One Good Turn

If people asked him-as they frequently did-why he had become a writer, Martin usually answered that, as he spent most of his time in his imagination, it had seemed like a good idea to get paid for it. He said this jovially, no giggling, and people smiled as if he’d said something amusing. What they didn’t understand was that it was the truth-he lived inside his head. Not in an intellectual or philosophical way, his interior life was remarkably banal. He didn’t know if it was the same for everyone, did other people spend their time daydreaming about a better version of the everyday? No one ever talked about the life of the imagination, except in terms of some kind of Keatsian high art. No one mentioned the pleasure of picturing yourself sitting in a deck chair on a lawn, beneath a cloudless midsummer sky, contemplating the spread of a proper, old-fashioned afternoon tea, prepared by a cozy woman with a mature bosom and spotless apron who said things like, “Come on, now, eat up, ducks,” because this was how cozy women with mature bosoms spoke in Martin’s imagination, an odd kind of sub-Dickensian discourse.

The world inside his head was so much better than the world outside his head. Scones, homemade black-currant jam, clotted cream. Overhead, swallows sliced through the blue, blue sky, swooping and diving like Battle of Britain pilots. The distant thock of leather on willow. The scent of hot, strong tea and new-mown grass. Surely these things were infinitely preferable to a terrifyingly angry man with a baseball bat?

Martin had been hauling his laptop around with him because the lunchtime comedy showcase he had been queuing for was a detour on today’s (very tardy) path to his “office.” He had recently rented the “office” in a refurbished block in Marchmont. It had once been a licensed grocer but now provided a bland, featureless space-plasterboard walls and laminate floors, broadband co

Death on the Black Isle was like a book under an enchantment: no matter how much he wrote, there never seemed to be any more of it. “You should change the title. It sounds like a Tintin book,” Melanie said. Before being published eight years ago, Martin had been a religious studies teacher, and for some reason, at an early stage of their relationship, Melanie had got it into her head (and never been able to get it out again) that Martin had once been in a monastery. How she had made this leap he had never understood. True, he had a premature tonsure of thi

Death on the Black Isle felt even more trite and formulaic to Martin than his previous books, something to be read and immediately forgotten in beds and hospitals, on trains, planes, beaches. He had been writing a book a year since he began with Nina Riley, and he thought that he had simply run out of steam. They plodded along together, he and his flimsy creation, stuck on the same tracks. He worried that they would never escape each other, that he would be writing about her inane escapades forever. He would be an old man and she would still be twenty-two and he would have wrung all the life out of both of them. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Melanie said. “It’s called mining a rich seam, Martin.” “Milking a cash cow for all it was worth” was how someone else, someone not on 15 percent, might have put it. He wondered if he could change his name-or, even better, use his real name-and write something different, something with real meaning and worth.

Martin’s father had been a career soldier, a company sergeant major, but Martin himself had chosen a decidedly noncombatant’s path in life. He and his brother, Christopher, had attended a small Church of England boarding school that provided the sons of the armed forces with a spartan environment that was one step up from the workhouse. When he left this cold-showers and cross-country-ru

University was followed by a postgraduate diploma in teacher training to give himself time to think about what he “really” wanted to do. He had certainly never intended actually to become a teacher, certainly not a religious studies teacher, but somehow or other he found that at the age of twenty-two he had already gone full circle in his life and was teaching in a small fee-paying boarding school in the Lake District, full of boys who had failed the entrance exams of the better public schools and whose sole interests in life seemed to be rugby and masturbation.

Although he thought of himself as someone who had been born middle-aged, he was only four years older than the oldest boys, and it seemed ridiculous that he should be educating them in anything, but particularly in religion. Of course, the boys he taught didn’t regard him as a young man, he was an “old fart” for whom they had no care at all. They were cruel, callous boys who were likely as not going to grow up into cruel, callous men. As far as Martin could see, they were being trained up to fill the Tory back benches in the House of Commons, and he saw it as his duty to try to introduce them to the concept of morality before it was too late, although unfortunately for most of them it already was. Martin himself was an atheist but hadn’t completely ruled out the possibility that one day he might experience a conversion-a sudden lifting of the veil, an opening of his heart-although he thought it more likely that he was damned to be forever on the road to Damascus, the road most traveled.

Except for where the syllabus dictated, Martin had tended to ignore Christianity as much as possible and to concentrate instead on ethics, comparative religion, philosophy, and social studies (anything except Christianity, in fact). It was his remit to “promote understanding and spirituality,” he claimed if challenged by a rugby-playing, Anglican, Fascista parent. He spent a lot of time teaching the boys the tenets of Buddhism because he had discovered, through trial and error, that it was the most effective way of messing with their minds.

He thought, I’ll just do this for a bit, and then perhaps go traveling or take another qualification or get a more interesting job and a new life will start, but instead the old life had carried on and he had felt it spi