The New Confessions Read Online Free Page A

Barnton village school. As its most celebrated former pupil, he had no difficulty placingme there. For some reason he had a perverse faith in its ability to reproduce in me the same rigid self-discipline and unwavering ambition that had secured his own swift elevation to academic heights. He was wrong. I failed as dismally there (in all but one subject) as I would have elsewhere.
    His truculent conviction that the Barnton village school held the answer had the irritating side effect of a long daily journey there and back by train. Every morning I would catch the 6:42 from Waverley Station to Barnton (whence I had a fifteen-minute walk to the school) and in the evening, if I was lucky, I would catch the 4:30 train back. Thompson had a ten-minute ride on a cable tram to handy Regent Road, while I spent up to two hours a day commuting to and from school. I was a lonely commuter too, moving against the tidal flow in and out of the city. More often than not I sat solitary in smoky third-class compartments as the train puffed slowly through the banal suburbs, on its meandering branch line.
    Donald Verulam lived in Barnton and once or twice a month, if he had been working at home and was going into town to dine at his club, or attend a University Photographic Society meeting, we would encounter each other on the station platform in the afternoon. It was Donald—not my father, not Oonagh—who told me about my mother.
    “You have your mother’s nose and eyes,” he said once, a singular expression on his face. He pushed my fringe back. “Yes.… She always wore her hair back.” He made a slight pursing movement of his lips; his Adam’s apple bobbed.
    “A gentle spirit, Johnny.… A terrible, terrible tragedy. You’d have—” He broke off and looked suddenly out of the window.
    He often had his camera with him, in its stout brown-leather, velvet-lined box, and sometimes buff envelopes of photographs and plates. He would tell me of the elementary principles of photography, of the carefully registered exposure of light to light-sensitive paper. And one summer evening as we rattled through Blackhall, he unpacked his camera, extended the lens on its leather bellows and allowed me to look through the viewfinder. I stood by the window, the bulky instrument heavy in my hands, and looked at the world through a camera for the first time. It was only the back gardens and allotments of Blackhall, a view I had observed innumerable times, but something about the mediation of the lens, the constriction of the frame, changed all that. It no longer seemed the same. It looked strangely different, somehow special, instinctwith some potential.… The gardens and houses chased past before my eyes.
    “Go on, press,” Donald said. “It’s easy.”
    Which moment would I choose? I hesitated. Click. That instant frozen in time. My fate decided.
    A week later when he came to dinner, he gave me the print. A skidding blur of houses, light and shade, a tepee of runner beans, a diamond spangle from a greenhouse.
    “Not bad,” he said. “Good impression of speed. You’d think we were going fifty miles an hour.”
    I showed the photograph to Oonagh. She turned it over; her tongue bulged her cheek.
    “What is it?” she said.
    “It’s my first photograph. I call it ‘Houses at Speed.’ ”
    “It’s no very good. Cannae see much.”
    For my tenth birthday I asked for a camera. I was given a tiny Watson’s Bebe, a hand or detective camera, as it was known. My father, happy to see some kind of interest growing in his son, gladly purchased it. I took very few pictures, from choice, not necessity (Donald’s darkroom was always available). This parsimony of image making seemed to suit me. I would go out and about in Edinburgh with my camera and often return home without having removed it from its box. So, what pictures did I take? I photographed a cabman’s shelter in Balcarres Street, decorated with two stuffed marionettes. I photographed the