‘No way. You can go to hell,’ she said and put down the phone like a punch on the ear.
I sat holding the phone and feeling ashamed of myself. By the time I put down the receiver, I had decided I couldn’t go through with what I had threatened. I had no rights here. Katie was right. I was sifting ashes. Let them lie.
Katie came back in with Buster. She looked as if she knew she was right. I was guilty about what I had been doing in her absence, feeling I had proved her case by being so insistent. It didn’t help that I had let the soup bubble over slightly. When Katie didn’t say anything but just adjusted the gas, I felt even worse. Buster was the most welcoming thing in the room. That made it time to get out.
I went upstairs for my jacket. When I came back down, I looked into the kitchen. Katie was tenderising meat as if it was my head.
‘That’s me away, Kate,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the breakfast. I’ll see you later.’
She turned her face, looking past me.
‘You going to be away all day?’ she said.
‘Is that a question or a request?’
She started almost to smile and waved me out of the room.
10
‘Gus. Right? So you probably think that my real name’s Angus. But that just shows yer cultural parochialism. Guess. On yese go. Ah’ll give yese a hundred guesses. An’ ye’ll no’ get near it.’
There were some less than serious accepters of the challenge (offering, among others, ‘Angustura’) but I wasn’t one of them. I stood among the jocularity and wondered what I was doing here, what I was doing in Graithnock, what I was doing in my head. The Katie Samson effect was still with me.
Leaving the Bushfield, I had parked the car in the town centre and taken my obsession for a walk. The town wasn’t interested. I had wandered for a while among the normal business of the day and felt as marginal to what was going on around me as if I had been a religious fanatic wearing a sandwich-board with a message only he could understand.
Coming in here, I felt worse. Maybe Katie was right about the way we inhabit different plays. I certainly seemed to be appearing in a different drama from anybody else. Obsessively following the script of some gloomy revenge tragedy, I had wandered into a vaudeville show. I had no lines here. All I could be was part of the audience.
‘Wrong. Wrong again. Let me enlighten your abysmal ignorance. The answer is. . Wait for it. .’
The answer was, apparently, Gustavus — ‘as in Adolphus’. Well, the truth was that his name was actually Gustave, since his ancestors had moved from Sweden to France and naturalised the name accordingly. But it had been originally Gustavus. The heavily built man who had been outlining his exotic origins looked as Scottish as a haggis. His ability to decorate the truth with lies and the appreciative response his talent evoked confirmed my sense of the hopelessness of my quest.
We’re all experts in concealment, hailing one another’s disguises as if they were old friends. Among this jostling crowd of masks, many of which were my own, I couldn’t expect to look upon the truth of what had happened to my brother. There’s nobody here but us liars.
But by the time the cabaret was over a small revelation had given me renewed hope. Although it was as insubstantial as misting on a mirror, it meant my belief in understanding wasn’t quite dead. I realised who had been speaking.
Scott had mentioned him to me more than once and I had a conviction of having seen him around the town when I was younger, though the effects of his aging made me uncertain about that. His name was Gus McPhater. Presumably Gus was short for Angus. The fact that he had just spent several minutes elaborately denying that this was the case made it seem likely.
He was the Baron Münchhausen of the Akimbo Arms. The lies he told were local legend. According to Scott’s intermittent reports to me, Gus McPhater had designed the Queen Mary (‘But some bastard altered the plans. Never was the boat it shoulda been!’), had written the James Bond books (‘Ian Fleming paid me a lump sum. Ye can shove yer publicity’) and designed the first mini-skirt, foisting it on an unsuspecting public for his own voyeuristic purposes (‘At my age, ye take yer pleasure where ye can get it’). He was a former merchant seaman.
I was standing in the public bar. Through the arched doorway that joined this gantry to the one in the lounge, I could see that the lounge was almost empty. Two elderly women with plastic shopping-bags beside them on the cushioned bench-seat were tippling quietly, nodding into each other’s remarks. The bar wasn’t much busier. Besides the artiste and myself, there were two men studying the horses as well as a young man distant enough to be into transcendental meditation and a vociferously unemployed bricklayer, wearing a boilersuit, as if the call to build something might come at any moment. From things Scott had said, I recognised the tall barman as well. His name was Harry and he looked as happy as a Rechabite at a wine-tasting. I recalled one of Scott’s quotes from Gus McPhater: ‘Harry does for conversation what lumbago does for dancin’.’
It was that time just after opening when a pub begins to come awake, starts a new day inside the old one, as if the morning had a stutter. The ice was brimming the bucket. The linoleum floor was devoid of cigarette-ends. The moted sunlight coming in the window was clear enough to see through.
But, imagining Scott’s nights here, I populated the emptiness. This had been one of his places and some small part of his spirit had been left here. Holding my own brief seance for my brother, I conjured vivid faces and loud nights. I saw that smile of his, sudden as a sunray, when he loved what you were saying. I saw the strained expression when he felt you must agree with him and couldn’t get you to see that. I caught the way the laughter would light up his eyes when he was trying to suppress it. I heard the laughing when it broke. He must have had some nights here. He had lived with such intensity. The thought was my funeral for him. Who needed possessions and career and official achievements? Life was only in the living of it. How you act and what you are and what you do and how you be were the only substance. They didn’t last either. But while you were here, they made what light there was — the wick that threads the candle-grease of time. His light was out but here I felt I could almost smell the smoke still drifting from its snuffing.
I looked across at the preposterousness of Gus McPhater. He, too, however marginally, had moved within the orbit of that light. He was sitting at a small, round, formica table, a third of a pint in front of him. He was staring at the floor. His short performance was over. He had the emptiness of an actor who has just divested himself of his role. I believed in who he was in silence more than who he had been in noise, despite the laughter of the others.
Watching him, I saw more than a vaudeville turn. He might be able to tell me something about Scott. Yet what was the point of talking to a professional liar? Then I remembered something else Scott had told me about him. He had a daughter who died young and it had made him a recluse for years. When he re-emerged into life, he came complete with armour-plated lies. I remembered Scott, lover of paradox, saying, ‘His gift is modesty.’ I think he meant that he chose to be a variety of people that he wasn’t rather than just be himself. ‘His patter’s a lapwing,’ Scott had said. ‘It leads you where he isn’t. Because where he is is too vulnerable.’
I went over to where he was.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘You’re Gus McPhater?’
He looked up slowly and by the time his eyes met mine he had remembered his lines.
‘This is correct, young man,’ he said.
He showed no surprise that a stranger should come up and know his name. Perhaps he was used to it. Perhaps he thought I was an autograph-hunter.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘This is permissible behaviour.’
‘A pint of McEwan’s?’