Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

‘He was married?’

  ‘Aye. Betty. Two boys.’

  ‘They still live here?’

  ‘Three streets away.’

  ‘Where exactly?’

  Frankie was staring at me.

  ‘You’re no’ goin’ there?’

  ‘That was the idea.’

  ‘Come on. What’s the point of that?’

  ‘Frankie. There’s things I need to know. I still don’t know what Scott had to do with all this. Do you?’

  ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Maybe Betty Scoular has.’

  ‘Rather you than me,’ Frankie said. ‘Betty never liked me anyway. She’s a smashin’ big wumman, right enough. But Ah’ll admire her from a distance. Especially now. Ah just hope she doesny know Ah’m here. Though Ah suppose she’s bound to. If thoughts could kill, they’d be buryin’ me soon, not ma mother.’

  I asked him where she lived and he told me how to get there.

  ‘You’ve kept your bit of the bargain,’ I said. ‘You want me to speak to your mother?’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Why should I mind?’

  ‘Well, Ah suppose Ah’m askin’ ye to lie.’

  ‘I’ve only two rules about lying, Frankie,’ I said. ‘Never tell them to yourself, if you can help it. Never tell them to anybody else unless they’re benign. I’ve known lies that were gifts. A dying woman who wants to believe she looks the way she looked when she was eighteen. You going to tell her she’s wrong? Of course, you’re not. You’re going to ask her for a date, aren’t you? Anyway, who said you’re the worst. I can talk nice about you without choking, don’t worry, Francis.’

  We went upstairs. There were two lamps with floral shades lit in Mrs White’s room. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, while Sarah Haggerty talked to her from a cushioned wicker-work chair. Frankie introduced me as an old friend who had dropped in. Sarah said she would have to be getting round to her own house to check on things but would come back later. She said cheerio to me. Frankie went downstairs with her, perhaps to see her out, perhaps to let my creative version of him flourish without the inhibiting presence of reality. I sat down in the chair from which Sarah had risen. I smiled at Mrs White.

  She had a face like a handful of bones and those pilgrim eyes of the dying. Most of the essential luggage of her life had gone on ahead and here she was waiting at a wayside station among strangers who had other business. The living are all strangers to the dying. It’s just that they’re too polite to tell us so. They are kind to our crass familiarities that mistake them for someone else. They do not tell us that we are the bores who have crashed a party for one, seeking company for our own terrified loneliness we have suddenly recognised in their eyes. The dying arrive at true politeness. Even if they scream, they only scream in so far as it is necessary. For who else can establish the rules for what is theirs alone? They cannot be unkind to us, for they leave us alive when they are not. She was kind to me.

  ‘Hullo. Mrs White?’

  ‘Hullo, son.’

  Her eyes seemed to be taking an inventory of the room, not with any particular urgency but in an offhand way. It wasn’t all that important but she might as well get it done with. Her look lingered on the curtains. But it wasn’t possible to tell why. She looked at me. She knew immediately who I was supposed to be.

  ‘So you’re a friend of Frank’s.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He’s an awfu’ man, is he no’?’

  ‘He’s all that.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Ah haveny seen you in here before, have Ah?’

  ‘Ah’ve been away for years.’

  ‘Ah sometimes think everybody’s been away for years, son. Whit are we gonny do wi’ him?’

  ‘Frank? He’ll be fine, Mrs White. He’s a good man. An’ he’s doin’ well these days. Don’t you worry.’

  ‘D’ye think so, son?’

  ‘Ah do, Ah do. Yer son’s a success. He’s a much respected man.’

  Her face enlivened slightly. We had found an old tune she liked and we could play it together, maybe evoking happier days when even Frankie looked like a coming man instead of what he was now, a shifting mirage of promises that never got any nearer.

  As we talked, I realised I knew her. I should do. I had seen her often enough, on buses, in shops, in innumerable houses of my youth. She was my auntie, a woman who lived along the street, a friend of my mother. She was one of a courageous multitude of women who without too much fuss made all of our lives better than they would otherwise have been. I found it no hardship to tell her many lies about her son. In any case, they weren’t lies to her. They were the truth of her dream and it was a dream that she had earned and that no one should take from her.

  We exhausted the topic of Frankie’s wonderfulness, at least as far as I was concerned. I had started to feel that if we went on much longer I might finish up believing it myself. I saw how tired she was and said I had to be going. She held out her hand and I took it.

  I felt the painful loss of any person of true worth being taken from us. I think for a moment I half-believed that if I could hold her hand hard enough I could keep her here. Her hand was precious with old skin and fading warmth. I did not know what to do. I leaned across and kissed her because her brave ordinariness was so beautiful and because she was so utterly of our kind and because that is what happened.

  Frankie was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘You want to earn her?’ I said. ‘Be better. I’ll try as well.’

  I came out and closed the door.

  22

  Betty Scoular was like an impressive house in bad repair and she didn’t seem bothered, as if the owner was away from home and she was only leasing it. She was tall and striking. But she wore a jumper that was beginning to gather small nubs of rolled wool and her skirt sat slightly asymmetrically on her hips. She had slippers on. The few flecks of grey in her hair seemed to have gone unchallenged for some time. The eyes watched me dully as she stood in the open doorway. She said nothing.

  ‘Mrs Scoular?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. My name’s Jack Laidlaw.’

  The expression of venom the name evoked in her face took me aback. It was like watching someone you didn’t know stick pins in your effigy. Her eyes found a focus. The lens was malice.

  ‘You’re a bit late, are you not?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Dan’s three months dead. Three months.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s nice. I don’t see your brother with you, anyway. Is he too ashamed to come?’

  ‘Mrs Scoular. My brother couldn’t make it. A bad case of death.’

  Her eyes cleared suddenly with surprise. I had arrived in front of her at last. The world for a moment became more than her widowhood. Her bad thing hadn’t ended all the bad things. They were still happening to other people. She found it hard to believe. Perhaps her grief had made her a pedant of its forms. This was something at least she was interested in.

  ‘How?’ she said.

  ‘He was run down by a car.’

  She closed her eyes and put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Does it never end? They must have known that he knew.’

  Hope can take strange forms. As she spoke, I had a sense of having arrived at the meaning of Scott’s death. He had known something he shouldn’t and had been killed for it. The quarrel with Fast Frankie White had demonstrated that he knew. Fast Frankie had told Matt Mason. Matt Mason had done the rest. It was simple. It was clean. And it absolved the rest of us. His death was a crime in which we weren’t involved. But that self-delusion lasted about three seconds. I had been told about the driver of the car that killed Scott. He was a newsagent with three children, who would never live as casually again as he had lived before. There was no way he had been part of a murder.

  Betty Scoular seemed to have forgotten about me. She was staring past me into the street. Perhaps she was
having difficulty associating all that had happened recently with the place where she thought she had been living.

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’

  She turned away and I came in after her. If I hadn’t closed the door, it wouldn’t have been closed. She was standing in the living-room. It might have been a street she didn’t know and her looking for directions. The room was well furnished but untidy. It was where a purposeful woman had begun to lose her purpose. It was essentially tasteful and attractive but the essence had been diluted somewhat with abandoned newspapers, books open on a table, clothes over a chair. She sat down in an armchair. I came and sat across from her.

  ‘Mrs Scoular,’ I said. ‘Why were you so angry with me at the door?’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘I’ve never met you before. I didn’t know of you until today.’

  ‘But you knew Dan all right.’

  ‘I never met your husband. I’ve got a vague idea I’ve heard Scott speaking about him.’

  ‘A vague idea? You bastard. You can sit there and talk about vague ideas.’

  ‘It’s all I can do, Mrs Scoular. I’ve got no choice.’

  ‘Scott told you the danger Dan was in. And what did you do about it? You’re even too late for the funeral.’

  ‘Scott knew about this before your husband died? How?’

  ‘How do you think? Dan told him. So that he could pass it on to you. His policeman brother. The great protector.’

  No wonder she hated me. I had found out more about my brother than I wanted to. I couldn’t believe he would renegue on such a crucial commission. For Scott’s sake, I was hesitant to tell her the truth. But there were enough lies and silence already surrounding this matter and, anyway, filial love was not quite at the full just then.

  ‘Scott didn’t tell me,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me. But he didn’t.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, turning a vowel into a brief keening.

  She didn’t apologise for maligning me in error. Why should she? That sound from her mouth came from far beyond the shores of etiquette. Where she was, I imagined, was in that place after a dying where you keep coming upon small, related fragments of the fact that give you yet another perspective on its enormity — the shoes that will never again be worn, the favourite cup, the letter addressed to the person whose eyes are closed forever. Scott was yet another one who had let her husband down. The terribleness of Dan Scoular’s death was renewed in that attendant detail. We teach ourselves the worst things by degrees. They are too big to be absorbed at once and so we memorise the pieces as we find them until we can bear to look at last and see our sadness whole. She had stumbled on another fragment in the meaning of her grief that she was trying to put together. She was sitting wondering where it fitted in.

  I was lost inside my own wonder. Why does every answer ask another question? I now knew how you could die twice. By representing in my brother’s mind someone who had died before. I knew why Scott had been so angry with Fast Frankie White. I knew a lot more than I had known when I set out from Glasgow — which seemed more than three days ago. But everything I knew resolved itself now into a more puzzling question: why had Scott not told me what Dan Scoular had asked him to tell me?

  That drunken moment in my flat came back to me. Scott had sat up on the floor in the early hours of the morning. There was something he had to tell me. It became ‘I am leaving Anna.’ But was that what it had truly been? I recalled the tension in his face before he spoke, the prelude to a most difficult thing to say. Perhaps he had failed to say it. The immediate relaxation on his face after he had threatened to leave Anna reminded me now of the expression people have when a joke successfully defuses extreme tension. He must have been leaving Anna a hundred times. It was a safe diversionary tactic that brought him back to where he had been for so long, allowing him to subside again into sleep. What was it he had almost confronted then? The need to tell me about Dan Scoular?

  And if it were, why couldn’t he say it? That was a conundrum I couldn’t see past. There was no reason he couldn’t tell me, that I could think of. Except, it slowly came to me, one reason. The reason was guilt.

  I have been long enough wandering through the shadows of other people’s lives — the violence, the betrayals and the hurt — to be aware of the power of guilt. It is often a malignant power, for it is those desirous of the good who feel it most and, when they do, it can intimidate them into conformity with natures smaller than their own. It can make them so ashamed of themselves that they condone the shameful acts of others. Self-contempt leaves you ill-equipped to challenge the immorality of anyone else.

  Towards the end, Scott had been expert in self-contempt. Had guilt closed his mouth? But, in my imagination, I could not see any connection between what Scott might have done and the kind of threat Dan Scoular had faced.

  ‘Mrs Scoular,’ I said. ‘How did Scott know your husband?’

  Renewed contemplation of her misery seemed to have gentled her rage against things for the moment. She shook her head.

  ‘They had met in Graithnock. Playing indoor football. Dan liked him so much. How could your brother let him down like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t believe it. You’re sure your husband told him? He didn’t just say that he would?’

  ‘He told him. I remember the night Dan said that he’d told him. I remember he said, “Should be some kinda deterrent.” You’ve been a name in this house for a while.’

  ‘I wish I’d known.’

  ‘I wish you’d known Dan,’ she said. ‘I mean, I don’t kid myself. We had our troubles. And maybe the marriage wouldn’t even have lasted. But nothing would’ve stopped me loving him. In whatever way it turned out it had to be. I couldn’t not, in a way. You don’t see two of him in your life. I disagreed with him a lot. But then I disagree with the rain. It doesn’t stop it raining. He was himself. He went wherever what he believed in took him. If it was over the edge of a cliff, that’s where it was. And it was over the edge of a cliff. Wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’d like to have met him.’

  ‘Yes, you would. After it, I resented him so much for it. I still do when I remember to. Leaving the boys and me like this. In some way, I’ll never forgive him. But then I knew I wasn’t marrying an insurance policy. I’ve sometimes thought, “What has he left the boys?” But money’s not the only inheritance. Maybe theirs is not a bad one.’

  Talking a kind of epitaph had calmed her, like paying another visit to the grave. I saw briefly how she must have been and how no doubt she would be again when she had won her way out of her present pain. Her attractiveness was beyond cosmetics. It came from the natural grace of a strong presence. She looked at me steadily.

  ‘How do you know about this if your brother didn’t tell you?’

  ‘When Scott died,’ I said, ‘I wanted to find out why. I came down to Graithnock to ask around. I heard about what had happened to your husband.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  It occurred to me that Frankie White didn’t want her to know he was in Thornbank. Frankie had enough problems of his own.

  ‘A couple of people in Graithnock knew about what had happened. They told me.’ I wanted to move her away from Frankie’s hide-out. ‘By the way, there was nothing suspicious about Scott’s death. It was definitely an accident.’

  ‘Are you sure? Maybe you think Dan’s was, too.’

  ‘You don’t, obviously.’

  ‘I don’t believe in the tooth fairy either. You know Matt Mason?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He killed Dan. That’s what happened.’

  ‘Yes, it has to look that way. But to do that, they would have to plan it. How would they know so much about your husband’s movements?’

  ‘It could’ve been Frankie White. Do you know him?’

  ‘I know who you mean.’

  ‘I hate him. I always will.
I could believe anything of him.’

  ‘But he’s been in London, hasn’t he?’

  ‘So what?’ She shook her head. ‘But I don’t really think it was him. There are some things even he’s not capable of. He’d be too busy saving his own skin. His poor mother. She’s dying, you know. Such a good woman. To have spawned that.’

  ‘If you’re sure it was Matt Mason,’ I said, ‘why haven’t you done something about it? Like tell the police.’

  She gave me a stone look, a rage so still and cold I was transfixed. I realised how volatile she was, living still between extremities of response, trying to find a stance towards what had happened which could hold in balance all the things she felt. The phone rang. I was glad.

  It was someone called Gordon. ‘I’m all right, Gordon,’ I heard her saying. ‘I’m all right.’ She responded quietly to whatever he was saying. ‘Not now,’ she said. She put down the phone. She crossed towards the sideboard.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ she said.

  ‘Better not. I’ve got the car there.’

  ‘Well, I will.’

  She poured a large vodka and topped it up with lemonade.

  She came and sat back down opposite me.

  ‘The boys have lunch at school,’ she said.

  I had a glimpse of the little deals she must have worked out between the pressure she was under and the demands made on her by her former standards. It would be all right to have a drink late morning if her sons didn’t see her.

  ‘I don’t usually do this,’ she said. ‘Just sometimes.’

  No doubt the way my presence reopened hurts in her had helped to make this one of the sometimes. She sipped her drink. I thought she had forgotten what I said. But she hadn’t.

  ‘I sometimes think nobody else notices what is happening,’ she said. ‘You ever get that feeling? It’s like the rest of the world is mad. It carries on regardless. Did I tell the police? What planet did you come from? They did a lot for Dan, didn’t they? Anyway, enough people in Thornbank told the police. This village knew what had happened. And this village loved Dan Scoular. I sometimes think they loved him to death. They encouraged him to try and stand for more than one person can stand for. And he died of it. I don’t blame them. They’ve done their best. And they’ll forget. I won’t forget.’