Strange Loyalties

32

There are public places on which our private lives have an imaginative freehold, because of their associations. La Bona Sospira was one of mine. It was where Jan and I had our first meal together. We had gone back often since then.

You came in, through a narrowly unimpressive frontage, to what wasn’t so much a bar as an ante-room to the restaurant. I had always enjoyed that room. It was like a bridge between two cultures. You stepped in off a Glasgow street and the room said: okay, you’re Scottish and you want a drink, you have a drink; but we’re Italian and any drink you have here is just a prelude to some serious food. The gantry was minute, telling you not to get excited. The decor was banal but so what? Bring your own dreams and any place is special.

This was where I had brought a few of mine. Tonight I wasn’t sure if they could live here any longer. I was nervous about meeting Jan. I loved her and I needed her and I thought she loved me but I didn’t think I was what she needed. That worried me because, many romantic fictions notwithstanding, most people will eventually go with what they need, not what they want. Think of Meece Rooney. That’s why drug-dealers do so well.

I sat down at one of what I had always assumed were beaten brass tables. I hardly know one metal from another. But I had always assumed they were beaten brass. I felt vague about myself. Guido turned up, as Guido often had.

‘Jacko,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’

‘Nice to be here, Guido.’

‘The glorious Jan will be here soon?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘I bring the menus. But, first, I bring a drink. We have a little of the Antiquary.’ The third syllable seemed to go on a long time. ‘This for you?’

‘That’s great. Marcella’s well?’

‘Marcella is too well. She’s so strong, it frightens me.’

Guido went away and came back and brought two menus and a stubby glass of the Antiquary and a jug of water. I had left the car at the hotel. I topped the glass up with water.

I looked at a menu. The food was inventive but so were the prices. I had once suggested this connection to Guido but I wouldn’t do it again.

‘You want Volvo,’ he had said, ‘you buy Volvo. You want Alfa Romeo, you pay for Alfa Romeo.’

The problem was, I reflected, I had for a long time been paying for Alfa Romeos I couldn’t afford. My finances were a disaster. My one piece of luck in that area was that Freddie, my landlord, was someone I had known for years. The rent he charged for the flat was ridiculously cheap. Beyond that, all was crisis. Once I had set aside what was for Ena and the children, the rest was carrion money, just there to feed the vultures. They had been constantly circling for some time now and my cunning plan had always been to ignore them. When I finally collapsed in a heap of putrefying debts, they would no doubt come and get me. In the meantime, just keep running.

I was starting on my whisky as Jan came in. I had just kissed her, tasting the coolness of the evening on her cheek, when Guido arrived like a heat-directed missile that only homed in on women. His small rotundity surrounded her. He buried her in facile compliments, which Jan received delightedly. I suppose if someone is showering you with flowers, it would be churlish to notice that they’re plastic.

I had to admit that she was due some compliments. As Guido elaborately unveiled her, taking her grey woollen coat like a gigantic matador’s cloak, she stood in a plain, tight, black dress that declared every pore to be perfectly in place. She sat down and the area around the table brightened.

‘You look incredible,’ I said.

‘That’s how I feel,’ she said. ‘You look tired.’

‘That’s not how I feel.’

We smiled opaquely at each other. We were circling. Few people can be more distant than estranged intimates.

‘How’s your week been?’ I said.

Before she could answer, Guido was back to make a ritual presentation of her Campari and soda, a large ruby for the Queen of Sheba. He fussed and Jan graciously accepted his fussing.

‘My week?’ she said, as Guido left. ‘Unbelievable. You know we closed last night?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The restaurant. We closed down last night. For renovations We’re getting far more business than we can handle. We’re extending the restaurant into the coffee-lounge. Even then things’ll be tight.’

I didn’t mention that all of this was a surprise to me, because perhaps that was my fault. If you’ve been down in a diving-bell for over a month, you can’t expect to keep up with the news. But her failure even to hint at it, previously, suggested to me not accident but deliberate policy.

‘I would’ve thought,’ I said, ‘that the obvious night to close down would be a Saturday. This way, you’re losing the two best nights of the week.’

‘Oh, we can afford it. It’s been going unbelievably well. The reason for closing Thursday. You know what it is? We wanted to prepare the place for one last thrash before the decorators move in. Tomorrow night we’re throwing a party. All the people who’ve helped us and some of our regulars. We’re making the biggest Boeuf Bourgignon in the world. It’ll be some night. You must come.’

Her invitation had all the intimacy of a business-card.

‘What about you?’ she said.

She leant towards her Campari, as if she needed a prop, and I noticed a sudden stillness in her. She was staring at the table. The defencelessness of her posture gave me a glimpse of the vulnerable woman behind the glamour, renewed the intensity of my feelings for her in an instant. Jan had once said to me after making love, ‘You make me frightened of me.’ I had known what she meant, for I felt the same way. Those moments we had shared defied pragmatism and were therefore difficult to accommodate in the light of day. I had a feeling that was difficult to accommodate now. I would have rather we had each other on the metal-topped table than go through these charades. She glanced up and we were sharing a look directly for the first time since we had met tonight. Our eyes were a mutual confession: we are a joint compulsion. The acknowledgement made her defensive again. She looked away.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Have you sorted things out?’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Oh, not still that.’

‘Still that.’

She lifted her drink and stared at it and sipped and looked round the room. She had moved away from the admission our eyes had made. She had remembered there were conditions to it I still hadn’t met.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Meantime, some of us have to live.’

‘I suppose we’re all trying to do that.’

‘I mean live in the daily world. You’re so unrealistic.’

I found that an interesting observation. I respected the difference of Jan’s life, the validity of her personal preoccupations. But I wasn’t quite prepared to concede that running a successful restaurant made you expert in the nature of reality.

‘The world moves on, Jack,’ she said.

‘Aye. But where to? That’s what’s worrying me.’

She took another sip of her drink and smiled at the passing Guido and became a busy, successful woman again. The passionate look we had exchanged might have been between an attractive scuffler in the street and a sophisticated woman, while her Daimler was stopped briefly at the lights. She opened a menu.

‘Nice Campari,’ she said.

Any evening has its motifs. Those were ours, evasive mannerisms and an impulse to strip each other in the restaurant. During the meal, we tried to talk seriously about our lives but the conversation remained somehow oblique. We seemed incapable of meeting in no-man’s-land. We just kept checking the other’s position and reinforcing our own. We were outmanoeuvring each other so effectively, I wondered if we would ever connect.

I asked, ‘How’s Betsy doing?’

‘Better than you would like,’ Jan replied.

Jan said, ‘You seem to have been talking a lot to Morag Harkness.’

I said, ‘That’s because she answers the phone.’

I said. ‘Barry Murdoch been around much?’

‘Barry Murdoch’s always around,’ Jan said. ‘So what? I know some people who aren’t.’

‘You’re a bit too vehement about Anna,’Jan said. ‘You sure you haven’t got a thing for her?’

‘I have,’ I said. ‘It’s called a Gatling gun.’

And so it went on through the jolly meal, a cross between a minuet and a sword dance, where you had to watch where you stepped in case you found you were bleeding. What I think we were doing, really, was devoting an entire evening to one of those long, askance looks lovers sometimes give each other in their minds, that could roughly translate into what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-this-one? Our lack of contact had perhaps emphasised to each the difference of the other. Sometimes Jan would look at me as at something surprisingly quaint, as if she were thinking, ‘I never noticed that you had two noses before’. Sometimes, for sure, I must have been doing the same.

What Jan was realising about me, I suppose, was that my relationship with her hadn’t smoothed my edges as much as she had hoped. I could order Pinot Grigio with the food, right enough, but while we drank it I still talked about the streets and swore occasionally. I might mention Shakespeare’s name but it might well be linked with that of Meece Rooney or Frankie White. That had always bothered Jan about me. I refused to pigeonhole my nature into separate social identities. I was the same person whatever room I entered. I would make adjustments out of consideration and politeness, like trying not to swear in front of someone I knew it would offend or not using a big word to someone I thought wouldn’t understand it. But there would be no pretence of being who I wasn’t.

Jan and I had argued about that a lot. Once I put the question to Tom Docherty when we were drinking. I didn’t connect it with Jan. I just posed it as a generality. Tom related it to writing, as he does with a lot of things.

Another of the shorter sayings of Chairman Tom: ‘It’s like literary criticism. It’s nearly all about register. There’s a lot of po-faced crap that gets highly praised because of its tone of voice. “I’m serious, I’m cultured,” it’s telling you all the time. Bollocks. The serious and the cultured don’t even have to mention the fact. It’s coming out their pores already. They just do it, they just create. Often laughing and swearing as they go along. Same with people. “There are things you say, things you don’t say, times to say it, and times not.” Some more bollocks. The idea of register in language is mainly just fences shutting out most of the reality we should all be sharing. There’s only one serious human register and it accommodates everybody: truth, in the most generous form you can find it.’

That would do me. Maybe that was why I was a policeman who read philosophy. I could understand both Albert Camus and Matt Mason. I had better. They were both telling me important things about the way we live. They were both part of the same world. It was my world, too. It had to be. There was only the one world to choose from.

What I was realising about Jan, I suppose, was how alien this attitude was to her. There was a time she had been more tolerant of the wind off the streets I had often brought into her life. But lately she seemed to be waiting more and more impatiently for me to close the door on its blowing. That wouldn’t happen. Tonight she seemed to understand that. She listened with a weary silence to the things that were concerning me. So I stopped talking about them.

I saw that she thought all of those people I had been talking to and all of those strange events others got themselves involved in had really nothing to do with this bright and pleasant room we were sitting in, nothing seriously to do with the life we might have together. I didn’t think that. This place was connected to those places. Any place she and I went to together would be. I could sit here and enjoy a good meal and love looking at her but I couldn’t make the pleasure erase those other things or somehow discount them. All I wanted to do tonight was to be with her. But I cared very deeply what happened in other places tomorrow. I hoped Marty Bleasdale found Melanie McHarg. I hoped Melanie McHarg would help me. I wanted that Dan Scoular’s death should have honour and that Scott’s death should be understood. If they weren’t, any life Jan and I could have together would be the less.

It seemed to me Jan thought I could live in two stories, the one where these other things happened and the one that she and I would write together. That couldn’t be. I could only live in the one continuous story — different chapters maybe but the one plot, if you had the sense to follow it.

But while our minds were behaving like strangers, our bodies were arranging an assignation. It was happening in spite of ourselves. She touched my leg instinctively below the table in contradiction of what she was saying. I lost the thread of my objections and was left simply enjoying her eyes. As our predetermined sense of ourselves proceeded rather pompously through the evening, together but apart, the desire to make love to each other followed furtively, like a down-and-out who had nothing to commend him but his need. I think we both knew he was bound to confront us.

Perhaps that’s why, after the restaurant, we went into a pub for a drink. We were allowing time for the unadmitted truth of what we felt to catch up. We both became slightly drunk and finished, by no route that I can explain, making our way into the restaurant to get to her flat.

The restaurant was in an alleyway in the West End. Jan’s flat was above it and had a metal work balcony which I liked. The flat had an outside door that you reached by means of a stairway. It could also be entered through a back staircase in the restaurant. Why Jan should decide that we had to go in through the restaurant I do not know. There may have been a logic at the time, now lost forever.

Inside the restaurant, all was pleasantly dim. Light came in from the streetlamps outside, as if filtered through gauze. Each empty table, draped simply in pink cloth, floated like a lotus in a pool. I moved with effortless grace among the tables and barked my shin very painfully on metal. I thought I was going to scream. After a brief, soundless dance, I looked down. I saw an object I had always hated.

It was a large metal flowerpot. It contained a lot of money, mainly coins but with quite a number of notes. It was supposed to be a unique tradition of the restaurant. The idea was that, since everybody who worked here was well enough paid, any tips were put into the flowerpot. Once the amount of money became impressive, it would be given to charity. I didn’t mind the thought so much. But I despised the public, patronising style of it. It was enough to make me worry about Jan. I was exhausted trying to connect with her anyway. The flowerpot palpitated, along with my leg, into a symbol. It blocked my way. This route I may go no further. Jan was still talking, oblivious to my pain.

‘But we’ll have an alcove. Leading through to where the coffee-room is. It’ll be like a room inside a room. Privacy inside privacy. More whispery than the main place.’

‘Hey, Lady of the Manor!’ I called.

She turned towards me. Having thrown her coat off, her body was the only sheer presence in the vagueness of the room. She was looking at me quizzically.

‘I’ve had this,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, take your pants off and put them round your mouth.’

I was as shocked as she was. But her shock became assurance more quickly. We looked at each other without the mediation of accidental circumstances or deliberate mannerisms and accepted the challenge. It was as if some kind of smoked glass were no longer between us — say, the window of a Daimler had come soundlessly down. She was face to face with the scuffler in the street. She smiled and waited to speak. When she spoke, it was just the one word. The word was a name. She said the word gloatingly, as if she were a spider that had found a species of fly it particularly enjoyed dismembering.

‘Sexist!’ she said softly.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Take your pants off and put them round my mouth. Even better. I love the taste of you any way it comes. But let’s just meet.’

She stared at me.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘If you’re that desperate. You know where they are.’

If I hadn’t known, I would have found out. She was standing, still as a startled animal, as if she had caught the sudden whiff of our own nature and knew we were its quarry. I came towards her. I did not touch her. I stood close to her and took her scent. That woman smell, may it always fuse every light in my head and teach me to wait again till my senses glow in the dark.

I reached down very gently. My fingers did not touch her. With both hands, I found the hem of her dress at the outside of each leg. I eased her dress up, very slowly. There being no attack, there was no resistance. As the cloth came above her thighs, it struggled and, in that feeling, the sensuality of her hips seized me more potently than if I had looked or touched. When the dress was crumpled round her waist, I released it and it stayed there.

In the half-dark, the whiteness of her thighs shone above the stocking-tops. Her legs were strong and beautiful. To my awed reverence they might as well have been the pillars to some temple. The white brocaded pants concealed her darkness. I knelt down and softly began to lick the insides of her thighs. I became engrossed, as if I had found my life’s work. She began to moan faintly. The sound grew, part pleasure, part complaint, like an animal that wanted to leave its lair but was afraid to. All the words of the evening had translated into this — a licking tongue, inarticulate noises, the sounds of need. Her legs were trembling and they did not so much part as they thawed open.

I reached up with both hands and pulled her pants down. The pants were pretty but they were an ugliness compared with what they were hiding. As I eased them over her ankles and she stepped out, her legs buckled and she closed on me like a trap I wanted to be caught in.

On the floor we stripped each other with an urgency that precluded the need for technique. It happened that we became naked. The rest took place beyond much that we could do about it. Such lust doesn’t submit suggestions to a committee to be ratified. It descends like a visiting divinity out of the machine and says, ‘You’ll do this and this and this. And then you’ll do that.’ We did. We ended with Jan sprawled naked across one of the tables, her hands grasping its edges, her buttocks hoisted in the air, and me serving her manically from the back. The idea of making love on the table in La Bona Sospira had, unintentionally, managed to fulfil itself. We had found a way past our pretences to ourselves. Pleased to meet us. The smart detective was a gasping, obedient servant of his phallus. The suave business-woman was an abandonment of beautiful, welcoming flesh. Oh, the lies we tell in the daylight about what we are in the dark. We came finally together with a terrible shuddering I thought I might not survive. The force of the moment shook me like a rat. I felt the strength of her loins would pull me outside in.

I fell across her. We lay. I lipped her back, like someone trying to convince himself he is still alive. ‘Oh, darling, oh,’ Jan said. She didn’t move. She lay spread-eagled, as if she had been fused to the table. It was a while before either of us said anything else. We had to wait for the intensity of what had happened to leave. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to speak in its presence. It was Jan who spoke again, reintroducing us to practicality.

‘We’re beside a window,’ she said. ‘I suppose we’d better move.’

I pinned her to the table.

‘No chance,’ I said. ‘I’m going to keep you here for good. Make us own up to what we’re really like.’

‘Could be awkward at the party.’

‘Don’t care. And they can decorate around us. Could make the place’s name. How’s this for trendy decor?’

‘Some people might object.’

‘More likely to follow suit. Or follow suitless. We could start the revolution right here. Own up. Strip off. Make love.’

‘Or we could just get the jail.’

‘No problem. I’m a policeman.’

‘Oh, I know.’

I had said the wrong thing. It was a cold shower after love, diminishing our intimacy. Our difficulties were gathering again in the room around us. I tried to disperse them.

‘I’m glad you bought strong tables for this place.’

‘I better remember to change the table-cover,’ she said, ‘before the hygiene-inspector comes.’

But the levity didn’t quite work. We eased ourselves apart and gathered our clothes together. The table reverted to a place where business-deals would be made over lunches and people would act out their fictions of success and self-sufficiency. At least we had blessed it with a kind of human truth.

We took on our problems with our clothes. As we made our way upstairs naked to the flat, we carried our social identities in our arms, our separate commitments, our mutually exclusive purposes, the continuity of our differences. We couldn’t stay naked for each other. We hadn’t resolved our dilemma, just rendered it irrelevant for a time. We were content with that for now.

Upstairs we lay in bed and held each other in the darkness. We shared skins. We touched hair. We said soft things we hoped came true. Before I slept, I realised that this was the closest thing to home I had, this fragile tent of feeling I could share with Jan.

The phone ripped through it.