Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  I waited. She was in a place of her own. No one should interrupt her there. She retracted her closed lips and contrived not to cry.

  ‘He phoned in the early evening. Charlie was out. He phoned from a pub. The pain in his voice was awful. I knew then. I knew how bad he was. I spoke to him for a long time. Till his money ran out. But I could’ve gone to him. I could’ve helped. Maybe if I had, it wouldn’t have happened.’

  She glanced at me and away, as if she couldn’t bear to face herself in my eyes.

  ‘No, Ellie,’ I said. Her first name came naturally out of the moment. ‘No. Don’t think that. He was probably too far out by then.’

  ‘But why didn’t I? Jesus, sometimes I hate how sensible I am. What did it matter if it was awkward to explain to Charlie? Or if people saw us? Scott was going to die.’

  ‘You didn’t know that.’

  ‘Maybe not. But I’ve thought about that phone-call a lot. I think maybe it’s typical of my life. It’s what I do. Scott was the most authentic thing that’s ever happened to me. Easy to accommodate he wasn’t. But he was real. I’ve thought perhaps that’s what bothered me. I wanted him but not the disturbance he caused. And the phone-call sometimes seems to sum it all up. I gave him as much space as wouldn’t disturb the routine of my evening. It’s what I do. What’s wrong with me?’

  Perhaps we choose our fears, I was thinking. We frighten ourselves with the smaller things so that the bigger things can’t get near enough to bother us. Perhaps Ellie Mabon chose the fear of breaking the pattern of her life to avoid confronting one of the biggest fears we have — the fear of feeling. Let go the reins on that one and where might it take us?

  ‘What did he say that night? Can you remember?’

  ‘It’s not the kind of call you can forget. He wasn’t talking about the weather. But it wasn’t too coherent either. Mainly what I remember is the pain. Most of it I could only half-understand. Oh, it was terrible.’

  ‘Can you remember anything?’

  She thought, staring at the grass in front of her.

  ‘Where would you start? It was all so confused. Something had happened recently. I know that much. I don’t mean just us breaking up. That hurt him enough. But something else. Something had happened recently. That almost destroyed him. He had always told me the only faith he ever had was in people. And I think that was gone.’

  ‘Happened here? In Graithnock?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was recent. It happened to somebody he knew. So maybe it happened here. Somebody he admired very much. Because he kept saying, “The best of us. He was one of the best of us.” The person he was talking about must have died.’

  ‘Does the man in the green coat mean anything to you?’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘He used that expression.’

  ‘In what context?’

  ‘I think he said it was the man in the green coat all over again.’

  ‘But you don’t know who he is?’

  ‘No idea. But I’ll tell you something. Whatever had happened made him hate Dave Lyons. He had never liked him much. But he was so angry with him that night.’

  And so angry with Fast Frankie White. I found it difficult to make a connection between the Dave Lyons I had just met and Frankie White. I asked her if she had heard of Frankie. She hadn’t.

  ‘Dave Lyons,’ I said. ‘You know him?’

  ‘No. I know of him. Scott had spoken about him.’

  ‘Did Scott still seem to be in touch with him?’

  ‘As far as I knew he was. He seemed to be lumping him along with two other people that night. As if they were all together. It was something that happened — when he was a student, I think. One of them was a name I’d never heard him mention before. Blake, I think it was. Andy Blake? He said a strange thing about him. “Physician, heal thyself,” he said. The other man he didn’t name. He just said I had seen him, but I didn’t know him. He said I had seen him all right. Don’t worry about it. It was all like that. He was telling me and he wasn’t telling me. It was weird.’

  ‘But what did he lump them together for? Was it something they had done?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I honestly think that’s all I can tell you. Believe me, I’ve gone over that call in my head a hundred times. Look. I think I’d better be going. We’re going out tonight. I’ve got to get ready.’

  I couldn’t imagine what else she could do to make herself look better. I took out my cigarettes. She didn’t smoke. Hardly anybody did these days. I would soon be in quarantine.

  ‘Do you know where Anna is just now?’

  She shook her head, looking up at the trees.

  ‘We weren’t that close.’

  ‘Listen. I really appreciate what you’ve done. It’s meant a lot to me. I can imagine how sore this has been for you.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I really did care about him, you know. You know what I said to him when we split up? “I’m saving both our lives.” That’s what I said. That’s irony, if you like.’

  The wind had risen. I smoked and listened to the leaves and watched some cows in a field. In this place where Scott had been and wouldn’t be coming back, I learned his absence again. It was a lesson from a bad teacher who taught by rote, not caring how well you understood it. You didn’t have to understand, only to know. Ellie Mabon put her arms round her shoulders and shivered.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’d better be going.’

  I looked at her and nodded. She smiled and pointed to the ground behind the cars. There were tread-marks on the grass.

  ‘Those,’ she said. ‘They’ll always remind me of Scott. Him and me here. I wonder how long they’ll last. What is all this about for you really? I mean. What is it you’re doing exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. I suppose I’m trying to make my own peace with Scott’s death. I suppose this is how I do it.’

  ‘How do I do it?’

  She started suddenly to cry.

  ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Will you hold me one time for him?’

  I crossed and held her. It was a small, chaste ceremony of mutual loss. Her hair in my face gave off a melancholy sweetness. Clenched to her, I felt the tremors of her body, how the edifice of beauty was undermined from within with deep forebodings. In the embrace I experienced our shared nature — so much questionable confidence containing so much undeniable panic. That was me, too. Some of my colleagues and bosses liked to say I was completely arrogant. They misunderstood the language of my living. Arrogance should be comparative. Humility was total. Faced with simplistic responses to life that tried to fit my living into themselves, I was arrogant. I seemed to meet them every day and I knew I was more than they said I was. But when I sat down inside myself in the darkness of a night, I knew nothing but my smallness. I knew it now and shared it with hers.

  She subsided slowly, sighed and moved away. Her mascara was spiked with tears. She sniffed.

  ‘Where is it you’re living anyway?’ she said in a watery voice that suggested the tears had invaded her larynx.

  ‘I’m in the Bushfield Hotel tonight. I might still be there tomorrow night. I don’t know.’

  ‘If there’s anything else I can think of, I’ll ’phone you there. I’d like to help you if I can.’ Her voice was submerging. ‘Oh, God.’

  She fumblingly opened the passenger-door and leant inside. She came out with her handbag and put it on the roof of the car. She went back inside and brought out a dispenser of quickie cleansers, from which she pulled a handful of connected, wet tissues. She put the dispenser on the roof of the car as well. She stood, breathing deeply and trying to make sure her tears were over. She wiped her face carefully, especially around the eyes. She opened her handbag, took out her compact and checked her face. She finished off wiping it clean and threw the dark-stained tissues away. She very carefully put on her make-up. She took more tissues and wiped the heels of her shoes. She put the stuff back in the car, closed
the door and went on tiptoe to the driver’s door. She looked at me. She was Mrs Mabon again.

  ‘You want me to move my car?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve done this before. I can do it one last time.’

  She pulled into the road, reversed back close to the gate and drove off without waving. I lit a new cigarette off the old one and stood on the stub. In the car, I rolled down the window and smoked, looking out at the country. The indifferent permanence of the place, where all the times they had been here had left no mark, told me nothing that I did would make any difference. But I started the engine. My ability to go on fed off that of the car as if it was a life-support machine. One mechanical purpose led to another. I would phone Brian Harkness.

  13

  ‘Meece was dealing, right? But he was dealing funny. He was putting quite a lot up his sleeve. Literally. He was using more and more of the stuff and selling less. It looks as if the woman and him were stashing too much away in their own veins. Or maybe saving it up for a rainy day. Keeping a private account. The story is that when he came to pay off his suppliers, the books didn’t balance. They warned him.’

  ‘That could’ve been the broken arm.’

  ‘Right. It looks as if it didn’t help his memory tying a knot in his arm. So they closed the account. With a warning to all bad debtors.’

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Asking around. Ye know Macey? Ernie Milligan’s tout.’

  ‘Well enough. I test every penny he gives me with my teeth. But that sounds real enough. Though it’s nothing you couldn’t have guessed. No names yet?’

  ‘Not yet. Macey’s listenin’ for us.’

  Like a visual aid to my understanding, Buster cocked an ear. Listening? You get it? Thanks, Buster. In contrast to what I was hearing, even he seemed an emblem of domestic cosiness, as if he were a dog stitched on a sampler: Buster, Sweet Buster. The kitchen was warm and pleasant with residual smells of cooking. We had both been well fed by Katie, who had forgiven the tetchiness of my morning.

  When I had come in late, she gave me a cuddle and told me to sit down. ‘What you need,’ she said, ‘is a poultice for your stomach.’ She made me a good one. Doing the dishes had let me feel temporarily a part of her sweetly dishevelled orderliness, where preoccupations were put up like shutters and kindliness was lit like a fire.

  In the brightness of the room I had rested from the darkness of my head. Phoning Brian had changed that. Now a chill wind was blowing in my ear from bad places where they broke your arm to encourage concentration and turned a life into garbage if it wasn’t serving their purpose. And I realised a part of me was still out there in the cold looking for something, picking among the waste.

  ‘You’ve got no information on the woman yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking a bit about her,’ I said.

  ‘You mean how she managed to get away?’ Brian said.

  ‘If she did.’

  ‘I think we would have found her by now if she was dead.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. When you think about it. Let’s say they didn’t do her. That would be sloppy workmanship, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe they saw her as an innocent bystander. Maybe they knew she was too frightened to say anything.’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s not how I would bet.’

  ‘All right, master,’ Brian said. ‘What do guru say?’

  I could imagine him smiling. He had me in a role that was familiar to him. It must have seemed like old times to be able to make professional fun of me. I quite enjoyed pretending I was back in what had passed for normalcy with me.

  ‘What if whoever did it was told to leave her alone? I mean, a good tradesman would’ve done the job right. He’s got his reputation to think of. That’s how you stay in business. Not leaving anybody who can lodge a complaint.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why don’t you think that way? That the head man’s got a soft spot for the woman. Something like that. That gives you another possible point of connection. It’s always the part that doesn’t fit that you should follow. Here’s an obvious, unimaginative pattern with one piece missing. Why? It shouldn’t be. If you’re prepared to kill one for money, what’s the difference with two? Just the price. Unless the instructions were specific that you shouldn’t.’

  ‘I gaze in wonder,’ Brian said. ‘Your fee’s in the post.’

  ‘Just a small deductive sketch I have dashed off,’ I said. ‘Like Leonardo doodling. It doesn’t help anybody, right enough. It doesn’t help you. And it certainly doesn’t help me.’

  ‘What about homeopathy?’ Brian said. ‘I know a homeopathic doctor in Ayrshire who’s supposed to be very good. That’s maybe the cure you need.’

  ‘Let’s try more conventional help first. This could take the place of the fee in the post. Fast Frankie White.’

  ‘What about ’im?’

  ‘I want to find the latest on him.’

  ‘I thought he was in London?’

  ‘So did I. But I’m not so sure now. You think you could check it out? And, Brian. I need to know where he comes from. Originally. That’s important. It’s Ayrshire. But where-abouts in Ayrshire?’

  ‘If you were up here, you could find the answer to the question for yourself. Instead of wasting your time down there. You would know the answer by now.’

  I had wondered when he would get round to that. Knowing what was coming had the same effect as seeing the digits on a payphone register zero. I had to go.

  ‘Brian, use your loaf,’ I said. ‘If I was up there, I wouldn’t have known the question, never mind the answer. I better not cost these people a fortune. Tell Morag that I’m asking for her. And Bob Lilley that I’m not.’

  I phoned Ena and we exchanged formalities briefly before she let me speak to the children. Moya was out (she often was out to me these days, even when she was in) but Sandra gave me a detailed account of the cat’s latest ailment and Jackie checked as usual on my whereabouts. I had once made a joke to Ena about his having a map in his room with flags to mark my movements but, when Ena suggested it would need to be an awful big map, I didn’t repeat the reference.

  I tried to phone Jan at the restaurant. It was Betsy, one of her partners, who answered. When she knew it was me, her voice — always distant — more or less emigrated. The only thing Betsy and I had in common was a mutual dislike. She thought Jan was wasting her time with me and I thought everybody was wasting their time with Betsy. She spoke like an elocution class on trivia, elaborately enunciating triteness. She was one of a new breed of Glaswegian who thought the city was a taxi-ride between a theatre and a wine-bar. She enjoyed telling me Jan was out having dinner. I said that wasn’t much of an advertisement for their place. She begged my pardon. I asked who was having dinner with Jan. She had no idea. I asked if it was Barry Murdoch. She had no idea. I asked when Jan might be back. She had no idea. I asked, saying I was keen to find a question it wouldn’t be too hard for her to answer, what time it was. She hung up the phone. Maybe she had no idea.

  I had an idea. The idea was Barry Murdoch — a big, suave phoney who seemed to have been born encased in a Porsche. Betsy had introduced Jan to him, presumably as an alternative diet to the unhealthy regimen of weekly traumas she was having with me — muesli for bacon and eggs. I had met him once in the restaurant and suggested afterwards to Jan, ‘Dress by Gucci, head by mail order catalogue.’ It was not a remark that had earned me maximum Brownie points.

  Someone must have opened the lounge-door, for there were the sounds of talking and laughter suddenly heard and suddenly gone. It was like hearing a party in a strange house you were passing and wanting to go in. I needed a furlough. Thinking of Jan at dinner, I wanted to go to some strange place and maybe see a woman I had never seen before and discuss with someone I had never met the oddness of things. I was hungry for fun.

  ‘Buster,’ I said. ‘You fancy a night on the skite?’

  He d
idn’t seem interested. I decided to go out. I had done what I could for Scott for the moment. John Strachan would be coming into the Bushfield later on. He had phoned twice during the day. Sanny Wilson might appear. But I had some time before that happened.

  I stood up and put on my jacket. Before I could escape to whatever new and exotic experiences were waiting out there in Graithnock, Katie opened the kitchen door.

  ‘Sanny Wilson’s here to see you,’ she said.

  I was back in the tunnel and excited about the possibility of seeing some light. The excitement didn’t last long. When I went into the lounge, I realised that Sanny Wilson was so well insulated with liquid from serious contact that he might as well have been a fish in an aquarium. His mouthings had much the same clarity of meaning.

  He would be about seventy, a marvellously benign man with sweet, open-handed gestures that seemed to be an attempt to embrace the world. He had obviously loved Scott and generously included me, as Scott’s brother, in his affection. That was touching but it was not hugely helpful. We drank and talked for a while and what I gleaned, beyond the frequent repetition of the opaque statement that the man in the green coat had died again, could have been written on my thumbnail.

  Still, he wasn’t a bad show to be with. He smoked with a great flourish of the hand, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the palm towards you. With each successive cigarette, his waistcoat looked more and more as if it had been tailored from ash. His soft hat assumed a jauntier angle on his bald head. He had a Dickensian turn of phrase, which tended to include words like ‘peregrination’ and ‘pharmaceutical’ and — my favourite — ‘clientiele’, spoken in what Sanny had apparently decided was a French accent. Only a Philistine would have resented his lack of direct communication. I had lost a source of information but I had found a pleasure to be with. You don’t ask Brahms to tell you the news.

  I was still enjoying his recital when John Strachan came in. John was carrying a wrapped painting that turned out to be the five at table. Mhairi and he had decided I should have it, in memory of Scott. I liked that. John had also found a piece of paper in the waste-basket of Scott’s old room. Everything else seemed to have been cleared out. The new teacher had just emptied the last of the stuff from a drawer into the basket today. Most of it, John said, had been related to school administration. Only this one sheet had looked like something personal, though what it was John couldn’t understand. Glancing over it, I could see why. It was a strange piece of writing. It wasn’t just the crumpled nature of the paper that made it difficult to read.