The Low Road

by A. D. Scott

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  For Elka Ray

  By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes,

  On the steep, steep side of Ben Lomond,

  Where me an’ my true love were ever wont to gae,

  By the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.

  Oh ye’ll tak the high road,

  An’ I’ll tak the low road . . .

  —Traditional

  PROLOGUE

  He shuddered as he got off the bus outside the main gate of the former Duke Street Prison. There was a give up all hope air about the prison gateway and the crenellated castle structure above. The main archway and two minor arches either side were bricked up, derelict and dirty-soot-darkened bleak; the ending of more than a century of punishment had neither reformed nor inhibited the crime that flourished in the poverty of the city. That the prison was in keeping with his mission was a thought he preferred not to think about.

  He turned in to the street leading to the flat of his old friends and slowly climbed between tenement terraces; here large families shared one- or at most two-roomed flats, with a communal stairway and often communal outside lavatory. The walk was a slow struggle, as he’d forgotten how steep the brae was.

  He couldn’t recall when he had last visited the family, when they had all been together: the father (his friend and colleague), two boys, and Mrs. McAllister, a woman he had always had a sneaking fancy for, her being so pretty and bright and a great cook. He had a bad feeling that the last time he’d visited had been for one or other of the funerals that left a widow with one son.

  He was not impatient as he waited for her to answer the door; at their age he well knew how long it took to rise from the armchair and shuffle down the hallway to the door. Looking around in the half-light of the close, feeling the chill of stone walls and the draft coming down the dark staircase from the top landing, four floors up, he fancied he could feel the high-summer June warmth from outside in the street drain out through his Sunday shoes onto the slate flagstones.

  He knocked.

  “Who is it?”

  Her voice was not as he remembered it—more an old crow than the linnet of years ago. “It’s Gerald Dochery, Mrs. McAllister.”

  She opened the door. Even with the light behind her it was a surprise. My God she’s aged, he thought. Then he remembered, Me too.

  She neither smiled nor seemed surprised. “Come in.” And she turned and walked down the hallway, expecting him to follow. The wallpaper was faded. The light that came from high up in the hall ceiling, filtered through a lampshade that had been installed a week after her honeymoon, was as washed out as her hair. The flat smelled of old people, but that Mr. Dochery did not notice, as he smelled the same.

  Then he recalled, It’s been nearly fifteen years since we last met—at her husband’s funeral.

  Both knew he would not visit without a reason and delayed what they sensed would be a difficult conversation. They chatted on the usual—weather, health, the infrequency of buses. After tea and a finger of shortbread, which he himself had made—baking being his hobby since his wife died—he told Mrs. McAllister why he was here.

  “There’s this man frae the Highlands. I’m told he’s a friend of your John. Needs help so he does.”

  She gave no indication, but the spoken and the unspoken—that Mr. Gerald Dochery was bringing trouble to her door—was now confirmed.

  “And what would the man’s name be?”

  “Jimmy McPhee.”

  The name meant nothing to her. “Where can he be found?”

  “Last I heard he was Barlinnie Prison. Now . . .” He shrugged.

  He knew that in this city a man could easily disappear: in the slums of the Gorbals, in the derelict areas of the Clydeside docks and warehouses, and in former merchant buildings. A merchant city, a high-Victorian homage to tobacco and cotton and slavery, the city was streets and terraces and private enclaves of former wealth and glory, interspersed with ruination more usual in bombed-out Europe than in the Great Britain of 1959.

  “I wouldn’t be bothering you, missus, if it wasn’t that this McPhee character is in danger of his life. And the man likely to do him harm is ma son, Wee Gerry.”

  She looked at him. Saw his age. His pain. “I’ll let John know.”

  “Good enough, missus.” He knew he could hope for no more.

  They said their goodbyes as though it would be their last meeting in this realm.

  As she shut the door she wished Mr. Dochery had not come. Trouble, she thought, the last thing ma John needs is more trouble.

  ONE

  The letter arrived two weeks after his fiancée, Joanne Ross, was released from hospital. McAllister read it and put it aside. Mother doesn’t know that Jimmy McPhee is more than capable of looking after himself, was his reasoning.

  Then two weeks later, at the offices of the Highland Gazette where he was editor, a note, in a plain brown envelope, was delivered by hand. It read, Meet me at seven tomorrow in the snug bar. The writing was rounded school-pupil-in-fourth-form script. He had no doubt whom it was from, even if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of a redheaded young man loping off down the Wynd to the High Street like a lurcher ambling behind a Traveler’s caravan.

  It was an appointment he knew he had to keep. There was too much history between himself and the matriarch of the McPhee family.

  “McAllister.” Jenny McPhee acknowledged his presence, and with a left jerk of her head, indicated he should sit. A glass of whisky was brought in by a middle-aged barman with no memorable features whatsoever, and a white linen tea towel over his shoulder with what looked like someone’s brain matter encrusted on one end.

  McAllister forced himself not to shudder, as the man wiped the none too clean glass with it.

  Though he was thinking Jenny’s buying, what does she want? he knew better than to ask. He waited. After the second round, and after the Highland ritual of asking after family health and happiness was observed, he watched Jenny stare into the light-peat-colored liquid, swirling it around the glass, releasing the scent of heather and peat and high summer on the moorland.

  He was fascinated by this woman. Seeing her examine the whisky, another image came to him, the image of an old Gypsy woman near Seville, looking deep into a crystal ball, shuddering at what she saw, before throwing her shawl, a bright yellow embroidered shawl, over the offending image. And not long after, Madrid fell to General Franco’s forces.

  They were of the same age, the Gypsy woman and Jenny, but Jenny McPhee was a Highland Traveler, not Romany, and although their ways were similar, their antecedents were completely different. For McAllister, however, a powerful woman was always beguiling, no matter her age or tribe.

  “Our Jimmy.”

  The name shook McAllister from his dwam. He hadn’t seen Jimmy McPhee, her second son and right-hand man, for some time, but the recollection of the letter from his mother made him listen carefully. And look more closely at the woman sitting opposite.

  She’s not herself, he thought. Her hair was mostly white in that bleached-out, slightly yellow way of former redheads. Her skin, always dark from years traveling in a horse-drawn caravan, was now not just the color of a walnut, but the texture also. And her coal-black buttons of eyes had equally dark rings underneath.

  He felt that somehow the fierceness of Jenny McPhee had been tamed, much as the ponies and horses, beloved by the Traveling people, were tamed and trained by her son Jimmy.r />
  Having made her decision, she sighed and her mouth tightened; asking an outsider for help was not something she did lightly, but this outsider was from the city, it was in his bones. Plus she thought he would still have contacts from his former job in the city newspaper. “Jimmy,” she started, “he’s gone missing. Glasgow was the last place he was seen—about four weeks since. Not that I’d normally worry, but he’s due back here weeks ago—has to get the horses ready for the Black Isle Show. It takes months to get them in condition—an’ he’s never missed a show since he was a bairn—since he was in the womb even.”

  He felt she knew more than she was telling. Then so was he. She had her shawl clutched around her as though she was feeling the chill of one of those long summer nights where the light evaporated for a few hours yet was never completely dark. But it was mild. Balmy even. Except Jenny McPhee seemed cold, and McAllister knew that feeling too well.

  “I phoned Barlinnie Prison after I got your message,” he said. “He did thirty days for breach of the peace but was released two weeks ago.” From the look on her face he immediately knew he should have told her. And paid heed to his mother’s warning.

  “And how did you know he was there?” Jenny was not perturbed that her son had been in prison, but she was not pleased McAllister knew and hadn’t told her.

  “My mother wrote to me. An old friend of our family mentioned something of Jimmy’s whereabouts.”

  “You should have told me!” But her anger died as swiftly as it arrived. “Sorry. You’ve had your fair share o’ troubles yerself.”

  She knew what had happened to Joanne Ross his fiancée; she had visited the hospital once, and visited at McAllister’s house twice. And Jenny McPhee was well aware how long it could take to recover from a blow to the head, days in a coma, locked up in a cellar by a volatile madwoman. It’s a wonder she survived, Joanne’s mother-in-law had told her, even as she fussed over a tinker woman’s visiting the house and McAllister’s allowing the visitor into the sitting room.

  Jenny had heard the rumors of perhaps permanent brain damage to Joanne. Even now, six weeks after the rescue, there was no firm verdict as to whether she would recover completely. But she had always thought Joanne Ross was a woman of strength—a strength Joanne herself did not recognize.

  McAllister acknowledged the older woman’s ire. Leaving a message in this public house, which she was rumored to own, would have taken him no effort. “I apologize, I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  She waved a hand as though cooling porridge. “One o’ ma sons in the gaol for a few days . . .” The slight shrug of her shoulders and gesture said it all. “Oor Jimmy no’ coming home to see to the horses, that’s different.”

  Jenny McPhee knew in her bones, mostly in her solar plexus, when danger threatened. A life on the road, the treatment of Traveling peoples through the centuries, and the weather made Scottish tinkers a wary, superstitious lot. And suspicion of outsiders, who could never know their ways, or their language, had kept them alive, if not healthy. Jenny and Jimmy McPhee’s relationship with McAllister might seem a friendship to outsiders, but both sides were aware it was far more, and far less. There was respect. And the acknowledgment that they could never be close. On McAllister’s part, he was never sure what drew him to Jimmy McPhee. Perhaps I’m just a romantic, he thought.

  Jenny knew better; she recognized a fascination with violence in McAllister, knew it came from the streets he grew up in. And in an unformed way, she knew men like McAllister, forever chaffing at the conformity of his chosen life, romanticized the Traveling peoples, not seeing that their life too was confined, by weather, the law, antagonistic townsfolk. And now, in the twilight of the old ways—settled life in houses, cottages, and council schemes—their millennia-old way of life was ending.

  McAllister apologized again. “I’m sorry, I should have been in touch before now. Tomorrow I’ll make a few phone calls, see if I can find out more.” He was trying not to check the time, but he knew he should be back home. Joanne was not up to making the cocoa, reading the story to Jean, her younger daughter, and putting the girls to bed.

  “It might be best if you go to Glasgow.” It was a challenge. She was looking into his eyes, daring him to refuse.

  Yes, he thought as he returned her stare, she does know what she’s asking of me, so it must be serious. “Let’s wait and see. But I’ll ask around, contact old colleagues, try to track Jimmy down.”

  “Aye, you do that.” She was still staring into his face as she said it. He looked away first. There was a loud shout from the bar next door, the banging of a door, then sudden quiet, before the usual barroom murmur recommenced.

  “Give Joanne my regards,” Jenny said, releasing him.

  • • •

  Driving home across the river, the late sun hovering in the west made the water glint like whisky in a glass held up for the traditional toast, Slaínte.

  He had acquired an affection for the town, and its inhabitants, and chastised himself for not being more appreciative. It was undeniably attractive: the castle looming high above the river, the handsome Town House, the mixed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture with some buildings dating back to the seventeenth century and earlier still intact. As he drove past and admired, he thought, Yes, this is a bonnie place—but for a well-traveled and well-educated man like himself it could be boring, parochial even, a county, a country, with one foot still firmly in the prewar era.

  The meeting with Jenny McPhee had also revived what he had been trying to quash—the overwhelming sense of helplessness he felt when confronted with Joanne’s condition. He had never known fear as paralyzing as the fear of losing her. He had never known rage as powerful as the rage he felt on discovering it was one of their own, the former Gazette advertising manager, who had been responsible for Joanne’s imprisonment. And now he was ashamed of his need for normality, his need to escape the troupe of doctors and nurses and police and friends and parents-in-law who visited his home, stayed for tea, chatted, smiled, forcing a cheer that fooled no one, disturbing the peace and the quiet and the anonymity that he so cherished.

  But Joanne was alive. They were about to be married. He would no longer be pitied as a middle-aged bachelor, at the mercy of every war widow in town. One of his mother’s favorite sayings popped into his head: Count your blessings, she’d tell him. But he had been too young and too arrogant in his affected persona of escaped-from-the-slums-now-star-journalist to hear the wisdom in the platitude. Or was it a hymn? A Sunday-school song, perhaps? Having lost religion, he wasn’t sure.

  He changed gears down to second to drive the last steep slope to the district where he had lived since arriving from the city to revamp an ailing local newspaper. The absence of life on the tree-lined streets depressed him. Not like Glasgow, he thought. On a summer’s night like this, the women will be sitting on doorsteps, on walls, out the back green, chatting, laughing, yelling at the bairns running wild, playing cowboys and Indians. Or skipping with a length of clothesline. The chip shop will be busy. And the men will be down the pub.

  He knew Joanne could never understand his fascination for the dirty, decrepit city, long past its glory days of the Victorian Merchant City era. Though still magnificent, it was the people, his clan, his tribe, that he loved the most. He smiled when she described the thick air, dirty with traffic fumes. He knew she hated the constant noise and shouts and fights. He once asked her if she had had firsthand experience of the city violence and had laughed when she’d said, No, but I’ve read about it. From Edinburgh folk, most likely, he’d replied before telling her of the journalists’ axiom: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

  When he came home, he found Annie, almost twelve, the daughter of his fiancée, in the sitting room. She said, “Mum’s asleep,” and told him her wee sister, Jean, two and a half years younger, was also asleep.

  Seeing the girl now comfortably nestled on the sofa with a book, an empty cocoa mug on the fl
oor beside her, McAllister did not think to tell her to go to bed. He too found the long white nights unsettling: a time out of time; not light, not dark, the midnight dim seemed like the light of a half-remembered dream, all color washed out, the outlines of mountain, river, loch, and sea blurred, yet distinct—and time felt suspended.

  McAllister started to talk. Quietly, he began telling her of his day at the Gazette.

  She told him she’d like to work in a newspaper. “Or be a writer,” she added.

  He believed her. He told her to do one or the other, telling her journalism can ruin an aspiring writer. They discussed the house—Joanne wanted to move to somewhere new, or back to her own wee prefab, changing her mind daily. Annie said she wanted to stay in this house. She liked the attic, where she could hide out and read without her sister or grandmother interrupting. She liked the old wood-burning kitchen stove, and it was a short walk to the academy, where she was certain to win a place when the eleven-plus exams results were announced.

  “I might have to go to Glasgow for a few days,” he told her. “I’ve a few things to sort out.”

  “You’re not going to leave us, McAllister?” Annie asked.

  He heard her anxiety and he hated her father for what he had done to his family. No matter how many in society accepted it as the norm, for McAllister domestic violence was never, ever, no matter the circumstances, acceptable. “My mother wrote to me. I need to see her. I’m also on a mission to try to persuade Mother to come here to visit. To meet you all.” He was disappointed in himself for telling a half-truth, something he’d sworn he’d never do. But, he thought, the story belongs to Jenny McPhee.

  “Good enough,” Annie said in imitation of her grandmother. “Go over a weekend. Granny Ross can be here with Mum, and Granddad will take me and Jean out to the pictures.”

  He knew the timing was wrong. And leaving felt cowardly. But from the moment the thought had formed, he knew he needed to breathe the air of Glasgow. He needed to be where no one knew him or his situation. He needed respite.