Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  As I came into Kelso, I was looking for sharers. The handsome trigness of the town didn’t promise well for my purpose. It was basking brightly in innocent sunshine. But that didn’t bother me too much. Innocence is often just guilt in hiding.

  16

  Martin and Alice Kerr were not at home. The bungalow sat complacent as a well-fed cat in the sunlight. The lawn looked as if it had just had a shave. A neighbour, who had watched me from her window, directed me to where they were.

  The bowling green was full. I sat on one of the wood-slat seats round the perimeter. At this time of day there were no younger people involved. I watched the elderly at play. It was a pleasant sight. If this was what age meant, perhaps I should try harder to get there. I didn’t take a cigarette.

  On a neat and well kept square of green moved neat and well kept people. The colours were mainly pastel — pinks and blues and greys. The gestures were unhurried. The faces expressed satisfaction or dismay at a shot in an almost abstract way — not emotion so much as the reflection of emotion in a mirror. The voices were all muted. The laughter seemed an echo of another time. The occasional knock of bowl on bowl was soothing. The men and women moved from end to end, turning back upon themselves like sand in an hourglass, measuring a morning.

  Seeing Martin and Alice Kerr among them, I was tempted to leave. They were playing with another elderly couple, a bald, brown, smiling man and a grey-haired woman whose roundness remained attractive, as if her femininity had just matured in the cask. They all seemed so happily preoccupied with one another that I had misgivings about disturbing them. The lives of Martin and Alice had surely earned them this time to play in the innocent light. They didn’t need me putting my private cloud between them and the sun.

  And yet. The old, like children, can disarm us while they keep their own weapons handy. I don’t think I’ve ever known age to perform a character transplant on anyone. The old are usually who they were with less energy to express it. The rectitude of the aged is often just the fancy clothes in which incapacity likes to dress up.

  I watched Martin and Alice. Their togetherness looked as cosy as an advertisement for an endowment policy. But I knew something about the terms of the contract, what their undisturbed present had cost in the past. Martin had been a building contractor and a friend of many local councillors. The word was that the two aspects of his life hadn’t always been kept effectively apart. There had been several stories about contracts won through political influence rather than the competitiveness of the tender. I didn’t know the truth of the stories but, knowing Martin, I could see that, if they were fiction, they were in the realistic mode. They emerged very convincingly from his nature.

  Martin was one of the smiling ruthless. Self-interest and callousness had been so effectively subsumed in his nature that they emerged as a form of politeness. He never raised his voice because he hadn’t enough self-doubt to make it necessary. He could listen calmly to opinions violently opposed to his own because he never took them seriously. He offered the conventional forms of sympathy effortlessly because there was no personal content to mean they might not fit. He seemed to me one of what was, in my experience, a depressingly large species, those who use manners not as a means of facilitating serious human contact but as a way of forbidding it. They spend their lives coming in an emotional condom in case they breed with life and create something they can’t control. Most of all, I hate the way they can sterilise the lives of those around them.

  It was my feeling that he had done that with Alice. I liked her a lot. My sense of their relationship came from the time of Scott and Anna’s wedding and a few family get-togethers since and things heard from Scott and Anna. The evidence wasn’t extensive but it was firm. How long does it take to analyse a vacuum?

  I recognised the frozen solidity of Martin’s unexamined attitudes and the way Alice could see wistfully beyond them but couldn’t quite get out, a maiden trapped in someone else’s castle that was moated with stagnant water. I had always enjoyed her company. She was a warm and open woman. But Martin’s presence tended to sit on her spontaneity like a scold’s bridle. What had heightened my awareness of her position was my worry for Scott. I thought I saw the potential for a reverse image of her parents’ relationship in Anna’s marriage to my brother. If Scott had the same openness as Alice, Anna was her father’s daughter. Self-interest followed her everywhere like a minder, telling her feelings where it was safe to go. I had feared her calculation would always outmanoeuvre Scott’s impetuosity.

  Watching from my seat, I remembered something I had said to Jan before leaving Glasgow on Monday. Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst of us flourish? Maybe I had found a clue. I could think of one reason why people as potentially rich in life as Alice and Scott seemed to fare less well and be apparently less successful than Martin and Anna. Those who love life take risks, those who don’t take insurance. But that was all right, I decided. Life repays its lovers by letting them spend themselves on it. Those who fail to love it, it cunningly allows very carefully to accrue their own hoarded emptiness. In living, you won by losing big, you lost by winning small.

  But the grandeur didn’t have to be external. As I had seen in Scott a big spirit, I saw in Alice a person of some stature. Her husband might be the public success but she had the substance. Her vulnerability meant that life could still take her by surprise, make moments to remember, leave room where dreams still unfulfilled could grow. The size of the humanity is the size of the person. I was surprised I could make out Martin from this distance.

  I saw him look across and do a double-take. He appeared not to say anything to the others. He went on playing. A couple of minutes later, Alice noticed me. She simply walked off the bowling green and came towards me, saying something to the others over her shoulder. In those two instinctive responses, my sense of two distinct natures had been defined.

  ‘Jack, Jack,’ she said as I stood up. We embraced. ‘I thought I had seen a ghost there. You reminded me so much of Scott. Poor Scott. Listen. I’m sorry about the funeral.’

  She and Martin had attended but had left with Anna without our having a chance seriously to talk.

  ‘We had to accept Anna’s way of doing things that day. I don’t think she could cope.’

  I sat back down and she sat beside me.

  ‘You’d better finish your game,’ I said.

  ‘To hell with it,’ she said. ‘It was the last end anyway. They can finish it without me. I don’t think my amazing skills will be missed. Poor Scott. I can’t believe it. I think of him so much. How are you coping?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see you, Alice. You’re looking well.’

  The others had abandoned the game. Martin was coming towards us.

  ‘But what are you doing here?’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw you there.’

  ‘I’m looking for Anna,’ I said.

  ‘Anna’s not here,’ Martin said.

  His handshake wasn’t a welcome. It was a formal declaration of opposition. What was to follow was a kind of extended psychological tag-wrestling match. If he gave me no information, he won. If I found out where Anna was, I did. The other couple, it seemed, were on his team.

  ‘I’m sorry we can’t wait,’ Martin said. ‘We’re having lunch with Bert and Jenny.’

  Alice, it seemed, was on my side.

  ‘Jack can come with us,’ she said. ‘Can’t you, Jack?’

  Of course, I could. I liked her move. She had used his own weight against himself. Martin’s only substance was politeness. They had booked lunch in Ednam House. While they went into the clubhouse to collect jackets and change their shoes, I drove on ahead.

  Ednam House: a monument to my father’s sense of Kelso. While I waited for them in the lounge, my old man’s ghost sat with me, saying, ‘See what Ah mean?’ I did, I did. While I sipped my soda and lime, I heard English voices crested like old school ties and native voices in which the confusedly rich
broth of Scottishness was passed through strained vowels until it became the thinnest of gruels. There was much talk of horses. Something was happening today at Floors Castle, maybe a gymkhana. I remembered something that’s often troubled me about where I come from. I tend to think of the Borders as the place of the horse. I like horses, especially if they’ve got Pat Eddery or Steve Cauthen up on them. But I gave up worshipping them before I was born. They’re where it was and I don’t like the way it was. It’s maybe a tribal memory. I’m sure my ancestors went on foot and had to fight the ones that sat on horses. And maybe in my heart I’m still fighting them.

  Four people close at hand were discussing the Royal Family in a very familiar way. How can people do that? Who knows who they are? Do they know who they are? It’s the King Lear syndrome. As soon as people bow or curtsey to you, how can you work out what they think? The existential mirror that is other people’s eyes becomes misted.

  The others arrived and fitted in perfectly, except for Alice. Bert was divorced and Jenny was a widow. They had only met six months ago and they were getting married in the summer. They were nice enough but they seemed to have started the honeymoon early. They were at that stage of conspiratorial involvement that finds the rest of the world a slightly droll irrelevance, eliciting suppressed giggles and secret smiles. There could have been something endearing about their born-again adolescence if Martin hadn’t been so patently making use of it.

  ‘How about these two?’ he kept saying. ‘Aren’t they something?’

  Alice and I agreed with Martin. Bert and Jenny smiled at each other. Martin agreed with Martin. But nobody specified what the something was. My own theories about what they were tended to darken as the meal progressed. Martin was making very sure that I could find no way to introduce the melancholy purpose of my visit and talk about Scott’s death. It would have felt like turning up in a hearse to drive the blushing bride to the wedding. Every time Alice and I threatened to make serious contact, Martin invited us to appreciate how Jenny was giving Bert a forkful of her salmon or Bert was offering Jenny a taste of lamb.

  Feeling excluded for so long, I had been tuning in occasionally to the talk at some of the tables around us. It didn’t help. So much of it sounded like variations on the same theme. Just as Bert and Jenny were telling each other, so that we could listen in, about the wonderful house they had offered for, so a boy nearby was explaining that, if he could maintain his saving pattern for three more years, he could buy a Porsche. The different conversations had an underlying coherence, like an orchestra tuning up to play the same music, probably ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

  Come the coffee, I had had it. I wanted a polite way out that took the information with me.

  ‘Well,’ I said. I nodded to Bert and Jenny. ‘It’s been nice meeting you. I’ve got to go. But listen. Let me get this. It’ll do as a kind of engagement present.’

  There was some polite demurring. But Martin liked the idea. Perhaps it proved to his friends that I wasn’t entirely a boor. I certainly hadn’t charmed them too much so far. Now that I had Martin relaxing his guard I said it.

  ‘I want to catch up with Anna today. Is she living near here?’

  Martin looked at Alice.

  ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Anna’s trying to get over things.’

  ‘Martin,’ I said. ‘So am I.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’

  ‘I need to try to understand what’s happened.’

  ‘I doubt if Anna knows.’

  ‘She knows more than me for sure.’

  ‘Perhaps we should let bygones be bygones.’

  ‘If I needed a wayside pulpit, Martin,’ I said, ‘I could’ve got one without driving this far.’

  ‘Edinburgh,’ Alice said. ‘It’s Jack’s brother. It’s been a month. He needs to talk about it.’

  She told me the address.

  ‘It’s an apartment,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  I shook hands with the others and kissed Alice. I was sorting things out with the waiter when Alice left the table and came up to me.

  ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘There’s something else. Do you know a man called David Ewart?’

  I’m one of those people who vaguely imagine they’ve heard almost every name before. I fed it into the amazing computer of my mind and it came up blank.

  ‘He lives here. In Kelso. Runs a pottery.’

  ‘The Kelso Pottery.’

  ‘No. That’s long established. This is another one. More recent.’

  She told me where it was.

  ‘I met him about a week ago in the street. He used to know Anna quite well when they were younger. I was telling him about Scott’s death. He said he met Scott when he was a student. I think when they were both students. It seemed to make a big impression on him. I don’t know what you’re doing. But I suppose you’re trying to sort out your image of Scott. So that you can live with it. I think I’ve been doing that myself. It might help you to talk to David Ewart.’

  ‘Alice,’ I said. ‘I’ve always believed in you.’

  ‘So do I. Sometimes.’

  She went back to the table and I paid the waiter. I asked him to take over a bottle of champagne. I think I felt guilty about not appreciating other people’s happiness enough. But I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t sure what I was inviting them to celebrate.

  For I hadn’t liked being there. Looking for the pottery, I found a phrase that helped me to understand why: urbane deprivation, the condition of being so sophisticated that you plumb the nature of most other people’s experience out of your life like waste. Your attitudes are so glib and self-assured and automatic, you lose the necessary naivety that is living. That way, you eat everything and taste nothing.

  The pottery shop offered shelter from that feeling. It was dimly lit and full of shelves on which glazed artefacts sat — pots and bowls and ornaments and ashtrays. Whoever worked here was making a simple daily contract with his living. I wandered around. A woman came through from the back. She was wearing a smock and flip-flops. She had careless hair. She smiled at me and went behind the cash-desk, waiting. I selected a green ashtray and went up to her. She smiled again.

  ‘On holiday?’ she said.

  ‘No. I was visiting people. And they told me about this place.’

  She gave me my change.

  ‘Nice to know we’re beginning to get talked about.’

  ‘Actually, David Ewart. He works here?’

  ‘That’s my husband.’

  ‘Would it be possible to speak to him?’

  ‘David!’

  Sometimes interesting truths emerge from the banal. You make a few casual remarks and they transmute inexplicably into passwords and there is called forth a message that will matter to you till you die. The messenger needn’t be elaborately dressed.

  David Ewart was wearing sandals, jeans and a sweater. He was tall and his hair and beard had decided on a merger. His eyes stared out of the darkness around them like cave-dwellers. I introduced myself and he introduced his wife, Marion, and took me into his workshop. He made three coffees. He carried one through to his wife in the front shop. He and I sat on stools and talked.

  He told me a story and I thanked him and we all said goodbye and I came away with my ashtray. As I drove towards Edinburgh, I reflected that a trip to Kelso to find out where Anna was living had yielded an altogether different and more valuable gift. The tedium of the meal in Ednam House had been worth it. Patience pays.

  For I believed I had been in a kind of antechamber to the presence of the man in the green coat.

  17

  When David Ewart was eighteen, he made a trip to Glasgow. It was perhaps his third time in the city. It was certainly his first time alone there. Everything amazed him. ‘I may have been eighteen but I hid my advancing years well. For me, travelling from Kelso to Glasgow was like taking the Golden Road to Samarkand. What would I find there?’

  He had with him the address of a ho
use in Park Road. It lay in his pocket like a visa to a new life. Anna Kerr had written it out neatly for him on a large sheet of paper which he had folded very carefully. She had also telephoned ahead to say he would be coming. She had spoken to someone called Scott Laidlaw. David Ewart had been with her during the call. The way she spoke to Scott Laidlaw suggested that she did not know him as well as she had pretended but that she would like to know him better. There was a forced familiarity in her manner.

  The address was where Scott Laidlaw and three other student friends were living. They had kept the flat on during the summer and, now that a new academic year was about to begin, they were moving out. David Ewart was starting out on the journey they were completing. He was to attend the Glasgow School of Art and he was checking the flat out for himself and three others. He felt important to be the one making the decision on behalf of the four of them.

  He decided to walk from the railway station. He did not know where Park Road was but it was a bright September day and he wasn’t sure how expensive a taxi would be or if taxi-drivers could be expected to know Park Road. Besides, to walk in the city was an adventure.

  ‘I learned three things fast. The first was how self-confident architecture can be. I mean, this was before old Glasgow got her face-lift. But I loved those big, dark buildings. “We know the story,” they seemed to be saying. The people who built those places knew who they were all right. The second was just the energy of the place. My pulse began to quicken. Like plugging into a generator. The third thing was the people. I thought cities were supposed to be anonymous. Everybody I stopped for directions related to me right away. Nobody spoke over their shoulder. Some of them might’ve looked at me as if I’d stepped out a spaceship. But they looked at me. “Christ, ye’re well oot yer road here, son.” “Park Road? That’s no’ a walk, pal. Ye book a flight for that yin.” It was love at first patter. Three different people went out of their way with me. They were like Indian scouts escorting you through their bit of the territory. See when I retire? I think I’ll reverse the process. This is where I work. But I’ve a notion. If I can get Marion to come with me. Check out in Glasgow. Die among humane noise.’