Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  ‘My round, I believe,’ Scott was shouting. ‘Another bowl of mead, mine host. Minion.’ Fortunately, he was referring to me. ‘The reckoning.’

  He threw a crumpled fiver towards the bar. A small man picked it up and held it in his closed hand. I wasn’t noticing much by then. But I noticed that. Mordred had a kind of malicious tunnel vision by this time. Only the bad things got through. I held out my hand, palm up. The small man looked at me questioningly. I tapped my right palm with my left forefinger, no mean achievement given my condition.

  ‘That,’ I said and closed my hand into a fist. ‘Or that.’

  The small man handed over the fiver but he didn’t like doing it.

  ‘It was a joke,’ he said.

  ‘That was a joke,’ I said. ‘Well, you’re about as funny as Arthur Askey.’

  I paid and brought the drinks back to our table, not mead but gin and tonic for Scott and for me a Bloody Mary, which was a logical expression of my mood, since I never drink it. I gave Scott his fiver back.

  ‘No, no,’ he was saying. ‘Give it to the people. Let the people drink.’

  ‘Behave yourself,’ I said.

  The small man was back.

  ‘Hey, you. That was a joke,’ he said.

  ‘What are you?’ I said. ‘A bloody budgie? That all they taught you to say? Come back in a month when you’ve learned another sentence.’

  ‘Listen, you,’ the small man said and grabbed my arm.

  I shook him off and he sat down on the floor. Things could have turned, as they say, ugly, except that I helped him up.

  ‘It was a joke,’ he said again.

  ‘So was that,’ I said. ‘Let’s forget it.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just so long as ye know it was a joke.’

  The repetition of that statement reanimated the demon.

  ‘Sorry Ah knocked you off your perch,’ I said.

  Thankfully, the small man didn’t turn back. But there followed many mutterings while Scott beamed upon the sotto voce threats as if they were a concert in his honour. Miraculously, we got out of there without any more trouble and out of the next bar as well and eventually bought a carry-out and took a taxi back to the flat.

  The evening resolved itself into what it had really been about. We were matching disasters. I think Scott had come to see me for some kind of joint exorcism, a mutual laying to rest of some of the wilder dreams we had spawned together lying in our shared bedroom in our parents’ house. He had started to admit to himself how badly his marriage was failing and he needed to share the admission with me, the keeper of his old dreams, as he was the keeper of mine. Also, he knew my situation and I think he suspected it might soon be his and he was perhaps checking out the terrain with someone who already lived there.

  I wished now that I had been more help. We were both too sore at that time. As we drank and talked into the night, we discovered a new kind of sibling rivalry. You think you’ve got wounds? Look at mine. Your compass is broken? My ambition’s got gangrene. Women came in for much meandering analysis. Weighty pronouncements on the nature of relationships were made and forgotten. Past girls who had long since vanished into unknown marriages and for all we knew divorces were conjured from their names and seen in the maudlin glow of nostalgia and knelt before, like shrines we never should have lost faith in. We battered ourselves against the incomprehensible and the unsayable and lay back exhausted.

  At about half past three in the morning, Scott sat up suddenly on the floor where he’d been lying. He stared ahead like a visionary.

  ‘I came here to tell you something,’ he said. ‘I should have told you this before.’

  He looked at me and looked away. Whatever he had to say was not something he found easy to say.

  ‘I am leaving Anna,’ he intoned and lay back down and went to sleep.

  Next morning he sheepishly washed himself and shaved with my razor and went back to her. I had seen him a few times since then but only over the shoulder of other people’s events.

  That was my last real memory of him alive and it wasn’t such a bad one. Let those who think life is measurable by its propriety wish for nicer last remembrances of the ones they love. That crazy night stayed with me. It made me smile. For in spite of all the hurt, he had somehow stayed above it. The size of the pain was the size of the dream he felt denied in him. To hold the pain yet was yet to hold the dream. That was one reason why I couldn’t forgive his dying. That was one reason why I was driving towards Anna.

  Who was Anna? I had never quite worked that out. I knew what she looked like all right. She was small and fine-boned and sweet-faced. Since her marriage to Scott, she and I had always exchanged pleasantries like sealed envelopes. Who knew what implications were inside them? Perhaps I would find out now.

  On my left I saw Fenwick, where Brian Harkness had lived with his father before marrying Morag. I had met the old man several times. I liked him. I was tempted to go in and see him, postpone my descent into whatever Graithnock had in store for me. Brian’s father and I had things in common. He wasn’t sure of policemen either. But Graithnock was only minutes away — too late to hide.

  I went round the one-way system until I saw a phone-box. Then I had to find a parking place. I had decided that, before I spoke to Anna, I would get in touch with John Strachan. He had told me at the funeral that he had been with Scott before he died. I think I was taking out insurance against the possibility of Anna’s monosyllabic responses. If she didn’t want to tell me anything, I could defy her silence and still make my journey worthwhile. I phoned Scott’s school.

  ‘Good afternoon. Glebe Academy.’

  There was a typewriter in the background and a voice saying something I couldn’t hear — those delicious sounds of normalcy that are sweets in the shop-window to an obsessive and he’s a boy again, only able to stare in, without the currency to purchase.

  ‘Glebe Academy. Yes?’

  ‘Good afternoon. Could I speak to Mr Strachan, please?’

  ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  ‘My name’s Laidlaw. Jack Laidlaw. I’m Scott’s brother.’

  I had nearly said, ‘I was Scott’s brother.’ Grief is often so mannerly that it ties itself in knots. I heard a silence I didn’t understand at the other end.

  ‘Oh, Mr Laidlaw.’ Then she said something that stuck to my chest like a badge. ‘You had one terrific brother, Mr Laidlaw. A lot of us miss him. Pupils and staff alike.’

  I loved not just the statement. I loved the breathlessness of her voice, the spontaneity with which she said it, the breaking through the barrier of her own embarrassment. It wasn’t something she had said by rote.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll get Mr Strachan for you.’

  When he came, I didn’t recognise the voice and I realised I might not know him if I saw him.

  ‘Hullo. Mr Laidlaw?’

  ‘Mr Strachan. I’m sorry to disturb your day. I know you must be busy. But I’m in Graithnock today. And I just wondered. Would it be possible to talk to you? About Scott. I just would like to understand it better. I’m sorry to impose on you. But could I see you sometime? Even just for half-an-hour?’

  He hardly paused.

  ‘You could come to the house tonight,’ he said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. You’ll still be around later on?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Okay. I’m sorry I haven’t time to warn Mhairi. Or you could eat with us. But you could come after that. If that’s all right.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  He gave me the address. I was relieved. That meant I was bound to recognise him.

  ‘Say about seven o’clock. Let’s hope we’ve got the kids down by about then.’

  ‘That’s great. I’ll see you then. I appreciate this.’

  ‘It’s no problem. Scott’s worth talking about.’

  His words and those of the secretary were ointment on my mind. Two people agree
d with the feeling in me. I felt as if I was a member of a cadre against the indifference to Scott’s death. I was ready to talk to Anna now, invested with more authority than my own mania. I went back to the car.

  5

  Scott and Anna’s house was the end one in a street of terraced houses. There were trees in the street, emerging from the buckling asphalt defiantly. As I parked between two of the trees, I noticed the sign. It was stuck in the sandstone chips of the front garden. It said ‘For Sale’.

  I got out and went up the path and rang the bell. It was one of those rings you know will never be answered, tirling into hollow silence. It was, appropriately enough, like calling at a mausoleum. I looked in the curtainless front window. The room was completely denuded. There were lighter patches on the walls where Scott’s paintings had been hanging.

  My memory rehung one of them. It was a big canvas dominated by a kitchen window. In the foreground on the draining board there were dishes, pans, cooking utensils. Through the window was a fantastic cityscape of bleak places and deprived people and cranes and furnaces. The people were part of the objects, seemed somehow enslaved by them. I remember a face looking out of a closed tenement window as if through bars. It was meant, Scott had told me, to be an echo of the face that was looking at his painting. I remember a man’s face seeming liquid in the glow of his own blowtorch, as if he were melting down himself. The whole thing was rendered in great naturalistic detail, down to recognisably working-class faces below the bonnets, but the total effect was a nightmare vision. On the left of the kitchen window, like an inaccurate inset scale on some mad map, was a small, square picture. It was painted in sugary colours in vivid contrast to the scene outside. It showed an idealised Highland glen with heather and a cottage pluming smoke from the chimney and a shepherd and his dog heading towards it. Scott had called his painting ‘Scotland’.

  The painting became the empty patch on the wall again. So easy was it to erase that fiercely felt vision. The room was anybody’s, nobody’s. Even the carpet had been lifted. Anna had always been thrifty.

  I crunched across the chips and went round the side of the house. There was a wooden door set in the wall around the garden. It was locked. I put my foot on the door-handle, pulled myself up and dropped over. The back area was just an outhouse, a garage and a patch of grass. Gardening hadn’t been one of Scott’s passions.

  I wandered around a while, peered in the kitchen window. The place was empty and clean. Anna had always been a good house-keeper. I looked at the patch of grass. I could remember sitting there a few times on travelling rugs during sunny Sundays, with Scott and Anna and Ena. The children were playing around us and we sipped beer. Our desultory talk from those times seemed to hang in the air about me. Our plans had been motes, just sun motes.

  The outhouse door wasn’t locked. I looked in. There was an old rusted lawn-mower, a rake, some lengths of wood, a small bag of tubes of oil-paint, nearly all of them squeezed empty. This was it so soon?

  I felt I might as well have stumbled upon an archaeological site. You would be hard pushed already to tell who had lived here, unless you adopted the experts’ technique of constructing an elaborate edifice of theory on a minute base of fact that couldn’t support it. Scott’s memorial was how much his house fetched and this handful of rubbish.

  Then I saw it. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. It was behind some pieces of board, face to the wall. I had thought it was just another board itself till I noticed the varnish shining and knew it was a frame. I extricated it. It was Scott’s painting, ‘Scotland’.

  Holding the painting up, I couldn’t believe it. What had happened between them that Anna should do this? She knew how much it had meant to Scott. I was angry.

  I found an old, black bin-bag and put the painting in it. I came out and closed the outhouse door. I balanced the painting on the garage-roof that abutted on to the garden door. I climbed the door and brought the painting with me on the way down. I was putting the painting in the boot of the car when a neighbour crossed the street towards me. I didn’t know him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just visiting,’ I said.

  ‘You can only view by appointment.’

  ‘I’ve seen all I need to see.’

  ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ I said. ‘The Keeper of the Suburbs?’

  As soon as I said it, I felt bad. The man was right enough. He had seen a stranger poking around an empty house.

  ‘Look,’ I said.

  I took out my identity-card and showed it to him.

  ‘I’m Scott Laidlaw’s brother. I’m just collecting something that was left for me. It’s a painting Scott did.’

  He was waiting for me to let him see it. He had a big chance.

  ‘Well,’ he said. He was giving the issue his lofty consideration. He seemed to imagine I cared. Why does a little piece of property make some people act as if they were on stilts? ‘Well. I suppose everything’s above board.’

  ‘Do you?’ I said and locked the boot and got in the car.

  Driving, I was annoyed at myself for becoming angry. Muzzle the dog. My anger wasn’t for him. But it was for somebody. I could feel it in me, sealed and ready, just waiting for an address.

  6

  I remembered John Strachan as soon as I saw him, just after ten past seven. I had been hoping to come later but this was as long as I could hold off. I had looked at the new town centre Scott hated. I had taken a meal in a café. I had left the car in a parking lot and walked. But impatience still outmanoeuvred me.

  ‘Jack, isn’t it?’ he said.

  We shook hands.

  ‘I’m John. Come in.’

  ‘This is good of you.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I feel like talking about it myself.’

  He was a tall man with glasses. He couldn’t have been more than early thirties but he had a troubled, abstracted air that suggested the sum he was trying to do in his head wasn’t working out. He was wearing jeans and a baggy sweater.

  He led me through to the living-room and introduced me to Mhairi. Mhairi was small and overweight and she had a shiny, round face, like a dumpling in which you know there won’t be any bad bits. She was wearing jeans and a loose, floral top. John introduced me to the children as well, Catriona and Elspeth, or rather he identified them for me as they dervished round us.

  The children were doing what children so often do, transforming the banality of the moment into a game. As is usual with such games, nobody knew the rules but them. This one appeared to consist of Catriona, who would be about eight, making the ugliest face she could contrive up against Elspeth’s nose, accompanied by a klaxon-like noise. Then she would run in and out of the furniture and stop in the most inaccessible place she could find. Elspeth, maybe five, would pursue her, make her face, her noise, and run away as well. Like so many children’s games nobody seemed to have devised a rule yet for deciding when it was over.

  The three adults were momentarily transfixed, perhaps by such effortless dissipation of enough energy to light up a small town.

  ‘I hope I haven’t come too early,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Mhairi said.

  She said it with surprise, looking into the strangeness of my remark. The rigid sense of time I had implied seemed alien to her. I had an insight, part observation, part memory, into where they were. Mhairi was standing by the door to the kitchen with a slightly dazed resignation, like someone waiting for a bus she had begun to think might not travel on this route after all. I could imagine the promised places it was supposed to have on its destination board: ‘When The Children Are Older’, ‘More Time To Myself’ and ‘Some Of The Things I’ve Always Wanted To Do’.

  ‘I think we should take Jack through to the lounge for a minute,’ Mhairi said.

  The three of us went through there. Catriona and Elspeth threatened concentration distantly, like gunfire in the hill
s around a fort.

  Moving into the lounge was moving nearer to John and Mhairi themselves, I thought, closer to the control room of what they were up to. It was furnished with a kind of vulnerable eclecticism. The floor was varnished, with an Indian rug on it. The chairs didn’t match but were old and handsome, chosen presumably for comfort. Someone had taken macramé. On the walls were an African mask and one of Scott’s paintings I hadn’t seen before. While I studied it, they didn’t speak. Books were much of the furniture. There were two main bookcases and a couple of smaller bookstands. One of them was devoted to black writers — George Jackson, Baldwin, Cleaver, Biko, Mandela, Achebe. I could imagine their friends sitting around here. They would drink wine and talk seriously about important matters. They would be easy to satirise. But I felt I was in one of decency’s bunkers, where two people were trying to find values that made their lives honestly habitable.

  ‘What do you think the painting’s about?’ I said as I sat down.

  It was a pastiche of Da Vinci’s last supper. Five men were at table, facing out. The man in the centre had no features. His hands were by his side. The other four were bearded. One of them could have been Scott. The meal and the clothes were contemporary. The perspective allowed you to see the five plates, still empty, before them. The plate of the man in the middle was blank. The other four plates had the image of the same face on them, a calm but mournful face of a balding man in his fifties, looking out at you. There were other elements in the picture but I hadn’t time to examine them. I didn’t like the painting. It seemed too derivative, not of Da Vinci, but of an idea extraneous to itself, an idea it hadn’t quite incarnated successfully.