Strange Loyalties

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Buster,’ I said. ‘You fancy a night on the skite?’

  He didn’t seem interested. I decided to go out. I had done what I could for Scott for the moment. John Strachan would be coming into the Bushfield later on. He had phoned twice during the day. Sanny Wilson might appear. But I had some time before that happened.

  I stood up and put on my jacket. Before I could escape to whatever new and exotic experiences were waiting out there in Graithnock, Katie opened the kitchen door.

  ‘Sanny Wilson’s here to see you,’ she said.

  I was back in the tunnel and excited about the possibility of seeing some light. The excitement didn’t last long. When I went into the lounge, I realised that Sanny Wilson was so well insulated with liquid from serious contact that he might as well have been a fish in an aquarium. His mouthings had much the same clarity of meaning.

  He would be about seventy, a marvellously benign man with sweet, open-handed gestures that seemed to be an attempt to embrace the world. He had obviously loved Scott and generously included me, as Scott’s brother, in his affection. That was touching but it was not hugely helpful. We drank and talked for a while and what I gleaned, beyond the frequent repetition of the opaque statement that the man in the green coat had died again, could have been written on my thumbnail.

  Still, he wasn’t a bad show to be with. He smoked with a great flourish of the hand, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the palm towards you. With each successive cigarette, his waistcoat looked more and more as if it had been tailored from ash. His soft hat assumed a jauntier angle on his bald head. He had a Dickensian turn of phrase, which tended to include words like ‘peregrination’ and ‘pharmaceutical’ and – my favourite – ‘clientiele’, spoken in what Sanny had apparently decided was a French accent. Only a Philistine would have resented his lack of direct communication. I had lost a source of information but I had found a pleasure to be with. You don’t ask Brahms to tell you the news.

  I was still enjoying his recital when John Strachan came in. John was carrying a wrapped painting that turned out to be the five at table. Mhairi and he had decided I should have it, in memory of Scott. I liked that. John had also found a piece of paper in the waste-basket of Scott’s old room. Everything else seemed to have been cleared out. The new teacher had just emptied the last of the stuff from a drawer into the basket today. Most of it, John said, had been related to school administration. Only this one sheet had looked like something personal, though what it was John couldn’t understand. Glancing over it, I could see why. It was a strange piece of writing. It wasn’t just the crumpled nature of the paper that made it difficult to read.

  I bought John and Sanny a drink and left them together while I took my treasure trove upstairs. I unwrapped the painting and looked at it and I read the piece of paper again. They yielded nothing much at the moment. I would have to study them more carefully.

  When I came back down, John Strachan was already preparing to leave. I thanked him and Mhairi and we threatened to meet again. Sanny Wilson couldn’t last much longer. He was beginning to keel over, still mouthing polysyllables as he went, like a pedant dying bravely at his post.

  I offered to see him home. Fortunately, he lived close at hand. It was an upstairs flat in an old tenement. Inside, it was a sad and lonely place. The bedroom had no lights.

  ‘Ah’ll fix that maybe tomorrow,’ Sanny said.

  He was nodding off on his feet. But there must have stirred in him some instinct of dignity that was determined I shouldn’t take away the wrong impression.

  ‘I am,’ he said suddenly, ‘festooned with friends.’

  I managed to get his shoes and his jacket off. The rest, he insisted, could stay as it was. I left him propped up in bed and made to leave.

  ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack.’

  I turned at the door and saw him in the light from the street lamp outside. He still had his hat on. He had a wonderful, dilapidated dignity, his hand making a vaguely papal gesture in the semi-dark, as if he were granting absolution to the world.

  ‘You are a gentleman,’ he said.

  ‘If you say so, Ah must be, Sanny. For you’re sure as hell one. Cheers.’

  I was at the door when he spoke again. His voice was very tired.

  ‘Jack.’

  I turned. Even as I looked, his head relaxed on the pillow and he went gently to sleep, breathing noisily. I was very quiet in closing the outside door.

  At the Bushfield I by-passed the lounge. I didn’t feel like company.

  14

  And in his throne room sat the demon king. The braying revelry beneath him touched him not. He had forsaken the courtiers of pretence and the retinue of folly. Dark was his purpose and his broodings deep. He sipped of the magic liquid men cleped Antiquary and felt its fluid alchemy transform the very reaches of his being, flooding him with the freedom that bringeth wisdom in an instant. But not enough.

  I could act out in my head the postures of a dedicated searcher for truth but I couldn’t find the stuff. I could abandon the jollity of the Bushfield lounge. I could come upstairs to sit alone. I could take my whisky carefully, like a mind-expanding drug. But, no matter what attitudes I struck, I stubbornly remained just a puzzled middle-aged man sitting in a hotel room, looking at a piece of paper and two paintings. The best thing about the sheet of foolscap John Strachan had given me was the familiarity of Scott’s handwriting. The message was pretty cryptic.

  ‘I have developed a compulsion to wonder what he was like, what he was really like. I mean, even in simple things. God knows an understanding of the simplest things would do me. The older I get, the fewer certainties I have.

  ‘I mean, did he drink beer, keep pigeons, have a favourite colour, curse a lot, know many women, have some kind of faith?

  ‘My social plumbing stopped working some time ago. I offend a lot of friends. Right in the middle of some hygienic conversation, I open my mouth and there’s sewage on their carpet. It has a lot to do with him. He has become like an eccentric hobby. The bank-clerk who’s an authority on match-box labels. The teacher who’s writing a monograph on wheelbarrows.

  ‘He’s no longer just himself, of course. Maybe he never was. Maybe there were always more of him. Maybe he’s everybody else.’

  This was not for other people’s understanding. It was an entry in a diary, written in a code that only the writer would understand. Its purpose was secrecy, a troubled mind whispering to itself. I wondered when Scott had written it. Apart from its crumpled state, the paper looked fresh enough. It bore no discolouration of ageing. I thought about ‘no longer just himself’. Did that refer to dying twice? Anyway, I was convinced I was reading a kind of minimalist biography of the man in the green coat. If Scott had known almost nothing about him, I surely knew less.

  I looked at the painting again. Even his face didn’t belong to him, transubstantiated four times over into the means of food for others. The beards were presumably a metaphor for disguise. The private identities the four had escaped into? If one of them could be Scott, who might the others be? They would presumably know what Scott had known, the thing he had never told me, the thing he had perhaps never told anyone, the thing that had gnawed him to death. Find them, find the means to understanding.

  There were clues all right but I didn’t know what they meant. The figure I took to be Scott was holding the stem of a flower that blossomed into petals that contained the small, neat head of a snake. The hand of another showed a prominent ring on which there was a carved shape. I thought I could make out a stick with a snake twined round it. Was that the rod of Aesculapius, symbol of medicine? ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Was he a doctor? But the snake seemed to have two heads. Why did the snake have two heads? The third man held a bitten apple in his hand. The fourth man had a badge on his lapel. It was the twin masks of tragedy and comedy.

  The snake and the apple were Christian, the rod and the masks were pagan. Was that significant? I would have given much
for an hour with Scott, and not just to talk about the painting. In his absence, I had another glass of the whisky and toasted his troublesome nature. It looked as if he had earned it.

  If he couldn’t tell me and I didn’t know who the other men were, there was only one road I could take. There was only one person I knew who might possibly have had access to what Scott had kept so secret. I had to find Anna. I didn’t know where she was but I knew where her parents lived. Talking to her father would be like interviewing a cardboard cut-out. My only hope was her mother, a woman about whom I had sometimes felt that, if we could have synchronised our youths, we might have meant a lot to each other.

  I would leave for Kelso very early in the morning. The decision to do something felt almost like an interim solution to the problem. I relaxed slightly. I undressed. I finished my drink and rinsed out the glass. I put out the light and went to bed. As I lay becoming drowsy in the dark, the sounds of singing downstairs faded slowly like lights on the shore receding from someone moving out to sea.

  THREE

  15

  Driving out of Graithnock, I came into sudden rain. It didn’t last long. But by the time it had stopped and the neurotic insistence of the wipers became still, an unsought memory was with me and I was travelling in two ways – the car in space and me in time, passing through the changes of my own internal weather.

  I remembered another car and other rain. Maddie Harris sat in the car with me. Windscreen and windows were misted blind, as if we were in a world in which there only existed our shared breathing. I was staring ahead. Maddie was talking. The talk was painful for her. Her mouth was naming the hopes she had had for us – each one like an orphan I had fathered. I rubbed a slow peephole in the glass to look at nothing. There was only the rain.

  I said, ‘No. No, Maddie. I’m sorry.’

  In memory my own voice made me grue. It sounded harsh and unrelenting, a sound track run too slow. Something in me, like a child at the films, wanted to shout advice to the preoccupied man in the car. But films can’t hear.

  I watched her – as I had watched her so often – put her hand on the door. She stood outside and turned, her hand still on the door. Beyond her, spring leaves were on the trees of the park beside which we had stopped. The rest of the world was there after all. I had insisted on bringing it in, like air to the womb of her dreaming. She stood looking at me. The rain fell on her. She didn’t open her umbrella. She closed the door and walked slowly away, receding in the space I had cleared in the misted glass to watch her going.

  She didn’t open her umbrella. That quirky fact, that small malfunction in normalcy had always haunted me. The dignity of it shamed me, its dismissal of what didn’t matter. It taught me the contemptibility of my pragmatism. I could love her but not give my life to the loving. If I couldn’t put my children at risk, why had I put her at risk? I could care about my children. But where were Maddie’s children? Wandering fatherless and disowned in her head. Better indifference than to love and not love fully, Maddie’s back was telling me as it went.

  Where I had been had an effect on where I was going. I took with me my guilt towards Maddie, towards Ena, towards my children, towards the just man I had always hoped to be. I was travelling through green country in an attempt to find a kind of truth. But perhaps I blighted the promise of the greenery as I passed and would find the purity of the destination fouled by the fact of who arrived there. Perhaps the nugget of understanding we look for is tarnished by the fallible humanity of the hand that finally holds it. How do the false gain access to the true? I was certainly one strange searcher for justice – the polluted avenger, knight of the rusted sword.

  But I still drove recklessly fast, as if I could outrun my unworthiness. And still I was driving into my own guilt. I remembered another car with Scott and me in it.

  I had been driving him home from an amateur football match we had both played in. Scott’s team were a man short and he had phoned me in Glasgow to ask if I wanted a game. I had been good at football in my teens and momentarily forgot the years in between. We had played the game in Ayr and won 3–2, not especially thanks to me. My main contribution had been to manage not to die of exhaustion in the second half.

  We had gone into Troon for a pint with some of the other players to replace lost sweat. Then Scott and I bought fish suppers and came along the shore road at Barassie. As we sat in the car with the windows down, eating out of the grease-stained paper, there happened one of those moments that belie their own banality. I saw what he was, not what he seemed to be.

  What he seemed to be was a trainee art-teacher who was also a reasonable mid-field player, still ruddy from recent exertion, fingering chips and pieces of fish into his mouth. What he was was a stunningly alive young man, unselfconsciously handsome, the eyes lit up with the search for horizons they hadn’t found. I saw the cage the car was for him. All he wanted was everything.

  Perhaps it was the sea laid out beside us that moved him, with its mocking immensity. But he talked with such passion about the things he wanted to do, simultaneously inspired by the possibilities and afraid of never grasping them.

  He was twenty-two then and about to marry Anna. He wanted to paint. He had plans to live abroad. They had discussed it together and agreed that they would make some money first and then they would go. He would teach wherever they found themselves, earn the space to put his easel. She could teach English anywhere. Their children would be Scottish cosmopolitans. I remembered him explaining to me very precisely how, if Anna became pregnant, they would both come back to Scotland for a time. No matter where they might live, any children would have to be born here. He was like an innocent visionary telling me the telephone number of the house where he would live in a Utopia that hadn’t been discovered yet.

  Even as he told me, there was a kind of distant panic in his eyes, as if he dreaded his sense of the future was doomed to live alone. It was a dream that needed company. He was right to dread. Anna’s idea of their future changed gradually once they were married. She wanted more and more time to make sure of where they were until no room was left for where they might have been. For all I knew, she was right. Maybe the attractiveness of Scott’s plan, like that of a lot of plans, lay in the impossible symmetry of its idealism. Maybe so much changed between them that the future they had seen couldn’t happen because they were no longer the people who had seen it. I didn’t know. I couldn’t blame her.

  But I could blame me. Remembering him sitting in the car, framed against the grey water that shifted behind him like a mirage of endless potential, I felt I had failed him then. There wasn’t much I could have done for him, of course, but I could at least have been less indifferent to his obvious intensity. I had been rather phonily worldly-wise, the older brother offering him a response that was about as specific as ‘Things’ll sort themselves out, son.’ I suppose I was too full of my own problems at the time, as usual.

  That time came back to me as an encapsulation of our relationship: an almost utterly vulnerable idealism that was trying to connect with an idealism that had learned some rules of survival. I had started out as wide-eyed as he was. We had both grown up in a house where we were taught to believe the best about people. You gave the world what you had and the world gave back. But I had had to learn quickly that there were plenty of people around who, once you had given them what you could, would pick your pocket to see what you had left. I hated that with a terrible anger. Love of others was a gift, not a steal. You could only give what wasn’t forcibly taken.

  So I had tried to teach my generosity how to live without becoming embittered. If I can spare it, you can have it. But don’t take it behind my back. Don’t pre-empt my right to give. It’s what makes me me.

  Scott hadn’t learned that then. I don’t think he ever did. That day at Barassie I left his vulnerability naked. I didn’t try to teach it to protect itself. Maybe I didn’t want him to change because I admired him a lot more than I admired me. He was the way I had been
and sometimes wished I still was. I loved the sheer openness of his living. But such admiration can be a luxury the ones we admire have to pay for. It leaves them to endure the storms of experience out in the open while we sit in shelter and applaud. Perhaps I had let him do that.

  I came through Moffat for Selkirk. Any time I’m in the Borders I like to pass through Selkirk. I don’t often stay but I like to pass through. It’s where I was born. You should visit your mother. If you lose where you come from, you lose where you’re going.

  Approaching that small, hard place, where the wind down Ettrick can shiver your bones with a sense of mortality, I was coming nearer to the source of Scott’s idealism and my own. I thought of my father, I thought of my mother.

  He was a big, dark man of brooding principles. Not many things pleased him. At the edges of his nature there was great kindness but the centre was sombre. He was a cave with flowers round the entrance. He was a Borderer whom the Borders displeased. He felt the place that had defined Scottishness at its weakest edge, where it meets Englishness, had lost its sense of itself and blurred into anonymity. ‘What weapons couldn’t,’ he once said to me, ‘trade and money did.’ Kelso came in for his special contempt. ‘As Scottish as muffins and tea.’

  He moved us from Selkirk to Hawick to Graithnock, working in mills. He was maybe following the work. He was maybe looking for Scotland. He was certainly looking for something he was never to find: a place where people behaved towards one another as he believed they should. Treating people shabbily outraged him till he died. The world seemed to him like a rented room not up to his specifications and he couldn’t quite settle.

  My mother was a warmer presence than he was. She had had a reputation as a beauty in her youth and I think the assurance that gave her didn’t leave till near the end. Attractiveness facilitates acquaintance, like a courier predisposing strangers to goodwill, and my mother had acquired early an innocent vanity that let her enjoy being who she was. But the kindness of other people towards her made her as idealistic as my father in her own way. She tended to think the way people treated her was how they treated everybody. She thought the best of them was all there was.