The New Confessions Read Online Free

blood. He was very tall, well over six feet, and had the slight self-conscious stoop common to many shy, tall men. He had a bony handsome look about him, marred only by his long neck and a rather prominent Adam’s apple. His balding hair grew long at the back. He was a kind diffident man who came to dinner once a month and played golf with my father during the summer on the many links courses around Edinburgh and the Fife coast. These were the only “family” excursions I can recall from my early years. Oonagh, my father, Donald Verulam, Thompson and me. We went to Longniddry, Aberlady, Gullane and Musselburgh, and sometimes across the Forth railway bridge to Crail, Anstruther and Elie. We must have made a curious group: the two earnest men; strong Oonagh, effortlessly lugging a picnic basket (sometimes Gregor too); moody Thompson, with a catapult or a kite; and me, fervent with anticipated pleasure. And yet my merriment was always shadowed by a distant sadness, as if I sensed the disparity in this amalgam of personalities, realized that its very existence hinted at another life, one that I should have been living, had my mother survived the fatal day of my birth.
    Donald was an accomplished amateur photographer. He had a new Houghton’s folding reflex camera, and after he and my father had played their round of golf they would return to the beach where we had had our picnic to collect us for the return journey. Then, more often than not, Donald would have us pose for his camera. Thompson couldnever really be bothered, Oonagh declined—suddenly superstitious—but I would obligingly stand on rocks, practice a swing with one of my father’s golf clubs or feed sugar lumps to donkeys—anything to aid Donald’s compositions.
    The only photograph of my mother that we possessed (in a black-ebony and silver frame kept on my father’s bedside table) had been taken by Donald. It was only later that I discovered that he had taken many more.
    I was not a clever child, academically speaking. I was alert, bright, chatty and energetic, but by the age of seven I could barely read. Thompson was by then attending the Royal High School, where my father hoped eventually to send me. However, it soon became clear that my difficulties in reading and writing were going to make entry into that strict establishment uncertain. Thompson had been taught to read, had been read to nightly, by my mother. Oonagh, as I have said, was illiterate. I spent my days with her as an infant and it was she who put me to bed at night. Without fail, I would ask for a story and she would tell me one. She spoke to me in Gaelic—old folk tales, I like to think—but I was completely entranced. The room dark, one lamp glowing, Oonagh’s haunch warming my side, and her soft lilting accent with its sonorous, soft gutturals. Oonagh’s square face crudely mimicking the effects of shock, surprise, horror, fabulous joy … It was more than enough. I am sure too that here lies the key to my development as an artist, that this was why my personality took the maverick course it did. In those crucial, early days my imagination was not formed by any orthodox literary or pedagogical tradition. Oonagh’s entrancing, meaningless tales and her big expressive face were sufficient fuel. I am convinced that it is this factor that separates me from my fellow artists, and it is this that makes my vision unique. Inchoate sound and dramatic expression were the foundations of my creative being. Sense, logic, cohesion, played no part. Oonagh’s mysterious voice and the bold analogues of her grimaces set my mind working independently. I owe nothing to any precursor, I had no tradition to guide me. What I saw in my mind’s eye was mine alone.
    Of course, my father was convinced he had a backward child—another burden I had imposed on him—and he sought to resolve the problem by sending me, aged seven, to his own elementary school in Barnton. He was on the board of governors of the