Strange Loyalties (14 page)

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.

Together, they didn't prepare Scott and me too well for the
everyday world. I remember my mother saying to me towards the end of her life, when she was worried about Scott, ‘Maybe your father and me should have told you two what some people can be like. But the truth was, I didn't know.' I think it was essentially through Scott's problems that she finally began to notice darknesses in people she hadn't known were there.

Driving through Selkirk, which doesn't take long, I was blaming them for the inheritance they had given us. Equipping sensitive children with ideals that are too demanding can make them factories for guilt. Look at what had happened to Scott – the pain of his sense of failure. Hadn't they realised what they were doing? I thought of the time when my father had taken Scott aside at the age of fourteen and lectured him on having to toughen up or life would break him. I knew what he meant. As a teenager, Scott took everybody else's suffering personally. But what did my father expect? He spent years tenderising our consciences and then wondered why life hurt us so much.

Once out on the road to Kelso, I generously relented and forgave my parents. They had stayed true to what they believed in and true to each other – perhaps, I had sometimes thought in my father's case, dangerously true. My mother died of cancer after a double mastectomy that left her feeling unwomaned and weary of living. My father lived on for four years. He had developed diabetes and his pancreas was chronically damaged. When he was found dead, I wondered if the carelessness with which he had lived those last four years amounted to a discreet form of suicide. It was an idea that gained new force when I thought of how Scott had died. Maybe harakiri of the spirit ran in the family.

I decided what they had given us wasn't so bad. The way things are, who shouldn't feel guilt? In our guilt is our humanity. But, as sole surviving legatee of the family conscience, I decided that the acknowledgement of your own guilt shouldn't be a means of absolving others. No scapegoats. Everybody shares.

As I came into Kelso, I was looking for sharers. The handsome trigness of the town didn't promise well for my purpose. It was basking brightly in innocent sunshine. But that didn't bother me too much. Innocence is often just guilt in hiding.

M
artin and Alice Kerr were not at home. The bungalow sat complacent as a well-fed cat in the sunlight. The lawn looked as if it had just had a shave. A neighbour, who had watched me from her window, directed me to where they were.

The bowling green was full. I sat on one of the wood-slat seats round the perimeter. At this time of day there were no younger people involved. I watched the elderly at play. It was a pleasant sight. If this was what age meant, perhaps I should try harder to get there. I didn't take a cigarette.

On a neat and well kept square of green moved neat and well kept people. The colours were mainly pastel – pinks and blues and greys. The gestures were unhurried. The faces expressed satisfaction or dismay at a shot in an almost abstract way – not emotion so much as the reflection of emotion in a mirror. The voices were all muted. The laughter seemed an echo of another time. The occasional knock of bowl on bowl was soothing. The men and women moved from end to end, turning back upon themselves like sand in an hourglass, measuring a morning.

Seeing Martin and Alice Kerr among them, I was tempted
to leave. They were playing with another elderly couple, a bald, brown, smiling man and a grey-haired woman whose roundness remained attractive, as if her femininity had just matured in the cask. They all seemed so happily preoccupied with one another that I had misgivings about disturbing them. The lives of Martin and Alice had surely earned them this time to play in the innocent light. They didn't need me putting my private cloud between them and the sun.

And yet. The old, like children, can disarm us while they keep their own weapons handy. I don't think I've ever known age to perform a character transplant on anyone. The old are usually who they were with less energy to express it. The rectitude of the aged is often just the fancy clothes in which incapacity likes to dress up.

I watched Martin and Alice. Their togetherness looked as cosy as an advertisement for an endowment policy. But I knew something about the terms of the contract, what their undisturbed present had cost in the past. Martin had been a building contractor and a friend of many local councillors. The word was that the two aspects of his life hadn't always been kept effectively apart. There had been several stories about contracts won through political influence rather than the competitiveness of the tender. I didn't know the truth of the stories but, knowing Martin, I could see that, if they were fiction, they were in the realistic mode. They emerged very convincingly from his nature.

Martin was one of the smiling ruthless. Self-interest and callousness had been so effectively subsumed in his nature that they emerged as a form of politeness. He never raised his voice because he hadn't enough self-doubt to make it necessary. He could listen calmly to opinions violently opposed to his own
because he never took them seriously. He offered the conventional forms of sympathy effortlessly because there was no personal content to mean they might not fit. He seemed to me one of what was, in my experience, a depressingly large species, those who use manners not as a means of facilitating serious human contact but as a way of forbidding it. They spend their lives coming in an emotional condom in case they breed with life and create something they can't control. Most of all, I hate the way they can sterilise the lives of those around them.

It was my feeling that he had done that with Alice. I liked her a lot. My sense of their relationship came from the time of Scott and Anna's wedding and a few family get-togethers since and things heard from Scott and Anna. The evidence wasn't extensive but it was firm. How long does it take to analyse a vacuum?

I recognised the frozen solidity of Martin's unexamined attitudes and the way Alice could see wistfully beyond them but couldn't quite get out, a maiden trapped in someone else's castle that was moated with stagnant water. I had always enjoyed her company. She was a warm and open woman. But Martin's presence tended to sit on her spontaneity like a scold's bridle. What had heightened my awareness of her position was my worry for Scott. I thought I saw the potential for a reverse image of her parents' relationship in Anna's marriage to my brother. If Scott had the same openness as Alice, Anna was her father's daughter. Self-interest followed her everywhere like a minder, telling her feelings where it was safe to go. I had feared her calculation would always outmanoeuvre Scott's impetuosity.

Watching from my seat, I remembered something I had said to Jan before leaving Glasgow on Monday. Why do the best of
us go to waste while the worst of us flourish? Maybe I had found a clue. I could think of one reason why people as potentially rich in life as Alice and Scott seemed to fare less well and be apparently less successful than Martin and Anna. Those who love life take risks, those who don't take insurance. But that was all right, I decided. Life repays its lovers by letting them spend themselves on it. Those who fail to love it, it cunningly allows very carefully to accrue their own hoarded emptiness. In living, you won by losing big, you lost by winning small.

But the grandeur didn't have to be external. As I had seen in Scott a big spirit, I saw in Alice a person of some stature. Her husband might be the public success but she had the substance. Her vulnerability meant that life could still take her by surprise, make moments to remember, leave room where dreams still unfulfilled could grow. The size of the humanity is the size of the person. I was surprised I could make out Martin from this distance.

I saw him look across and do a double-take. He appeared not to say anything to the others. He went on playing. A couple of minutes later, Alice noticed me. She simply walked off the bowling green and came towards me, saying something to the others over her shoulder. In those two instinctive responses, my sense of two distinct natures had been defined.

‘Jack, Jack,' she said as I stood up. We embraced. ‘I thought I had seen a ghost there. You reminded me so much of Scott. Poor Scott. Listen. I'm sorry about the funeral.'

She and Martin had attended but had left with Anna without our having a chance seriously to talk.

‘We had to accept Anna's way of doing things that day. I don't think she could cope.'

I sat back down and she sat beside me.

‘You'd better finish your game,' I said.

‘To hell with it,' she said. ‘It was the last end anyway. They can finish it without me. I don't think my amazing skills will be missed. Poor Scott. I can't believe it. I think of him so much. How are you coping?'

‘All right,' I said. ‘It's good to see you, Alice. You're looking well.'

The others had abandoned the game. Martin was coming towards us.

‘But what are you doing here?' she said. ‘I couldn't believe it when I saw you there.'

‘I'm looking for Anna,' I said.

‘Anna's not here,' Martin said.

His handshake wasn't a welcome. It was a formal declaration of opposition. What was to follow was a kind of extended psychological tag-wrestling match. If he gave me no information, he won. If I found out where Anna was, I did. The other couple, it seemed, were on his team.

‘I'm sorry we can't wait,' Martin said. ‘We're having lunch with Bert and Jenny.'

Alice, it seemed, was on my side.

‘Jack can come with us,' she said. ‘Can't you, Jack?'

Of course, I could. I liked her move. She had used his own weight against himself. Martin's only substance was politeness. They had booked lunch in Ednam House. While they went into the clubhouse to collect jackets and change their shoes, I drove on ahead.

Ednam House: a monument to my father's sense of Kelso. While I waited for them in the lounge, my old man's ghost sat
with me, saying, ‘See what Ah mean?' I did, I did. While I sipped my soda and lime, I heard English voices crested like old school ties and native voices in which the confusedly rich broth of Scottishness was passed through strained vowels until it became the thinnest of gruels. There was much talk of horses. Something was happening today at Floors Castle, maybe a gymkhana. I remembered something that's often troubled me about where I come from. I tend to think of the Borders as the place of the horse. I like horses, especially if they've got Pat Eddery or Steve Cauthen up on them. But I gave up worshipping them before I was born. They're where it was and I don't like the way it was. It's maybe a tribal memory. I'm sure my ancestors went on foot and had to fight the ones that sat on horses. And maybe in my heart I'm still fighting them.

Four people close at hand were discussing the Royal Family in a very familiar way. How can people do that? Who knows who they are? Do
they
know who they are? It's the King Lear syndrome. As soon as people bow or curtsey to you, how can you work out what they think? The existential mirror that is other people's eyes becomes misted.

The others arrived and fitted in perfectly, except for Alice. Bert was divorced and Jenny was a widow. They had only met six months ago and they were getting married in the summer. They were nice enough but they seemed to have started the honeymoon early. They were at that stage of conspiratorial involvement that finds the rest of the world a slightly droll irrelevance, eliciting suppressed giggles and secret smiles. There could have been something endearing about their born-again adolescence if Martin hadn't been so patently making use of it.