Holding the painting up, I couldn’t believe it. What had happened between them that Anna should do this? She knew how much it had meant to Scott. I was angry.
I found an old, black bin-bag and put the painting in it. I came out and closed the outhouse door. I balanced the painting on the garage-roof that abutted on to the garden door. I climbed the door and brought the painting with me on the way down. I was putting the painting in the boot of the car when a neighbour crossed the street towards me. I didn’t know him.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just visiting,’ I said.
‘You can only view by appointment.’
‘I’ve seen all I need to see.’
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Who the hell are you?’ I said. ‘The Keeper of the Suburbs?’
As soon as I said it, I felt bad. The man was right enough. He had seen a stranger poking around an empty house.
‘Look,’ I said.
I took out my identity-card and showed it to him.
‘I’m Scott Laidlaw’s brother. I’m just collecting something that was left for me. It’s a painting Scott did.’
He was waiting for me to let him see it. He had a big chance.
‘Well,’ he said. He was giving the issue his lofty consideration. He seemed to imagine I cared. Why does a little piece of property make some people act as if they were on stilts? ‘Well. I suppose everything’s above board.’
‘Do you?’ I said and locked the boot and got in the car.
Driving, I was annoyed at myself for becoming angry. Muzzle the dog. My anger wasn’t for him. But it was for somebody. I could feel it in me, sealed and ready, just waiting for an address.
6
I remembered John Strachan as soon as I saw him, just after ten past seven. I had been hoping to come later but this was as long as I could hold off. I had looked at the new town centre Scott hated. I had taken a meal in a café. I had left the car in a parking lot and walked. But impatience still outmanoeuvred me.
‘Jack, isn’t it?’ he said.
We shook hands.
‘I’m John. Come in.’
‘This is good of you.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I feel like talking about it myself.’
He was a tall man with glasses. He couldn’t have been more than early thirties but he had a troubled, abstracted air that suggested the sum he was trying to do in his head wasn’t working out. He was wearing jeans and a baggy sweater.
He led me through to the living-room and introduced me to Mhairi. Mhairi was small and overweight and she had a shiny, round face, like a dumpling in which you know there won’t be any bad bits. She was wearing jeans and a loose, floral top. John introduced me to the children as well, Catriona and Elspeth, or rather he identified them for me as they dervished round us.
The children were doing what children so often do, transforming the banality of the moment into a game. As is usual with such games, nobody knew the rules but them. This one appeared to consist of Catriona, who would be about eight, making the ugliest face she could contrive up against Elspeth’s nose, accompanied by a klaxon-like noise. Then she would run in and out of the furniture and stop in the most inaccessible place she could find. Elspeth, maybe five, would pursue her, make her face, her noise, and run away as well. Like so many children’s games nobody seemed to have devised a rule yet for deciding when it was over.
The three adults were momentarily transfixed, perhaps by such effortless dissipation of enough energy to light up a small town.
‘I hope I haven’t come too early,’ I said.
‘Oh no,’ Mhairi said.
She said it with surprise, looking into the strangeness of my remark. The rigid sense of time I had implied seemed alien to her. I had an insight, part observation, part memory, into where they were. Mhairi was standing by the door to the kitchen with a slightly dazed resignation, like someone waiting for a bus she had begun to think might not travel on this route after all. I could imagine the promised places it was supposed to have on its destination board: ‘When The Children Are Older’, ‘More Time To Myself’ and ‘Some Of The Things I’ve Always Wanted To Do’.
‘I think we should take Jack through to the lounge for a minute,’ Mhairi said.
The three of us went through there. Catriona and Elspeth threatened concentration distantly, like gunfire in the hills around a fort.
Moving into the lounge was moving nearer to John and Mhairi themselves, I thought, closer to the control room of what they were up to. It was furnished with a kind of vulnerable eclecticism. The floor was varnished, with an Indian rug on it. The chairs didn’t match but were old and handsome, chosen presumably for comfort. Someone had taken macramé. On the walls were an African mask and one of Scott’s paintings I hadn’t seen before. While I studied it, they didn’t speak. Books were much of the furniture. There were two main bookcases and a couple of smaller bookstands. One of them was devoted to black writers — George Jackson, Baldwin, Cleaver, Biko, Mandela, Achebe. I could imagine their friends sitting around here. They would drink wine and talk seriously about important matters. They would be easy to satirise. But I felt I was in one of decency’s bunkers, where two people were trying to find values that made their lives honestly habitable.
‘What do you think the painting’s about?’ I said as I sat down.
It was a pastiche of Da Vinci’s last supper. Five men were at table, facing out. The man in the centre had no features. His hands were by his side. The other four were bearded. One of them could have been Scott. The meal and the clothes were contemporary. The perspective allowed you to see the five plates, still empty, before them. The plate of the man in the middle was blank. The other four plates had the image of the same face on them, a calm but mournful face of a balding man in his fifties, looking out at you. There were other elements in the picture but I hadn’t time to examine them. I didn’t like the painting. It seemed too derivative, not of Da Vinci, but of an idea extraneous to itself, an idea it hadn’t quite incarnated successfully.
‘I’m not sure,’ John said. ‘Maybe that the four are feeding off the man in the middle? His loss of identity.’
‘Something like that,’ Mhairi said. ‘Anyway, I like it. And Scott never explained.’
We all looked at it briefly.
‘It’s good to meet you,’ Mhairi said. ‘Scott talked about you a lot. Black Jack, he sometimes called you. Nicely, though. We miss him so much.’
‘So do I,’ I said. ‘Not that I had seen too much of him lately. But he was always there for me. Like money in the bank. Suddenly it’s the Wall Street crash. I feel a bit impoverished without him.’
‘He was special,’ John said. ‘The pupils talk a lot about him at the school. I think a couple of the sixth-year girls had vaguely thought they might marry him.’
‘We used to see a lot of him and Anna,’ Mhairi said. ‘Not so much lately. But he still came round himself.’
‘Anna,’ I said. ‘I tried to go and see her today. The house is up for sale. That was quick.’
They looked at each other.
‘You know how bad it was between them before Scott died?’ John said.
‘I thought I had some idea. But maybe I underestimated drastically. I don’t know how you felt about the funeral, John. But I found that hard to take. I know Anna has to cope with it the way she can. But come on.’
‘I think I can understand what Anna did,’ Mhairi said. ‘I don’t know if it’s what I would’ve done. But then maybe I wouldn’t have had the guts.’
I waited.
‘They were really separated before Scott died. They lived in the same house, right enough. But it was all over bar admitting it. What Anna felt must have been close to hate, I think. I think the funeral was a way to avoid hypocrisy as much as possible. She’s very strong-willed, Anna.’
‘So was Scott, Mhairi,’ John said. ‘He had a lot of charm with it. But if you ruffled the etiquette, you touched iron quick enough.’