‘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.
I watered my drink in the kitchen and came back through. I remembered the card Scott had written to Michael Preston. I took it out of my pocket and stuck it in the corner of the frame of the five at supper. I sat down. Later today, I would see my children. I would begin again to try to be a good father to them. As I finished my glass, I looked at Scott’s card. I couldn’t make out the writing from here, but that didn’t matter. I had read it over so many times since Michael Preston gave me it that I knew it by heart.
‘Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As they drove to meet him, they knocked down a man on the road. He was dying. If they tried to save him, they might miss their appointment. They decided that their appointment, which concerned all of us, was more important than the life of one man. They drove on to keep their appointment. They did not know that the man they were to meet was the man they had left to die.’
I wished I had more whisky.