The Papers of Tony Veitch

25

Sometimes the pragmatic leads to wonder, like Columbus setting out on a business enterprise and discovering a new world. They went to Eck Adamson’s sister’s for information and Laidlaw found a lost part of himself. She was where he came from and had lost touch with.

Anderston wasn’t a place where he would have expected to find it. It’s an area of the city that memorialises a part of Glasgow’s confused quarrel with itself, a warm and vivid slum expensively transformed into a cold and featureless one. Jinty Adamson lived high up in a grey block of flats, as accessible as a bald Rapunzel.

She would be about seventy going on seventeen, with eyes still alive with interest. Once she had established that their credentials made them trustworthy they weren’t so much let in as they were ambushed.

‘Ah haveny spoken to anybody since last Thursday. When Ah went out for ma messages. Ah’m surprised ye made it up here wi’ the lift broken. An’ no even wearin’ grimpons.’

The mountaineering references surprised Laidlaw. The accuracy of the pronunciation suggested an aural source. There couldn’t be too many sherpas in Anderston. But she explained it.

‘See that,’ she said, pointing at the television. ‘Ma best friend. Ah watch everythin’. Ah can tell ye about silver-backed gorillas, life in Bogota or what Annie Walker had for ’er tea. Ah feel like an eagle up here. These wid be great hooses for folk wi’ wings.’

It seemed a pity to spoil the pleasure with which she was taking to words like a disembarked sailor to drink. But Laidlaw felt that, if she was going to treat their visit like an unexpected present, they’d better open it for her quickly.

‘It’s about Eck,’ he said.

‘Oor Alec?’ She sat down. She went inside herself briefly till she found the admission that she had been expecting something like this for a long time. The expression she gave Harkness and Laidlaw seemed to say they couldn’t surprise her. ‘Siddoon, boays. Whit’s happened?’

‘You haven’t heard anything?’ Harkness asked.

‘Son. Is the war over? Up here ye widny know. Whit’s happened?’

Harkness waited for Laidlaw to tell it.

‘Alec was brought into the Royal Infirmary on Friday night. He had asked for me. I saw him just before. Before he died. He died peacefully.’

‘Of course. You’re Jack Laidlaw. He’s talked about ye. Whit wis it? The drink?’

‘Well. In a way.’

‘It wid be. Oh Alec. It wid be.’

‘But it was more than that. We think he died drinking wine that had been mixed with something. Paraquat.’

The word infiltrated her preparedness, undermined it. It became obvious to them that the calmness with which she had talked past hearing the fact of his death was just delayed action, like a body still trying to run before it realises it’s gone over the edge of a cliff. She knew now. She cuddled herself as if against the cold and closed her eyes. Rocking very gently, she started to cry. Her quiet grief was a fact so sheer, consolation couldn’t have found a handhold on it.

Laidlaw and Harkness could only let it happen for the moment. Laidlaw became aware more clearly of the room she sat in. It was comfortably furnished, with several old photographs positioned around, fading sepias in which the figures seemed threatening to recede into darkness. One that he thought must be her family showed mother and father, daughter and son in those stiff clothes they used to affect for photographs, like cardboard cut-outs that would stay when the people walked away. Jinty Adamson had eyes that looked as if they were trying to see beyond the horizon. Had Eck ever been so young? The parents were statues of self-assurance. Ah, Laidlaw thought, no amount of self-assurance worked. Jinty had laboured and polished and made a small, bright fortress of this place but she was found just the same. And there was nothing you could do for her.

He got up and crossed towards her. He put an arm round her shoulders, leaning down.

‘I’m going to make us a cup of tea,’ he said quietly.

‘Oh, Ah’ll get it, son,’ she said through the tears. A sense of the proper way to treat others was a reflex with her that would die when she did.

‘Naw. Ah’ll get it. Hey.’ He put his head down till his face rested sideways on her head. ‘He wisny a bad man. Most of the damage he ever did was to himself. You remember that.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, Alec.’

He straightened up and smoothed her hair slightly and went through to the kitchen. For the first time, Harkness understood what Laidlaw had felt about Eck’s death. He had been right. No death is irrelevant. It’s part of the pain of all of us, even if we don’t notice. Watching them, Harkness knew how relevant Jinty Adamson’s tears were to him. It was one world or no world, no other way. She wasn’t just paying tribute to Eck, she was dignifying living, no matter what form it took.

Harkness felt vaguely ashamed of something he had done recently. At first, he managed not to remember what it was. Then it came to him. He had given the photograph of Tony Veitch to Ernie Milligan. That didn’t matter in itself. It was fair enough to help Ernie if he could. But he hadn’t told Laidlaw. That was what he was ashamed of. He should have told him. Why hadn’t he? He would do it now.

But when Laidlaw came through with three cups of tea on a tray with a poke of sugar and a bottle of milk, it seemed to Harkness an indulgence to insist on his small confession here, like announcing during a funeral service that you’ve cut your finger. He would do it later. This was Jinty’s time. Over her tea she talked the nearest thing to an elegy Eck would have. It was just fragments, less a monument than a home-made wreath of already withering flowers.

‘He wisny a bad man. You’ve said it, son. He wisny bad’ and ‘The last time Ah saw him, he wis greetin’ for the wastry of his life. Like a wee boy’ and ‘He wis that softhearted. Ah mind when he wis three or fower. Ma mither found him greetin’ ower a picture o’ Jesus with a’ the thoarns in his heid. An’ he said, “Look whit they did tae him, mammy.” An’ she couldny console ’im’ and ‘He wis a grand drawer, Oor Alec. Could draw a bird on a bit o’ paper ye wid think could fly away. Always could draw. Coulda made something o’ himself. But a luckless man. All his days a luckless man. The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic.’

The unintentional humour of the remark was like her natural appetite for life reasserting itself. Harkness couldn’t stop smiling. It was as if Glasgow couldn’t shut the wryness of its mouth even at the edge of the grave. Laidlaw seemed to be feeling something similar because he decided it was all right to speak.

‘It’s a bad time to be bothering you with questions,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. But there’s things I want to ask.’

‘No, no, son,’ she said. ‘You carry on. You’ve yer work to do.’

‘If Alec was poisoned. And I think he was. Can you think of anybody who might have wanted to do that to him?’

She shook her head.

‘Ah canny believe it, son. Oor Alec? Ah mean, Ah’m no’ talkin’ as some daft, dotin’ sister. But you think about it. He wis that busy bein’ bad to himself, he hadn’t the time to make a lot of enemies. Ah canny see it.’

‘He didn’t say anything to you that might have suggested he was in trouble?’

‘Son. Ye know the kind of life he led. God bless ’im. He wis only here when he couldny stand it any more. He wis always welcome. He knew that. But he couldn’t forgive himself for whit he’d become. So every second blue moon Ah saw him. Ah always tidied him up and gave him whit Ah could. Ma mither would’ve wanted that. She wis a kind wumman, mamither. Woulda bought extra cheese if she’d knew there wis a moose in the hoose.’

‘But Eck must’ve raved a bit. Coming to you like that. I mean, he must’ve been coming when he was out his mind with the drink. Otherwise, he couldn’t have faced it. Because of his own guilt, I mean. I know what I’m like on that stuff. I’ll talk for a week. So what did he say the last time?’

‘You’re right, son. You are right. He talked till the clock wis dizzy. It didny know a.m. from p.m. That last time? Wait a minute. He said he had a benefactor. That was the word. Some rich boy. Name of Veitch.’

Laidlaw and Harkness were sharing the same held breath. Laidlaw’s voice came out on tiptoe.

‘Anything else?’

‘Ah’m no’ sure. Some woman he talked about.’

‘Lynsey Farren?’ Harkness said.

‘Whit kinna name is that, son?’

They took that as a very definite no. She couldn’t remember her name or anything else about her. Harkness’s disappointment couldn’t understand why Laidlaw stayed so gentle. He couldn’t have been more solicitous to his mother. He thanked her and took the dishes back through to the kitchen, was going to wash them. She was offended.

‘Ah’m affrontit enough. A man makin’ the tea,’ she said. ‘Ye’ll not be doing the dishes in my house.’

Laidlaw surrendered. He respected where she came from too much to argue. She was one of a species he recognised.

They were decency’s martyrs, who would treat death itself with an instinctive politeness, the unofficial good, uncalendared. You wouldn’t find their names in any book of fame but Laidlaw believed they were the best of us because they gave off their good, quite naturally, in actions. They weren’t dedicated to God or high political principles or some idea but to an unforced daily generosity of giving, a making more bearable for others and themselves. And they were legion.

Everybody, Laidlaw thought, must know many of them. He himself was in debt to countless of them, aunties and uncles, strangers chatted to in pubs, small miracles of humanity witnessed, unself-aware. Recently, on a trip back to Ayrshire, he had caught up again with another, Old Jock, an ex-roadman in his seventies who lived uncomplaining with his wife on a pittance of pension, spending more on his budgies than he did on himself. His modest Calvary had been forty years on the roads for barely enough to feed his family and him, coming home on black winter mornings from a night spent spreading grit, his hands bulbous from overuse and skinned with the cold. He had taken it as no concern of anybody but him. It was what he did. Laidlaw remembered him admitting, almost embarrassedly, that he had never clenched a fist against anyone that he could remember in his life.

Faced with people like Jock, or Jinty Adamson, Laidlaw was reminded that he didn’t want the heaven of the holy or the Utopia of the idealists. He wanted the scuffle of living now every day as well as he could manage without the exclusive air-conditioning of creeds and, after it, just the right to lie down with all those others who had settled for the same. It seemed to him the hardest thing to do.

Jinty herself, he thought, was a hard case. How else could she have stayed so innocent? She demonstrated her hard innocence now. In the middle of her grief her head was still sifting details, trying to remember.

‘Baker,’ she said. ‘Not Baker. Brown. That wis the woman’s name. Her name was Brown. Alec wis goin’ between her an’ him. That boy Veitch. She lives in a big house. She knew where the boy was stayin’, right enough. But she only kept in touch through Alec. Some problem wi’ her man, Ah think.’

They thanked her again and left her alone with her television, like the Lady of Shalott with a distorting mirror.