Strange Loyalties (29 page)

‘Who would I get to do the job?' I said. ‘Your shadow's got trouble keeping up with you.'

I joined Brian and Bob at their table. The vagueness of my arrangement with Marty didn't impress them. It didn't impress me much either. The music reflected the continuing uncertainty of where I was – all the disparate elements I had tried to bring together still hadn't fused, were still looking for the timing and inter-connection that would make them cohere. Jan was a part of that uncertainty. Where had I found the arrogance to give Marty her phone-number? I didn't know what she had decided. Maybe after dinner tonight I'd be lucky to reach her by postcard.

T
here are public places on which our private lives have an imaginative freehold, because of their associations. La Bona Sospira was one of mine. It was where Jan and I had our first meal together. We had gone back often since then.

You came in, through a narrowly unimpressive frontage, to what wasn't so much a bar as an ante-room to the restaurant. I had always enjoyed that room. It was like a bridge between two cultures. You stepped in off a Glasgow street and the room said: okay, you're Scottish and you want a drink, you have a drink; but we're Italian and any drink you have here is just a prelude to some serious food. The gantry was minute, telling you not to get excited. The decor was banal but so what? Bring your own dreams and any place is special.

This was where I had brought a few of mine. Tonight I wasn't sure if they could live here any longer. I was nervous about meeting Jan. I loved her and I needed her and I thought she loved me but I didn't think I was what she needed. That worried me because, many romantic fictions notwithstanding, most people will eventually go with what they need, not what they want. Think of Meece Rooney. That's why drug-dealers do so well.

I sat down at one of what I had always assumed were beaten brass tables. I hardly know one metal from another. But I had always assumed they were beaten brass. I felt vague about myself. Guido turned up, as Guido often had.

‘Jacko,' he said. ‘It's nice to see you.'

‘Nice to be here, Guido.'

‘The glorious Jan will be here soon?'

‘That's the idea.'

‘I bring the menus. But, first, I bring a drink. We have a little of the Antiquary.' The third syllable seemed to go on a long time. ‘This for you?'

‘That's great. Marcella's well?'

‘Marcella is too well. She's so strong, it frightens me.'

Guido went away and came back and brought two menus and a stubby glass of the Antiquary and a jug of water. I had left the car at the hotel. I topped the glass up with water.

I looked at a menu. The food was inventive but so were the prices. I had once suggested this connection to Guido but I wouldn't do it again.

‘You want Volvo,' he had said, ‘you buy Volvo. You want Alfa Romeo, you pay for Alfa Romeo.'

The problem was, I reflected, I had for a long time been paying for Alfa Romeos I couldn't afford. My finances were a disaster. My one piece of luck in that area was that Freddie, my landlord, was someone I had known for years. The rent he charged for the flat was ridiculously cheap. Beyond that, all was crisis. Once I had set aside what was for Ena and the children, the rest was carrion money, just there to feed the vultures. They had been constantly circling for some time now and my cunning plan had always been to ignore them. When I finally
collapsed in a heap of putrefying debts, they would no doubt come and get me. In the meantime, just keep running.

I was starting on my whisky as Jan came in. I had just kissed her, tasting the coolness of the evening on her cheek, when Guido arrived like a heat-directed missile that only homed in on women. His small rotundity surrounded her. He buried her in facile compliments, which Jan received delightedly. I suppose if someone is showering you with flowers, it would be churlish to notice that they're plastic.

I had to admit that she was due some compliments. As Guido elaborately unveiled her, taking her grey woollen coat like a gigantic matador's cloak, she stood in a plain, tight, black dress that declared every pore to be perfectly in place. She sat down and the area around the table brightened.

‘You look incredible,' I said.

‘That's how I feel,' she said. ‘You look tired.'

‘That's not how I feel.'

We smiled opaquely at each other. We were circling. Few people can be more distant than estranged intimates.

‘How's your week been?' I said.

Before she could answer, Guido was back to make a ritual presentation of her Campari and soda, a large ruby for the Queen of Sheba. He fussed and Jan graciously accepted his fussing.

‘My week?' she said, as Guido left. ‘Unbelievable. You know we closed last night?'

‘Sorry?'

‘The restaurant. We closed down last night. For renovations We're getting far more business than we can handle. We're extending the restaurant into the coffee-lounge. Even then things'll be tight.'

I didn't mention that all of this was a surprise to me, because perhaps that was my fault. If you've been down in a diving-bell for over a month, you can't expect to keep up with the news. But her failure even to hint at it, previously, suggested to me not accident but deliberate policy.

‘I would've thought,' I said, ‘that the obvious night to close down would be a Saturday. This way, you're losing the two best nights of the week.'

‘Oh, we can afford it. It's been going unbelievably well. The reason for closing Thursday. You know what it is? We wanted to prepare the place for one last thrash before the decorators move in. Tomorrow night we're throwing a party. All the people who've helped us and some of our regulars. We're making the biggest Boeuf Bourgignon in the world. It'll be some night. You must come.'

Her invitation had all the intimacy of a business-card.

‘What about you?' she said.

She leant towards her Campari, as if she needed a prop, and I noticed a sudden stillness in her. She was staring at the table. The defencelessness of her posture gave me a glimpse of the vulnerable woman behind the glamour, renewed the intensity of my feelings for her in an instant. Jan had once said to me after making love, ‘You make me frightened of me.' I had known what she meant, for I felt the same way. Those moments we had shared defied pragmatism and were therefore difficult to accommodate in the light of day. I had a feeling that was difficult to accommodate now. I would have rather we had each other on the metal-topped table than go through these charades. She glanced up and we were sharing a look directly for the first time since we had met tonight. Our eyes
were a mutual confession: we are a joint compulsion. The acknowledgement made her defensive again. She looked away.

‘What about you?' she said. ‘Have you sorted things out?'

‘I'm trying.'

‘Oh, not still that.'

‘Still that.'

She lifted her drink and stared at it and sipped and looked round the room. She had moved away from the admission our eyes had made. She had remembered there were conditions to it I still hadn't met.

‘Oh well,' she said. ‘Meantime, some of us have to live.'

‘I suppose we're all trying to do that.'

‘I mean live in the daily world. You're so unrealistic.'

I found that an interesting observation. I respected the difference of Jan's life, the validity of her personal preoccupations. But I wasn't quite prepared to concede that running a successful restaurant made you expert in the nature of reality.

‘The world moves on, Jack,' she said.

‘Aye. But where to? That's what's worrying me.'

She took another sip of her drink and smiled at the passing Guido and became a busy, successful woman again. The passionate look we had exchanged might have been between an attractive scuffler in the street and a sophisticated woman, while her Daimler was stopped briefly at the lights. She opened a menu.

‘Nice Campari,' she said.

Any evening has its motifs. Those were ours, evasive mannerisms and an impulse to strip each other in the restaurant. During the meal, we tried to talk seriously about our lives but the conversation remained somehow oblique. We seemed
incapable of meeting in no-man's-land. We just kept checking the other's position and reinforcing our own. We were outmanoeuvring each other so effectively, I wondered if we would ever connect.

I asked, ‘How's Betsy doing?'

‘Better than you would like,' Jan replied.

Jan said, ‘You seem to have been talking a lot to Morag Harkness.'

I said, ‘That's because she answers the phone.'

I said. ‘Barry Murdoch been around much?'

‘Barry Murdoch's always around,' Jan said. ‘So what? I know some people who aren't.'

‘You're a bit too vehement about Anna,'Jan said. ‘You sure you haven't got a thing for her?'

‘I have,' I said. ‘It's called a Gatling gun.'

And so it went on through the jolly meal, a cross between a minuet and a sword dance, where you had to watch where you stepped in case you found you were bleeding. What I think we were doing, really, was devoting an entire evening to one of those long, askance looks lovers sometimes give each other in their minds, that could roughly translate into what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-this-one? Our lack of contact had perhaps emphasised to each the difference of the other. Sometimes Jan would look at me as at something surprisingly quaint, as if she were thinking, ‘I never noticed that you had two noses before'. Sometimes, for sure, I must have been doing the same.

What Jan was realising about me, I suppose, was that my relationship with her hadn't smoothed my edges as much as she had hoped. I could order Pinot Grigio with the food, right enough, but while we drank it I still talked about the streets
and swore occasionally. I might mention Shakespeare's name but it might well be linked with that of Meece Rooney or Frankie White. That had always bothered Jan about me. I refused to pigeonhole my nature into separate social identities. I was the same person whatever room I entered. I would make adjustments out of consideration and politeness, like trying not to swear in front of someone I knew it would offend or not using a big word to someone I thought wouldn't understand it. But there would be no pretence of being who I wasn't.

Jan and I had argued about that a lot. Once I put the question to Tom Docherty when we were drinking. I didn't connect it with Jan. I just posed it as a generality. Tom related it to writing, as he does with a lot of things.

Another of the shorter sayings of Chairman Tom: ‘It's like literary criticism. It's nearly all about register. There's a lot of po-faced crap that gets highly praised because of its tone of voice. “I'm serious, I'm cultured,” it's telling you all the time. Bollocks. The serious and the cultured don't even have to mention the fact. It's coming out their pores already. They just do it, they just create. Often laughing and swearing as they go along. Same with people. “There are things you say, things you don't say, times to say it, and times not.” Some more bollocks. The idea of register in language is mainly just fences shutting out most of the reality we should all be sharing. There's only one serious human register and it accommodates everybody: truth, in the most generous form you can find it.'

That would do me. Maybe that was why I was a policeman who read philosophy. I could understand both Albert Camus and Matt Mason. I had better. They were both telling me important things about the way we live. They were both part
of the same world. It was my world, too. It had to be. There was only the one world to choose from.

What I was realising about Jan, I suppose, was how alien this attitude was to her. There was a time she had been more tolerant of the wind off the streets I had often brought into her life. But lately she seemed to be waiting more and more impatiently for me to close the door on its blowing. That wouldn't happen. Tonight she seemed to understand that. She listened with a weary silence to the things that were concerning me. So I stopped talking about them.

I saw that she thought all of those people I had been talking to and all of those strange events others got themselves involved in had really nothing to do with this bright and pleasant room we were sitting in, nothing seriously to do with the life we might have together. I didn't think that. This place was connected to those places. Any place she and I went to together would be. I could sit here and enjoy a good meal and love looking at her but I couldn't make the pleasure erase those other things or somehow discount them. All I wanted to do tonight was to be with her. But I cared very deeply what happened in other places tomorrow. I hoped Marty Bleasdale found Melanie McHarg. I hoped Melanie McHarg would help me. I wanted that Dan Scoular's death should have honour and that Scott's death should be understood. If they weren't, any life Jan and I could have together would be the less.

It seemed to me Jan thought I could live in two stories, the one where these other things happened and the one that she and I would write together. That couldn't be. I could only live in the one continuous story – different chapters maybe but the one plot, if you had the sense to follow it.

But while our minds were behaving like strangers, our bodies were arranging an assignation. It was happening in spite of ourselves. She touched my leg instinctively below the table in contradiction of what she was saying. I lost the thread of my objections and was left simply enjoying her eyes. As our predetermined sense of ourselves proceeded rather pompously through the evening, together but apart, the desire to make love to each other followed furtively, like a down-and-out who had nothing to commend him but his need. I think we both knew he was bound to confront us.

Perhaps that's why, after the restaurant, we went into a pub for a drink. We were allowing time for the unadmitted truth of what we felt to catch up. We both became slightly drunk and finished, by no route that I can explain, making our way into the restaurant to get to her flat.