Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney

notice the difference.’
    â€˜I feel like a Valentine card,’ Brian said. ‘Passing on all these loving messages.’
    â€˜Cheers,’ I said.
    I put down the phone rather noisily and Buster growled at me, his Dobermann ears erect.
    â€˜Shut your face, Buster,’ I said. ‘The world’s queuing up to have a go at me and you’re at the end of the queue. I’ll see you after.’
    We stared at each other. One of the advantages of having big worries is that smaller problems seem irrelevant. It’s all a question of perspective. I felt as if I could give Buster a sorer bite than he could give me.

8
    I imagined a party. That is not a difficult thing for me to do. It has always been a word liable to send my mind off in pursuit of its fabulous nature, like El Dorado.
    This was a big party. It took place in a house in Marrenden Drive, which is a street in Troon, a town not far from Graithnock. Troon is an interestingly Scottish town. It has for a long time had a shipyard. It has also for a long time been a fairly popular coastal resort, where quite a few well-off people have chosen to live. Therefore, it has, like most things Scottish, a dual nature. It is both rough and genteel. Visitors may have to find the roughness for themselves. The gentility will be more obvious. A passer-by might be forgiven for wondering if they toilet-train the seagulls.
    But then that modest gentility sub-divides itself into its own duality, for it conceals not only the fact that some people have much harder lives than the town suggests but the fact that some people have much softer ones. There is considerable wealth here. Marrenden Drive is where some of that wealth resides. In the slightly Calvinist forthrightness of the place, Marrenden Drive is a well-hidden softness, like a secret and surprisingly lush garden where discreet riches bloom into stone.
    The house where the party was held was large and sat in its own grounds. That night it must have been lit up like a small city. Its owner was known for a certain lavishness. His name was Dave Lyons and he had many business interests, though perhaps only he knew what they all were. Besides the house in Marrenden Drive, he appeared to have a place in Edinburgh, where his business was conducted.
    There were maybe sixty or seventy people present at the party. The guest-list was varied. Dave Lyons was a self-made man who had, like a lot of us, played at rebelliousness in his youth and had continued to maintain loose friendships with people from different areas of society. The party would be an expression of his socially eclectic life, with all its disparate elements seemingly reconciled in an atmosphere of warmth and celebration.
    As the evening progressed, the whole house came into use. The party broke up into side-shows, as parties often will. People stood in the kitchen, trapped in one of those drink-assisted debates that seem at the time like the most important issue in the world. In the dining-room, some were pecking at the remains of the very impressive buffet. Music was playing in the spacious lounge, where disorderly dancing was taking place. Who knows what else was happening in other rooms? But upstairs, in what Dave Lyons called the television room, some four or five people sat around, watching a programme. They seem not to have noticed that someone had come in and stood behind their chairs, looking over their heads at the images on the screen. But they couldn’t help noticing what he was soon to do.
    The room was in darkness apart from the light of thetelevision set. In that peaceful dimness, where people lolled with glasses in their hands, what happened must have been like an air-raid on a pleasure beach. A very large crystal vase passed above their heads in a deadly trajectory and converged with the television screen. The set, balanced on one ornately decorative, spindly leg, keeled backwards on to the floor, where it is reported to have expired in a