My Life as a Man (21 page)

Norman came to my side. For a big man, he moved quickly.

‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘How did I miss those?’

The glass of the painting was covered with dark brown flecks.

Instead of complaining again Bernard crossed to stand on the other side of me.

‘Fuck!’ His voice was just above a whisper, and I was alarmed to see that his face had gone grey.

‘That would be the
mot juste
,’ Norman said cheerfully.

Bernard turned away and sat down. He sank forward, head in his hands. ‘I shouldn’t have brought him here,’ he said.

Norman had one knee on the couch and was leaning forward to pick delicately with his thumbnail at one of the flecks on the glass. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. I love Colquhoun. And
over there’s a MacBryde. Such dear friends, I thought it would be nice to let them face one another. And I simply didn’t see these.’ Scratching at the last trace of the fleck.
‘It shows that you should move paintings around or you stop seeing them, even the ones you love.’

With a sigh, he wriggled his bulk round and settled on the couch. I was left standing between the two brothers.

‘You’ve caused more trouble than you could imagine,’ Norman said.

‘None of it was—’

‘Eileen’s fault? So why isn’t she here with you?’

That took a long time to explain. I told them everything I could think of, except what the old crofter had told me about August’s real name and his relationship to Beate. When I was
confused, Norman would ask one question and then another until things were clear to him. Bernard’s head came up but he didn’t say anything. Only, as I went on, the grey in his cheeks
was replaced by a flush of blood.

‘So you left the poor man,’ Norman said at last, ‘with nothing to show for his morning but a bag of pastries. Unless, of course, he ate them as he walked home.’ He shook
his head at me. ‘You have a weakness for stealing cars.’

Incongruously, I thought of August’s car left behind in the yard at the factory; biscuits, jam, marmalade and half a dozen bars of fudge in the boot. And something else, besides: the box
of newspaper clippings. If they held a clue as to who my father had been and what he had made of the world, they were gone. I didn’t suppose I would ever see them again.

‘You dirty little bastard,’ Bernard said. They were his first words in half an hour. ‘You ran away and left her.’

Tired of Norman’s complaining of hunger, Bernard stopped abruptly as we ran through a small town.

‘Where’s this?’ I asked in the car park of the hotel, and Norman grunted, ‘Pitlochry.’

He had mutton broth, then a steak pie, pushing aside the vegetables and asking for more potatoes to add to the half-dozen already on the plate; afterwards he crammed in a pudding. Watching him
sweat, chins quivering as he shovelled it in, made me feel sick, but didn’t stop me finishing a plate of haddock and chips. As for Bernard, he emptied a pot of coffee while he waited for us,
and had a brandy with each of his last two cups.

In the middle of his meal, spraying flecks of pastry as he spoke, Norman assured me suddenly, ‘You did the right thing.’

What could I say in reply that wouldn’t be ridiculous? I hope so?

‘You got in over your head, and now you want to make everything all right again. I understand that.’

Gloomy Bernard pushed away his plate of uneaten food.

‘And that’s how it’s going to be,’ Norman said. ‘Eileen’s had her fling and we’ll take her home. It’ll be as if it never happened. She’s
been strange for a long time.’

Staring at the table, Bernard said, ‘She lost a child.’

‘Alice,’ I said.

When he glanced up, I saw that he hated me, but his head went down again so quickly it wasn’t hard to think I might be mistaken. ‘After the child died, she blamed herself and wanted
to be punished. If I punished her, it was what she wanted.’

‘She didn’t need that,’ I blurted. I alarmed myself, but as much out of shame as courage went on, ‘Whatever she needed, she didn’t need that.’

‘A boy . . . How would you understand?’

‘It’s not difficult. All it would take is to be a decent human being.’

‘She tried to commit suicide. More than once. I kept her where I could keep an eye on her.’

‘Everything just as it was before,’ Norman said. I saw the dark wad of food churning in his open mouth as he chewed. ‘Except that I don’t think we could see our way to
giving you your old job back.’ He giggled. ‘Sorry.’

I hadn’t thought any of it through properly. I’d wanted to make Eileen safe, and I couldn’t do that by myself. But if I’d gone to the police, what could I have told them?
That we’d stolen money and a man who had given us shelter might or might not have seen it? But if I arrived with the Morton brothers, August couldn’t do anything against three of us.
That was the way my mind had worked. Now, as the muddle cleared, I asked myself the obvious question.

If they drove away with Eileen, what would happen to me?

When I couldn’t stand the silence any longer, I said, ‘August is a dangerous man. I don’t know if I made that clear.’

What was I doing? Asking that they wouldn’t go off and leave me with him? Was I pleading? I gathered the scraps of my pride around me and closed my mouth tight.

‘It had better still be there,’ Norman said.

It took me a moment to realise he was talking about the money.

‘Where did it come from?’ If I was going to get hurt because of it, why shouldn’t I know?

At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, ‘It was Mr Shea’s money.’

‘How could it be?’ I had thought of him as a little street thug, someone you hired.

‘Who says crime doesn’t pay?’

Cutting across Norman’s high-pitched giggle, Bernard snarled over his shoulder, ‘Leave it!’

Norman, however, was in no mood for taking orders.

‘Certainly I wouldn’t know where that money of his came from – best not to know.’ He paused an instant as if inviting a protest, but Bernard had sunk back into silence.
‘Bernard met him first through a mutual acquaintance. He was interested in politics, would you believe? And even more against trade unions and all that sort of thing than my brother is. The
two of them did some things together, and I was informed but not entirely
involved
.’ The same giggle burst from him, an overspilling of some mysterious source of high spirits.

‘Anyway, when the big thing came along, we were, you could say, overstretched. Out of our depth, more or less. Put it this way, we didn’t have what was needed to pull the last lever
we needed to pull. And there he was, ready to help, for a not entirely fair share of the rewards. Mr Shea and his case of money. It had to be ready cash, the gentleman we were dealing with insisted
on that. He’d been out in Kenya governing the niggers for so long he’d got into their way of doing business. But when he saw the money, he refused to take the case! It seems Mr Shea
kept his money in the Clydesdale Bank.’ He tapped me on the arm, ‘You understand? Clydesdale Bank notes offered to an English gentleman. He thought Shea had printed them himself. To be
fair – it’s important to be fair, isn’t it? – Bernard was magnificent at calming things down. He promised the notes would be exchanged for Bank of England notes. The
gentleman was placated – not difficult since he didn’t want to lose his bribe. The only thing he insisted on was that Bernard make the exchange. And Shea let my brother have the case to
complete the transaction. It shows how an English gentleman taking a high line can upset the Sheas of this world. That seemed to be that. Everything back on track. And then you came along.’
He sighed and said sorrowfully, ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’

Driving the car away with Eileen beside me was an event in the distant past. An archaeologist digging into prehistory might be able to tell something had been built on a particular spot, but not
why. After a time, there was nothing but guesses.

I shook my head.

‘Anyway, Mr Shea wasn’t in the best of tempers when he came back empty-handed from chasing you. Unfortunately, his solution was that we should pay him what he’d lost. He
couldn’t see it was a problem we all shared.’

‘Shea’s dead,’ I said. ‘The receptionist, Theresa, told me.’

‘Didn’t you see it in the papers?’

‘I haven’t seen a paper in a while.’

‘They made quite a splash of it. It was on the wireless, too – not just the Scottish news, the one from London as well.’ As the car took a corner at speed, the fat leg nudged
mine. ‘He was found at three in the morning lying in the middle of the road outside the Stevenson Memorial Church in Belmont Street. It took some time to identify him, for there wasn’t
much of his face left. Although his head had been beaten to a pulp, there was no blood, which meant he’d been brought there after he was killed. The police decided he’d probably been
dumped from a car. They wanted to know if anyone had seen a car stopping at the church after midnight. If he was killed indoors, they said, the room must have been covered in blood. Halfway up the
walls, they said. We’d to keep our eyes open. Lots of appeals like that. But he was such a bad man, I doubt if they’re looking too hard. The Deputy Chief Constable himself told me
– this was after his third malt – Shea was responsible for four killings they couldn’t prove. People were too afraid of him to testify, he explained. Do you know what he told me
then?’

He waited until I admitted I didn’t know.

‘Whoever killed that bastard should be given the freedom of the city.’ He could hardly get the words out for giggling.

The difficulty came with the network of back roads we then found ourselves in. Over and over again, I was faced with the choice of turning left or right as narrow roads came to junctions or
split off, more than once ending in a farm track. Through all this the two brothers were surprisingly quiet, but the temperature climbed until sweat ran down my back. The only thing I could think
was that I’d reacted to the first glimpse of the mountains and turned off the main road too soon. It didn’t help that as the minutes passed Bernard’s speed rose so that whenever
he stamped on the brakes to surge round a corner the wood of hedges rattled against the window beside me.

We were past before it registered.

‘That’s it! The sign I told you about!’

I twisted round to look back and he hit the brake so hard my side was battered against the dashboard. He put down his window and, leaning out, reversed in the dark. We’d passed the post
going the wrong way. Now, reversed beyond the opening, the headlamps still shone on the back of the sign; but when, rubbing my bruised kidney, I got out to check I could just make out the crude
daub done, August had told me, by his sister:
SNACKS
. We were there. For better or worse.

There was no attempt to conceal our arrival. As Bernard swung into the yard, our lights flooded across the front of the house. He pulled in behind Eileen’s car, still in the same place
outside the shed in which the pig had been killed. Before the engine was switched off, Norman had heaved himself out. As I came beside him, he was fiddling at the boot with the key I’d given
him.

‘You didn’t lock it,’ he said and lifted the lid.

I was sure I had, but there was no point in arguing. There wasn’t anything to say. The case wasn’t there.

Bernard was already walking towards the house. Before he got to the door, it opened and Eileen stood in the entrance. They exchanged words, but though I’d started towards them their voices
were too low for me to hear what was said. She turned and he followed her inside.

Coming into the room, over Bernard’s shoulder I saw Eileen sitting down again at the table, where a place was set for her. August was already seated opposite her, a plateful of food half
eaten in front of him. Beate was leaning back against the sink, as if she’d turned from her work at the interruption. For an instant, it held composed and still as a painting and then Norman
burst in behind me.

‘I’ll put the police on you. Where’s the phone?’ he cried.

‘We don’t have one,’ August said. His voice was that of a man from the islands, lilting and apologetic. Sitting at the table, shoulders bowed, slumped over his food, he seemed
much smaller than before.