Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Thanks, Carla,’ Anna said. ‘You know where the biscuits are.’

  Carla went out. Anna sat down.

  ‘You want to sit down?’ she said to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Anna. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Scott.’

  ‘Let’s wait till Carla comes back,’ she said.

  ‘Anna. What is this? My brother’s dead. I’d like to talk about him. Who needs third-party insurance? It’s a conversation I want. Not a lawyer’s meeting. We both loved the same person at one time. That’s our connection. What can be the harm in that?’

  ‘Let’s just wait, please.’

  She was studying the ornate fireplace as if it was an Open University programme. She made no immediate further attempt to talk. Neither did I. If they had special house rules here, let’s wait and find out what they were. As I sat, I confirmed what had occurred to me when I saw Carla in the sitting-room. Anna had decided to be in when I came so that she could meet me in a controlled environment. Carla was the thermostat. Whatever Anna thought of me, she knew I was persistent. To avoid me now was to have to confront me later, perhaps when she wasn’t prepared for it. It was better that she choose the terrain and get it over with.

  The terrain was impressive enough. It was a beautiful airy room with a marvellous view that took in, in the distance, the Forth. All that stunning Edinburgh light poured into the place and made it as bright and sharp and self-delighted as a Hockney painting. The real leather furniture showed off its sheen in the glow. A reproduction mahogany desk against a wall, its green leather surface unmarred by any papers, achieved a cool definition. The three abstract paintings distilled the roofs and the shapes and colours outside and stuck them on the white walls. But there was something out of place. I decided it was Anna. The room had been here like this before she was. It fitted her the way a jock-strap would.

  While we were awaiting the coming of Carla the Protector the phone rang. I started slightly and looked at Anna. Her eyes registered and erased, swift as a well programmed computer. At the fourth ring, I spoke.

  ‘I think the phone’s ringing,’ I said.

  ‘Let it ring,’ she said.

  We did. It gave up at twelve. This was an interesting house. People spoke to each other as if you weren’t there and let phones ring twelve times, as if that’s what they were meant to do. What would happen next? Carla came in.

  She was carrying a large silver tray with a stylish coffee pot on it, three coffee-cups and saucers, crystal milk and sugar dishes and a willow-pattern plate with small biscuits. She gave no indication that the phone shouldn’t have rung twelve times without anybody answering. She smiled at Anna. Anna smiled at Carla.

  A small, complicated ceremony began. I’ll give this saucer to you. You give it to him. I’ll give this saucer to you. You keep it. I’ll leave this saucer here. I’ll keep it for me. I’ll fill out this cup of coffee, you pass it to him. Here is the milk. You pass it to him. I’ll take it back. He takes sugar? Does he? You pass it to him. It went on. I’ve had five-course meals that were served with a lot less fuss. When we were finally settled with our cups which, given the trouble it took to get them, might have been filled with the gold of the Incas, I spoke again. I had already refused a biscuit.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I said.

  ‘Actually, we do,’ Carla said. ‘This is a smoke-free zone. We’d like to keep it that way. There are children who live here.’

  ‘Do you mind if we talk?’ I said. ‘Is that all right, Anna? I mean, do we have a quorum now?’

  ‘What is it you want?’ Anna said.

  ‘Just to talk about Scott. I can’t get used to it. I don’t understand what happened at the end. I just want to make sense of what happened.’

  ‘I tried that for years. It doesn’t work.’

  ‘But you must be able to tell me something, Anna.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Remember me, Anna?’ I said. ‘I was the best man. Come on. I’m not trying to pry into your marriage. I know that’s your business. But what was it that was troubling Scott so much at the end?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘We were in different worlds.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can tell me?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  We sat and said nothing. It had been a long way to travel to exchange silences. Carla was holding a biscuit which seemed to be as full of detail as an Elizabethan miniature. In a place as cold as that all you can do is try to light a fire with whatever comes to hand.

  ‘Hell,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe this.’

  But the silence outvoted me two to one.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s not actually have a conversation. But do you mind if I ask you some questions? All you have to do is answer. Monosyllables welcome. All right?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Do you know who the man in the green coat is?’

  Anna glanced at Carla in elaborate amazement.

  ‘Shall we take your pulse?’ Carla said.

  ‘The man in the green coat,’ I said.

  ‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ Anna said.

  ‘Have you heard of him?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘Are you sure? He seems to have meant an awful lot to Scott. He wrote things down about him. He must have mentioned him to you sometime.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  Who had? Maybe Sanny Wilson had been drunk. No. Ellie Mabon had heard of him, too. But I was beginning to feel like someone trying to fill in a census-form for the invisible man. Not known at this address. The rest of my questionnaire didn’t yield much more in the way of significant answers. It was full of dismissive strokes where the words should have been. Not applicable, not applicable.

  Fast Frankie White?

  Unknown.

  Sandy Blake?

  Unknown.

  Dave Lyons?

  Known but hardly.

  David Ewart?

  Known at one time but not now.

  Why sell the house?

  To get away.

  Why Edinburgh?

  Why not?

  Possible to see the boys?

  Not possible to see the boys.

  Why not possible to see the boys?

  Boys away at swimming.

  Boys at school here?

  Boys at private school here.

  Is there a toilet?

  Jackpot. Whereabouts of toilet known. Directions supplied.

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to piss or puke. I shut the door and walked up and down, grimacing at the ceiling. I mouthed furiously at the walls and gave the print of a Degas ballet dancer the fingers. I briefly strangled a loofah. Purdah wasn’t just a Muslim tradition. Women could withdraw into it any time they chose. Behind the veil, what was there? Another veil. Relieving myself, I realised I was being careful to hit the side of the bowl, presumably in case the noise profaned their feminine ears. I felt as if I was defiling the sanctum with male urine.

  But I could hardly be doing that. For I noticed something as I washed my hands. This bathroom had been decorated for a man. I knew that instinctively because this place didn’t interest me at all. That is never the case in a bathroom which is dominated by the sense of a woman’s presence. I could go my holidays to those places. All the appurtenances of femininity intrigue me. A bathroom’s a kind of confessional, where we admit to the inescapable physicality of ourselves, own up to the nature we lie about in public. I like the secret hoard of womanhood they can hold.

  This one didn’t rate. My instinct was confirmed when I checked it out against a rational examination. There were some of what I assumed were Anna’s things on the window-ledge — perfume, a couple of fancy deodorants, hair-colouring. But that was all. It was as if she hadn’t moved in properly yet. The rest was too stark. As an interesting bathroom, this one’s Laidlaw rating was nil.

  I opened th
e mirrored door of the cabinet above the wash-hand-basin. There was a Wilkinson razor and blades, a jumble of pill bottles. There was a bottle of Aramis aftershave. I remembered Dave Lyons’ proximity in Cranston Castle House. I remembered that he worked in Edinburgh. I remembered how he could say without thinking that Anna came from the Borders. I closed the cabinet door.

  I began to wash my hands again very slowly. It gave me an excuse for waiting longer and it’s a great aid to reflection. I decided my journey hadn’t been wasted. Knowledge begins in establishing the dimensions of your ignorance. Anna had helped me to establish the dimensions of mine. She had taught me exactly what I didn’t know.

  All I knew was that she was lying. A baby with the cord not cut would have known more than she did. But what I didn’t know was why. The interesting thing was why. The interesting thing is always why.

  What did she have to hide? This house probably belonged to Dave Lyons. Was it loaned to her by someone who was just a friend in need? She wouldn’t have to hide that. Was she set up in it by a lover? Was that what she had to hide from me? But then why would she have to hide that? What the hell did it have to do with me? It couldn’t be that. Unless it was to protect Dave Lyons. Did she think I would tell his wife? But her silence seemed too massively fortified. You don’t build Fort Knox on the off-chance that someone may try to break in. You build it to make certain that nobody ever can. I thought her secret was a big one. Why did she have to hide it so determinedly?

  As I was drying my hands, the phone rang three times. I was assuming that it was all right to pick it up now that I was no longer in the room. But then it rang again, almost immediately, just once, and I was forced to revise that conclusion. It had rung twelve times when I was in the room because there were people who phoned here that Anna mustn’t speak to? They were presumably people who didn’t know she was here. Perhaps a triple ring was a signal and prepared her to pick up the phone when the call was repeated. An interesting household.

  When I came back into the living-room, Anna said, ‘Speak to you soon. ’Bye,’ and put down the receiver. I asked if I could use the phone. Nobody threatened to bar my way. I phoned the Crime Squad office and left a message for Brian and Bob Lilley. I left a pound note beside the phone.

  ‘I’ll leave you the money for that, Anna,’ I said.

  Anna was standing in the middle of the room. Carla rose to join her. I think they were telling me something.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Anna. Carla. It’s been a gas. Let’s do it again some time. When we’re all dead.’

  ‘That’ll be soon enough for us,’ Carla said.

  That Carla was good at it. I wouldn’t have liked to be her husband and be found in a compromising situation. She would probably feed you through a mincer. We parted. Nobody cried.

  Isn’t what people don’t say so interesting? I had plenty of time to contemplate how interesting it was as I tried to negotiate Princes Street. I hadn’t arrived anywhere with Anna. But I had increased my determination to travel on. Her behaviour was more full of questions than Trivial Pursuits. Another small one occurred to me. Who had warned her that I was coming? Dave Lyons? But how would he know? Her father? Or had her father told Dave Lyons, who told her? With someone as well hidden as Anna, a lot of things were possible.

  I studied Edinburgh Castle. The evening traffic of Princes Street was moving slowly enough to let me do a painting of Edinburgh Castle. It was a strange place, I decided. There was the uncompromising ruggedness of the rock and growing out of it, like a natural extension, the old battlements. But I knew that if you saw it from a different angle — say, Castle Street — you would notice the more modern addition to it, like a genteel country house. It was maybe a fair symbol of Scotland right enough, of our duality. It would certainly have been fitting as Anna’s coat-of-arms, and perhaps mine as well, though I hoped not. See how what it has been grows incomprehensibly into what it is, survives by denying itself, as if the root of a thistle should nourish a rose.

  19

  I decanted the water carefully into the whisky and watched them quarrel in the glass. Let us not rush pleasure. It was my first of the day and my last of the day, all I could allow myself when driving. I take a lot of water in my whisky. I think I’m trying to convince my liver that I don’t really drink. Down there, whatever metabolic foremen are on shift may be confused. ‘It’s all right, boys. He’s into the water again. We can relax. There’s just a tincture of something in it.’ By the time they’ve worked out what’s going on, the crisis is over. Danger multiplies in the knowledge of itself, through panic.

  I sat and watched the clouds pass in the mixture. Clear weather followed. I lifted my drink. Proust had his madeleine. I had my whisky. As I sipped, I saw this pub on countless other occasions and tuned into long, rambling conversations and wandered again through labyrinthine nights. Memory was held in a glass. Why do I drink? To remember.

  I suppose I had chosen the Admiral as the place to meet Brian and Bob because of the associations it had for me. I’ve known a lot of pubs in Glasgow. I could gantry-stare for Scotland. But no bar has meant more to me than the Admiral.

  Since I left University at the end of my first year, suffering from irrelevance-fatigue, a group of us had been meeting here once a month or so. Those innumerable nights began with myself and Tom Docherty, whom I knew from school in Graithnock. We had been joined over the years by various others but the hard core remained as Tom and myself, Vic Vernon and Ray Harrison. For more than twenty years, give or take long furloughs when one or more of us was out of the country, we had been coming here to discuss the books we had been reading, the lives we were living, politics, ideas, relationships. Those times were important in my life.

  Tonight I sat alone and felt that the company of the others would have helped, especially Tom. If Morag Harkness thought I was mad, she hadn’t met Tom Docherty. Come to think of it, I hadn’t met him lately myself. His marriage had broken up, too, and he had vanished into a bedsit somewhere in Glasgow. Vic was trying to find out where he was. He was a writer and I assumed he must be writing now, doing what he called ‘unravelling my entrails’. His grandfather, Tam Docherty, had been a legend in Graithnock before we were born, a street-fighter for justice. I sometimes thought Tom had carried the family tradition on to the verbal plane. It helped me a little just to think that he was somewhere nearby, trying to wrestle his experience into meaning. I wasn’t the only obsessive in town. I toasted Tom with the last of my whisky, missing him.

  For the moment I would have to settle for the less sympathetic presences of Brian Harkness and Bob Lilley. The way they were looking at me as they came in wasn’t promising. Bob put his hand on my forehead.

  ‘Do you want a second opinion?’ Brian said.

  When I came back with the drinks, Bob suggested to me, as he had more than once, that it was perhaps the soda and lime that was clouding my judgment.

  ‘It could be the sudden shock to your system. Taking in substances it’s not used to.’

  ‘I’ve had my quota. I’ve got to drive back to Graithnock tonight.’

  ‘You’re still not finished down there?’ Brian said. ‘I thought when you phoned us to meet you here, you had recovered. And you were back to stay in the real world.’

  ‘It feels real enough where I’ve been. Full of deceit and lies. That’s the real world, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the same place we’ve been lately, anyway,’ Bob said.

  Brian was studying me with some curiosity.

  ‘So you drove up here from Graithnock just to talk to us? That’s quite touching, Jack.’

  ‘No, I came through here from Edinburgh. I thought since I was passing through, I could catch up with you.’

  ‘Edinburgh? What were you up to there?’

  ‘That’s where Anna is. I was talking to her.’

  They exchanged looks that were a serious version of Bob’s hand on my forehead. I imagined they were thinking of me encroaching on the widow’s grief. They di
dn’t realise you’d have to find it first.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘What’s the story with you two? You look as if you’ve been up to something more fruitful than me.’

  They had a flush of purposefulness on them, the look of people who are convinced of the importance of what they’re doing. Bob, with his healthy, open-air appearance, might have been happy with the way things were going on the farm. Brian, younger and more citified, might have had a good day at the office. I felt a moment of envy, like a failed alchemist looking on at two happy dispensing chemists.

  ‘Jack,’ Bob said. ‘More fruitful than you? Ploughing the Sahara would be more fruitful work than you’re up to.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Everybody knows that. But you.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘When? When will we see? How long before you just admit that Scott’s dead and leave it at that? Now you’re chasing up Anna, for God’s sake. Get a grip.’

  ‘Leave it, Bob.’

  ‘You take a week off work to do this? Why not just take a holiday?’

  ‘You could use one,’ Brian said. ‘You really could.’

  I caught unmistakably the modulations of prepared speeches. They were a duet.

  ‘How about it, Jack?’ Bob said. ‘Give yourself a break for a few days.’

  ‘You’ve done what you can,’ Brian said.

  I imagined them setting up their advice bureau between them before they came into the pub. I hate rehearsed scenes.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ve left my tolerance for lectures in my other clothes. Just give me what you have about Fast Frankie and I’ll piss off.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ Brian said. ‘What’s Frankie White got to do with anything?

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out, for Christ’s sake. To do that it would help to talk to him. And if I want to talk to him, it would be useful to meet him. And if I want to meet him — ’

  ‘Kentish Town,’ Brian said.

  ‘Kentish Town? Thanks. That really narrows it down. Brian, we both thought he was in London. Kentish Town’s in London, right enough. But is that as close as we get?’