The Papers of Tony Veitch

29

The cottage was a very self-conscious act — rough white walls with horse tackle hanging from them and a Gudgeon sketch of the inevitable fighting cock. In Gudgeon’s world did they ever just peck corn? The wooden furniture was rough enough not just to have been made by hand but possibly by foot. But Jan liked it.

She knew it was Tom and Molly’s romantic sense of a country retreat, as relevant to the urban reality of their lives as a Christmas card is to Christmas. But liking them so much, she felt at home here. The place partook of their liberal niceness, meant no harm. Coming here any time she had days off from the Burleigh Hotel, she was grateful again that they gave her the run of the place. She must get them to meet Jack.

But, glancing at him, she wondered how the meeting would go. How badly he fitted in here wasn’t a good omen. He was sprawled in front of the log fire, drinking what must have been at least his fifth whisky and reading a copy of The Great Gatsby he had picked up. His shoes were off. His shirt was open to the navel, showing the beginning of a paunch. His face was a small fury of concentration as he flicked back and forwards among the pages.

He belonged to the place the way a bird belongs to a roof, an accidental alighting, right at the time but incalculably brief. She wasn’t at all sure that he would stay the night. He might get up at any time and go. He had done it before. At least, he had done before what made you know that what he was doing now you couldn’t be sure.

He had no image of himself, she realised. That was why he was so out of place here. This was where Tom and Molly had very understandably built an alternative sense of themselves, like a cache of iron rations they could have recourse to if the going got too tough. But Jack had no such fortress. He often seemed still as raw as a cut umbilicus.

It worried her. She had known the way the car pulled up the kind of pressure he was under. Lately, she had seriously doubted how long he could go on. He was walking the edge of himself like a ledge. She remembered him once saying to her in bed, in that wild dispensation sometimes achieved there, ‘You know what I believe? There’s no centre as such. The sum of the edges is the centre. You have to keep walking the edges.’ But that was how you fell off. She sensed him teetering.

Tonight had been like a warning. He came in both bright and hurt. ‘How you doin’, darlin’? Nice wee place ye’ve got. Phoo, I could sleep for a year.’ He had taken to the whisky as if it was a swimming pool. His eyes had been like bruises, yet he wouldn’t just present her with the pain. He had a meticulous sense of what he should cope with himself. She had felt the desperation in the lightness of his touch but had known he wouldn’t come to her fully until he was sure he wasn’t abusing her. He was determined to come as a gift, not an act of theft.

She thought, he’s so complicated. And so was she. She thought of the tests, unconscious at the time, she had put him to. She had been harder on him than any Lady of Courtly Love, dropping her glove in the bear-pit and asking him to fetch it. She remembered how, meeting him at the beginning, she had been inviting him to pay for where she had been. She thought of the men she had known before, most of them leaving her wondering what past painful assignation with what forgotten bitch they were trying to memorialise on her. But that wasn’t the way he worked.

It struck her like a secret that the essence of his nature was the desire to be kind. His anger came from the bafflement of that desire, because he hated to think that his kindness might be abused.

Another thing he had once said to her was, ‘Most people can’t stand kindness. It compromises their sense of themselves. We all spend so much time working out how to be hard, we don’t like the rules changed. Makes us feel guilty. As if kind people were cheating.’

She looked at him, assessing how he was now. His preoccupation was as complete as a child’s. She tried to read again what he had given her. But it seemed so wild. Jack had tried to get her to read it soon after he came in. But she had managed to put it off by making him some chicken vols-au-vent. He had been insisting on making the food. Fortunately, she had dissuaded him. As a cook he belonged in the same league as the Borgias.

She finished reading it again and put it down. She took a sip of her glass of wine. She knew he was aware that she had finished reading. He looked at The Great Gatsby a little longer.

‘Some book,’ he said, putting it back on the shelf. ‘I worry about it now and again. But the man did it. A naivety as hard as bell metal. If you’ve got to be naive, that’s the way to do it.’

He sipped his whisky.

‘Well. What do you think?’

She hadn’t wanted the question.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You must feel something.’

‘Who wrote this?’

‘I told you. Tony Veitch. The boy they found dead tonight.’

‘Well, the circumstances tend to inhibit criticism a bit. I mean, it would be like spitting on the grave.’

‘Come on, Jan. You’re among friends.’

‘It seems a bit crazy to me.’

‘How crazy is that?’

‘I don’t know. It seems like following ideas beyond the point you can follow them. How do you believe all that and go on living?’

‘He didn’t, right enough. The question is, why? And how?’

She watched him worry about it.

‘What is it, Jack?’

‘I can’t believe it. We have a case where he killed two people and then himself. I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it. There’s something we’ve missed.’

‘Maybe it’s just the energy you’ve put into it. Maybe you can’t believe it’s as simple as that.’

‘That’s right. I don’t believe it’s as simple as that. You know what? I don’t believe anything is. The simplicity of this case offends me. It’s so neat, it’s like a preconception. One thing you can be sure about any preconception. It’s wrong. If there’s a God and he tried to preconceive the world, he got it wrong. If you tried to imagine taking a walk down the street you know the best, you couldn’t come near the reality of doing it. There’s always the bit of paper blowing you couldn’t have imagined. The man coming out of his house you didn’t account for. That’s it. That’s what’s wrong. It answers all the questions you would ask in court. But when you ask it anything else, it’s totally dumb. Who’s been sniffing round the edges of this case? We still don’t know. Who does the birth-mark belong to? Whose are the other fingerprints on Eck’s bottle? We still don’t know. We have to know. What we’re looking at here isn’t the truth. It’s somebody’s idea of what we might expect the truth to be. We’re all looking at this from inside somebody’s head. Who the hell belongs to the head? That’s the question.’

She panicked quietly. Laidlaw was so obsessively lost, like a man in a private labyrinth.

‘From here to there we go how?’ he said.

‘Jack. Leave it just now.’

‘Okay, darlin’.’

He smiled at her suddenly, his generous mouth a place she would like to explore. They knew they had access to each other at last. The point of their night till now became a strange wooing, a stillness around each other, a waiting for signs, a delicate keeping of balance until they could move. They moved. He found again the sheer openness of her, the preparedness for anything to happen. She found again his gentle aggressiveness, his desire to overwhelm her into herself. They hunted each other remorselessly over their bodies. He conjured her out with his fingers. She sucked him alive with her mouth. They made a fierce meeting. The end of it was like getting lost in each other.

Beached on their mutual exhaustion, they saw their clothes like part of the shipwreck. Her pants were beside the fire. Her skirt hung strange from a chair. Her blouse was crumpled surprisingly small. His trousers and underpants were the one truncated garment, like lined shorts. Her brassiere lay far away in an odd place. They both realised he was still wearing his shirt. The fire was mottling their legs.

He gave them both cigarettes and they smoked, adjusting the heat by moving away from it. They were as natural as cats. His arm around her felt as if she had been born with it there. When he threw the stub of his cigarette in the fire, she knew what would happen. She felt his arm go limp. He was asleep. She put her own stub away, gave him some minutes.

‘Jack,’ she said. ‘Jack darling.’

He didn’t move.

‘Jack.’ Her voice was touching him as softly as her hands had. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

His eyes opened like a doll’s. He stared at the ceiling.

‘Jan! You all right, darlin’? What’s the problem?’

‘No problem. I think we should go to bed.’

He sat up slowly.

‘I think we should.’

He stood up not too steadily. His shirt was like farce, a pretence of concealment that hid nothing. She lay back on the floor and laughed, being honestly naked.

‘Oh aye,’ he said sleepily. ‘Nice to furnish amusement.’

He put the meshed fireguard in front of the fire. He stood vaguely doing nothing, threatening to fall asleep on his feet. Then he took Tony Veitch’s message she had been reading, folded it lengthwise and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket that was over a chair. He was handcuffing himself to tomorrow, even though he was drunk.

‘It’s bed then, lovely,’ he said.

She lay looking at him. The fierceness of her love for him was more than he could find ways to avoid, she knew. He was going to settle for her, she decided. She understood his grief for the failure of his family. She would give him time to get over it. She stood up, knowing how right she looked naked.

‘Right, Jack Laidlaw. We’re going to bed.’

He nodded long enough to suggest senility.

‘And all your worries can wait till tomorrow.’

‘Aye, right enough,’ he said as he put out the light. ‘They’ll be there all right. They get delivered with the milk.’