Strange Loyalties

5

Scott and Anna’s house was the end one in a street of terraced houses. There were trees in the street, emerging from the buckling asphalt defiantly. As I parked between two of the trees, I noticed the sign. It was stuck in the sandstone chips of the front garden. It said ‘For Sale’.

I got out and went up the path and rang the bell. It was one of those rings you know will never be answered, tirling into hollow silence. It was, appropriately enough, like calling at a mausoleum. I looked in the curtainless front window. The room was completely denuded. There were lighter patches on the walls where Scott’s paintings had been hanging.

My memory rehung one of them. It was a big canvas dominated by a kitchen window. In the foreground on the draining board there were dishes, pans, cooking utensils. Through the window was a fantastic cityscape of bleak places and deprived people and cranes and furnaces. The people were part of the objects, seemed somehow enslaved by them. I remember a face looking out of a closed tenement window as if through bars. It was meant, Scott had told me, to be an echo of the face that was looking at his painting. I remember a man’s face seeming liquid in the glow of his own blowtorch, as if he were melting down himself. The whole thing was rendered in great naturalistic detail, down to recognisably working-class faces below the bonnets, but the total effect was a nightmare vision. On the left of the kitchen window, like an inaccurate inset scale on some mad map, was a small, square picture. It was painted in sugary colours in vivid contrast to the scene outside. It showed an idealised Highland glen with heather and a cottage pluming smoke from the chimney and a shepherd and his dog heading towards it. Scott had called his painting ‘Scotland’.

The painting became the empty patch on the wall again. So easy was it to erase that fiercely felt vision. The room was anybody’s, nobody’s. Even the carpet had been lifted. Anna had always been thrifty.

I crunched across the chips and went round the side of the house. There was a wooden door set in the wall around the garden. It was locked. I put my foot on the door-handle, pulled myself up and dropped over. The back area was just an outhouse, a garage and a patch of grass. Gardening hadn’t been one of Scott’s passions.

I wandered around a while, peered in the kitchen window. The place was empty and clean. Anna had always been a good house-keeper. I looked at the patch of grass. I could remember sitting there a few times on travelling rugs during sunny Sundays, with Scott and Anna and Ena. The children were playing around us and we sipped beer. Our desultory talk from those times seemed to hang in the air about me. Our plans had been motes, just sun motes.

The outhouse door wasn’t locked. I looked in. There was an old rusted lawn-mower, a rake, some lengths of wood, a small bag of tubes of oil-paint, nearly all of them squeezed empty. This was it so soon?

I felt I might as well have stumbled upon an archaeological site. You would be hard pushed already to tell who had lived here, unless you adopted the experts’ technique of constructing an elaborate edifice of theory on a minute base of fact that couldn’t support it. Scott’s memorial was how much his house fetched and this handful of rubbish.

Then I saw it. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. It was behind some pieces of board, face to the wall. I had thought it was just another board itself till I noticed the varnish shining and knew it was a frame. I extricated it. It was Scott’s painting, ‘Scotland’.

Holding the painting up, I couldn’t believe it. What had happened between them that Anna should do this? She knew how much it had meant to Scott. I was angry.

I found an old, black bin-bag and put the painting in it. I came out and closed the outhouse door. I balanced the painting on the garage-roof that abutted on to the garden door. I climbed the door and brought the painting with me on the way down. I was putting the painting in the boot of the car when a neighbour crossed the street towards me. I didn’t know him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just visiting,’ I said.

‘You can only view by appointment.’

‘I’ve seen all I need to see.’

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Who the hell are you?’ I said. ‘The Keeper of the Suburbs?’

As soon as I said it, I felt bad. The man was right enough. He had seen a stranger poking around an empty house.

‘Look,’ I said.

I took out my identity-card and showed it to him.

‘I’m Scott Laidlaw’s brother. I’m just collecting something that was left for me. It’s a painting Scott did.’

He was waiting for me to let him see it. He had a big chance.

‘Well,’ he said. He was giving the issue his lofty consideration. He seemed to imagine I cared. Why does a little piece of property make some people act as if they were on stilts? ‘Well. I suppose everything’s above board.’

‘Do you?’ I said and locked the boot and got in the car.

Driving, I was annoyed at myself for becoming angry. Muzzle the dog. My anger wasn’t for him. But it was for somebody. I could feel it in me, sealed and ready, just waiting for an address.