Strange Loyalties

6

I remembered John Strachan as soon as I saw him, just after ten past seven. I had been hoping to come later but this was as long as I could hold off. I had looked at the new town centre Scott hated. I had taken a meal in a café. I had left the car in a parking lot and walked. But impatience still outmanoeuvred me.

‘Jack, isn’t it?’ he said.

We shook hands.

‘I’m John. Come in.’

‘This is good of you.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I feel like talking about it myself.’

He was a tall man with glasses. He couldn’t have been more than early thirties but he had a troubled, abstracted air that suggested the sum he was trying to do in his head wasn’t working out. He was wearing jeans and a baggy sweater.

He led me through to the living-room and introduced me to Mhairi. Mhairi was small and overweight and she had a shiny, round face, like a dumpling in which you know there won’t be any bad bits. She was wearing jeans and a loose, floral top. John introduced me to the children as well, Catriona and Elspeth, or rather he identified them for me as they dervished round us.

The children were doing what children so often do, transforming the banality of the moment into a game. As is usual with such games, nobody knew the rules but them. This one appeared to consist of Catriona, who would be about eight, making the ugliest face she could contrive up against Elspeth’s nose, accompanied by a klaxon-like noise. Then she would run in and out of the furniture and stop in the most inaccessible place she could find. Elspeth, maybe five, would pursue her, make her face, her noise, and run away as well. Like so many children’s games nobody seemed to have devised a rule yet for deciding when it was over.

The three adults were momentarily transfixed, perhaps by such effortless dissipation of enough energy to light up a small town.

‘I hope I haven’t come too early,’ I said.

‘Oh no,’ Mhairi said.

She said it with surprise, looking into the strangeness of my remark. The rigid sense of time I had implied seemed alien to her. I had an insight, part observation, part memory, into where they were. Mhairi was standing by the door to the kitchen with a slightly dazed resignation, like someone waiting for a bus she had begun to think might not travel on this route after all. I could imagine the promised places it was supposed to have on its destination board: ‘When The Children Are Older’, ‘More Time To Myself’ and ‘Some Of The Things I’ve Always Wanted To Do’.

‘I think we should take Jack through to the lounge for a minute,’ Mhairi said.

The three of us went through there. Catriona and Elspeth threatened concentration distantly, like gunfire in the hills around a fort.

Moving into the lounge was moving nearer to John and Mhairi themselves, I thought, closer to the control room of what they were up to. It was furnished with a kind of vulnerable eclecticism. The floor was varnished, with an Indian rug on it. The chairs didn’t match but were old and handsome, chosen presumably for comfort. Someone had taken macramé. On the walls were an African mask and one of Scott’s paintings I hadn’t seen before. While I studied it, they didn’t speak. Books were much of the furniture. There were two main bookcases and a couple of smaller bookstands. One of them was devoted to black writers — George Jackson, Baldwin, Cleaver, Biko, Mandela, Achebe. I could imagine their friends sitting around here. They would drink wine and talk seriously about important matters. They would be easy to satirise. But I felt I was in one of decency’s bunkers, where two people were trying to find values that made their lives honestly habitable.

‘What do you think the painting’s about?’ I said as I sat down.

It was a pastiche of Da Vinci’s last supper. Five men were at table, facing out. The man in the centre had no features. His hands were by his side. The other four were bearded. One of them could have been Scott. The meal and the clothes were contemporary. The perspective allowed you to see the five plates, still empty, before them. The plate of the man in the middle was blank. The other four plates had the image of the same face on them, a calm but mournful face of a balding man in his fifties, looking out at you. There were other elements in the picture but I hadn’t time to examine them. I didn’t like the painting. It seemed too derivative, not of Da Vinci, but of an idea extraneous to itself, an idea it hadn’t quite incarnated successfully.

‘I’m not sure,’ John said. ‘Maybe that the four are feeding off the man in the middle? His loss of identity.’

‘Something like that,’ Mhairi said. ‘Anyway, I like it. And Scott never explained.’

We all looked at it briefly.

‘It’s good to meet you,’ Mhairi said. ‘Scott talked about you a lot. Black Jack, he sometimes called you. Nicely, though. We miss him so much.’

‘So do I,’ I said. ‘Not that I had seen too much of him lately. But he was always there for me. Like money in the bank. Suddenly it’s the Wall Street crash. I feel a bit impoverished without him.’

‘He was special,’ John said. ‘The pupils talk a lot about him at the school. I think a couple of the sixth-year girls had vaguely thought they might marry him.’

‘We used to see a lot of him and Anna,’ Mhairi said. ‘Not so much lately. But he still came round himself.’

‘Anna,’ I said. ‘I tried to go and see her today. The house is up for sale. That was quick.’

They looked at each other.

‘You know how bad it was between them before Scott died?’ John said.

‘I thought I had some idea. But maybe I underestimated drastically. I don’t know how you felt about the funeral, John. But I found that hard to take. I know Anna has to cope with it the way she can. But come on.’

‘I think I can understand what Anna did,’ Mhairi said. ‘I don’t know if it’s what I would’ve done. But then maybe I wouldn’t have had the guts.’

I waited.

‘They were really separated before Scott died. They lived in the same house, right enough. But it was all over bar admitting it. What Anna felt must have been close to hate, I think. I think the funeral was a way to avoid hypocrisy as much as possible. She’s very strong-willed, Anna.’

‘So was Scott, Mhairi,’ John said. ‘He had a lot of charm with it. But if you ruffled the etiquette, you touched iron quick enough.’

‘What do you think went wrong between them?’ I asked.

They both smiled and shook their heads.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Cancel the question.’

‘No,’ John said. ‘I suppose, knowing them as well as we did, we got a few pointers. But how do you referee that stuff? You just see them sometimes coming out of their privacy and you know the game’s changed.’

‘That’s right,’ Mhairi said. ‘You know what I’ve noticed? One of the signs is when a couple start to overreact to something in public. A subject comes up and they’re both going over the top. And you realise it’s not that they’re talking about at all. It’s something else. That’s just the excuse for a much deeper enmity. I think that’s when it’s bad. Because they’ve stopped trying to sort out the real problem. They’re just using it as fuel to fight about other things.’

‘I know what you mean,’ John said. ‘Know when I noticed that with Scott and Anna? Know one of the first times? The private school discussion? Remember that?’

Mhairi breathed out and shook her head.

‘Do I remember the Vietnam War? That was terrible. I thought Scott was going to get violent.’

‘He would never have done that. But he took words as far as they would go.’

‘Private school?’ I said.

‘It was Anna’s idea,’ Mhairi said. ‘She said she wanted David and Alan to go to a private school. It was one night they were in here. Just the four of us. I think Anna mentioned it in company deliberately, to see if she could get some support.’

‘Fat chance,’ John said. ‘I teach where I teach because I believe in it. It’s not just the money. That helps, though. The little there is of it.’

‘Oh, the three of us were agreed. But Anna still had the right to her opinion. But Scott was outraged. By the time he was finished, I was beginning to think maybe I agreed with Anna. Excuse me. But he was out of order that night.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I believe you. I think it’s a family characteristic.’

‘It was as if she was trying to undermine the meaning of his life,’ John said.

Catriona and Elspeth entered the room like a Molotov cocktail, exploding in the middle of us.

‘Come on, girls,’ Mhairi said wanly.

All right, Canute said: turn back, tide. They had devised a different game. This game was less complicated than the previous one, marked a distinct regression in subtlety. What this game was about was simply decibels.

‘Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah,’ Catriona sang. ‘Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.’

‘Nyoo, nyoo, nyoo,’ sang Elspeth. ‘Nyoo, nyoo, nyoo. Nyoo, nyoo, nyoo.’

The lyrics were a lot better than the tunes. Mhairi nodded to John.

‘Sh!’ John said, a man trying to blow out a forest fire. ‘What Mhairi and I were thinking. You and I could nip round to the pub. Have a blether there.’

Mhairi smiled at me and nodded. I was grateful to them, not just because the shift would make communication possible but because I liked them and I didn’t want to repeat the brief vision I’d just had of shooting their children.

‘You sure you’ll be all right, love?’ John said.

I could understand the question.

‘I’ve survived so far. I’ll get these two to bed. You won’t be too long?’

‘No. We’ll go to the Akimbo. Okay?’

John kissed her and kissed the children. I thanked Mhairi and waved to Catriona and Elspeth.

‘Maybe we’ll see you sometime when the circumstances are less sad.’

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘I think I would like that.’