Strange Loyalties

14

And in his throne room sat the demon king. The braying revelry beneath him touched him not. He had forsaken the courtiers of pretence and the retinue of folly. Dark was his purpose and his broodings deep. He sipped of the magic liquid men cleped Antiquary and felt its fluid alchemy transform the very reaches of his being, flooding him with the freedom that bringeth wisdom in an instant. But not enough.

I could act out in my head the postures of a dedicated searcher for truth but I couldn’t find the stuff. I could abandon the jollity of the Bushfield lounge. I could come upstairs to sit alone. I could take my whisky carefully, like a mind-expanding drug. But, no matter what attitudes I struck, I stubbornly remained just a puzzled middle-aged man sitting in a hotel room, looking at a piece of paper and two paintings. The best thing about the sheet of foolscap John Strachan had given me was the familiarity of Scott’s handwriting. The message was pretty cryptic.

‘I have developed a compulsion to wonder what he was like, what he was really like. I mean, even in simple things. God knows an understanding of the simplest things would do me. The older I get, the fewer certainties I have.

‘I mean, did he drink beer, keep pigeons, have a favourite colour, curse a lot, know many women, have some kind of faith?

‘My social plumbing stopped working some time ago. I offend a lot of friends. Right in the middle of some hygienic conversation, I open my mouth and there’s sewage on their carpet. It has a lot to do with him. He has become like an eccentric hobby. The bank-clerk who’s an authority on match-box labels. The teacher who’s writing a monograph on wheelbarrows.

‘He’s no longer just himself, of course. Maybe he never was. Maybe there were always more of him. Maybe he’s everybody else.’

This was not for other people’s understanding. It was an entry in a diary, written in a code that only the writer would understand. Its purpose was secrecy, a troubled mind whispering to itself. I wondered when Scott had written it. Apart from its crumpled state, the paper looked fresh enough. It bore no discolouration of ageing. I thought about ‘no longer just himself’. Did that refer to dying twice? Anyway, I was convinced I was reading a kind of minimalist biography of the man in the green coat. If Scott had known almost nothing about him, I surely knew less.

I looked at the painting again. Even his face didn’t belong to him, transubstantiated four times over into the means of food for others. The beards were presumably a metaphor for disguise. The private identities the four had escaped into? If one of them could be Scott, who might the others be? They would presumably know what Scott had known, the thing he had never told me, the thing he had perhaps never told anyone, the thing that had gnawed him to death. Find them, find the means to understanding.

There were clues all right but I didn’t know what they meant. The figure I took to be Scott was holding the stem of a flower that blossomed into petals that contained the small, neat head of a snake. The hand of another showed a prominent ring on which there was a carved shape. I thought I could make out a stick with a snake twined round it. Was that the rod of Aesculapius, symbol of medicine? ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Was he a doctor? But the snake seemed to have two heads. Why did the snake have two heads? The third man held a bitten apple in his hand. The fourth man had a badge on his lapel. It was the twin masks of tragedy and comedy.

The snake and the apple were Christian, the rod and the masks were pagan. Was that significant? I would have given much for an hour with Scott, and not just to talk about the painting. In his absence, I had another glass of the whisky and toasted his troublesome nature. It looked as if he had earned it.

If he couldn’t tell me and I didn’t know who the other men were, there was only one road I could take. There was only one person I knew who might possibly have had access to what Scott had kept so secret. I had to find Anna. I didn’t know where she was but I knew where her parents lived. Talking to her father would be like interviewing a cardboard cut-out. My only hope was her mother, a woman about whom I had sometimes felt that, if we could have synchronised our youths, we might have meant a lot to each other.

I would leave for Kelso very early in the morning. The decision to do something felt almost like an interim solution to the problem. I relaxed slightly. I undressed. I finished my drink and rinsed out the glass. I put out the light and went to bed. As I lay becoming drowsy in the dark, the sounds of singing downstairs faded slowly like lights on the shore receding from someone moving out to sea.