Strange Loyalties (19 page)

‘Mary doesn't know about Scott and me,' she said. ‘But I couldn't very well come here on my own.'

‘You've thought of something?'

‘You mentioned Dave Lyons.'

‘That's right.'

‘There was a party at his house. Scott was there. I spoke to a friend who was there as well. She told me.'

I appreciated the effort Ellie had made. But I couldn't help feeling disappointed. She was delivering yesterday's newspaper.

‘I know,' I said.

‘But do you know what happened?'

‘He threw a vase at the telly?'

Her disappointment made a small girl of her.

‘I thought maybe you didn't know. It seemed as if it might be important. It must have taken something special for Scott to do that.'

‘Your friend didn't happen to say what was on television at the time?'

Ellie's reaction wasn't much more reassuring than Dave Lyons' had been.

‘Do you think that matters?'

‘It might.'

‘No. She wasn't actually in the room at the time. She just said some people had been watching a video.'

‘A video?'

‘Yes. Why?'

‘Try to be exact about this, Ellie. Your friend said it was a video. It wasn't just a television programme?'

‘What's the difference?'

‘There's a big difference.'

Ellie considered it. ‘She said “video”. What she actually said, she said, “one of Dave's videos”. I took her to mean something he had taped himself. Why?'

‘Dave Lyons says he doesn't know what was on television when Scott had his brainstorm. But if it was a video, that seems less likely. Especially if it was something he had taped himself. It was maybe something he wanted his guests to see. It was at least something he would have to take out of the machine later. So he would know what they had been watching.'

‘So what does that prove?'

‘It proves he was lying. Why would you lie about something as trivial as that? Unless you had something to hide.'

‘He's not the only one,' Ellie said.

‘What?'

‘With something to hide.'

I thought at first she meant herself. She seemed hesitant.

‘Anna,' she said.

‘What about Anna?'

‘I didn't mention it to you yesterday. But there was something that was troubling Scott. Anna had someone else.'

‘Who?'

‘I don't know. I'm not even sure that he knew who it was.'

‘It wasn't just a fantasy of his?'

‘I don't know. But his conviction was real enough.'

Mary Walters reappeared at the end of the lounge. Perhaps she knew more than Ellie thought. She had taken her time in the toilet, possibly to give us a chance to talk.

‘How long are you staying here?' Ellie asked.

‘Maybe not after tonight.'

‘Give me your home number then. In case I need to get in touch.'

As Mary Walters came towards us, I wrote my number on a beermat. As Mary Walters sat down, Ellie slipped the beermat into her handbag. We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes more and they finished their drinks and left.

The friendly Dane was at the bar with some others. He waved to me. But I didn't want one of those Bushfield nights that wander on into the morning. I had some more travelling to do tomorrow. Thornbank was one place on my itinerary. Troon was another. If Fast Frankie White wasn't in Thornbank, there must be people there who knew him. It was worth trying. If Frankie did happen to be there, I fancied my chances of getting him to tell me what I wanted to know. Dave Lyons was a harder proposition.

I recalled that image of him walking away from me in Cranston Castle House. I didn't know too much more about the smaller versions of himself that were hiding behind the veneered exterior. But I had some ideas. If I hadn't worked out yet how to unscrew the outermost Russian doll, I could maybe break it. I knew he was lying. I could prove it on the triviality about the television. I had the basis for one very strong suspicion: he was more than Anna's landlord. Let's see
if the polish at least cracked. He had said he would be at home this week. That was the best place to see him. Liars are at their most vulnerable in their own house, because it's where the truth can hurt them most.

I finished my soda and lime, feeling such a clean-living man, and handed it in at the bar. The earliness of my departure evinced a chorus of disbelief and the suggestion that Katie should get my Horlicks ready. I promised I would bring them in some tracts on teetotalism tomorrow. Before going upstairs, I went across to the pay-phone in the hall.

I rang Kentish Town. Nobody answered. I rang the restaurant. I wished nobody had answered. It was Betsy, pleased to elocute precisely that Jan wasn't there. I rang Jan's flat. Standing lonely in a busy place, I thought how much I could have used a night with my friends. Where was Tom Docherty anyway? There are few sounds more forlorn than the phone of someone you love ringing out with no one to answer.

S
omeone's death can be like a flare illumining where you are. You realise with a shock how far you have wandered from where you were intending to go, how strangely the terrain differs from where you had hoped to be. Driving to Thornbank, I was still held in the livid brightness of Scott's dying. The landscape was more than a landscape. It was also a private ordnance map of questions and messages to me. The countryside and the villages I passed through seemed to make an innocent statement about the coexistence of people and nature but the subtext for me was the strangeness of what I had become.

Outside of Graithnock, I drove past familiar fields where three of us had wandered a lot one summer. We would be fifteen, Davy, Jim and me. Jim's father had greyhounds and we sometimes took them with us. I remembered the private club of our laughter and the grandiose folly of our expectations. Jim died at nineteen on a motorbike. I had met Davy by accident a few years ago. He was an architect who appeared to be drinking what was left of his dreams to death. I was a middle-aged detective who liked to try and read philosophy, like someone studying holiday brochures in the poorhouse.

In the village of Holmford I passed a shabby council house I had known before they finished building it. I had been there with one of the first girls I took home from the dancing. I was seventeen and so was she. We missed her last bus and walked the few miles to Holmford. Seeing the doorless and windowless shell of the building, I carried her over the threshold. It wasn't a long marriage. We stayed there maybe a couple of hours, away from the eyes of others. We could have done anything without being observed. What we did was kiss and touch each other in many places with endless gentleness and sing songs. We must have sung about twenty duets. No doubt my performance would have earned me disbarment from the mobile stag party that was male adolescence in Graithnock at that time. But I didn't care. I acquired with my first interest in girls a conviction that whatever good things happen between two people looking for love are their own sweet secret and nobody else's business. And, anyway, I enjoyed what we did. I think the songs were a kind of making love, a shared dreaming, a faith in what would be, even if it didn't happen between us. Thinking of black-haired Mary and wondering how she was now, I wished her well. I wished her a good duet with someone kind. The house then, it seemed to me, was where I had been. The house now, I was afraid, was maybe where I was.

It's not just you that moves on. Places move too. You go back and you find that they are not where they were. The streets and buildings may remain, with modifications, but they aren't any longer the place you knew. The looker makes the looked at and what I was seeing perhaps was a kind of absence, a self no longer there. I had come into what I took for manhood among these parts of Ayrshire and they had meant much to
me, not just as a geography but as a landscape of the heart, a quintessential Scotland where good people were my landmarks and the common currency was a mutual caring. Why did it feel so different to me today, a little seedy and withdrawn? Had I dreamed a place? Going through Blackbrae towards Thornbank, I recalled that big Pete Wells was dead. He had come from here, the father of a friend of mine at Graithnock Academy. I had enjoyed listening to him talking many times. He had been one of the strongest believers in the worth of people I had ever met and in the social justice that was coming. Thinking of him, I wondered what he would think of me and of what I had become. Stopping in Thornbank to ask the way to Fast Frankie White's mother's house, I felt as if I was asking directions to the faith Pete Wells had had. Was it still there and could I share it?

The house was in the middle of a terrace, a two-storey roughcast. As I walked up the path, I noticed that the curtains of the upstairs bedroom window were still drawn. I tapped the letter-box lightly. A woman opened the door. She was maybe forty, pleasantly strong-featured.

‘Yes?

She said it quietly, as if conversation were a cabal. I found myself joining in the conspiracy.

‘I'm looking for Frankie,' I said. ‘I was passing through. I thought I would say hello.'

‘You haven't heard?' she said.

‘It's been a long time since I saw him.'

She glanced upstairs.

‘Come in,' she said.

She ushered me into the living-room and closed the door.

‘It's Mrs White,' she said. ‘She hasn't long to go. A couple of weeks at the most. Frankie's upstairs with her now.'

I understood why Frankie White was home. Brian had said it would take more than the SAS to get him out of London. The death of your mother qualified.

‘Ah'm sorry,' the woman said. ‘Ah'm forgettin' maself.' She held out her hand. ‘Ah'm Sarah Haggerty.'

‘Jack Laidlaw.'

‘You known Frankie long?'

‘Quite a few years. Back and forward.'

‘Ah was just makin' a cup of tea there. Ye want one?'

‘That would be nice.'

She left the kitchen door open and we talked in a quiet and desultory way. The nature of her references to how Frankie was ‘workin' in London these days' convinced me that she thought the work was legal. When she asked me what I did myself, I didn't want to mar her image of Frankie as an honest grafter. I said I worked for quite a big firm. In personnel. Involved mainly in recruitment. I was glad she didn't go on to ask me about working conditions as I was running out of euphemisms. She was full of praise for Frankie's concern for his mother. It seemed he had arranged leave of absence from his work in London to stay with her till she died. He didn't care if it cost him his job. There were people in Thornbank, she said, who spoke badly of Frankie, especially after what had happened lately. What had happened lately? She didn't seem to hear the question. Perhaps it was because the kettle was boiling at the time. But the gossips didn't know the real Frankie White. ‘He loves that woman up the stair. An' he's a good judge.' Unlike a lot of people these days, he hadn't forgotten where he came from.

The picture she painted of Fast Frankie White as an upholder of the solid virtues in shifting times was an interesting departure from realism, the portrait as an abstract of improbable colours. Frankie was good-looking and unviolent and he dispensed slickness like a Brylcreem machine. But what he promised, you must never hope to be realised. He had a mouth like a dud cheque.

Yet in this place Sarah Haggerty's sense of Frankie seemed less ludicrous. The style of the room was familiar enough to me to be part of a whole contemporary trend in interior decoration: filial plush. In this case, it meant thick wall-to-wall carpeting, heavy wallpaper, a lot of ornaments and a fyfe-stone fire-place encasing a very elaborate metal-work gas-fire.

I liked the style fine not because it pleased the eye but because it pleased the heart. I had seen examples of it all over the West of Scotland. What it meant was gratitude. Its essence was that you should realise this place had very definitely been
decorated
. The person who lived here mattered to her family and this was their way of thanking her for enduring threadbare carpets and linoleum while she sacrificed to bring them up. If you were to judge Frankie White by what he had done for his mother, you came closer to understanding Sarah Haggerty's naive idea of him. I just hoped the video hadn't fallen off the back of a lorry. That would have been like making a crucifix out of stolen gold.

‘Here we are,' she said. ‘Jack, isn't it?'

‘That's right. Thanks. Sarah?'

She nodded. I was glad to be one of the family before Frankie arrived. It should make our performance easier. I had been adopted just in time. Frankie came in.

I couldn't remember having seen Frankie White without his make-up. I was seeing him now. Even Pagliacci had a place where he took off the greasepaint. This was Frankie's. The flip attitudes were gone. The fear of what was happening to his mother still looked out of his face. Perhaps most revealingly for Frankie, who normally dressed in the sartorial equivalent of neon lights, he was wearing a woollen shirt, track-suit trousers and trainer shoes. Then he realised who it was he was looking at.

‘Hullo, old friend,' I said, being not too subtle with the cue. ‘I was explaining to Sarah that I haven't seen you for a while.'

‘Oh, Frankie,' Sarah said. ‘Ah was just sayin' to Jack here about yer mother. He hadn't heard.'

Trouble always travels in company, as Katie Samson would say. As if upstairs wasn't bad enough for Frankie, here was a policeman drinking tea in his house like an old family friend. What was happening to the world? Frankie didn't know. He stood in the middle of our charade like the only person at the masked ball who had forgotten his costume. I thought I had better not offer to shake hands in case he had a cardiac attack at the end of my arm. Sarah helped the situation unknowingly by getting a cup of tea for Frankie and saying she would go up and see his mother.