The Crow Road (46 page)

The lawyer Blawke had found me a place to rent for the year I needed to be in Glasgow. It was part of the property of a Mrs Ippot, who’d died rich but intestate at a sourly ripe old age, having throughout her life promised part, or all, of her sizeable fortune to various individual relations and combinations of relations within her extensively and antagonistically divided family, in a blizzard of contradictory letters, and with what appeared to be a profound lack of consideration for the litigious chaos that was bound to ensue. Mrs Ippot, in short, had been the sort of client probate lawyers have wet dreams about.

My own theory was that Mrs I had actually thoroughly detested every single one of her relatives, and had hit on a nicely appropriate way of confounding all of them. By Jarndyce out of Petard, Mrs Ippot’s lawyer-infested legacy had ensured that her rebarbatively consistent family would suffer years if not decades of self-inflicted hatred and frustration as the increasing legal fees gradually corroded the monies she had left; a tortuously slow method of telling your relatives from beyond the grave exactly what you thought of them that makes giving all the loot to a cats’ home look positively benign in comparison.

And so I stayed in the late Mrs Ippot’s enormous town house in Park Terrace, overlooking Kelvingrove Park and the River Kelvin running through it. The museum and art gallery sat red, huge and stately to the left, its sandstone bulk crammed with the silt of time and human effort, while on the hill to its right, skirted by the black outlines of trees, the university soared with self-impressed Victorian fussiness into the grey autumnal skies, positively exuding half a millennium’s experience in the collation and dissemination of knowledge.

The high ceilings and vast windows of Mrs Ippot’s former home appeared to have been the work of an architect anticipating the design of aircraft hangars; the interior was cluttered with paintings, rugs, chandeliers, life-sized ceramics of the smaller big cats, small statues, large statues and objets d’art of every imaginable description, all interspersed with heavy, dark, intricately gnarled wooden furniture that gave the appearance of being volcanic in origin. The house’s inventory - drawn grimly to my attention by a spotty clerk who obviously resented the fact I was younger than he was - came in three volumes.

I christened the place Xanadu, but never did find any sleds.

My friends, of whom I saw less these days, suggested parties when they first heard about the place. On seeing it, they usually agreed with me that to mount a serious whoopee on the premises would be to invite cultural catastrophe on a scale usually only witnessed during major wars and James Last concerts.

One of my pals - graduated, employed; moving on to better things - sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I didn’t have any classes on a Friday. James and I helped mum, who was redecorating the house. She was talking about knocking down the old conservatory and putting in a new one, perhaps covering a small swimming pool. She had also formed the idea of building a harpsichord, and then learning to play it. We took tea at the Steam Packet Hotel on occasion, and James kept an Ordnance Survey map on which he inked in all the walks we undertook, on the hills and through the forests around Gallanach.

Mum and I had started going through dad’s diaries. Some were pocket size, some were desk diaries; a couple of early ones were effectively home made. They went back to when he’d been sixteen. I’d suggested Mum read them first in case there was anything embarrassing in them, though I think in the end she just skimmed them. They weren’t the stuff of scandal, anyway; the entries we’d sampled when we first discovered them in the box at the back of the cupboard were about as revealing as they ever got; really just appointments, notes on what had happened that day, where dad had been, who he’d met. If there was a single indiscretion recorded there, I never found it. The same went for any but the most basic observation or idea; he’d kept those in the A4 pads.

It was at the bottom of the box containing dad’s diaries, in an old presentation tin which had held a bottle of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig, that I found Rory’s diaries; little pocket books, usually a week-per-two-pages. Dad must have filed them separately from the other papers.

I got very excited at first, but then discovered that Rory’s diaries were even more sparse - and considerably more cryptic - than my father’s, with too many initials and acronyms to be easily understood, and too full of week- and even month-long gaps to form a reliable impression of Rory’s life. There was no diary for the year he disappeared. I’d tried to make sense of Rory’s diaries, but it was uphill work. The entry for the day of my birth (when Rory had been in London) read:

The entry for the next day read: “vho” in shaky writing, and that was all. “ho” and “vho” (or sometimes h.o. and v.h.o.) often followed entries regarding pubs or parties the night before, and I strongly suspected they stood for hungover and very hungover. K meant Kenneth and M Mary, pretty obviously. ok was itself (its opposite was nsg, which stood for Not So Good; he’d spelled it out the first time he’d used it, following a “48hr h.o.” after Hogmanay the previous year). A small r meant “rang”; a telephone call. And I had indeed weighed in at eight pounds.

I found a few mentions of “CR” - I even recognised some of the notes I’d read the previous year; he must have jotted them down in his diary first before transferring them to his other papers. But there was nothing to provide any new answers.

The one thing that stayed with me as a result was not a solution to anything, but rather another mystery. It was on a page at the back of the last diary, the diary for 1980; a page headlined by the mysterious message:

JUST USE IT!

... a page covered with notes, some in pencil, some in ball-point, some in very thin felt-tip, but a page which held the only instance anywhere in all the papers I had where Rory had made an effort not just to alter or score out some words or letters, but to obliterate them. It read:

 
The symbols just before the H and C had been obliterated by a heavy black felt-tip marker, but the original note had been written with a ball-point, and by holding the page up to the light at just the right angle, I could see that the first letter had been an F and the second an L.

F and L. Those abbrevations didn’t turn up anywhere else in Rory’s notes for either
Crow Road
or anything else that I knew of. Rory
never
crossed stuff right out; he only ever put a line through it. Why the big deal with the felt-tip? And who were F and L? And why that “whoops”? And what was too close to what?

I found myself cursing Uncle Rory’s inconsistency. F in the diaries sometimes meant Fergus (aka Fe), sometimes Fiona (also Fi), and sometimes Felicity, a girl Rory had known in London, also recorded as Fls, Fl or Fy (I guessed). The only L in the diaries seemed to be Lachlan Watt, though he - mentioned on the rare occasions when he came back to visit from Oz - was LW, more usually.

Some nights at Lochgair, after long evenings spent poring over those little, thin-paged diaries on the broad desk in dad’s study, trying to make sense of it all, and failing, I’d fall asleep in my bed with the symbols and acronyms, the letters and numbers and lines and boxes and doodles and smudges all swirling round in front of me even after I’d put the light out and closed my eyes, as though each scribbled sign had become a mote of dust and - by my reading - been disturbed; lifted from the page and blown around me in a vortex of microscopic info-debris, chaotic witnesses of a past that I could not comprehend.

I found one thing which - after a little puzzled thought — I could comprehend, but which I hadn’t been expecting, in Uncle Rory’s 1979 diary. Stuck to the inside back cover with a yellowing stamp hinge was an old, faded, slightly grubby paper Lifeboat flag, without its pin.

The sentimentalist in me was reduced almost to tears.

 
 
 
In Glasgow I had taken to sitting in churches. It was mostly just for the atmosphere. Catholic churches were best because they felt more like temples, more involved with the business of religious observance. There was always stuff going on; candles burning, people going to confession, the smell of incense in the air ... I’d just sit there for a while, listening but not listening, seeing but not seeing, there but not there, and finding solace in the hushed commerce of other people’s belief, absorbed in the comings and goings of the public and the priests, and their respective professions of faith. A father would approach me, now and again ... but I’d tell him I was just browsing.

I walked a lot, dressed in my Docs and jeans and a long tweed coat that had been my father’s. Uncle Hamish sent me thick letters full of original insights into the sacred scriptures, which I dipped into sometimes when I couldn’t sleep. I never got further than page two of any of them. I frequented the Glasgow Film Theatre, and installed a video and a TV in the lounge. I bought a ghetto-blaster which usually lived in the flat’s kitchen (and so became known as the gateaux-blaster) but which I would take walkabout with me sometimes, at least partly for the weight-training which transporting the brute from room to room provided. I’d stand and look at time-dark paintings, or run a finger over the line of some cold, marble animal, while the tall, glittering rooms resounded to the Pixies, REM, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, The Fall and Faith No More.

 
 
 
‘He’s here,’ Ash said, coming back with the drinks. She sat down.

I looked around. I saw him after a while. A little shorter and a little younger-looking than I’d expected, from the tape I’d seen. He was talking to a couple of other guys; they were all dressed in grey trench coats, and one had put a hat down on the bar that at least looked like it ought to be called a fedora. I wondered if the other two were also journalists.

Rupert Paxton-Marr; a foreign correspondent, his meticulously-trained, razor-sharp mind ready in an instant to describe a place as ‘war-torn’ and bring home to us all events and disasters in far away places, to talk of people tearing at the rubble with their bare hands, to reveal that only with dawn did the full extent of the devastation become apparent, and even - in the very best traditions of British popular journalism - to ask people who’d just seen their entire family duly butchered, burned, crushed or drowned, How do you feel?

Ash seemed contemplative, eyeing me with a steady gaze. ‘Well ...’ I said, feeling my heart beat faster and my palms start to sweat. I took the two torn match-book covers out of my pocket. ‘Think I’ll go see what he has to say for himself.’

‘Want me to come?’ Ash started to move in her seat.

I shook my head. Then bit my lip. ‘Shit, I don’t know. All the way down here, I was just going to go up to him and say, “You send these to my dad?”, but now I don’t know. It feels a bit weird.’ I looked over at the three men. ‘I mean,’ I laughed. ‘They’re even wearing trench-coats!’

Ash looked briefly over too. ‘Hey,’ she said, smiling. ‘They’re on wine; they’re not just knocking back whiskies and heading off. They’ll be here a while yet. Sit and think for a moment.’

I nodded, took a deep breath and drank some whisky.

I thought about it some more. Then I said, ‘Okay. Maybe we should go together. You could sort of introduce ... I could go out and pretend to just come in ... Hell; I could just tell him the truth ... I don’t know.’ I closed my eyes, appalled at my own lack of gumption.

Ash got up, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘Sit here. I’ll tell him I’ve just recognised him. You come over later; just mention the match-books. Don’t show them, not at first. How does that sound?’

I opened my eyes. I shook my head and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, good as anything.’

‘Right.’ Ash went over to the men. She pulled something from the back of her head as she went, and shook her long fawn hair down. It was the length of the jacket. I smiled to myself. That’s my girl, I thought.

I saw them look her up and down. Rupert smiled, then looked mystified as she talked, animated, hands waving. Then he laughed, his tanned, handsome face smiled and he looked her up and down again. The expression changed just a little, though, after that, as though something else had occurred to him. He looked a little more wary. So it appeared to me, anyway. He held out one hand, seeming to make introductions. Ash nodded. He pointed to the bar; she shook her head, then nodded back at me.

Rupert Paxton-Marr gazed above me, then dropped his gaze. He looked at me then back at Ashley. She was talking to him. His expression went through puzzlement, maybe concern, then went wary again, finally cold, studiously expressionless. He nodded, leaning back against a post supporting the front of the bar. Ash glanced back at me, her eyes opening wide for an instant, then she turned back to the men.

I started to get to my feet.

Rupert’s expression didn’t change as I walked over. Two couples passed in front of me, weaving their way between the tables. When they’d passed, Rupert was already on his way to the door, mouth smiling broadly, one hand alternately waving and pointing at his watch as he backed off. By the time I got to where Ash and the two guys in the trench coats were standing, he’d made it out to the street.

I stood there, frowning at the door Rupert Paxton-Marr had exited through. Something about the way he’d moved as he’d backed off had left me with an uncanny feeling of déjà vu.

Ash looked surprised. So did the two guys. One of them looked me up and down. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘How’d you do that? Usually only women with toddlers screaming “Daddy!” in tow have that sort of effect on Rupe.’

Remember, remember,
I thought to myself, and smiled. I turned to the man and shrugged. ‘It’s a gift,’ I told him.

‘He owe you money or somefink?’ the second man said. They were both about thirty, lean and clean-cut. Both were smoking.