'I could almost blame myself...' The Headmaster sniffed, his eyes steely, his smile tight. 'I should never have let you stay with them. It was...' he searched for the proper word... 'irregular.' He shifted nervously. 'But I mean, really...' Fingers drumming on the polished wood. He was bristling with a subconscious agitation.

'The thing is, what to do for the best.' He smiled once more, utterly charming, utterly ruthless. The School's need for Gordon to "disappear" was urgent, was compelling. He gripped a pen in his clenched fingers. 'So...'

The organisation was clinical. 'I've prepared a letter of resignation for you to sign... We'll put it down to overwork...'

Gordon sat there in easy shirt-sleeves and blinked : The Headmaster opposite him, in his tailored suit, stared back. Cases of polished cups behind him glinted, a symbol of the man's success. And, on his desk, where the photograph of his wife and children had formerly rested, there was now a picture of the winning rugby team for all prospective parents to behold.

The young man's informality annoyed him.

'You just don't realise what you've done. Of all the hare-brained escapades...' He spoke with terse disdain. 'I've got governors on the phone all day; children being withdrawn from school; people in hospital; a helicopter destroyed! How do I explain it all?'

'Really,' said Gordon, 'that wasn't us.'

'Well they never found who did it...' He sniffed again. 'Anyway, that's not the point. It's a publicity disaster for the School. You have damaged our prestige.'

Gordon felt sorry for him, in fact. His perennial sniff had developed into a snuffling sound at moments of heightened concern... as if something taut was splintering somewhere beneath the varnished surface...

The man slammed down his hand.

'What was the point of it? Of this cock-eyed adventure?'

Gordon shrugged and smiled faintly.

'We called it Chasing Charlie' the teacher answered calmly. 'Trying to get to the heart of it all. Isn't that what we should all be doing, one way or another?'

The Headmaster gave a disparaging look. 'Chasing Charlie? Chasing Charlie?' He shook his head with weariness. 'You poor chap. You've been overdoing things...'

Gordon's eyes distant, agleam... as he recalled the wilderness.

'This claptrap about Jacobites!' the man berated him. 'They were rebels anyway... you, as an historian, should know that...' he said, with condescension... 'and they were put down. Taught a lesson.' It reassured him. He rearranged the pile of books, neatly stacked up on his desk. 'Culture was spreading north' he beamed. 'The Enlightenment!'

He patted the tidy pile of books, placed by a list of things to do. This insistent neatness, Gordon thought, seemed to reflect some submerged fear of chaos... fear of the collapse of reason; fear of disorder, havoc and usurpation. He was, the young man realised in a sudden recognition, a very frightened man.

'Well I don't know, I don't know. This is a disaster for your C.V.' He seemed alarmed. 'You understand, I will not be able to offer you a reference. You've wrecked your whole career...' He seemed to look for some sign of emotion from the younger man.

But Gordon could not shake off a sense of unreality : this circumscribed code of behaviour - set out, required... the manly mannerisms... a life led to compile a C.V.... it was like a confined game of charades, to be played according to a set of rules... he tried, but he simply couldn't take it seriously...

'I suppose you could teach in a State School, heaven help you : but frankly, you're not cut out to be a teacher' he said disdainfully. 'Take my advice... try insurance...'

A replacement Labrador behind his desk let out a whine.

'What a waste, what a waste. You might have become a housemaster... maybe even A Headmaster...' Gordon swallowed... Yes, that was about the size of it. And, indeed, he had escaped it all.

An almost uncontrollable lightness of being overtook him...

The Headmaster looked back at him, wearily, tensely; disturbed by his apparent lack of contrition. It irritated him. Everything about him did. He was contemptuous of Gordon's weakness, his lack of manliness and moral fibre; he despised it... it unnerved him.

He glanced furtively at the clock - its precise measure, its oppressive rhythm, beating on mechanically. 'If that is all...' The Headmaster said brusquely, clicking the lid back on his pen... 'I have a lot to do, you'll realise : to find a replacement two days before term. You've really let me down, you know...' He seemed so tense and worried, driven by anxious thoughts and expectations.

The teacher cleared his throat.

'There's one thing more,' said Gordon.

The Headmaster sniffed and reached for his handkerchief.

'The boy, Baxter. I was wondering if the School would consider granting him a bursary? It's the only community he has got.'

The other man burst out in cheerless laughter.

'My dear Gordon. Haven't you lost me enough money? If I started granting hand-outs every time somebody's mortgage fell in arrears, they'd all be at it. You just don't understand. The market forces bear on us the same as anybody else. It's called survival of the fittest.'

'But what kind of community casts out its weakest members at the very time they need help most? What about our school motto - Thinking of Others?'

'Well as it happens' The Headmaster snuffled 'that isn't the motto any longer. We had it changed over the holidays...' He nodded to a board beside the door... 'Our marketing survey made it clear : it's what our parents pay for, what they want...'

In inlaid gold on varnished wood, the words - 'Success and Excellence'.

Gordon blinked.

'Besides,' The Headmaster carried on, 'Baxter is in the hands of the Social Services. They'll take good care of him.'

'Oh yes! Go on! Put them on the Emigration boats. Send them to Canada,' Gordon muttered distantly. 'It's for the best...'

The Headmaster stared, but comprehended nothing.

'Now you're getting emotional' he sneered.

He recoiled from such displays as these; had an aversion to all these unfettered feelings; dreaded the heart, with its subtle undermining of control.

'Not the bearing we would expect from someone with your pedigree. To be quite frank, you've shown a dismal lack of self-restraint in this whole chapter. Have you completely forgotten the meaning of etiquette and breeding?'

The room was charmless now and both men rose.

'One tip,' he smiled in parting. 'Before you go to interview - cut your bloody fingernails, man!' He looked at Gordon with unwavering certainty that overpowered him. He couldn't find it in himself to answer these last patronising comments, and walked away irresolutely.

But at the door, he stopped and said with feeling and sincerity, 'Please pass on my best wishes to your Wife, and give her my apologies for leaving without saying goodbye in person. She was always very kind to me.' The Headmaster started snuffling, and tidying another pile of papers.

'My Wife is away at the moment. Enjoying a holiday in the sun, ha-ha!' As he spoke, a drawn and tense new grimness spread across The Headmaster's face : a touch more pallor. It reminded Gordon of the pallor on his face when the dog was lost - no, not as much as that, perhaps.

He went to his class to clear up his belongings, and stood there, in the cramped garret : where he had given himself, inspired, encouraged, and sometimes moved the children with his mild and gentle feeling.

A dried-up coffee cup sat on the shelf; a half-eaten biscuit... the familiar touch and smell of chalk-dust. As he looked out at the cedar trees beyond, he noticed too the peeling paint and ran his fingers along the dust on the window-sill... There was a feel of damp decay. The room felt sad.

'A school without children is like a world without music' he thought. 'Or truth without beauty. A school is children, truth is beauty, and - Hughie, at least, would have ventured to say - the world is music : a resonance on the surface of the deeps...'

He began packing up the arbitrary baggage of his life and taking down his Charlie display. As he rolled each poster up, a vacancy on the surface of his mind hid from him feelings stirring further down : flashes of light, rushes of colour, and moments surrendered... they constituted the history he had lived and taught. Yet he felt numbed.

Pulling a half-full whisky bottle from its hiding-place behind a picture of some old Caledonian wood, he sat in his chair and let the gleam of another summer ripple along his tongue and down his throat. Moments after, he felt the golden water loosen his feelings, loosen his heart and start to glow within. He looked at a scene from Culloden on his desk and recalled a lesson in early May : emotion had rent a silence from the pupils... as the clansmen charged into the mouth of Hell, braving the grapeshot, the cross-fire, and bayonets, after being pounded by artillery and the might of London's government. For, at any cost, the centre had to hold. And this was it, the apotheosis of control and violent enforcement. In a single hour, The Establishment was saved.

'Bastards!' he whispered.

Always, the centre had to hold; a brutal society based on power : the wise locked up like mental patients; the facile and superficial revered as saints. And as for Charlie? What about bloody Charlie?

'Will ye no' come back again?' a child's poem began, in irregular script on some lined paper before him. No, he'd never returned. Nor would Gordon return to fight again in this musty classroom.

Light shimmered through the window-panes.

For a few months, Bonnie Prince Charlie had lived up to his character, and those around him... Somehow, it was an insufficient consolation. The people themselves had lived on with the aftermath - a political programme of subjugation : nasty, coercive and violent. And then, the Clearances began, and the heart of the Highland way of life was broken apart. Harry Baxter had copied out a poem - 'The Dark Isle' - under a photograph from the West. He recollected Hughie sing that song, as the whisky flowed, and the fire cracked. And it shook the night with feeling as he sang.

Now Gordon was aware that he was holding back deep hurt himself, denying all his feelings : not just his own, but the collective wound of all those others too. Above him, Peary in his furs stared down from the polar scenes that he'd left up, ridiculous in his manly pose... another enigmatic hero... perhaps that was the thing. After all, Charlie's was only a tiny walk-on part in British History... perhaps, at the behest of Greater Powers, he was acting quite inevitably - like the priest Melchizedek - in some enigmatic mirror. Just part of a greater game, beyond his means of understanding. More dreamed about, than dreaming. And if so, what of himself? What of Wiggy? What of them all?

He was very tired of this pretence. Somehow, feelings were the only release.

He looked at himself in the mirror by his desk, and suddenly wept freely like a girl. Wept for the children in their loss; wept for the man who'd been his friend; wept for the people who had disappeared; wept for Scotland and the dispossessed. And out of those tears, he collected himself : somehow quieted, somehow more involved.

As he rose to depart, he saw he'd left a beautiful picture lurking in a corner : a gorgeous view of the Five Sisters. Sisters! He'd two himself and remembered them now, all lovely in their childhood like those mountains.

What were we playing at, spoiling such beauty as this? Man turning the world to waste, at war with the delicate balances of nature. He knew the land, its femininity, and felt one with it... he loved it with an ache, its aspen whispers, its sullen beauty - which so echoed the feminine in himself : a female nature that ached to be released...

He picked up his books, his transient presence marked by the dust-free spaces where they'd lain, and then walked out, leaving the door open behind him. He passed the paint-cracked corridors and children's pegs, and as he went, he felt a burden lifting, sensed escape was near.

Stepping outside, the day was glorious, autumnal : nature beyond, all overgrown...

Gordon blinked in the brightness, the sun glinting on The Headmaster's newly-cleaned car; a langour hanging around the yard, lending the appearance of well-being : the impression that all remained well with this world.

Yet he noticed, too, the flaking masonry and the masked dilapidation... tendrils of ivy, reaching softly up the guttering, creeping unseen. And beyond, the crisp air fetching down from the hills; the turning leaves, and smell of damp earth; smell that always heralded the new season of matches.

On the sunlit steps of the School's entrance a games master was pumping rugby-balls.

'I hope you have a good term' Gordon said.

He stared back condescendingly, and didn't answer... just went inside.

Yet it did not trouble him anymore. He felt he no longer had to pretend. In certain respects, all this postured maleness seemed like a deviation, if dislocated from a full and feminine humanity. If only there was a greater focus on female experience, as a source of dominant values for the community as a whole.

As for himself, Gordon felt more - in balance; free, at last, from all that bondage... a deliverance really, an escape, from dogmatism and rigid thought. He was severing links that reached far back to childhood... leaving the patriarchy behind... and following gaily out to the verges, the margins. Light-hearted, he knew he was being true to himself.

Walking unencumbered towards the cedars, he heard their ceaseless rocking and swaying - all life restless, moving on : himself less conscious, more aware...

The day was fresh and lovely. It was one of those days when the air was clear and everything seemed foreshortened... he could see the mountain tops forty miles off across the strath... and it felt as if, at one joyous leap, he could be there, walking once more their sun-steeped slopes. They wore a raiment of purple heather, the joyful passing splendour of the season, and looked - invigorating, free. Yes, the wild country beyond was always there - beckoning, calling to him, to them all.

He strode out into the golden sunlight, and golden leaves of autumn; light shining off the grass; shafts of sun, breaking everywhere from blue recesses of another world - always somewhere up there beyond the greyness, breaking through the swirling mists, spilling out before him in a glory.

* * *