‘Three streets away.’
‘Where exactly?’
Frankie was staring at me.
‘You’re no’ goin’ there?’
‘That was the idea.’
‘Come on. What’s the point of that?’
‘Frankie. There’s things I need to know. I still don’t know what Scott had to do with all this. Do you?’
‘Not a clue.’
‘Maybe Betty Scoular has.’
‘Rather you than me,’ Frankie said. ‘Betty never liked me anyway. She’s a smashin’ big wumman, right enough. But Ah’ll admire her from a distance. Especially now. Ah just hope she doesny know Ah’m here. Though Ah suppose she’s bound to. If thoughts could kill, they’d be buryin’ me soon, not ma mother.’
I asked him where she lived and he told me how to get there.
‘You’ve kept your bit of the bargain,’ I said. ‘You want me to speak to your mother?’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Why should I mind?’
‘Well, Ah suppose Ah’m askin’ ye to lie.’
‘I’ve only two rules about lying, Frankie,’ I said. ‘Never tell them to yourself, if you can help it. Never tell them to anybody else unless they’re benign. I’ve known lies that were gifts. A dying woman who wants to believe she looks the way she looked when she was eighteen. You going to tell her she’s wrong? Of course, you’re not. You’re going to ask her for a date, aren’t you? Anyway, who said you’re the worst. I can talk nice about you without choking, don’t worry, Francis.’
We went upstairs. There were two lamps with floral shades lit in Mrs White’s room. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, while Sarah Haggerty talked to her from a cushioned wicker-work chair. Frankie introduced me as an old friend who had dropped in. Sarah said she would have to be getting round to her own house to check on things but would come back later. She said cheerio to me. Frankie went downstairs with her, perhaps to see her out, perhaps to let my creative version of him flourish without the inhibiting presence of reality. I sat down in the chair from which Sarah had risen. I smiled at Mrs White.
She had a face like a handful of bones and those pilgrim eyes of the dying. Most of the essential luggage of her life had gone on ahead and here she was waiting at a wayside station among strangers who had other business. The living are all strangers to the dying. It’s just that they’re too polite to tell us so. They are kind to our crass familiarities that mistake them for someone else. They do not tell us that we are the bores who have crashed a party for one, seeking company for our own terrified loneliness we have suddenly recognised in their eyes. The dying arrive at true politeness. Even if they scream, they only scream in so far as it is necessary. For who else can establish the rules for what is theirs alone? They cannot be unkind to us, for they leave us alive when they are not. She was kind to me.
‘Hullo. Mrs White?’
‘Hullo, son.’
Her eyes seemed to be taking an inventory of the room, not with any particular urgency but in an offhand way. It wasn’t all that important but she might as well get it done with. Her look lingered on the curtains. But it wasn’t possible to tell why. She looked at me. She knew immediately who I was supposed to be.
‘So you’re a friend of Frank’s.’
‘That’s right.’
‘He’s an awfu’ man, is he no’?’
‘He’s all that.’
‘Uh-huh. Ah haveny seen you in here before, have Ah?’
‘Ah’ve been away for years.’
‘Ah sometimes think everybody’s been away for years, son. Whit are we gonny do wi’ him?’
‘Frank? He’ll be fine, Mrs White. He’s a good man. An’ he’s doin’ well these days. Don’t you worry.’
‘D’ye think so, son?’
‘Ah do, Ah do. Yer son’s a success. He’s a much respected man.’
Her face enlivened slightly. We had found an old tune she liked and we could play it together, maybe evoking happier days when even Frankie looked like a coming man instead of what he was now, a shifting mirage of promises that never got any nearer.
As we talked, I realised I knew her. I should do. I had seen her often enough, on buses, in shops, in innumerable houses of my youth. She was my auntie, a woman who lived along the street, a friend of my mother. She was one of a courageous multitude of women who without too much fuss made all of our lives better than they would otherwise have been. I found it no hardship to tell her many lies about her son. In any case, they weren’t lies to her. They were the truth of her dream and it was a dream that she had earned and that no one should take from her.
We exhausted the topic of Frankie’s wonderfulness, at least as far as I was concerned. I had started to feel that if we went on much longer I might finish up believing it myself. I saw how tired she was and said I had to be going. She held out her hand and I took it.
I felt the painful loss of any person of true worth being taken from us. I think for a moment I half-believed that if I could hold her hand hard enough I could keep her here. Her hand was precious with old skin and fading warmth. I did not know what to do. I leaned across and kissed her because her brave ordinariness was so beautiful and because she was so utterly of our kind and because that is what happened.
Frankie was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.
‘You want to earn her?’ I said. ‘Be better. I’ll try as well.’
I came out and closed the door.
22
Betty Scoular was like an impressive house in bad repair and she didn’t seem bothered, as if the owner was away from home and she was only leasing it. She was tall and striking. But she wore a jumper that was beginning to gather small nubs of rolled wool and her skirt sat slightly asymmetrically on her hips. She had slippers on. The few flecks of grey in her hair seemed to have gone unchallenged for some time. The eyes watched me dully as she stood in the open doorway. She said nothing.
‘Mrs Scoular?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. My name’s Jack Laidlaw.’
The expression of venom the name evoked in her face took me aback. It was like watching someone you didn’t know stick pins in your effigy. Her eyes found a focus. The lens was malice.
‘You’re a bit late, are you not?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Dan’s three months dead. Three months.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s nice. I don’t see your brother with you, anyway. Is he too ashamed to come?’
‘Mrs Scoular. My brother couldn’t make it. A bad case of death.’
Her eyes cleared suddenly with surprise. I had arrived in front of her at last. The world for a moment became more than her widowhood. Her bad thing hadn’t ended all the bad things. They were still happening to other people. She found it hard to believe. Perhaps her grief had made her a pedant of its forms. This was something at least she was interested in.
‘How?’ she said.
‘He was run down by a car.’
She closed her eyes and put her hand to her mouth.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Does it never end? They must have known that he knew.’
Hope can take strange forms. As she spoke, I had a sense of having arrived at the meaning of Scott’s death. He had known something he shouldn’t and had been killed for it. The quarrel with Fast Frankie White had demonstrated that he knew. Fast Frankie had told Matt Mason. Matt Mason had done the rest. It was simple. It was clean. And it absolved the rest of us. His death was a crime in which we weren’t involved. But that self-delusion lasted about three seconds. I had been told about the driver of the car that killed Scott. He was a newsagent with three children, who would never live as casually again as he had lived before. There was no way he had been part of a murder.
Betty Scoular seemed to have forgotten about me. She was staring past me into the street. Perhaps she was having difficulty associating all that had happened recently with the place where she thought she had been living.
‘Do you mind if I come in?’
She turned away and I came in after her. If I hadn’t closed the door, it wouldn’t have been closed. She was standing in the living-room. It might have been a street she didn’t know and her looking for directions. The room was well furnished but untidy. It was where a purposeful woman had begun to lose her purpose. It was essentially tasteful and attractive but the essence had been diluted somewhat with abandoned newspapers, books open on a table, clothes over a chair. She sat down in an armchair. I came and sat across from her.