Frankie wasn’t talking any more. Our heads had parted company, mine trying to work out how to get closer to Matt Mason, Frankie’s presumably how to get further away.
‘Thanks, Frankie,’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t say that,’ Frankie said. ‘Ah hate to hear a polisman sayin’ thanks. It usually means ye’ve said somethin’ that ye’re gonny regret. Any chance of a lift?’
Outside his house, we sat a moment in the car.
‘Well,’ Frankie said. ‘Ah can’t wish ye luck. It’s against ma religion.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘With the kind of luck you would wish me, Frankie, I could be in terrible trouble.’
He smiled.
‘I hope your mother feels no pain,’ I said.
‘Aye.’
He looked quietly terrified of many things. He had his reasons.
‘Honourable,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Honourable. That was Melanie’s word for big Dan. Honourable. The most honourable man she’d ever met, she said. Ah wonder what it means.’
‘I don’t know, Frankie. I suppose it’s one of those things it’s up to other people to see in you. From where I’m sitting, maybe there’s a bit of it in you at that.’
‘You couldn’t point it out to me?’
We both laughed. I watched him walking up his mother’s path, wearing his jauntiness like someone else’s clothes.
25
In Graithnock I had to find a Clydesdale Bank with a hole in the wall. The introduction of the Autobank has allowed my life to inhabit an intermittent fantasy of solvency. I have always looked on money as if it were a species of bird unhappy in captivity. It never sings there. Before autobanks, my only technique for getting access to more money than I had involved mournful conversations with an understanding bank manager in Byres Road. Now, after each heartbreaking performance in which the applause took the form of an extended overdraft, I could forget the seedy realities of finance and for a time draw money when I chose. The notes that slid towards me assumed a proper meaninglessness. They might as well have been Monopoly money, part of a game in which I had marked the cards and drew only the ones I wanted. Collect £200. Do not go to jail.
My vulnerability being covered with money, modern society’s figleaf, I went to a florist’s. I bought a large bouquet of flowers of indeterminate genus. All I knew was they looked good to me. I went to a newsagent’s and bought cigarettes, a newspaper and a box of chocolates. I found an off-licence and managed to get a bottle of Talisker. I put the flowers, the chocolates and the whisky in the boot of the car. I drove to the Bushfield.
Katie was in the kitchen. When I went in, Buster and I exchanged our usual greetings. He growled at me and I told him that I hoped his third brain-cell arrived soon.
‘You two,’ Katie said. ‘Ah think ye secretly love each other. Scartin’ an’ nippin’ is Scots folk’s wooin’.’
‘Aye. Don’t call the banns yet anyway, Katie.’
‘Ye’re early the day.’
‘I’ve got bad news for you,’ I said. ‘Maybe ye should sit down. I go back to Glasgow tonight.’
‘Ah wish ye’d told me earlier,’ Katie said. ‘We coulda put the bunting an’ the streamers out. It’s no’ often we get something to celebrate in the Bushfield.’
‘It’s all right, Katie. Ah know ye’re just puttin’ on a brave face.’
‘That’s right,’ Katie said. ‘The laughter’s just hysterical. Actually, Ah will miss ye. At least, you’re no’ boring. A different mood for every minute. Ye’re like that thing they used to say in “Monty Python”. “And now for something completely different”.’
‘We better square up here, Katie.’
‘How d’ye mean?’
‘That’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night. And meals and everything.’
Katie turned another page of her magazine.
‘Jack, it’s the first break I’ve had the day. It’s the only break I’ll get the day. Don’t bother me wi’ business. I’ll see ye before ye leave. Also, I’ve got something special for ye to eat the night. Ah haven’t worked out what it’ll cost yet. Probably more than the rest of what ye owe us put together. Ah’ll see ye before ye leave.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I turned at the door. ‘It wouldn’t be Buster a l’orange, would it? That would really make my night.’
She stared up at me from her magazine.
‘More like char-broiled Laidlaw.’
I went up to my room and sat for a while. I looked again at my personal collection of Scott’s paintings. ‘Scotland’ reminded me somehow of my father. I think it was because of the suggestion in the picture that the public reality of Scottish experience was denied in private lives. For my father, the method he hated had been to translate the demotic of Scottish traditions into a bland standard English, losing most of the meaning in the translation. For Scott, the method had been what? To simplify the darker realities of our lives into bogus tourist images? To deny the truth of what we were in order to live more comfortably with lies? But wasn’t that what we all did, what society taught us to do? Wasn’t that perhaps what Scott and his student friends had done when faced with whatever truth was represented by the man in the green coat?
I looked at the faceless one again. The sense of Scott’s guilt had occurred to me forcefully in the Red Lion earlier today. Now, staring at the painting afresh, the element of guilt seemed to me so obvious. I remembered what John Strachan had said the first time I saw the five at supper and was wondering what their strange conclave meant. ‘Maybe the four are feeding off the man in the middle.’ Also if, as I had decided, it was a pastiche of ‘The Last Supper’, what else could it mean but guilt? It was an echo of the primal treachery, betrayal of God. Scott had been an atheist. But that Christian symbol could have a humanist reading. In his terms, it could mean treachery against people, the denial of kinship with others. Was it belief in the necessary shared humanity of all of us that had been sold for thirty pieces of silver? Who then was Judas? Or, given the same face on each plate, were they all Judas?
I was looking at a public confession of private conspiracy. Scott had wanted that there should hang, in the house of friends he believed in, an admission of guilt. Anyone could see the painting, though not anyone could understand it. What he couldn’t find the means to declare directly in his life, whether through fear or coercion from others or the addiction of habit, he had acknowledged here in code.
I could read some of the code now. The bearded men were no longer so well disguised. The stem of the flower that bloomed to the head of a serpent was held in Scott’s hands. His was the creativity that gave not sustenance but poison. The man with the ring was Sandy Blake, the healer who could dispense sickness as well as health. Did the double masks of tragedy and comedy belong to the unknown man? Had he become an actor? They had been watching television at Dave Lyons’ party. Had he been what they were watching? Had the apple of knowledge been bitten by Dave Lyons? If so, maybe I could get him to share some of that knowledge with me.
I rose from the bed where I had been lying and straightened out the coverlet. I gathered the dirty clothes I had worn since Monday and put them in one of the plastic bags I always keep in my travelling-bag. I put what was for washing at the bottom of the travelling-bag. I emptied the pockets of my leather jacket and put it in next. I would be wearing the blazer. Maybe it would help Dave Lyons to believe that I wasn’t fresh off the farm. I put the rest of my things on top and zipped the bag half-way along. Why do clothes always expand between unpacking and repacking?
I lifted the paintings and carried them carefully down to where the car was parked in the forecourt of the Bushfield. I slid the paintings in beside the flowers and the whisky and the chocolates. I retrieved David Ewart’s ashtray from the back seat and put it in the boot as well. I closed and locked the boot.