‘Don’t use up all your anecdotes,’ she said to him. ‘You’ve got the dinner-party.’
‘I’ll just steal some of yours,’ he said.
‘Then I’ll tell the punchlines early.’
She went out. He nodded at the closed door.
‘She’s my life,’ he said. ‘She’s got a spirit stronger than ten Sumo wrestlers. She knows about this. But she doesn’t know I’m telling you about it. I’ll tell her tomorrow. This dinner-party matters to her. Truth is, I wouldn’t have been telling you. If Scott hadn’t died. That’s changed things for me.’
He pushed the biscuits towards me, sipped his coffee.
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The ambiguity of things. I can talk about the mockery that’s my life and sip coffee at the same time. I can sit in my own guilt like an armchair. We’re strange things. I sometimes think our lives are a contract with the impossible. If we’re going to live together, we have to sign that contract. But most of us know we can’t really meet its terms. So we insert our private clauses in small print. And don’t mention it to anybody else. Only the best of us try to abide by the contract. And the attempt often destroys them. Like Scott. You take us four. When we left that room that morning. We had an agreement. But that was an unfair agreement. It obliged the best of us to abide by the terms of the worst. It denied Scott’s nature. Which was to follow the honesty of his idealism to the bone. It was a death-sentence. We killed Scott as well as the other man. Think of it. I’ve thought of it. A lot I’ve thought of it. Dave would survive. What else would he do? It’s all he was born for. Sandy? There are people who wander the world like dinosaurs. They don’t know evolution happened. They eat, they sleep, they shit. When they get the chance, they copulate. If they manage to keep doing all of them, they don’t know anything’s wrong. That’s Sandy. I don’t resent him. I pity him. For myself, I think Bev saved my life. She’s allowed me to believe in some part of myself that stayed decent. But Scott took the pain most, for all of us.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sorry.’
He was right about the ambiguity of things. What do you do when you’ve heard the news that changes the significance of your life forever? You finish drinking your coffee. You don’t make some profound statement that matches the enormity of what you’ve heard. You may ask a weird, tangential question, like an uncomprehending child wondering what colour the car was that has killed his father.
‘Why do you think he dressed him in green?’ I said. ‘You said his coat was brown. Why would Scott do that?’
‘I think I know,’ he said. ‘I should do. This has been my life’s study in a way, hasn’t it? The methodology of guilt. I’ve thought about how we’ve all handled it. We didn’t exactly keep in touch. Who needs to stare their own hypocrisy in the face every day? Although I think Dave tried to stay close to Scott. He was monitoring him. In a chain of lies, honesty’s always going to be the weak link. But that wasn’t friendship. It was supervision.’
I thought of Dave Lyons’ relationship with Anna. Had that begun as part of the supervision? I realised the riskiness of his having an affair with Scott’s wife. If Scott had found out, nothing was more likely to make him break and declare publicly what had happened. Why had Dave Lyons involved himself there? Had he not been able to stop himself? Had the very danger of it intrigued him? Would it have remained clandestine if Scott hadn’t died? Even the certainty of our duplicities will multiply into doubts.
‘Sandy,’ he said. ‘I see him as a kind of moral idiot. He has no sense of the other. He just is. For him, I would imagine, the problem wouldn’t seriously exist if it isn’t acknowledged. Justification is not being found out. Dave is different. I think in a strange way he took his subsequent strength from what happened. He had been to the worst place and survived it. If life couldn’t break him there, what else could it do him? He had found a secret. The way things work. There are no avenging angels. No poetic justice. There’s only the law. Avoid it and you’re running free. All you have to deal with is the inside of your head. Dave could do that all right. And I can see why. I’ve tried to think of it with his head. I’ve tried to think of it with everybody’s head I can imagine. You know how I think he might have squared it with himself? Think of it. The very fact that you can flout the law like that proves how little it means. It’s just a set of rules for those who happen to get caught. And if you can make a mockery of the law and thrive, it would be a bit immodest to think you were the only one. Wouldn’t it? Dave knew his guilt must also be a lot of other people’s. It was the nature of the game. That was a find. It was like splitting his private atom. He understood the structure of things. Hypocrisy wasn’t a weakness for him. It became a strength. It wasn’t social death. It was the lifeblood of career. No wonder he’s such a successful man. It’s quite simple, really, when you think of it. The bad have limitless capacities. The good are constrained. The hypocritical good have got it made. They have a structure of conformity that is plainly visible from the outside. Inside it, there are subterranean passageways in which anything is allowed to happen. That’s Dave. Me?’
He stared at his desk. He smiled. It was a shy, vulnerable smile, less pleasure than pain with a mask on.
‘Don’t laugh at this,’ he said. ‘What I think I’ve done with it is try to be as good a man as I can be. Bev became the meaning of my life. Her and the kids. I wanted that things should be right for them. Beyond that, just do the best I can for everybody else. That’s all. The house, everything’s in Bev’s name. I’ve got a horror of possessions. Anything in here that’s mine, Bev bought for me. Every year I set aside whatever I can for charities. I’ve never knowingly cheated another person since that night. I’ve never been unfaithful to Bev. It’s pathetic, isn’t it? To think that changes anything. Because I still shared in what happened. And it still happened. And this may be technically Bev’s house. But I live in it comfortably enough, don’t I? And it’s still built on the bones of a dead man. My life remains a lie, no matter how white I try to make it.’
He stared at me. The meaning I took from his eyes was something like: judge me as hard as you like, I can add to your severity.
‘Scott,’ he said. ‘Well, you know, don’t you? Who are the bitterest people in the world? The failed idealists, I would think. We made sure that Scott was one of them. But we couldn’t kill his idealism. We just gave it cancer. He still kept it in him but it became grotesquely tumoured. If he couldn’t undo what had happened and he couldn’t admit it, he could make it the most important thing in the world. The man we killed came to stand for everybody who’s a victim of our socialisation, the wholeness of our nature we lose in order to fit in to society. I think that’s why he gave him a green coat. I suppose he saw him as natural man. To meet Scott’s needs, he couldn’t just be the man we knocked down and killed with a car. That’s what he is for me, right enough. But who am I to say my way of living with it is nearer the truth than Scott’s? For Scott, I think he was the part of ourselves we kill. In order to be able to go on living with the pretence of being who other people think we are. I’ll show you something.’
He opened one of the top drawers in his desk. Whatever he was showing me must matter to him, since he kept it so conveniently to hand. It was a plain postcard with a handwritten message. He passed it across to me.
‘Scott sent me that a couple of months or so ago.’
I read it slowly.
‘See what I mean?’ he said.
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘You can keep it,’ he said. ‘Evidence, eh?’
I put it in my pocket. So now I knew. At least, the facts were in my head. It might be some time yet before they reached my heart. But some unsatisfied instinct persisted in me still, like a hand automatically fixing the hair on a corpse.