The swearword was shocking in his gentle mouth.
‘I hate these times,’ he said. ‘The shallowness of them. Some of the noblest dreams the species ever had are being drowned in puddles.’
His gaze returned to the empty cup.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I felt different then. That time in the flat with them had knocked me off my horse on the road to Damascus. It was like a conversion. I believed in almost total hope. You know what I kept thinking at my aunt’s house? They were going out together for one last night. The four of them. I kept wondering what they would be up to. What they were saying. I was wishing I was with them.’
On the afternoon of the next day he was in Glasgow and he had the key in his pocket and he decided to go there, just to sit in it for a while, to become familiar with where he would be staying. The placard had been taken off the door but the drawing pins remained. He turned his key proprietorially and went in. He wished he hadn’t.
‘I can’t explain how much it affected me. It was like having found your faith and losing it in one night. I knew something terrible had happened. I didn’t know what it was but I knew that it was terrible and that it related to me as well. Somehow it diminished my expectations. I felt as if the previous afternoon had been a lie. They had been playing a cynical game with me. All the idealism, all that marvellous positive energy had been phoney. Otherwise, how could it have changed to this in just one night?’
The flat was a litter of debris. Every book had been torn up, every painting smashed. All across the floor of the hall and the living-room sentences had been severed and scattered into irreparable chaos. David Ewart thought that the passage he had heard the previous day must be lying somewhere untraceable among the dismembered wisdom of the dead. All around him were jagged fragments of image with no context to belong in. An eye looked out of nowhere. A guitar was broken in two. A field had no sky with which to connect. Sunshine still made a window of light on the floor.
‘I wandered around there. I couldn’t believe it. It was like finding the corpse of youth. It had committed suicide. Why? The obscenity of destructiveness like that appalled me. I think denying the past is maiming the future. I thought I was looking at a terrible desecration. The murder of promise.’
He put down his empty cup. He held his hands cupped towards himself and stared at them.
‘So now I do my job. It has a purpose. It’s all right. But I had intended to do more. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming that disillusionment for what I am. I made my own smallness. I house-trained my own dreams. But that experience back there. You know what I think it did? It gave me an easy way out. All the bad times. When I felt I was selling out, I had my escape clause handy. I remembered that wastage and I thought, “Yes. That’s what we’re like. That’s the way it always goes. Let’s not pretend we’re more than we are.”’ He was picking dry clay from his fingers. He held up a piece between forefinger and thumb and his eyes lit with an idea. He smiled at me. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. ‘You know what I mean? Circumstances are the real potter. We’re just the clay. We can take any shape they tell us.’
He flicked the piece of clay on to the floor.
‘But I would like to know what happened. Oh, that I would like to know. I left the key on a table and closed the door behind me. We all lived somewhere else that year. But I would have liked to understand, still would. Think about it. I’ve thought about it. It must have been him that did it. Scott. Who else would have done that to his paintings? What could have happened between one day and the next to make him do that? What did idealism die of? That’s what I’d like to know. What happened?’
What happened? Was it then that he met the man in the green coat? At least three people would know. Dave Lyons and two others. One of those other two was still unknown. He had studied English. But Ellie Mabon had said, ‘Andy Blake?’ and ‘Physician, heal thyself’. Sandy had been studying medicine. Dave Lyons and Sandy Blake and another man. And presumably sweet-faced Anna. How could Scott, especially when they were young and trusting each other in the beginning, have kept this from her?
18
Anna’s address was in Edinburgh New Town. I’ve always loved the architecture there but there’s enough of my father boarding in me still to have misgivings about the pleasure the place gives me. It may be a feast for the eyes but for a Scot it’s a Thyestean feast in which at some point you should realise you’re eating the death of your kin. If the old man had found Kelso reprehensibly English, what would he have made of the New Town?
This was in its origins the most English place in Scotland, built to be a Hanoverian clearing-house of the Scottish identity. The very street names declare what’s happening, like an announcement of government policy in stone: you have Princes Street and George Street and Queen Street with, in among them, Hanover Street and Rose Street and Thistle Street. Any way you count it, the result is the defeat of Scottishness. This was an English identity superimposed on the capital of Scotland, an attempted psyche-transplant: ‘Scottishness may have been a life but Britishness can be a career.’ You are not where you come from but where you can go. I couldn’t help wondering how far Anna fitted in with the original premise of the place.
Her name was written in ink and covered with perspex in the top slat beside the buzzer. It made me pause. It read: Anna Kerr. That hadn’t taken long. It was her choice, sure enough. But I wondered how the two boys felt coming home to here. They were presumably still Laidlaws. A primitive feeling passed through me, too darkly irrational to be identified clearly. It was maybe anger. It was maybe hurt. But I felt she had dissolved a part of my brother’s life into instant oblivion, as if it had never been. The ancient Egyptians had believed that if you erased a dead man’s name from the funeral tablet, you killed his ka. He couldn’t live after death. She was getting there. I pressed the buzzer. The briefness of the pause suggested preparedness.
‘Yes?
‘Hullo? Is that Anna? This is Jack. Jack Laidlaw.’
‘Oh, yes. All right. Top floor.’
The release mechanism was growling like a watch-dog. I pushed the door and it clicked open. After being so desperate to find her, I was almost there. The woman who was closest to the secret of what had been happening to my brother before he died was above me. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. I mean, really let it down. But there were still the stairs. I laboured up them as if they were a small mountain. Truth is sometimes said to live in high places. Let’s hope so. After all this, I was thinking, just be there, guru of truth. I don’t want to be talking just to wind and empty noise.
She was standing with the door open. She was looking good. She was wearing a tight-fitting, V-necked, light cashmere sweater and ski-pants and long leather boots. Her black hair was attractively short and she was beautifully made up. She looked about twenty-five. But the eyes seemed to have been borrowed from someone older. They stared at me assessingly through a grille of caution. You didn’t get into the head behind them just by looking.
‘Hullo, Anna,’ I said. ‘I’m glad I found you in.’
She gave me a smile that showed no teeth. Who said she was in?
‘Hello,’ she said.
It was not an effusive greeting. She stood aside to let me pass. There would be no familial embraces. Coming into the hall, I was already unsure why she was bothering to see me at all. This meeting was obviously not the highlight of her day. Her reaction on the intercom had indicated that she knew I would be arriving. Why had she not just arranged to be out? When I came into the sitting-room I thought I understood. There was another woman there, sitting on a leather chair. She was casually glancing through a magazine.