Strange Loyalties

11

Life is like a journey, saith the preacher. It’s corny and he’s been saying it too long but you can see what he means. I was thinking that as I came nearer to Cranston Castle House. Only, with the Irish in me from my mother’s side, I turned the image on its head. A journey can be like life, I thought. Take this one.

I had left the decaying industrialism of Graithnock on the north side and was driving past green fields right away. Graithnock is like that these days, an aridity surrounded by the green world, a desert in an oasis. I turned right before I came into Kilmaurs at the place I had heard my father call the Old Stewarton Road-end. From there I was moving uncertainly and unhurriedly and vaguely towards Stewarton. Never take directions from a committee. That way, you’re looking for a place that exists only in the abstract. The gathered wisdom of the Bushfield left me looking for landmarks that weren’t there and gradually becoming aware that I would know where Cranston Castle House was when I found it.

But the weather was good and, though I didn’t know where I was, I knew, in the countryside around me, where I had been. For I was driving through my past. These might not be the very places where Scott and I had played but, given the mythic quality of childhood terrain, they might as well have been. It was to places like this that we had come from the town to imagine more than the streets gave us, to replenish our horizons. The infinite innocence of our dreams was growing all around me.

I remembered the promise of those times, how the world had seemed to belong to everybody and the possibilities were anybody’s for the taking, and then, uncertainly at first among the camouflage of the trees but slowly gaining substance, I made out the crenellations of what had to be Cranston Castle House. As I found the entrance to the driveway and came nearer to the place, its solidity grew more and more to feel like the hidden meaning of the countryside, the definitive clause in the statement of the place you might easily have overlooked. That was why I had been thinking that a journey can be like life, Scott’s and mine. Here was where all the paths we had hoped to follow led, to entrenched property and status and wealth. The very ground we walked on had been owned, and not by us. The mirages of youth evaporated and confronted you with this. I parked the car among the few other cars in front of the building. Brian’s Vauxhall was a Shetland pony in the Winners’ Enclosure.

The building was big, one of those nineteenth-century attempts to re-invent the past, capitalism imitating feudalism. I opened the large wooden door and came into a small, wood-panelled entrance hall — Lilliputian baronial. A couple of floral armchairs and a brass-topped table were arranged tastefully beside the huge empty fireplace. The Akimbo Arms it wasn’t. On my left, through an open, arched doorway, I could see the dining-room. Three men were finishing a meal with a lot of empty, freshly set tables around them. Through an arched doorway on my right was the bar. Everywhere, there was wood. If you could have replanted the interior of this place, you would have had a forest.

Going into the bar, I experienced a moment of confusion. That happens to me quite often. Throughout my boyhood, I was shy to the point of embarrassing other people — given to frozen silences and good at blushing. Perhaps we never quite grow out of the children we have been. Certainly with me adulthood seems to be a veneer that hasn’t quite taken. Patches of the raw wood keep showing through in unexpected places. I’ll walk into a party, dressed in maturity and nodding suavely, and suddenly realise that I don’t know what the hell to say. Panic breaks out in me like pimples. This was one of the times.

I had recourse to my usual solution. I headed for the drink, even though that was a defensive reflex that clicked on an empty cartridge. I was on soda and lime. The girl behind the bar helped. She was dressed in what I assumed must be the uniform of the staff — black skirt, white blouse, a tiny scarf like a floppy bow tie. But the naturalness of her manner gave me some ease and made me feel I had an ally against all this supposed sophistication. As I sipped my drink, I tried to find my bearings.

This was where the diners took coffees and liqueurs. It didn’t look as if it had been a very busy day. There were two tables with a couple at each. The only other people were two groups of business men — four at one table, five at another. I didn’t know where Dave Lyons was. I had been hoping he would give me some sign when I came in. But nobody had moved, nobody had glanced towards me. I had made all the impact of the pheasant carved in wood above the gantry.

Gradually, impatience led me out of the time-lock of my adolescent awkwardness back into what I take for manhood. After all, I had been waiting long enough to grow a beard. I decided on the group of five and crossed towards their table. As I came nearer, I noticed one of them become very still. He didn’t look towards me. He seemed to be listening to one of the other men but his listening, I thought, became a performance of listening. I concluded that he was the man. I also concluded that he wasn’t keen to see me.

When I stood beside them, the man who was talking eventually looked up at me. He took me in vaguely, seeming slightly annoyed at my intrusion. Perhaps he thought I was a waiter.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Dave Lyons.’

The acting listener was amazed. He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. His face couldn’t have expressed more surprise if I’d dropped in through the roof.

‘Scott’s brother,’ he said. ‘Right? Of course, you are. Of course, you are.’

It was nice to have his confirmation of the fact. He stood up and shook hands.

‘I’m Dave Lyons. It’s great to meet you. Even if it’s sad about the circumstances. Gentlemen. This is. .’

‘Jack Laidlaw.’

‘Jack. That’s right. Jack Laidlaw. He’s the brother of a friend of mine. A friend unfortunately recently deceased. Jack. This is. .’

He gave me the names. I was glad he didn’t ask me to repeat them. All I was aware of about them was the proximity of a lot of rubicund flesh, well-fed faces, heavy hands.

‘If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen. I have to give Jack here a little of my time. Please. Have more brandies if you want.’

He lifted his own brandy glass from a table with other glasses on it and coffee-cups and a sheaf of paper with mysterious figures on the top sheet. I caught the whiff of Aramis aftershave. I’d know it anywhere because Jan had once given me a bottle as a present. I had spent a fortnight trying to get used to it. I finished up leaping away from the smell as soon as the cork came off. I’m sure it’s lovely but I had to admit eventually that I was allergic to it. Jan wasn’t too pleased. Perhaps that’s where our relationship had begun to founder: I couldn’t inhabit her ideal sense of me. Maybe I could introduce her to Dave Lyons. Was this the kind of man Jan wanted?

‘We’ll sit over here,’ he said to me. ‘You have a drink?’

‘It’s at the bar.’

I collected my drink and joined him at the table in the corner, well away from everyone else. He looked at my glass.

‘Soda and lime?’ he said. ‘I take that myself occasionally. When I want to stimulate my taste buds for a real drink. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.’

Dave Lyons was small, getting heavy. The features were thickening but that didn’t diminish their attractiveness. It was a very positive face, the kind you could distinguish from fifty yards. The dark eyes didn’t flicker. Neither the lack of height nor the thinning hair caused him any problems. When he had stood up to shake my hand, he had seemed to be on a podium of self-assurance. Perhaps he was standing on his wallet.

‘I was sorry to hear about Scott,’ he said.

We talked about Scott’s dying. He accepted as something easily understood my need to bother the people Scott had known. But there wasn’t much he could offer by way of insight. He had lost touch with Scott in any serious terms many years ago. Mainly, they had been friends when they were students. And everybody had changed a lot since then. He had been hearing for a few years how badly things were going for Scott. But the end had come as a shock. Didn’t it always, though?

His even voice had a mesmeric quality. It almost put my misgivings to sleep. I felt again that I was being stupid. I had interrupted a man’s business lunch in order to have him tell me the platitudes with which we respond to the death of those friends who, due to time and circumstance, had more or less died to us already. What more could I expect?

Only two things niggled at the lassitude of purpose into which his voice had put me. One was something he said. One was something he didn’t say. He said, ‘I was sorry I couldn’t make the funeral.’ That was understandable. But the deliberateness with which he said it, right in the middle of no context, made me notice. It made me wonder if the deliberateness of the apology was a response to the deliberateness of the absence. What he didn’t say was anything about the party Scott had disrupted.

‘You had a party not too long ago,’ I said. ‘Scott was there.’

He paused, stared at me, shook his head and smiled sadly.

‘You know about that?’ he said.

‘I heard.’

‘I wasn’t going to mention it. I thought it might be too painful for you.’

‘No, that’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s not quite as painful as his death.’

‘I can see what you mean. Well, you’ll know about it then. It was no big deal, really. Scott just got steadily drunker. Argued with a few people. Finished up in the television room. Some of the guests were watching something. And for some reason Scott threw a heavy crystal vase at the TV. It sent a certain frisson through the party, you might say. Didn’t do the telly a lot of good either. Or the vase. Still, they were replaceable. Could’ve been somebody’s head. Anna had to get Scott out of there. I think she was afraid he might set fire to the curtains next. He was wild that night. But then I think he usually was towards the end.’

‘The television. You wouldn’t know what was on at the time?’

He looked at me and his expression distanced itself from the remark. He seemed measuring me for a strait-jacket. It did sound like a ridiculous question, I had to admit to myself, and his eyes, taking on a sheen of amusement, confirmed my feeling.

‘You know,’ he said. ‘That’s something I neglected to find out. That’s a bit remiss of me. But maybe that’s it. You think that might explain it? Scott was just practising to be a television critic?’

The comforting cosiness of his presence had changed suddenly. In a few sentences he had turned the mood of the conversation from warm to cold. I saw how much he disliked me. In my modesty, I wondered why. Quite often, I don’t like me either. But I couldn’t see what I had done to earn such quick contempt — unless I was encroaching where I shouldn’t. So I encroached further.

‘You don’t see the point of the question?’

‘Well,’ he said. He sipped his brandy. ‘It does seem about as relevant as asking what colour of tie he was wearing.’

‘Not really. The people I know don’t usually go to parties to watch television.’

‘I have big parties. Very big parties. The house is populated like a village. There are people doing lots of things. Maybe we don’t go to the same kind of parties.’

‘I just wondered if there was any special reason for them to be watching television. If maybe the programme had special associations for the people at the party. Including Scott.’

‘I really wouldn’t know. In the mayhem after it, nobody thought to check the TV Times.’

He sighed. He took some brandy. He glanced across to where his friends were sitting. He was effortlessly making me look silly. I had given him a lot of help. I gave him some more. If he thought my last question was a weird one, wait till he heard these.

‘Do you know Fast Frankie White?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Fast Frankie White. Do you know him?’

He put his hand to his head.

‘What is this? Am I appearing on “Mastermind”? Specialising in the works of Damon Runyon?’

I waited.

‘I do not think I’ve ever had that pleasure,’ he said.

‘Where’s Anna?’ I said.

‘She’s not in Graithnock now?’

‘No. She’s selling the house.’

‘Maybe she’s trying to avoid answering your questions.’

‘Maybe she is.’

‘I honestly don’t know. Perhaps she went home. She comes from the Borders, too, doesn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why don’t you try there?’

‘Do you know who the man in the green coat is?’ I said. His head was cupped in his left hand by now. He was talking to the table, presumably since it seemed more sane than I was.

‘I imagine he could be quite a lot of people,’ he said. ‘I also imagine that, if you keep on talking the way you’re talking, he may enter this room at any moment in search of you. With a very large net.’

‘Before he does,’ I said. ‘Have you ever had a beard?’

His hand came down over his nose and he looked up at me, seeming genuinely alarmed. He laughed briefly and stood up. He didn’t offer to shake my hand. Interview over.

‘Well, Mr Laidlaw,’ he said. ‘It’s been interesting meeting you. I hope the pills work soon.’

I stood as well.

‘Thanks for your time,’ I said.

‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘Please. Not to anyone. I must admit I could have spent it more fruitfully. Take care of yourself. Or maybe you should get somebody else to do it for you.’

He had chewed me up nicely. This was him spitting me out. As he walked back to his friends, leaving me standing, I noticed that his stomach had the protuberance of a Russian doll. I wondered how many smaller men were hiding inside the polished confidence of his exterior. I intended to find out.