William McIlvanney - Strange Loyalties

‘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.

‘Who was driving?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said.

‘Was Scott driving?’

He stared at the floor. He stared at me.

‘Look. Because he was your brother and because he’s dead. I’ll tell you this. Scott wasn’t driving. But that’s all I tell you. The other three of us were driving. All right? A deal’s a deal. No matter how foul the terms. Honour among the dishonoured. It’s all I’ve got left. As it is, you’ve got enough to blow us all away, I suppose. That’s up to you. I sit at this dinner-party tonight and I don’t know when the lights might go out on my life. I can live with that. I’ve lived with this, I can live with that. Maybe a part of me wants you to do it. I think it’s only Bev and the kids I would worry about. Dave and Sandy, with them I’ve kept the bad faith. But when Scott died, that changed the terms for me. When you came round, I knew I had to tell you. For Scott’s sake. He deserved it. I’ve told you. You do with it what you will.’

I was afraid I would just have to endure it. I had thought earlier tonight, on my wanderings, that I might have to bring this case to court, as well as the death of Dan Scoular. But why? What would we achieve? The resurrected pain of an unknown man’s family, the damaged lives of a lot of innocent relatives who didn’t even know the perpetrators when it happened. There are griefs we must try to put right and griefs we must endure. This guilt was not absolvable. All I could do was take my share of it. I took the secret into myself.

But I would live with it on my own terms. Dave Lyons wouldn’t win. That must not be. There are other things we can do with our capacity to betray one another besides condone it. We can quarrel with it till we die, as Scott had done in his way.

I thought of Scott now, trying to see him whole. I knew that there was in me a recurrent tendency to think back to the excitement of new beginnings and regret the ends they’ve come to. The bitterness that can give rise to is bearing false witness to life. I thought that the essence of life lies not in the defeat of our expectations but in the joy that they were ever there at all. Life’s a spendthrift mother. Once she has given what she has, it’s ungrateful to complain that she didn’t have the foresight to take out an insurance policy on your behalf. You just say thanks.

I did. He was my brother and that made for pride in me. I loved him in his anger and his weakness and the folly of his dying as much as ever I loved him in his strength and in his kindness. I found no part of him deniable.

And his last gift to me from the grave had perhaps been a more intense vision of the blackness in myself. It gave me a proper fear of who I was. In trying to penetrate the shadows in his life I had experienced more deeply the shadows in my own. I was his brother, all right. The beast he had fought, that ravens upon others, slept underneath my chair. I would have to try and learn to live with it as justly as I could. Beware thyself.

I had finished my whisky. I rose and filled out the last of the Antiquary. I put the empty bottle in the cupboard in the living-room. It’s where I keep some objects that matter to me as memory-hinges. They are all quite worthless, to be thrown out with my body. But they serve to remind me of some of the things I believe are important.