Laidlaw

5

The room was a permanent hangover. Waking up in it, Harry Rayburn was always faced with coming to terms with himself all over again. It was the room in the house where he spent most time and it was furnished with the debris of past attitudes. Those attitudes were an unresolvable argument in which he was a very tired chairman. The two Beardsley prints looked uncomfortable beside the framed photographs of boxers. The largest one was Marcel Cerdan. The huge, elaborately patterned lampshade clashed with the ascetic whiteness of the walls, making the room look like a Calvinist brothel. The round bed appalled him, obliged him to sink nightly into his own embarrassment. His dressing-gown was a kimono.

More than once he had lain here and laughed at his pretentiousness. The room was such a wardrobe of psychological drag. But this morning he had no time to achieve that distance from his attempts to come to terms with his own nature. The phone pulled him out of bed and he put on the kimono without thinking. He bumped towards the phone in a confusion that was part hangover, part way of life. He felt momentarily bad about answering the phone in such a mess. As he lifted the receiver, he ran his hand through his hair.

‘Hello?’

‘Harry? It’s Tommy. Tommy Bryson.’

The name went through him like a spear.

‘Tommy! Where are you? Do you want to come up?’

It struck him that the last word was strange, unless it meant upstairs, to the bedroom. He was fussing with his hair again.

‘I can’t. Harry.’

The way he said the name made a crossroads of feeling in Harry. It was a plea and that was what Harry had longed to hear but it was so fraught with pain that he dreaded what it was going to lead to. He waited to find out what he would have to feel.

‘Something’s happened. Something terrible.’

‘What is it, Tommy?’

‘I need your help. I’ve killed a girl.’

The statement spread between them like a steppe.

‘Tommy,’ Harry said.

They listened to each other’s silence hopelessly.

‘Tommy.’

The name died out between them. Harry was amazed to find that his voice knew what to say.

‘What is it you want me to do?’

‘You bring me paper and a pen. I need to write things down. I need to know what’s happened.’

It was pathetic, as if somebody dying of throat-cancer should ask for pastilles.

‘But first. Would you go and see my mother, please? Do you remember the address?’

‘I remember.’

‘Tell her something. Make up something. I don’t want her to go to the police. I don’t want that.’

‘You could come here, Tommy. They’ll not look for you here.’

‘No, I can’t,’ Tommy said, ‘no, I can’t.’

‘Where are you, then?’

The pause was self-deception, a choosing whether to trust, but the choice had already been made.

‘I’m in the Bridgegate. Off Jocelyn Square. It’s condemned. Above “Alice’s Restaurant”. There’s corrugated iron across the door of the entry. But I forced it. Don’t come till later on. When things are quiet. But see my mother just now. See her right away.’

‘Tommy,’ Harry said.

‘Will you do all that?’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘All right.’

‘I love you, Tommy. Don’t forget that.’

But the phone was already down. It wasn’t until he had said it that Harry realised how true it was. As he laid down the receiver, he knew he had just had a terminal conversation. This was a kind of arrival. The pretence that he wasn’t really bothered by not having seen Tommy for the past couple of weeks was over. All the pretences with which he had furnished his house were over, or at least their compulsiveness was over. If he used any of those roles again, it would only be to help Tommy.

He remembered what he had said to Tommy the last time they spoke. ‘You’re terrified that you’re gay. I know I’m a homosexual.’ But although he had admitted his homosexuality to himself for a long time, he had admitted it only to contrive more effectively ways of protecting himself from other people. His life had been spent acquiring compensatory qualities that weren’t natural to him but which enabled him to survive. The hardness of his own experience made him forgive Tommy at once, whatever he had done. As far as Rayburn was concerned, everybody else deserved to be Tommy’s scapegoat.

The toughness he had learned would have an honest purpose now. He would use it to help Tommy to get away. It was his revenge on his own experience.