Martin was one of the smiling ruthless. Self-interest and callousness had been so effectively subsumed in his nature that they emerged as a form of politeness. He never raised his voice because he hadn’t enough self-doubt to make it necessary. He could listen calmly to opinions violently opposed to his own because he never took them seriously. He offered the conventional forms of sympathy effortlessly because there was no personal content to mean they might not fit. He seemed to me one of what was, in my experience, a depressingly large species, those who use manners not as a means of facilitating serious human contact but as a way of forbidding it. They spend their lives coming in an emotional condom in case they breed with life and create something they can’t control. Most of all, I hate the way they can sterilise the lives of those around them.
It was my feeling that he had done that with Alice. I liked her a lot. My sense of their relationship came from the time of Scott and Anna’s wedding and a few family get-togethers since and things heard from Scott and Anna. The evidence wasn’t extensive but it was firm. How long does it take to analyse a vacuum?
I recognised the frozen solidity of Martin’s unexamined attitudes and the way Alice could see wistfully beyond them but couldn’t quite get out, a maiden trapped in someone else’s castle that was moated with stagnant water. I had always enjoyed her company. She was a warm and open woman. But Martin’s presence tended to sit on her spontaneity like a scold’s bridle. What had heightened my awareness of her position was my worry for Scott. I thought I saw the potential for a reverse image of her parents’ relationship in Anna’s marriage to my brother. If Scott had the same openness as Alice, Anna was her father’s daughter. Self-interest followed her everywhere like a minder, telling her feelings where it was safe to go. I had feared her calculation would always outmanoeuvre Scott’s impetuosity.
Watching from my seat, I remembered something I had said to Jan before leaving Glasgow on Monday. Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst of us flourish? Maybe I had found a clue. I could think of one reason why people as potentially rich in life as Alice and Scott seemed to fare less well and be apparently less successful than Martin and Anna. Those who love life take risks, those who don’t take insurance. But that was all right, I decided. Life repays its lovers by letting them spend themselves on it. Those who fail to love it, it cunningly allows very carefully to accrue their own hoarded emptiness. In living, you won by losing big, you lost by winning small.
But the grandeur didn’t have to be external. As I had seen in Scott a big spirit, I saw in Alice a person of some stature. Her husband might be the public success but she had the substance. Her vulnerability meant that life could still take her by surprise, make moments to remember, leave room where dreams still unfulfilled could grow. The size of the humanity is the size of the person. I was surprised I could make out Martin from this distance.
I saw him look across and do a double-take. He appeared not to say anything to the others. He went on playing. A couple of minutes later, Alice noticed me. She simply walked off the bowling green and came towards me, saying something to the others over her shoulder. In those two instinctive responses, my sense of two distinct natures had been defined.
‘Jack, Jack,’ she said as I stood up. We embraced. ‘I thought I had seen a ghost there. You reminded me so much of Scott. Poor Scott. Listen. I’m sorry about the funeral.’
She and Martin had attended but had left with Anna without our having a chance seriously to talk.
‘We had to accept Anna’s way of doing things that day. I don’t think she could cope.’
I sat back down and she sat beside me.
‘You’d better finish your game,’ I said.
‘To hell with it,’ she said. ‘It was the last end anyway. They can finish it without me. I don’t think my amazing skills will be missed. Poor Scott. I can’t believe it. I think of him so much. How are you coping?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see you, Alice. You’re looking well.’
The others had abandoned the game. Martin was coming towards us.
‘But what are you doing here?’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw you there.’
‘I’m looking for Anna,’ I said.
‘Anna’s not here,’ Martin said.
His handshake wasn’t a welcome. It was a formal declaration of opposition. What was to follow was a kind of extended psychological tag-wrestling match. If he gave me no information, he won. If I found out where Anna was, I did. The other couple, it seemed, were on his team.
‘I’m sorry we can’t wait,’ Martin said. ‘We’re having lunch with Bert and Jenny.’
Alice, it seemed, was on my side.
‘Jack can come with us,’ she said. ‘Can’t you, Jack?’
Of course, I could. I liked her move. She had used his own weight against himself. Martin’s only substance was politeness. They had booked lunch in Ednam House. While they went into the clubhouse to collect jackets and change their shoes, I drove on ahead.
Ednam House: a monument to my father’s sense of Kelso. While I waited for them in the lounge, my old man’s ghost sat with me, saying, ‘See what Ah mean?’ I did, I did. While I sipped my soda and lime, I heard English voices crested like old school ties and native voices in which the confusedly rich broth of Scottishness was passed through strained vowels until it became the thinnest of gruels. There was much talk of horses. Something was happening today at Floors Castle, maybe a gymkhana. I remembered something that’s often troubled me about where I come from. I tend to think of the Borders as the place of the horse. I like horses, especially if they’ve got Pat Eddery or Steve Cauthen up on them. But I gave up worshipping them before I was born. They’re where it was and I don’t like the way it was. It’s maybe a tribal memory. I’m sure my ancestors went on foot and had to fight the ones that sat on horses. And maybe in my heart I’m still fighting them.
Four people close at hand were discussing the Royal Family in a very familiar way. How can people do that? Who knows who they are? Do they know who they are? It’s the King Lear syndrome. As soon as people bow or curtsey to you, how can you work out what they think? The existential mirror that is other people’s eyes becomes misted.
The others arrived and fitted in perfectly, except for Alice. Bert was divorced and Jenny was a widow. They had only met six months ago and they were getting married in the summer. They were nice enough but they seemed to have started the honeymoon early. They were at that stage of conspiratorial involvement that finds the rest of the world a slightly droll irrelevance, eliciting suppressed giggles and secret smiles. There could have been something endearing about their born-again adolescence if Martin hadn’t been so patently making use of it.
‘How about these two?’ he kept saying. ‘Aren’t they something?’
Alice and I agreed with Martin. Bert and Jenny smiled at each other. Martin agreed with Martin. But nobody specified what the something was. My own theories about what they were tended to darken as the meal progressed. Martin was making very sure that I could find no way to introduce the melancholy purpose of my visit and talk about Scott’s death. It would have felt like turning up in a hearse to drive the blushing bride to the wedding. Every time Alice and I threatened to make serious contact, Martin invited us to appreciate how Jenny was giving Bert a forkful of her salmon or Bert was offering Jenny a taste of lamb.
Feeling excluded for so long, I had been tuning in occasionally to the talk at some of the tables around us. It didn’t help. So much of it sounded like variations on the same theme. Just as Bert and Jenny were telling each other, so that we could listen in, about the wonderful house they had offered for, so a boy nearby was explaining that, if he could maintain his saving pattern for three more years, he could buy a Porsche. The different conversations had an underlying coherence, like an orchestra tuning up to play the same music, probably ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.