Strange Loyalties

17

When David Ewart was eighteen, he made a trip to Glasgow. It was perhaps his third time in the city. It was certainly his first time alone there. Everything amazed him. ‘I may have been eighteen but I hid my advancing years well. For me, travelling from Kelso to Glasgow was like taking the Golden Road to Samarkand. What would I find there?’

He had with him the address of a house in Park Road. It lay in his pocket like a visa to a new life. Anna Kerr had written it out neatly for him on a large sheet of paper which he had folded very carefully. She had also telephoned ahead to say he would be coming. She had spoken to someone called Scott Laidlaw. David Ewart had been with her during the call. The way she spoke to Scott Laidlaw suggested that she did not know him as well as she had pretended but that she would like to know him better. There was a forced familiarity in her manner.

The address was where Scott Laidlaw and three other student friends were living. They had kept the flat on during the summer and, now that a new academic year was about to begin, they were moving out. David Ewart was starting out on the journey they were completing. He was to attend the Glasgow School of Art and he was checking the flat out for himself and three others. He felt important to be the one making the decision on behalf of the four of them.

He decided to walk from the railway station. He did not know where Park Road was but it was a bright September day and he wasn’t sure how expensive a taxi would be or if taxi-drivers could be expected to know Park Road. Besides, to walk in the city was an adventure.

‘I learned three things fast. The first was how self-confident architecture can be. I mean, this was before old Glasgow got her face-lift. But I loved those big, dark buildings. “We know the story,” they seemed to be saying. The people who built those places knew who they were all right. The second was just the energy of the place. My pulse began to quicken. Like plugging into a generator. The third thing was the people. I thought cities were supposed to be anonymous. Everybody I stopped for directions related to me right away. Nobody spoke over their shoulder. Some of them might’ve looked at me as if I’d stepped out a spaceship. But they looked at me. “Christ, ye’re well oot yer road here, son.” “Park Road? That’s no’ a walk, pal. Ye book a flight for that yin.” It was love at first patter. Three different people went out of their way with me. They were like Indian scouts escorting you through their bit of the territory. See when I retire? I think I’ll reverse the process. This is where I work. But I’ve a notion. If I can get Marion to come with me. Check out in Glasgow. Die among humane noise.’

By the time he found the place, he was sweating slightly with exertion and excitement, high on new sights and vivid faces. He felt like an explorer. He had climbed to the top floor of the tenement. What further discoveries lay beyond the door he was staring at? They threatened to be strange. On a placard fixed to the door with drawing pins there was a legend in beautiful script: ‘Hard Truths Unlimited. Knock and Go Away.’ He hesitated. He knocked and waited. The door was ajar.

He thought he heard a muffled voice saying ‘Come in’ but he couldn’t be sure. He knocked again. This time the voice bellowed.

‘Entrez. Avanti. Kommen sie in. Entrada. Get a grip. Come bloody in.’

He did. The first impression he had was a smell. It was the smell of oil paint. Several canvases were stacked in the dim hall. He negotiated them respectfully and looked in the door of the living-room. What he saw was to stay with him — ‘like a picture of a place where I wanted to live. I was looking at where I somehow wanted to be.’

Sunshine made a window of light on the floor. The room was shabby and poorly furnished but the effect wasn’t depressing. The place for him had a romantic dignity imparted to it by the unknown lives that had passed through. There were more paintings scattered around the room, resting in groups against the walls. There were piles of books on the floor. A young man sat with his back towards the living-room doorway, leaning sideways so that he was profiled against the window. It was a striking profile. He was leafing through a book. An attractive girl sat in the chair opposite, her face towards the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. Neither of them seemed to be aware of David Ewart’s presence. That impressed him.

‘I mean, I had just knocked at the door. And they seemed to have forgotten already. I could’ve been robbing the place for all they knew. They had a kind of animal preoccupation. The way a cat might glance at you if you try to catch its attention. But you won’t seriously disturb it. It goes back to what it was concentrating on. I don’t know. It was just the natural rightness of where they were, what they were doing. I wanted to live with that kind of assurance.’

The man stopped turning the pages. He read carefully for a moment. He held up his finger, though the girl’s eyes remained closed.

‘This is the bit,’ he said.

He read aloud a brief passage from the book. David Ewart could never remember afterwards what the words had been saying. He had never found the book from which the passage came. He regretted that. It was as if he had been listening to the password to where they were, a password he had never learned. The girl didn’t open her eyes.

‘Maybe,’ she said.

‘Maybe? Nobody could say it as well as that if it wasn’t true.’

David Ewart walked into the living-room. The man looked up.

‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘The ghost of freshers past.’

The girl opened her eyes. They were blindingly blue.

‘David Ewart,’ the man said, pointing. ‘Sorry. I’m Scott Laidlaw. Some welcome that. I’m sorry.’ They were shaking hands. ‘We thought you were just some of the through traffic we get here. This is Hester.’

He gave her surname but David Ewart couldn’t remember it. He couldn’t remember very clearly much that followed. What remained with him was a sense of excitement. His memory of the circumstances that generated it was fragmentary. Hester showed him round the flat. Scott made coffees for them. He learned that Hester was at Art School as well with one year still to go.

‘She paints any surface she can find,’ Scott said. ‘Stick out your tongue and she paints it.’

‘I could do a mural on yours then.’

Someone came in who was called Sandy. He was studying medicine. His course wasn’t finished and he was going to move in with Hester. Scott Laidlaw had introduced them. Somebody else came in who was called Dave. (‘I remember that because it was the same name as mine.’) He couldn’t remember their second names. The fourth person who was sharing the flat was studying English. He didn’t appear. His first name was mentioned to Dave Ewart several times but it was long gone.

The atmosphere became that of an impromptu party. People were teasing Scott about being the only one who still had some stuff to move out. Derogatory remarks were made about his paintings. He said they would fetch millions in years to come. They held a mock showing of them for David Ewart. He liked them. His valuation was significantly higher than the prices the others put on them. In celebration of having found an appreciative patron at last (‘Do you mind if I call you Theo?’), Scott collected an amazing hoard of empty bottles from a cupboard. He and David Ewart got the money back on the empties and brought three bottles of suicidally cheap wine back to the flat. The party moved up a gear.

‘That first glass of wine was terrible. But the atmosphere of the place did something to it. It refermented into vintage in the bottle. See the third glass? Nectar, nectar.’

There was a lot of laughter. They formed a solemn committee to decide upon the fate of Scott’s remaining property, since he was apparently notorious for his sentimental attachment to places, his inability to leave when his time was up. It seemed to be a seriously entertained possibility that his books and pictures would become a permanent fixture here.

‘I can be nostalgic for half-an-hour ago,’ he said.

A bonfire was mooted. A pavement sale. Oxfam. (‘What do you have against Oxfam?’) Finally, it was agreed that Dave’s uncle would collect the stuff in his van the next day. Hester and Sandy would store it till Scott could retrieve it.

‘Otherwise,’ Hester said, ‘he’ll never move it. He was supposed to be packing these books today. So what does he do? He starts reading them.’

‘I was packing them,’ Scott said. ‘In the mind.’

Happy insults flew back and forward like thrown knives which the recipients always seemed to catch by the handle and return. David Ewart enjoyed being a part of it. He even joined in the singing. By the time he was leaving, he had decided this was where he would be living, even if it was just to share in the ghost of this ambience, which he loved. He was ceremonially given a key.

‘I had an uncle and auntie who lived in Rutherglen. I was staying the night there. They all chipped in with the best way to get there. Scott walked me to the corner. I remember him waving. He looked to me like a sailor with a lot of voyages ahead of him. I envied him the things that he might see, the possibilities he had.’

Reaching Rutherglen, David Ewart was light-headed with more than the wine. He liked the people who welcomed him but the evening passed him by like a distant parade. He was still full of where he had been, still hearing the laughter, still seeing the faces. Everything else seemed colourless beside them.

‘You ever see The Taming of the Shrew? The film? Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The two young men at the beginning. Burton and Michael York, was it? They come into. . Padua? Anyway. The beginning of that picture. The first few scenes. I loved them. The place is just bursting with life. And there’s people everywhere. And noise. And. . I don’t know. I can’t remember. But chickens being sold or something. There’s just so much happening. And the two of them are all over the place. Laughing. And drinking it in. They’re eating everything with their eyes. I could tell what they were feeling. I knew what they were feeling. Because it’s what I felt that night. It’s the feeling of beginnings. Beginnings are beautiful. Aren’t they? It’s the feeling that everything is possible. That night I felt the terrifying energy of a new generation. And I knew that I was part of it. I knew that everything was possible.’

He had been sitting in his pottery when he said that, turning his empty coffee-cup slowly in his hands like a crystal ball that had gone opaque. He looked too young to be so old. He stared up at me, searching for what I couldn’t give him.

‘And it was,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it? What happened? I mean, I remember that time. That’s just sixteen years ago. Maybe the Yellow Submarine had sunk. But we still had dreams we shared that were worth dreaming. Dreams that made you worthy of being human. Now if you want to dream them still, you dream alone. The communal dreams? You buy them in a fucking supermarket.’

The swearword was shocking in his gentle mouth.

‘I hate these times,’ he said. ‘The shallowness of them. Some of the noblest dreams the species ever had are being drowned in puddles.’

His gaze returned to the empty cup.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I felt different then. That time in the flat with them had knocked me off my horse on the road to Damascus. It was like a conversion. I believed in almost total hope. You know what I kept thinking at my aunt’s house? They were going out together for one last night. The four of them. I kept wondering what they would be up to. What they were saying. I was wishing I was with them.’

On the afternoon of the next day he was in Glasgow and he had the key in his pocket and he decided to go there, just to sit in it for a while, to become familiar with where he would be staying. The placard had been taken off the door but the drawing pins remained. He turned his key proprietorially and went in. He wished he hadn’t.

‘I can’t explain how much it affected me. It was like having found your faith and losing it in one night. I knew something terrible had happened. I didn’t know what it was but I knew that it was terrible and that it related to me as well. Somehow it diminished my expectations. I felt as if the previous afternoon had been a lie. They had been playing a cynical game with me. All the idealism, all that marvellous positive energy had been phoney. Otherwise, how could it have changed to this in just one night?’

The flat was a litter of debris. Every book had been torn up, every painting smashed. All across the floor of the hall and the living-room sentences had been severed and scattered into irreparable chaos. David Ewart thought that the passage he had heard the previous day must be lying somewhere untraceable among the dismembered wisdom of the dead. All around him were jagged fragments of image with no context to belong in. An eye looked out of nowhere. A guitar was broken in two. A field had no sky with which to connect. Sunshine still made a window of light on the floor.

‘I wandered around there. I couldn’t believe it. It was like finding the corpse of youth. It had committed suicide. Why? The obscenity of destructiveness like that appalled me. I think denying the past is maiming the future. I thought I was looking at a terrible desecration. The murder of promise.’

He put down his empty cup. He held his hands cupped towards himself and stared at them.

‘So now I do my job. It has a purpose. It’s all right. But I had intended to do more. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming that disillusionment for what I am. I made my own smallness. I house-trained my own dreams. But that experience back there. You know what I think it did? It gave me an easy way out. All the bad times. When I felt I was selling out, I had my escape clause handy. I remembered that wastage and I thought, “Yes. That’s what we’re like. That’s the way it always goes. Let’s not pretend we’re more than we are.”’ He was picking dry clay from his fingers. He held up a piece between forefinger and thumb and his eyes lit with an idea. He smiled at me. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. ‘You know what I mean? Circumstances are the real potter. We’re just the clay. We can take any shape they tell us.’

He flicked the piece of clay on to the floor.

‘But I would like to know what happened. Oh, that I would like to know. I left the key on a table and closed the door behind me. We all lived somewhere else that year. But I would have liked to understand, still would. Think about it. I’ve thought about it. It must have been him that did it. Scott. Who else would have done that to his paintings? What could have happened between one day and the next to make him do that? What did idealism die of? That’s what I’d like to know. What happened?’

What happened? Was it then that he met the man in the green coat? At least three people would know. Dave Lyons and two others. One of those other two was still unknown. He had studied English. But Ellie Mabon had said, ‘Andy Blake?’ and ‘Physician, heal thyself’. Sandy had been studying medicine. Dave Lyons and Sandy Blake and another man. And presumably sweet-faced Anna. How could Scott, especially when they were young and trusting each other in the beginning, have kept this from her?