Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney

breakfast. I’ll see you later.’
    She turned her face, looking past me.
    â€˜You going to be away all day?’ she said.
    â€˜Is that a question or a request?’
    She started almost to smile and waved me out of the room.

10
    â€˜ G us. Right? So you probably think that my real name’s Angus. But that just shows yer cultural parochialism. Guess. On yese go. Ah’ll give yese a hundred guesses. An’ ye’ll no’ get near it.’
    There were some less than serious accepters of the challenge (offering, among others, ‘Angustura’) but I wasn’t one of them. I stood among the jocularity and wondered what I was doing here, what I was doing in Graithnock, what I was doing in my head. The Katie Samson effect was still with me.
    Leaving the Bushfield, I had parked the car in the town centre and taken my obsession for a walk. The town wasn’t interested. I had wandered for a while among the normal business of the day and felt as marginal to what was going on around me as if I had been a religious fanatic wearing a sandwich-board with a message only he could understand.
    Coming in here, I felt worse. Maybe Katie was right about the way we inhabit different plays. I certainly seemed to be appearing in a different drama from anybody else. Obsessively following the script of some gloomy revenge tragedy, I had wandered into a vaudeville show. I had no lines here. All I could be was part of the audience.
    â€˜Wrong. Wrong again. Let me enlighten your abysmal ignorance. The answer is . . . Wait for it . . .’
    The answer was, apparently, Gustavus – ‘as in Adolphus’. Well, the truth was that his name was actually Gustave, since his ancestors had moved from Sweden to France and naturalised the name accordingly. But it had been originally Gustavus. The heavily built man who had been outlining his exotic origins looked as Scottish as a haggis. His ability to decorate the truth with lies and the appreciative response his talent evoked confirmed my sense of the hopelessness of my quest.
    We’re all experts in concealment, hailing one another’s disguises as if they were old friends. Among this jostling crowd of masks, many of which were my own, I couldn’t expect to look upon the truth of what had happened to my brother. There’s nobody here but us liars.
    But by the time the cabaret was over a small revelation had given me renewed hope. Although it was as insubstantial as misting on a mirror, it meant my belief in understanding wasn’t quite dead. I realised who had been speaking.
    Scott had mentioned him to me more than once and I had a conviction of having seen him around the town when I was younger, though the effects of his aging made me uncertain about that. His name was Gus McPhater. Presumably Gus was short for Angus. The fact that he had just spent several minutes elaborately denying that this was the case made it seem likely.
    He was the Baron Münchhausen of the Akimbo Arms. The lies he told were local legend. According to Scott’s intermittent reports to me, Gus McPhater had designed the Queen Mary (‘But some bastard altered the plans. Never was the boat it shoulda been!’), had written the James Bond books (‘IanFleming paid me a lump sum. Ye can shove yer publicity’) and designed the first mini-skirt, foisting it on an unsuspecting public for his own voyeuristic purposes (‘At my age, ye take yer pleasure where ye can get it’). He was a former merchant seaman.
    I was standing in the public bar. Through the arched doorway that joined this gantry to the one in the lounge, I could see that the lounge was almost empty. Two elderly women with plastic shopping-bags beside them on the cushioned bench-seat were tippling quietly, nodding into each other’s remarks. The bar wasn’t much busier. Besides the artiste and myself, there were two men studying the horses as well as a young man distant enough to be