‘Buster,’ I said. ‘You fancy a night on the skite?’
He didn’t seem interested. I decided to go out. I had done what I could for Scott for the moment. John Strachan would be coming into the Bushfield later on. He had phoned twice during the day. Sanny Wilson might appear. But I had some time before that happened.
I stood up and put on my jacket. Before I could escape to whatever new and exotic experiences were waiting out there in Graithnock, Katie opened the kitchen door.
‘Sanny Wilson’s here to see you,’ she said.
I was back in the tunnel and excited about the possibility of seeing some light. The excitement didn’t last long. When I went into the lounge, I realised that Sanny Wilson was so well insulated with liquid from serious contact that he might as well have been a fish in an aquarium. His mouthings had much the same clarity of meaning.
He would be about seventy, a marvellously benign man with sweet, open-handed gestures that seemed to be an attempt to embrace the world. He had obviously loved Scott and generously included me, as Scott’s brother, in his affection. That was touching but it was not hugely helpful. We drank and talked for a while and what I gleaned, beyond the frequent repetition of the opaque statement that the man in the green coat had died again, could have been written on my thumbnail.
Still, he wasn’t a bad show to be with. He smoked with a great flourish of the hand, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the palm towards you. With each successive cigarette, his waistcoat looked more and more as if it had been tailored from ash. His soft hat assumed a jauntier angle on his bald head. He had a Dickensian turn of phrase, which tended to include words like ‘peregrination’ and ‘pharmaceutical’ and — my favourite — ‘clientiele’, spoken in what Sanny had apparently decided was a French accent. Only a Philistine would have resented his lack of direct communication. I had lost a source of information but I had found a pleasure to be with. You don’t ask Brahms to tell you the news.
I was still enjoying his recital when John Strachan came in. John was carrying a wrapped painting that turned out to be the five at table. Mhairi and he had decided I should have it, in memory of Scott. I liked that. John had also found a piece of paper in the waste-basket of Scott’s old room. Everything else seemed to have been cleared out. The new teacher had just emptied the last of the stuff from a drawer into the basket today. Most of it, John said, had been related to school administration. Only this one sheet had looked like something personal, though what it was John couldn’t understand. Glancing over it, I could see why. It was a strange piece of writing. It wasn’t just the crumpled nature of the paper that made it difficult to read.
I bought John and Sanny a drink and left them together while I took my treasure trove upstairs. I unwrapped the painting and looked at it and I read the piece of paper again. They yielded nothing much at the moment. I would have to study them more carefully.
When I came back down, John Strachan was already preparing to leave. I thanked him and Mhairi and we threatened to meet again. Sanny Wilson couldn’t last much longer. He was beginning to keel over, still mouthing polysyllables as he went, like a pedant dying bravely at his post.
I offered to see him home. Fortunately, he lived close at hand. It was an upstairs flat in an old tenement. Inside, it was a sad and lonely place. The bedroom had no lights.
‘Ah’ll fix that maybe tomorrow,’ Sanny said.
He was nodding off on his feet. But there must have stirred in him some instinct of dignity that was determined I shouldn’t take away the wrong impression.
‘I am,’ he said suddenly, ‘festooned with friends.’
I managed to get his shoes and his jacket off. The rest, he insisted, could stay as it was. I left him propped up in bed and made to leave.
‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack.’
I turned at the door and saw him in the light from the street lamp outside. He still had his hat on. He had a wonderful, dilapidated dignity, his hand making a vaguely papal gesture in the semi-dark, as if he were granting absolution to the world.
‘You are a gentleman,’ he said.
‘If you say so, Ah must be, Sanny. For you’re sure as hell one. Cheers.’
I was at the door when he spoke again. His voice was very tired.
‘Jack.’
I turned. Even as I looked, his head relaxed on the pillow and he went gently to sleep, breathing noisily. I was very quiet in closing the outside door.
At the Bushfield I by-passed the lounge. I didn’t feel like company.
14
And in his throne room sat the demon king. The braying revelry beneath him touched him not. He had forsaken the courtiers of pretence and the retinue of folly. Dark was his purpose and his broodings deep. He sipped of the magic liquid men cleped Antiquary and felt its fluid alchemy transform the very reaches of his being, flooding him with the freedom that bringeth wisdom in an instant. But not enough.
I could act out in my head the postures of a dedicated searcher for truth but I couldn’t find the stuff. I could abandon the jollity of the Bushfield lounge. I could come upstairs to sit alone. I could take my whisky carefully, like a mind-expanding drug. But, no matter what attitudes I struck, I stubbornly remained just a puzzled middle-aged man sitting in a hotel room, looking at a piece of paper and two paintings. The best thing about the sheet of foolscap John Strachan had given me was the familiarity of Scott’s handwriting. The message was pretty cryptic.
‘I have developed a compulsion to wonder what he was like, what he was really like. I mean, even in simple things. God knows an understanding of the simplest things would do me. The older I get, the fewer certainties I have.
‘I mean, did he drink beer, keep pigeons, have a favourite colour, curse a lot, know many women, have some kind of faith?
‘My social plumbing stopped working some time ago. I offend a lot of friends. Right in the middle of some hygienic conversation, I open my mouth and there’s sewage on their carpet. It has a lot to do with him. He has become like an eccentric hobby. The bank-clerk who’s an authority on match-box labels. The teacher who’s writing a monograph on wheelbarrows.
‘He’s no longer just himself, of course. Maybe he never was. Maybe there were always more of him. Maybe he’s everybody else.’
This was not for other people’s understanding. It was an entry in a diary, written in a code that only the writer would understand. Its purpose was secrecy, a troubled mind whispering to itself. I wondered when Scott had written it. Apart from its crumpled state, the paper looked fresh enough. It bore no discolouration of ageing. I thought about ‘no longer just himself’. Did that refer to dying twice? Anyway, I was convinced I was reading a kind of minimalist biography of the man in the green coat. If Scott had known almost nothing about him, I surely knew less.
I looked at the painting again. Even his face didn’t belong to him, transubstantiated four times over into the means of food for others. The beards were presumably a metaphor for disguise. The private identities the four had escaped into? If one of them could be Scott, who might the others be? They would presumably know what Scott had known, the thing he had never told me, the thing he had perhaps never told anyone, the thing that had gnawed him to death. Find them, find the means to understanding.
There were clues all right but I didn’t know what they meant. The figure I took to be Scott was holding the stem of a flower that blossomed into petals that contained the small, neat head of a snake. The hand of another showed a prominent ring on which there was a carved shape. I thought I could make out a stick with a snake twined round it. Was that the rod of Aesculapius, symbol of medicine? ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Was he a doctor? But the snake seemed to have two heads. Why did the snake have two heads? The third man held a bitten apple in his hand. The fourth man had a badge on his lapel. It was the twin masks of tragedy and comedy.