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answered. Brian wasn’t home. Laidlaw apologised. Brian’s father was a nice man who had met Laidlaw several times and who seemed to exempt him from his general dislike of policemen. He took the word about the death and said he would tell Brian the earlier time at which Laidlaw wanted to meet him. But he didn’t know Eck.
    Laidlaw put down the phone and took Eck’s piece of paper from his hip pocket. Holding the paper, he remembered the money. For Eck to have seven pounds was as unusual as a win on the football pools. That number had to be a telephonenumber, three digits for the district. He dialled it. He let it ring fifteen times. There was no answer.
    That not very surprising fact took Laidlaw’s depression further down. If the intensive care unit had seemed like rock bottom, this was potholing. The silence at the other end of the line had felt absolute, as if he had been trying to telephone God. That recurrent ambush of despair about how little we care for one another trapped him again and wiped out any sense of achievement he could imagine.
    Everybody mattered or nobody did. He remembered as a teenager wrestling with lofty matters as if he was the first person ever to think of them, what he thought of as his wherefore-are-we-put-upon-this-earth phase, when he sometimes wandered around with a head like a billboard containing its caption of the day: Is There A God? What Is The Meaning Of Life? He could smile at it now but it was a rueful smile.
    The truth was that some of the impossibilities he had come up against then still haunted him. He could recall giving up any belief in an overall meaning to living because any such meaning would have to be indivisible, unequivocally total, giving significance impartially to every drifting feather, every piece of paper blowing along a street.
    Eck was like one of those pieces of paper. You couldn’t say the meaning of things was elsewhere and Eck was irrelevant. That was a betrayal. All we have is one another and if we’re orphans all we can honourably do is adopt one another, defy the meaninglessness of our lives by mutual concern. It’s the only nobility we have.
    Laidlaw tried to reinstate his energy by declaring war, over his whisky, on all brutalisers of others, all non-carers. Yet thevery thought embarrassed. He would have been such a compromised champion, a failure opposing failures. He admitted to himself that he wanted at this moment to phone Jan at the Burleigh Hotel and felt a double guilt. There was the guilt of being tempted to use Jan to soothe him now when he gave her so little of his life. There was the guilt of betraying Ena. The compromise of his own life, so hurting to others, appalled him.
    But he couldn’t think of anybody else who would care about Eck enough to find out what had happened to him. Laidlaw had better try. Pathetically, it seemed to him, he could only think of small things to do. He would check the address and the names. He would phone that bloody number till somebody answered. He would get a post-mortem tomorrow.
    At least tomorrow he could tell Brian, somebody who would know who was dead. It would swell the mourners’ roll by one. But the thought still left him with an angry sadness.

 
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    7
    H arkness woke up into a problem of his own. It had become his constant companion lately, the ante-room to every day. When was he going to get married? Finding an answer was complicated by the second question which always came attached to the first, like a Siamese twin: who was it he was going to marry?
    Wearily, he went through his early morning programme of thoughts, what he did instead of press-ups. He was fed up scuffling around. He wanted to get married. He fancied Morag. He fancied Mary. He didn’t want to give up Morag. He didn’t want to give up Mary. He wanted to get married. He was fed up scuffling around.
    His present situation confirmed it. He was lying on a couch in his underpants