Strange Loyalties

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Don’t throw it,’ I said.

  Buster, with his finely honed sensitivity always aware of everything except what was going on, began to growl. Jokes seemed to be lost on him. A nuance to Buster was whether to bite your right leg or your left.

  ‘Your dog’s daft, by the way,’ I said. ‘You should get him a brain transplant. I’ll pay for it.’

  ‘Leave Buster alone. You don’t understand him. He’s got a lot of affection.’

  ‘He’s a dumb bastard. You should shave his head and tattoo National Front on it.’

  She put down the knife. She stared at the wall immediately in front of her.

  ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘Why are you so angry? It’s only a dog. And that stuff you’re asking. That’s personal. Any talks Scott and me had are between us.’

  ‘What’s this, Katie? The sanctity of the pub confessional? Who do you think I am? An income-tax inspector? I’m his brother, for Christ’s sake. I loved him.’

  ‘Do you want another cup of coffee?’ she said.

  ‘I want some answers,’ I said.

  She sighed and wiped her hands on her apron. She took a fresh cup and saucer and put them on the table across from me. She collected the percolator, filled my cup and filled her own. She replaced the percolator. She came and sat at the table. She took a cigarette from my packet, lit it and gave it across to me. I love the way a woman can make a ceremony out of a passing moment. Maybe society is a masculine distortion of reality but civilisation is feminine. I felt disarmed by small kindnesses.

  ‘What is it. Jack?’ she said.

  ‘Katie,’ I said. ‘My life’s collapsed about my ears. And I’m trying to rebuild it. Simple.’

  ‘When do men grow up? I can still see you in short trousers.’

  As if on cue, I went in the huff.

  ‘We’re in different plays,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Men and women. We’re in different plays. Women are realistic. You lot are trying to act out some grand drama that isn’t there.’

  She sipped her coffee black. She looked at me steadily. Her mood had taken off the morning and its preoccupations like so much make-up. I saw her clearly, maybe for the first time. She seemed thoughtful and understanding and slightly tired of it all. Where she had been and what she had gone through came out to settle on her face and the tension in her between her past and her refusal to give in to it gave her a dignity.

  ‘It’s like Mike,’ she said. ‘So we can’t have any children. What’s that? It’s a sad thing you learn to live with. Like a dark place in your head. But you can make brightness round about it. Not him. It’s like a holy curse to him. The world picked him out specially, it seems. To blight his life. We could’ve adopted years ago. But he had to fight things on his own terms. To prove himself. It’s too late for us now.’

  A door swung gently open on her words. Beyond it was the mustiness of dead dreams, an attic of ghostly aspirations, children’s clothes no one would ever wear. I saw her pain and the courage with which she bore it. I thought of Jan and understood her a little more clearly. She would be trying to avoid going where Katie was. She was right to try.

  ‘Mike,’ Katie said. ‘Drama, drama. Different plays.’

  Mike came into focus for me, all that bleak tenseness in him. He was a silent and furious quarrel with the world, a raging stillness. I sensed him as one of life’s obsessive litigants who, isolating one slander on his sense of himself, expends everything fruitlessly on trying to have it retracted. But I sympathised.

  ‘It’s funny, Katie,’ I said. ‘But I see it the other way round. I think it’s often women who live among melodrama. Melodrama to me’s effects exaggerated beyond their causes. I’ve known women sing opera because the arse had burned out a pan. I’m going crazy because my brother’s dead. Not because there’s a button off my shirt.’

  We looked at each other across the table, as if it was no-man’s-land, acknowledging truce.

  ‘But I love them just the same,’ I said.

  Katie smiled and leaned over and touched my hand. ‘I can tolerate you as well,’ she said. ‘Ask.’

  ‘So were there any women? With Scott.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’

  I thought of what he had been trying to say that night in my flat.

  ‘I think maybe once he came close. But I don’t know. We had lost touch a bit. For whiles we might as well have been on different continents.’

  ‘There was somebody,’ she said.

  The significance of the words materialised before me, solid as a door into a mysterious chamber of Scott’s life where I hadn’t been. It was a door I hesitated at, even as his brother. I would be rifling his privacy in his absence. But something in me needed it to open. Only Katie could do that and she wasn’t making any moves. I waited. She waited, sipping her coffee. There were rules here, I understood. You didn’t just blunder in. There was a ceremony of respect to be performed and Katie would conduct it.

  ‘I think I was the only one he told,’ she said.

  She was staring at the table, cuddling the secret to her one last time before she would release it. I thought I saw what it must have meant to her. Trying to tell people who you really are is always a kind of love letter. It invests them with importance in your life. Enlarged by Scott’s trust in her, Katie didn’t want to betray it. She had to talk herself towards sharing it with me.

  ‘I loved him in some way, you know,’ she said. ‘I think a lot of people did a bit. He could be a pain in the bum could your Scott. But even while he was doing it, you could see how vulnerable he was. I fell out with him very badly a few months back. It wasn’t like him. He didn’t come in for two weeks. You’ve no idea how much that upset me. I thought a part of my life was gone. When he walked in that door, it felt like Christmas for me. And you getting the best present you’d ever had. Oh, he could brighten the day.’

  She finished her coffee.

  ‘Her name was Ellie,’ she said suddenly. ‘She was a teacher. She didn’t have any children. That’s all I know.’

  ‘She worked beside him?’

  ‘Jack.’

  She made my name a long, slow accusation. Having admitted me to the sanctum, she didn’t want me trampling all over it.

  ‘What do you think Scott did. Jack? Show me pictures? Maybe three or four times in here, in the early hours, he mentioned her. Always just “Ellie”. No second name. And I didn’t ask for it. I know she mattered to him a lot. I know the guilt was damaging him. I know it seemed to have broken up between them. I was sharing his pain. The details weren’t what mattered. He was bleeding for somebody. Was I supposed to ask for her phone number? He needed a bandage. I was a bandage.’

  ‘But who is she? Where did she live?’

  As soon as I said it, I knew I had closed the door on myself. She stared at me as if focussing the lens on the microscope. What strange creature have we here? She spoke with carefully muted anger.

  ‘Why don’t you go to the crematorium and sift the ashes?’

  ‘If I thought it would help, I would,’ I said.

  I stared back through the lens at her. What strange creature thinks I’m a strange creature?

  She stood up and lifted her cup and lifted mine, though it wasn’t empty, and crossed to the sink and rinsed them out. She went on with making the soup. I wondered, perhaps unworthily, about Katie. Maybe her motives for not wanting to talk about the unknown Ellie were less noble than she made out. Maybe jealousy was one of them. I always suspect self-righteousness. I think it’s usually a way of cosmeticising the truth of self, like a powdered periwig on a headful of lice.

  Katie had brought her pot of soup to the boil and turned it down to simmer.

  ‘Buster,’ she said.

  Buster recognised his name. He wasn’t as dumb as I had thought. Katie took the leash that was draped round a hook on the kitchen door.

  ‘If that starts to boil over,’ she said, ‘turn it down some more, will you? I’m taki
ng Buster out to clean himself.’

  I thought about the euphemism when they were gone. It was an expression my father had used. ‘Take Bacchus out to clean himself,’ I could remember him saying. Or Judie. Or Rusty. Or Tara. We had a lot of dogs, which is why I have always liked them as long as they don’t develop delusions of grandeur and begin to think they’re the householder. The phrase reminded me of my family, the four of us living together. I thought of the possibilities there had seemed then and how strangely they had led to me sitting alone in the kitchen of the Bushfield Hotel. The other three were dead. I was glad my parents hadn’t known Scott’s death. I felt somehow responsible towards the other three. We had tried to make some kind of honest contract with the world and it seemed to me the world had cheated on us. The least we were due was some retrospective understanding. I decided I was here to collect.

  I lifted the phone and dialled Glebe Academy. It was the same nice woman from yesterday who answered. John Strachan was with a class. They would have to fetch him. While I waited, I reflected that I had to know more about that closed room of Scott’s life Katie had allowed me to glimpse. If I couldn’t go through the door, maybe I could get in a window. But I would have to be careful in speaking to John Strachan. I wasn’t sure what John knew. I wasn’t even sure what I knew yet. Approach by indirections.

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Hullo, John. It’s Jack Laidlaw.’

  ‘Hullo, Jack.’

  A session in a pub can be a great force-feeder of intimacy.

  ‘Look. I’m sorry to bother you again so soon. Especially taking you away from a class.’

  ‘No problem. It’s one of my more civilised groups. The room should still be there when I get back.’

  ‘What it is –’ is something I’ll have to work up to. So let me cover my tracks a little by saying – ‘I was just wondering. Scott must have left some things at the school. I mean, he didn’t exactly know that he was leaving. I’m thinking of papers and stuff like that. Something that might help me to understand what he was going through at the end.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘I know it’s probably a terrible nuisance for you. But do you think you could check it out for me? Take a look at his room? And see if there’s anything there at all? That would give us a clue.’

  I was trying to read the pause that followed. I wondered if he was going to refuse.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘his room’s been taken over. You know? There’s somebody else in it now. It was a coveted room. Terrific windows for an art room.’

  I understood his hesitation. He hadn’t wanted to convey to me how quickly Scott’s dying had converted to administrative practicalities. One man’s death is another man’s sunlight.

  ‘So I think it’s been cleaned out,’ he said. ‘But I’ll go up there today and have a look. I suppose there might be something.’

  ‘Thanks, John. Oh. There’s something else,’ which I casually mention since it’s why I phoned. ‘Ellie Somebody? It’s a woman I thought I might try to speak to. But I can’t get her second name. Does that name mean anything to you?’

  This time the pause was impenetrable. Did he know about Scott and her? Was he instinctively deducing what I had just learned about them? Was he simply baffled by the name? The slowness of his answer, when it came, suggested alien matter caught up in his thoughts, grinding the machinery to a halt.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. It’s not an unusual name. But there was a woman who worked here at one time. Ellie. But I don’t know if that’s who you mean. She’s left now. Ellie Mabon. Do you mean Ellie Mabon?’

  I didn’t know. But if all you have are shots in the dark, you’d better check out anything you hit to see if it’s what you’re after.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It could be. Anyway, thanks.’

  ‘All right,’ he said at last, perhaps not sure what I was thanking him for. ‘I’ll see about Scott’s room. I’ll phone you if there’s anything.’

  ‘I’ll be out and about today, John.’

  ‘Well. If I can’t get you personally, I’ll try and look in at the Bushfield. Sometime in the evening. All right? I better go and see if the natives are getting restless. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  I put the phone down and went to look for Katie’s phone-book. I could hear someone walking about upstairs and imagined Mike pacing the psychological prison he seemed to have made for himself. The phone-book was behind the bread-bin. With Katie, it would be. We weren’t so different from each other as she thought.

  I was on my third Mabon before I found an Ellie. The first one hadn’t answered. The second was what sounded like an amazingly old man who insisted on telling me about a mix-up with the plumbing in his house. I promised to look into it. The third was at a good address in Graithnock. The voice was brusque but with interesting undertones, like a sensuous body in a business-suit.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. I’m sorry to bother you. I may have a wrong number here. I’m looking for Ellie Mabon.’

  ‘Speaking.’

  I knew this was the one. The realisation paralysed my mouth for the moment. She didn’t know how closely we were connected, what I knew about her.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My name’s Jack Laidlaw. I’m Scott’s brother.’

  She practised breathing for a little.

  ‘God,’ she said. ‘Your voices are so alike.’

  ‘You knew Scott,’ I said, not one of my more illuminating remarks.

  ‘Well, I didn’t just speak to him on the telephone.’ Then I sensed her realise she was showing too much of herself too soon. Her voice, when she spoke again, was like a woman who has readjusted her dress. ‘I taught beside him, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Could I meet you and speak to you about that?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m sorry. This must sound pretty bizarre to you. But I found Scott’s death hard to take. I’m just trying to come to terms with it. Talking to people who knew him. You know? I thought maybe we could talk.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It does sound pretty bizarre.’

  ‘I thought it might.’

  ‘What am I supposed to tell you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t, neither do I. All right?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Come on. Please. It’s not such a wild request.’

  ‘Wild? Listen. As far as I’m concerned, it might have come straight from the Amazon jungle. Why don’t you go back there?’

  The conversation wasn’t going well. I felt myself within seconds of losing this hand. But a couple of things had registered with me: the remark about not just speaking to Scott on the telephone was an admission in code and she knew it; if she was as angry as she acted, why hadn’t she put down the phone? Her whole game-plan was set on keeping me away from her life. I understood that. I even sympathised. But I couldn’t afford to agree. I might need something that she could tell me. Her weakness was that she didn’t want to put down the phone until she was sure she had frightened me off. I knew there was only one card I could play.

  ‘You live at 28 Sycamore Road,’ I said, reading from the phone-book. ‘I’m sure I can find it.’

  ‘What? Listen, you. I’m a married woman.’ She thought about it, made an emendation. ‘A happily married woman. I don’t need you messing up my life. What would my husband say?’

  ‘When does he come home?’ I said.

  ‘6.30.’ She had said it before she realised the impertinence of the question. That made her angrier. ‘What the hell does it have to do with you?’

  ‘Mrs Mabon,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to mess up your life. What good would that do me? I just want to talk. I can come in the afternoon. Nobody needs to know.’

  ‘I do have neighbours.’

  ‘We can stand on the doorstep.’

  ‘What about the children?’

  �
�Mrs Mabon, you don’t have any.’

  There was silence.

  ‘This afternoon. Okay?’

  ‘I don’t think I believe you.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  ‘No way. You can go to hell,’ she said and put down the phone like a punch on the ear.

  I sat holding the phone and feeling ashamed of myself. By the time I put down the receiver, I had decided I couldn’t go through with what I had threatened. I had no rights here. Katie was right. I was sifting ashes. Let them lie.

  Katie came back in with Buster. She looked as if she knew she was right. I was guilty about what I had been doing in her absence, feeling I had proved her case by being so insistent. It didn’t help that I had let the soup bubble over slightly. When Katie didn’t say anything but just adjusted the gas, I felt even worse. Buster was the most welcoming thing in the room. That made it time to get out.

  I went upstairs for my jacket. When I came back down, I looked into the kitchen. Katie was tenderising meat as if it was my head.

  ‘That’s me away, Kate,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the breakfast. I’ll see you later.’

  She turned her face, looking past me.

  ‘You going to be away all day?’ she said.

  ‘Is that a question or a request?’

  She started almost to smile and waved me out of the room.

  10

  ‘Gus. Right? So you probably think that my real name’s Angus. But that just shows yer cultural parochialism. Guess. On yese go. Ah’ll give yese a hundred guesses. An’ ye’ll no’ get near it.’

  There were some less than serious accepters of the challenge (offering, among others, ‘Angustura’) but I wasn’t one of them. I stood among the jocularity and wondered what I was doing here, what I was doing in Graithnock, what I was doing in my head. The Katie Samson effect was still with me.

  Leaving the Bushfield, I had parked the car in the town centre and taken my obsession for a walk. The town wasn’t interested. I had wandered for a while among the normal business of the day and felt as marginal to what was going on around me as if I had been a religious fanatic wearing a sandwich-board with a message only he could understand.