Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  When I stood beside them, the man who was talking eventually looked up at me. He took me in vaguely, seeming slightly annoyed at my intrusion. Perhaps he thought I was a waiter.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Dave Lyons.’

  The acting listener was amazed. He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. His face couldn’t have expressed more surprise if I’d dropped in through the roof.

  ‘Scott’s brother,’ he said. ‘Right? Of course, you are. Of course, you are.’

  It was nice to have his confirmation of the fact. He stood up and shook hands.

  ‘I’m Dave Lyons. It’s great to meet you. Even if it’s sad about the circumstances. Gentlemen. This is. .’

  ‘Jack Laidlaw.’

  ‘Jack. That’s right. Jack Laidlaw. He’s the brother of a friend of mine. A friend unfortunately recently deceased. Jack. This is. .’

  He gave me the names. I was glad he didn’t ask me to repeat them. All I was aware of about them was the proximity of a lot of rubicund flesh, well-fed faces, heavy hands.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen. I have to give Jack here a little of my time. Please. Have more brandies if you want.’

  He lifted his own brandy glass from a table with other glasses on it and coffee-cups and a sheaf of paper with mysterious figures on the top sheet. I caught the whiff of Aramis aftershave. I’d know it anywhere because Jan had once given me a bottle as a present. I had spent a fortnight trying to get used to it. I finished up leaping away from the smell as soon as the cork came off. I’m sure it’s lovely but I had to admit eventually that I was allergic to it. Jan wasn’t too pleased. Perhaps that’s where our relationship had begun to founder: I couldn’t inhabit her ideal sense of me. Maybe I could introduce her to Dave Lyons. Was this the kind of man Jan wanted?

  ‘We’ll sit over here,’ he said to me. ‘You have a drink?’

  ‘It’s at the bar.’

  I collected my drink and joined him at the table in the corner, well away from everyone else. He looked at my glass.

  ‘Soda and lime?’ he said. ‘I take that myself occasionally. When I want to stimulate my taste buds for a real drink. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.’

  Dave Lyons was small, getting heavy. The features were thickening but that didn’t diminish their attractiveness. It was a very positive face, the kind you could distinguish from fifty yards. The dark eyes didn’t flicker. Neither the lack of height nor the thinning hair caused him any problems. When he had stood up to shake my hand, he had seemed to be on a podium of self-assurance. Perhaps he was standing on his wallet.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about Scott,’ he said.

  We talked about Scott’s dying. He accepted as something easily understood my need to bother the people Scott had known. But there wasn’t much he could offer by way of insight. He had lost touch with Scott in any serious terms many years ago. Mainly, they had been friends when they were students. And everybody had changed a lot since then. He had been hearing for a few years how badly things were going for Scott. But the end had come as a shock. Didn’t it always, though?

  His even voice had a mesmeric quality. It almost put my misgivings to sleep. I felt again that I was being stupid. I had interrupted a man’s business lunch in order to have him tell me the platitudes with which we respond to the death of those friends who, due to time and circumstance, had more or less died to us already. What more could I expect?

  Only two things niggled at the lassitude of purpose into which his voice had put me. One was something he said. One was something he didn’t say. He said, ‘I was sorry I couldn’t make the funeral.’ That was understandable. But the deliberateness with which he said it, right in the middle of no context, made me notice. It made me wonder if the deliberateness of the apology was a response to the deliberateness of the absence. What he didn’t say was anything about the party Scott had disrupted.

  ‘You had a party not too long ago,’ I said. ‘Scott was there.’

  He paused, stared at me, shook his head and smiled sadly.

  ‘You know about that?’ he said.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to mention it. I thought it might be too painful for you.’

  ‘No, that’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s not quite as painful as his death.’

  ‘I can see what you mean. Well, you’ll know about it then. It was no big deal, really. Scott just got steadily drunker. Argued with a few people. Finished up in the television room. Some of the guests were watching something. And for some reason Scott threw a heavy crystal vase at the TV. It sent a certain frisson through the party, you might say. Didn’t do the telly a lot of good either. Or the vase. Still, they were replaceable. Could’ve been somebody’s head. Anna had to get Scott out of there. I think she was afraid he might set fire to the curtains next. He was wild that night. But then I think he usually was towards the end.’

  ‘The television. You wouldn’t know what was on at the time?’

  He looked at me and his expression distanced itself from the remark. He seemed measuring me for a strait-jacket. It did sound like a ridiculous question, I had to admit to myself, and his eyes, taking on a sheen of amusement, confirmed my feeling.

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘That’s something I neglected to find out. That’s a bit remiss of me. But maybe that’s it. You think that might explain it? Scott was just practising to be a television critic?’

  The comforting cosiness of his presence had changed suddenly. In a few sentences he had turned the mood of the conversation from warm to cold. I saw how much he disliked me. In my modesty, I wondered why. Quite often, I don’t like me either. But I couldn’t see what I had done to earn such quick contempt — unless I was encroaching where I shouldn’t. So I encroached further.

  ‘You don’t see the point of the question?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. He sipped his brandy. ‘It does seem about as relevant as asking what colour of tie he was wearing.’

  ‘Not really. The people I know don’t usually go to parties to watch television.’

  ‘I have big parties. Very big parties. The house is populated like a village. There are people doing lots of things. Maybe we don’t go to the same kind of parties.’

  ‘I just wondered if there was any special reason for them to be watching television. If maybe the programme had special associations for the people at the party. Including Scott.’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know. In the mayhem after it, nobody thought to check the TV Times.’

  He sighed. He took some brandy. He glanced across to where his friends were sitting. He was effortlessly making me look silly. I had given him a lot of help. I gave him some more. If he thought my last question was a weird one, wait till he heard these.

  ‘Do you know Fast Frankie White?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Fast Frankie White. Do you know him?’

  He put his hand to his head.

  ‘What is this? Am I appearing on “Mastermind”? Specialising in the works of Damon Runyon?’

  I waited.

  ‘I do not think I’ve ever had that pleasure,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Anna?’ I said.

  ‘She’s not in Graithnock now?’

  ‘No. She’s selling the house.’

  ‘Maybe she’s trying to avoid answering your questions.’

  ‘Maybe she is.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Perhaps she went home. She comes from the Borders, too, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why don’t you try there?’

  ‘Do you know who the man in the green coat is?’ I said. His head was cupped in his left hand by now. He was talking to the table, presumably since it seemed more sane than I was.

  ‘I imagine he could be quite a lot of people,’ he said. ‘I also imagine that, if you keep on talking the way you’re talking, he may enter this room at any moment in search of you. With a very large net.’

  ‘Before he
does,’ I said. ‘Have you ever had a beard?’

  His hand came down over his nose and he looked up at me, seeming genuinely alarmed. He laughed briefly and stood up. He didn’t offer to shake my hand. Interview over.

  ‘Well, Mr Laidlaw,’ he said. ‘It’s been interesting meeting you. I hope the pills work soon.’

  I stood as well.

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘Please. Not to anyone. I must admit I could have spent it more fruitfully. Take care of yourself. Or maybe you should get somebody else to do it for you.’

  He had chewed me up nicely. This was him spitting me out. As he walked back to his friends, leaving me standing, I noticed that his stomach had the protuberance of a Russian doll. I wondered how many smaller men were hiding inside the polished confidence of his exterior. I intended to find out.

  12

  I drove to 28 Sycamore Road. My route was hardly direct. I cruised the countryside for a while. I stopped beside a bridge above the Bringan, an area of woods and fields we had known as boys. I leaned on the parapet and watched the river running. It looked like melting glass below the bridge. Downstream it hit the rocks and the glass went frosted the way glass does around where it has broken. I looked among the trees where gangs of us had played at hide-and-seek. You’re hiding again, I said to him in my head, and everybody else has gone home. But I’m still seeking.

  I got back in the car and drove some more. Dave Lyons’ dismissiveness had been counter-productive. It came too pat, it was too complete. Nobody could justify that much self-assurance. He froze me out too fast. That made me suspicious. If he had lost touch so long ago, how did he know where Anna came from? If he had become such a stranger to Scott, why did he invite him to a party?

  I thought I would like to talk to him again with more in my mouth than a series of disconnected questions. To do that, I had to know more. Ellie Mabon might be more. I regretted invading her life. But it was still just late afternoon. There should be no husband. I was apologising to her mentally as I stopped the car at her door.

  I parked behind a blue Peugeot and stepped out. The house was big, an odd amalgam of wood and stone. It was an original concept. I hadn’t seen another one like it, for which I was grateful. The complicated bell had only begun its symphony of chimes when the door opened. We stood looking at each other while the bell continued pointlessly.

  I appreciated Scott’s taste. If you were going to lose your head, she was a good place to lose it. She was tall and red-haired with a beautiful mouth even her present expression couldn’t mar. The eyes were green as an aquarium and drew you to them in the same way. She was dressed to go out, wearing a black fitted suit, the lapels of which met enticingly across her bare chest.

  ‘Hullo,’ I was able to say.

  ‘How dare you!’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry. But I — ’

  She was glancing down the road.

  ‘Turn right now and get back into your car.’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘Do it!’

  She started to smile sweetly. She was nodding as if agreeing with something I was saying.

  ‘Do it now. Get into your car. Drive in the direction in which it’s facing.’ She pointed helpfully, still smiling. ‘What I’m doing just now is showing the neighbours I’m giving you directions. At the end of the street, you take first right. First left. Then you pull in to the side of the road. You wait till my car comes past. And you follow it. It’s the blue Peugeot out there. Move.’ I started to walk away.

  ‘That’s where it is,’ she called after me. ‘I’m sure you’ll find it. You can’t miss it.’

  She closed the door quite loudly.

  I waited for ten minutes before I saw the Peugeot in the rearview mirror. She was a careful woman. I followed her out of the town. She drove for some time. Just when I thought we might be leaving the country, she took a winding road, turned into another and pulled on to the grass beside the gate of a field. There was room for me behind her.

  Outside the cars, we stood looking at each other. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a bad way to spend the time.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘I’m Jack Laidlaw.’

  She ignored my outstretched hand.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘Scott told me about you. But I thought he was exaggerating. He exaggerated about a lot of things. You’re the one area where he seems to have mastered understatement. You’re off your head.’

  It was a day for collecting accolades.

  ‘Do you think we should be telling each other such intimate things about ourselves so soon?’

  She stared at me and shook her head, the way people might when watching a disaster on television. She sat against the bonnet of the Peugeot. She had legs from which fantasies are made. I tried not to make any. It wasn’t easy. The urge to live is a kind of holy idiot. It finally understands nothing but itself. It has no sense of context. Attending the funeral in all good faith, it may finish up wanting to screw the widow.

  Ellie Mabon was staring through the trees and I, supposedly obsessive pursuer of the truth, saw not a source of information but a marvellous woman. The mad, whispering optimist who had arrived in me with my awareness of my own sexuality was talking again: perhaps she’s the one. Perhaps with her I could have made the place where I want to be.

  ‘Scott and I used to come here,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you phone first?’

  ‘I thought I did.’

  ‘I mean again. Before you arrived just now. There could have been someone with me.’

  ‘I didn’t want to give you the chance to knock me back again.’

  She was still abstracted, presumably remembering the past. It was a good place to have chosen. The roadway was hemmed with trees, high but hidden, a position from which to see without being seen. Below us, some distance away in a small valley, there was a house. It was a modern house with just a little land around it. It wasn’t a farmhouse. It was perhaps a townie’s dream of the country, urban amenities included.

  ‘We used to pretend that house down there was ours,’ she said. ‘Pretty pathetic, I suppose.’

  Her references to Scott and herself demystified the moment for me. This wasn’t just a woman dreaming. This was Ellie Mabon, who had had an affair with my brother and had a husband she was worried about. Seeing the icon animate into someone who breathed the same troubled air as I did, I banalised her further. I noticed the shoes she was wearing. Their high heels were digging into the turf. But she had chosen the location. She must have known where she was coming, with someone she didn’t want to meet. Yet she had dressed like a fashion show and worn shoes that were spectacularly unsuited to the place. The reason might be vanity, the need to look her best before a stranger. Or the reason might be a sense of theatre — wearing the costume of the other woman. Either way, it put her among the rest of us. Speech returned to me.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you came. I just need to talk to you.’

  ‘What I can’t forgive,’ she said. ‘What I won’t forgive is that Scott told you about us.’

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  ‘Then how did you know?’

  ‘I just found out today. Today was the first time I heard your name.’

  ‘Then he must have told somebody.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean that what he said was bad. And it was only your first name he mentioned.’

  ‘Oh, that’s lovely. I suppose that’s what you call discretion. I didn’t tell anybody.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’

  She threw me a look like a spear.

  ‘If you only had the first name, how did you find me?’

  ‘I’m a detective.’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ she said.

  She turned towards me and folded her arms. She had made up her mind.

  ‘Let’s get this over with. What is it you want to ask me? You seem to know enough already.’

  ‘No, not enough.�
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  ‘Before you start. I’ll tell you anything I can about Scott. But don’t ask me about us. We stopped seeing each other more than a couple of months ago. It was over for us.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  She seemed to be deciding whether my question came within her rules. She made a concession.

  ‘I stopped it. Scott was too serious about everything. He couldn’t have an affair. It had to be a grand passion. He was so intense about everything. I could see the whole thing blowing up in our faces. I dreaded that some night he would arrive at the door.’ Her eyes returned from contemplating the house that could never be theirs and looked at me. ‘Maybe it runs in the family. I mean, I wasn’t too wrong, was I? In a way, it did happen.’

  Her implied accusation didn’t affect me. I was too busy accusing the accuser. She appeared to want a relationship that wouldn’t interrupt her meals with her husband or embarrass her in front of the neighbours. Scott had made the mistake of loving her too much, I thought.

  ‘You weren’t seeing him at school?’

  ‘I left. I do relief teaching now. I had to get away. It was too painful being so close. Charlie had been suggesting I take it easier for years. He makes good money. And every day I was living with the dread that Scott might announce our forthcoming engagement to the staffroom. Or decide to kiss me in the corridor. He was unpredictable towards the end, you know.’

  People whose heads are imploding often are.

  ‘So you’ve had no contact with him for months.’

  She eased her heels out of the mud, found a new position for them.

  ‘He phoned,’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘A lot of times. But at least it was during the day. Except for the last time.’

  ‘When was that?’

  For the first time I saw her forget her lines. The role she must have chosen to play with me faltered, couldn’t hold. Like an actress remembering who she really is in the middle of a performance, she froze. I saw real pain. It made me want to hold her. But she reassumed a kind of composure.

  ‘It was that night,’ she said. ‘The night he died.’