Lennox

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I took Elsie, the nurse who had so solicitously cared for my clobbered noggin, out to the Trocadero. I usually avoided Glasgow’s dance halls. They did big business: these were the mating grounds of the city’s working class. And because Glasgow was a resolutely working-class city, the dance halls were filled to bursting every Friday and Saturday night.

My dislike of the dance halls stemmed from the fact that despite the glitz and the sham Hollywood glamour, they had the charm of municipal slaughterhouses. And they frequently became just that. The bouncers often outnumbered the bar staff and nudging someone and spilling their drink by accident could cost you an eye.

But Elsie, my pretty little nurse, was ‘keen on the dancing’, so our fourth date was to the Troc. I also suspected that she took comfort in a crowd that would keep my dishonourable intentions at bay.

We squeezed through the doors at eight thirty and I was hit immediately by the clammy heat of a thousand bodies condensing against anything from outside. The band was working its hardest to balance volume and tunefulness as it bashed its way through a version of the Ray Martin Orchestra hit ‘Blue Tango’. We shouldered a path through the throng and I left Elsie standing on the edge of the dance floor while I got us some drinks. I spotted a table with two free seats and when I came back I steered her towards it. She fell into conversation, as Glaswegians tend to do with any stranger, with the three girls already seated at the table. We danced and drank the whole evening, the alcohol taking no effect in the hothouse of the dancehall.

Shortly after ten the density of the crowd in the Troc intensified as a wave of latecomers poured in, thrown out of pubs and onto the street by Scotland’s Presbyterian licensing laws. A group of boys came in, no older than nineteen, with joyously murderous hate burning in their eyes. There was a depressing predictability about what would happen next and my instincts told me it was time Elsie and I should be going.

‘There’s going to be trouble,’ I said when she protested. I was right. We had just made it to the door when we heard the familiar sounds of a gang fight breaking out.

I parked around the corner from the hospital. Glasgow was again wreathed in fog, not as thick as the night I’d encountered Lillian Andrews, but thick enough to give us the feeling of solitude.

After some kissing and fumbling Elsie pushed me away from her.

‘That’s quite enough of that, Mr Lennox.’ She smiled with coquettish reproachfulness but there was a hint of nervousness in her voice.

‘What’s the matter, Elsie? Don’t you like me?’

‘I think you’re very nice.’ She regarded me in the half dark of the car appraisingly. ‘In fact you’re very handsome.’

‘This doesn’t bother you?’ I laid my hand on my left cheek.

‘No. Not at all. The scars aren’t that bad and they make you look rugged. How did you get them?’

‘I turned the other cheek. Unfortunately I turned it to a German grenade. Actually the scars are from the surgeon patching me up.’

Elsie frowned and traced the small web of thin white scars with her fingertips. I moved in on her again and she pulled back. ‘I need to get back…’

We got out and I walked her back to the nurses’ home.

‘I found out what you were looking for,’ she said as we walked. ‘I couldn’t find out everything, but I spoke to a friend who works in Hairmyres. They specialize in TB there.’

‘What did you find out?’

‘Wilma Marshall was taken by the police to Hairmyres Hospital. They had to collapse a lung and they put her on a course of that new TB drug, streptomycin. She had a bad reaction to it so they gave her nicotine to counteract the side effects. She was in Hairmyres for two weeks and then transferred to the sanatorium in Perthshire. That’s all I could find out. My friend wasn’t happy about giving the information. You said she’s your cousin?’ There was a hint of suspicion clouding Elsie’s pretty heart-shaped face.

I nodded. ‘My aunt is very worried about her.’

We came close to the nurses’ home. I pulled Elsie gently into the mouth of an alley and out of the fog-wreathed pool of light from the street lamp. We kissed and then she protested as I hoisted her skirt up. She didn’t protest enough. Afterwards, when we stepped back out of the alley mouth, she cried a little and I had to comfort her. She made me promise to see her again and I said I would meet her the following weekend. A promise. It was a lie and we both knew it.

As I walked back to where I’d left my car, the heavy feeling in my chest again warned that the fog was going to congeal into a suffocating smog. I had to drive back along Great Western Road at little more than walking pace, guiding myself by following the ribbon of kerb along the roadside. Fiona White was still up when I arrived home and came to the door.

‘Pleasant evening, Mr Lennox?’ The air tinted with a hint of sherry when she spoke. The extent of a Saturday night’s recreation for a middle-class war widow in Glasgow.

‘It was fine, Mrs White. You?’

Her small smile bordered on a sneer. She reached into the hall and handed me an envelope. ‘A gentleman delivered this for you this afternoon.’

‘Did he leave a message?’

‘No. Goodnight, Mr Lennox.’

I threw the envelope down onto my bed unopened, took off my tie and hung up my jacket. I switched the radio on, lit a cigarette and looked out through the window at the street. The smog had closed its grip even tighter on the city. I thought of little Elsie’s tear-stained face. There was a time when I would not have used a woman like that. When I would have thought of a man like me as a total shit. There was a time when I would not have done a lot of the things I did now.

I kept my radio permanently tuned into the BBC Overseas Service, the station created to persuade Canadians like me, as well as Australians and New Zealanders, that it was a jolly good idea to stay part of the British Empire. Listening to the Overseas Service had become a habit. Maybe it was because, ironically, it made me feel like I was back in New Brunswick. I listened to the news. Malenkov had succeeded Stalin as Soviet premier. Two members of the Kenyan Home Guard had been murdered in a Mau Mau guerrilla raid. Continued stalemate at Kaesong. More clashes between Arabs and Israelis. Hunt and Hillary had set up base camp in the foothills of Everest. Preparations continuing for the June coronation.

I opened the envelope Fiona White had given me. The note said simply: Worth looking at. There was a Chubb key with a tag bearing an address in Milngavie. I turned the envelope upside down and shook it: there was nothing else in it. Nothing to indicate who had sent it. My guess was that it had come from Willie Sneddon, but he hadn’t mentioned it when I had spoken to him on the ’phone earlier. Maybe it was from someone else who didn’t want to advertise their involvement, should the boys in blue visit me again and find it. I decided I would ’phone Sneddon and ask what it was all about. In the meantime, I had another property to find.

The next day I walked into Byres Road with the list of addresses I had gleaned from my calls to solicitors and estate agents. One was on Byres Road, the others on the streets that ran off it. All densely packed terraces of smaller Victorian townhouses, their faces pushed hard onto the street with only a token skirt of garden to the front. All red sandstone turned soot-black. Some of the houses had been subdivided into flats, the others still intact. Glasgow University was just around the corner and many of the flats and houses were occupied by middle-income academics.

I looked at each property from the outside first. None looked like former brothels. Or maybe they all did. I had my cover story at the ready, but was reluctant to go knocking door to door. There was one house, in Dowanside Road, about three hundred yards from the junction with Byres Road, that looked as likely as any. There was a narrow street to the side of the house that rose steeply away from Dowanside Road. I walked up it and around to the back of the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as I could on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The back of the house was guarded by rails, but I could see that the new occupant had begun renovation of a garden that had been let go. Brothel keepers don’t spend a lot of time in the garden.

The affected accent of the Kelvinside area of Glasgow was a remarkable piece of vocal engineering. The socially pretentious Kelvinsiders could not imitate the vowel sounds of Standard Southern English, so instead tried to torture the instinctive Glasgow flatness out of each syllable. Cavalry became kevelry, cash became kesh. The woman who answered the door was the Torquemada of vowels. She was a small, plain housewife in her late thirties with dull reddish-blonde hair and a frosty manner. I could hear the sounds of children from inside the house.

‘Ken I help you?’ she said.

‘Hi, ma’am. My name is Wilbur Kaznyk. I’m over here on vacation from the States and I was hoping to look up an old buddy of mine. War buddy. Frank Harris. I don’t have his exact address, but I know it’s here in Dowanside Road. Someone told me he’d sold up and moved. I believe you folks’ve just bought this house.’

For a moment she eyed me suspiciously. She called over her shoulder into the hall. ‘Henry… there’s a menn here looking for a Frenk Herris.’

Henry appeared at his wife’s shoulder. He was a small mole of a man behind thick glasses. I repeated my fiction about being an American guest.

‘It wasn’t this house,’ he said. ‘We bought this house from a Mrs McGahern. She was a young war widow, apparently.’

‘Did you meet Mrs McGahern?’ I pushed credibility as far as I could. ‘I mean, maybe she bought the place from Frank and has a forwarding address.’

‘We nayver met Mrs McGeyhern,’ continued Henry’s wife. ‘She hed already moved. Everything was conducted through Mason and Brodie, her solicitors.’ It had been Mason and Brodie who had given me the address. ‘Perhepps you should ask them. Their offices are in St Vincent Street. Good day.’

She closed the door. So much for hands across the ocean. At least I knew now that I had the right address. I was also pretty sure that Tam McGahern hadn’t had a secret wife. I’d have to work out some way of getting the information from Mason and Brodie.

I thought about heading in to the Horsehead Bar at opening time for the traditional pie and pint but Hammer Murphy’s processing plant came to mind, so I decided to have high tea in Byres Road. The overpriced pastries were too sweet. Rationing was being phased out and sugar had only just come off the ration book, so the new badge of affluence was to be liberal with it. I sat at the window and watched the world, or at least Byres Road, pass me by. I drank my tea and contemplated where I was with everything. The sun outside shone on the people and cars that passed with the joyfulness of a Presbyterian preacher: the time I felt most homesick for Canada was the British Sunday.

I made a decision and, after I’d paid, picked up my car and headed up towards Bearsden. Parking where I had before, I walked round to the drive of the Andrews house. A mink-coloured MG TF convertible swished down the drive and out onto the road and I ducked back out of sight, shielded by an overhang of thick bush. I recognized the driver as the blonde woman whom I’d seen Lillian Andrews with that night in the smog, and I was pretty sure it was Lillian in the passenger seat. I waited until they had pulled out into Drymen Road before heading up towards the house.

It was John Andrews who answered the door. He was wearing an open-necked shirt with a cravat and a pale-blue sweater that exaggerated a paunch that needed no exaggeration. Given that he had been avoiding my calls, I expected him to be taken aback, angry even. But he looked startled. And afraid.

‘What do you want, Lennox?’

‘We have to talk, Mr Andrews.’

‘Our business is concluded. We discussed that already. My wife is back safe and sound.’

I held up the envelope. ‘We need to discuss what I have here, Mr Andrews. I’m afraid it’s important. May I come in?’

Andrews looked undecided for a moment, then stood to one side. I tried not to show that I knew my way into the Contemporary-furnished lounge. Andrews remained standing and didn’t invite me to sit. I handed him the envelope with the photographs. After planning this moment for so long, I suddenly found that I wasn’t sure what to say. I let him look at the pictures. Halfway through he didn’t so much sit down as drop all the way onto the low-slung sofa. He kept looking. When he was finished he looked up at me. There was pain in his eyes. Lots of pain, but no surprise. Or disappointment.

‘Are you satisfied now, Mr Lennox?’ he said, the hate dull, heavy and blunt in his voice. ‘Are you happy that I’m now humiliated before you?’

‘No, Mr Andrews. This gives me absolutely no pleasure. I could have left things as they were-’

‘Then why the hell didn’t you?’ His eyes were now glossy. ‘Why didn’t you leave things alone when I asked you to?’

‘Because, Mr Andrews, I thought you were a man in trouble. And I think it even more now. I can imagine these pictures are upsetting for you to see, but I also know they were no surprise to you. Are you in trouble, Mr Andrews? Are you being blackmailed or something?’

He laughed a bitter laugh. ‘I loved my wife, you know. I still love her. Lillian is so beautiful. So beautiful. I couldn’t believe that I could be so lucky at this time of life. My first wife died, you see.’

‘I’m sorry. So even then you thought it too good to be true?’

Another bitter laugh. ‘Thanks for that, Lennox. Thanks for pointing out how obvious it should have been.’

‘Listen, I know you’re in trouble. I want to help if I can.’

‘I see. Touting for more business…’

‘I’m not interested in the money. You’ve paid me more than enough already. I just want to help.’

‘Then leave me alone. Just piss off and leave me alone. I’m in trouble all right. I’ve married a gold-digger and a slut and she’s going to take me for everything I’ve got. That’s all the trouble I’m in. And believe me that’s enough. Isn’t that enough for you, Mr Lennox?’

I picked up my hat. ‘If you say so. But I still think there’s more to this. If you need my help, ’phone me at my office or on this number.’ I wrote down the number of my digs. ‘One more thing… you maybe aren’t aware of this, but Lillian’s real name is Sally. Sally Blane. I thought you ought to know. If that still is her legal name and she married you under a false identity, then the marriage is void. You could get out.’

He continued to glare at me with a dull hatred, but took the number anyway.

I stopped off at the Horsehead Bar for a couple. I needed them. I didn’t like Andrews. I didn’t like his fleshy, ugly face, his affected manner or the way he talked. But once more, somewhere deep inside, I felt pity for another human being in distress. Again it surprised me. I thought that capacity had died in the war along with the kid from the Kennebecasis.

A couple became three or four and I started to think about the little nurse again. And then about Fiona White, my landlady. About her Kate Hepburn eyes. About kissing her to loosen the lips that were always drawn too tight. About how easy it would be for one bundle of damaged goods to get mixed up with another.

About how shit everything and everyone was.

Big Bob asked me if I wanted another but I said no. I was getting into that ugly tinder mood that needs just one drink too many to catch light and then you want to smash a face, any face, just to make someone else feel worse than you do. There was more Scots blood in me than I liked to admit.

I went out into the cold and clammy Glasgow night. I left the car outside the Horsehead and walked all the way back to my flat. It was a long walk and the night air slowly cooled my mood. I stood outside the house. The curtains of Fiona White’s downstairs flat were drawn but edged with warm light. The two girls would be asleep in the room to the back, probably dreaming of a father whom they now only really remembered from photographs.

I opened the door quietly and moved quickly up the stairs once I’d closed it behind me. Tonight was not the night to bump into Mrs White. Tonight there was a danger that our mutual need for comfort would be too great.

Or perhaps I was deluding myself.