‘Bomb,’ Brond repeated, making a thick pat with his lips, ‘poof! Pop! Like that,’ and he splayed his fingers, and then picked at the grey cloth tight over his thighs as if lifting off tiny seeds he had shaken from his finger tips: ‘and then a body here, a leg, a finger perhaps . . . what would this be?’ He lifted nothing between a careful thumb and forefinger. ‘Too pulped to tell.’
And he opened his fingers making us look down as if some horrible fragment would lie on the carpet she swept so clean each morning.
‘My husband?’ The absurdity of the idea released her. ‘My husband! He’s not fond of . . . I mean, he’s a Loyalist all right. But never to go further than a grumble over the papers. Oh, I mean if you knew him. If you only knew him.’
She looked at me for confirmation. That dull stick Kennedy – Oh, I should confirm it. But I had listened to Briody’s story.
I remembered as her smile faded, that strange thing she had told me: how he had got up from among the young men on a beach and done contemptuously what they had been afraid to do, being daring only in talk.
‘Not Loyalist,’ Brond said. ‘The other lot.’
Any doubts I had felt about her vanished. She showed no smallest sign of understanding; it was beyond anything she could have contemplated.
‘Your husband’s a terrorist,’ Brond said impatiently, ‘with a list of Protestant dead notched on his shillelagh.’ He looked at her sharply. ‘And you, what do you want to be taken for? A good Ulster girl of Loyalist stock . . . Yes. Well, if that’s so, some of those dead may be yours. Think about that.’
I had known her for a winter without seeing that she was admirable. When she spoke, it was with a firmness there would be no shaking.
‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said, ‘but there’s only one person I want to explain it to me.’
‘You want him, I want him. Our interests seem to be identical. Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ She made a gesture to stop him from saying anything. ‘Not exactly. I really don’t know. He got a few days’ holiday and went away fishing. He went up north, but I don’t know where.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes. He likes to be on his own.’
‘Well, he would,’ Brond said and gave her a sweet smile. ‘It must be a strain to live a lie every waking hour. Even with the one closest to you.’
She bent at that but would not break.
Outside the house, I was put into the car by Primo’s hand. Even in the interrogation room, I had not felt so entirely at someone else’s disposal. Brond said something to him and then got into the driver’s seat.
We drove off leaving him on the pavement.
‘What is he going to do?’ I asked. The sound of my own voice surprised me. I found in myself a feeling for Jackie which I did not want. There was no future for that feeling; not any real future of the kind my mother would understand. ‘Why have you left him behind? He won’t hurt her?’
We climbed the circling ramp that led to the bridge over the Clyde. Across pouring ranks of cars I saw dock cranes and a glitter of light from the big river.
‘If you went into that water,’ Brond said, ‘jumped, pushed or driven off the edge in a car, first requirement when they fished you out – if they fished you out – would be a stomach pump. Look there!’ I caught a glimpse of a racing boat, young men pulling back on the oars. ‘Jolly boating weather! When they lift it out the hull will be plastered with swabs of used toilet paper.’
We curled down and back on earth were held at traffic lights.
‘Primo won’t hurt her?’ I repeated stubbornly.
‘ “Primo”. That’s rather splendid.’
I had never thought of him as anything else, but it was only a joke, a malicious joke by the removal driver Andy.
‘Primo.’ He rolled the name between his lips like a cigar. ‘It’s not a bit like his real name, which is redolent of glens, swinging kilts and dawn trumpets at Kandahar. Hurt her? You’re a poor judge of human nature. Primo is a chivalrous man, another of the world’s idealists.’
‘I had the impression,’ I said with a sense of danger, ‘that he would do anything you told him to do.’
‘Did you?’ Brond stole a glance at me and then turned his attention to the traffic. We left the main road and went along beside tenements of black scabbed stone. ‘Was that the impression you had?’
He sounded childishly pleased.
The front shop had Licensed Bookmaker and the usual kind of name beside it. I thought it must be the place where Kennedy worked. Brond got out and left me. There was nothing to prevent me from opening the door and walking away. He had left the key in the ignition and I could drive. I could drive up any road until the petrol ran out. When Brond came limping back I was still there.
‘He had a phone call,’ he said, putting the car into gear, ‘from his wife.’ I thought for a moment that Jackie had managed to deceive him. Afraid for her, I searched his face for a sign of anger. He did not look angry; but then he did not look surprised either. I did not believe in the possibility that Jackie could trick Brond.
When I recognised the route, though, and realised we were going back to Kennedy’s house, I grew afraid again for her sake.
Primo was standing where we had left him, talking to someone. When I saw it was Muldoon, I wondered if everyone in the world belonged to Brond; but, as the car stopped, he turned away abruptly as if to go into the house then changed his mind. I understood why as a change of angle showed me Primo’s hand covering Muldoon’s arm like a rockslide.
‘Open the door,’ Brond suggested and I stretched back and put down the handle.
Muldoon came into the car half lifted on Primo’s grip.
‘What’s the game?’
He was close to blubbering; the narrow face fragmented by fright and ratty anger. That was what I would have expected of him, so why did I feel he was acting? Acting as he asked what was going on, what kind of mistake had been made, who they were.
‘My name is Brond.’
Perhaps very special actors have bodily control that will let them drain colour out of flesh and leave a face grey and sick. I didn’t believe Muldoon was that kind of actor.
I wondered what the name Brond meant to him.
In Glasgow you can drive out of a slum street into one beside it that looks like an Adam terrace in Edinburgh. It is a city of contrasts. The house Brond stopped the car at was handsome. It was like the house some friends lived in; five students in a ground floor flat; they ate in a room that had a carved wood mantelpiece thirteen feet high. It was the kind of house the merchants and the shipping barons built for themselves when the city was rich. Now in my friends’ flat holes like woodworm in the mantelpiece showed where the lads played darts after they had been drinking. This house, however, was Brond’s. He said so when Muldoon, trembling, asked where he was.
‘My place,’ Brond said. ‘Come on.’
There were patches of green grass cut close on either side of the path. I noted every detail as if we were moving very slowly, even the dry yellow circles where cat piss had burned the lawn. When we went up the stone steps to the front door, I thought Brond would ring and that one of those smooth young men, like the ones who had whispered to him in the corridors at police headquarters and later in the hotel, would open the door to us.
Instead he took out keys and turned one, then another, and a third lock. The hall was dirty and shabby. The air smelled stale. The only furnishing was a low table with a telephone, but as we passed I saw there was no cord to connect the instrument to the wall. Our feet beat on the uncarpeted staircase. On the landing, we were faced by an open door. I glimpsed a sofa and a table with papers but we walked on down a crooked strip of matting until Brond stopped at the last door in the corridor.
‘My parlour,’ he said to Muldoon. ‘Walk into my parlour. You’ll know the verse.’