‘As a student, yes. He had what I would call a serious intelligence. By that I mean he thought ideas were for living, not just thinking. Hm?’
He nodded infinitesimally towards the other two, who were still talking. He bit his lip briefly as if dismayed at the garishness of his own indiscretion.
‘Academicism, of course, can be mental formaldehyde. A way for people to put their brains on display without actually doing anything with them. Tony wanted more. For him any idea he accepted carried a responsibility to living along with it. He was an interesting thinker. Is, no doubt. It’s some time since I’ve seen him.’
Laidlaw was set to ask something, Harkness could see, but Mr Jamieson was preoccupied in following his own thought, like someone out to net a butterfly.
‘That’s rare, of course. Though less rare here than in some other places. I was glad to come back to Glasgow for that reason. The borders are crossed more easily here, of course.’
Laidlaw noted the intellectual trick of that ‘of course’, a way of stating something you might only just have realised as if only fools could be unaware of it. It disarmed close examination.
‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
‘You get a lot of first-generation academics here. And some of them are not inclined to endorse the rules of academe too quickly. There’s a strong autodidact tradition in Scotland, you see. I happen to believe it’s especially strong in the West. Such people don’t submit too happily to academic categories. They can have a refreshing swingeing freedom of mind. Mind you, too often career seduces them and they conform to get success. Every year some Visigoths arrive. And every year I feel renewed hope. Perhaps among them there’s an Attila of the mind — if you’ll excuse a racially mixed metaphor. Someone who will reanimate our rituals by attacking them. Tony had possibilities in that direction.’
Laidlaw was beginning to be more and more interested in Tony Veitch.
‘As far as his crossing of borders went? I mean, did he associate with people who didn’t seem to fit with university life?’
‘Hm? Well, I was his tutor, not a social worker.’
When he stopped talking, the voices of the other two men seemed never to have let up. They weren’t reading or drinking or even looking at each other. They just sat casually communing with their own profundity.
‘A despair as actual as leprosy.’
‘Imagine a Somme,’ Mr Jamieson said, ‘where everyone is immortal. Nothing can happen, of course. But, oh my God, the noise!’
‘Mr Jamieson,’ Laidlaw said. ‘About Tony Veitch.’
‘Yes. Tony hated that.’
‘Is that why he ducked out of his finals?’
‘I should imagine so. He seems to have been doing well in the papers he sat. He was rejecting us, I suppose. Perhaps not without reason.’ For the first time his eyes achieved a clearly specific focus, emerged from the abstract. ‘Do you think you’ll find him?’
‘We were hoping you might help,’ Laidlaw said, not without some recrimination in his voice.
‘Yes. I’m getting an address for you. We tried ourselves, you see. At first. We hoped it might be possible to make some arrangement for him to take the other papers. But he obviously didn’t intend that anyone should find him.’
‘Did he seem to you a violent person at any time?’
The pale eyes smiled.
‘Isn’t everyone?’ The remark was unexpected in his mild mouth. ‘He was certainly intellectually violent. Iconoclastic. But then many young people are.’
A woman with glasses came in, wearing a smile that was like opening a window in a stuffy room. She gave Mr Jamieson a piece of paper and went out.
‘Thank you, Sybil,’ he said and passed the paper to Laidlaw.
‘Who’s Guthrie Hawkins?’ Laidlaw asked.
‘He shared a flat with Tony Veitch. The other addresses are Tony and Guthrie’s home addresses. The flat may be vacated by now, of course.’
Laidlaw drained his lime-juice and soda. A bit of ice, eroded to a lozenge, slid down the glass as he replaced it.
‘Thank you, Mr Jamieson,’ he said. ‘I appreciate the time and all the help you’ve given us.’
‘I hope that he’s all right. I think I understand him a little. I think I understand his decision. One of the terrors of academicism is that our criticism becomes absorbed as merely one of its own techniques. Hm? It’s an endless maze. Every exit from one dilemma is merely an entrance to another. Hm?’
It should have been eerie as a man carving his own epitaph. He sat looking old, gentle, charming and hopeless. He gave off a sense of defeat. Yet he spoke without feeling, seemed merely to be commenting. It was as if he had reduced himself to the status of a gloss on his own life.
‘There is something. Guthrie Hawkins is perhaps an example of the crossing of borders I was talking about. Tony Veitch once mentioned in tutorial that Guthrie had a brother in the criminal world.’
‘Do you know his first name?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Observatory Road,’ Laidlaw said as they came out into University Avenue. ‘That’s just round the corner. Off Byres Road. We may as well try it. The other address is in Hutchesontown.’
They got into the car. Laidlaw lit a cigarette. As usual, Harkness was driving.
‘You think Eck knew about Paddy’s death and had to be shut up?’ Harkness asked.
‘Could be, I suppose.’
‘Nice old man.’
‘Brave enough, too. When you think how near his heart the hemlock is.’
15
The peg-board in the window showed a couple of bright blouses and a sweatshirt with a lurex butterfly. The name painted across the glass in cursive red letters was ‘Overdrive’. Beneath it the black printing said: ‘If you like top gear, why not come into Overdrive?’ He went in.
He felt like a visitor from a spaceship, but an interested one. The piped music made him feel alien, as rock always did. His musical taste had stopped at Country amp; Western. The smell of what could have been incense annoyed him into wondering again what the hell teenagers were up to. The clothes didn’t help, racks of the kind of colours that suggested a dressing-room at a circus.
Besides the long racks and circular racks he noticed bright Indian-looking scarves tied from a beam. There was a display of thonged sandals, a section for beads he would have refused as a prize at a fairground. He heard a voice.
‘Try it on. I think you’ll see what I mean.’
He walked along a rack of dresses and a girl emerged at the other end. She was wearing a shocking-pink blouse with one shoulder and sleeve missing and leopard-skin trousers that would have fitted a gnat. She was doing everything but carry a megaphone. She smiled a smile that was twenty years ahead of its time and condescendingly acknowledged the awkwardness of his hulking invasion of her trendy world.
‘Yes, sir. Can I get you something?’
‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘Ah’m no’ holdin’ Hallowe’en this year.’
He looked casually past her at the slatted saloon doors that were the entrance to the two small fitting-rooms. Beneath one set of doors he could see a good pair of legs that were trying on a denim skirt.
‘But don’t mind me. Ah can wait.’
He looked back at her and enjoyed the way her face had lost its composure and was fumbling for the right reaction. She looked properly young again and her accent had got lost in the post.
‘Lusten, mister. Whit is it ye want?’
‘Well. Nane o’ these is quite ma colour. Could Ah see the manageress? Is Lynsey Farren in?’
‘Whit for?’
‘Hen, suddenly Ah’m in a hurry. Tell ’er.’
‘Whit for?’
He looked round and located a beaded curtain blocking a doorway. He walked towards it. Coming behind him, the girl called, ‘Miss Farren!’ The curtain was pulled aside and the face that looked past it renewed his interest of last night. It looked as if it had ordered the future, which would be coming along on a silver tray. The face took him in like passing traffic and referred itself to the girl.