The Papers of Tony Veitch (11 page)

He nodded to the pavement thirteen storeys below. Mickey Ballater couldn't believe how silly the boy was but he was trying to. This was unbelievable but it was happening. What struck him was how seriously Hook was taking it.

‘For Christ's sake,' Hook was saying. ‘You get a grip. The man's just askin' a question. Tony owes him money.'

‘I don't believe that.'

‘But it's true,' Mickey said.

‘Tony Veitch's got money. His mother left him it. He doesny need to owe anybody.'

‘Ah don't mean he borrowed it,' Mickey said. ‘Ah just said he owes it.'

‘What for?'

‘That's ma business.'

‘Fine. Take it with you when you go out. Like as fast as your legs'll carry you.'

Hook held up his hand to forestall Mickey. He looked down at two boys playing with a ball.

‘Gus. Ye're no' in a book now, son. This is serious business. Ah didny want to come here. Ah tried for ye at the flat. Then Ah knew ye wid be here for yer dinner. There's people in a hurry tae find where Tony Veitch is. Mickey's just one o' them.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Big John Rhodes is lookin'. And Cam Colvin.'

Gus looked from one to the other, unbelieving.

‘Come on. Tony blew his finals.' He laughed. ‘Is Cam a member of the University Senate?'

‘Whatever that is, Ah think your Tony did a bit more than that,' Mickey said.

‘They reckon he did Paddy Collins,' Hook explained.

Gus stood looking over the balcony as if he had never seen the view before. He started to laugh and stopped and looked at the sky. When he looked back at them, his certainty was already clouding.

‘Tony?'

‘Tony,' Hook said.

‘But why would he do that?'

‘He owed Paddy as well,' Mickey said. ‘I came up and we were gonny collect together. By the time I get here, Paddy's dead. Veitch's shot the crow. Looks a bit that way, doesn't it?'

‘You reckon?' Gus was looking at Hook.

Hook nodded.

‘So what's it got to do with me?'

‘You shared a flat, Gus,' Hook said.

‘And what's it got to do with you?'

Gus was completing his thought, running through Hook's statement. Hook was shifty.

‘Cam isny too sure about me. Paddy an' me fell out a wee while back.'

Gus's stare left Hook wanting a shield against it.

‘Anyway, Ah know you liked him, Gus. Better if Mickey finds him. If he does, he'll have a chance to check if the boay did it, before Cam gets there.'

‘I don't know where he is,' Gus said.

‘You must have some kind of information,' Mickey said. ‘Ah'm holdin' Cam Colvin off. He doesny know about you.'

‘Then tell him.'

‘It's no' you that's gonny get the napalm. It's yer brither. That wouldny do yer mother a lot o' good.'

Gus looked into the living-room. His father was sitting like somebody found at Pompeii. His mother was reading the paper. Seen from outside, the room looked small, some chairs and ornaments, the pathetic sum of two hard lives. And here on the balcony was what those lives had produced, a hooligan whose existence mocked their decency and a student who still hadn't begun to repay them for what they had given.

He felt an anger that was never far away from him. He
looked down at what had been the Gorbals. This was improvement? His parents lived thirteen storeys up in a building where the lift broke down if you looked at it askance. His father's life had made him an offshoot of the bookie and the pub. His mother still offered the world an irreducible decency the world didn't deserve. Something had to be done. In the meantime, he couldn't bear to add one more worry to their lot.

‘Gus,' Hook was saying.

Gus looked at Hook, then at Mickey Ballater.

‘Don't you two come back,' he said.

But he knew himself the aggression of the remark was no more than stylish surrender. Why should he protect Tony Veitch? Let Tony look to himself. Gus's parents were more important. Yet he resented how his brother was teaching him to hate himself. Family shouldn't matter that much, but here it did. He thought how his father admired Hook more because he lived by his body, whereas Gus was just a reader of books. For his father it was better to batter one aggressor into the ground than try to help all the non-aggressors like himself. It was a strange philosophy, but not uncommon where Gus lived. What did this place want?

‘Okay,' Gus said. ‘I'll tell you the only thing about Tony that might help you. There's a girl called Lynsey Farren. Lady Lynsey Farren. Lord Farren's daughter. She was with Tony. Then Paddy Collins. Then Dave McMaster.'

Ballater knew he was getting close.

‘Where do Ah find 'er?' he asked.

‘She's got a shop in East Kilbride. Called Overdrive.'

‘Thanks, Gus,' Hook said.

‘For being a shite? Don't mention it.'

Distantly, Gus watched them go into the living-room. He saw how animated his father became because Jim was inviting him down to the pub. When they had gone, he saw how contented his mother looked, as if all was well with the world. He saw how Hook was probably nearer to them than he was, though he loved them in a way he sometimes thought might destroy him. He came slowly back into the room. He lifted his book.

‘Oor Jimmy's lookin' well,' his mother said.

Gus didn't look up. He was thinking that he would soon be with Marie and he was glad.

‘Is everything all right, son?'

‘Fine, maw. Everything's fine.'

He tried to concentrate on his reading. But it was strange how he felt on the opposite side of the book from that with which he had identified before Jim and his friend came in. He felt he was one of the people Aimé Césaire was talking about rather than to.

‘In this disarming town, this strange crowd which does not gather, does not mingle: this crowd that can so easily disengage itself, make off, slip away . . .'

 

 

 

 

14

^‘
A
distinct tendency to sculpture whimsy,' the tall man said. His eyes contemplated nothing thoughtfully.

‘Not unlike Joyce's poetry.' The small man was fat with black hair like a bush. He spoke with an assurance that suggested it was burning. He wore the kind of intense spectacles that draw the pupils like a poultice. ‘But at least he had his prose. Isn't it strange with Joyce how the originality of the prose never seems to transfer to the poetry? As a poet, he remained slightly sub-Georgian. “Lean out of the window, Goldenhair.” My God.'

‘Or like Emily Dickinson. Reducing all experience to lace doilies.'

‘At least it makes a change from the spurious passion of Lawrence. You can't read his poetry without feeling drenched in saliva.'

‘Jesus,' Harkness said quietly.

‘If we're dropping names, that's a good one,' Laidlaw said.

‘How
about
this?'

They were sitting in the Glasgow University Club bar where Mr Jamieson had left them. He was a senior lecturer in English who had known Tony Veitch but he had gone to look for a
younger man who had been Veitch's tutor in his final year. Laidlaw was staring at his lime-juice and soda. Harkness was taking his lager like anaesthetic. Around them the heavy buildings and empty quadrangles seemed to shut out the city, giving them the feeling of being at the entrance to a shaft sunk into the past. Certainly, the only other two people in the room were having less a conversation than a seance, though they only seemed to summon the dead in order to rekill them.

‘Have there not been any good writers, like?' Harkness asked.

The talk of the two university men reminded Laidlaw of why he had left university at the end of his first year, having passed his exams. He found that the forty-year-old man agreed with the nineteen-year-old boy. He suspected that a lot of academics lived inside their own heads so much they began to think it was Mount Sinai. He disliked the way they seemed to him to use literature as an insulation against life rather than an intensification of it.

He liked books but they were to him a kind of psychic food that should convert to energy for living. With academics the nature of their discipline seemed to preclude that. To take it that seriously would have annihilated the limits of aesthetics.

Listening to their exchange of attitudes in what amounted to a private code, he didn't regret the youthful impulse which had pushed him out into the streets and now brought him back here, by a circuitous and painful route, as an alien visitor. He didn't want to be included in that clique of mutually supportive opinions that so often passes for culture.

He remembered what had finally crystallised his rejection of university. It had been having to read and listen to the vague
nonsense of academics commenting on the vague nonsense of much of what D. H. Lawrence wrote. Coming himself from a background not dissimilar to Lawrence's, he thought he saw fairly clearly how Lawrence had put out his eyes with visions rather than grapple with reality that was staring him in the face. You needn't blame him for hiding but you needn't spend volumes trying to justify it either; unless, of course, it helped to make your own hiding easier to take.

‘A lot of what passes for intellectuality's just polysyllabic prejudice,' Laidlaw thought aloud.

Harkness remembered Laidlaw telling him that he'd left university at the end of his first year.

‘Were you glad to get out of here?'

Before Laidlaw had answered, they saw Mr Jamieson come back in alone. Laidlaw rose to get him a drink. Mr Jamieson took a whisky and joined them.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘Tony's tutor isn't in today. It's a pity. He knows Tony well. But the academic year is really over, of course.'

He was a frail man with thinning grey hair and pale eyes. His voice was gentle.

‘But you know Tony Veitch quite well,' Laidlaw said.

‘As a student, yes. He had what I would call a serious intelligence. By that I mean he thought ideas were for living, not just thinking. Hm?'

He nodded infinitesimally towards the other two, who were still talking. He bit his lip briefly as if dismayed at the garishness of his own indiscretion.

‘Academicism, of course, can be mental formaldehyde. A way for people to put their brains on display without actually
doing anything with them. Tony wanted more. For him any idea he accepted carried a responsibility to living along with it. He was an interesting thinker. Is, no doubt. It's some time since I've seen him.'

Laidlaw was set to ask something, Harkness could see, but Mr Jamieson was preoccupied in following his own thought, like someone out to net a butterfly.

‘That's rare, of course. Though less rare here than in some other places. I was glad to come back to Glasgow for that reason. The borders are crossed more easily here, of course.'

Laidlaw noted the intellectual trick of that ‘of course', a way of stating something you might only just have realised as if only fools could be unaware of it. It disarmed close examination.

‘How do you mean?' he asked.

‘You get a lot of first-generation academics here. And some of them are not inclined to endorse the rules of academe too quickly. There's a strong autodidact tradition in Scotland, you see. I happen to believe it's especially strong in the West. Such people don't submit too happily to academic categories. They can have a refreshing swingeing freedom of mind. Mind you, too often career seduces them and they conform to get success. Every year some Visigoths arrive. And every year I feel renewed hope. Perhaps among them there's an Attila of the mind – if you'll excuse a racially mixed metaphor. Someone who will reanimate our rituals by attacking them. Tony had possibilities in that direction.'

Laidlaw was beginning to be more and more interested in Tony Veitch.

‘As far as his crossing of borders went? I mean, did he
associate with people who didn't seem to fit with university life?'

‘Hm? Well, I was his tutor, not a social worker.'

When he stopped talking, the voices of the other two men seemed never to have let up. They weren't reading or drinking or even looking at each other. They just sat casually communing with their own profundity.

‘A despair as actual as leprosy.'

‘Imagine a Somme,' Mr Jamieson said, ‘where everyone is immortal. Nothing can happen, of course. But, oh my God, the noise!'

‘Mr Jamieson,' Laidlaw said. ‘About Tony Veitch.'

‘Yes. Tony hated that.'

‘Is that why he ducked out of his finals?'

‘I should imagine so. He seems to have been doing well in the papers he sat. He was rejecting us, I suppose. Perhaps not without reason.' For the first time his eyes achieved a clearly specific focus, emerged from the abstract. ‘Do you think you'll find him?'

‘We were hoping you might help,' Laidlaw said, not without some recrimination in his voice.

‘Yes. I'm getting an address for you. We tried ourselves, you see. At first. We hoped it might be possible to make some arrangement for him to take the other papers. But he obviously didn't intend that anyone should find him.'

‘Did he seem to you a violent person at any time?'

The pale eyes smiled.

‘Isn't everyone?' The remark was unexpected in his mild mouth. ‘He was certainly intellectually violent. Iconoclastic. But then many young people are.'

A woman with glasses came in, wearing a smile that was like opening a window in a stuffy room. She gave Mr Jamieson a piece of paper and went out.

‘Thank you, Sybil,' he said and passed the paper to Laidlaw.

‘Who's Guthrie Hawkins?' Laidlaw asked.

‘He shared a flat with Tony Veitch. The other addresses are Tony and Guthrie's home addresses. The flat may be vacated by now, of course.'