Strange Loyalties

THREE
15

Driving out of Graithnock, I came into sudden rain. It didn’t last long. But by the time it had stopped and the neurotic insistence of the wipers became still, an unsought memory was with me and I was travelling in two ways — the car in space and me in time, passing through the changes of my own internal weather.

I remembered another car and other rain. Maddie Harris sat in the car with me. Windscreen and windows were misted blind, as if we were in a world in which there only existed our shared breathing. I was staring ahead. Maddie was talking. The talk was painful for her. Her mouth was naming the hopes she had had for us — each one like an orphan I had fathered. I rubbed a slow peephole in the glass to look at nothing. There was only the rain.

I said, ‘No. No, Maddie. I’m sorry.’

In memory my own voice made me grue. It sounded harsh and unrelenting, a sound track run too slow. Something in me, like a child at the films, wanted to shout advice to the preoccupied man in the car. But films can’t hear.

I watched her — as I had watched her so often — put her hand on the door. She stood outside and turned, her hand still on the door. Beyond her, spring leaves were on the trees of the park beside which we had stopped. The rest of the world was there after all. I had insisted on bringing it in, like air to the womb of her dreaming. She stood looking at me. The rain fell on her. She didn’t open her umbrella. She closed the door and walked slowly away, receding in the space I had cleared in the misted glass to watch her going.

She didn’t open her umbrella. That quirky fact, that small malfunction in normalcy had always haunted me. The dignity of it shamed me, its dismissal of what didn’t matter. It taught me the contemptibility of my pragmatism. I could love her but not give my life to the loving. If I couldn’t put my children at risk, why had I put her at risk? I could care about my children. But where were Maddie’s children? Wandering fatherless and disowned in her head. Better indifference than to love and not love fully, Maddie’s back was telling me as it went.

Where I had been had an effect on where I was going. I took with me my guilt towards Maddie, towards Ena, towards my children, towards the just man I had always hoped to be. I was travelling through green country in an attempt to find a kind of truth. But perhaps I blighted the promise of the greenery as I passed and would find the purity of the destination fouled by the fact of who arrived there. Perhaps the nugget of understanding we look for is tarnished by the fallible humanity of the hand that finally holds it. How do the false gain access to the true? I was certainly one strange searcher for justice — the polluted avenger, knight of the rusted sword.

But I still drove recklessly fast, as if I could outrun my unworthiness. And still I was driving into my own guilt. I remembered another car with Scott and me in it.

I had been driving him home from an amateur football match we had both played in. Scott’s team were a man short and he had phoned me in Glasgow to ask if I wanted a game. I had been good at football in my teens and momentarily forgot the years in between. We had played the game in Ayr and won 3–2, not especially thanks to me. My main contribution had been to manage not to die of exhaustion in the second half.

We had gone into Troon for a pint with some of the other players to replace lost sweat. Then Scott and I bought fish suppers and came along the shore road at Barassie. As we sat in the car with the windows down, eating out of the grease-stained paper, there happened one of those moments that belie their own banality. I saw what he was, not what he seemed to be.

What he seemed to be was a trainee art-teacher who was also a reasonable mid-field player, still ruddy from recent exertion, fingering chips and pieces of fish into his mouth. What he was was a stunningly alive young man, unselfconsciously handsome, the eyes lit up with the search for horizons they hadn’t found. I saw the cage the car was for him. All he wanted was everything.

Perhaps it was the sea laid out beside us that moved him, with its mocking immensity. But he talked with such passion about the things he wanted to do, simultaneously inspired by the possibilities and afraid of never grasping them.

He was twenty-two then and about to marry Anna. He wanted to paint. He had plans to live abroad. They had discussed it together and agreed that they would make some money first and then they would go. He would teach wherever they found themselves, earn the space to put his easel. She could teach English anywhere. Their children would be Scottish cosmopolitans. I remembered him explaining to me very precisely how, if Anna became pregnant, they would both come back to Scotland for a time. No matter where they might live, any children would have to be born here. He was like an innocent visionary telling me the telephone number of the house where he would live in a Utopia that hadn’t been discovered yet.

Even as he told me, there was a kind of distant panic in his eyes, as if he dreaded his sense of the future was doomed to live alone. It was a dream that needed company. He was right to dread. Anna’s idea of their future changed gradually once they were married. She wanted more and more time to make sure of where they were until no room was left for where they might have been. For all I knew, she was right. Maybe the attractiveness of Scott’s plan, like that of a lot of plans, lay in the impossible symmetry of its idealism. Maybe so much changed between them that the future they had seen couldn’t happen because they were no longer the people who had seen it. I didn’t know. I couldn’t blame her.

But I could blame me. Remembering him sitting in the car, framed against the grey water that shifted behind him like a mirage of endless potential, I felt I had failed him then. There wasn’t much I could have done for him, of course, but I could at least have been less indifferent to his obvious intensity. I had been rather phonily worldly-wise, the older brother offering him a response that was about as specific as ‘Things’ll sort themselves out, son.’ I suppose I was too full of my own problems at the time, as usual.

That time came back to me as an encapsulation of our relationship: an almost utterly vulnerable idealism that was trying to connect with an idealism that had learned some rules of survival. I had started out as wide-eyed as he was. We had both grown up in a house where we were taught to believe the best about people. You gave the world what you had and the world gave back. But I had had to learn quickly that there were plenty of people around who, once you had given them what you could, would pick your pocket to see what you had left. I hated that with a terrible anger. Love of others was a gift, not a steal. You could only give what wasn’t forcibly taken.

So I had tried to teach my generosity how to live without becoming embittered. If I can spare it, you can have it. But don’t take it behind my back. Don’t pre-empt my right to give. It’s what makes me me.

Scott hadn’t learned that then. I don’t think he ever did. That day at Barassie I left his vulnerability naked. I didn’t try to teach it to protect itself. Maybe I didn’t want him to change because I admired him a lot more than I admired me. He was the way I had been and sometimes wished I still was. I loved the sheer openness of his living. But such admiration can be a luxury the ones we admire have to pay for. It leaves them to endure the storms of experience out in the open while we sit in shelter and applaud. Perhaps I had let him do that.

I came through Moffat for Selkirk. Any time I’m in the Borders I like to pass through Selkirk. I don’t often stay but I like to pass through. It’s where I was born. You should visit your mother. If you lose where you come from, you lose where you’re going.

Approaching that small, hard place, where the wind down Ettrick can shiver your bones with a sense of mortality, I was coming nearer to the source of Scott’s idealism and my own. I thought of my father, I thought of my mother.

He was a big, dark man of brooding principles. Not many things pleased him. At the edges of his nature there was great kindness but the centre was sombre. He was a cave with flowers round the entrance. He was a Borderer whom the Borders displeased. He felt the place that had defined Scottishness at its weakest edge, where it meets Englishness, had lost its sense of itself and blurred into anonymity. ‘What weapons couldn’t,’ he once said to me, ‘trade and money did.’ Kelso came in for his special contempt. ‘As Scottish as muffins and tea.’

He moved us from Selkirk to Hawick to Graithnock, working in mills. He was maybe following the work. He was maybe looking for Scotland. He was certainly looking for something he was never to find: a place where people behaved towards one another as he believed they should. Treating people shabbily outraged him till he died. The world seemed to him like a rented room not up to his specifications and he couldn’t quite settle.

My mother was a warmer presence than he was. She had had a reputation as a beauty in her youth and I think the assurance that gave her didn’t leave till near the end. Attractiveness facilitates acquaintance, like a courier predisposing strangers to goodwill, and my mother had acquired early an innocent vanity that let her enjoy being who she was. But the kindness of other people towards her made her as idealistic as my father in her own way. She tended to think the way people treated her was how they treated everybody. She thought the best of them was all there was.

Together, they didn’t prepare Scott and me too well for the everyday world. I remember my mother saying to me towards the end of her life, when she was worried about Scott, ‘Maybe your father and me should have told you two what some people can be like. But the truth was, I didn’t know.’ I think it was essentially through Scott’s problems that she finally began to notice darknesses in people she hadn’t known were there.

Driving through Selkirk, which doesn’t take long, I was blaming them for the inheritance they had given us. Equipping sensitive children with ideals that are too demanding can make them factories for guilt. Look at what had happened to Scott — the pain of his sense of failure. Hadn’t they realised what they were doing? I thought of the time when my father had taken Scott aside at the age of fourteen and lectured him on having to toughen up or life would break him. I knew what he meant. As a teenager, Scott took everybody else’s suffering personally. But what did my father expect? He spent years tenderising our consciences and then wondered why life hurt us so much.

Once out on the road to Kelso, I generously relented and forgave my parents. They had stayed true to what they believed in and true to each other — perhaps, I had sometimes thought in my father’s case, dangerously true. My mother died of cancer after a double mastectomy that left her feeling unwomaned and weary of living. My father lived on for four years. He had developed diabetes and his pancreas was chronically damaged. When he was found dead, I wondered if the carelessness with which he had lived those last four years amounted to a discreet form of suicide. It was an idea that gained new force when I thought of how Scott had died. Maybe harakiri of the spirit ran in the family.

I decided what they had given us wasn’t so bad. The way things are, who shouldn’t feel guilt? In our guilt is our humanity. But, as sole surviving legatee of the family conscience, I decided that the acknowledgement of your own guilt shouldn’t be a means of absolving others. No scapegoats. Everybody shares.

As I came into Kelso, I was looking for sharers. The handsome trigness of the town didn’t promise well for my purpose. It was basking brightly in innocent sunshine. But that didn’t bother me too much. Innocence is often just guilt in hiding.