Strange Loyalties

3

Where do they come from, those times? They are no respecters of persons. You’ve decided a day’s just bad business. You’ve coloured it grey, when suddenly it’s blinding you with hues you didn’t know were there. You’re ambushed by pleasure. It was like that at Lock 27.

We ate outside at the wooden tables. It was a place that had meant something to Jan and me a few times before, slow drinks and long talk that was winding to bed by a devious route, pausing to pick the odd flower from our different pasts, while her mouth turned into an astonishing organism, exotic as a sea-anemone, and I became briefly infatuated with the lobe of her left ear. Those times.

Today was like an orchestration of them all. The particulars that created the effect didn’t seem too great. But then the notation to Solveig’s Song doesn’t look like a lot, at least not to me. (A music teacher once showed me when I was at school.) Heard, it can melt you.

Jan and Brian shared a bottle of white wine. I, as prospective driver of some distance, was on Perrier. We ate some kind of food. And we talked. That was about it.

But then May was out, laying tracks of scent in the air like mysteries you would want to follow till they buried you and the sunlight was showing off with the canal — see what I can do with water? — and a young couple were walking up and down the bank with a child and people were talking and laughing and you felt this wasn’t such a bad species to be part of and I thought, what a game this is to play. Freeze the frame. This’ll do.

After Jan and Brian had delicately kidded me throughout the meal about my incompetence in living alone (no mention of Scott), Brian insisted on paying and went off for a walk along the canal.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Jan said.

‘I think so.’

‘That should make a change.’

‘Come on, Jan. Not you as well.’

‘Me especially.’

Her eyes were in the sunlight and she had a stare it wasn’t easy to confront. She looked as if she could see, as the man says, ‘quite through the deeds of men’. With me, that must have been easy for her, I thought. She had a lot of confessional moments to draw on. But she contradicted me.

‘Who are you, anyway? I still don’t know. I thought I did. But watching you lately’s been like trying to find someone in a crowd. By the time I get hold of what I think is your arm, it’s someone else. It’s not just Scott’s death. It was there before. But it’s worse now. Look at what you’re up to now. What made you decide to do this?’

‘I think it was the funeral.’

‘The funeral?’

‘I think it was. You don’t get any good ones, Jan. But this was the worst. Scott wasn’t there. Don’t smile. I didn’t expect him to walk in with the mourners. I mean, among the mourners I didn’t feel him there. Except maybe with David and Alan. And the kids didn’t know what was going on. But at least their shock was real. Anna was hurt, of course. But, Jesus, she was cold with it. You know there was nothing afterwards? Nothing. Not a sausage roll, not a cup of tea. We stood outside the crematorium a couple of minutes. A bunch of strangers, looking as if the host hadn’t turned up. The man who was his headmaster spoke to me. “You must be the brother. He was a fine teacher.” A fine teacher? Shove it up your arse. He was a lot more than a fine teacher. Anyway, we all know he wasn’t such a fine teacher towards the end. What we don’t know is why. None of us there had a clue. “Fine.” That word pisses me off. It’s not a personal response. It’s a box in a report card. Poor, fine, excellent. Tick the appropriate place. Some of the rest of them spoke to me. There was a John Strachan. I need to speak to him for starters. I was too numb at the time. We all just got in our cars and came away. We might as well have been at a football match.’

‘Jack. That’s what those things are like.’

‘You don’t bury a dog that way, Jan. You don’t bury my brother that way. That’s for sure. I may have been numb at the time but I knew even then. This won’t do. Did they know what they were dealing with? This was some man, you know. I knew him when he was him. A head busier than an anthill. He painted. He tried to write. He wanted to be into everything. He was thirty-eight when he died. How the hell did that happen?’

‘It was an accident.’

‘I know it was an accident, Jan. But where did the accident begin? That’s what I want to know. In the middle of the road? At the kerb? In the pub before he went out? In the fact that he drank too much? In the reasons why he drank too much? When did the accident begin? And why? When did my brother’s life give up its purpose? So that it could wander aimlessly for years till it walked into a car? Why? Why did it lose itself until we found it lying in front of that car? I want to know, Jan. Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst of us flourish? I want to know.’

That was on Perrier water. It was lucky I wasn’t on the whisky. A few minutes before, I had been wanting to stay here. Now the idyll was broken. I had rained on it with my words. The sun was still there and the people, but they didn’t look the same to me any more. I think I resented them a little. I think Jan resented me.

‘I don’t know how much longer, Jack,’ she said.

The remark should have been surprising. But love has its own grammar. Unspoken clauses pass between you, understood. I wasn’t surprised. A familiar dread appeared in the sunshine like a fin in a bright bay.

‘I never intended to fall in love with a band of guerrillas. You take up a new cause every day. Group sex was never my thing. We make love the best. But outside of bed, who are you? I never know who’s getting out of bed, never mind who’s getting in. I need a Jack Laidlaw of my own. I’m thirty now.’

She had been talking lately of having a child. I knew I was first choice as the father, but only first choice. She seemed to think there was potential in my genes, given the right training, which obviously I hadn’t had. The clairvoyance of women amazes me. They can project a smile into a relationship and some embraces into a future. They can nest in a promise you didn’t know you had made. Jan saw a future in us but, if I didn’t, she still saw a future. I could understand her impulse. I wasn’t the only one who stared into the darkness above the bed and heard age whispering around me. Jan had her own dark voices. Somewhere inside her, she knew the faces of her young glowing hopefully, featureless as candle flames. If the features didn’t take after me, they would take after someone else. Time was running out for her, too. Wasn’t it always for all of us?

‘You go and have your week,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’

I had a temptation to plead my case but I resisted it. I didn’t know which way to plead. I sensed which direction she was going and it might well be away from me. She had given up working in the hotel and was in partnership with two friends in a small restaurant. Her life was orderly and successful. Me, I seemed to be moving backwards. I sometimes get the feeling that I’m on foot while everybody else is driving. It’s as if my life still hasn’t invented the wheel. Maybe this week it would. At least Jan would be waiting. Court was in recess for a week.

Brian was loitering close at hand and I called him over. At Jan’s car she and I took an assessing farewell and she mouthed through the windscreen that she loved me. I drove Brian home.

We didn’t talk much in the car. Outside his house, he stood with the car-door open.

‘Remember, Jack,’ he said. ‘Polismen have even less unofficial freedom than civilian punters. Don’t do anything daft, or not too daft. And keep in touch, if only to tell me how the car’s doing. I want to hear from you. And I might need your advice on the case.’

It was a prepared speech. I found that moving.

‘I’ll phone every mile, on the mile,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. And take a tip from a good detective. Always check the glove compartment of a new car.’

We waved and I drove off. It wasn’t until I had gone some way that I thought of what he had said. I pressed the switch and the flap of the glove compartment came down and a bottle of the Antiquary fell into my hand. I put it back in and closed the flap.

I thought of people setting out on journeys in fables: warnings from beautiful, dark women and magic potions given to help them through.