Brond (26 page)

The farmer laughed and as he walked away a black dog that had been crouched in the grass sprang up and followed him, looking back at me over its shoulder. When he had gone, I walked up the brae
until I found a good site. I unrolled the sleeping bag and lay listening to the burn and eating the last of my chocolate; over and over in the trees behind me, a chaffinch did his run-up-and-bowl
song; it sounded sweeter than the ones at home, but like people chaffinches have different dialects; I thought about that and then I thought about sleeping and then I told myself it didn’t
matter as long as I rested. A fox barked. Waves kept running up the shore and I came properly awake and it was traffic on the main road and I was out of that night into another day.

‘Ye changed your mind then.’

It was the tall stooped farmer. His face was brown with deeply scored lines in the cheeks.

‘That’s right. I decided against the midges.’

He walked at my side back across the long field.

‘This is the life,’ I said, ‘We could be a million miles from anywhere. We could be on an island out in the middle of the Atlantic.’

‘An island . . .’ He spat into the grass. ‘Ah canna bear the sea. Ah’ve bided here all my days. Except the one time. And ah got all the travellan ah’d ever want oot
o that. In a khaki uniform tae the other side o the world. The Japs took us the same day the auld “Prince o Wales” was sunk. This place does me fine – ah’ll no leave it a
second time.’

At the top of the slope, we were ambushed by the main road. Container lorries in convoy shook the air and left an ache of silence. ‘Ah don’t regret going. It was a thing that had tae
be done. Mind ye,’ he finished with a serious nod, ‘thae three years ruined me.’ I had no answer to that, and he walked back through the washed early morning light with the black
dog at heel.

Later in the afternoon, I was going through a village when I heard my name called. ‘This is me at home,’ Donald Baxter said, picking seeds from the pouch of his lower lip. I had
thought he lived in an armchair at the Men’s Union, the oldest student in captivity. Despite the plaid shirt open at the neck, his concession to countryside and summer, I suspected the
woollen underwear would still be there and all the way down to his ankles. Clutching a bunch of black grapes, he had appeared from a dark little cave of a village store and stood blinking in the
sunlight. ‘Back to the big city? Why not?’ he pondered. ‘Any excuse for a party.’ He came back in a clapped out Marina, one wing punched in and gaping from a past collision.
As he braked to a violent stop, flakes of blue-daubed rust detached themselves from the injured part. ‘Auntie’s car,’ he said, and somehow that explained what ‘home’
meant and in getting away from there I knew he was doing himself a favour. It was nice not to have to feel grateful. A day-old copy of
The Herald
was lying on the front passenger seat; as I shifted
it to make room for myself, I saw a banner headline telling of murder and a picture of the old politician who had died in the Riggs Lodge Hotel. Glancing, Donald Baxter said, ‘Full of years
and dishonour. A treacherous old bastard from a long line of them going back to Flodden. In any decent country of self-respecting Christians, he would have been assassinated long ago.’
Driving one-handed, he groped on the shelf and produced as in a way of celebration a bottle of whisky. We passed the bottle back and forth.

Passed it too often. Drunk on an empty stomach, I ended up in Baxter’s room intent upon getting drunker. At some moment during what followed, he made the old silly jibe of calling me the
Homicidal Pacifist and, when I objected as before, reminding him that he had been a conscientious objector during the war, he cried, ‘Not a bloody pacifist! Not then or now. Like Young, I
held to the articles of the Treaty of Union. I would join no army but the army of an independent Scotland.’ That seemed so silly to me, I began to laugh, but then when I thought of what I had
read about the Nazi horrors and remembered that poor devil of a farmer I had met in the morning, I grew angry and told him that he might not be a bloody pacifist but he was certainly either a
bloody coward or a lunatic.

‘I understand why people get irritated when Scots go on about independence,’ Baxter said in a tone of disinterested kindliness. ‘I feel the same about Shetlanders – or
about the Orkneys. Little piss-pot islands. Whining, “We’re Orcadians. We’re not Scotch.” Bugger them, I think. Let’s send a gunboat. A wee gunboat. A wee wee
particularly
wee gunboat,’ and collapsed laughing at his own joke.

Later we were bottle friends and comrades and I heard myself telling him about Brond; about Kilpatrick; about Muldoon being tortured; but not about how Kennedy died. In the still centre of my
drunken brain, an ape congratulated itself upon being too cunning to tell him how Kennedy died.

‘That’s not real,’ he said, his great dish face pouring sweat. ‘That stuff you’re telling me. Don’t try to kid a kidder. That stuff doesn’t happen in
never-never land. I don’t believe you. Nobody here would believe you. We know real things happen on television and always somewhere else. Not here. If you want to pretend something that
matters is happening here, you’ll have to tell it in dreams and parables. Dreams and—’

That was when I punched him. Blood flew out from his mouth and he fell backwards on to the floor, looking up at me but keeping very still. His lips had burst on his teeth.

There wasn’t anywhere you could hide from history, even when that was what you had settled for.

In the morning, I wakened with a stiff neck. I had slept with my head on the table. The room was empty, but as I climbed up the steps from the basement to the street I heard a noise and, looking
down, saw Donald Baxter swaying with a glass in his hand.

‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Stories end in corruption. Everybody’s does. But you’re like me. One of the sad ones. The worm gets to us early.’

He wept a single tear of malice.

It wasn’t far to the Kennedy’s house. Even walking slowly, it didn’t take me long to get there. I let myself in and went through all the downstairs apartments. I opened the
door of one room and had such a vivid memory of the night I was ill that I expected Jackie to be there and Kennedy at the end of a shaft of light watching us. On the carpet in the parlour there was
an overturned Guinness bottle and a tumbler.

As I came back into the hall, a man rushed downstairs at me in a jiggle of gold glasses, plump waistcoat, a squeal of ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I live here.’

‘Not now, you don’t;’ a fat man settling, as he worked it out, into a merely professional wariness. ‘Were you one of the lodgers? Haven’t you heard? Mr Kennedy and
his wife are selling up.’

‘You’ve seen him—’

He would say yes and Kennedy would be alive.

‘There’s no doubt the property is for sale. We have authorisation from their agent. They are going abroad.’

I did not have to ask for a description of that agent. I had seen those smooth young men of Brond’s. Perhaps it had been the one who took Jackie to Edinburgh, talking softly to her in the
car.

‘I’d like to wash,’ I said.

‘I should really ask for some proof of identity.’

‘Just to wash. I’ll collect my stuff later.’

He looked at the blood on my outheld arm and stood back from the stairs.

Sometimes you need to wash more than to eat. I stripped to the waist and took my time, pouring cool water over the dirt and sweat. In my room I put on a clean shirt. Someone had piled my clothes
and books in the middle of the floor.

When I came down, the man said, ‘I’m not sure that you should still have a key.’

He did not manage to sound like a man who would insist.

In the garden outside there was a ‘For Sale’ board. Perhaps it had been put up while I was inside.

‘I’d like a lift.’

‘A lift?’

‘I’ve no money. If you give me a lift, it would save me walking. I have a weak ankle and it’s too hot to walk.’

To my surprise, he let me into his car and when I told him where I wanted to go he had to pass it on the way to his next desirable property. Ten minutes brought us outside Margaret
Briody’s house. As I opened her gate, she was coming out of the front door.

‘I didn’t kill Peter.’

Till I heard the words leaving my mouth, I had not known that was what I had come to tell her. She didn’t shut the door but waited as I came along the path. If she was grieving for
Kilpatrick, grief wasn’t good for her. She was very pale and pimples at various stages cropped out round her mouth and on her left cheek. As I walked closer, instead of her beauty I saw the
yellow sores of squeezed acne.

‘The police wouldn’t have let me go if I’d killed Peter.’ Because of those stupid unexpected pimples, I was quite calm. I coaxed her. ‘That stands to reason,
doesn’t it?’

‘Can’t you see I’ve had enough?’

Her tone was dull and tired but in spite of herself the separate notes chimed like water over pebbles. She didn’t try to stop me as I went past her into the house. I thought she would
follow me into the front room, but her steps crossed the hall. A door closed.

This was the room where I had surprised Muldoon the night he broke into Margaret’s house: a pair of burglars. I wondered where Muldoon was now. On the table where Margaret had left the
note for her parents, a newspaper lay open in a patch of sunlight. I remembered pale fingers of torchlight probing the darkness. Margaret was speaking to someone. I looked at the picture on the
front of the newspaper: crowds lining a street, soldiers on horseback, carriages. More than ever, murmuring in the distance her voice was like music.

‘You’d better not be here when Dada gets back,’ she said behind me.

‘Who were you talking to then? Somebody’s here. Your Uncle Liam?’

‘No – I mean yes. My uncle’s here – you’d better go.’

She was a bad liar. I realised there was no one except us in the house.

‘Of course, I’d forgotten the phone. You were using the phone in the bedroom.’

‘Please go away. There’s nothing for you here. I can only ask you.’

‘Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to wait here until your father comes back, and if he has anything to say to me that would be all right, too. You know what happened. He can
ask me anything. And when he’s finished I’ll tell him I want to marry you. I’m a university student, I’ll say, and I want to marry your daughter.’

‘You frighten me.’

‘Is that a reason for not getting married?’

‘You’re trying to frighten me,’ she said.

I had not meant it as a threat or a joke. While I spoke I had seen two respectable young people walking up the aisle to get married.

‘I
am
a university student.’ I held out the idea like a talisman.

‘Have some pity. Don’t you know how I felt about Peter?’

‘
I’m
not a policeman.’ Kilpatrick had been a policeman, which after all was also one of the professions and respectable. ‘I’m just – My father works on a
farm.’ Why did I never tell the whole truth about him? ‘He’s just a labourer. He’s a farm labourer. But you might like him. He’s a kind man. He’d be very
impressed by you.’

But not as impressed as he would have been if I could have brought home my expensive whore in her Pringle sweater and soft wool skirt to patronise him in the voice of the gentry. From the
beaches of the south and sunlight off ski slopes, the whore’s skin (and what did it matter if it had been a sunlamp in a stinking sauna and massage parlour?) had burnished brown and pure.

‘What’s wrong? If you’re ill, won’t you go?’

‘Everything’s spoiled,’ I said.

We faced one another across the little table. I could have reached out and touched her. In the shop we had slept together and I had touched her then; but afterwards I had held my whore’s
little naked breast between my hands, fucked her, watched with her as Brond knelt under the rain of the fat woman’s sweat.

The doorbell rang. After a pause, it started again and did not stop.

‘It doesn’t sound like your father,’ I said. I knew who it was.

‘I asked you to go. I said please go.’

Pretty please.

‘Did he give you a number to ring, just in case I came? He likes to play games, you know. It’s because he gets bored.’

‘Leave me in peace,’ she said.

As I waited for her to let him in, I looked at the high black headline above the newspaper picture. He had been an old man, and whatever he had done probably he had thought it was right. He had
been born to it, as my father would say; but, then, hadn’t we all? He hadn’t deserved to be beaten to death in an hotel room, because no one deserved that death. They had given him a
fine funeral, though, and he would have appreciated that since it was the kind of thing he valued.

‘Don’t you understand I just want to be left in peace now?’ Margaret Briody said.

Somebody else who wanted to opt out of history.

NINETEEN

O
f the rooms Brond had filled with his presence, this was the shabbiest. Wearing a black overcoat that seemed too big for him, he sat in a tangle
of blankets on a narrow bed. The room looked worse because of the neat respectability of the rest of the apartment. Primo had led me through past a woman and a young girl busy folding clothes into
two open suitcases. As the woman looked up – pale round face, too tired to be any longer pretty – Primo said, ‘It’ll be all right Beth,’ and I knew she was his wife
and the girl must be his daughter.

Once, hitchhiking, I had slept overnight in a doss house, which should have been an adventure but had left me feeling desolate. This room was like that, despite being neat enough and clean; it
was a bleakness of the spirit. The only decoration was a photograph in a cheap wood frame hung over Brond’s head on the wall behind the bed. The photograph seemed to have been torn from a
magazine and was deeply creased as if at one time it might have been carried folded in a wallet. Putting stuff like that on the wall was the kind of thing children did or what my parents would have
called ‘the lowest of the low’, meaning those who were poorer than we were and feckless in their poverty.