Strange Loyalties Read Free Page B

find out. Put your question on hold.’
    â€˜Anyway,’ he said. ‘That gives me a problem. Jan coming. I was going to give you my car.’
    â€˜You’ll need it.’
    â€˜I’ll use Morag’s. She can’t drive anyway, the way she is. She’d need to steer from the back seat.’
    Morag was eight months gone. It was their second. Stephanie was fifteen months. They weren’t loitering.
    â€˜You sure?’
    â€˜Be like driving a dodgem car. But I’ll be all right.’
    â€˜Hey, thanks. That would help. You’re not so hard-bitten after all, are you?’
    â€˜I’ve got a soft spot for lunatics. You should never have given Ena the car, anyway.’
    â€˜She needed it more than I did. For the kids.’
    â€˜But how do I get home now? I was hoping you’d drive me there.’
    â€˜I will.’
    â€˜But you’re seeing Jan.’
    â€˜Then you come too.’
    â€˜Oh no. That’s private business.’
    â€˜Brian. We’re going for lunch. Not to the back row of the pictures. We’re all sophisticated adults now, wee man. I think we’ll manage.’
    While we waited for Jan, Brian asked me about Ena and the children. I had seen them the day before, Sunday: the day of the child, the new agnostic sabbath when all over the western world diffident fathers turned up to catch a glimpse of the only things they still believed in from their marriage. They brought gifts of ill-fitting clothes and books that would never be read and membership-cards for leisure centres.
    I was enlisted in their ranks. The idea depressed me. How about years of that stuff? If I died on a Saturday, they would be losing a stranger. I turned away from the contemplation, bruised. I had bumped into another bad thought. Too much of the furniture of my mind seemed to be constructed these days from despair.
    I was glad when Jan tooted the horn. I picked up my travelling-bag, a week in prospect, and Brian and I came out into bright sunshine. Brian waved to Jan and held out his hands and nodded at me. The translation was ‘Blame him’. She smiled. Her smile was a beautiful absolution.
    In the car Jan and I kissed, nothing too hot, just checking that the pilot light was still on. After she had pulled away, she referred to the rear-view mirror.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s following us. He’s coming too.’
    â€˜You feel you need support?’
    â€˜Brian’s lending me his car. I’ve got to drive him back home. What else could I—’
    â€˜Jack.’ She could stroke you with your name. ‘I’m kidding. All right? Just as long as we get some time together to talk.’
    With that voice and the smell of her, a few of the hormones started to bristle: okay, we might be needed here.
    Just when you think you’re dead, life tickles your feet.

3
    W here do they come from, those times? They are no respecters of persons. You’ve decided a day’s just bad business. You’ve coloured it grey, when suddenly it’s blinding you with hues you didn’t know were there. You’re ambushed by pleasure. It was like that at Lock 27.
    We ate outside at the wooden tables. It was a place that had meant something to Jan and me a few times before, slow drinks and long talk that was winding to bed by a devious route, pausing to pick the odd flower from our different pasts, while her mouth turned into an astonishing organism, exotic as a sea-anemone, and I became briefly infatuated with the lobe of her left ear. Those times.
    Today was like an orchestration of them all. The particulars that created the effect didn’t seem too great. But then the notation to Solveig’s Song doesn’t look like a lot, at least not to me. (A music teacher once showed me when I was at school.) Heard, it can melt you.
    Jan and Brian shared a bottle of white wine. I, as prospective driver of some distance, was on Perrier. We ate