Dear Father,
I’m conscious of how corny it is to be turning against your father so I’ll try not to make this too long. But that’s what I’m doing all right. I would say I was ‘rejecting your values’ except that that seems too grandiose since I honestly don’t think I’ve been able to locate a serious value of yours that was ever more than money.
What prompts me to write this just now is that I’ve packed up university, didn’t finish my finals, and I’ve got a mental picture of you being convinced that I did it to spite you. That’s not true. I did it for myself. What I have against you is a lot more than could be expressed by blowing the finals.
I’ll clarify that. That was one weird childhood you gave me. I suppose they all are so I won’t labour it. But what age was I when my mother died? Eleven. Up till then the things that happened in the house had just been there like furniture. But when my mother went, the loss sent me looking. I used to spend a lot of time then opening up bits of the past and trying to see what was inside then, turning over memories to see if I could understand them. I suppose I was trying to keep some of my mother.
What I think slowly dawned on me was that they were all really memories of you or maybe of her hurt in relation to you. It was as if she couldn’t reach me past you, your dominance of her, your dominance of both of us. I began to realise how badly you had treated her, how badly, it seemed to me, you treated everybody. I didn’t rush to judgment. But I had my own sense of you now and I waited and watched and, I’m afraid, confirmed.
I apologise for that now. Who needs a witness for the prosecution in the house, taking notes? All I can say to lessen the rottenness of that is that I was also a witness for the defence. A lot of nights I used to lie in bed, unravelling my sense of you, and try to start again the next day. It didn’t work too well.
Anyway, the last thing you need is that stuff. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think I’ve got any right to accuse you. But I think I’ve got the right to behave towards you according to the sense of you I have — it took me a lot of years to get it. And don’t imagine Alma helped to make me lose respect for you. She always tried to defend you. I don’t know how quickly I realised that Alma had been involved with you before my mother died. But, funnily enough, that only made me more sympathetic towards her, I suppose because you seemed to me to treat her the same way.
I don’t think we should have any contact from now on, at least not for a while. One of the things I’m trying to do is simply work things out for myself. For example, I’ve just decided what honour is for me: the refusal to relate to other people exclusively on your terms and the refusal to let them relate to you exclusively on theirs. On one of those counts, I think you’re a dishonourable man. And the hypocrisy with which you’ve bought yourself a progress through the world appals me.
I was making a note for myself the other day and it was only when I had finished I realised I was trying to say something I believed about you: an image of authority: the priest talks steadily, dynamoed on unshakeable conviction. His voice is stern but kind, hardened on his understanding of the nature of the enemy, his thoughts rich with past analogies. The girl’s head is lowered in the shame of being known. She is too ravelled in the mystery her body has become to notice that his voice goes momentarily blunt. The priest has seen a unique shard of sunlight, never before existent, never again to happen, caught in her hair. Under his cassock, he is masturbating.
Tony.
‘They had some terrible quarrels.’ She was raving quietly, saying anything that came to mind. Coming from a person of such studied correctness, the passion of it shocked Harkness, as if they had put a coin in a drinks machine and it was dispensing a cataract. ‘Terrible quarrels. And Milton was wrong. He wouldn’t give Tony room to breathe. Tony hates what Milton stands for. He once told Milton the only way he could make love to a woman was with a dildo made of tenners.’
She stopped suddenly, aghast at what she had said. She thought it over, accepted that she had said it. She looked from one to the other, took a drink of her cooled coffee. She stared at the table.
‘I didn’t even know what it meant at the time. When I did, I knew it meant something about me as much as Milton. And it does. Oh, it does. I wish it didn’t.’
‘So why do you stay?’ Harkness asked.
The expression she turned to Harkness made him feel naive. It was hurt and baffled, like someone looking through bars and resenting the freedom he had to ask such a question.
‘Because I can’t see how to leave,’ she said. ‘I’ve known him for nearly twenty years.’
The vague misgivings Harkness had had about her crystallised. He thought he understood something. He remembered the assurance of Milton Veitch, like something made of marble, and how long it must have been like that. He imagined her young. She must have been very beautiful. She must have thought how lucky she was having someone like Milton Veitch wanting her. He would give her so much, but only so much. And what he wouldn’t give her, a sense of her own worth separate from him, was precisely what would nail her to him. Now she still looked good but not as good as she had looked, and somehow incomplete, like someone who had got herself in a correspondence course and couldn’t keep up the payments. Harkness knew who were running that course. He expressed it to himself in a simple thought. Men are a bunch of bastards. Laidlaw confirmed it for him as he thought it.
‘Miss Brown,’ he said quietly. ‘I understand how protective you feel towards Tony. But anything you know about him you should tell us. For his own good.’
‘I can’t.’
Harkness winced for her because her refusal declared her knowledge and he knew that Laidlaw would make her give up her small pride in her loyalty. Harkness thought he did it harshly.
‘Well, if you don’t, you could be protecting him to death. You could be putting six feet of ground between him and the nasty world. If that’s what you want.’
She took the two sheets of paper, put them in her handbag, clicked it shut. Perhaps it was long practice that enabled her to give up her pride so gently.
‘Kelvin Drive,’ she said. ‘Flat 8, 8 Kelvin Drive.’
Harkness lit her cigarette for her and paid the coffees, buying her another. They thanked her. Harkness would have lingered but Laidlaw was in a hurry. As they left her in a place where she didn’t belong, Harkness wondered where she did. While Laidlaw drove, Harkness stared out the passenger window.
‘That felt pretty shitty.’
‘Yes,’ Laidlaw said.
‘Very, very shitty.’
‘Come on, Brian. It’s hard priorities.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, it is. Chivalry has its limits. Better a hurt woman than a dead man. Kelvin Drive. That’s right beside those phone-boxes. If only we’d known. I hope we’re not too late already.’
Harkness, in his anger, was looking for some way to get back at Laidlaw, no matter how petty.
‘Christ, I hope we’re not too late,’ Laidlaw said again.
‘Perchance,’ Harkness said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Nine letters. Perchance.’
28
There was no perchance about it. There is a mildly disturbing sense of activity that surrounds the discovery of a death in a city, like the buzzing of flies. It is a small distraction in normalcy. The longest running show on earth has come to town and that fascination with dangerous tricks that can dilate with a little wonder the most blasé eyes claims its craners for the riskiest feat of all.
What looked like the advance publicity for someone’s last performance was waiting for them. They knew the signs. As they crossed Queen Margaret Bridge they could see ahead of them, at the corner beyond the bridge where you turn left into Kelvin Drive, three or four people standing. They had the unselfconsciousness of bystanders, a preoccupation like people in a painting. They were practitioners of a style that must have had its representatives at the crucifixion. One of them was pointing towards what Laidlaw knew was his destination.