“I don’t know you,” I said, detaching myself. I thought he was drunk. Outside the pub he started walking beside me saying, “You don’t know me, pal, but I know you. Because of my daughter.”
I saw that he wasn’t drunk but had pretended to be as a way of introducing himself. I asked if she had been to Molendinar Primary. “What you talking about? You know who I mean, pal!” and he tried to nudge me. I asked who he was talking about.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know!” he said, exasperated. I stood still and faced him. We were at the corner of Ruthven Street. The pavement was busy with people who knew me but even without them he would not have seemed physically threatening, being only half a head taller than me with a haggard face, broken nose, and so thin that, from armpits of denim jacket to turned-up cuffs of grubby jeans, his sides were perfectly straight, without bulges indicating where waist, hips, knees were.
“Are you Yvonne’s father?” I asked, determined not to be intimidated. He asked me who the fuck Yvonne was. I said, “Are you Niki’s dad?” He shook his head. I said, “If you are the father of Is, she came to my house with friends over two years ago and ate my biscuits and scones and left without saying a word to me.”
He said, “Who the fuck is Is?”
I told him our conversation was pointless since neither of us knew who the other was talking about. I strode away and he followed me bleating, “Come on, pal! Come on! You know I’m talking about Zoe.”
“I don’t know a Zoe.”
“You must, pal! She keeps talking about you — says you’re the most cultured man she ever met. Zoe’s mad keen on culture — wanted to be a muralist when she was wee. Even now she keeps hanging around fuckin musicians with rings in their ears and noses.”
I faced him again and said I had never met a Zoe in my life and I am not a liar, so either she was or he was. He protested that Zoe was the straightest, honestest girl in the world — she never told fibs. He said, “I’m honest too, though I don’t pretend to be a saint. I’ve done drugs, pal, and been done for drugs, been in and out of jail ever since I left school. I’m telling you straight, I’ve never did an honest day’s work in my life — that shows you how honest I am.”
I asked if he was trying to frighten me. He shouted “Not at all, pal! I can see you’re no feart. I’m no feart either. I don’t care if I get done by the fuckin polis10 or by my fuckin mates because I’m used to it — in fact, tell you the truth, I quite like it being a bit of a masochist. I’m no feart of jail, I’m used to that too. I’m no feart of death because what difference will it make? None. The world will continue without me. Business as usual. Zoe cares for me a bit but I don’t fool myself, me dying would be a weight off her mind. But you, you’re a prosperous cultured gentleman and a scholar, pal. Surely you can spare me a tenner or two for Zoe’s sake?”
He was so abject that I gave him a fiver, saying that I knew no Zoe and adding that he would get no more money from me. He went away mumbling that I hadn’t heard the end of this. I wonder about Zoe. How can a man like me have made a strong cultural impression on a woman I cannot remember? The woman Henry James Prince raped in the year of the Great 1851 Exhibition was a Zoe, but the Florentine Quatracento is a far more satisfying period. Concentrate on it.
Found note from Yvonne tonight saying, “Thanks for helping in a hard time but things have improved so I am off. You will not see me again but you are a decent old spud11 a lot decenter than I expected when you first picked me up. All the best and good luck from, Your Pal, Yvonne.” — a better goodbye note than none at all or a curse, which is what most nymphs leave me with. She has left the place tidy and seems to have taken nothing but a cake of toilet soap and tube of toothpaste. Still, it is a blow. I solace myself by concentrating on my amazing Brother Filippo.
The mural in Prato cathedral shows him last in a queue of folk attending Saint Stephen’s funeral, with beside him Diamante, the monk who was his painting assistant. Their dark grey gowns contrast with the red robes of an adjacent cardinal. Filippo has the glum face and wry mouth of a child suddenly deprived of a sweet or favourite toy. The head of Diamante looks toward his master with a firmer, more dignified expression. This was painted in the early 1460s when Filippo was about fifty-five. In 1469 he paints himself more prominently in the cathedral of Spoleto among attendants at the death of the Virgin. Here he wears a white robe open over his dark one, facing forward but his eyes looking sideways to the bier where the Virgin peacefully expires. His hand points her out to a fair-haired boy of about twelve who stands in profile beside him, holding a tall glass candlestick. This is a portrait of his son Filippino, and the boy’s clear, handsome, thoughtful face is very different from his dad’s worried, uneasy gaze, depressed mouth and dark chin. Filippo obviously regarded himself with interest but without admiration, a proof of high intelligence. In the same cathedral his finely carved head and shoulders, with the same pointing hand and wearing the same Carmelite robe, lean out of a roundel above the tomb Filippino designed twenty years after Filippo’s death, when the son was an artist as famous as his dad. Lorenzo the Magnificent commissioned that memorial. The bronze head and pointing hand in this carving are like those in the Spoleto mural, except that the face looks wise and kind. Was Filippino’s memorial to his dad more truthful than dad’s self-portrait? Can that pleasanter portrait of him also be true to side of his character he himself ignored? Of course it can.
I live in strange, strange times. Newspapers and broadcasts would make study and calm writing impossible if I attended to them, and they still erupt on me from pub television sets, from Mastermind, from headlines glimpsed on newsagents’ billboards. Shortly after Thatcher’s reign I saw billboards yelling LOONY M.P. BACKS IRISH BOMBERS! Mastermind, an old-fashioned Conservative, told me an English Tory M.P. had examined evidence presented at a trial of Irishmen jailed for a murderous I.R.A. bombing, and decided there had been no evidence to convict them, because a new law by a panic-stricken government had let the police arrest people on suspicion, and also use anything they said or signed after arrest as evidence against them, even if they later denied it in court. The British politicians, police, judges, newspapers and public wanted some Irishmen arrested for the crime, wanted that so much and so fast that the real bombers were never found. The “loony” Tory re-opened the case and the jailed Irish were proved innocent, “which could never have happened in Scotland,” a woman I met yesterday told me. She was intensely agitated by injustices and said, “Scottish M.P.s and lawyers are the most corrupt and cowardly in Britain. Hardly one of them has the guts to challenge a judge, a sheriff, the police or anyone with some authority. I’m a Socialist and Irish, so I naturally hate the English, but I have to admit some of them have a sense of fair play I see hardly anywhere in Scotland.”
I met her on the way back from Heraghty’s around lunchtime.12 On Gorbals High Street I entered an eating place called Hasta Mañana and found a seat opposite a small woman with a large nose questioning a waiter about his private life. Her voice was penetrating yet so fast I could hardly catch her words, though they were friendly. The waiter left after taking my order and she told me, “A very good man, that!” and a long story about his courage and decency. He was Spanish Moroccan and owned the place. One night he saw a stabbed man staggering on the pavement outside and rushed out with towels and staunched the wounds, saving the man’s life. “Not many Glaswegians would have the guts to do that,” she said. “Most of them would cross the road to avoid helping a stabbed man, afraid of being stabbed by his enemies. What do you do?”