Strange Loyalties

27

I was in the shower when Brian phoned me at the Grosvenor. I had intended it to be a luxurious experience. In the Bushfield I had only had access to a bath. Now I could have hydrotherapy as well as wash myself. But the pleasure was short-lived. I hadn’t even finished singing ‘The Other Side of Nowhere’ by the time the phone rang.

I was still dripping as I took the call, trying to towel myself. It wasn’t a long conversation. We talked a moment about Marty Bleasdale and Melanie McHarg. Brian and Bob would be looking for them tomorrow. They would phone me at the hotel and leave word if I wasn’t there. Brian suggested I should get an early night so that I could be fit and fresh to carry on with my mania in the morning.

I finished drying myself. I pulled on a sweater and a clean pair of underpants. I combed my hair. I filled out an Antiquary and watered it. I stood at the window and looked down on to Byres Road. It felt good to be back in Glasgow. I thought of David Ewart’s ambition for his retirement. It wasn’t a bad one.

I watched the cars pass, the people walking in the street. I saw endlessly criss-crossing preoccupations, not noticing one another seriously, pursuing their own strange loyalties. Strange and questionable loyalties, I thought, including my own. We were moles that lived in the light, following painstakingly constructed tunnels of private purpose.

My week so far had been one of those tunnels. In its determined progress it had broken into other people’s secret places, disturbing the still air, bringing an alien and upsetting presence. In the calmness of this moment, I could acknowledge how abrasive I had been. I regretted that, but not too much.

For although I admired loyalty, I reflected, it could have strange side-effects. Frankie White’s loyalty to a malignant ethic had allowed his friend to be buried in a very deep silence. Anna’s loyalty to Dave Lyons had amputated her husband from her life with clinical coldness. Dave Lyons’ loyalty to himself made everything else irrelevant. In our haste to get to the places to which our personal and pragmatic loyalties lead us, we often trample to death the deeper loyalties that define us all — loyalty to the truth and loyalty to the ideals our nature professes.

I was faced with a labyrinth of commitments in which, it seemed to me, people kept to their exclusive space and pretended it did not connect with other corridors, where bad things happened in their name but not in their hearing. Given that, I could see only one way to proceed. Each of the people I was dealing with had presumably more than one loyalty. Let’s strike one against the other and see if a spark of truth came out of that. Let’s force them to a choice of loyalties.

Eddie Foley, for example, was a faithful minion of Matt Mason. It seemed there was no way he would betray him. But Eddie Foley was also a devoted family man. He lived two contradictory lives. Let’s make them confront each other, the nice man and the criminal, and see who won the fight. I would start with him. It wouldn’t be easy. From here on, I might have to be somewhat more abrasive. I drank reluctantly to that. When the world decides to take away from you, without explanation, a part of what matters to you most, you’d better challenge its indifference, some way or other.

And the meek shall inherit the earth, but not this week.