‘Are ye now?’
Watt takes his foot off the brake and lets the car roll down the other side of the bridge. ‘Better than Stirling Moss, any day of the week.’
At the other end of the bridge he restarts the engine. The High Court glides past on the left, a long, low blackened building with a columned portico.
Manuel’s face follows it. ‘Ever been in there?’
Watt knows the question is a prompt. Manuel wants Watt to bat the question back so he can roll out his stories. Watt decides not to, out of spite, because he is defensive about his driving,
‘Why the hell would I have been in there?’
It’s a throwaway line but neither of them says anything for a while so the spiky comment hangs uncomfortably in the car.
They’re not getting on any more. They both start to think about what they want from each other.
Watt takes a left and plunges into the tunnel under St Enoch’s railway lines. A train grinds slowly by overhead. The railway tunnels are dark, a piss-tang smell seeps in through the windows. The coal smog is heavy and damp here, it swirls at ankle height. This dank world is peopled with tramps and whores from Glasgow Green and clapped-out street fighters. A burning brazier lights men with fight-flattened noses slumped against a crumbling black wall.
The car makes it out the other side and they head up town, dodging rumbling trams and staggering drunks. Watt is sobering up. He feels his rational mind wake up. He felt terribly drunk just then because of the confusion of their leaving Jackson’s Bar so suddenly, of their coming out from the warm into the cold, leaving the embrace of good regard for a cold street and a sore conversation, these things have thrown him off his stride, made him melancholy, but he’s regaining equilibrium. He makes a decision: he will take Manuel to his brother John over in Bridgeton. John will be sober. John will witness Manuel telling William where the gun is. He glances at his watch. It’s ten to ten. Too early. John will still be finishing the books. Watt needs to play for time.
They cross a busy junction and Watt realises why he is feeling so sad: he misses the power he felt in Jackson’s. His mind rolls through ways to get that back and Ah! He realises where they are. The Chamber of Commerce is one street over, straight ahead is the Sheriff Court, the Merchants House, the City Chambers, the Trades Hall. This is the epicentre of Glaswegian prosperity and respectability.
A good, warm feeling washes over him. He drives slowly on, passing the Trades Hall, a perfectly symmetrical Robert Adam building. It is full of rich people and rich things, friezes, oak-panelled rooms with roll calls of officer bearers since 1605 etched on them. Power and prosperity and respectability. Watt wants to sit outside and warm his face in the glow of it.
But Peter Manuel is common and Watt cannot be seen with him and being this drunk is disgraceful. Still, even being near the Trades Hall would rekindle that lovely cosseted sensation. He draws over to the kerb and parks.
‘Why d’you stop?’
Watt smiles graciously. He opens his mouth and shuts it and thinks–I want to be near powerful, upper-class people. It thrills and comforts me. I want to be near them, not you. You make me less. You are cheap.
He can’t say that. He nods across the road. ‘Swift one in the Steps Bar?’
It is a clerks’ pub, full of office types, straights. Manuel smiles at the soft lights of it. He is aspirational, Watt forgot that. It’ll be a treat for him to go in there for one and on the way back out Watt can look at the Trades Hall again, at the windows and the beautiful doors, at the historic stained glass. Since 1605 the Guilds of the Fleshers and the Hammermen, the Maltmen and the Gardeners and all the other trades have had their associations here or nearby. Some of the Baking families go back fifteen generations, almost to its foundation. Over the centuries the networks tighten and the money builds until a guild of grocers, worried about cheap apples from Ayr, have spawned slave armies, funded fleets and built an empire. The Trades Hall and the Merchants House work together. They are power and money and respectability. The Industrial Revolution saps their official power but by then they’ve amassed so much money it hardly makes a dent.
Watt sees himself as the coming man. He’s a businessman, not a tradesman, his path will be through the Merchants House, but still, as he locks his car door, his eyes linger on the warm windows of their sister association, the Trades Hall. He thinks he will soon take his place in that line of dynamic men who made the world cleave to their will. This they did by having the mettle to do things others would find distasteful. They gain mastery by enslaving weaker men, by profiteering, doing that which must be done, by meeting Peter Manuel. It is a timely reminder of what he is doing this for. The lights warm the back of his fat neck as he crosses the road away from it.
The entrance to the Steps Bar is a few stairs up from the street. There are two doors. Red carpet creeping beneath one denotes the lounge area, red and white tiles under the other the public bar. They go through the door to the public bar, the cheap seats.
An oily smog of cigarette smoke hangs in the room. Four or five men sit alone at tables. They all look tired. They are suited in the old-fashioned way, double-breasted, wide-shouldered, conservative business fashion from ten years ago. The ashtrays are glass, not tin. It is a confident signal that the clientele are trusted not to hit each other and if you want that sort of evening then just move on, bub.
Watt and Manuel approach the bar. Watt orders half and halfs. The wiry, weathered barman has a grubby black apron and steel suspenders on his sleeves. Watt winks: Make the Scotch doubles. The barman salutes with two fingers to his temple, As you will, sir.
Watt looks at Manuel, expecting him to be pleased, but Manuel rolls his eyes. ‘Watt, don’t think you can get me drunk. I can pour this stuff down my neck all night.’
Watt is glad that Manuel has mistaken his need for drink for a cunning ploy. He is quite self-conscious about his drinking.
The drinks arrive. Watt drinks half of his beer and then drops his shot glass into it. It’s a silly thing to do, childish, a way of making the drink more fun. He lifts the double glass to drink and sees Manuel disapprove.
That cuts him. He’s warming himself at the thought of the Trades and the Merchants, sharing their money and power and status, and now a man who is just out of prison is sneering at him.
Watt drinks. Through the white froth smeared on the beer glass he sees Manuel’s expression deepen. Uncomfortable, Watt keeps drinking because he doesn’t want to put the glass down and have a conversation about his drinking. But there, it’s finished and he has to. He puts the glass on the bar.