‘No,’ I said. ‘It was probably always a wild idea. And the way you are just now, it’s just not on.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Let’s forget it.’
‘Tell me.’
I told her. She stared a long time at the floor.
‘Could I have a drink, please?’
‘What do you take?’
‘Gin and tonic would do.’
I broke the seal on the drinks cabinet and gave her what she wanted.
‘I think I’ll join you,’ I said.
I found another tumbler in the bathroom. I poured out a miniature of whisky and filled it up with water. I put the empty bottles in the bin. I sat down opposite her while she thought about it.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘You should understand the details. And there’s somebody else involved.’
I explained to her. She took another sip of her drink.
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Maybe you should think longer about it.’
‘I’m leaving anyway,’ she said. ‘Maybe this is one way to pay my respects to Dan Scoular before I go. And Meece as well. Meece wasn’t all bad, you know.’
We clinked glasses. I gave her some more time.
‘So I can phone these people?’
She nodded. I phoned Edek Bialecki. He would come to the hotel immediately. I phoned Eddie Foley. I arranged where I wanted him to meet me. I phoned Brian Harkness and asked him to bring Bob to the hotel. Reception said they would page Mr Bleasdale and ask him to come up to the room.
When Marty found out what we were proposing to do, he tried to dissuade Melanie. But she stayed firm. I think I went down in his estimation. He refused a drink on the grounds that he didn’t like attending wakes. The arrival of Edek made Marty disown the whole proceedings. He stood looking out of the window while we discussed things. Looking at Melanie’s jeans, Edek said she would have to change.
‘Ah know where we can check out some costumes. We should be able to get something.’
‘Make it a shroud,’ Marty said.
35
Davy, the disillusioned architect I had met up with again a few years ago, had a theory about houses. It is true that he expounded the theory to me when we were both drunk. It is also true that we had just finished holding a kind of conversational memorial service for Jim, our mutual friend who had been killed at nineteen when his motorbike went under a lorry. We had been remembering the preposterous hopes of that year when we were all fifteen and wandering the fields of Ayrshire with the combined imaginative vision of three Columbuses staring out at the Atlantic. Therefore, Davy’s theory may have been less coherent and perhaps more dark than he had wanted it to be. It expressed the immediacy of a sad mood as well as the general unease of a troubled life. But I think he meant it all right and I think the sober man would have ratified the findings of the drunk one.
‘Theatre,’ Davy had said, his forefinger tracing out an immediately vanishing pattern in the spillage on the table in the bar. The noise around him drowned his voice the way the liquid defied any shape he tried to give it. But he had found something he meant and he had to say it.
‘Theatre,’ Davy said. ‘That’s what houses are, you know. Just theatre. All buildings are. Charades of permanence. They’re fantasies. Fictions we make about ourselves. Right?’
With the prescience of the drunk, I was nodding in agreement before I knew what it was he meant.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘What do the pyramids mean, for example? They’re a lie, that’s what they are. Okay? What are they supposed to mean? The immortality of the Pharaohs. Right? Are the Pharaohs immortal? Are they hell. The Pharaohs is long gone, don’t worry about it. Empty bandages and some pots of entrails. That’s the Pharaohs. So what do the pyramids really mean? Mortality. The corpses of all the people it took to build them. The pyramids are a lie. They mean the opposite of what they say.’
He sipped a little more whisky, sending it in pursuit of his thoughts.
‘Well, most houses are lies, anyway. If we just built them as shelters, that would be fair enough. If we say, look, we’re a pretty feeble species and it’s cold out there and we need all the help we can get to survive, that makes sense. Let’s make wee shelters and hide in them. That’s honest. A tent’s honest. But as soon as we go past function, we’re at it. Big houses aren’t an expression of ourselves. They’re a denial of ourselves. We’re not saying, see how feeble we are, but look at how important we are. Right? We’re saying we could be here forever. We’re a permanent fixture. Houses are one of the main ways that we tell lies about ourselves. They’re public statements of security and stability and achievement that deny the private truth. They’re masks. They’re where we play out roles that aren’t us. Just theatre. Look at houses carefully.’
I was trying to take his advice. This house in Bearsden, in Davy’s guide to house-watching, was presumably enacting a domestic comedy. It sat in soft sunshine. The well kept grass looked too green to be true. The French windows were open. Children kept spilling through them into the garden and being shepherded by adults back into the house where the party was taking place. From this distance, the performance was in mime.
The audience consisted of four men sitting in a car parked on the hill above the house, looking down on it. We were a mixed audience, as all audiences are, each bringing his own experience, his own preoccupations, his own interpretation to what we were watching. Edek, the mechanical man, was just there for the acoustics. He was an extension of his machinery, not so much concerned about what would happen as concerned that it should happen clearly. Brian Harkness was being a bit blasé as if he just wanted the performance over without any mistakes being made. Eddie Foley, I imagined, had to be the most fraught of us. He would take the drama for real because it was real for him, a possibly life-changing moment where he was both watcher and participant.
Myself, I suppose I was looking for a highly personal denouement to the first part of a double bill. I had another play to go to. I was aware of Michael Preston waiting to say his piece and I was hoping he hadn’t learned his lines from Dave Lyons. The scene, as they say, would be an apartment in Glasgow. There would be played out the coda to my week.
But what would happen there was related to what happened here. They were interconnected, the legal hypocrisies reflecting the illegal ones in endlessly duplicating mirrors until they made a warren. I was hoping not just to incriminate Matt Mason but to move nearer to understanding where I had been this week, where I had been for a long time. As I looked at Matt Mason’s house, I thought of Scott’s house and Dave Lyons’ house. I thought of our house in Simshill, where Ena and I had for years enacted a marriage that was a concealment of mutual loneliness.
Eddie Foley coughed. Nobody said anything. We were waiting for the entrance that would transform the scene for us. From our high position, we could see the taxi come along the street beneath us. As it stopped at the opening to the driveway at the front of the house, a small girl came running out of the French windows at the back, followed by Matt Mason. He was wearing slacks and a polo-neck sweater.
The small girl seemed to be upset about something. As Matt Mason caught up with her, she stopped. Melanie McHarg stepped out of the taxi. Matt Mason put his hand on the girl’s shoulder and crouched down to talk to her. Melanie McHarg was paying the driver through his window, which is not a Glasgow idiom, since payment is usually made inside. I thought maybe she didn’t use a lot of taxis. Matt Mason straightened up and took the girl’s hand, apparently distracting her by showing her the garden. The taxi moved off. Melanie McHarg adjusted her blue lightweight coat over her wide-skirted floral dress and went out of sight towards the house.
Matt Mason looked like any dutiful husband spending a weekend in the garden with his family. From this far, he seemed an identikit of suburban man. But my knowledge of him provided me with some harsh close-ups. I was aware that the hand gently holding that of the small girl was aggressive with expensive rings, wore wealth like a socially accepted knuckle-duster. I saw the thinning hair, the hard face, the grey irises flecked with ice that could put a frost on anything they looked at. I saw him where he was, not where he seemed to be.