Strange Loyalties

12

I drove to 28 Sycamore Road. My route was hardly direct. I cruised the countryside for a while. I stopped beside a bridge above the Bringan, an area of woods and fields we had known as boys. I leaned on the parapet and watched the river running. It looked like melting glass below the bridge. Downstream it hit the rocks and the glass went frosted the way glass does around where it has broken. I looked among the trees where gangs of us had played at hide-and-seek. You’re hiding again, I said to him in my head, and everybody else has gone home. But I’m still seeking.

I got back in the car and drove some more. Dave Lyons’ dismissiveness had been counter-productive. It came too pat, it was too complete. Nobody could justify that much self-assurance. He froze me out too fast. That made me suspicious. If he had lost touch so long ago, how did he know where Anna came from? If he had become such a stranger to Scott, why did he invite him to a party?

I thought I would like to talk to him again with more in my mouth than a series of disconnected questions. To do that, I had to know more. Ellie Mabon might be more. I regretted invading her life. But it was still just late afternoon. There should be no husband. I was apologising to her mentally as I stopped the car at her door.

I parked behind a blue Peugeot and stepped out. The house was big, an odd amalgam of wood and stone. It was an original concept. I hadn’t seen another one like it, for which I was grateful. The complicated bell had only begun its symphony of chimes when the door opened. We stood looking at each other while the bell continued pointlessly.

I appreciated Scott’s taste. If you were going to lose your head, she was a good place to lose it. She was tall and red-haired with a beautiful mouth even her present expression couldn’t mar. The eyes were green as an aquarium and drew you to them in the same way. She was dressed to go out, wearing a black fitted suit, the lapels of which met enticingly across her bare chest.

‘Hullo,’ I was able to say.

‘How dare you!’ she said.

‘I’m sorry. But I — ’

She was glancing down the road.

‘Turn right now and get back into your car.’

‘Wait.’

‘Do it!’

She started to smile sweetly. She was nodding as if agreeing with something I was saying.

‘Do it now. Get into your car. Drive in the direction in which it’s facing.’ She pointed helpfully, still smiling. ‘What I’m doing just now is showing the neighbours I’m giving you directions. At the end of the street, you take first right. First left. Then you pull in to the side of the road. You wait till my car comes past. And you follow it. It’s the blue Peugeot out there. Move.’ I started to walk away.

‘That’s where it is,’ she called after me. ‘I’m sure you’ll find it. You can’t miss it.’

She closed the door quite loudly.

I waited for ten minutes before I saw the Peugeot in the rearview mirror. She was a careful woman. I followed her out of the town. She drove for some time. Just when I thought we might be leaving the country, she took a winding road, turned into another and pulled on to the grass beside the gate of a field. There was room for me behind her.

Outside the cars, we stood looking at each other. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a bad way to spend the time.

‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘I’m Jack Laidlaw.’

She ignored my outstretched hand.

‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘Scott told me about you. But I thought he was exaggerating. He exaggerated about a lot of things. You’re the one area where he seems to have mastered understatement. You’re off your head.’

It was a day for collecting accolades.

‘Do you think we should be telling each other such intimate things about ourselves so soon?’

She stared at me and shook her head, the way people might when watching a disaster on television. She sat against the bonnet of the Peugeot. She had legs from which fantasies are made. I tried not to make any. It wasn’t easy. The urge to live is a kind of holy idiot. It finally understands nothing but itself. It has no sense of context. Attending the funeral in all good faith, it may finish up wanting to screw the widow.

Ellie Mabon was staring through the trees and I, supposedly obsessive pursuer of the truth, saw not a source of information but a marvellous woman. The mad, whispering optimist who had arrived in me with my awareness of my own sexuality was talking again: perhaps she’s the one. Perhaps with her I could have made the place where I want to be.

‘Scott and I used to come here,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you phone first?’

‘I thought I did.’

‘I mean again. Before you arrived just now. There could have been someone with me.’

‘I didn’t want to give you the chance to knock me back again.’

She was still abstracted, presumably remembering the past. It was a good place to have chosen. The roadway was hemmed with trees, high but hidden, a position from which to see without being seen. Below us, some distance away in a small valley, there was a house. It was a modern house with just a little land around it. It wasn’t a farmhouse. It was perhaps a townie’s dream of the country, urban amenities included.

‘We used to pretend that house down there was ours,’ she said. ‘Pretty pathetic, I suppose.’

Her references to Scott and herself demystified the moment for me. This wasn’t just a woman dreaming. This was Ellie Mabon, who had had an affair with my brother and had a husband she was worried about. Seeing the icon animate into someone who breathed the same troubled air as I did, I banalised her further. I noticed the shoes she was wearing. Their high heels were digging into the turf. But she had chosen the location. She must have known where she was coming, with someone she didn’t want to meet. Yet she had dressed like a fashion show and worn shoes that were spectacularly unsuited to the place. The reason might be vanity, the need to look her best before a stranger. Or the reason might be a sense of theatre — wearing the costume of the other woman. Either way, it put her among the rest of us. Speech returned to me.

‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you came. I just need to talk to you.’

‘What I can’t forgive,’ she said. ‘What I won’t forgive is that Scott told you about us.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘Then how did you know?’

‘I just found out today. Today was the first time I heard your name.’

‘Then he must have told somebody.’

‘That doesn’t mean that what he said was bad. And it was only your first name he mentioned.’

‘Oh, that’s lovely. I suppose that’s what you call discretion. I didn’t tell anybody.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’

She threw me a look like a spear.

‘If you only had the first name, how did you find me?’

‘I’m a detective.’

‘I’ve heard,’ she said.

She turned towards me and folded her arms. She had made up her mind.

‘Let’s get this over with. What is it you want to ask me? You seem to know enough already.’

‘No, not enough.’

‘Before you start. I’ll tell you anything I can about Scott. But don’t ask me about us. We stopped seeing each other more than a couple of months ago. It was over for us.’

‘Why was that?’

She seemed to be deciding whether my question came within her rules. She made a concession.

‘I stopped it. Scott was too serious about everything. He couldn’t have an affair. It had to be a grand passion. He was so intense about everything. I could see the whole thing blowing up in our faces. I dreaded that some night he would arrive at the door.’ Her eyes returned from contemplating the house that could never be theirs and looked at me. ‘Maybe it runs in the family. I mean, I wasn’t too wrong, was I? In a way, it did happen.’

Her implied accusation didn’t affect me. I was too busy accusing the accuser. She appeared to want a relationship that wouldn’t interrupt her meals with her husband or embarrass her in front of the neighbours. Scott had made the mistake of loving her too much, I thought.

‘You weren’t seeing him at school?’

‘I left. I do relief teaching now. I had to get away. It was too painful being so close. Charlie had been suggesting I take it easier for years. He makes good money. And every day I was living with the dread that Scott might announce our forthcoming engagement to the staffroom. Or decide to kiss me in the corridor. He was unpredictable towards the end, you know.’

People whose heads are imploding often are.

‘So you’ve had no contact with him for months.’

She eased her heels out of the mud, found a new position for them.

‘He phoned,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘A lot of times. But at least it was during the day. Except for the last time.’

‘When was that?’

For the first time I saw her forget her lines. The role she must have chosen to play with me faltered, couldn’t hold. Like an actress remembering who she really is in the middle of a performance, she froze. I saw real pain. It made me want to hold her. But she reassumed a kind of composure.

‘It was that night,’ she said. ‘The night he died.’

I waited. She was in a place of her own. No one should interrupt her there. She retracted her closed lips and contrived not to cry.

‘He phoned in the early evening. Charlie was out. He phoned from a pub. The pain in his voice was awful. I knew then. I knew how bad he was. I spoke to him for a long time. Till his money ran out. But I could’ve gone to him. I could’ve helped. Maybe if I had, it wouldn’t have happened.’

She glanced at me and away, as if she couldn’t bear to face herself in my eyes.

‘No, Ellie,’ I said. Her first name came naturally out of the moment. ‘No. Don’t think that. He was probably too far out by then.’

‘But why didn’t I? Jesus, sometimes I hate how sensible I am. What did it matter if it was awkward to explain to Charlie? Or if people saw us? Scott was going to die.’

‘You didn’t know that.’

‘Maybe not. But I’ve thought about that phone-call a lot. I think maybe it’s typical of my life. It’s what I do. Scott was the most authentic thing that’s ever happened to me. Easy to accommodate he wasn’t. But he was real. I’ve thought perhaps that’s what bothered me. I wanted him but not the disturbance he caused. And the phone-call sometimes seems to sum it all up. I gave him as much space as wouldn’t disturb the routine of my evening. It’s what I do. What’s wrong with me?’

Perhaps we choose our fears, I was thinking. We frighten ourselves with the smaller things so that the bigger things can’t get near enough to bother us. Perhaps Ellie Mabon chose the fear of breaking the pattern of her life to avoid confronting one of the biggest fears we have — the fear of feeling. Let go the reins on that one and where might it take us?

‘What did he say that night? Can you remember?’

‘It’s not the kind of call you can forget. He wasn’t talking about the weather. But it wasn’t too coherent either. Mainly what I remember is the pain. Most of it I could only half-understand. Oh, it was terrible.’

‘Can you remember anything?’

She thought, staring at the grass in front of her.

‘Where would you start? It was all so confused. Something had happened recently. I know that much. I don’t mean just us breaking up. That hurt him enough. But something else. Something had happened recently. That almost destroyed him. He had always told me the only faith he ever had was in people. And I think that was gone.’

‘Happened here? In Graithnock?’

‘I don’t know. It was recent. It happened to somebody he knew. So maybe it happened here. Somebody he admired very much. Because he kept saying, “The best of us. He was one of the best of us.” The person he was talking about must have died.’

‘Does the man in the green coat mean anything to you?’

‘Who is that?’

‘I’d like to know.’

‘He used that expression.’

‘In what context?’

‘I think he said it was the man in the green coat all over again.’

‘But you don’t know who he is?’

‘No idea. But I’ll tell you something. Whatever had happened made him hate Dave Lyons. He had never liked him much. But he was so angry with him that night.’

And so angry with Fast Frankie White. I found it difficult to make a connection between the Dave Lyons I had just met and Frankie White. I asked her if she had heard of Frankie. She hadn’t.

‘Dave Lyons,’ I said. ‘You know him?’

‘No. I know of him. Scott had spoken about him.’

‘Did Scott still seem to be in touch with him?’

‘As far as I knew he was. He seemed to be lumping him along with two other people that night. As if they were all together. It was something that happened — when he was a student, I think. One of them was a name I’d never heard him mention before. Blake, I think it was. Andy Blake? He said a strange thing about him. “Physician, heal thyself,” he said. The other man he didn’t name. He just said I had seen him, but I didn’t know him. He said I had seen him all right. Don’t worry about it. It was all like that. He was telling me and he wasn’t telling me. It was weird.’

‘But what did he lump them together for? Was it something they had done?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I honestly think that’s all I can tell you. Believe me, I’ve gone over that call in my head a hundred times. Look. I think I’d better be going. We’re going out tonight. I’ve got to get ready.’

I couldn’t imagine what else she could do to make herself look better. I took out my cigarettes. She didn’t smoke. Hardly anybody did these days. I would soon be in quarantine.

‘Do you know where Anna is just now?’

She shook her head, looking up at the trees.

‘We weren’t that close.’

‘Listen. I really appreciate what you’ve done. It’s meant a lot to me. I can imagine how sore this has been for you.’

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I really did care about him, you know. You know what I said to him when we split up? “I’m saving both our lives.” That’s what I said. That’s irony, if you like.’

The wind had risen. I smoked and listened to the leaves and watched some cows in a field. In this place where Scott had been and wouldn’t be coming back, I learned his absence again. It was a lesson from a bad teacher who taught by rote, not caring how well you understood it. You didn’t have to understand, only to know. Ellie Mabon put her arms round her shoulders and shivered.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’d better be going.’

I looked at her and nodded. She smiled and pointed to the ground behind the cars. There were tread-marks on the grass.

‘Those,’ she said. ‘They’ll always remind me of Scott. Him and me here. I wonder how long they’ll last. What is all this about for you really? I mean. What is it you’re doing exactly?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I suppose I’m trying to make my own peace with Scott’s death. I suppose this is how I do it.’

‘How do I do it?’

She started suddenly to cry.

‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Will you hold me one time for him?’

I crossed and held her. It was a small, chaste ceremony of mutual loss. Her hair in my face gave off a melancholy sweetness. Clenched to her, I felt the tremors of her body, how the edifice of beauty was undermined from within with deep forebodings. In the embrace I experienced our shared nature — so much questionable confidence containing so much undeniable panic. That was me, too. Some of my colleagues and bosses liked to say I was completely arrogant. They misunderstood the language of my living. Arrogance should be comparative. Humility was total. Faced with simplistic responses to life that tried to fit my living into themselves, I was arrogant. I seemed to meet them every day and I knew I was more than they said I was. But when I sat down inside myself in the darkness of a night, I knew nothing but my smallness. I knew it now and shared it with hers.

She subsided slowly, sighed and moved away. Her mascara was spiked with tears. She sniffed.

‘Where is it you’re living anyway?’ she said in a watery voice that suggested the tears had invaded her larynx.

‘I’m in the Bushfield Hotel tonight. I might still be there tomorrow night. I don’t know.’

‘If there’s anything else I can think of, I’ll ’phone you there. I’d like to help you if I can.’ Her voice was submerging. ‘Oh, God.’

She fumblingly opened the passenger-door and leant inside. She came out with her handbag and put it on the roof of the car. She went back inside and brought out a dispenser of quickie cleansers, from which she pulled a handful of connected, wet tissues. She put the dispenser on the roof of the car as well. She stood, breathing deeply and trying to make sure her tears were over. She wiped her face carefully, especially around the eyes. She opened her handbag, took out her compact and checked her face. She finished off wiping it clean and threw the dark-stained tissues away. She very carefully put on her make-up. She took more tissues and wiped the heels of her shoes. She put the stuff back in the car, closed the door and went on tiptoe to the driver’s door. She looked at me. She was Mrs Mabon again.

‘You want me to move my car?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve done this before. I can do it one last time.’

She pulled into the road, reversed back close to the gate and drove off without waving. I lit a new cigarette off the old one and stood on the stub. In the car, I rolled down the window and smoked, looking out at the country. The indifferent permanence of the place, where all the times they had been here had left no mark, told me nothing that I did would make any difference. But I started the engine. My ability to go on fed off that of the car as if it was a life-support machine. One mechanical purpose led to another. I would phone Brian Harkness.