Strange Loyalties (15 page)

‘How about these two?' he kept saying. ‘Aren't they something?'

Alice and I agreed with Martin. Bert and Jenny smiled at each other. Martin agreed with Martin. But nobody specified what the something was. My own theories about what they were tended to darken as the meal progressed. Martin was making very sure that I could find no way to introduce the melancholy purpose of my visit and talk about Scott's death. It would have felt like turning up in a hearse to drive the blushing bride to the wedding. Every time Alice and I threatened to make serious contact, Martin invited us to appreciate how Jenny was giving Bert a forkful of her salmon or Bert was offering Jenny a taste of lamb.

Feeling excluded for so long, I had been tuning in occasionally to the talk at some of the tables around us. It didn't help. So much of it sounded like variations on the same theme. Just as Bert and Jenny were telling each other, so that we could listen in, about the wonderful house they had offered for, so a boy nearby was explaining that, if he could maintain his saving pattern for three more years, he could buy a Porsche. The different conversations had an underlying coherence, like an orchestra tuning up to play the same music, probably ‘Land of Hope and Glory'.

Come the coffee, I had had it. I wanted a polite way out that took the information with me.

‘Well,' I said. I nodded to Bert and Jenny. ‘It's been nice meeting you. I've got to go. But listen. Let me get this. It'll do as a kind of engagement present.'

There was some polite demurring. But Martin liked the idea. Perhaps it proved to his friends that I wasn't entirely a
boor. I certainly hadn't charmed them too much so far. Now that I had Martin relaxing his guard I said it.

‘I want to catch up with Anna today. Is she living near here?'

Martin looked at Alice.

‘Jack,' he said. ‘Anna's trying to get over things.'

‘Martin,' I said. ‘So am I.'

‘But what's the point?'

‘I need to try to understand what's happened.'

‘I doubt if Anna knows.'

‘She knows more than me for sure.'

‘Perhaps we should let bygones be bygones.'

‘If I needed a wayside pulpit, Martin,' I said, ‘I could've got one without driving this far.'

‘Edinburgh,' Alice said. ‘It's Jack's brother. It's been a month. He needs to talk about it.'

She told me the address.

‘It's an apartment,' she said.

‘Thanks,' I said.

I shook hands with the others and kissed Alice. I was sorting things out with the waiter when Alice left the table and came up to me.

‘Jack,' she said. ‘There's something else. Do you know a man called David Ewart?'

I'm one of those people who vaguely imagine they've heard almost every name before. I fed it into the amazing computer of my mind and it came up blank.

‘He lives here. In Kelso. Runs a pottery.'

‘The Kelso Pottery.'

‘No. That's long established. This is another one. More recent.'

She told me where it was.

‘I met him about a week ago in the street. He used to know Anna quite well when they were younger. I was telling him about Scott's death. He said he met Scott when he was a student. I think when they were both students. It seemed to make a big impression on him. I don't know what you're doing. But I suppose you're trying to sort out your image of Scott. So that you can live with it. I think I've been doing that myself. It might help you to talk to David Ewart.'

‘Alice,' I said. ‘I've always believed in you.'

‘So do I. Sometimes.'

She went back to the table and I paid the waiter. I asked him to take over a bottle of champagne. I think I felt guilty about not appreciating other people's happiness enough. But I had to admit to myself that I wasn't sure what I was inviting them to celebrate.

For I hadn't liked being there. Looking for the pottery, I found a phrase that helped me to understand why: urbane deprivation, the condition of being so sophisticated that you plumb the nature of most other people's experience out of your life like waste. Your attitudes are so glib and self-assured and automatic, you lose the necessary naivety that is living. That way, you eat everything and taste nothing.

The pottery shop offered shelter from that feeling. It was dimly lit and full of shelves on which glazed artefacts sat – pots and bowls and ornaments and ashtrays. Whoever worked here was making a simple daily contract with his living. I wandered around. A woman came through from the back. She was wearing a smock and flip-flops. She had careless hair. She smiled at me and went behind the cash-desk, waiting. I selected a green ashtray and went up to her. She smiled again.

‘On holiday?' she said.

‘No. I was visiting people. And they told me about this place.'

She gave me my change.

‘Nice to know we're beginning to get talked about.'

‘Actually, David Ewart. He works here?'

‘That's my husband.'

‘Would it be possible to speak to him?'

‘David!'

Sometimes interesting truths emerge from the banal. You make a few casual remarks and they transmute inexplicably into passwords and there is called forth a message that will matter to you till you die. The messenger needn't be elaborately dressed.

David Ewart was wearing sandals, jeans and a sweater. He was tall and his hair and beard had decided on a merger. His eyes stared out of the darkness around them like cave-dwellers. I introduced myself and he introduced his wife, Marion, and took me into his workshop. He made three coffees. He carried one through to his wife in the front shop. He and I sat on stools and talked.

He told me a story and I thanked him and we all said goodbye and I came away with my ashtray. As I drove towards Edinburgh, I reflected that a trip to Kelso to find out where Anna was living had yielded an altogether different and more valuable gift. The tedium of the meal in Ednam House had been worth it. Patience pays.

For I believed I had been in a kind of antechamber to the presence of the man in the green coat.

W
hen David Ewart was eighteen, he made a trip to Glasgow. It was perhaps his third time in the city. It was certainly his first time alone there. Everything amazed him. ‘I may have been eighteen but I hid my advancing years well. For me, travelling from Kelso to Glasgow was like taking the Golden Road to Samarkand. What would I find there?'

He had with him the address of a house in Park Road. It lay in his pocket like a visa to a new life. Anna Kerr had written it out neatly for him on a large sheet of paper which he had folded very carefully. She had also telephoned ahead to say he would be coming. She had spoken to someone called Scott Laidlaw. David Ewart had been with her during the call. The way she spoke to Scott Laidlaw suggested that she did not know him as well as she had pretended but that she would like to know him better. There was a forced familiarity in her manner.

The address was where Scott Laidlaw and three other student friends were living. They had kept the flat on during the summer and, now that a new academic year was about to begin, they were moving out. David Ewart was starting out on the journey
they were completing. He was to attend the Glasgow School of Art and he was checking the flat out for himself and three others. He felt important to be the one making the decision on behalf of the four of them.

He decided to walk from the railway station. He did not know where Park Road was but it was a bright September day and he wasn't sure how expensive a taxi would be or if taxi-drivers could be expected to know Park Road. Besides, to walk in the city was an adventure.

‘I learned three things fast. The first was how self-confident architecture can be. I mean, this was before old Glasgow got her face-lift. But I loved those big, dark buildings. “We know the story,” they seemed to be saying. The people who built those places knew who they were all right. The second was just the energy of the place. My pulse began to quicken. Like plugging into a generator. The third thing was the people. I thought cities were supposed to be anonymous. Everybody I stopped for directions related to me right away. Nobody spoke over their shoulder. Some of them might've looked at me as if I'd stepped out a spaceship. But they looked at me. “Christ, ye're well oot yer road here, son.” “Park Road? That's no' a walk, pal. Ye book a flight for that yin.” It was love at first patter. Three different people went out of their way with me. They were like Indian scouts escorting you through their bit of the territory. See when I retire? I think I'll reverse the process. This is where I work. But I've a notion. If I can get Marion to come with me. Check out in Glasgow. Die among humane noise.'

By the time he found the place, he was sweating slightly with exertion and excitement, high on new sights and vivid
faces. He felt like an explorer. He had climbed to the top floor of the tenement. What further discoveries lay beyond the door he was staring at? They threatened to be strange. On a placard fixed to the door with drawing pins there was a legend in beautiful script: ‘Hard Truths Unlimited. Knock and Go Away.' He hesitated. He knocked and waited. The door was ajar.

He thought he heard a muffled voice saying ‘Come in' but he couldn't be sure. He knocked again. This time the voice bellowed.

‘Entrez. Avanti. Kommen sie in. Entrada. Get a grip. Come bloody in.'

He did. The first impression he had was a smell. It was the smell of oil paint. Several canvases were stacked in the dim hall. He negotiated them respectfully and looked in the door of the living-room. What he saw was to stay with him – ‘like a picture of a place where I wanted to live. I was looking at where I somehow wanted to be.'

Sunshine made a window of light on the floor. The room was shabby and poorly furnished but the effect wasn't depressing. The place for him had a romantic dignity imparted to it by the unknown lives that had passed through. There were more paintings scattered around the room, resting in groups against the walls. There were piles of books on the floor. A young man sat with his back towards the living-room doorway, leaning sideways so that he was profiled against the window. It was a striking profile. He was leafing through a book. An attractive girl sat in the chair opposite, her face towards the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. Neither of them seemed to be aware of David Ewart's presence. That impressed him.

‘I mean, I had just knocked at the door. And they seemed
to have forgotten already. I could've been robbing the place for all they knew. They had a kind of animal preoccupation. The way a cat might glance at you if you try to catch its attention. But you won't seriously disturb it. It goes back to what it was concentrating on. I don't know. It was just the natural rightness of where they were, what they were doing. I wanted to live with that kind of assurance.'

The man stopped turning the pages. He read carefully for a moment. He held up his finger, though the girl's eyes remained closed.

‘This is the bit,' he said.

He read aloud a brief passage from the book. David Ewart could never remember afterwards what the words had been saying. He had never found the book from which the passage came. He regretted that. It was as if he had been listening to the password to where they were, a password he had never learned. The girl didn't open her eyes.

‘Maybe,' she said.

‘Maybe? Nobody could say it as well as that if it wasn't true.'

David Ewart walked into the living-room. The man looked up.

‘Jeez,' he said. ‘The ghost of freshers past.'

The girl opened her eyes. They were blindingly blue.

‘David Ewart,' the man said, pointing. ‘Sorry. I'm Scott Laidlaw. Some welcome that. I'm sorry.' They were shaking hands. ‘We thought you were just some of the through traffic we get here. This is Hester.'

He gave her surname but David Ewart couldn't remember it. He couldn't remember very clearly much that followed.
What remained with him was a sense of excitement. His memory of the circumstances that generated it was fragmentary. Hester showed him round the flat. Scott made coffees for them. He learned that Hester was at Art School as well with one year still to go.

‘She paints any surface she can find,' Scott said. ‘Stick out your tongue and she paints it.'

‘I could do a mural on yours then.'

Someone came in who was called Sandy. He was studying medicine. His course wasn't finished and he was going to move in with Hester. Scott Laidlaw had introduced them. Somebody else came in who was called Dave. (‘I remember that because it was the same name as mine.') He couldn't remember their second names. The fourth person who was sharing the flat was studying English. He didn't appear. His first name was mentioned to Dave Ewart several times but it was long gone.

The atmosphere became that of an impromptu party. People were teasing Scott about being the only one who still had some stuff to move out. Derogatory remarks were made about his paintings. He said they would fetch millions in years to come. They held a mock showing of them for David Ewart. He liked them. His valuation was significantly higher than the prices the others put on them. In celebration of having found an appreciative patron at last (‘Do you mind if I call you Theo?'), Scott collected an amazing hoard of empty bottles from a cupboard. He and David Ewart got the money back on the empties and brought three bottles of suicidally cheap wine back to the flat. The party moved up a gear.

‘That first glass of wine was terrible. But the atmosphere
of the place did something to it. It refermented into vintage in the bottle. See the third glass? Nectar, nectar.'

There was a lot of laughter. They formed a solemn committee to decide upon the fate of Scott's remaining property, since he was apparently notorious for his sentimental attachment to places, his inability to leave when his time was up. It seemed to be a seriously entertained possibility that his books and pictures would become a permanent fixture here.