Whit

I turned and smiled, wondering that Topee did not hear my heart thudding in my chest.

'Right,' I said, and put the fiche back in its box.  'Topee, could you ask a librarian whether it is permitted to have a glass of water or a cup of tea here, at the desk?  I'm thirsty, but I don't want to leave…'

'Yup!' he said, and bounded out of his seat as though released by a spring.

I put the fiche back in the machine and took a couple of copies of it while he was away.  I quickly searched the other papers.  They had the same story, though the Courier seemed to have the most detail; their reporter had talked exclusively to Private Black's grandmother.  I went to another shelf and selected the box with October's newspapers in it.

On Saturday the 2nd of October there was another report in the Courier to the effect that Black was still being hunted.  The junior officer who had been attacked in the incident was recovering in hospital, concussed.

On the same page, a familiar word attracted my eye; it turned out to be the name of a ship.  It appeared in a report which stated that the SS Salvador, a general cargo vessel of 11,500 tons registered in Buenos Aires, which had sailed from Govan docks on the morning of the 28th September bound for Quebec, New York, Colon and Guayaquil, had encountered heavy weather off the Outer Hebrides on the night of the 30th, and suffered structural damage.  The ship was now limping back to Glasgow.  Amongst its cargo had been railway carriages and other rolling stock, bound for South America.  Several carriages lashed to its deck had been washed overboard during the storm.

My God.

I read the article about the SS Salvador again, and looked up at the ceiling.

My Grandfather was washed ashore after a train wreck?

We got back to Topee's flat.  Stephen reported, drunkenly, that there had been a message from a Mister Wormsludge - har har - asking me to ring his home number.

I rang Mr Womersledge.  He said the serial number on the ten-pound note I had shown him was one of a consecutive batch which had been stolen from the Army Pay Corps in September 1948.  The note might be more valuable than he'd said originally, and he could now offer me fifty pounds for it.  I said, Thank you, I'd think about it, and put down the phone.

As the final teetering keystone of my belief in my Grandfather finally tumbled down about me and the world I had known seemed to fall away like unseasonable sprink before the sudden thaw, Topee asked, Hey, were we, like, ready to go out for a drink, like, yet?

I - of course - said, Yes.

CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN

I had thought that I might find release from my tormented thoughts in alcoholic oblivion, but it was not to be.

After making another couple of phone calls, I duly went out that evening with Topee and his pals, but as we sat quickly drinking beer in a bar in Byres Road - apparently the natural and normal preparation before a dance at something called the Queen Margaret Union - I found myself slipping behind in the beer-drinking, unable to stop myself thinking about the revelation of the inherited, bizarrely serial nature of my Gift and the treachery and mendacity of those close to me.

Barely had I started to come to terms with the betrayal of my own brother when I discovered that my Grandfather was a thief and a liar as well as a potential rapist; that particular scrofulously scabrous cat was scarcely out of the bag when it was revealed - in an almost off-hand ma

Our whole Order had been constructed on a base more dangerous and shifting than the sands of Luskentyre themselves; everybody had been lying to everybody else!  Far from being a single eruption of poison in our placid and serene environment, Allan's lies and machinations suddenly started to look like an unremarkable and even predictable continuance of a vein of evil and mendacity that had been intertwined with the roots of our Faith from the very start, and indeed which predated it.  Was there no foundation of my life on which I could still rely?

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that the Community and the Order had some intrinsic merit independent of their genesis.  In a sense, all I had discovered - about my Grandfather, at any rate - made no difference.  The proof of our Faith's worth lay in the hearts and minds of all of us who believed, and in the commitment and dedication we displayed.  Why should good not come out of evil?  Was it not a sign of the ineffable bounteousness of God that They wrought the gold that was our Faith from the base and toxic ore that had been my Grandfather's violence and thievery and my grandmother's and my great-aunt's deceptions and manipulations?

It might be argued that the subsequent deceits of my grandmother and great-aunt had been the balancing wrong that had redeemed my Grandfather's original sins, that sometimes two wrongs do make a right, and that of all the things Aasni and Zhobelia might have done - reporting the find of money and Grandfather's army pay-book to the appropriate authorities being the most obvious and strictly correct - their actual course of action, intrinsically dishonest though it was and including Zhobelia's exploitation of her own Gift and my Grandfather's need for guidance, had produced entirely the best and most fruitful outcome, and a harvest of enlightenment and happiness very few avowedly good and well-intentioned acts ever yielded.

But ancestry matters in the minds of men and women, and symbols are important.  To discover that Salvador had been no more than a common thief on the run after an act of violence, and realise that had he been able to find his washed-up loot he would probably have disappeared from Aasni and Zhobelia's lives, could not fail to alter the whole way people thought of my Grandfather, and by implication the Faith he had engendered.  We would all feel deceived, and our beliefs cheapened.

It could be argued that the worse Grandfather had been before his conversion, the more blessed he became in comparison afterwards; God may take little credit for turning a man already good into a slightly better one, but to perform the miracle of forging a virtuous man from a bad one signified serious divine accomplishment and deserved real appreciation.  But would such considerations make up for the inevitable feeling of betrayal people were bound to experience?

How many followers would we lose if this truth came out, as I had vowed to myself it must?  How many more converts could we hope to gain once my Grandfather's history became common knowledge?  Ought I now to renounce my earlier oath and, like my grandmother and great-aunt, conceal the ugly truth to favour the general good?  What, then, would my word be worth?  What self-respect could I claim for myself if a commitment, so freshly made, so vehemently sworn, could be so quickly abandoned when its consequences proved even more wide-ranging and more grave than I had anticipated?

Well, my self-respect was far from being the most important point at issue, I supposed; what mattered was the good of the Order and the Community and the spiritual well-being of the great majority of blameless people therein.  I was confident that should I go back on my vow and keep my Grandfather's dreadful secret to myself, I could rest easy with such contained knowledge, and its cosseting would not contaminate or poison me.

But would it be right to incorporate what would in effect be another lie into what was already a whole tangled web of them, when the truth might sweep them all away and let us start again, righteous, uncontaminated, and without the baleful, jeopardising threat of that deceit hanging over us?  And was I right - and had I the right - to assume that our Faith was so fragile it required shielding from such unpleasant facts?  In the long term, might it not be better to embrace the truth regardless, and suffer whatever falling away in belief and support such a course entailed, secure in the knowledge that what - and who - remained would be true and strong and fundamentally trustworthy, and proofed - tempered -against further harm?