Strange Loyalties (7 page)

‘Oh, that's fine,' he said. ‘Given that reassurance, I can help. I know somebody who should have the number. I'll try him.'

He went out to the pay-phone in the hall and I crossed to get us in another drink. Things were picking up at the bar. Gestures were becoming more expansive. Three separate groups had connected up loosely. I was introduced to one of the Danish residents. His name was Søren, which endeared him to me immediately. But unlike Kierkegaard, he seemed never to have experienced angst. He had a face like a baby which has just discovered tickling. His mood was infectious. A late night in the Bushfield looked to be in the offing.

John Strachan came back with the number and the address. The sight of a fresh pint seemed to make him nervous. He would have to be getting back to Mhairi. I thanked him for his help and we talked a little longer and I told him how much the painting of the five men at the table had interested me.

When he was gone, I went to the pay-phone and dialled the number he had given me. The voice that answered was strong and self-assured.

‘Yes?'

‘Hullo. Is that Mr Lyons?'

‘It is. Who's this?'

‘I'm sorry to bother you. My name's Jack Laidlaw. I'm Scott Laidlaw's brother.'

‘Ah, hullo. I was really sorry to hear about Scott. It was a terrible loss.'

‘Yes. I was wondering, Mr Lyons. I'm in Ayrshire just now. I suppose you could call it a kind of sentimental journey. I'm just trying to sort out my feelings about Scott's death. And I wondered if I could talk to you some time this week.'

He hadn't sounded like the sort of man who would hesitate as long as this.

‘Excuse me. Where did you get my number?'

It was my turn to hesitate, since I didn't know where his number had come from. I could hear what I thought was Mozart faintly in the background.

‘I was going through some of Scott's papers. And your number came up.' I was embarrassed by the way it came out. I had made it sound rather ominous: this is death on the line. ‘I mean, I found your telephone number. And I thought, as a friend of Scott's, you were somebody I would like to talk to. I had lost touch a bit with him at the end. I'd just like to see him more clearly.'

‘Papers?' he said. ‘What kind of papers were these?'

It was a strange question, not to say impertinent. That interested me. It seemed to imply that there might be papers Dave Lyons would be worried about. My casually evasive movement might have bumped against something solid. I decided to move carefully.

‘Just some of Scott's things.'

‘Well, I'm very busy this week. Normally, I'd be in Edinburgh and it wouldn't be possible anyway. But I'm working from home this week. I'm sorry but the schedule's pretty tight.'

‘It wouldn't take long, Mr Lyons. There's something in particular I'd like to talk to you about.'

‘What would that be?'

Papers, significant papers, I hoped my pause was suggesting. ‘It's a bit complicated to go into on the phone.'

I suspected his silence was debating whether it was better to close me off now or to check out what I thought it was I had. There was something here. I sensed it.

‘Tell you what. I really am busy this week. There's not much time I can give you. But tomorrow. I have a business lunch. At Cranston Castle House. If you're there round about twoish. We can maybe have a few minutes. But only a few. It's the best I can do.'

‘It's great,' I said. ‘I appreciate it.'

‘You know where it is?'

‘Not exactly. But I'll find it.'

‘All right, then. I'll see you then.'

I was looking forward to meeting him. When I came back into the lounge, my evening went into a higher gear. The talk covered a lot of ground fast. The Happy Dane and I found we both liked Kris Kristofferson. A stranger offered me his condolences and told me that an old man called Sanny Wilson had met Scott in a bar the night he was killed. Sanny had told the man something he remembered. Scott had said at one point, ‘The man in the green coat has died again.' I was intrigued. The man said that, if I was still here tomorrow night, he would try and bring Sanny Wilson in to tell me about it himself. I said I thought I would still be here.

After closing time, the residents stayed on in the lounge. A guitar-player who had come in after doing a gig in another
pub decided to become a resident as well for the night. We had a sing-song. In the pauses during it, I had a long, rambling, self-revelatory conversation with Katie. I sang ‘Cycles' when it was first my turn. Later, when the mood had been established by the right amount of alcohol, I gave them ‘The Learig', perhaps Scott's favourite song. As a reward, I received a lot of advice on how to locate Cranston Castle House.

I might have been in the lounge yet, so good was it, except that I wanted to keep some brain-cells for tomorrow. I took my farewell of everybody as if I had known them all my life. Before going upstairs, I went out to the car and collected Scott's painting and the bottle of whisky. It seemed a matter of tremendous urgency there and then. When I came back in, I had a brilliant idea. It did not occur to me at the time that it was the same kind of brilliant idea that Caesar had when he decided to go to the Capitol. I rang Jan's number. Fortunately, no one answered.

In my room, I unveiled Scott's painting and set it up against the wall. I stripped and sat on the bed and looked at those images of Scotland. I opened the bottle of whisky. I communed with art and had a long conversation with the Antiquary, recalling old times. I put out the light and went to bed.

I woke up suddenly in the darkness with two thoughts, distinct as nightlights, in my mind.

The man in the painting of the five at supper was wearing a green coat.

How do you die twice?

A
kitchen in the morning: it can be a garden of the senses. The sunlight is shafting in through the window, as if William Blake has been given the commission today and is announcing the sacredness of the everyday. The coffee-percolator is putt-putting like the pulse of normalcy. The aroma it gives off is wandering aimlessly somewhere, inviting anyone to follow. A woman stands in the sunshine, chopping vegetables. The rich smells they release make a meadow in a room. A man sits at a table, drinking coffee. The warmed clay of the cup in his hand warms him fraternally, telling him we're all part of the same process. I'll be your cup today, you can be someone else's later. The man has eaten a good breakfast. A dog drowses on the sunlit floor, occasionally opening one lazy eye on the world. The room around the woman and the man is sustaining. The feeling it engenders is of hope, old failures buried, new possibilities to be born. Perhaps God has taken the twice bitten apple from Adam and Eve, gently healed it with his hand, hung it back up on the tree, said, ‘Try again.' That kind of feeling.

If place were only place and the present only the present, but we invade them with the past, complicate them with our
futures. For I was the man at the table and Katie the woman at the worktop. To individualise the moment is not perhaps, as we think, to save it but to lose it. The room was still the room but we were an unhappy woman and an angry man within it. That melted it into flux. If the world was a new red apple, I was the worm inside.

I was just Jack Laidlaw finishing his coffee and wondering what to do next to assuage a need for understanding. Katie was an over-worked woman making soup. Even the dog was no canine ideal. It had its own fleas of banality. This was Buster, who had a serious aggression problem. We were accidentally sharing some space. Mike was somewhere mysterious, as he usually was even when he was with you.

I had wakened with a thought that was still around. While I had a bath and shaved and changed and heard Katie giving the other residents their breakfast, the idea had continued to play about the edges of my mind. During my breakfast in the kitchen, I called it home for a serious confrontation. It seemed to me, in my obsessiveness, that it was a new, important angle from which to confront the mystery of Scott's last month. I thought I should invite Katie to consider it. So I did.

‘Women, Katie,' I said.

It must have sounded more like a wistful expression of longing than the question I was asking myself aloud.

‘Sorry?'

‘Women. Scott. The way he was at the end, there had to be a woman in there somewhere.'

‘There was Anna.'

‘Did you know her?'

‘I knew who she was. I'd had her pointed out to me in the
street. But I never spoke to her. I don't think she mixed a lot with the servants.'

The adder's tongue of malice flicked and withdrew. I knew how much Katie had cared about Scott. Maybe the caring hadn't been entirely platonic. Maybe she had seen in him the wastage of a man she might have saved, as women sometimes will.

‘Nah,' I said. ‘That's not what I mean. It was gone between him and Anna. Somebody else. He was living raw. There's only one ointment I can think of for that kind of pain. And he wasn't that different from me.'

Katie was finding the chopping of the vegetables an act of total concentration.

‘What do you think?' I said.

‘What would I know about that?'

‘Katie. What you don't know about the people around you, it wouldn't even cover a penny. And watch you don't include a couple of fingers in the soup. You're going at it hard there.'

The knife nearly came down strong enough to split the bread-board in two. She turned towards me, the knife still in her hand. She was a formidable woman. I thought I could hear The Ride of the Valkyries starting up faintly in the background. I pretended to duck behind the table.

‘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?'