Bech Is Back by John Updike

guidebook, Arthur’s Seat. Burdened by baggage as he was, Bech felt lifted up, into the airy and the epic. Scotland seemed at a glance ancient, raw, grimy, lush, mysterious, and mannerly. Like Bech, it was built solid of disappointments. Lost causes abounded. Defenders of the Castle had been promptly hanged outside the Portcullis Gate, witches were burned in bundles, Covenanters were slaughtered. In Holyrood Palace, the red-haired Queen of Scots, taller than Bech had expected, slipped in her brocaded slippers down a spiral stone staircase to visit the handsome boy Darnley, who, devoid of all common sense, one evening burst into her little supper room and, with others, dragged off her pet secretary David Rizzio and left him in the audience chamber dead of fifty-six stab wounds.
The alleged indelible stain of blood, if it exists, is concealed by the floor covering. Jealousy of Rizzio’s political influence, and perhaps a darker suspicion in Darnley’s mind, were the probable motives for the crime
. Dried blood and dark suspicions dominated the Caledonian past; nothing in history sinks quicker, Bech thought, than people’s actual motives, unless it be their sexual charm. In this serene, schizophrenic capital—divided by the verdant cleavage of a loch drained in 1816—he admired the biggest monument ever erected to an author, a spiky huge spire sheltering a statue of Sir Walter Scott and his dog. He glanced, along the slanting Royal Mile, down minuscule alleys in the like of which Boswell had caught and clipped his beloved prostitutes. “Heaven,” Bech kept telling Bea, who began to resent it.
    But Bech’s abrasive happiness grew as, a few days later, the windows of their next train gave on the gorse-blotched slopesof the Grampians, authentic mountains green and gray with heather and turf. In Inverness, they rented a little cherry-red car in which everything normally on the right was on the left; groping for the gear-shift, Bech grabbed air, and, peering into the rearview mirror, saw nothing. Bea, frightened, kept reminding him that she was there, on his left, and that he was driving terribly close to that stone wall. “Do you want to drive?” he asked her. At her expected answer of “Oh, no,” he steered the short distance to Loch Ness; there they stood among the yellow-blooming bushes on the bank, hoping to see a monster. The water, dark even in the scudding moments of sunlight, was chopped into little wavelets each shadow of which might be a fin, or a gliding plesiosaur nose. “It’s possible,” Bech said. “Remember the coelacanth.”
    His fair wife touched his arm and shivered. “Such dark water.”
    “They say the peat, draining into it. Tiny black particles suspended everywhere, so all these expensive cameras they lower down can’t see a thing. There could be whales down there.”
    Bea nodded, still staring. “It’s much bigger than anybody says.”
    Married peace, that elusive fauna swimming in the dark also, stole back upon them at the hotel, a many-gabled brick Guests beside the pretty river Ness. After dinner, in the prolonged northern light, they wandered across a bridge and came by chance upon a stadium where a show for tourists was in progress: Scots children in kilts performed traditional dances to the bagpipes’ keening. The couple loved, when they travelled, all children, having none of their own. Their marriage would always be sterile; Bea had been willing, though nearing the end of her fourth decade, but Bech shiedfrom paternity, with its overwhelming implication of commitment. He aspired to be no more than one of mankind’s uncles, and his becoming at a blow stepfather to Bea’s twin adolescent girls, Ann and Judy, and to little Donald (who had at first called him “Mr. Bech” and then “Uncle Henry”), was bliss and burden enough, in the guardianship line. His books and in his fallow years his travels were his children, and by bringing Bea along he gave her what he could of fresh