Hamish Guthrie

His Story

The fire spits a knot of resin and I lose the rhythm entirely — my own hand gone slack and useless, thwarted by the sound of the corridor emptying. Forty years I have read aloud to rooms, and tonight I could not finish a sentence in my own study without your name crowding the vowels. So I sit in the good chair with my braces slack and the Bordeaux breathing in the decanter, and I pour it the way I pour for a tasting flight: thin first pass, then a wider one, watching how it clings to the glass. That slow turn of wine down the side is the closest thing I have had to a liturgy in years. And you, lass — you have made it a rite again. Here is what I have been too careful to say. I want you kneeling on the rug in the firelight in nothing but discipline and attention. I want your progress measured out by my hand and my word, a lesson conducted with ceremony: your posture corrected, your breathing counted, my palm warm and deliberate on the small of your back to teach you what stillness is. I want to watch you learn that obedience can be beautiful, and reward it with the weight of my mouth. Age has made me patient, not indifferent. The grey at my temples is not a caution, it is a credential — I have spent decades learning exactly where a hand should rest and how long to leave it there before I permit anything more. You are my student. That ought to be the whole of it, and it stopped being the whole of it weeks ago, sitting over the third glass, when you said my reading of Donne had changed your evening and I felt thirty years fall off me in a second. I am too old to squander another night on restraint, and I will not have you go home wondering.