Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Jack. Why does darkness fascinate you so much?’

  I put my jacket on and stood there. I tried to answer honestly.

  ‘Maybe because I see it almost everywhere,’ I said. ‘And a lot of people trying to ignore it.’

  She lay and I stood with that statement stretching between us like a terrible distance. I tried to cross it. I went to the bed and bent down and kissed her face. Her cheek was like ice beneath my lips. It didn’t thaw.

  ‘I’ll see you tonight?’ I said.

  ‘Will you?’ she said. ‘I don’t know if either of the people we were last night can be there.’

  I came out and closed the door and stood a moment on her balcony. It looked like being a nice day. I wished I could have shared it with her.

  34

  Even for a messenger of darkness, which is presumably what Jan would have seen Melanie McHarg as being, practical preparations have to be made. At the hotel I showered and shaved and dressed. I ordered continental breakfast for two — orange juice, croissants and coffee — to be delivered at ten o’clock. It arrived a couple of minutes before Marty Bleasdale knocked at the door.

  They came in and Marty introduced us. Melanie McHarg had an appearance that caught the attention. But she was a sketch of attractiveness rather than its fulfilled image, a sketch that seemed to be undergoing erasure and alteration. Her body moved gracefully but it wasn’t the way you felt it should be. It was too fine-drawn. The features of her face needed filling out. The dark hair lacked sheen. Only the eyes were vivid. They were bright blue, honest and startlingly vulnerable. She was wearing jeans, blouse and black cotton jacket.

  Marty said, ‘Ah’ll leave you two to talk. Ah’ll be downstairs. Take it easy, Jack.’

  I nodded and he went out. We sat down at the low table. Breakfast allowed us to deflect our awkwardness into small actions. I poured the coffee. She sipped orange juice and picked at a croissant. She took neither milk nor sugar. I took both.

  ‘Thanks for coming to talk to me,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve heard of you,’ she said. ‘The people I used to mix with sometimes talked about you. They weren’t exactly fans. But they did have a grudging admiration. It made me think I could trust you.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  ‘Marty’s told you about me?’

  ‘Some,’ I said. ‘I hope you make it out of the drugs.’

  At the mention of her situation, her eyes looked even more naked. I saw how raw she must be, as if her skin didn’t quite cover her.

  ‘So do I,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’m leaving for Canada today. For a while. I’ve got a sister lives in Oshawa. It’s outside Toronto. Maybe I’ll find I’ve still got some kind of life to live.’

  ‘Of course, you have,’ I said. She looked about mid-thirties. ‘You have.’

  ‘How did you hear about me?’

  ‘I’ve got a brother just died,’ I said. ‘Thirty-eight.’

  I didn’t know why I said his age. Maybe I was still accusing the world of a misdemeanour. Her eyes stared at me with immediate compassion. She had the openness of pain to share the pain of others. We looked at each other as if we had met a while ago.

  ‘And I went down to Ayrshire. Where he lived. I suppose I’ve been trying to understand his death. And I talked to a lot of people. One of them was Fast Frankie White.’

  She began immediately and very loudly to cry. The name had unlocked her. I was astonished. I stood up and went across and put my arm round her. I was assuming she must have been involved with Frankie at one time. But it wasn’t that. As she started to talk through her tears, I realised that it wasn’t Frankie himself evoking the reaction but bigger things that his name stood as cipher for, like a phrase of a song evoking past times.

  The weeping breached her self-containment and a lot of words came out. It was an autobiography in fragments. The impromptu abstract I made of it as I listened suggested that it wasn’t exactly a unique story but it was not less moving for that.

  I could imagine how good-looking she had been in her late teens. A Glasgow jeweller whose name I knew had taken her up. His name had been in vogue in the city at the time in certain places. He would be in his late twenties then and living what passed for the fast life. There were cars and trips abroad and a lot of parties. He introduced her to many people, including Matt Mason, and to a style of living as progressive as a merry-go-round. When he jumped off, landing softly on his money, he left her there.

  Her chief talent had been her looks and she admitted she had used them. I felt that she was mourning more than lost time. She was grieving for what she had allowed time to take from her in the going.

  ‘I kept my vanity for a while,’ she said. ‘But I lost my pride.’

  ‘I’m terrified,’ she said. ‘You know what frightens me most? I’m afraid I can’t love anybody. Vanity can’t do that. Only pride can.’

  Her fear, set against the confused and broken details of her life, made a kind of sense to me. Thinking she was using other people, she had let them use her in small, seedy ways. Her vanity had been pleased by the flattery of being used. (‘I’m still attractive, I’m still liked.’) Vanity can use using but it can’t use love. One reaffirms vanity, the other calls it in question. She had become addicted to other people’s uses for her and, when they waned, she made the addiction chemical.

  Dan Scoular had happened to her between the soft dependency and the hard. She had seen him as someone she could love. When that chance went, she didn’t believe in the chances any more. He had reminded her of where she came from, values she had lost, and with his departure from her life any pretence of recapturing them went too. She knew herself a long distance from where she should have been and no way back. She settled for letting herself use Meece and Meece use her. It had been a fragile union, balanced on a needle point.

  As she mentioned Dan Scoular yet again, I gathered from her remark that she did not know he was dead. I weighed the hurt she didn’t know with the hurt she did, and I thought one might help to absorb the other. I told her. I held her shoulders while they shook like wings that had lost the power of flight but were taking a long time to accept it. She became eventually very still and very quiet.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  I released her. She took her handbag and went into the bathroom. I looked at the cold coffee. I thought of being in Rico’s with Eddie Foley. I wasn’t doing well with coffees. Maybe some year I would finish one. I rinsed out the cups in the wash-hand basin and put them on the tray. I noticed the croissant she had been plucking at. It lay in several pieces on her plate, less a meal than a blueprint for a meal.

  I was staring at the croissant when I decided. I couldn’t ask her to do what I had intended to ask her to do. She was too wounded. She had been through too much to be put through any more.

  When she came out of the bathroom, she had done her face skilfully but the make-up was a mask from behind which the eyes looked out warily. She sat back down.

  ‘How did Dan Scoular die?’ she said.

  ‘He was run down by a car.’

  ‘Run down?’

  ‘We think Matt Mason killed him. We don’t know that. But we think he did.’

  ‘And Meece?’

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  She nodded. Though the eyes were still nervous, the face set cold around them.

  ‘Why did you want to see me?’

  ‘There was something I thought of asking you to do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was probably always a wild idea. And the way you are just now, it’s just not on.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Let’s forget it.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  I told her. She stared a long time at the floor.

  ‘Could I have a drink, please?’

  ‘What do you take?’

  ‘Gin and tonic would do.’

  I broke the seal on the drinks cabinet and gave her what she wanted.r />
  ‘I think I’ll join you,’ I said.

  I found another tumbler in the bathroom. I poured out a miniature of whisky and filled it up with water. I put the empty bottles in the bin. I sat down opposite her while she thought about it.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘You should understand the details. And there’s somebody else involved.’

  I explained to her. She took another sip of her drink.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you should think longer about it.’

  ‘I’m leaving anyway,’ she said. ‘Maybe this is one way to pay my respects to Dan Scoular before I go. And Meece as well. Meece wasn’t all bad, you know.’

  We clinked glasses. I gave her some more time.

  ‘So I can phone these people?’

  She nodded. I phoned Edek Bialecki. He would come to the hotel immediately. I phoned Eddie Foley. I arranged where I wanted him to meet me. I phoned Brian Harkness and asked him to bring Bob to the hotel. Reception said they would page Mr Bleasdale and ask him to come up to the room.

  When Marty found out what we were proposing to do, he tried to dissuade Melanie. But she stayed firm. I think I went down in his estimation. He refused a drink on the grounds that he didn’t like attending wakes. The arrival of Edek made Marty disown the whole proceedings. He stood looking out of the window while we discussed things. Looking at Melanie’s jeans, Edek said she would have to change.

  ‘Ah know where we can check out some costumes. We should be able to get something.’

  ‘Make it a shroud,’ Marty said.

  35

  Davy, the disillusioned architect I had met up with again a few years ago, had a theory about houses. It is true that he expounded the theory to me when we were both drunk. It is also true that we had just finished holding a kind of conversational memorial service for Jim, our mutual friend who had been killed at nineteen when his motorbike went under a lorry. We had been remembering the preposterous hopes of that year when we were all fifteen and wandering the fields of Ayrshire with the combined imaginative vision of three Columbuses staring out at the Atlantic. Therefore, Davy’s theory may have been less coherent and perhaps more dark than he had wanted it to be. It expressed the immediacy of a sad mood as well as the general unease of a troubled life. But I think he meant it all right and I think the sober man would have ratified the findings of the drunk one.

  ‘Theatre,’ Davy had said, his forefinger tracing out an immediately vanishing pattern in the spillage on the table in the bar. The noise around him drowned his voice the way the liquid defied any shape he tried to give it. But he had found something he meant and he had to say it.

  ‘Theatre,’ Davy said. ‘That’s what houses are, you know. Just theatre. All buildings are. Charades of permanence. They’re fantasies. Fictions we make about ourselves. Right?’

  With the prescience of the drunk, I was nodding in agreement before I knew what it was he meant.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘What do the pyramids mean, for example? They’re a lie, that’s what they are. Okay? What are they supposed to mean? The immortality of the Pharaohs. Right? Are the Pharaohs immortal? Are they hell. The Pharaohs is long gone, don’t worry about it. Empty bandages and some pots of entrails. That’s the Pharaohs. So what do the pyramids really mean? Mortality. The corpses of all the people it took to build them. The pyramids are a lie. They mean the opposite of what they say.’

  He sipped a little more whisky, sending it in pursuit of his thoughts.

  ‘Well, most houses are lies, anyway. If we just built them as shelters, that would be fair enough. If we say, look, we’re a pretty feeble species and it’s cold out there and we need all the help we can get to survive, that makes sense. Let’s make wee shelters and hide in them. That’s honest. A tent’s honest. But as soon as we go past function, we’re at it. Big houses aren’t an expression of ourselves. They’re a denial of ourselves. We’re not saying, see how feeble we are, but look at how important we are. Right? We’re saying we could be here forever. We’re a permanent fixture. Houses are one of the main ways that we tell lies about ourselves. They’re public statements of security and stability and achievement that deny the private truth. They’re masks. They’re where we play out roles that aren’t us. Just theatre. Look at houses carefully.’

  I was trying to take his advice. This house in Bearsden, in Davy’s guide to house-watching, was presumably enacting a domestic comedy. It sat in soft sunshine. The well kept grass looked too green to be true. The French windows were open. Children kept spilling through them into the garden and being shepherded by adults back into the house where the party was taking place. From this distance, the performance was in mime.

  The audience consisted of four men sitting in a car parked on the hill above the house, looking down on it. We were a mixed audience, as all audiences are, each bringing his own experience, his own preoccupations, his own interpretation to what we were watching. Edek, the mechanical man, was just there for the acoustics. He was an extension of his machinery, not so much concerned about what would happen as concerned that it should happen clearly. Brian Harkness was being a bit blasé as if he just wanted the performance over without any mistakes being made. Eddie Foley, I imagined, had to be the most fraught of us. He would take the drama for real because it was real for him, a possibly life-changing moment where he was both watcher and participant.

  Myself, I suppose I was looking for a highly personal denouement to the first part of a double bill. I had another play to go to. I was aware of Michael Preston waiting to say his piece and I was hoping he hadn’t learned his lines from Dave Lyons. The scene, as they say, would be an apartment in Glasgow. There would be played out the coda to my week.

  But what would happen there was related to what happened here. They were interconnected, the legal hypocrisies reflecting the illegal ones in endlessly duplicating mirrors until they made a warren. I was hoping not just to incriminate Matt Mason but to move nearer to understanding where I had been this week, where I had been for a long time. As I looked at Matt Mason’s house, I thought of Scott’s house and Dave Lyons’ house. I thought of our house in Simshill, where Ena and I had for years enacted a marriage that was a concealment of mutual loneliness.

  Eddie Foley coughed. Nobody said anything. We were waiting for the entrance that would transform the scene for us. From our high position, we could see the taxi come along the street beneath us. As it stopped at the opening to the driveway at the front of the house, a small girl came running out of the French windows at the back, followed by Matt Mason. He was wearing slacks and a polo-neck sweater.

  The small girl seemed to be upset about something. As Matt Mason caught up with her, she stopped. Melanie McHarg stepped out of the taxi. Matt Mason put his hand on the girl’s shoulder and crouched down to talk to her. Melanie McHarg was paying the driver through his window, which is not a Glasgow idiom, since payment is usually made inside. I thought maybe she didn’t use a lot of taxis. Matt Mason straightened up and took the girl’s hand, apparently distracting her by showing her the garden. The taxi moved off. Melanie McHarg adjusted her blue lightweight coat over her wide-skirted floral dress and went out of sight towards the house.

  Matt Mason looked like any dutiful husband spending a weekend in the garden with his family. From this far, he seemed an identikit of suburban man. But my knowledge of him provided me with some harsh close-ups. I was aware that the hand gently holding that of the small girl was aggressive with expensive rings, wore wealth like a socially accepted knuckle-duster. I saw the thinning hair, the hard face, the grey irises flecked with ice that could put a frost on anything they looked at. I saw him where he was, not where he seemed to be.

  Margaret, his wife, stood at the French windows and said something to him. He let go of the girl’s hand. His wife came out into the garden. They talked briefly. He stared at the ground. He went into the house. Margaret took the girl’
s hand and followed him in.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ Brian Harkness said in a whisper.

  Even from this distance, Margaret Mason walked like a carnival of womanhood.

  ‘Bloody activate,’ Edek said. ‘Bloody activate.’

  He rolled down his rear-seat window and balanced his leather-cased receiver on the sill. He pulled out the aerial. He checked the connection to the tape-recorder on the seat, which he had insisted on telling us was a Nagra. (‘State of the bloody art, don’t worry about it.’)

  ‘Is this going to work, Edek?’ I said.

  ‘Is up to her now, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘There’s no more I can do from here. She’s got a mike in her brassiere. Connected up to a first-class transmitter. Taped to the outside of her thigh. That was hard work. Jeez, the things you have to do for your art. I even picked her wardrobe. Now it’s in the lap of the gods. Or the breast of the goddess, maybe.’

  He was doing mysterious things with some of the knobs on his machine.

  ‘I hope she hasn’t interfered with the bloody wiring,’ he said.

  The garden was empty. The building looked charming and beautiful, a picture in an estate agent’s window. Then there was a sudden crackling and the house was haunted by a dark voice.

  ‘In here. Your timing could’ve been better.’

  Rendered metallic by the recording equipment, Matt Mason’s voice was low and harsh. Abstracted from gesture or facial expression or social context, it emerged without concealment, just itself. It cut into the silence of the car like a serrated knife.

  ‘So, Melanie. To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  There was a pause. Melanie’s voice, when it came, seemed barely there. It impressed itself on the surface of the silence as delicately as fingerprints, seeming almost to fade as it happened. It made you listen intently.

  ‘Matt, I’m sorry to be bothering you.’