Strange Loyalties

SEVEN
39

And on the seventh day I rested. It’s exhausting trying to remake the world in your own image.

As I let myself into the flat, carrying my little parcel of rejection from Jan, the phone was ringing. Moving hurriedly through the darkness, I stumbled on something and cursed it. It hadn’t been there when I left. Had the furniture been mating in my absence? I lifted the phone.

‘Where are you?’

It was a good question. I would have to give it some thought. ‘We’re having a slight gay-and-hearty here. You should be the guest of honour.’

It was Brian Harkness. He sounded like a town-crier. I had to hold the ear-piece side-on to my head. There was the sound of merriment in the background.

‘Jack? Is that you? What are you doing there? We’re in the Getaway. Behind closed doors. A mob of us. Marty was great tonight. They’re all asking for you. That doesn’t happen often. You should cash in on it while it lasts. Get over here. We’ve done it, we’ve done it. Mason, Brogan and Walker. How’s that for a half-back line? Signed, sealed and delivered.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Matt Mason still hasn’t believed it, I don’t think. You should have seen his face. When we were bringing him out, he looked as if he’d never seen a street before. As if he didn’t recognise where he lived.’

I thought of Betty Scoular staring out of her doorway. Matt Mason had earned his alienation from himself.

‘So are ye comin’? Even Big Ernie Milligan’s here.’

‘That’s a good enough reason for stayin’ away. I’m having my own wee ceremony here, Brian. Thanks all the same.’

‘Ah can imagine that. Come on, Jack. Get outa there.’

‘Not tonight. I’m tired.’

‘Well, listen. That meal’s still on. This week. Morag says you have been warned. No excuses will be accepted.’

‘No excuses will be made. I’m looking forward to that.’

‘Bob and Margaret as well. We’ll have a night. Listen. Jack. Are you all right?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, you’ve laid the ghost?’

‘Oh, I think so. I’m not sure where I’ve laid it, right enough. But I’ve laid it somewhere.’

‘No more trips to funny places? I mean, I need the car.’

‘I’ll see you on Monday.’

‘Okay. Take care.’

‘Enjoy.’

‘Oh, Jack. Bob Lilley says you’re the best. You could cobble a solution out of anything.’

But the cobbler’s children, they say, are always the worst shod. I couldn’t solve the problems of my own life. When I put on the light, I saw that I had tripped over my travelling-bag. I hadn’t thanked Brian for delivering it. Scott’s two paintings were leaning against a wall. The Antiquary, sadly diminished, stood on the sideboard along with the green ashtray from David Ewart’s workshop.

I would have liked to give him Michael Preston’s version of how idealism died. I felt I owed it to him. But then it was the story of a criminal act. Some of those involved in it were still alive. If I told David Ewart, it would have to be an anonymous account, with names omitted to protect the guilty.

At least later today I could phone Betty Scoular. Dan Scoular’s death was going to be paid for. That might help her to let the grave settle and go on to wherever her life was taking her. I hoped so. This place needed women like her at full strength, not debilitated by the unjust wounds that had been inflicted on them. I might also phone Fast Frankie White. At the moment he deserved to have whatever fragile peace of mind his nomadic sense of himself was capable of. I hoped his mother was finding a painless way to go. I could still feel the echo of her gentle, dying hand in mine. I wished Melanie well. At least we shouldn’t have to use the tape.

I drew the curtains. The place looked slightly less bleak that way. It didn’t change my mood but it put a blindfold on my loneliness, so that it had nothing to compare itself with. I opened the plastic bag Jan had given me. Two shirts came out, then two pairs of underpants, then three socks. They were unwashed. I could imagine her wrenching them from the laundry-basket in her anger. I smiled wryly to think of that one buried, subversive sock. Parting is never easy. Something of the other will remain against your will. But, in this case, not for long, I could imagine. There was still something that weighed lightly in the plastic bag. I reached in and brought out a packet of cigarettes. I opened it. There were three cigarettes inside. In the pettiness of the gesture I saw the finality of her dismissal. Maybe she would fumigate the place to complete the process.

It was cold. I put on the gas fire. I unzipped my travelling-bag and put away such clothes as weren’t to be washed. Then I took what was for washing and put it in the washing machine. For some sentimental reason I did not care to examine, I included the odd sock. I suspect I was imagining myself as some embarrassing variant of Prince Charming. If I were ever again to match it up with its neighbour, I would be with my own true love. No wonder I hid from my motivation. I took the washing powder from under the sink and filled the white plastic drawer. I closed the machine and started it up. The sudden noise in the stillness reminded me with a shock that we were in the early hours of Sunday morning. I switched the sound off at once, grimacing to myself. I stood in the kitchen and started to worry about what living alone was doing to me. Perhaps I would finish up existing inside a private timescale of impulse and compulsion.

I went back through to the living-room to escape from the now-I-must-do-the-washing impulse and found another one waiting for me. I had to hang Scott’s paintings. Home handyman not being one of my more impressive personas, it took me about twenty minutes to find a hammer. I took two picture-hooks from the bedroom where, on renting the flat, I had put up photographs of the children. I could repair their desecrated shrine when I bought more hooks. I hung the five at supper above the fire-place and ‘Scotland’ on the opposite wall, hammering furtively and intermittently.

The bottle of the Antiquary had two drinks left in it. I filled out one and watered it in the kitchen and came back through. It wasn’t so cold now. I put my blazer over the back of a chair and sat down at the fire with my whisky. I took a sip and looked at the five men. Scott, Sandy Blake, Dave Lyons, Michael Preston. And the man who was still unidentified. Not even the colour of the coat was accurate.

‘It was brown, as I remember it.’

Even our guilt we shape into our own needs. Scott had spent a long time shaping his. I confronted it at last.

‘It was brown, as I remember it.’

Michael Preston’s voice had brought home to me how even shared actions can separate us. His sense of what had happened that night after the impromptu party in the flat with David Ewart remained clear and it troubled him still but not as it had troubled Scott. I thought of Dave Lyons. Did anything trouble him? I thought of Sandy Blake in South Africa. Maybe for him guilt was geographical.

‘We got drunk that night,’ Michael Preston had said. ‘It was a celebration, after all. Three of us were finishing up. Sandy still had some time to go. But he was saying goodbye to us. It was one of those nights when you’re young and you feel the possibilities. Know what I mean? We went on a pub-crawl. I suppose we felt like the new aristocracy visiting the peasants. We all thought we had so much potential then. Our horizons seemed limitless. I remember saying not unportentously that I was going to write the house down. Scott was going to paint. Dave Lyons was going to do something of great scientific value. I don’t know what Sandy was going to do. Maybe find the cure for cancer. All I’ve ever written are commentaries for television programmes that may have helped to pass the time in a few living-rooms, that died with the credits.’

He lifted the paper-weight and turned it and replaced it. We sat watching the imitation snow-storm fall gently on the miniature house. He stared at it till it had subsided.

‘I sometimes think I might as well be living in that house,’ he said. ‘Hermetically sealed in my career. That night. I remember Scott warning us all against succumbing to the system. He had a dread of settling for too little. This was only a beginning, he was saying. It would all be meaningless unless we related it to what mattered, to where we came from. We were all from working-class backgrounds. The chance we had was held in trust for others, he said. Whatever talents we had belonged to the man in the street. Each of us had to find our own way to reconnect with him. Find him, bring whatever gifts we had to him, and he would teach us how to use them. Without him, what we had learned was useless. It was a good speech at the time.’

He ran his hand along some of the clip-binders filed on one of the shelves beside him. On the back of each was something written in felt pen. I assumed they were the titles of projects he had been involved in but I couldn’t read them.

‘Tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘I think it’s still a good speech. These.’ His forefinger played along the binders. ‘These are Preston’s Thesaurus. A personal dictionary of synonyms for futility. They make a long study of nothing. The longer I live, the more I think Scott was right that night. I wish I didn’t.’

He looked at me and I thought I saw in his eyes how the depth of the wish was measured by its hopelessness.

‘We came out of the pub that night,’ he said. ‘Thrown out of the last one at time-up. It was pissing with rain. Coming down in sheets. I think in our euphoria we were almost offended that the weather wouldn’t match our mood. We doorway-hopped for a spell. We reaffirmed what we were going to achieve. Like a pact. We addressed the weather like King Lear. Telling it to behave itself. We didn’t want the feeling we had made among us to stop. We were busking an end to the night that would match the grandeur we felt in it. Then, from some final doorway, somebody saw a car. I don’t know who saw it first. All I remember is there we were talking about it. It was an old A40, pretty beat-up. It was parked across the street. There were no lights in the buildings around us.’

They decided to steal the car.

‘It was a group decision, I suppose. I remember that my own clever contribution was to say, “Property is theft. Let’s thieve it back.” The idea was just to drive it close to the flat and leave it there. No harm done. Even if they traced us to the flat, we’d be off by tomorrow. It was just a joy-ride.’

Breaking in was easy. Dave Lyons connected the wires. They drove off. As he reached that point in his story, Michael Preston held his hand up, forestalling my question.

‘We were all driving,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me to define it more closely than that. We were one group mood. The way it can get sometimes. All of us broke into the car. So all of us drove it. We accepted that among us afterwards. I still accept it. I know Scott did. Maybe one pair of hands on the wheel. But four intentions. There’s no reneguing from that.’

He stared into my scepticism and didn’t flinch. I saw the strength that had enabled him to live for so long with something he hated to live with. Wounds sometimes heal into hard places.

‘I was there,’ he said. ‘I remember the shared madness. I think they call it hubris. That wasn’t just a car to us. It was an ego-machine. That wasn’t just a road. It was our road, where we were going, what we would become. We were all shouting instructions. Naming destinations. “Take us to our leader.” “Next stop: the meaning of the world.” “Drop me off at the next planet.” “Self-fulfilment here we come.” That kinda nonsense. The car was fogged with our lunacy. The rain hammering down outside didn’t hear us. And then it happened. Jesus, I don’t know where he came from. It seemed to me he reared up out of nowhere. He might as well have been born full grown in the headlights. It was as if he came out of the impact, not the other way around. He was a brief shape in the air. Like Icarus. Only difference is we were the arrogant bastards. It was him that took the fall. The car stopped. That’s the loudest rain I’ve ever heard. Or ever want to hear. It was like living under a waterfall. One you know is never going to stop. You’re going to live the rest of your life with the sound of it in your ears.’

He lifted the dagger that was his paper-knife and his face was so clenched and dark he might have been contemplating using it on himself. He sat still for a moment as if he was still listening to the rain. He looked at me.

‘That was your man in the green coat,’ he said. ‘Except that it wasn’t green. It was brown, as I remember it. But then maybe that was just the rain. He was lying mainly on the pavement. He was the stillest thing I’d ever seen. He was balding. Not a face you’d notice normally. One of those that make up the numbers. An extra in a thousand pub-scenes. Could’ve been anybody. He was lying with a terrifying awkwardness. That’s been the shape of a lot of my nightmares. Sandy Blake examined him. He wasn’t dead. But he said that he was getting there. And no way would he live. We had found the man in the street all right. And it looked as if we had killed him.’

I have dreamed many times that I have murdered someone. Those are the most frightening dreams I have ever had. The terror, I think, comes from the sense of irrevocability. I am in a place from which it is impossible to go back. I have become someone I never wanted to be and I must be that person forever. Waking up with the sweats, I have experienced a feeling of immeasurable relief. I tried to imagine never wakening up.

‘The only blood,’ he said, ‘was coming from under his head, where it had hit the road. We tried to argue with Sandy. But he said he was losing his heartbeat. We were shouting in whispers to each other. And the rain was drowning out everything. Terror, people talk of it loosely. That was terror. Imagine your life frozen in one long, long accidental moment. You have to move to unfreeze it. And you’re too terrified to move. Because there are only two ways you can go. And both of them are badder than you ever imagined anything could be. You can take him in and he’ll be dead already. And you’ll be just drunken bastards who have killed a man with a car. Your lives are over before they properly got started. Or you can leave him there. And maybe nobody will ever know except yourselves. But the rest of your life is based on leaving an innocent man to lie dying in the rain. Nice choice we had made for ourselves. You fancy it?’

I didn’t say anything. His bitter smile was just a scar across his face.

‘We made our choice,’ he said. ‘Or panic made it for us. The longer we stood, the more chance we would be found. And have no choice. Scott was crying. We more or less had to wrestle him into the car. We drove away. We left the man there. We left him there. We left him there. He’s there still, I think, for all of us. Except poor Scott. He’s erased that image at last. We abandoned the car somewhere and went back to the flat.’

He sat very still, staring straight ahead. His voice took on a dead quality, as if he were repeating a text he had learned painfully by heart.

‘University,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you went there. I thought I had graduated earlier, that summer. But it was that night in the rain I really graduated. I found out who I was. And that I didn’t like who I was. And that I never could. I mean, I had loved all that grappling with great minds. The moral questions. Then suddenly, in one night, the issues were real. We were living the questions. Seminars? Did we have a seminar that night. We talked into the light, though I don’t know that we ever found it. Scott still wanted to go back. That we should give ourselves up. I felt like that myself. Dave and Sandy were against it. I couldn’t see how I could live with this. I still don’t see how I have. But I have. It was Dave who finally persuaded me that there was nothing else we could do but live with it. He said we had all acquired certain abilities. The most valid respect we could pay to the man we had killed was to fulfil those abilities. Anything else was anti-life. If we gave ourselves up, we were destroying ourselves for a moral convention. For what good could it do? It wouldn’t bring back a dead man. It would simply waste our lives, bury such abilities as we had. A terrible, irreversible thing had happened. We could either sacrifice ourselves to no purpose. Or we could find the strength to live with it and fulfil our lives as best we could. I came to accept that. We were three against one. But we needed four. Scott couldn’t implicate himself without implicating all of us. His conscience wasn’t his own. It was all or none. That’s when he wrecked his paintings and tore up his books. We let him do it. Because I think we knew what it meant. That he had given up on his self-belief. And would have to find out how to live without it. Which was what we needed.’

There was a knock at the door and Bev, his wife, looked in. As he saw her, the softness that suffused his face was striking. It was not an act of concealment, so that she wouldn’t know the dark things he had been saying. It was a spontaneous admission of love.

‘You two old wives,’ she said. ‘I’ve made some coffee.’

She brought in a tray with coffee and biscuits.

‘I hope this one’s not boring you,’ she said to me.

‘Never that,’ I said.

As she put down the tray, his hand rested briefly on her hip. It was an instinctive expression of affection.

‘Don’t use up all your anecdotes,’ she said to him. ‘You’ve got the dinner-party.’

‘I’ll just steal some of yours,’ he said.

‘Then I’ll tell the punchlines early.’

She went out. He nodded at the closed door.

‘She’s my life,’ he said. ‘She’s got a spirit stronger than ten Sumo wrestlers. She knows about this. But she doesn’t know I’m telling you about it. I’ll tell her tomorrow. This dinner-party matters to her. Truth is, I wouldn’t have been telling you. If Scott hadn’t died. That’s changed things for me.’

He pushed the biscuits towards me, sipped his coffee.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The ambiguity of things. I can talk about the mockery that’s my life and sip coffee at the same time. I can sit in my own guilt like an armchair. We’re strange things. I sometimes think our lives are a contract with the impossible. If we’re going to live together, we have to sign that contract. But most of us know we can’t really meet its terms. So we insert our private clauses in small print. And don’t mention it to anybody else. Only the best of us try to abide by the contract. And the attempt often destroys them. Like Scott. You take us four. When we left that room that morning. We had an agreement. But that was an unfair agreement. It obliged the best of us to abide by the terms of the worst. It denied Scott’s nature. Which was to follow the honesty of his idealism to the bone. It was a death-sentence. We killed Scott as well as the other man. Think of it. I’ve thought of it. A lot I’ve thought of it. Dave would survive. What else would he do? It’s all he was born for. Sandy? There are people who wander the world like dinosaurs. They don’t know evolution happened. They eat, they sleep, they shit. When they get the chance, they copulate. If they manage to keep doing all of them, they don’t know anything’s wrong. That’s Sandy. I don’t resent him. I pity him. For myself, I think Bev saved my life. She’s allowed me to believe in some part of myself that stayed decent. But Scott took the pain most, for all of us.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sorry.’

He was right about the ambiguity of things. What do you do when you’ve heard the news that changes the significance of your life forever? You finish drinking your coffee. You don’t make some profound statement that matches the enormity of what you’ve heard. You may ask a weird, tangential question, like an uncomprehending child wondering what colour the car was that has killed his father.

‘Why do you think he dressed him in green?’ I said. ‘You said his coat was brown. Why would Scott do that?’

‘I think I know,’ he said. ‘I should do. This has been my life’s study in a way, hasn’t it? The methodology of guilt. I’ve thought about how we’ve all handled it. We didn’t exactly keep in touch. Who needs to stare their own hypocrisy in the face every day? Although I think Dave tried to stay close to Scott. He was monitoring him. In a chain of lies, honesty’s always going to be the weak link. But that wasn’t friendship. It was supervision.’

I thought of Dave Lyons’ relationship with Anna. Had that begun as part of the supervision? I realised the riskiness of his having an affair with Scott’s wife. If Scott had found out, nothing was more likely to make him break and declare publicly what had happened. Why had Dave Lyons involved himself there? Had he not been able to stop himself? Had the very danger of it intrigued him? Would it have remained clandestine if Scott hadn’t died? Even the certainty of our duplicities will multiply into doubts.

‘Sandy,’ he said. ‘I see him as a kind of moral idiot. He has no sense of the other. He just is. For him, I would imagine, the problem wouldn’t seriously exist if it isn’t acknowledged. Justification is not being found out. Dave is different. I think in a strange way he took his subsequent strength from what happened. He had been to the worst place and survived it. If life couldn’t break him there, what else could it do him? He had found a secret. The way things work. There are no avenging angels. No poetic justice. There’s only the law. Avoid it and you’re running free. All you have to deal with is the inside of your head. Dave could do that all right. And I can see why. I’ve tried to think of it with his head. I’ve tried to think of it with everybody’s head I can imagine. You know how I think he might have squared it with himself? Think of it. The very fact that you can flout the law like that proves how little it means. It’s just a set of rules for those who happen to get caught. And if you can make a mockery of the law and thrive, it would be a bit immodest to think you were the only one. Wouldn’t it? Dave knew his guilt must also be a lot of other people’s. It was the nature of the game. That was a find. It was like splitting his private atom. He understood the structure of things. Hypocrisy wasn’t a weakness for him. It became a strength. It wasn’t social death. It was the lifeblood of career. No wonder he’s such a successful man. It’s quite simple, really, when you think of it. The bad have limitless capacities. The good are constrained. The hypocritical good have got it made. They have a structure of conformity that is plainly visible from the outside. Inside it, there are subterranean passageways in which anything is allowed to happen. That’s Dave. Me?’

He stared at his desk. He smiled. It was a shy, vulnerable smile, less pleasure than pain with a mask on.

‘Don’t laugh at this,’ he said. ‘What I think I’ve done with it is try to be as good a man as I can be. Bev became the meaning of my life. Her and the kids. I wanted that things should be right for them. Beyond that, just do the best I can for everybody else. That’s all. The house, everything’s in Bev’s name. I’ve got a horror of possessions. Anything in here that’s mine, Bev bought for me. Every year I set aside whatever I can for charities. I’ve never knowingly cheated another person since that night. I’ve never been unfaithful to Bev. It’s pathetic, isn’t it? To think that changes anything. Because I still shared in what happened. And it still happened. And this may be technically Bev’s house. But I live in it comfortably enough, don’t I? And it’s still built on the bones of a dead man. My life remains a lie, no matter how white I try to make it.’

He stared at me. The meaning I took from his eyes was something like: judge me as hard as you like, I can add to your severity.

‘Scott,’ he said. ‘Well, you know, don’t you? Who are the bitterest people in the world? The failed idealists, I would think. We made sure that Scott was one of them. But we couldn’t kill his idealism. We just gave it cancer. He still kept it in him but it became grotesquely tumoured. If he couldn’t undo what had happened and he couldn’t admit it, he could make it the most important thing in the world. The man we killed came to stand for everybody who’s a victim of our socialisation, the wholeness of our nature we lose in order to fit in to society. I think that’s why he gave him a green coat. I suppose he saw him as natural man. To meet Scott’s needs, he couldn’t just be the man we knocked down and killed with a car. That’s what he is for me, right enough. But who am I to say my way of living with it is nearer the truth than Scott’s? For Scott, I think he was the part of ourselves we kill. In order to be able to go on living with the pretence of being who other people think we are. I’ll show you something.’

He opened one of the top drawers in his desk. Whatever he was showing me must matter to him, since he kept it so conveniently to hand. It was a plain postcard with a handwritten message. He passed it across to me.

‘Scott sent me that a couple of months or so ago.’

I read it slowly.

‘See what I mean?’ he said.

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘You can keep it,’ he said. ‘Evidence, eh?’

I put it in my pocket. So now I knew. At least, the facts were in my head. It might be some time yet before they reached my heart. But some unsatisfied instinct persisted in me still, like a hand automatically fixing the hair on a corpse.

‘Who was driving?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said.

‘Was Scott driving?’

He stared at the floor. He stared at me.

‘Look. Because he was your brother and because he’s dead. I’ll tell you this. Scott wasn’t driving. But that’s all I tell you. The other three of us were driving. All right? A deal’s a deal. No matter how foul the terms. Honour among the dishonoured. It’s all I’ve got left. As it is, you’ve got enough to blow us all away, I suppose. That’s up to you. I sit at this dinner-party tonight and I don’t know when the lights might go out on my life. I can live with that. I’ve lived with this, I can live with that. Maybe a part of me wants you to do it. I think it’s only Bev and the kids I would worry about. Dave and Sandy, with them I’ve kept the bad faith. But when Scott died, that changed the terms for me. When you came round, I knew I had to tell you. For Scott’s sake. He deserved it. I’ve told you. You do with it what you will.’

I was afraid I would just have to endure it. I had thought earlier tonight, on my wanderings, that I might have to bring this case to court, as well as the death of Dan Scoular. But why? What would we achieve? The resurrected pain of an unknown man’s family, the damaged lives of a lot of innocent relatives who didn’t even know the perpetrators when it happened. There are griefs we must try to put right and griefs we must endure. This guilt was not absolvable. All I could do was take my share of it. I took the secret into myself.

But I would live with it on my own terms. Dave Lyons wouldn’t win. That must not be. There are other things we can do with our capacity to betray one another besides condone it. We can quarrel with it till we die, as Scott had done in his way.

I thought of Scott now, trying to see him whole. I knew that there was in me a recurrent tendency to think back to the excitement of new beginnings and regret the ends they’ve come to. The bitterness that can give rise to is bearing false witness to life. I thought that the essence of life lies not in the defeat of our expectations but in the joy that they were ever there at all. Life’s a spendthrift mother. Once she has given what she has, it’s ungrateful to complain that she didn’t have the foresight to take out an insurance policy on your behalf. You just say thanks.

I did. He was my brother and that made for pride in me. I loved him in his anger and his weakness and the folly of his dying as much as ever I loved him in his strength and in his kindness. I found no part of him deniable.

And his last gift to me from the grave had perhaps been a more intense vision of the blackness in myself. It gave me a proper fear of who I was. In trying to penetrate the shadows in his life I had experienced more deeply the shadows in my own. I was his brother, all right. The beast he had fought, that ravens upon others, slept underneath my chair. I would have to try and learn to live with it as justly as I could. Beware thyself.

I had finished my whisky. I rose and filled out the last of the Antiquary. I put the empty bottle in the cupboard in the living-room. It’s where I keep some objects that matter to me as memory-hinges. They are all quite worthless, to be thrown out with my body. But they serve to remind me of some of the things I believe are important.

I watered my drink in the kitchen and came back through. I remembered the card Scott had written to Michael Preston. I took it out of my pocket and stuck it in the corner of the frame of the five at supper. I sat down. Later today, I would see my children. I would begin again to try to be a good father to them. As I finished my glass, I looked at Scott’s card. I couldn’t make out the writing from here, but that didn’t matter. I had read it over so many times since Michael Preston gave me it that I knew it by heart.

‘Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As they drove to meet him, they knocked down a man on the road. He was dying. If they tried to save him, they might miss their appointment. They decided that their appointment, which concerned all of us, was more important than the life of one man. They drove on to keep their appointment. They did not know that the man they were to meet was the man they had left to die.’

I wished I had more whisky.