The snake and the apple were Christian, the rod and the masks were pagan. Was that significant? I would have given much for an hour with Scott, and not just to talk about the painting. In his absence, I had another glass of the whisky and toasted his troublesome nature. It looked as if he had earned it.
If he couldn’t tell me and I didn’t know who the other men were, there was only one road I could take. There was only one person I knew who might possibly have had access to what Scott had kept so secret. I had to find Anna. I didn’t know where she was but I knew where her parents lived. Talking to her father would be like interviewing a cardboard cut-out. My only hope was her mother, a woman about whom I had sometimes felt that, if we could have synchronised our youths, we might have meant a lot to each other.
I would leave for Kelso very early in the morning. The decision to do something felt almost like an interim solution to the problem. I relaxed slightly. I undressed. I finished my drink and rinsed out the glass. I put out the light and went to bed. As I lay becoming drowsy in the dark, the sounds of singing downstairs faded slowly like lights on the shore receding from someone moving out to sea.
THREE
15
Driving out of Graithnock, I came into sudden rain. It didn’t last long. But by the time it had stopped and the neurotic insistence of the wipers became still, an unsought memory was with me and I was travelling in two ways — the car in space and me in time, passing through the changes of my own internal weather.
I remembered another car and other rain. Maddie Harris sat in the car with me. Windscreen and windows were misted blind, as if we were in a world in which there only existed our shared breathing. I was staring ahead. Maddie was talking. The talk was painful for her. Her mouth was naming the hopes she had had for us — each one like an orphan I had fathered. I rubbed a slow peephole in the glass to look at nothing. There was only the rain.
I said, ‘No. No, Maddie. I’m sorry.’
In memory my own voice made me grue. It sounded harsh and unrelenting, a sound track run too slow. Something in me, like a child at the films, wanted to shout advice to the preoccupied man in the car. But films can’t hear.
I watched her — as I had watched her so often — put her hand on the door. She stood outside and turned, her hand still on the door. Beyond her, spring leaves were on the trees of the park beside which we had stopped. The rest of the world was there after all. I had insisted on bringing it in, like air to the womb of her dreaming. She stood looking at me. The rain fell on her. She didn’t open her umbrella. She closed the door and walked slowly away, receding in the space I had cleared in the misted glass to watch her going.
She didn’t open her umbrella. That quirky fact, that small malfunction in normalcy had always haunted me. The dignity of it shamed me, its dismissal of what didn’t matter. It taught me the contemptibility of my pragmatism. I could love her but not give my life to the loving. If I couldn’t put my children at risk, why had I put her at risk? I could care about my children. But where were Maddie’s children? Wandering fatherless and disowned in her head. Better indifference than to love and not love fully, Maddie’s back was telling me as it went.
Where I had been had an effect on where I was going. I took with me my guilt towards Maddie, towards Ena, towards my children, towards the just man I had always hoped to be. I was travelling through green country in an attempt to find a kind of truth. But perhaps I blighted the promise of the greenery as I passed and would find the purity of the destination fouled by the fact of who arrived there. Perhaps the nugget of understanding we look for is tarnished by the fallible humanity of the hand that finally holds it. How do the false gain access to the true? I was certainly one strange searcher for justice — the polluted avenger, knight of the rusted sword.
But I still drove recklessly fast, as if I could outrun my unworthiness. And still I was driving into my own guilt. I remembered another car with Scott and me in it.
I had been driving him home from an amateur football match we had both played in. Scott’s team were a man short and he had phoned me in Glasgow to ask if I wanted a game. I had been good at football in my teens and momentarily forgot the years in between. We had played the game in Ayr and won 3–2, not especially thanks to me. My main contribution had been to manage not to die of exhaustion in the second half.
We had gone into Troon for a pint with some of the other players to replace lost sweat. Then Scott and I bought fish suppers and came along the shore road at Barassie. As we sat in the car with the windows down, eating out of the grease-stained paper, there happened one of those moments that belie their own banality. I saw what he was, not what he seemed to be.
What he seemed to be was a trainee art-teacher who was also a reasonable mid-field player, still ruddy from recent exertion, fingering chips and pieces of fish into his mouth. What he was was a stunningly alive young man, unselfconsciously handsome, the eyes lit up with the search for horizons they hadn’t found. I saw the cage the car was for him. All he wanted was everything.
Perhaps it was the sea laid out beside us that moved him, with its mocking immensity. But he talked with such passion about the things he wanted to do, simultaneously inspired by the possibilities and afraid of never grasping them.
He was twenty-two then and about to marry Anna. He wanted to paint. He had plans to live abroad. They had discussed it together and agreed that they would make some money first and then they would go. He would teach wherever they found themselves, earn the space to put his easel. She could teach English anywhere. Their children would be Scottish cosmopolitans. I remembered him explaining to me very precisely how, if Anna became pregnant, they would both come back to Scotland for a time. No matter where they might live, any children would have to be born here. He was like an innocent visionary telling me the telephone number of the house where he would live in a Utopia that hadn’t been discovered yet.
Even as he told me, there was a kind of distant panic in his eyes, as if he dreaded his sense of the future was doomed to live alone. It was a dream that needed company. He was right to dread. Anna’s idea of their future changed gradually once they were married. She wanted more and more time to make sure of where they were until no room was left for where they might have been. For all I knew, she was right. Maybe the attractiveness of Scott’s plan, like that of a lot of plans, lay in the impossible symmetry of its idealism. Maybe so much changed between them that the future they had seen couldn’t happen because they were no longer the people who had seen it. I didn’t know. I couldn’t blame her.
But I could blame me. Remembering him sitting in the car, framed against the grey water that shifted behind him like a mirage of endless potential, I felt I had failed him then. There wasn’t much I could have done for him, of course, but I could at least have been less indifferent to his obvious intensity. I had been rather phonily worldly-wise, the older brother offering him a response that was about as specific as ‘Things’ll sort themselves out, son.’ I suppose I was too full of my own problems at the time, as usual.
That time came back to me as an encapsulation of our relationship: an almost utterly vulnerable idealism that was trying to connect with an idealism that had learned some rules of survival. I had started out as wide-eyed as he was. We had both grown up in a house where we were taught to believe the best about people. You gave the world what you had and the world gave back. But I had had to learn quickly that there were plenty of people around who, once you had given them what you could, would pick your pocket to see what you had left. I hated that with a terrible anger. Love of others was a gift, not a steal. You could only give what wasn’t forcibly taken.