Lennox

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

When I was a kid growing up in New Brunswick, I went to Rothesay Collegiate School for Boys, which was as upper as the crust came in Canada. I played in the ice hockey team and was pretty damned good. So good that I started to harbour ambitions about turning professional.

One day we found ourselves playing against another private school: King’s Collegiate. King’s was based in Windsor, Nova Scotia and we should have taken that as a bad omen in itself, seeing as ice hockey was supposedly invented in Windsor. Anyway, there was this kid called MacDonald, not big enough to be a power forward but as fast as hell, who played the right wing and was my opposite number.

Grace isn’t something you usually associate with ice hockey, but MacDonald was truly graceful. Every time I got a run he would come up and dash past me. No checking, no contact, just a flash of red and the puck would be gone. Whatever I decided to do, he’d predict it. Whatever I’d thought of, he’d thought of it first. I felt outclassed and outmanoeuvred. It was a feeling I didn’t like.

Now Lillian Andrews was making me feel like that, too.

We arrived at the Andrews house to find it deserted. But this was no hurried evacuation prompted by the unexpected complication of John Andrews’s death. The estate agent’s sign that we passed on the way into the drive and the curtainless windows told me that there had been a lot of forewarning and planning before this particular coop had been well and truly flown.

I parked on the drive and I could have sworn the Atlantic eased up several inches on its suspension when Twinkletoes and Tiny struggled out of it. I told Tiny to lean against a door at the back of the house and it took us only ten minutes to confirm that it had been thoroughly cleared out. No furniture, no personal items; and I didn’t need to lift floorboards or jemmy off bath panels to know there would be no hidden caches of currency and passports.

I stood in the lounge, now empty of low-slung Contemporary furniture and stared blankly at Twinkletoes and Tiny as I tried to work out what to do next. They gazed back at me blankly. I told them there was no point in hanging about. I drove them back to my place, where Twinkletoes had parked the Sunbeam. I told them I was calling it a day and I’d ’phone Sneddon if I needed them again. What I really needed was to be free of my two-gorilla escort for a while. I could do with time to think. The move out of the Bearsden house hadn’t been hurried or unplanned. And because an estate agent was involved in the sale of the property, the proceeds had to go somewhere. It was my guess that it had all been part of Lillian’s schedule. And maybe John Andrews’s sudden detour from the highway had been part of that schedule too.

Again I thought of how Lillian was dancing around me in the same way as MacDonald, my teenage nemesis on skates, who had made me look pedestrian on the hockey rink. MacDonald had been signed by the Ottawa Senators before the war broke out. Then he had had his legs blown off in a minefield at Anzio. I don’t think the Senators renewed his contract.

I was going to have to take the legs from under Lillian.

I didn’t feel like the Horsehead Bar, but I stopped off for a couple. Maybe it was because I’d been thinking of Lillian Andrews’s legs that I found myself hankering after some gentler company than I’d find at the Horsehead.

May Donaldson was the kind of woman it’s good for a man to know: as obliging as she was undemanding. Most women made you work hard for your entry pass. May, on the other hand, handed you a season ticket straight off. And threw in a few away games as well.

May Donaldson’s flat was in the West End, not too far from mine, in one of the ubiquitous Victorian tenements that curled around Glasgow’s black heart. I didn’t know a lot about May’s background, but it wasn’t the usual Glasgow working-class story and things had gone wrong for her along the way. I had heard somewhere that at one time she had been married to a farmer. Apparently, he had left her to plough a different furrow.

Being a gentleman, I never asked her age but I reckoned she was in her mid-thirties, maybe a couple of years older than me. Britain’s attitude to divorce was the attitude everywhere else had had a hundred years earlier and you could probably deduct a century or two more in Scotland. Being a divorcee here made May spoiled goods and her chances of remarriage were slim. As a consequence, she played the sad and desperate role of the good-time girl. So May and I were occasional playmates. It wasn’t the deepest of relationships, but, like I said, it was convenient.

If I sound critical of Scotland’s divorce laws, don’t get me wrong: I had good reason to be grateful for them. Whenever I wasn’t working for one or other of the Three Kings, I helped middle-class couples dance through the legally required pantomime of divorce. It was usually still the husband who sacrificed his reputation, even if he had not been the unfaithful partner. He would fall on his sword, as it were, even if his wife had been falling on someone else’s.

May helped me out with my divorce cases. The required choreography was that I would arrange for May and the husband to book into a hotel together, pull nightclothes over their daywear, get into bed together and I would turn up with a member of the hotel staff to witness that the delicto was indeed flagrante. The maid or the under-manager would then sign a statement and get their cut of the proceeds and the soon to be ex-spouse would shuffle off. There wasn’t a sordid business that wasn’t more sordid or more business.

I took a taxi from the Horsehead across town to May’s. I would be able to walk back from her place to my digs afterwards. May poured me a whisky as soon as I arrived and we sat down on the sofa together. She wasn’t pretty, but she used make-up to make the most of her regular features. From the neck down, however, she was a piece of art. When I arrived she was wearing a white blouse and black pencil-skirt that hugged the most huggable parts of her.

‘How are things, Lennox?’ she asked.

‘Fine. You?’

‘The usual. You got a job for me?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘At least not yet. And probably not a divorce when it does come up.’

‘So what can I do for you?’ she asked. The hint of weariness annoyed me.

‘I just came by to say hello,’ I said. ‘Do I need a reason?’

‘Not if you don’t say so.’ She got up and poured herself another gin. I was still nursing my Scotch. It was something I’d noticed about May: that she always took a couple or three before we got down to business. Not gassed. Just enough for her to take the edge off what we both knew we were going to do. It was a thought that did my self-esteem no end of good.

‘Still working in the hotel?’

‘Still.’

There was probably some law of physics that prevented the small talk getting any smaller and after my second whisky and her fourth gin, I moved in on her. She led me into the bedroom before heading into the bathroom to fit her cap. I stripped and lay on the bed smoking a Player’s. The wallpaper was yellow and floral-patterned, although I guessed it had been white once: May smoked even more than I did. There were scattered attempts at gentility with the furniture and the knick-knacks. Suddenly I felt depressed.

May lightened my mood by coming back in naked except for her stockings and garter belt. She lay down next to me on the bed and we became consumed in our act of heightened apathy. At least I put my Player’s out first: in Scotland that made me Rudi Valentino.

Afterwards she made some coffee and brought it through to the bedroom. I lit a cigarette for her and one for myself.

‘Do you never feel like a new start?’ she asked out of nowhere.

‘This is my new start,’ I said and blew a wispy circle of smoke towards the cracked plaster of the ceiling. ‘I started off life rich and content. There’s only so much of that a man can take. My life is so much more colourful now. Mainly black and blue.’

‘I’m being serious. I want to get out of this town, Lennox. I want to get married and have kids before it’s too late.’

‘May…’

‘Don’t get in a sweat,’ she said and laughed bitterly. ‘I’m not proposing. I didn’t come up the Clyde on a banana boat. I know exactly what I mean to you, Lennox. But sometimes I need to talk. Don’t you need to talk sometimes?’

‘Oh yeah. I talk. I talk myself silly.’

‘I want to get out of Glasgow. Get out from behind that fucking hotel bar. Go somewhere where no one knows anything about me. Somewhere cut off from everywhere else. Like South Africa or Australia. Or the middle of the bloody African jungle.’

‘You should think about Paisley,’ I said. ‘It’s even more removed from civilization but you can get to it by bus.’

‘I’m being serious. This city is shite. My life is shite. Everybody here thinks they know who I am. What I am. They know fuck all about me. Everyone in this ugly fucking city thinks the universe revolves around Glasgow. They just can’t see past it. And the truth is this isn’t a city: it’s a village. Full of petty, stupid, bigoted shits. I hate it. Fucking hate it.’ She bit into the crimson of her lower lip.

I stroked her arm. ‘Why don’t you just leave?’

‘And do what?’ she said, pulling away. ‘I need money, Lennox. The kind of money that working a bar or helping you with your divorce scams doesn’t bring. I don’t suppose you know any lonely rich widowers?’

The gag startled me for a moment. ‘I did. One. But he’s not looking in the lonely hearts any more.’