Read Online Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney - Free Book Online

thought I would still be here.
    After closing time, the residents stayed on in the lounge. A guitar-player who had come in after doing a gig in anotherpub decided to become a resident as well for the night. We had a sing-song. In the pauses during it, I had a long, rambling, self-revelatory conversation with Katie. I sang ‘Cycles’ when it was first my turn. Later, when the mood had been established by the right amount of alcohol, I gave them ‘The Learig’, perhaps Scott’s favourite song. As a reward, I received a lot of advice on how to locate Cranston Castle House.
    I might have been in the lounge yet, so good was it, except that I wanted to keep some brain-cells for tomorrow. I took my farewell of everybody as if I had known them all my life. Before going upstairs, I went out to the car and collected Scott’s painting and the bottle of whisky. It seemed a matter of tremendous urgency there and then. When I came back in, I had a brilliant idea. It did not occur to me at the time that it was the same kind of brilliant idea that Caesar had when he decided to go to the Capitol. I rang Jan’s number. Fortunately, no one answered.
    In my room, I unveiled Scott’s painting and set it up against the wall. I stripped and sat on the bed and looked at those images of Scotland. I opened the bottle of whisky. I communed with art and had a long conversation with the Antiquary, recalling old times. I put out the light and went to bed.
    I woke up suddenly in the darkness with two thoughts, distinct as nightlights, in my mind.
    The man in the painting of the five at supper was wearing a green coat.
    How do you die twice?

TWO

9
    A kitchen in the morning: it can be a garden of the senses. The sunlight is shafting in through the window, as if William Blake has been given the commission today and is announcing the sacredness of the everyday. The coffee-percolator is putt-putting like the pulse of normalcy. The aroma it gives off is wandering aimlessly somewhere, inviting anyone to follow. A woman stands in the sunshine, chopping vegetables. The rich smells they release make a meadow in a room. A man sits at a table, drinking coffee. The warmed clay of the cup in his hand warms him fraternally, telling him we’re all part of the same process. I’ll be your cup today, you can be someone else’s later. The man has eaten a good breakfast. A dog drowses on the sunlit floor, occasionally opening one lazy eye on the world. The room around the woman and the man is sustaining. The feeling it engenders is of hope, old failures buried, new possibilities to be born. Perhaps God has taken the twice bitten apple from Adam and Eve, gently healed it with his hand, hung it back up on the tree, said, ‘Try again.’ That kind of feeling.
    If place were only place and the present only the present, but we invade them with the past, complicate them with ourfutures. For I was the man at the table and Katie the woman at the worktop. To individualise the moment is not perhaps, as we think, to save it but to lose it. The room was still the room but we were an unhappy woman and an angry man within it. That melted it into flux. If the world was a new red apple, I was the worm inside.
    I was just Jack Laidlaw finishing his coffee and wondering what to do next to assuage a need for understanding. Katie was an over-worked woman making soup. Even the dog was no canine ideal. It had its own fleas of banality. This was Buster, who had a serious aggression problem. We were accidentally sharing some space. Mike was somewhere mysterious, as he usually was even when he was with you.
    I had wakened with a thought that was still around. While I had a bath and shaved and changed and heard Katie giving the other residents their breakfast, the idea had continued to play about the edges of my mind. During my breakfast in the kitchen, I called it home for a serious confrontation. It seemed to me, in my obsessiveness, that it was a