The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

  Everybody, Laidlaw thought, must know many of them. He himself was in debt to countless of them, aunties and uncles, strangers chatted to in pubs, small miracles of humanity witnessed, unself-aware. Recently, on a trip back to Ayrshire, he had caught up again with another, Old Jock, an ex-roadman in his seventies who lived uncomplaining with his wife on a pittance of pension, spending more on his budgies than he did on himself. His modest Calvary had been forty years on the roads for barely enough to feed his family and him, coming home on black winter mornings from a night spent spreading grit, his hands bulbous from overuse and skinned with the cold. He had taken it as no concern of anybody but him. It was what he did. Laidlaw remembered him admitting, almost embarrassedly, that he had never clenched a fist against anyone that he could remember in his life.

  Faced with people like Jock, or Jinty Adamson, Laidlaw was reminded that he didn’t want the heaven of the holy or the Utopia of the idealists. He wanted the scuffle of living now every day as well as he could manage without the exclusive air-conditioning of creeds and, after it, just the right to lie down with all those others who had settled for the same. It seemed to him the hardest thing to do.

  Jinty herself, he thought, was a hard case. How else could she have stayed so innocent? She demonstrated her hard innocence now. In the middle of her grief her head was still sifting details, trying to remember.

  ‘Baker,’ she said. ‘Not Baker. Brown. That wis the woman’s name. Her name was Brown. Alec wis goin’ between her an’ him. That boy Veitch. She lives in a big house. She knew where the boy was stayin’, right enough. But she only kept in touch through Alec. Some problem wi’ her man, Ah think.’

  They thanked her again and left her alone with her television, like the Lady of Shalott with a distorting mirror.

  26

  Friends, I’m not proud of it. But I can admit it now. I neglected my children. I beat my wife. Drink was my God. Until I found Jesus. Let him come into your life, friends. Behold. He knocks at the door. Will you let him in?’

  ‘Behold’ was the give-away for Macey. He didn’t like words like ‘behold’. To him they were people talking in fancy-dress, acting it, playing at who they weren’t. Macey knew who the speaker was. He was Ricky Smith from Govan, a man who had been known to knock at a couple of doors himself, usually with a claw-hammer.

  There weren’t many people in the Buchanan Street pedestrian precinct. A few of them had paused in the vague vicinity of Ricky, the way they might have for a sword-swallower or an amateur Houdini disentangling himself from ropes. Other people’s sin was one way to brighten a dull Sunday.

  Macey had chosen a bench a bit apart and to the side of Ricky, so that he wouldn’t be recognised. Salvation wasn’t what he needed just now, at least not Ricky’s brand. It interested him to hear a version of a life he knew about.

  ‘Friends, name a sin I haven’t committed, a bad thing I haven’t done.’ Fellatio with an Alsatian, Macey thought. ‘When I look back on my life, I’m disgusted with myself. I can hardly believe my own sinfulness.’

  Ricky was overstating it, Macey thought. He had been bad enough, wouldn’t have done too well in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. He had punched a few faces, treated wee Mary as if marriage was a fight to the death and he was for surviving, finally behaved as if he had hidden something he had to find at the bottom of a bottle and couldn’t remember which one. He hadn’t been a nice man.

  Macey was glad for him now. Ricky looked a lot better, though his face had that slightly dessicated look a lot of reformed bevviers had. They were like people who’ve had to amputate a part of their own nature to survive and the infected part was where unthinking pleasure was. It was certainly better for Ricky to be battering people’s ears than anything else.

  But why did found-again Christians all have to claim they’d been Genghis Khan? Macey looked at the three people who were with Ricky, a woman and two men. They were scanning the faces of the bystanders with a fierce attentiveness, like showmen gauging the effect of the performance. For Macey they had a look he recognised among do-gooders, an intensity that never quite connected, an openness like an iron grille. They were reaching out to shake hands with life, but they kept their gloves on. They kept glancing at Ricky in a proprietary way, as if they’d found the authentic wildness of evil and seen it turn to good.

  As far as Macey was concerned, Ricky didn’t really qualify. If they had got a few others to stand up there, Macey would have converted on the spot. But he didn’t expect to see John Rhodes or Cam Colvin or Mickey Ballater or Ernie Milligan taking Ricky’s place. And they were who Macey was trying to deal with in his mind.

  ‘We have a choice,’ Ricky was saying.

  Some choice. If he told Rhodes or Colvin or Ballater, and Milligan got to hear of it, he wouldn’t be seeing Jean and the baby for a while. He couldn’t face that Peterhead. But if he told Milligan and the others got to hear of that, he might not be seeing Jean and the baby at all. He didn’t fancy being the packing for a concrete stanchion. That’s what Cam had done with Vince Leighton. Macey had never told anybody he knew that. Some information you kept to the grave or it became one.

  Macey had no illusions about his status in this situation. He remembered a nature film on the telly where he had seen a small bird that hopped about an alligator’s mouth, getting the pickings from its teeth. Or was it a crocodile? Same difference, if the jaws shut at the wrong time. Macey saw himself as the small bird. The jaws were the criminals and the police.

  Macey just wanted to survive. He had nothing against this Tony Veitch but he had nothing particularly in favour of him either. Everybody was at it. If those were the rules, you better be at it yourself. Macey saw himself as a middle-man. He didn’t invent the conditions; he just worked out how to survive in them.

  ‘Friends, when will you make your choice?’

  Macey stood up and walked away. He had made his. He would have to put it into operation with care. When you were jay-walking among juggernauts, you had to pay attention.

  27

  Opening on Sunday evenings was an experiment for the Tea Tray. It wasn’t working.

  Harkness, who had been here a few times with Mary, could understand why. Its customers weren’t exactly night people. It was a place for morning coffee, afternoon tea, for making small rituals out of the boredom of lives which were ‘successful’ without ever having found the self-doubt to examine the terms of that success. The voices he had heard here seemed to him to go round and round the same pre-occupation – family, friends, possessions – like well-kept poodles being taken for a walk. It always gave him a quiet dose of the creeps, Madame Tussaud’s with words.

  The place had been Alma Brown’s choice. Having eventually contacted her in Pollokshields, they had found her talking as if the phone was bugged. After much devious finagling, she had fixed a time later than they wanted and a place more boring than Harkness imagined anybody could want.

  It reminded him mysteriously of a couple of rugby clubs he had been in, places of raucous masculinity measured by the gullet, where the sexual ravings had a distinctly hysterical tone to them. The connection, he decided, was that this place was the female counterpart of those ones, cliché calling to cliché and wanting to mate in mutual unawareness. He thought, not for the first time, that he must be a people’s liberationist. (His mind avoided the word ‘libber’ because where he came from to lib meant ‘to geld’.) This was as good a place as any to set up his standard.

  It was quiet. Two well-off ladies in late middle-age were massaging each other’s egos over the coffees, listing which of the other’s dresses each liked best. The only other people were Harkness and Laidlaw. Harkness was leafing through the Sunday Mail. Laidlaw, with the Observer, had done the sport, the arts and the news skimpily in that order.

  ‘Maybe the fish is articled to the Church,’ Laidlaw said. Harkness looked at him.

  ‘Nine letters.’

  ‘Thought you’d been putting bennies in your coffee.’<
br />
  Alma Brown came in. They had only seen her before in the context of Veitch’s house in Pollokshields, where she had learned to fit. Here she looked slightly vulnerable, a woman who must have been in her late thirties and still looked almost gawky with her own sexuality. She was flushed with haste or nervousness and when she opened her coat as she sat down the front of her black wool dress was distractingly busy. Harkness caught Laidlaw glancing at him and remembered Laidlaw saying once, ‘How many times is that you’ve fallen in love today? It’s been a quiet one.’ Harkness ordered more coffees.

  While they waited for the coffee to come, she went through a protective routine of checking her handbag for cigarettes and gold lighter, putting them on the table, laying the bag on the floor beside her chair, placing her silk scarf over the back of the chair. Harkness and Laidlaw declined one of her cigarettes, which were menthol. Like inhaling cottonwool, Laidlaw felt. He took one of his own.

  ‘Well,’ she said to Laidlaw when she was ready. ‘What is this about?’

  ‘D’you know Eck Adamson?’ Harkness asked.

  Something very small happened, no more than a stutter in her coffee-spoon, and a little coffee shipped into the saucer.

  ‘Eck? What’s that short for?’

  ‘Alec. Alexander.’

  ‘Alec Adamson. No. Who is he?’

  ‘Was,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He’s dead.’

  She made to lift the cup and didn’t bother. It was very full and her hand didn’t seem too steady. Laidlaw drank from his.

  ‘What’s the Eck short for?’ he said. ‘Some case this. It’s more full of liars than the House of Commons. Maybe we’ll find out the truth about Tony Veitch in time to put it on the headstone. Drink your coffee, Miss Brown. It’s all you came to do.’

  The atmosphere at their table belied the place. Harkness was having a familiar feeling. Why was it that sometimes just making contact with Laidlaw was like trying to shake hands with a hedgehog? It was happening again. Laidlaw seemed bent on pursuing his career as a kind of interior desecrator, going about Glasgow laying quite pleasant rooms with wall-to-wall tension. He was doing a good job this time. She stared at her coffee for a while before looking at Laidlaw.

  ‘I think you’d better explain that remark.’

  ‘Certainly. You were in the room when I mentioned Eck yesterday at Pollokshields. And he still comes as a surprise to you. I’m not saying he’s the most memorable name in the world, but under the circumstances I would have thought you would remember. Eck Adamson knew you but you didn’t know him. How does that come about? Was he watching you through binoculars? You know nothing about Tony since he disappeared but Eck was an intermediary between Tony and you. Miss Brown, you talk such convoluted crap you must have a tongue like a corkscrew.’

  After tapping her cigarette ineffectually against the base of the ashtray, she dropped it in, still smoking. The small bit of stage business seemed to give her the time she needed.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘You can have my coffee as well. It costs too much for me.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll meet at the funeral,’ Laidlaw said, putting out her cigarette for her.

  She had taken the scarf from the back of her chair but she didn’t stand up.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Nothing, I hope. But somebody’s looking for Tony. Judging by the way he’s going about getting the information, it’s not to give him a provident cheque. Tony’s been mixing with a lot of rough people. The kind who could kill a man on the way to the cinema. And still enjoy the picture.’

  Harkness could see her eyes trying to back off from the implications of what Laidlaw was saying.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe he did something they didn’t like.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Or maybe he’s got something they want. Like money. Tony does have a lot of money. Doesn’t he, Miss Brown?’

  She stared at him, nodding.

  ‘Money can get you anything. If you’re careless enough with it, it’ll get you dead.’

  Harkness thought she was going to cry. Her eyelids flickered as if she had a mote. She let the scarf fall into her lap and seemed to be looking for something. He reached down and gave her the handbag. But after she had ferreted there it wasn’t a handkerchief she came out with. It was a grubby piece of paper which she handed to Laidlaw. Opening the two folded sheets out, he skimmed them quickly.

  ‘Milton threw it out,’ she said. ‘But I salvaged it. It feels like a part of Tony to me.’

  Laidlaw passed it to Harkness and, while he read it, she was talking a gloss.

  ‘That’s what Tony’s been through. Only he understates it . . .’

  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 s
hard 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.