I questioned Gus McPhater some more but the mist didn’t clear. I ordered a pizza from the bar (‘They’re classic,’ Gus McPhater had said) and, while my mouth engaged it in combat, my mind was trying to work out where this new information took me. It wasn’t much. But it was strange enough to re-invoke the demon in me that insisted there was more to Scott’s death than a road-accident. My appointment with Dave Lyons might be worth keeping. I was already trying to see beyond it.
‘Fast Frankie,’ I said to Gus McPhater. ‘Do you know where he comes from originally?’
‘Does anybody?’ he said. ‘It’s round these parts somewhere, right enough. But he was never too strong on solid information was Frankie. Mainly, he comes from his own imagination, Ah think.’
My respect for Gus McPhater grew some more. He knew Frankie White down to his fingerprints. I left him another drink behind the bar and came out. Mind you, Gus was a better judge of people than he was of food. I hadn’t quite finished my meal. It was a classic pizza, all right — say, first century AD.
11
Life is like a journey, saith the preacher. It’s corny and he’s been saying it too long but you can see what he means. I was thinking that as I came nearer to Cranston Castle House. Only, with the Irish in me from my mother’s side, I turned the image on its head. A journey can be like life, I thought. Take this one.
I had left the decaying industrialism of Graithnock on the north side and was driving past green fields right away. Graithnock is like that these days, an aridity surrounded by the green world, a desert in an oasis. I turned right before I came into Kilmaurs at the place I had heard my father call the Old Stewarton Road-end. From there I was moving uncertainly and unhurriedly and vaguely towards Stewarton. Never take directions from a committee. That way, you’re looking for a place that exists only in the abstract. The gathered wisdom of the Bushfield left me looking for landmarks that weren’t there and gradually becoming aware that I would know where Cranston Castle House was when I found it.
But the weather was good and, though I didn’t know where I was, I knew, in the countryside around me, where I had been. For I was driving through my past. These might not be the very places where Scott and I had played but, given the mythic quality of childhood terrain, they might as well have been. It was to places like this that we had come from the town to imagine more than the streets gave us, to replenish our horizons. The infinite innocence of our dreams was growing all around me.
I remembered the promise of those times, how the world had seemed to belong to everybody and the possibilities were anybody’s for the taking, and then, uncertainly at first among the camouflage of the trees but slowly gaining substance, I made out the crenellations of what had to be Cranston Castle House. As I found the entrance to the driveway and came nearer to the place, its solidity grew more and more to feel like the hidden meaning of the countryside, the definitive clause in the statement of the place you might easily have overlooked. That was why I had been thinking that a journey can be like life, Scott’s and mine. Here was where all the paths we had hoped to follow led, to entrenched property and status and wealth. The very ground we walked on had been owned, and not by us. The mirages of youth evaporated and confronted you with this. I parked the car among the few other cars in front of the building. Brian’s Vauxhall was a Shetland pony in the Winners’ Enclosure.
The building was big, one of those nineteenth-century attempts to re-invent the past, capitalism imitating feudalism. I opened the large wooden door and came into a small, wood-panelled entrance hall — Lilliputian baronial. A couple of floral armchairs and a brass-topped table were arranged tastefully beside the huge empty fireplace. The Akimbo Arms it wasn’t. On my left, through an open, arched doorway, I could see the dining-room. Three men were finishing a meal with a lot of empty, freshly set tables around them. Through an arched doorway on my right was the bar. Everywhere, there was wood. If you could have replanted the interior of this place, you would have had a forest.
Going into the bar, I experienced a moment of confusion. That happens to me quite often. Throughout my boyhood, I was shy to the point of embarrassing other people — given to frozen silences and good at blushing. Perhaps we never quite grow out of the children we have been. Certainly with me adulthood seems to be a veneer that hasn’t quite taken. Patches of the raw wood keep showing through in unexpected places. I’ll walk into a party, dressed in maturity and nodding suavely, and suddenly realise that I don’t know what the hell to say. Panic breaks out in me like pimples. This was one of the times.
I had recourse to my usual solution. I headed for the drink, even though that was a defensive reflex that clicked on an empty cartridge. I was on soda and lime. The girl behind the bar helped. She was dressed in what I assumed must be the uniform of the staff — black skirt, white blouse, a tiny scarf like a floppy bow tie. But the naturalness of her manner gave me some ease and made me feel I had an ally against all this supposed sophistication. As I sipped my drink, I tried to find my bearings.
This was where the diners took coffees and liqueurs. It didn’t look as if it had been a very busy day. There were two tables with a couple at each. The only other people were two groups of business men — four at one table, five at another. I didn’t know where Dave Lyons was. I had been hoping he would give me some sign when I came in. But nobody had moved, nobody had glanced towards me. I had made all the impact of the pheasant carved in wood above the gantry.
Gradually, impatience led me out of the time-lock of my adolescent awkwardness back into what I take for manhood. After all, I had been waiting long enough to grow a beard. I decided on the group of five and crossed towards their table. As I came nearer, I noticed one of them become very still. He didn’t look towards me. He seemed to be listening to one of the other men but his listening, I thought, became a performance of listening. I concluded that he was the man. I also concluded that he wasn’t keen to see me.
When I stood beside them, the man who was talking eventually looked up at me. He took me in vaguely, seeming slightly annoyed at my intrusion. Perhaps he thought I was a waiter.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Dave Lyons.’
The acting listener was amazed. He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. His face couldn’t have expressed more surprise if I’d dropped in through the roof.
‘Scott’s brother,’ he said. ‘Right? Of course, you are. Of course, you are.’
It was nice to have his confirmation of the fact. He stood up and shook hands.
‘I’m Dave Lyons. It’s great to meet you. Even if it’s sad about the circumstances. Gentlemen. This is. .’
‘Jack Laidlaw.’
‘Jack. That’s right. Jack Laidlaw. He’s the brother of a friend of mine. A friend unfortunately recently deceased. Jack. This is. .’
He gave me the names. I was glad he didn’t ask me to repeat them. All I was aware of about them was the proximity of a lot of rubicund flesh, well-fed faces, heavy hands.
‘If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen. I have to give Jack here a little of my time. Please. Have more brandies if you want.’
He lifted his own brandy glass from a table with other glasses on it and coffee-cups and a sheaf of paper with mysterious figures on the top sheet. I caught the whiff of Aramis aftershave. I’d know it anywhere because Jan had once given me a bottle as a present. I had spent a fortnight trying to get used to it. I finished up leaping away from the smell as soon as the cork came off. I’m sure it’s lovely but I had to admit eventually that I was allergic to it. Jan wasn’t too pleased. Perhaps that’s where our relationship had begun to founder: I couldn’t inhabit her ideal sense of me. Maybe I could introduce her to Dave Lyons. Was this the kind of man Jan wanted?