Whiskies
Twenty-five years ago I visited a friend for the first time. He was editing a small magazine in the southwest of England, and I was living in London writing for a newspaper whose perspective I abhorred but whose salary was remunerative. I turned out a gossip column twice a week and I had an ample allowance to trawl clubs and restaurants, cafes and bars, looking for information on those whose wealth allowed for numerous indiscretions but who weren’t deemed rich or powerful enough to sue the newspaper. I was told to leave the royal family alone, along with a few politicians and some actors and musicians. My editor said if I had a story on someone hugely well-known, they would do a cost-benefit analysis: they would look at how many newspapers a story would sell against likely damages if the celebrity sued. I didn’t feel too much pressure in the job; all the decisions passed through the editorial team and any ire would be towards the owner if he was expected to pay off a star or find himself in court. Maybe the paper would try and sack me, but even then, I supposed, I could defend myself, saying I didn’t decide to publish the piece. Sometimes the job was exciting, even morally investigatory; mostly, it seemed sleazy and dubious. The paper liked nothing more than exposing an upstart, which from the editors’ angle would often mean a person from a working-class background with social concerns, who had become a well-known actor or singer, and wished to use their status to support a cause the paper found objectionable. One actor from a housing estate in London was campaigning with the community to prevent exorbitant rent rises after an offshore consortium bought up the properties. For several days a photographer and I ate in restaurants where he lived, which was no longer on the housing estate but in a part of Islington that was becoming popular with the young who had money. We would tell people we were looking to get an interview with the actor, which wasn’t quite a lie. We would have been happy to have done so; we just never asked him. We weren’t looking for a confession; we were seeking rumours: the nebulous and unsubstantiated that could become an insinuating story. Over those three or four days we heard several stories about the actor, and all were positive. Locals in a bar told us that he would come in sometimes, take a table in the corner with a friend who didn’t seem famous or wealthy, and stay for hours. When he was getting a round at the bar, he would chat to whoever spoke to him, and extricate himself only when friends were yelling at him to bring over the beers. He didn’t always buy the beers; these were friends, not leeches. He was the sort of guy who would have plenty of the former people concurred.
At a cafe we were in, we mentioned to the staff we were looking to interview the actor and they said he sometimes came in and read a book by the window. Sometimes he would look up as though trying to observe people’s behaviour without conspicuously staring; often he looked outside. One waitress said he could be flirtatious and I immediately asked in which way. Did she feel threatened; did she find it offensive; did he act entitled? She said it was light and funny. Once, he said, waitressing was the opposite of acting: in acting, you are trying to get everybody’s attention; in waitressing, everyone is trying to get yours - maybe it is better to be a beautiful waitress than a beautiful actress. She replied saying maybe it would be, if they paid the same. He said a beautiful waitress can be as radiant and influential in a cafe as a beautiful actress in a film. Perhaps they should be paid as much. She then blushed and he apologised, saying he meant to compliment her; not embarrass her, adding that he had often wondered about the similarities between waiting staff and actors, believing both professions benefited from elegant movements through space. I asked if she felt intimated and pressurised to go out with him. She said not at all. If he had asked her out she probably would have said yes. Not because he was famous but because he seemed intriguing, and also bashful. It is a nice combination in a man she said, looking at me as if I were being predictable and far from shy. I said it was the nature of my profession to be inquisitive. She supposed it was more like nosiness, as though the difference rested on curiosity asking for no answer and the nosy insisting on a particular one.
2
Sometimes the photographer and I admitted defeat or even occasionally agreed that the person we were targeting may have acted indiscreetly, but this was no reason to destroy the person’s reputation. Most of the time I did believe we went after people who deserved it, at least within the world of morality expressed in tabloid journalism. We knew our readership liked titillation but it was often best served up with a moral point; better still if we could find victims of the star’s behaviou. We weren’t victimising the celebrity; we were defending those who had been victimised by them.
We knew however that the work was tawdry and nobody more so than the photographer, whose girlfriend wouldn’t let the paper into the house, even as he argued it was the salary that helped pay the mortgage. He offered it, the indignation of the compromised, half-heartedly. He wanted to photograph animals and mountains, he said, not people and parties, and as he looked for different work he found it often paid far less, or he knew far more photographers would likely be applying for the job. His despondence was most evident when he was at his most concessionary, and it looked like we would both be quitting when an editor asked us to use our investigative skills towards the poor over the rich. The newspaper had lost a news photographer to another newspaper; the reporter was off on paternity leave, and they asked us to follow a story the others had instigated. It concerned a couple who claimed to have separate residences, though it looked like the partner was using an address that belonged to a friend, and he was most of the time staying with his partner who had two children. Our job was to expose the man as a benefit fraudster, proposing he was really living with his girlfriend and was claiming the other residence as a way of getting extra money. It seemed he was working but that was ok — he was on tax credit and the government topped up his income: he worked as a personal trainer. Over the three weeks we pursued the story, he stayed at the partner’s around five days a week and spent a couple of nights at the friend’s place. We assumed that he did so for various reasons that included the woman’s benefit payments: she was in part-time work too (as a school assistant), and the amount of money they were swindling from the state was negligible. We also discovered that the person who contacted the newspaper over them was the father of the two children who wanted to minimise maintenance payments and get the other man to pay his share. We discovered, too, that this man had previously had two restraining orders after harassing his ex, and that his own business practices were suspect. He owned two takeaways and a taxi service. The takeaways both said their card machine was broken and they only took cash. We also suspected that the taxi firm was a front for low-key drug dealing when after using the firm a few times the driver said that ferrying people around wasn’t their only trade. We asked what that meant and he went cagey and said you know what I mean with a grin.
It seemed to us that the ex was far more of a criminal liability than the couple and we went to the editor and said the story over the fraud was a bit of a non-story; the one about the ex, if we had to investigate any at all, was by far the more important one. The editor was a big man, the sort of figure who wouldn’t have been useful for the sort of surreptitious reporting I was employed to do and, when in his office, staff were made to feel smaller still. He wasn’t much over six-foot but he had a head like a slab of granite, a low forehead and thick short grey hair. His eyes looked like they had long since banished kindness and his voice was the low growl of a dog looking for its next meal. The story was the next meal, though a journalist might feel like it would be them. He was an impatient man and this may have been what made him a good tabloid editor; a person with no patience for nuance was unlikely to lose his readers. We should have known that going with the more complex story wouldn't interest him.
As he sat talking to us I noticed for the first time that the two chairs we were seated on were lower than his and it made me think that this was surely by design. He augmented his size by then getting up out of the chair and moving around the room, at one moment standing behind our chairs with one hand on each, and saying that since when had reporters and photographers become part of the editorial team? It was a fair question but why did he let us into his office at all, I might have proposed, but a reasonable question couldn’t be taken for anything other than insolence. He said our purpose was simple: to find those cheating the benefits system; nothing that we had offered him about the ex indicated that he was a cheat. A tax fraudster, perhaps, a pest who would harass a woman, without a doubt. But if he wanted a story about a pest or a tax dodger he would have asked for one, and maybe he would. But he also insisted that the reader liked nothing better than reading about people worse off than themselves who were ripping them off. The hard-working taxpayer loved such stories and the paper could never get enough of them. What we were proposing was a story about that hard-working taxpayer. Yes, he might have been doing a few dodges but he wasn’t leeching off the state. It is the leeches he loved going after, he said, lapsing into personal prejudice as though exhausted in seeking an alibi through some abstract reader.
3
We duly published the story and I started to look for a way to leave, aware that at any time my job could be turned inside out at the whim of the editor. My excuse for long enough was that I was on the side of the poor and my roundabout way of defending them was by exposing the rich. But from the paper’s point of view, all that mattered was making people feel small, especially anybody who looked like they might not have money or were siding with those who didn’t. That was why they asked me to go after the working-class actor, and the people committing the most modest of benefit fraud. These stories were published within a month of each other and it was during this time I visited the editor of the small magazine. I had published a couple of stories there and chatted on the phone to him several times, and when my then-girlfriend proposed we take a short break from London, I said we could take a trip to Dorchester where he lived. We could book a room in a hotel for three nights and visit him one afternoon, where I would give him a bottle of his favourite whisky, from a distillery that received a mention in at least three of his own stories, a whisky I’d bought several bottles of after visiting the distillery in Speyside through his indirect recommendation. I knew I wanted to get out of tabloid journalism and thought he might have some contacts in the broadsheets and the little magazines. I offered this to my partner as a way of justifying the trip, but I also wanted to see a man who was viewed as a person of integrity and willpower when I didn’t feel I had much of either. The whisky was a way of impressing him but also no less homage to a man I respected at a time I didn’t much respect myself.
The trip was a success from every perspective, except one. Molly and I found a place to stay that wasn’t expensive, where the food was home-cooked and organic, with many items from the garden, and the weather held throughout our visit. It was mid-May yet felt like mid-summer and was among the happiest moments of our five years as a couple. The only negative was the bottle of whisky. The first evening the editor insisted we stay at his place and, while we managed to persuade him that since we planned to stay for several days, we had already booked into a hotel, we accepted his hospitality for a night. He said if we stayed and drank like a fish on the first night at least we wouldn’t need to smell like one as he offered the adage that guests, like fish, start to smell after three days. Yet, when we arrived at the house he had inherited from his late parents and that was also where he housed the magazine, as I opened my case I noticed a distinct smell coming from it. The single malt offered the pleasantest of odours in the most unfortunate of circumstances: the bottle had smashed and the whisky spilt over the clothes. All I had to offer were shards of glass and a permeating bouquet. We picked away at the glass and put it in the bin, and he insisted that I put all the clothes in the washing machine with one proviso: that we shouldn’t put in any detergent. All the clothes were clean and it would be nice if they came out still smelling just a little of the whisky that I had so kindly brought to him. You seem to know my work well he proposed: he had noticed the label on the bottle as we were picking out the shards. I said I knew it from at least three short stories he’d written and he replied that I seemed to know his work very well. I said better than I knew how to pack a bottle of single malt as I tried to think how and where I managed to break it.
For a man who lived alone in a small town, with no partner and only a dog for company, one that offered the obligatory loud barking as we arrived before settling down, he looked like he neither wanted for company nor was he awkward in it. That night we ate a vegetable chilli he had made earlier that day, followed by a crumble that he usually made with apples from the garden; we must visit again in September for that, he said. To accompany the meal we drank a bottle of wine that Molly had carried and which survived the trip; we discussed my job for the paper, his editorship of the magazine he had created eight years earlier, and Molly’s work as a teacher in an inner city school, where people expressed surprise at her pleasure in doing it. If someone looked a little worried for her as she said this, she smiled, saying they shouldn’t always believe what the paper say. Throughout the evening, Jack was enquiring without being intrusive, interested in our lives and determined, he said by the end of the evening, to rescue me from my job and to continue admiring Molly for the work she was doing. He said if I would help him apply for a grant he could employ me as an editorial assistant; he could also perhaps help me get work reviewing for a couple of broadsheets. I wouldn’t make a lot of money but it should allow me to escape from my tabloid nightmare.
The next morning we left when my clothes were dry, and after I put on a crisp, fragrant shirt he said that if Cleopatra could bathe in milk why couldn’t I wash my clothes in single malt whisky? I said I supposed the newspaper editor could have afforded to do so if he had wished. It would kill the whiff of hypocrisy.
4
Molly and I treated the editor to lunch the day when we left to return to London, and in the months following, Jack helped me a lot. He benefited not at all from the funding the magazine applied for: it paid no more than a modest salary to me. I also started writing for a Sunday newspaper and a weekly literary journal, so was in a position to leave the daily. Over the next decade, I edited the magazine as each year we managed to secure just enough funding to pay me a modest wage as long as I lived within my means. I left London after Molly and I broke up, moved to Edinburgh where a friend from university lived, and who noted I could get a one-bedroom flat for little more than half the amount I was paying in the English capital. I did not need to remain; the books could be sent and the editing had always taken place at a distance. It did mean I saw less of Jack, and my twice-yearly visits dwindled to once every two years, then less often than that
I settled into Edinburgh life and after a few years became editor of a magazine in the city, and continued writing for the Sunday paper and the weekly, while also writing for newspapers in the Scottish capital that paid less well but would often provide work. I married, and had a child, and my wife, Maggie, took time off work for a couple of years but returned since she both enjoyed her job and it paid well enough: she worked in family law, and saw many a cautionary tale and was determined our marriage wouldn’t become another one. That we are still together probably owes a lot more to her than to me. I still contributed occasionally to Jack’s journal and I sometimes think he asked me to write for him, and I suggested writing for him so that we would keep in contact, fearing that without the professional, the personal would cease. I kept threatening to visit, but the idea of a ten-hour trip with two stops was off-putting, and I would have liked also to have taken Maggie and Brendan with me. I would tell Maggie how important Jack was, how I might still be writing gossip columns for London newspapers, have become ever more scurrilous in my determination to get a story, and of course would never have met her. Jack the matchmaker, she joked, well aware that the impression I gave of Jack was someone who had no interest in romance and was dedicated to producing what he believed was the best literary magazine in the UK. That might not quite have been true but I can think of no other that has held to its principles and that is loved by its contributors.
On a couple of occasions, I invited Jack up to Edinburgh, telling him I could get a slot for him at the Book Festival, where he could promote the magazine and possibly increase the number of subscribers — never very high. He wrote back saying that was so kind of me — but he seemed even more reluctant to make the trip up north as I was unwilling to go south, and he was never one to put himself before the public. He said I seemed to know more about his taste in whisky than I did about his interest in publicity, and that was that. I sent a bottle down to him afterwards: I still liked the odd glass and had begun to know a lot more about it. Unlike Jack’s, our magazine took advertising: it focused on Scottish literature and culture and so it seemed acceptable that we would feature ads for Scottish whiskies, distilleries, food, pubs and hotels. It allowed us to pay our contributors and none of the advertisers interfered even when we published articles slamming the Heather and Haggis notion of Scotland. I became friends with the people managing a couple of distilleries, and it was under their recommendation I bought the bottle I sent to Jack
5
But it wasn’t until twenty-five years after I first met him, fifteen years after I last saw Jack, that I found a reason to visit him that seemed unequivocal. I suppose I kept putting off the visit assuming an appropriate opportunity would come about but the South West of England isn’t part of the country that a Scottish resident is likely to pass through. I had no other friends nor relatives further south than London or west of Oxford. Neither was Jack likely to celebrate the magazine’s thirtieth or fortieth anniversary and I didn’t want the necessary occasion to be his funeral.
One of the friends at the distillery whose work we had been advertising in the magazine for a decade, said he wanted to honour that loyalty with a gift. I was more inclined to think that the magazine should have been rewarding them: advertising helped the journal survive, and we weren’t afraid of undermining their image if a writer felt whisky should be as subject to mockery as Heather and Haggis. But no, he said, it had been a pleasure working with a magazine that wasn’t at all compromised by the advertising; he liked the idea that Scotland could produce quality items whether it was a whisky or a magazine, and didn’t have to feel compromised in the process. Business is business, he said, but it can’t only be a tautology or where would be? No, quality matters.
Brian was telling me this in a favourite pub in Morningside. We had been in our different capacities as editor and distiller at a premiere for a new Scottish film that had been hosted at the nearby cinema, and after imbibing at the wine reception after it, we had continued to the pub just ourselves. We were drinking a single malt that was forty years old. He paid with a hundred-pound note and didn’t receive any change. As we were sitting in the corner of a pub that seemed all corners, he asked if I liked the whisky. Like wasn’t the word, too meagre for the density of the flavour, and I said it was probably the best whisky I had ever tasted. He said he was pleased to hear that and took out of his leather satchel a 50ml bottle with no more than an informal label saying 1981. He told me it was the whisky I was drinking, and it was mine as a gift, for ten years working together. I knew the magazine meant a lot to him, as he would sometimes say that he believed most of the time they were advertising in papers, on billboards at airports and hotels, on TV sometimes, without feeling that the money they were spending was of much value. It was all part of the media and the business world, he said, and what the magazine was doing was culture; culture had to be more than just business. He would usually express such thoughts when inebriated. I knew that he was estranged from his wife and that his two children had left home for university, around the same time his wife left to emancipate herself from the predictability of family life. She was at a retreat somewhere in India, adding: how predictable was that? It was a rare moment of cynicism that came no doubt through feeling much pain, and though we didn’t talk about exactly what happened, I think he knew he could discuss it with me if he wanted to, and in that freedom didn’t feel obliged to talk about it all. I suppose it manifested itself in such sentimental gestures as the bottle of whisky he gave me. I knew he was a generous man and the kindest of drunks, giving large tips, praising the service and complimentary without becoming obsequious or predatory. His wife had her reasons for leaving but I didn’t see anything in his behaviour that suggested it was about him rather than her. As she said herself — it was her problem to sort out; not one he could be blamed over. When he said this that night long after he gave me the whisky, I saw no reason not to believe him.
6
I did feel the need however to talk a little about myself, though I think it was more for his sake than mine. I’d never said how I became editor of the magazine and told him I was a gossip columnist rescued from the job by someone who had a small magazine and who allowed me to apply for a grant so that I could become his assistant. He also helped me get work book-reviewing for a Sunday paper and also a weekly magazine. I told him how tawdry the gossip column could be and explained how Jack created a salary for me, and how much I owed to him. I told him too about Jack's love for whisky and the anecdote about the broken bottle. He smiled a warm and drunken smile after I’d finished, insisted that I must visit him, and I must do so with the bottle of whisky he had given me, sharing a dram with this man I admired perhaps more than anyone else, and who had a greater love of whisky than anybody I knew. As we parted that evening I resolved to do so, and his parting remark was that I mustn’t break this one.
I returned home drunker than usual that night and felt guilty Maggie hadn’t been able to join me for the premiere: one of us had to look after our twelve-year-old son when he had come home from school early with food poisoning or a bug. Brendan had been vomiting for much of the day and she didn’t need me to be sick as well. When I got back I asked her how he was and she said he’d been sleeping since nine. She supposed he would be ok by the morning and laughed saying maybe I would be as well. I asked if she could take time off in the spring and if she would like all of us to go down to Dorchester. She knew of Jack, knew how important he had been to me, but admitted she saw him somehow as part of my earlier life. I wondered then if Jack were linked in her mind with Molly; that they were part of my English existence and she only had access to my Scottish one. All she knew of Molly was that we had been together for five years and it was my only significant relationship prior to my marriage. It was perhaps the first time I noticed how Scottish Maggie happened to be and that I hadn’t noticed before because I’d always perceived her as international. She’d studied for a year during her law degree in France on an Erasmus programme, worked for twelve months in Australia, and for another year in the US. The jobs weren’t linked to her degree but were attempts to figure-out whether Law was what she wanted to pursue more permanently. She’d had more boyfriends than I had girlfriends and once we’d worked out she had travelled to over twenty countries; I had only been to France, Spain and Italy, and never been outside Europe. Yet when she talked about England it was as though it happened to be a more foreign land than many she had visited. I couldn’t work out whether this was a thought that merely never occurred to me, or that she suddenly felt excluded from my life as I mentioned Jack and the possibility of visiting him. Including her in my plans wouldn’t change that she was not part of my life when I first knew Jack, as I also tried to recall if I’d told her that when I visited him first, Molly had come with me. She said she would let me know the following week but I sensed in her voice that she wasn’t going to come. A few days afterwards she told me she wouldn’t.
7
I contacted Jack, saying I had finally found time to come and visit and would be coming with my son. We wouldn’t inconvenience him; we would book into a hotel, and while I might have expected like last time that he would have tried to insist we stay with him, he said that might be for the best.
Brendan and I travelled down on what he saw as an exciting adventure. He’d never been to England and been on a plane far more often than on trains, as we would fly directly over England for trips to France, Italy and Spain. For much of the long journey, he looked out of the window as we passed Preston, edged near Liverpool and on to Bristol. He said England looked very different from Scotland. It seemed to him greener and yet more industrial, and on the train people’s accents changed as people got on and off. He said that on a plane, before getting on everyone in the place of departure had one accent and then when they got off everybody at the destination had a different language. Here the people seemed the same and yet not at all. He found this strange and pleasing as I realised that if travelling to Europe was partly about expanding Brendan’s mind, as he experienced other cultures, he was passing through ostensibly the one country and finding cultures aplenty. I said I would be interested to know what he made of Jack, while wondering how I would find him after I’d lived so many years in Scotland.
We arrived in the town and walked for a few minutes after exiting the station. We found our nearby hotel and after unpacking our things took a walk around the town centre and through Borough Gardens. Along the streets, we passed a baked potato shop, a bargain store, a charity shop and a card store. If the shops were different from those all those years earlier — I couldn’t recall —they were the same as many to be found in Edinburgh. Yet when we strolled along Antelope Walk, the shops seemed more distinctive, not so much in what they were selling but in the architecture as Brendan said it reminded him of heritage films and TV shows — while Scotland he always reckoned was somehow more historical. Scotland he thought was bigger and grander; England smaller and richer. I said that was a big and broad generalisation and were he a little older I’d have asked him to expand it into an article for our magazine. What became clear to me was that this trip was expanding his mind more than our holidaying in Europe, and not just because he was ten when we last travelled abroad and he was now twelve.
He asked me to tell him about the man we were going to see the following afternoon and I replied I didn’t have much to say, a combination I suppose of Jack’s peculiar life and my absence from it for many years. As far as I knew he had never married, never had children, and his life, social and professional, had been dedicated since the age of thirty to this magazine he would now have been editing for almost forty years. What I said to Brendan was that Jack was so important that he might not have been born without him, that he changed my life and led me to move to Scotland, Brendan thought that odd: a man who changed my life and led me to Scotland had been living all these years in the south of England — and we had travelled almost twelve hours to see him. Yes, it is odd I replied.
8
When we arrived at the house for lunch I assumed time would have stood still, and perhaps that is always what we think unless we have been given reason to assume otherwise. I knew he was living in the same house, that if he had married I would have known about it, and that the magazine’s address remained the one he had used for almost forty years. And sure enough, when we got there little seemed to have changed. The garden at the front with stitchworts, cowslips and purple orchids, was as well-kept as I remember, and when Jack came to the door he looked like I expected: a man fifteen years older but not greatly changed. He was as casually dressed as before in a pair of beige chinos, brown loafer shoes and a sky-blue shirt. He was as slim as before, though a little hunched, and his previously greying hair was almost white. The house was clean and tidy, and when I asked how he managed to keep his place from getting dusty with so many books, he admitted that he had help: a woman friend who came in twice a week and kept the place neat, and prepared and cooked food for him as well. She made the lunch he admitted as he began to bring dishes to the table that had already been set before we arrived.
Yet I also noticed in Jack a weariness of spirit that wasn’t there before, and over lunch I discovered why. While drinking the white wine that I sipped and he gulped, we discussed the state of small, printed literary magazines now that most had moved online. For many years he resisted, saying he was sure that people read differently on electronic media than on the printed page — he didn’t need any fancy data telling him this was the case. It was a bit like finding out whether people show the same concentration when watching a film in the cinema or on the phone. Yet his latest assistant editor, the one doing the job that my grant had instigated, reckoned the only way he was going to keep that post, and more specifically the government money that came with it, was to go at least partly digital. Jack could see that this was necessary as his resignation in the twin sense of the term. He hadn’t handed over the magazine yet but was resigned to its likelihood. After lunch, Brendan asked if he could play in the garden and I said since he probably wanted to play with the ball he had taken down with him and that he would have to pump up, he would have to ask Jack if it was ok. Brendan said he wouldn’t do any more than keepie-up and offered a rare moment of immodesty when he said that he had very good control and he wouldn’t be likely to boot the ball into the bushes. Ok, Jack said, but hoped that his rhododendrons would be safe. There was something about flowers he said that made him see life as cyclical rather than moving in a terrible straight arrow.
I aked how long he'd felt so despondent; he supposed it had been for several years but only over the last one or two did he feel life was worthless, or at least that his was. He said to me it was great that I came down but he knew that while his life had remained static, mine had been transformed. He looked into the garden as Brendan was counting the number of times he could keep the ball up in the air, and said there I was married, running a magazine and no doubt with decent circulation as well. I said that was due to compromises he would never have entertained: when we started we offered a glossy version for the shops and an online version with shorter pieces. We took advertising that helped define the magazine’s perception even if we tried hard to make sure it didn’t alter the content. I said I supposed my existence was a compromise: Maggie wanted a child and I went along with it; I remained in Edinburgh because she didn’t want to live anywhere else, and I knew the magazine could make me a decent salary though it would never possess the singularity of Jack’s. As I was saying this I added that some good things come out of compromise and took out the bottle of whisky. I said it could finally replace the one that served as a pleasant washing detergent all those years earlier. I started unravelling the three layers of bubble wrap and handed it to him. I didn’t tell Jack that it may have been worth more than £10,000 and probably didn’t need to: he knew his whiskies far better than I did and was moved by my gesture.
I expected he might store it away but instead, he went over to the sideboard, unlocked the glass cabinet, and took out two whisky glasses. Over the afternoon we finished the bottle, or rather Jack did. I had two drams, sipped over four hours, while Jack regularly topped up his glass and yet never seemed to become drunk. He became sad as he wondered what his life had amounted to; that maybe compromise wasn’t such a bad thing. It was as if he were living in the past, he said, and offered this most obvious of claims with a clarification: it was as though he was determined to live his ethical youth in old age, in a time that was different from then and in a body that no longer possessed that invulnerability.
In the early 1970s, he was part of a large circle and all of them were resistant to tradition and suspicious of change, a paradoxical position perhaps but one that could be best seen through supporting the liberalisation of social mores while wary of an incipient shift from the mixed economy to a more ferocious form of capitalism. He apologised for the history lesson but said that at least he hoped it contained a personal one and might be useful in explaining the differences between us.. I knew Jack had studied at the London School of Economics, and knew his initial plan had been to become an economist and possibly a politician. But in an interview from the early years of the magazine, he said he was sidetracked and discovered that this track was always meant to be the main one. I mentioned this to him and supposed that now he would see things differently; that he needn’t have had, so to speak, a one-track mind. Yet when he started the magazine he was sure this was what he wanted to do with his life; to produce a journal that would be resistant to academic expectation and commercial imperatives. Thinking back, he was surprised how little he acknowledged that it came out of a catastrophic event. His parents died quite suddenly — they were on holiday in Egypt and exited a restaurant feeling ill, and both were dead within thirty-six hours. He grieved for them, of course, moving back into the home and taking care of the legal arrangements. But after a few months, he saw he was left with a large house and invited various friends down to stay with him. They could remain as long as they liked, and at one moment there were eight of them living there, a couple of writers, a book editor, a designer, even a proofreader. How could he not start a magazine, and that is how it all began: with people who wouldn’t leave; with skills he could exploit. Now they are all gone, he said, though I wasn’t sure if he meant they had all passed away or were merely no longer living in his home. I didn’t ask, instead looking out the patio windows of the lounge and saw Brendan still playing with the ball.
9
Jack said when I joined the magazine fifteen years later, he knew things had changed, supposed that fifteen years earlier I wouldn’t have been working for a tabloid newspaper and pragmatically trying to find a way to make a living. None of his friends cared to make money at the beginning of the seventies, and none of them would have taken a job as a gossip columnist. That would have been to sell out, he said, aware that his remarks had become contaminated with cliche, or well aware that what might have seemed without irony then, had accumulated much irony over the years. By the mid-eighties the problem wasn’t with selling out it was with the use of the phrase: someone who’d sold out was more acceptable than anyone using the words without irony. I didn’t disagree but also said that it wasn’t enough. It might have been socially acceptable to be writing a gossip columnist to friends who found it cool, but it wasn’t to me. At the time I had an acceptable social identity, but I didn’t feel so good about myself. Working for Jack allowed me to become so: his sincerity saved me, I said. I felt as I talked as though I was not so much thinking aloud as assuaging private thoughts Jack may have been having for years. I said he may have helped me more practically than most — the grant I received for editing the magazine was a decent sum. But many others would have been helped by the existence of the magazine and their occasional contributions to it. During the 80s and 90s, and maybe more so in the 2000s, the magazine represented a value that was more than only literary.
As I talked, Jack drank, and I sensed that my words were impacting upon him, yet having no effect at all. I believed he could see their pertinence and maybe even understood them as part of a legacy. But they weren’t going to give him much hope; his life was in the past; not in the future. The best my words could do was alleviate the regret. It couldn’t do anything to galvanise his existence. By the time Brendan and I left, the bottle of whisky was empty and it was only 7 in the evening.
Walking back to the hotel with Brendan, he asked me whether Jack was a rich man. At first I supposed he meant that Jack had a house with a large garden while we occupied a three bedroom flat, but then he added that not many people could afford to drink a £10,000 bottle of whisky in one go. He said even the most expensive football boots were only £250; a premier league football about a £100. I wanted to say to Brendan that Jack was unhappy more than rich; it was indifference that led him to drink it straight. Instead, I said that Jack had wealth: a wealth of stories, of friends, of people who were indebted to him. I told Brendan I was one of those debtors and he asked whether this was why I gave him the whisky; to pay off my debt.
It was a smarter reply than I would have liked and made me think again about when working for the tabloid. That evening in the hotel room with Jack asleep in the bed, and me lying awake on the settee, I looked online and sought out those I remembered from the paper, including the editor and the photographer. I knew the editor had retired but I didn’t realise he was now in the House of Lords and discovered that the photographer was teaching at a college in Wales, where he was originally from. The actor the paper deemed an upstart I knew became well-known but never any more famous than he was then, and for reasons I suppose were based on the type of integrity I saw in Jack, but perhaps even harder to maintain in the 80s and from an actor. In one interview, from 2010, he said he wanted to act in films, do television work and in the theatre. A successful career didn’t mean moving to Hollywood; it meant doing work that reflected the lives of people he knew and still did. It seemed the interview caused some problems, with a few British actors in the States attacking him for his high-mindedness, and there was the tabloid still determined to rummage around in his life. They discovered his home in Islington was worth a million, that he was no longer living with his partner and their child, and that there were regular visits to his home by an actress with whom he was appearing in a new film, a woman ten years his junior. It wasn’t much of a story and didn’t need to be; it was insinuation and innuendo, and the home he lived in was expensive because London house prices happened to be. It looked no bigger than my flat in Edinburgh and a lot smaller than Jack’s house in Dorchester.
I wondered while reading the story if I could have written it, if my younger self would have accepted this as a necessary compromise when making a living was paramount. I knew when I thought of the word compromise, using it in the context of my life with Maggie was unfair, or that perhaps a better word to describe what the tabloid expected from me was capitulation: that it wanted me to surrender whatever values I believed I possessed to the newspaper’s ethos, if ethos was the word. Maybe the present editor would find himself too in the House of Lords for services to the country, while Jack (and the actor) hasn’t even been offered an OBE, which both would probably refuse. What I did know was that Jack wouldn’t have been surprised that this tabloid menace, as he once called him, would end up covered in dubious glory — he could see the shift from the early 70s to the mi- 80s and didn’t think it would get any better. He was right I suppose, as I suspected the journalist writing up the story and the photographer taking snaps of the actress arriving at the actor’s house, had fewer qualms than we did. Perhaps. All I did know was that we managed to dissuade the editor from publishing a story and that I managed to find work I believed in elsewhere, just as eventually so did the photographer. Would the people who exposed the actor find other work and perhaps Jack would say they wouldn’t even try; that well into the millennium this is what people would be aspiring to do; to write for a tabloid paper and care little if they made other people's lives miserable while earning a salary that would nevertheless be a fraction of what the high-paid columnists would be getting — including an ex-prime minister who may have got the column in return for sticking the previous editor in the upper chamber. That was at least what Jack believed as he had downed another whisky.
10
I had no further contact with Jack after that visit, except for a brief email exchange a month after Brendan and I returned to Edinburgh. He thanked me for the whisky, felt a little ashamed that so expensive a bottle was drunk in one sitting, and wished he had saved a little for the wash. He would have loved to have worn a shirt smelling of what must have been at least a £10,000 bottle of whisky. He added that he was relinquishing control of the magazine but it would at least continue. The new editor had secured funding and was taking over in a couple of weeks. He gave me the email of the new editor and said he didn’t doubt that I could still contribute if I wished.
I never did contact the new editor; I believed an era had ended and whether the magazine would be as good under someone else it must surely be different - when I picked up a copy a couple of years afterwards, it had indeed changed. It was glossier, the essays, stories and book reviews shorter, and had interviews with writers Jack would have been inclined not to take seriously. By then, Jack had been dead eight months and may have been dying when Brendan and I visited him. I received a letter from the housekeeper who I now suspect had also been his lover. She said in it that the funeral had taken place a few days earlier; that Jack wanted the quietest of affairs and asked her to write to the people he cared about after the funeral, so that nobody felt obliged to travel far to say cheerio to someone who had no right of reply. She said he had been sick for some time, that he wasn’t very good at taking the doctors’ advice, and when the magazine was no longer in his hands he felt somehow his life was out of his as well. The letter's tone was as if permeated with Jack’s humour and the woman’s love, and Maggie came into the kitchen as I finished reading it and saw my distraught expression. She said to me it is Jack, isn’t it? Jack’s dead. I nodded unable to speak and she came over, sat beside me and I asked her to read the letter out loud. It was late afternoon, in mid-May, and the light came into the room as a cloud disappeared, illuminating the objects on the table in front of us — a cafetière, a cup and saucer, a copy of our latest magazine, and the flaky crumbs from a half-priced croissant. Any sadness I felt was relieved by the awareness that somebody loved him, and with Maggie’s lilting voice I could hear at the same time Jack’s ironic one, and I felt very far away from the young man who made money from gossip.
© Tony McKibbin