the pub, after another reading he had given, she told him the story. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring that night and explained why she happened to be three months earlier. He admired her honesty, he said, as they talked on stools at the bar while most of the others were seated around a table. They had gone up to the bar together to order a round which she insisted on paying for and, as he deposited everybody else’s orders to the table, she remained seated on the stool. He went back to the bar and sat with her. He walked her home again that night but this time not to a flat in Bruntsfield but one in Marchmont. She might have invited him in but he said he had a class the next morning (the one day he taught at the language school) but hoped they could meet again. They swapped numbers and met once more about ten days later. 

While he talked I wondered why he was telling me all this and recalled that it was premised on the notion of understanding. How did this have anything to do with his opening remark? Usually when Jeremy or any of the others would tell me something about their life, or a colleague from work in the pub on a Friday evening, it seemed more to the point yet less interesting. I sensed Daniel was going somewhere with it but couldn’t quite work out where. When Jeremy or other people I knew told me that a funny thing had happened to them at work, or a story about an incident many years earlier when they were at school, I knew that the story didn’t really involve them. They weren’t telling me to reveal anything about themselves but to fill time with an anecdote. I didn’t feel this with Daniel and perhaps why I allowed him to continue, with only a few interruptions, all the way to the inn. 

5

It is of course interesting when we admire somebody’s honesty it often comes after a moment of dishonesty disclosed. Perhaps it is more logical to admire their dishonesty since they managed to fool us the first time around, while their claim in telling the truth could be another example of keeping something from us. Yet this didn’t seem to be so, Daniel added, saying that if anything Myra couldn’t stop introducing him to people as her new boyfriend. He was aware that nobody knew of her ex-lover, knew that it had now been several months that she told friends she and her husband had broken up, and she implied too that they had managed a quick divorce — but that could have been his misapprehension. Anyway, after a week of them sleeping together, she invited him to a party where not only her friends were but her ex-husband too. Her husband appeared to be with someone else but couldn’t stop looking across at Myra and Daniel whenever she put her hand on his knee, and Daniel couldn’t deny that he felt that she was her husband’s ex-wife far more than she seemed to be his present girlfriend. 

This feeling was exacerbated a few days later when she came around to his apartment for the first time and said that at least the place had a nice view. It was as if she weren’t only seeing it with her own eyes but her ex-husband’s as well: he could imagine the pair of them arriving in Edinburgh looking for a flat to rent and somehow looking at this one, alarmed that they found themselves contemplating even for a moment the possibility that they could live there. Over the next year, Myra stayed over only twice more: once when they were drinking in a pub off the Royal Mile and only a few hundred metres from his flat. It was Saturday night, taxis would have been hard to find, and so at Daniel’s they stayed. The other evening was a night when they were breaking up but that, Daniel said, would be to jump a little ahead of himself. I thought then that he had told this story perhaps many times before but also recalled him saying he wrote fiction; thus well aware that the order of events mattered, even in what might seem an anecdote or a confession. 

So generally they stayed over at her flat which seemed to her less of a disappointment in the wake of seeing Daniel’s except for the evening when she went over to her ex’s to pick up some things and asked if Daniel could help her carry some of them too. She had a set of keys and let herself into the apartment. Her ex was again in Norway and wouldn’t be back for a week. She said it with a smile as though they were committing a minor sin by being there, one that she wanted to exacerbate with a greater deed. Instead of initially picking up the clothes they came for, she started to remove the ones she was wearing. She pulled Daniel into the main bedroom took his jacket off and proceeded to undress him as she hurriedly undressed herself. He showed some resistance initially, though he was aroused; she said that her ex would have had various lovers in this flat since they had broken up and yet wasn't the flat hers too; hadn’t it been her home for some years? 

   That was not the moment to discuss the intricacies of her husband's love life but sometimes we don’t only not think of things at the time but for quite some time afterwards as well. He accepted her reasoning as justified and, in her enthusiasm to rip his clothes off in a moment of passion, Myra managed to tear his flimsy jacket; one of the arms was all but hanging off. After their hurried action, she looked at the jacket on the floor, picked it up and said she was certain her ex had one he didn’t need. Sure enough in the spare bedroom were her clothes and a couple of bags of his, ready for the charity shop. She asked him to rummage through the bags sure he would find something. Daniel found a tight-fitting bottle green velvet jacket that he admitted when he tried it on was bold but that suited him. Myra said it was a gift she gave her husband years ago when he was a little less stout but he rarely wore it, thought it was too bohemian. Daniel was ambivalent, of course, but he liked it, and if he had tried it on in a charity shop he would have bought it. Did it make sense to wait until her ex finally deposited the bags at a charity shop and then search the city looking for the jacket, or should he accept that he liked it, that it suited him and he should take it now, especially as he had no other jacket at that moment to wear? When Myra said her ex probably wouldn’t bother taking it to a charity shop, he would just dump it in the nearest bin when he finally got around to getting rid of it at all, he decided to take it. He didn’t like things going to waste. 

6

Over the following months, Daniel wore the jacket often and when he tried to imagine her ex wearing it he couldn’t. He hadn’t seen him since that party but if he hadn’t scrutinised him quite as closely as the ex had scrutinised him, he saw enough to know that this was a jacket that had found its rightful owner, no matter if it belonged to the other man. If he did anything wrong it wasn’t to accept the jacket; it was to have sex with Myra in her ex’s apartment. Yet wasn’t the flat hers as well? That evening back at her place, he asked her about this and that was when she admitted the divorce hadn’t gone through yet. Her lawyer insisted that she was entitled to a share of the apartment for the period of their marriage and Daniel found himself defending her husband rather than taking the lawyer’s position. Myra had told Daniel that it was her husband who paid for her PhD and without it, she wouldn’t have found work in the university, and wouldn’t have been able now to support herself. She had always said how grateful she was that while he was working away, making money, she had the chance to stay in Edinburgh and get the further qualifications she needed to get a job too. 

      When she started the PhD the intention was afterwards to find a job that paid well enough that her husband no longer needed to work offshore but by the end of it she no longer wanted to be in the marriage at all. She felt guilty not only because she was walking out on a marriage but walking away with a doctorate her husband had paid for. Daniel reminded her of this when she mentioned the lawyer and it was as though his sympathy with her husband was more important than his anger that Myra hadn’t told him before that the divorce was far from finalised. Perhaps he was more sympathetic to the husband than he was angered by her subterfuge because he was ambivalent about how seriously he wanted to take their relationship. He wasn’t so sure that when she said she was still married he felt a small sense of relief; that he could justify ending the affair since she was still after all a married woman. 

Myra said she wouldn’t push for a cash settlement but would go along with whatever the lawyer advised and over the next couple of months he was adamant that she was entitled to a share of the flat and that her soon-to-be ex-husband would have to buy her out. 

7

It would have been around three months after the night they had sex at the ex’s when Myra and Daniel attended a party again at the friends who hosted the first one they had gone to together; the one where her husband had also been in attendance. Daniel still hadn’t got around to repairing his other jacket and was ambivalent about wearing the green velvet one, until Myra said, the night before the party, that her ex was in Norway and wouldn’t be back for three weeks. She said it after telling Daniel that the previous week, when he was still in the city, she had gone round to the flat to discuss with him in person what had mainly been dealt with by the lawyers, and he had lost his temper. Her ex had never been violent before and she could tell he wished to hit her but constrained himself by throwing a plate against the wall, a cup onto the floor, and a glass forcefully into the sink. All broke and he himself seemed broken as he slumped to the ground and leaned against the cooker. He asked what she wanted from him: that he put his head in the oven? She told him none of this was personal but that her lawyer said it was her legal right. “That is just it”, he said to her, "it really isn’t personal for you is it?” There Daniel was telling me, who had been told by Myra, who was hearing it from her ex, and all I could think about was how odd it seemed that during this walk I’d become interested in the lives of people I didn’t know when I often couldn’t pay much attention to the anecdotes some of the others in our group told me about their existence. 

Daniel asked Myra what she replied when her ex said this. She said she reiterated what the lawyer had insisted upon: she was entitled to her share. He almost wished that she was lying, that she had taken her ex in her arms and hugged him, saying that she was sorry it had come to this and they should have worked things out a couple of years earlier. It might have hinted at infidelity towards Daniel but at least it would have shown compassion towards her ex. That evening as her ex collapsed by the oven, the emotionally important thing wasn’t to be faithful to Daniel but to put her arm around her ex and to stay there for however long it would have taken for him to feel calm. She said she left after a few minutes, knowing Daniel was waiting for her. He recalled they had a table booked at a restaurant that night. She should have cancelled, he thought.  

But there he was, now, about to attend a party wearing the velvet jacket. That morning he had gone to the tailor and asked if there was any chance they could repair his ripped jacket that day and the person said they would try. But when he went back shortly before six, the tailor said he was sorry but his assistant had to go home early; he was on his own with so much work. He would try and fix it the following day he said. Daniel looked at the man’s harried face, a worn look suggesting hassles and harassment in the past and elsewhere. Was he Kurdish, Iraqi, Afhgan, he didn’t know, but he sensed that to ask this man to do him a favour, that it was important, that he must sew on the sleeve, would have been an insult to the man’s experience and show up the callowness of his own. Daniel said of course that would be fine and crossed the road to a second-hand vintage store hoping to catch it before it closed. He was too late. It seemed he was destined to wear the velvet jacket. 

If the husband was to have attended the party, Daniel would obviously not have worn the jacket but there he was in Norway; there was no reason to feel self-conscious. Yet when he arrived with Myra he was sure the host and her partner as they received the wine with gratitude noticed the brilliance of his jacket, and before he had the chance to remove it several other people passed through the broad hallway and said hello. He remained in the hall for more than half an hour in various discussions before he took the jacket off and placed it on the bed. He felt relieved, as though he were himself again and knew that he wouldn’t wear it any more. It would end up in the charity shop after all. When they left the party three hours later he had the jacket in his hand as he said goodbye to the hosts, and didn’t put it on until he was outside the building. Myra asked if he enjoyed the evening; he said he wasn’t sure. She said that seemed odd — how could he not know? Yet as he said to me there are certain events in which we partake where the full consequences of it are retrospective. This was one such instance.

8

By now we were only a few hundred yards from the inn and about to take lunch. I wanted to hear the rest of the story but was aware too that he couldn’t have continued telling it if we were to eat with others. How to fill the other diners in with the various details? Equally, I sensed it would have seemed odd if I were to insist on eating with this stranger alone. Once at the inn, Amelia suggested we sit with Jeremy and Bea and proposed to Daniel that he join us. I ordered the plaice and chips with mushy peas, accompanied by a pint and followed by sticky toffee pudding and ice cream, and an espresso: a modest touch amongst the excess. It had become a tradition to go for the fish and chips and most of the men did likewise, a reward we all sensed we deserved in the middle of a long walk. I had no interest in eating such rich food on any other occasion and I couldn’t say for sure whether it was biological or circumstantial: that I was ravenous and wanted a couple of thousand calories or whether I liked the habit of eating this particular food in this particular place. I said this to the others as we ate, self-conscious perhaps because Daniel was with us and, while Jeremy had ordered the same, Daniel had chosen a smoked salmon salad. He proposed he wasn’t that hungry and I might have assumed it was an attempt to make me feel better at guzzling on such heavy food. But I knew too that he had already eaten his sandwiches during our tea break at eleven and it was now only 130. He asked whether I’d ever driven out here just to have this lunch. I said no and he supposed I’d answered my question. 

    It was a conclusive remark and yet his own story was thus far not yet concluded, even if we had been talking for well over an hour before arriving at the inn. It was as though my remark was there to exist in the smallest anecdotal space and his the largest and I found myself thinking, as the others chatted, about this notion of how large or small a story’s space happened to be. I wasn’t thinking about this at all in terms of stories, novels or anything like that. I was trying to understand why in most conversations it is so easy to join it at any moment without feeling that what has thus far been talked about needs to be reiterated. How often has someone entered a conversation and the people sitting there have offered just a few words and the person can easily contribute? I thought too of jokes and why I have always disliked telling them, even if I believed the joke to be funny. It was the sense of temporal constraint, the feeling that time was being squeezed into an expectation and I had no more than a minute or two to make people laugh. I also noticed that with all of our friends, with the group Amelia and I walked with and other friends too, there was always time subordinate to space, so that even when it wasn’t — as in these long walks we took — the comments we made to each other seemed still constrained by our usual sense of time. 

I came back out of my thoughts and heard Amelia saying we needed to sort out the box room in the flat. We had moved into the present place a year earlier and she wanted to turn it into a work area and at the moment it was full of various boxes that we used for packing. A box room indeed, Daniel said. I laughed, but nobody else did. I knew at that moment most of the others didn’t like Daniel, wondered what he was doing there, thinking since he had chosen to tag along then he could have at least reflected in his request the demeanour of the lonely and the lucky — a person who others had allowed to join them. Gratitude is sometimes best expressed not in thank-yous but in bodily expression, in an extended acknowledgement of a debt. There was nothing to suggest this debt as Daniel sat there, as if he might even have thought others should have been grateful for his company and didn’t quite know what they were missing by not listening to him more. But I think that would have been to misconstrue him. To misunderstand him. Only Bea I sensed might have understood him instinctively, and I often envied Jeremy in having a partner who appeared to believe that everyone has their reasons and that she had neither the need to judge them nor to understand them any more than they wished to be understood. Somehow he wouldn’t have needed to talk to Bea at all, by that reckoning, but why might he have needed to talk to me?

9

Leaving the inn, I could see that Amelia wanted me to walk with her and perhaps also with Jeremy and Bea; that if I were to walk again with Daniel it would be an act of betrayal so small that to explain it might have taken perhaps the same amount of time as Daniel’s story. Yet I knew that Amelia wasn’t inclined to offer such an explanation and that it would manifest in small acts of irritation instead. Yet I wanted to hear the rest of the story and while walking with Amelia, Jeremy and Bea I watched as Daniel, a few feet in front of us, fell into conversation with Bill. He didn’t seem to be talking at all but listening as Bill chatted to him about some issue at work. Amelia started talking again about the boxroom and what she was going to equip it with: she needed a new computer anyway, and she was hoping to replace the shelves with narrower ones that would utilise the space better and could be used for books. I knew all this so anything she said wasn’t directed at me; yet I also suspected if I were to walk on ahead and engage in conversation with Daniel, then it would have offended her.

I knew there was a chance that once we reached Hillhead, once we were at the edge of the city, some might propose getting a bus rather than walking the remaining miles into town. The route was no longer scenic, and the rest of the way would be walking along busy roads and past anonymous housing. I noticed too that despite the sun cream a couple of people were looking slightly burned and the sun was still strong. No matter the weather, whether the walk was done in the rain, or with powerful winds or acute sun, usually a few of us wanted to continue back just to achieve the circularity of the walk, and I was pleased when Bill said he wanted to keep walking, sure that Daniel wouldn’t wish to take the bus. Jeremy and Daniel said they would walk too, and I said I would join them. Amelia didn’t seem especially displeased and, as they waited for the bus, we continued. Bill and Jeremy walked on ahead and Daniel and I fell behind. I said I didn’t think he had finished his story. Was it a story, he asked, and I said it depends on how you define one. It seemed like a story to me, and I felt he hadn’t finished it. He apologised. He had no urge to tell stories and echoed my earlier thought about jokes when saying that the problem with people telling stories is they hold people captive, often against their will, for the length of the tale told. To interrupt or to walk off is rude but isn’t it the person who tells it who is being rude in a different way, in holding the other temporally captive? Perhaps I said, but it seemed that whatever he was saying had been interrupted; that there was still a point I felt about the bottle green velvet jacket. That I remembered it was bottle green convinced him that he should continue; that if I had said merely the jacket he might not have wished to go on. I looked at him as though he were joking but I couldn’t tell by the expression on his face whether he was. 

10

He said that a few weeks after the party, Myra went around again to her ex’s place to talk through a few details about the flat and her share. Her lawyer said that she should keep her distance until the case was resolved but she didn’t want to fall out altogether with her husband and did exactly that by ignoring the lawyer’s advice. She told Daniel what happened when she phoned him as she was leaving her ex’s flat and asked if he could meet her at her place as soon as possible. He got on his bike and was there before she arrived. She thanked him for coming as one appreciates the gesture of a stranger and he knew that evening if she wasn’t in love with her husband, her love for her spouse was evident enough for her to acknowledge the weakness of her feelings towards Daniel. At the time he wasn’t unhurt by this realisation but over the following months, he supposed that he became increasingly irked by what her husband had said about him. It seemed that he had heard that Daniel had worn the bottle green velvet jacket at the party and assumed that it wasn’t only his blazer that Daniel wanted but the metaphorical shirt off his back too — he reckoned Daniel wanted the money from the flat and now believed that it was not Myra who pushed for the cash, nor even her lawyer. It had been Daniel. Myra said that of course that was nonsense but Daniel also suspected that her prejudices about his apartment may have been vocalised to her husband: if someone could in a matter of weeks have revealed to him that Daniel was at the party wearing the jacket, couldn’t have Myra said to him, or to a mutual friend who said to him, that Daniel was living in an ex-council flat. He might then have assumed that Daniel wanted to better himself, and why not do it at his expense?

For some reason he didn’t think too much about it that night, nor over the following few days as he and Myra broke up, meeting several times trying to resolve a situation they both knew was untenable. She came round to his flat for only the third time and he saw in her willingness to stay that her feelings were strong enough to accept that she would even occupy this miserable apartment for a night if it meant lying with him. But the more he mused over it thereafter the more he sensed not just a condescension which suggested amongst Myra’s circle that he was perceived to be living in a hovel and had stolen her ex’s clothes. He was someone who wished to get the husband’s money as well, and thus everything was an enormous misunderstanding. He felt lucky for what he had and never believed he was someone who coveted more. He liked his flat and was all these years later still living in it, happy that he could afford to teach no more than one or two mornings a week along with a few private classes, and could write what he wished for magazines and journals. I asked him about these journals and asked him too for his full name and said I would try and seek out some of the work. He said I could find some stuff online, other stories and articles in the library. By now we had reached Marchmont. We had said goodbye to most of the others on the way and said goodbye to Jeremy up at Bruntsfield. There were just the two of us left and the weather was still warm and the sun still high on this longest of summer nights. 

  He asked where I lived and, as I pointed in the direction of the top floor a few apartments down the street, he said it was at the end of it where Myra’s ex had a place. He never found out whether he sold it or how much money he gave Myra for her share if she took anything at all. It wasn’t his business even if everybody else seemed to think he had made it so. Before that we were in a place around Polworth, I said, and realised just how little I had talked over the last few hours, how few questions he had asked. In most circumstances, I might have found that a problem but for some reason, it was as if he was talking to me but never at me, that whatever he was saying seemed to be of as much interest to me in the listening as it was for him in the telling. How often had he told this story I wondered, and did it matter? As we said goodbye, I promised again to search for his work and he said to read the opening paragraph of a few things and continue reading whatever interested me and, if nothing did, to stop. He said he wrote to be understood but isn’t that what we all want, to be understood, and not only writers?

11

Over the next few days, I could see that Amelia was still mildly irritated that I had talked to her little during the walk and almost exclusively to a man who was a stranger. Such a sense of priorities would almost have mystified Amelia, but I suppose had always been much more ambivalent about me. I liked the security of our peer group and had known Jeremy and Bea for almost as long as I'd known Amelia. I hadn’t the confidence, I suppose, to meet new people. But whenever an opportunity arose, when I was sitting in a pub with the others, and those at the next table wished to engage in chat, I was usually the one most inclined to hear what they had to say, even on occasion joining their discussion and half-ignoring the very friends I came in with. Was I being rude or were they? Was my behaviour obnoxious as I enjoyed the company of people I’d never before met, or were they for showing such reluctance in speaking to others? 

I wondered too if this was why so often we all talked in a manner that meant no conversation could be properly interrupted; that there was nothing new enough that it took any length of time to convey. It was as if when within the group we were all offering each other short articles and I had a yearning, in modern parlance, for a long read. I decided to take that literally and one evening, in the middle of the week, I went online and searched out Daniel’s stories. Daniel Mullaney he had said and I found a few online magazines where he contributed fiction. I read through one which focused on a hippy community on the west coast of Mexico, another a road trip through France and Spain, and a third about a young boy who finds himself parentless when both his mother and father lose their life trying to rescue him from the sea. The boy was in an inflatable ring and the current pulled him far from the shore before eventually he found himself inland again at another bay. The parents couldn’t see him, swam far out themselves, had no inflatable to keep them afloat and perished in the waves. The story was narrated by the boy as a grown-up and it was as though he was trying to find someone who might understand him, comprehend the unlikelihood of such a loss — and of a guilt that you cannot begin to feel you aren’t responsible for in their lost lives. 

The fourth story was the one he had told me as we walked and I was confronted by it the way we are faced with a lie. I am not saying that what he told me was made up (perhaps it was but I had no evidence to match it against) but that I felt a little like someone who, after being flattered, overhears the same person flattering another in a like manner. I also had to admit that two-thirds of the way through the story he had told me, I wanted him to continue; that he didn’t seek me out to finish it. Was it his way of filling out a walk, idly passing the time without conveying anything about himself that had not only occurred to him before but that had already been published in a magazine? I returned to the story about the orphaned boy and read once more a passage where he says he long ago gave up trying to be understood and tried instead to be plausible. Unable to express his pain, to find anyone to share it, he found instead that he could share stories, and in their sharing, a truth would reveal itself he hoped, even if he couldn’t pretend it was his own. When he met people he started to tell them stories instead of his story, and he didn’t know whether this was an act of subterfuge or generosity, whether he was hiding the truth or protecting people from it. That he wanted to be understood didn’t mean he expected to be, the narrator says; that when he found he could express himself on the page as he couldn’t with others he wondered if he should take that expression and see if he could apply it in life too. He started to tell people stories that he sensed they wanted to hear and he enjoyed telling them and believed that he got closer to others this way than he had ever managed when he attempted to explore his life and his feelings by chatting to people. 

Of course, I had no idea whether what he offered in this story was the truth of his actual life, all I knew was the one he told me was a tale that he had previously put on the page. There Myra was, and the ex-husband, and of course the bottle green velvet jacket. And he did tell me a story I wanted to hear since, when it was interrupted, when we stopped for lunch and Amelia talked about the boxroom, I wanted to get back to the tale, to hear more about how important that jacket happened to be. When I thought about it, there wasn’t that much of a story to tell — a person feels misunderstood when his partner’s ex takes the wearing of a jacket to be stealing the shirt off his back. Yet in the negligible nature of the story did it perhaps say something about my negligible life, or did it contain within it a moral I needed to extract if I were to think about my own existence and my relationships? I thought about my partner and my friends and realised that amongst them I had no story to tell, nor one that I sensed they would be interested in sharing either. That dual realisation might not have been the intention behind Daniel’s telling, but I was left with an odd sense that these were the consequences of it. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Misunderstandings

 

 

 

1

He said he never wanted much from life but he did want to be understood. I thought of husbands who say their wives can’t understand them or artists who feel they never get the recognition they deserve. But I also thought that when many insist people speak in cliches is this the listener or the speaker’s fault? Had I left it at that, if I hadn’t enquired further, the stock phrase would have been evident and I would have been another who had misunderstood him.

I didn’t know Daniel at all but one Sunday around a dozen of us went for a walk out to the Pentlands, commencing from the Meadows and walking along the canal, out past Juniper Green and Currie, towards Threipmuir and then down towards an inn for lunch, before intending to go back into town along by Hillend. The walk would take most of the day but as we gathered at 930 on a June, Sunday morning, the weather was already warm, and the fear was more of sunstroke than rain. Several people were putting cream on their faces others asked their partners to apply it to their bare shoulders. 

The walk had become a yearly ritual, usually on the weekend of the longest day of the year, and friends of friends could come and join the dozen of us, most of whom I had known for some years. Daniel had been sitting on the park bench where we had all arranged to meet and asked as we were about to leave if he could join us. He had planned to go for a long walk that day; our route seemed as good as any he might have thought up for himself. We looked at his feet and saw he was wearing a good pair of walking shoes, with thick, strong, rubbery soles, that he was wearing too loose fitting cotton trousers that wouldn’t cause chaffing during such a long walk, and that he had with him a rucksack, a litre bottle of water and also a flask. Over the years, we did invite others on the walk, though they were people at least one or two of us knew beforehand. Why not a stranger we found sitting on a bench in the park? It wasn’t so much that anybody said yes; more that nobody quite had the will to say no, and couldn’t find a decent excuse in the refusal. 

2

For the first hour of the walk my girlfriend, Amelia, was talking to her closest friend amongst the women, Bea, and I fell into chatting with Bea’s husband, Jeremy. It often happened like this, on the walks we would do (and not only our yearly epic) or in restaurants, pubs and cafes. Jeremy and I didn’t share many affinities yet we knew that if we were both there, the basic social anxiety of getting stranded with nobody to talk to would be unlikely to happen. We never expressly stated that we would always look out for each other, making sure if we were in a bar and everyone else was immersed in chat that we would pull them into our conversation or go off and talk to them. However, I am sure he felt as I did, secure that the night wouldn’t be a disaster if I were present 

Equally, we probably didn’t enjoy talking to each other very much even if we did like each other’s company; a paradox easy enough to resolve if we accept there are those with whom we feel at ease but in whose company we rarely feel engaged. Jeremy and I often lobbed commonplaces back and forth with neither of us interested enough in examining the comments we made, the statements we proclaimed. Whether we discussed a football game, a political issue or a film we had both seen, we rarely followed up or called into question the truism the other offered. That morning we discussed a film we both saw the previous week on a streaming channel. The chat mainly consisted of commenting on the story and the acting, why we thought one of the actors was wrong for the role and yet we never discussed precisely why they were wrong. My thoughts on the subject were more intricate than I managed to express, and supposed Jeremy's were too. I said that the actor walked into too many roles because they were famous; that he was well-connected and his mum was an actress and his father a film director. Anybody who lands his first role when he is ten, in a second lead, has it way too easy. Most of his performances have shown him on auto-pilot I said. Jeremy reckoned he went into the family business where the next generation usually just vegetated on the success of the previous one, who did all the hard work. Today it isn’t only in cinema, he said, it is there in business, fashion, politics and other areas where money and fame are to be had without much hard work. Yet if I’d thought about it some of the best actors were products of nepotism. Hadn’t I read that one well-known actor's grandfather was a famous producer, his mother an actress, his father a poet laureate and his father-in-law probably America’s best-known post-war playwright? Another actor became well-known coming out of his more famous brother’s shadow after the latter died. Maybe he was the best actor in American cinema. I didn’t say any of this and neither did Jeremy, though we both watched a lot of films and he was probably as aware of these facts as I was. 

I could nevertheless have enjoyed well enough walking for the rest of the day beside Jeremy, as we threw the occasional comment back and forth, with each of us satisfied by the long silences. Around eleven thirty we stopped for a tea break and Jeremy sat with his partner and I with mine. After a couple of minutes, I saw Daniel was alone and was about to ask him to join us, yet I noticed in him not only what seemed a man content in his own company, but also a contemplation passing through his mind that suggested an invite may have been seen as an intrusion. His self-possession fascinated me; aware that if I had tagged along with a group of strangers on a long walk I would have been mortified to find myself sitting alone. Of course, I wouldn’t have been likely to propose joining strangers and that might have been the point. Daniel was comfortable enough on his own that he could feel no less comfortable proposing he join the company of others. It seemed a contradiction to me but wasn’t to Daniel, and I knew as well that if we talked at all it wouldn’t be because I found him interesting, and that I wished to talk to him. It would be because I felt socially obliged to ask him to join us (therein lay my confidence) or that he might choose to speak to me. 

We started walking again after a twenty-minute break and just as we started doing so, Daniel and I put a couple of items in a nearby bin at the same time. He said he had overheard me talking about a film I’d seen that he said he saw too. I am not sure if he said this to instigate a conversation or whether he had seen the film: we didn’t talk about it. But as we started up the steep hill towards Threpmuir he fell into step with me. Jeremy had joined my partner and his own up ahead. Daniel said he hoped people didn’t think he was intruding, that he often joined people’s walks rather than joining a walking club. He felt freer that way; sometimes he wanted to walk alone — other times with people. But better the other people be strangers to him, he said. Familiarity might make for settled nervous systems but often didn’t do much for energy and interest. I thought for a moment that he hadn’t only overheard my conversation with Jeremy but my interior monologue too. It felt uncanny and I was briefly embarrassed, aware that if he couldn’t read my mind maybe he had read my body language: that he could see I was at ease in Jeremy’s company but hardly stimulated by it. 

It was then that he said what he wanted from life was to be understood. For some reason, I asked, as I wouldn’t have asked Jeremy, my partner, or probably any of the others in the group, what he meant by that. He said fifteen years ago he started seeing a woman who had just broken up with her husband. Myra and her spouse had publicly parted a year earlier, she had a brief affair that ended before Daniel started seeing her (an affair that had commenced before the publicly acknowledged end of her marriage)and though there were signs she was still married, she claimed it was over. But after a year she admitted that she was still technically married, that divorce proceedings hadn’t started, and she suspected her husband would take her back. Daniel thought she may have been saying this to persuade him to offer more commitment but she also added that after the brief affair had ended she often stayed over at her husband’s place in the months between the end of her affair and the start of her relationship with Daniel. Myra and her husband didn’t have sex but they slept in the same bed, and for a while, it was as though they were back together. After all, they hadn’t had sex for well over a year before they broke up. There were degrees of potential awkwardness and revelation in his telling that I couldn’t imagine any of the others in my peer group offering. I looked at the backs of my friends up ahead of us, and I saw in their healthy hiking enthusiasm a lack of something. Here was a man who I’d started talking to twenty minutes earlier telling me not only about an ex-girlfriend but about an ex-girlfriend’s husband too. Daniel of course appeared indiscreet but also conveyed to me a respect for these people he was discussing as though in each instance he wasn’t talking about them; he was sharing in their predicament. 

I suppose why I liked Jeremy’s company more than Bill, Ben, John, James and also their wives, or present partners, Jill, Jane, Barbara and Briony, was that he didn’t talk ill of people. Sometimes when I was in conversation with the others, they discussed a colleague at work, a family member or a neighbour, as though the person were an object in the way, a subject to be discussed only as a means to vent their frustration. I remember on the walk last year I fell into step with Bill and he told me of a fellow academic who stole his work, who asked him if he wanted another pair of eyes on the paper Bill was working on and Bill stupidly showed him. A few months later a paper appeared in a journal Bill co-edited with ideas in it that were stolen from him. I didn’t insist on asking questions that may have helped Bill see the action in a broader context, didn’t ask if they were working in similar areas and that it may have been a coincidence. I was sure that wasn’t what Bill wanted to hear: he wanted me to nod in agreement at how terrible this person had been. There were similar moments with others and I often felt an odd loneliness in these conversations. I can only describe it as the loneliness of feeling that I too could have been thus described if any of the others had a reason to say they had a problem with me (and maybe they did). It was as if though when Daniel said he wished to be understood it wasn’t a statement but an invitation, and thus I asked him what he meant by this.

4

He didn’t answer directly but told me more about this relationship break up fifteen years earlier. He said that Myra’s husband was a geologist who often worked away and she initially told Daniel this as an explanation why she started an affair. He worked one month on

and one month off. What she didn’t initially tell him was how much money he earned — enough to have bought the flat they were living in within five years. She still felt it belonged almost as much to her as to her husband, and not only did she still have keys to the apartment but she admitted much later to him that she often stayed there when her ex was away in Norway. The flat was near the park where we set off on our walk, and much roomier than the flat she had moved into and never quite felt at home in on a side street about a mile away from Haymarket station, one moving out towards the prison. She never much liked this other apartment and often felt mildly frightened on Saturday afternoons when hordes passed below her window before three in the afternoon and passed again around five. She rather naively wondered why, until a friend who visited her one afternoon asked if she hadn’t noticed that most of the people passing coincidentally seemed to be wearing a scarf with particular colours. Myra looked at the friend still confused and she asked Myra if she had ever heard of a game called football. Myra laughed, and laughed at herself months later telling Daniel the story. 

She didn’t like Daniel’s place either, a flat he bought off the council after it was left to him by his mother. His granny died and there was enough money in her will to buy it for around £12,000. There he was having benefitted from his mother remarrying when he was eighteen (she moved into a house on the outskirts with her new husband) and getting left a flat and then a few years later his grandmother died and he got to buy it too. It wasn’t until Myra came around one evening a few weeks after they had started dating (they had always stayed over at hers) that he first saw it with eyes suggesting he was unfortunate rather than lucky. It wasn’t as if over the years girlfriends hadn’t slept the night but they were all from backgrounds similar enough to his own for them to acknowledge that they too wished they could live without rent so near to the city centre. The flat was not far from the parliament and on the third floor, looking out onto the Crags and Arthur’s Seat. Inside it had a kitchen large enough for a two-person dining table, a sitting room and two bedrooms, a double, and a single that he used as a study, with a sofa bed, a desk, a chair and shelves of books. 

Myra and Daniel had met when he gave a reading at a second-hand bookshop. It was promoting the launch of a new magazine which he suspected would have few readers but had editors canny enough to access grants. Most of the magazines he wrote for survived the same way and after the editors were paid there wasn’t a lot of money left over to pay the contributors. If he made a hundred pounds from a story; fifty from a book review he was happy. His main income came from offering conversational English to foreigners and teaching one morning a week at a language school. Myra said afterwards she liked the story he read out and said she didn’t realise Edinburgh could harbour such secrets. She asked if it was based on fact; he said it wasn’t. She asked if he was going to the pub afterwards. He said a few of them were. At first, he thought she was forward but later in the pub he reckoned she was lonely, the sort of loneliness that leaves someone the last to leave the pub and the least likely to say they must be going. The pub was off the Royal Mile and he said he’d happily detour and walk her home. He had earlier wanted to walk before going to the pub but thought it would be rude for one of the speakers to disappear for forty-five minutes and saw now an opportunity to take a walk in company. 

     He’d noticed Myra’s wedding ring and thought there was a story behind it which didn’t suggest a happy marriage but neither did he wish to take advantage of what he perceived was her unhappiness. What he didn’t know at the time was that she had put the ring back on after the heartbreak of an extramarital affair. Had he met her a week earlier she would still have been with the man and wouldn’t have been wearing the ring. He might have thought she was an available woman when instead she would have been in a relationship within a marriage. Now she had returned to marital status as a way of protecting herself against the loneliness of her lover’s parting. It was odd she supposed; she often didn't wear the thing ring through her marriage but felt the need when her lover wanted no longer to see her. 

As we approached the top of the hill, walking through the Pentlands, before looking down on Glencorse reservoir, Daniel told me that he didn’t wish to sound judgemental describing her character; it was more to suggest the complexity of situations and our capacity to misjudge them. That evening he walked her to what he assumed was her flat in Bruntsfield and said goodbye, unaware at the time that it wasn’t a husband she was returning to (he was offshore) but the apartment of her lover whom she wished to visit even he didn’t wish to see her. 

Daniel didn’t see Myra again for several months and it was when in the pub, after another reading he had given, she told him the story. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring that night and explained why she happened to be three months earlier. He admired her honesty, he said, as they talked on stools at the bar while most of the others were seated around a table. They had gone up to the bar together to order a round which she insisted on paying for and, as he deposited everybody else’s orders to the table, she remained seated on the stool. He went back to the bar and sat with her. He walked her home again that night but this time not to a flat in Bruntsfield but one in Marchmont. She might have invited him in but he said he had a class the next morning (the one day he taught at the language school) but hoped they could meet again. They swapped numbers and met once more about ten days later. 

While he talked I wondered why he was telling me all this and recalled that it was premised on the notion of understanding. How did this have anything to do with his opening remark? Usually when Jeremy or any of the others would tell me something about their life, or a colleague from work in the pub on a Friday evening, it seemed more to the point yet less interesting. I sensed Daniel was going somewhere with it but couldn’t quite work out where. When Jeremy or other people I knew told me that a funny thing had happened to them at work, or a story about an incident many years earlier when they were at school, I knew that the story didn’t really involve them. They weren’t telling me to reveal anything about themselves but to fill time with an anecdote. I didn’t feel this with Daniel and perhaps why I allowed him to continue, with only a few interruptions, all the way to the inn. 

5

It is of course interesting when we admire somebody’s honesty it often comes after a moment of dishonesty disclosed. Perhaps it is more logical to admire their dishonesty since they managed to fool us the first time around, while their claim in telling the truth could be another example of keeping something from us. Yet this didn’t seem to be so, Daniel added, saying that if anything Myra couldn’t stop introducing him to people as her new boyfriend. He was aware that nobody knew of her ex-lover, knew that it had now been several months that she told friends she and her husband had broken up, and she implied too that they had managed a quick divorce — but that could have been his misapprehension. Anyway, after a week of them sleeping together, she invited him to a party where not only her friends were but her ex-husband too. Her husband appeared to be with someone else but couldn’t stop looking across at Myra and Daniel whenever she put her hand on his knee, and Daniel couldn’t deny that he felt that she was her husband’s ex-wife far more than she seemed to be his present girlfriend. 

This feeling was exacerbated a few days later when she came around to his apartment for the first time and said that at least the place had a nice view. It was as if she weren’t only seeing it with her own eyes but her ex-husband’s as well: he could imagine the pair of them arriving in Edinburgh looking for a flat to rent and somehow looking at this one, alarmed that they found themselves contemplating even for a moment the possibility that they could live there. Over the next year, Myra stayed over only twice more: once when they were drinking in a pub off the Royal Mile and only a few hundred metres from his flat. It was Saturday night, taxis would have been hard to find, and so at Daniel’s they stayed. The other evening was a night when they were breaking up but that, Daniel said, would be to jump a little ahead of himself. I thought then that he had told this story perhaps many times before but also recalled him saying he wrote fiction; thus well aware that the order of events mattered, even in what might seem an anecdote or a confession. 

So generally they stayed over at her flat which seemed to her less of a disappointment in the wake of seeing Daniel’s except for the evening when she went over to her ex’s to pick up some things and asked if Daniel could help her carry some of them too. She had a set of keys and let herself into the apartment. Her ex was again in Norway and wouldn’t be back for a week. She said it with a smile as though they were committing a minor sin by being there, one that she wanted to exacerbate with a greater deed. Instead of initially picking up the clothes they came for, she started to remove the ones she was wearing. She pulled Daniel into the main bedroom took his jacket off and proceeded to undress him as she hurriedly undressed herself. He showed some resistance initially, though he was aroused; she said that her ex would have had various lovers in this flat since they had broken up and yet wasn't the flat hers too; hadn’t it been her home for some years? 

   That was not the moment to discuss the intricacies of her husband's love life but sometimes we don’t only not think of things at the time but for quite some time afterwards as well. He accepted her reasoning as justified and, in her enthusiasm to rip his clothes off in a moment of passion, Myra managed to tear his flimsy jacket; one of the arms was all but hanging off. After their hurried action, she looked at the jacket on the floor, picked it up and said she was certain her ex had one he didn’t need. Sure enough in the spare bedroom were her clothes and a couple of bags of his, ready for the charity shop. She asked him to rummage through the bags sure he would find something. Daniel found a tight-fitting bottle green velvet jacket that he admitted when he tried it on was bold but that suited him. Myra said it was a gift she gave her husband years ago when he was a little less stout but he rarely wore it, thought it was too bohemian. Daniel was ambivalent, of course, but he liked it, and if he had tried it on in a charity shop he would have bought it. Did it make sense to wait until her ex finally deposited the bags at a charity shop and then search the city looking for the jacket, or should he accept that he liked it, that it suited him and he should take it now, especially as he had no other jacket at that moment to wear? When Myra said her ex probably wouldn’t bother taking it to a charity shop, he would just dump it in the nearest bin when he finally got around to getting rid of it at all, he decided to take it. He didn’t like things going to waste. 

6

Over the following months, Daniel wore the jacket often and when he tried to imagine her ex wearing it he couldn’t. He hadn’t seen him since that party but if he hadn’t scrutinised him quite as closely as the ex had scrutinised him, he saw enough to know that this was a jacket that had found its rightful owner, no matter if it belonged to the other man. If he did anything wrong it wasn’t to accept the jacket; it was to have sex with Myra in her ex’s apartment. Yet wasn’t the flat hers as well? That evening back at her place, he asked her about this and that was when she admitted the divorce hadn’t gone through yet. Her lawyer insisted that she was entitled to a share of the apartment for the period of their marriage and Daniel found himself defending her husband rather than taking the lawyer’s position. Myra had told Daniel that it was her husband who paid for her PhD and without it, she wouldn’t have found work in the university, and wouldn’t have been able now to support herself. She had always said how grateful she was that while he was working away, making money, she had the chance to stay in Edinburgh and get the further qualifications she needed to get a job too. 

      When she started the PhD the intention was afterwards to find a job that paid well enough that her husband no longer needed to work offshore but by the end of it she no longer wanted to be in the marriage at all. She felt guilty not only because she was walking out on a marriage but walking away with a doctorate her husband had paid for. Daniel reminded her of this when she mentioned the lawyer and it was as though his sympathy with her husband was more important than his anger that Myra hadn’t told him before that the divorce was far from finalised. Perhaps he was more sympathetic to the husband than he was angered by her subterfuge because he was ambivalent about how seriously he wanted to take their relationship. He wasn’t so sure that when she said she was still married he felt a small sense of relief; that he could justify ending the affair since she was still after all a married woman. 

Myra said she wouldn’t push for a cash settlement but would go along with whatever the lawyer advised and over the next couple of months he was adamant that she was entitled to a share of the flat and that her soon-to-be ex-husband would have to buy her out. 

7

It would have been around three months after the night they had sex at the ex’s when Myra and Daniel attended a party again at the friends who hosted the first one they had gone to together; the one where her husband had also been in attendance. Daniel still hadn’t got around to repairing his other jacket and was ambivalent about wearing the green velvet one, until Myra said, the night before the party, that her ex was in Norway and wouldn’t be back for three weeks. She said it after telling Daniel that the previous week, when he was still in the city, she had gone round to the flat to discuss with him in person what had mainly been dealt with by the lawyers, and he had lost his temper. Her ex had never been violent before and she could tell he wished to hit her but constrained himself by throwing a plate against the wall, a cup onto the floor, and a glass forcefully into the sink. All broke and he himself seemed broken as he slumped to the ground and leaned against the cooker. He asked what she wanted from him: that he put his head in the oven? She told him none of this was personal but that her lawyer said it was her legal right. “That is just it”, he said to her, "it really isn’t personal for you is it?” There Daniel was telling me, who had been told by Myra, who was hearing it from her ex, and all I could think about was how odd it seemed that during this walk I’d become interested in the lives of people I didn’t know when I often couldn’t pay much attention to the anecdotes some of the others in our group told me about their existence. 

Daniel asked Myra what she replied when her ex said this. She said she reiterated what the lawyer had insisted upon: she was entitled to her share. He almost wished that she was lying, that she had taken her ex in her arms and hugged him, saying that she was sorry it had come to this and they should have worked things out a couple of years earlier. It might have hinted at infidelity towards Daniel but at least it would have shown compassion towards her ex. That evening as her ex collapsed by the oven, the emotionally important thing wasn’t to be faithful to Daniel but to put her arm around her ex and to stay there for however long it would have taken for him to feel calm. She said she left after a few minutes, knowing Daniel was waiting for her. He recalled they had a table booked at a restaurant that night. She should have cancelled, he thought.  

But there he was, now, about to attend a party wearing the velvet jacket. That morning he had gone to the tailor and asked if there was any chance they could repair his ripped jacket that day and the person said they would try. But when he went back shortly before six, the tailor said he was sorry but his assistant had to go home early; he was on his own with so much work. He would try and fix it the following day he said. Daniel looked at the man’s harried face, a worn look suggesting hassles and harassment in the past and elsewhere. Was he Kurdish, Iraqi, Afhgan, he didn’t know, but he sensed that to ask this man to do him a favour, that it was important, that he must sew on the sleeve, would have been an insult to the man’s experience and show up the callowness of his own. Daniel said of course that would be fine and crossed the road to a second-hand vintage store hoping to catch it before it closed. He was too late. It seemed he was destined to wear the velvet jacket. 

If the husband was to have attended the party, Daniel would obviously not have worn the jacket but there he was in Norway; there was no reason to feel self-conscious. Yet when he arrived with Myra he was sure the host and her partner as they received the wine with gratitude noticed the brilliance of his jacket, and before he had the chance to remove it several other people passed through the broad hallway and said hello. He remained in the hall for more than half an hour in various discussions before he took the jacket off and placed it on the bed. He felt relieved, as though he were himself again and knew that he wouldn’t wear it any more. It would end up in the charity shop after all. When they left the party three hours later he had the jacket in his hand as he said goodbye to the hosts, and didn’t put it on until he was outside the building. Myra asked if he enjoyed the evening; he said he wasn’t sure. She said that seemed odd — how could he not know? Yet as he said to me there are certain events in which we partake where the full consequences of it are retrospective. This was one such instance.

8

By now we were only a few hundred yards from the inn and about to take lunch. I wanted to hear the rest of the story but was aware too that he couldn’t have continued telling it if we were to eat with others. How to fill the other diners in with the various details? Equally, I sensed it would have seemed odd if I were to insist on eating with this stranger alone. Once at the inn, Amelia suggested we sit with Jeremy and Bea and proposed to Daniel that he join us. I ordered the plaice and chips with mushy peas, accompanied by a pint and followed by sticky toffee pudding and ice cream, and an espresso: a modest touch amongst the excess. It had become a tradition to go for the fish and chips and most of the men did likewise, a reward we all sensed we deserved in the middle of a long walk. I had no interest in eating such rich food on any other occasion and I couldn’t say for sure whether it was biological or circumstantial: that I was ravenous and wanted a couple of thousand calories or whether I liked the habit of eating this particular food in this particular place. I said this to the others as we ate, self-conscious perhaps because Daniel was with us and, while Jeremy had ordered the same, Daniel had chosen a smoked salmon salad. He proposed he wasn’t that hungry and I might have assumed it was an attempt to make me feel better at guzzling on such heavy food. But I knew too that he had already eaten his sandwiches during our tea break at eleven and it was now only 130. He asked whether I’d ever driven out here just to have this lunch. I said no and he supposed I’d answered my question. 

    It was a conclusive remark and yet his own story was thus far not yet concluded, even if we had been talking for well over an hour before arriving at the inn. It was as though my remark was there to exist in the smallest anecdotal space and his the largest and I found myself thinking, as the others chatted, about this notion of how large or small a story’s space happened to be. I wasn’t thinking about this at all in terms of stories, novels or anything like that. I was trying to understand why in most conversations it is so easy to join it at any moment without feeling that what has thus far been talked about needs to be reiterated. How often has someone entered a conversation and the people sitting there have offered just a few words and the person can easily contribute? I thought too of jokes and why I have always disliked telling them, even if I believed the joke to be funny. It was the sense of temporal constraint, the feeling that time was being squeezed into an expectation and I had no more than a minute or two to make people laugh. I also noticed that with all of our friends, with the group Amelia and I walked with and other friends too, there was always time subordinate to space, so that even when it wasn’t — as in these long walks we took — the comments we made to each other seemed still constrained by our usual sense of time. 

I came back out of my thoughts and heard Amelia saying we needed to sort out the box room in the flat. We had moved into the present place a year earlier and she wanted to turn it into a work area and at the moment it was full of various boxes that we used for packing. A box room indeed, Daniel said. I laughed, but nobody else did. I knew at that moment most of the others didn’t like Daniel, wondered what he was doing there, thinking since he had chosen to tag along then he could have at least reflected in his request the demeanour of the lonely and the lucky — a person who others had allowed to join them. Gratitude is sometimes best expressed not in thank-yous but in bodily expression, in an extended acknowledgement of a debt. There was nothing to suggest this debt as Daniel sat there, as if he might even have thought others should have been grateful for his company and didn’t quite know what they were missing by not listening to him more. But I think that would have been to misconstrue him. To misunderstand him. Only Bea I sensed might have understood him instinctively, and I often envied Jeremy in having a partner who appeared to believe that everyone has their reasons and that she had neither the need to judge them nor to understand them any more than they wished to be understood. Somehow he wouldn’t have needed to talk to Bea at all, by that reckoning, but why might he have needed to talk to me?

9

Leaving the inn, I could see that Amelia wanted me to walk with her and perhaps also with Jeremy and Bea; that if I were to walk again with Daniel it would be an act of betrayal so small that to explain it might have taken perhaps the same amount of time as Daniel’s story. Yet I knew that Amelia wasn’t inclined to offer such an explanation and that it would manifest in small acts of irritation instead. Yet I wanted to hear the rest of the story and while walking with Amelia, Jeremy and Bea I watched as Daniel, a few feet in front of us, fell into conversation with Bill. He didn’t seem to be talking at all but listening as Bill chatted to him about some issue at work. Amelia started talking again about the boxroom and what she was going to equip it with: she needed a new computer anyway, and she was hoping to replace the shelves with narrower ones that would utilise the space better and could be used for books. I knew all this so anything she said wasn’t directed at me; yet I also suspected if I were to walk on ahead and engage in conversation with Daniel, then it would have offended her.

I knew there was a chance that once we reached Hillhead, once we were at the edge of the city, some might propose getting a bus rather than walking the remaining miles into town. The route was no longer scenic, and the rest of the way would be walking along busy roads and past anonymous housing. I noticed too that despite the sun cream a couple of people were looking slightly burned and the sun was still strong. No matter the weather, whether the walk was done in the rain, or with powerful winds or acute sun, usually a few of us wanted to continue back just to achieve the circularity of the walk, and I was pleased when Bill said he wanted to keep walking, sure that Daniel wouldn’t wish to take the bus. Jeremy and Daniel said they would walk too, and I said I would join them. Amelia didn’t seem especially displeased and, as they waited for the bus, we continued. Bill and Jeremy walked on ahead and Daniel and I fell behind. I said I didn’t think he had finished his story. Was it a story, he asked, and I said it depends on how you define one. It seemed like a story to me, and I felt he hadn’t finished it. He apologised. He had no urge to tell stories and echoed my earlier thought about jokes when saying that the problem with people telling stories is they hold people captive, often against their will, for the length of the tale told. To interrupt or to walk off is rude but isn’t it the person who tells it who is being rude in a different way, in holding the other temporally captive? Perhaps I said, but it seemed that whatever he was saying had been interrupted; that there was still a point I felt about the bottle green velvet jacket. That I remembered it was bottle green convinced him that he should continue; that if I had said merely the jacket he might not have wished to go on. I looked at him as though he were joking but I couldn’t tell by the expression on his face whether he was. 

10

He said that a few weeks after the party, Myra went around again to her ex’s place to talk through a few details about the flat and her share. Her lawyer said that she should keep her distance until the case was resolved but she didn’t want to fall out altogether with her husband and did exactly that by ignoring the lawyer’s advice. She told Daniel what happened when she phoned him as she was leaving her ex’s flat and asked if he could meet her at her place as soon as possible. He got on his bike and was there before she arrived. She thanked him for coming as one appreciates the gesture of a stranger and he knew that evening if she wasn’t in love with her husband, her love for her spouse was evident enough for her to acknowledge the weakness of her feelings towards Daniel. At the time he wasn’t unhurt by this realisation but over the following months, he supposed that he became increasingly irked by what her husband had said about him. It seemed that he had heard that Daniel had worn the bottle green velvet jacket at the party and assumed that it wasn’t only his blazer that Daniel wanted but the metaphorical shirt off his back too — he reckoned Daniel wanted the money from the flat and now believed that it was not Myra who pushed for the cash, nor even her lawyer. It had been Daniel. Myra said that of course that was nonsense but Daniel also suspected that her prejudices about his apartment may have been vocalised to her husband: if someone could in a matter of weeks have revealed to him that Daniel was at the party wearing the jacket, couldn’t have Myra said to him, or to a mutual friend who said to him, that Daniel was living in an ex-council flat. He might then have assumed that Daniel wanted to better himself, and why not do it at his expense?

For some reason he didn’t think too much about it that night, nor over the following few days as he and Myra broke up, meeting several times trying to resolve a situation they both knew was untenable. She came round to his flat for only the third time and he saw in her willingness to stay that her feelings were strong enough to accept that she would even occupy this miserable apartment for a night if it meant lying with him. But the more he mused over it thereafter the more he sensed not just a condescension which suggested amongst Myra’s circle that he was perceived to be living in a hovel and had stolen her ex’s clothes. He was someone who wished to get the husband’s money as well, and thus everything was an enormous misunderstanding. He felt lucky for what he had and never believed he was someone who coveted more. He liked his flat and was all these years later still living in it, happy that he could afford to teach no more than one or two mornings a week along with a few private classes, and could write what he wished for magazines and journals. I asked him about these journals and asked him too for his full name and said I would try and seek out some of the work. He said I could find some stuff online, other stories and articles in the library. By now we had reached Marchmont. We had said goodbye to most of the others on the way and said goodbye to Jeremy up at Bruntsfield. There were just the two of us left and the weather was still warm and the sun still high on this longest of summer nights. 

  He asked where I lived and, as I pointed in the direction of the top floor a few apartments down the street, he said it was at the end of it where Myra’s ex had a place. He never found out whether he sold it or how much money he gave Myra for her share if she took anything at all. It wasn’t his business even if everybody else seemed to think he had made it so. Before that we were in a place around Polworth, I said, and realised just how little I had talked over the last few hours, how few questions he had asked. In most circumstances, I might have found that a problem but for some reason, it was as if he was talking to me but never at me, that whatever he was saying seemed to be of as much interest to me in the listening as it was for him in the telling. How often had he told this story I wondered, and did it matter? As we said goodbye, I promised again to search for his work and he said to read the opening paragraph of a few things and continue reading whatever interested me and, if nothing did, to stop. He said he wrote to be understood but isn’t that what we all want, to be understood, and not only writers?

11

Over the next few days, I could see that Amelia was still mildly irritated that I had talked to her little during the walk and almost exclusively to a man who was a stranger. Such a sense of priorities would almost have mystified Amelia, but I suppose had always been much more ambivalent about me. I liked the security of our peer group and had known Jeremy and Bea for almost as long as I'd known Amelia. I hadn’t the confidence, I suppose, to meet new people. But whenever an opportunity arose, when I was sitting in a pub with the others, and those at the next table wished to engage in chat, I was usually the one most inclined to hear what they had to say, even on occasion joining their discussion and half-ignoring the very friends I came in with. Was I being rude or were they? Was my behaviour obnoxious as I enjoyed the company of people I’d never before met, or were they for showing such reluctance in speaking to others? 

I wondered too if this was why so often we all talked in a manner that meant no conversation could be properly interrupted; that there was nothing new enough that it took any length of time to convey. It was as if when within the group we were all offering each other short articles and I had a yearning, in modern parlance, for a long read. I decided to take that literally and one evening, in the middle of the week, I went online and searched out Daniel’s stories. Daniel Mullaney he had said and I found a few online magazines where he contributed fiction. I read through one which focused on a hippy community on the west coast of Mexico, another a road trip through France and Spain, and a third about a young boy who finds himself parentless when both his mother and father lose their life trying to rescue him from the sea. The boy was in an inflatable ring and the current pulled him far from the shore before eventually he found himself inland again at another bay. The parents couldn’t see him, swam far out themselves, had no inflatable to keep them afloat and perished in the waves. The story was narrated by the boy as a grown-up and it was as though he was trying to find someone who might understand him, comprehend the unlikelihood of such a loss — and of a guilt that you cannot begin to feel you aren’t responsible for in their lost lives. 

The fourth story was the one he had told me as we walked and I was confronted by it the way we are faced with a lie. I am not saying that what he told me was made up (perhaps it was but I had no evidence to match it against) but that I felt a little like someone who, after being flattered, overhears the same person flattering another in a like manner. I also had to admit that two-thirds of the way through the story he had told me, I wanted him to continue; that he didn’t seek me out to finish it. Was it his way of filling out a walk, idly passing the time without conveying anything about himself that had not only occurred to him before but that had already been published in a magazine? I returned to the story about the orphaned boy and read once more a passage where he says he long ago gave up trying to be understood and tried instead to be plausible. Unable to express his pain, to find anyone to share it, he found instead that he could share stories, and in their sharing, a truth would reveal itself he hoped, even if he couldn’t pretend it was his own. When he met people he started to tell them stories instead of his story, and he didn’t know whether this was an act of subterfuge or generosity, whether he was hiding the truth or protecting people from it. That he wanted to be understood didn’t mean he expected to be, the narrator says; that when he found he could express himself on the page as he couldn’t with others he wondered if he should take that expression and see if he could apply it in life too. He started to tell people stories that he sensed they wanted to hear and he enjoyed telling them and believed that he got closer to others this way than he had ever managed when he attempted to explore his life and his feelings by chatting to people. 

Of course, I had no idea whether what he offered in this story was the truth of his actual life, all I knew was the one he told me was a tale that he had previously put on the page. There Myra was, and the ex-husband, and of course the bottle green velvet jacket. And he did tell me a story I wanted to hear since, when it was interrupted, when we stopped for lunch and Amelia talked about the boxroom, I wanted to get back to the tale, to hear more about how important that jacket happened to be. When I thought about it, there wasn’t that much of a story to tell — a person feels misunderstood when his partner’s ex takes the wearing of a jacket to be stealing the shirt off his back. Yet in the negligible nature of the story did it perhaps say something about my negligible life, or did it contain within it a moral I needed to extract if I were to think about my own existence and my relationships? I thought about my partner and my friends and realised that amongst them I had no story to tell, nor one that I sensed they would be interested in sharing either. That dual realisation might not have been the intention behind Daniel’s telling, but I was left with an odd sense that these were the consequences of it. 


© Tony McKibbin