‘Don’t throw it,’ I said.
Buster, with his finely honed sensitivity always aware of everything except what was going on, began to growl. Jokes seemed to be lost on him. A nuance to Buster was whether to bite your right leg or your left.
‘Your dog’s daft, by the way,’ I said. ‘You should get him a brain transplant. I’ll pay for it.’
‘Leave Buster alone. You don’t understand him. He’s got a lot of affection.’
‘He’s a dumb bastard. You should shave his head and tattoo National Front on it.’
She put down the knife. She stared at the wall immediately in front of her.
‘Jack,’ she said. ‘Why are you so angry? It’s only a dog. And that stuff you’re asking. That’s personal. Any talks Scott and me had are between us.’
‘What’s this, Katie? The sanctity of the pub confessional? Who do you think I am? An income-tax inspector? I’m his brother, for Christ’s sake. I loved him.’
‘Do you want another cup of coffee?’ she said.
‘I want some answers,’ I said.
She sighed and wiped her hands on her apron. She took a fresh cup and saucer and put them on the table across from me. She collected the percolator, filled my cup and filled her own. She replaced the percolator. She came and sat at the table. She took a cigarette from my packet, lit it and gave it across to me. I love the way a woman can make a ceremony out of a passing moment. Maybe society is a masculine distortion of reality but civilisation is feminine. I felt disarmed by small kindnesses.
‘What is it. Jack?’ she said.
‘Katie,’ I said. ‘My life’s collapsed about my ears. And I’m trying to rebuild it. Simple.’
‘When do men grow up? I can still see you in short trousers.’
As if on cue, I went in the huff.
‘We’re in different plays,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Men and women. We’re in different plays. Women are realistic. You lot are trying to act out some grand drama that isn’t there.’
She sipped her coffee black. She looked at me steadily. Her mood had taken off the morning and its preoccupations like so much make-up. I saw her clearly, maybe for the first time. She seemed thoughtful and understanding and slightly tired of it all. Where she had been and what she had gone through came out to settle on her face and the tension in her between her past and her refusal to give in to it gave her a dignity.
‘It’s like Mike,’ she said. ‘So we can’t have any children. What’s that? It’s a sad thing you learn to live with. Like a dark place in your head. But you can make brightness round about it. Not him. It’s like a holy curse to him. The world picked him out specially, it seems. To blight his life. We could’ve adopted years ago. But he had to fight things on his own terms. To prove himself. It’s too late for us now.’
A door swung gently open on her words. Beyond it was the mustiness of dead dreams, an attic of ghostly aspirations, children’s clothes no one would ever wear. I saw her pain and the courage with which she bore it. I thought of Jan and understood her a little more clearly. She would be trying to avoid going where Katie was. She was right to try.
‘Mike,’ Katie said. ‘Drama, drama. Different plays.’
Mike came into focus for me, all that bleak tenseness in him. He was a silent and furious quarrel with the world, a raging stillness. I sensed him as one of life’s obsessive litigants who, isolating one slander on his sense of himself, expends everything fruitlessly on trying to have it retracted. But I sympathised.
‘It’s funny, Katie,’ I said. ‘But I see it the other way round. I think it’s often women who live among melodrama. Melodrama to me’s effects exaggerated beyond their causes. I’ve known women sing opera because the arse had burned out a pan. I’m going crazy because my brother’s dead. Not because there’s a button off my shirt.’
We looked at each other across the table, as if it was no-man’s-land, acknowledging truce.
‘But I love them just the same,’ I said.
Katie smiled and leaned over and touched my hand. ‘I can tolerate you as well,’ she said. ‘Ask.’
‘So were there any women? With Scott.’
‘He didn’t tell you?’
I thought of what he had been trying to say that night in my flat.
‘I think maybe once he came close. But I don’t know. We had lost touch a bit. For whiles we might as well have been on different continents.’
‘There was somebody,’ she said.
The significance of the words materialised before me, solid as a door into a mysterious chamber of Scott’s life where I hadn’t been. It was a door I hesitated at, even as his brother. I would be rifling his privacy in his absence. But something in me needed it to open. Only Katie could do that and she wasn’t making any moves. I waited. She waited, sipping her coffee. There were rules here, I understood. You didn’t just blunder in. There was a ceremony of respect to be performed and Katie would conduct it.
‘I think I was the only one he told,’ she said.
She was staring at the table, cuddling the secret to her one last time before she would release it. I thought I saw what it must have meant to her. Trying to tell people who you really are is always a kind of love letter. It invests them with importance in your life. Enlarged by Scott’s trust in her, Katie didn’t want to betray it. She had to talk herself towards sharing it with me.
‘I loved him in some way, you know,’ she said. ‘I think a lot of people did a bit. He could be a pain in the bum could your Scott. But even while he was doing it, you could see how vulnerable he was. I fell out with him very badly a few months back. It wasn’t like him. He didn’t come in for two weeks. You’ve no idea how much that upset me. I thought a part of my life was gone. When he walked in that door, it felt like Christmas for me. And you getting the best present you’d ever had. Oh, he could brighten the day.’
She finished her coffee.
‘Her name was Ellie,’ she said suddenly. ‘She was a teacher. She didn’t have any children. That’s all I know.’
‘She worked beside him?’
‘Jack.’
She made my name a long, slow accusation. Having admitted me to the sanctum, she didn’t want me trampling all over it.
‘What do you think Scott did. Jack? Show me pictures? Maybe three or four times in here, in the early hours, he mentioned her. Always just “Ellie”. No second name. And I didn’t ask for it. I know she mattered to him a lot. I know the guilt was damaging him. I know it seemed to have broken up between them. I was sharing his pain. The details weren’t what mattered. He was bleeding for somebody. Was I supposed to ask for her phone number? He needed a bandage. I was a bandage.’
‘But who is she? Where did she live?’
As soon as I said it, I knew I had closed the door on myself. She stared at me as if focussing the lens on the microscope. What strange creature have we here? She spoke with carefully muted anger.
‘Why don’t you go to the crematorium and sift the ashes?’
‘If I thought it would help, I would,’ I said.
I stared back through the lens at her. What strange creature thinks I’m a strange creature?
She stood up and lifted her cup and lifted mine, though it wasn’t empty, and crossed to the sink and rinsed them out. She went on with making the soup. I wondered, perhaps unworthily, about Katie. Maybe her motives for not wanting to talk about the unknown Ellie were less noble than she made out. Maybe jealousy was one of them. I always suspect self-righteousness. I think it’s usually a way of cosmeticising the truth of self, like a powdered periwig on a headful of lice.
Katie had brought her pot of soup to the boil and turned it down to simmer.
‘Buster,’ she said.
Buster recognised his name. He wasn’t as dumb as I had thought. Katie took the leash that was draped round a hook on the kitchen door.
‘If that starts to boil over,’ she said, ‘turn it down some more, will you? I’m taking Buster out to clean himself.’