Текст книги "Brond"

Автор книги: Frederic Lindsay

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

SEVENTEEN

I had nothing to do with Peter Kilpatrick’s death and for it I had been arrested and interrogated and put in the shadow of imprisonment. I knew less than nothing about the assassination and I had fallen into the hands of secret police and been threatened in the hotel; the impress on a bed of the man haunted me and with it a dead face from under a pile of sacks. I had killed Kennedy; I had stabbed him and he had spouted blood; I had stabbed him and he drowned in a cupful of it; and that night I was returned to my father’s house and woke the next day in the bed I had slept in as a boy.

The window rattled in its frame. In any kind of wind, it had done that ever since I could remember. I had never noticed before how it sounded like hasty footsteps. Everything familar looked strange that morning. This was my bedroom, Jess, my sister, had the tiny room across the landing; downstairs, the kitchen was the only other room in the house and my parents slept there in the bed set into a recess in the wall. The ceiling of my bedroom sloped and bumped to fit under the roof; Jess’s room was even worse. Her bed was unmade and clothes and schoolbooks lay in a casual archipelago; at her age I had been forced by my mother to be tidy. With a small shock, I recognised the clock on her bedside table: the alabaster lady. Jess must have persuaded my mother to let her take it from its pride of place downstairs. Green marble and on top of it a woman in white drapery, Grecian, flowing – the alabaster lady I called her to myself: the word was like an incantation – alabaster, alabaster. Her breasts were bare and nothing else like that was ever allowed in the house. For years it puzzled me until I decided that probably they had never noticed. Once when I was about seven I went down in the middle of the night and took her back to bed with me. I held her between my legs and fell asleep, but when I woke she was gone. I was terrorised by shame but neither of them ever mentioned it.

I put out a finger and touched her cheek and two little breasts of stone.

It was always dark in the kitchen. The ceiling was low and the wooden beams seemed to pull it down towards your head. There was a small window at either end, but the back one looked out on a bank of earth and the tree that hung its branches over the house. Even on sunny days I wanted to put on the light. When I did, my mother would put it out: we could not afford it. She had spent her married life in this room.

‘Ten o’clock. I slept in this morning.’

I had always to apologise for sleeping late. With the hours my father worked, it seemed indecent to lie in bed.

‘This morning,’ she said looking up at me from where she knelt. She was wiping round the hearth. ‘This morning. Well, you’d an excuse.’

I tried to keep my back to her while I cut and made a sandwich of cheese.

‘There’s an egg.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘This is fine.’

I poured milk into a glass and chewed looking out of the window as if there might be something new and surprising to see. The sandwich tasted like cardboard.

‘Who was he?’

I remembered her face last night as she tried to see past me to where Primo bulked in the dark at the end of the path.

‘Just a friend. He gave me a lift home.’

‘You told us you had a job.’

‘I had a job.’

‘How could you be here if you have a job?’

Her voice was thin and querulous like an old woman’s. I put what was left of the sandwich wastefully back on the plate hoping she would not notice.

‘My friend’s a kind of doctor. He advised me to stay here for my health.’

‘Just a kind of doctor? And what does that mean?’

‘Till classes start again. I’d like to stay till it’s time for next year’s classes.’

‘Something’s wrong.’

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said without looking round at her. ‘I’ll walk up and see Dad. He’ll be up past the brig?’

Turning from the window, everything in the room was dark.

‘I’ll not be long.’

But she followed me to the door.

‘You’ve spoiled your chance.’

‘What?’ My voice cracked like an angry child’s. It was as though she were laying a curse on me.

‘Tell him your lies. You’ve spoiled your chance.’

She closed the door in my face.

Beyond the bridge were fields of crops. On our side of the burn, there were cattle and some sheep. I walked slowly in the warm sun. The bridge was three broken planks wide. Even since last summer, it had got worse. It would be made to last, though, till it rotted into the water. On the other side, sparrows balanced on the feathery heads of barley. They rippled into the air as I went by, resettling as the wind stroked the yellow swell back and forward. I heard my father before I saw him.

Crouched over, the canister strapped on his back, he swung the nozzle like the blade of a scythe. The spray hissed and stopped, restarted and hesitated like an asthmatic breathing. I had come round by the far end to find him. He was very methodical, making his way towards me as if the big farmer in the sky oversaw his efforts. In shop windows sometimes in Glasgow I would glimpse myself slow plodding as if mired in the glaur of a farm lane; then I would put back my shoulders and march away from the sight picking up my feet as I went.

‘Hold it! You’ll have me sprayed as well.’

He straightened, blinking in slow pleasure.

‘Aye, son.’

Easing the straps, he set the load down off his back. After a stretch luxurious as a yawn he fished with two fingers into his shirt pocket and fetched out a tattered pack of cigarettes.

‘Want one?’

‘You know I don’t.’

He grinned, pleased with himself. The blue smoke paled from his lips. It was warm in the shelter of the hedge watching the wind move through the barley. After a minute, he eased up one leg and let air go.

‘Pardon. I thought you’d have picked up some bad habits by this time.’

‘Like farting,’ I said.

He gave the unexpected laugh that took him sometimes like a giggle when you surprised him with a joke. He was a small man, not up to my shoulder – broad though, a good worker.

‘That wouldnae do, if your professors heard you saying that.’

‘All some of them are worth. It’s a great thought – yon big lecture hall and right at the climax, just when he makes a point – “Shakespeare’s father was fined for his dung heap” – a whole year, hundreds of us, up on one side and giving him a blast.’

‘No’ easy tae get the timing right,’ my father reflected and we laughed and fell into a comfortable silence.

‘A bit o an overlap, mind, wouldnae matter,’ he said and laughed again. He was fond of jokes like that.

‘Decent o that chap giving you a lift home.’

I looked at him thinking he was probing, but that was all he meant. Whoever had given me a lift home had been decent.

‘He was passing this way.’

‘Still . . . Some car. Cost a bob or two.’

‘It was a big car.’

‘I’m glad you’re making that kind of friend.’ He cleared his throat, and gazed intently at the patched blanket of fields thrown across the little hills in front of us. As always, he would never look at you when he was saying something serious. ‘It’s with you being at the University. In my day . . . See, in our day, you never had a chance. You’d no chance.’

I clapped my hands and flights of little birds bickered up into the air.

‘What was that about?’

‘Ach, I got tired o them bobbing up and down and stuffing their stupid faces.’

My father laughed.

‘Auld Robertson’ll never miss what they eat. He can afford it . . . It’s good to have you back. You’re needing the rest.’

‘I’m not staying.’ I didn’t know till that moment that I had decided. ‘I’ll really need to get back. I’ve work to do.’

He cleared his throat.

‘I’d think twice about that, son. It’s up to yourself, of course. You’ve been ill, remember. I mean if it’s the money . . .’

‘Not that kind of work. Nothing heavy. Not real work, just studying. Playing on my backside.’

Still without looking at me, he wondered, ‘Could you not do that at home?’

‘I wouldn’t have the books. They’re too dear to buy. I can work in the library – at the Mitchell or the University. It’s a good time to get the books, being quiet in the summer.’

He sighed out a breath.

‘Aye, well, the studying comes first. I can see you would need tae get back.’

Back. To my good friends with the big cars.

EIGHTEEN

The car rolled to a stop and he said, ‘I leave the main road across there, but you’ll have no bother getting another lift.’ I climbed out and, to prove his truthfulness, he signalled carefully right, turned across the three lanes and slipped out of sight under an arch of branches.

About it being easy to get another lift, he had made a mistake. Cars came fast and showed no inclination to stop. A cluster of three went by like that and then a big Ford trundled along sedately. The driver, an elderly man in glasses, leaned forward to hold my gaze until at the last moment he gave me two fingers and accelerated away.

After that, the entry under the arch of branches on the other side of the road seemed cool and secret. I looked at it while cars snarled past, and then crossed over. Beyond the arch there was a narrow lane sloping sharply down. Under the big intermingled screen of beeches, it would have been easy to miss. In the still air, under the dappled light, it was like going down a tunnel, except that fields showed between the trees on either side, unpleating over little hills. Half way down there was a patch of waste ground and a young couple beside a car making apologetic noises to a tall stooped man with the look of a farmer. As I walked down, they disappeared into the car and began to edge it back and forward trying to turn. I stood aside to give them room and at last they beat a retreat up towards the highway.

‘They didnae understand a word.’ The farmer shook his head at me.

‘They were German,’ I said. ‘At least that’s what the plate on the back said.’

‘Ah couldnae make them understand there’s a bit ground on the far side o the brae would’ve done them fine. They were settan up a tent here – but there’s nae water and God’s plenty o midges.’

Tumbled stones of a ruined but and ben cottage were almost buried among chickweed and dandelions.

‘I’ll sleep here,’ I said. ‘If it’s okay with you.’

‘Ye’ll be eaten alive.’

‘I’m immune to midges.’

The farmer laughed and as he walked away a black dog that had been crouched in the grass sprang up and followed him, looking back at me over its shoulder. When he had gone, I walked up the brae until I found a good site. I unrolled the sleeping bag and lay listening to the burn and eating the last of my chocolate; over and over in the trees behind me, a chaffinch did his run-up-and-bowl song; it sounded sweeter than the ones at home, but like people chaffinches have different dialects; I thought about that and then I thought about sleeping and then I told myself it didn’t matter as long as I rested. A fox barked. Waves kept running up the shore and I came properly awake and it was traffic on the main road and I was out of that night into another day.

‘Ye changed your mind then.’

It was the tall stooped farmer. His face was brown with deeply scored lines in the cheeks.

‘That’s right. I decided against the midges.’

He walked at my side back across the long field.

‘This is the life,’ I said, ‘We could be a million miles from anywhere. We could be on an island out in the middle of the Atlantic.’

‘An island . . .’ He spat into the grass. ‘Ah canna bear the sea. Ah’ve bided here all my days. Except the one time. And ah got all the travellan ah’d ever want oot o that. In a khaki uniform tae the other side o the world. The Japs took us the same day the auld “Prince o Wales” was sunk. This place does me fine – ah’ll no leave it a second time.’

At the top of the slope, we were ambushed by the main road. Container lorries in convoy shook the air and left an ache of silence. ‘Ah don’t regret going. It was a thing that had tae be done. Mind ye,’ he finished with a serious nod, ‘thae three years ruined me.’ I had no answer to that, and he walked back through the washed early morning light with the black dog at heel.

Later in the afternoon, I was going through a village when I heard my name called. ‘This is me at home,’ Donald Baxter said, picking seeds from the pouch of his lower lip. I had thought he lived in an armchair at the Men’s Union, the oldest student in captivity. Despite the plaid shirt open at the neck, his concession to countryside and summer, I suspected the woollen underwear would still be there and all the way down to his ankles. Clutching a bunch of black grapes, he had appeared from a dark little cave of a village store and stood blinking in the sunlight. ‘Back to the big city? Why not?’ he pondered. ‘Any excuse for a party.’ He came back in a clapped out Marina, one wing punched in and gaping from a past collision. As he braked to a violent stop, flakes of blue-daubed rust detached themselves from the injured part. ‘Auntie’s car,’ he said, and somehow that explained what ‘home’ meant and in getting away from there I knew he was doing himself a favour. It was nice not to have to feel grateful. A day-old copy of The Herald was lying on the front passenger seat; as I shifted it to make room for myself, I saw a banner headline telling of murder and a picture of the old politician who had died in the Riggs Lodge Hotel. Glancing, Donald Baxter said, ‘Full of years and dishonour. A treacherous old bastard from a long line of them going back to Flodden. In any decent country of self-respecting Christians, he would have been assassinated long ago.’ Driving one-handed, he groped on the shelf and produced as in a way of celebration a bottle of whisky. We passed the bottle back and forth.

Passed it too often. Drunk on an empty stomach, I ended up in Baxter’s room intent upon getting drunker. At some moment during what followed, he made the old silly jibe of calling me the Homicidal Pacifist and, when I objected as before, reminding him that he had been a conscientious objector during the war, he cried, ‘Not a bloody pacifist! Not then or now. Like Young, I held to the articles of the Treaty of Union. I would join no army but the army of an independent Scotland.’ That seemed so silly to me, I began to laugh, but then when I thought of what I had read about the Nazi horrors and remembered that poor devil of a farmer I had met in the morning, I grew angry and told him that he might not be a bloody pacifist but he was certainly either a bloody coward or a lunatic.

‘I understand why people get irritated when Scots go on about independence,’ Baxter said in a tone of disinterested kindliness. ‘I feel the same about Shetlanders – or about the Orkneys. Little piss-pot islands. Whining, “We’re Orcadians. We’re not Scotch.” Bugger them, I think. Let’s send a gunboat. A wee gunboat. A wee wee particularly wee gunboat,’ and collapsed laughing at his own joke.

Later we were bottle friends and comrades and I heard myself telling him about Brond; about Kilpatrick; about Muldoon being tortured; but not about how Kennedy died. In the still centre of my drunken brain, an ape congratulated itself upon being too cunning to tell him how Kennedy died.

‘That’s not real,’ he said, his great dish face pouring sweat. ‘That stuff you’re telling me. Don’t try to kid a kidder. That stuff doesn’t happen in never-never land. I don’t believe you. Nobody here would believe you. We know real things happen on television and always somewhere else. Not here. If you want to pretend something that matters is happening here, you’ll have to tell it in dreams and parables. Dreams and—’

That was when I punched him. Blood flew out from his mouth and he fell backwards on to the floor, looking up at me but keeping very still. His lips had burst on his teeth.

There wasn’t anywhere you could hide from history, even when that was what you had settled for.

In the morning, I wakened with a stiff neck. I had slept with my head on the table. The room was empty, but as I climbed up the steps from the basement to the street I heard a noise and, looking down, saw Donald Baxter swaying with a glass in his hand.

‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Stories end in corruption. Everybody’s does. But you’re like me. One of the sad ones. The worm gets to us early.’

He wept a single tear of malice.

It wasn’t far to the Kennedy’s house. Even walking slowly, it didn’t take me long to get there. I let myself in and went through all the downstairs apartments. I opened the door of one room and had such a vivid memory of the night I was ill that I expected Jackie to be there and Kennedy at the end of a shaft of light watching us. On the carpet in the parlour there was an overturned Guinness bottle and a tumbler.

As I came back into the hall, a man rushed downstairs at me in a jiggle of gold glasses, plump waistcoat, a squeal of ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I live here.’

‘Not now, you don’t;’ a fat man settling, as he worked it out, into a merely professional wariness. ‘Were you one of the lodgers? Haven’t you heard? Mr Kennedy and his wife are selling up.’

‘You’ve seen him—’

He would say yes and Kennedy would be alive.

‘There’s no doubt the property is for sale. We have authorisation from their agent. They are going abroad.’

I did not have to ask for a description of that agent. I had seen those smooth young men of Brond’s. Perhaps it had been the one who took Jackie to Edinburgh, talking softly to her in the car.

‘I’d like to wash,’ I said.

‘I should really ask for some proof of identity.’

‘Just to wash. I’ll collect my stuff later.’

He looked at the blood on my outheld arm and stood back from the stairs.

Sometimes you need to wash more than to eat. I stripped to the waist and took my time, pouring cool water over the dirt and sweat. In my room I put on a clean shirt. Someone had piled my clothes and books in the middle of the floor.

When I came down, the man said, ‘I’m not sure that you should still have a key.’

He did not manage to sound like a man who would insist.

In the garden outside there was a ‘For Sale’ board. Perhaps it had been put up while I was inside.

‘I’d like a lift.’

‘A lift?’

‘I’ve no money. If you give me a lift, it would save me walking. I have a weak ankle and it’s too hot to walk.’

To my surprise, he let me into his car and when I told him where I wanted to go he had to pass it on the way to his next desirable property. Ten minutes brought us outside Margaret Briody’s house. As I opened her gate, she was coming out of the front door.

‘I didn’t kill Peter.’

Till I heard the words leaving my mouth, I had not known that was what I had come to tell her. She didn’t shut the door but waited as I came along the path. If she was grieving for Kilpatrick, grief wasn’t good for her. She was very pale and pimples at various stages cropped out round her mouth and on her left cheek. As I walked closer, instead of her beauty I saw the yellow sores of squeezed acne.

‘The police wouldn’t have let me go if I’d killed Peter.’ Because of those stupid unexpected pimples, I was quite calm. I coaxed her. ‘That stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

‘Can’t you see I’ve had enough?’

Her tone was dull and tired but in spite of herself the separate notes chimed like water over pebbles. She didn’t try to stop me as I went past her into the house. I thought she would follow me into the front room, but her steps crossed the hall. A door closed.

This was the room where I had surprised Muldoon the night he broke into Margaret’s house: a pair of burglars. I wondered where Muldoon was now. On the table where Margaret had left the note for her parents, a newspaper lay open in a patch of sunlight. I remembered pale fingers of torchlight probing the darkness. Margaret was speaking to someone. I looked at the picture on the front of the newspaper: crowds lining a street, soldiers on horseback, carriages. More than ever, murmuring in the distance her voice was like music.

‘You’d better not be here when Dada gets back,’ she said behind me.

‘Who were you talking to then? Somebody’s here. Your Uncle Liam?’

‘No – I mean yes. My uncle’s here – you’d better go.’

She was a bad liar. I realised there was no one except us in the house.

‘Of course, I’d forgotten the phone. You were using the phone in the bedroom.’

‘Please go away. There’s nothing for you here. I can only ask you.’

‘Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to wait here until your father comes back, and if he has anything to say to me that would be all right, too. You know what happened. He can ask me anything. And when he’s finished I’ll tell him I want to marry you. I’m a university student, I’ll say, and I want to marry your daughter.’

‘You frighten me.’

‘Is that a reason for not getting married?’

‘You’re trying to frighten me,’ she said.

I had not meant it as a threat or a joke. While I spoke I had seen two respectable young people walking up the aisle to get married.

‘I am a university student.’ I held out the idea like a talisman.

‘Have some pity. Don’t you know how I felt about Peter?’

‘I’m not a policeman.’ Kilpatrick had been a policeman, which after all was also one of the professions and respectable. ‘I’m just – My father works on a farm.’ Why did I never tell the whole truth about him? ‘He’s just a labourer. He’s a farm labourer. But you might like him. He’s a kind man. He’d be very impressed by you.’

But not as impressed as he would have been if I could have brought home my expensive whore in her Pringle sweater and soft wool skirt to patronise him in the voice of the gentry. From the beaches of the south and sunlight off ski slopes, the whore’s skin (and what did it matter if it had been a sunlamp in a stinking sauna and massage parlour?) had burnished brown and pure.

‘What’s wrong? If you’re ill, won’t you go?’

‘Everything’s spoiled,’ I said.

We faced one another across the little table. I could have reached out and touched her. In the shop we had slept together and I had touched her then; but afterwards I had held my whore’s little naked breast between my hands, fucked her, watched with her as Brond knelt under the rain of the fat woman’s sweat.

The doorbell rang. After a pause, it started again and did not stop.

‘It doesn’t sound like your father,’ I said. I knew who it was.

‘I asked you to go. I said please go.’

Pretty please.

‘Did he give you a number to ring, just in case I came? He likes to play games, you know. It’s because he gets bored.’

‘Leave me in peace,’ she said.

As I waited for her to let him in, I looked at the high black headline above the newspaper picture. He had been an old man, and whatever he had done probably he had thought it was right. He had been born to it, as my father would say; but, then, hadn’t we all? He hadn’t deserved to be beaten to death in an hotel room, because no one deserved that death. They had given him a fine funeral, though, and he would have appreciated that since it was the kind of thing he valued.

‘Don’t you understand I just want to be left in peace now?’ Margaret Briody said.

Somebody else who wanted to opt out of history.