Читать книгу Naming the Bones - Louise Welsh - Страница 11

Chapter Six

THE REASONS MURRAY WATSON usually avoided Fowlers were clustered around their customary corner table, looking like a eugenicist’s nightmare. The pub wasn’t busy, but it was warming up with the overspill of office workers and students from more popular establishments so he was halfway to the bar before he spotted Vic Costello, Lyle Joff and Phyllida McWilliams and remembered that this was where they congregated late on Friday afternoons, playing at being the Algonquin club and staving off the wretchedness of the weekend.

Maybe the need to suffer that misery so often brings in its wake would have led him into their company anyway, or maybe he would have settled for a lone pint and a nod in their direction, but then he felt a hand on his elbow and turned to see Rab Purvis’s face, shiny with sweat and bonhomie.

‘I’ll get this, Moira.’ It was typical of Rab to be on first-name terms with the manageress; typical too of him to add Murray’s drink to the round and a tip on top of the price. Mrs Noon nodded her thanks and Rab gave Murray’s elbow a squeeze that told him his friend was at least three pints to the good. ‘Come away into the body of the kirk.’

It had drifted beyond the time where even late diners could pretend to be having a pre-prandial and the department’s dwindling stock of alcoholics welcomed Murray with hearty relief. He was the fresh blood, the bringer of new topics, the excuse to get another round in and postpone the moment when the pub door swung home and they each stepped out alone.

‘Hello, stranger.’ Phyllida McWilliams’s voice had lost its usual edge and now held the full throaty promise of a pack of unfiltered Camels. She leaned over and gave Murray a kiss. ‘Why do we never see you?’

Murray didn’t bother to mention that she’d passed him in the corridor three days ago, her head bowed, looking like Miss Marple’s hungover younger sister.

‘You know how it is, Phyllida. I’m a busy little bee.’

Phyllida picked a blonde hair from Murray’s lapel and raised her eyebrows.

‘He’s a B, all right,’ said Vic Costello. ‘Leave him alone, Phyl, you don’t know where he’s been.’

The woman let the hair fall from her fingers onto the barroom floor. She nodded. ‘Many a true word.’

‘He flits from flower to flower.’

Rab conducted a little minuet in the air with his hand.

Phyllida laughed her barmaid’s laugh and started to recite,

‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly . . .’

It was worse than he’d thought. They must have been there for hours. Murray wondered if they suspected about Rachel. He should go home, make himself something to eat, think things through.

Lyle Joff began an anecdote about a conference he’d attended in Toronto. Phyllida clamped an interested expression onto her face and Vic Costello rolled the beer around in his glass, staring sadly into space. Over by the bar Mrs Noon turned up the music and Willie Nelson cranked into ‘Whisky River’. Vic Costello placed his hand on top of Phyllida McWilliams’s and she let him keep it there for a moment before drawing hers away. Murray wondered if Vic’s divorce was finalised and if he had moved out of the family home yet, or if he was still camping in the space that had once been his study.

Phyllida leaned against Murray and asked, ‘Seriously, where have you been?’

She took his hand in hers and started to stroke his fingers.

‘Around.’ Murray tried to return her flirt, but he could see Vic Costello’s slumped features on Phyllida’s other side and, despite the rips in its fabric, the banquette they were sharing was reminiscent enough of a bed to invite un­welcome thoughts of ménage à trois. ‘I was at the National Library today, working though what’s left of Archie’s papers.’

‘Oh.’ Phyllida’s fascination was a thin veneer over boredom. ‘Find any fabulous new poems?’

‘No, but I did find notes for a sci-fi novel.’

‘Poor Murray, out to restore and revive, and all you get is half-boiled genre fiction.’

Murray laughed with her, though the barb hurt. He took out his notebook and flipped it open at the pages where he’d copied down the contents of Archie’s jotter.

‘I found this, a catalogue of names.’

Phyllida glanced at the scribbled page.

‘Obviously trying to work out what to call his characters, and doing rather badly, poor sod.’

Murray wondered why he hadn’t realised it earlier. The disappointment sounded in his voice.

‘You think so?’

She gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘Shit, I thought it might have been something.’

He snapped his notebook shut.

Murray’s curse seemed to wake Vic Costello from his trance. He necked the last three inches of his beer.

‘It’s my shout.’

‘Not for me, thanks.’ Lyle Joff raised his glass to his lips and the last of his heavy slid smoothly down. ‘It’s past my curfew.’ He gave Murray a complicit look. ‘Bedtime-story duty. Winnie the Pooh – a marvellous antidote to a hard day at the coalface.’

As preposterous as the image of chubby Joff at a coalface was, it seemed more feasible than the picture of him sitting at the bedside of freshly washed, pyjama-clad toddlers reading about a bear of little brain. Murray had been introduced to Joff’s wife at a faculty party once; she was prettier than he’d expected. He wondered how they’d met and why Joff was so often in the early-evening company of people for whom the only alternative to the pub was the empty flat, the armchair tortured with cigarette burns and the book collection that was only so much comfort.

Vic Costello looked at his watch.

‘It’s gone half-nine. They’ll be safe in the land of Nod by now surely, long past breathing in your boozy breath, Lyle.’

Lyle Joff looked at his own watch as if astonished to see that the hands had moved round. He hesitated, then looked at his glass as if equally amazed to find it empty.

‘You’ll get me shot, Costello.’ He grinned. ‘Just one more for the road then.’

Vic raised his empty glass in the air until he caught the attention of Mrs Noon. He held five fingers up and the manageress gave a curt dip of her head to show she’d oblige, but only for the moment.

Phyllida leaned over and whispered, ‘You’re a cunt, Vic. You won’t be happy until that boy’s marriage has gone the same way as yours and you’ve got a full-time drinking companion.’

‘Why would I need that when I’ve got you, Phyl?’

Costello gave her a hug. Phyllida pushed him away.

‘You forget yourself sometimes.’

Drink took the sting from the scold, but there was a seed of bitterness in her voice that would blossom with more watering, and when Vic Costello tried for a second squeeze her shove was impatient.

The tray of drinks arrived and Lyle Joff helped himself to a fresh pint. He took a sip and wiped the foam from his top lip.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my marriage.’

‘I’m sure it’s rock solid.’ Rab patted Lyle’s arm and asked Murray, ‘Have you met Lyle’s wife? A beautiful girl, classical profile, a touch of the Venus de Milo about her.’

He winked and Murray wearily took his cue.

‘Armless?’

‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

Phyllida laughed and Lyle said, ‘Built on strong found­ations. Love, affection, shared values.’

He looked into the middle distance as if trying to recall other reasons his marriage would endure.

‘Children,’ Phyllida said. ‘Children are a blessing.’ Vic Costello excused himself to go to the gents.

Keeping his voice uncharacteristically low, Rab turned to face Murray, cutting the pair of them off from the rest of the company.

‘I’m glad you dropped by.’ The phrase sounded old- fashioned, as if Murray had accepted an invitation to afternoon tea. ‘I owe you an apology, for coming on too strong when I saw you last. Just because I’m not getting any doesn’t give me a right to become one of the moral majority.’ Rab’s face set into a stern inquisitiveness, eyebrows raised almost to the ridges of his brow. It was only acting. The look he gave nervous students to encourage them to speak up. He held out his hand. ‘Shake?’

Murray had let slip about Rachel a month into the affair. The two men had eaten dinner with a visiting speaker then gone for a drink on their own to discuss the lecture free of its author. Maybe it was the combination of wine and beer or maybe it was the rose-tinted evening. Maybe he was boasting or maybe, just for that instant, Murray had thought his friend might be able to help. Whatever it was, as they’d left the pub, skirting the exiled smokers loitering on the pavement outside and stepping into the gloaming of a pink sunset, Murray had found himself saying, ‘I’m having a bit of a thing with Rachel Houghton.’

Rab Purvis had been more forthright than a casual listener might expect a professor of chivalric romance to be.

‘She’s a ballbreaker. I wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole.’

Murray had glanced at his friend’s tubby abdomen and tried to imagine Rachel propositioning Rab as she had him, shutting the door of his office on sports afternoon Wednesday, pushing the essays he’d been trawling through to one side, sitting on the edge of his desk, so close he’d wondered, then guiding his hand under her sweater so that the quality of his wonder had shifted and magnified.

‘It wasn’t a bargepole that I was thinking of.’

‘Any kind of pole. Leave well alone, if you know what’s good for you.’

‘What if it’s my one last chance of true love?’

‘Then run for the hills. Rachel Houghton isn’t looking for love, Murray. She’s happy with Fergus. She simply likes spicing things up by screwing around.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing, if shagging your head of department’s wife doesn’t bother you.’

‘Why should it?’

‘Would you like me to give you a list?’

‘Not really.’

But his friend had gone on to recite a long, frequently crude but eminently sensible catalogue of reasons why Murray Watson should steer clear of Rachel Houghton. It hadn’t made one iota of difference. The affair remained acknowledged but unmentioned again, until now.

Murray took Rab’s proffered hand and shook it.

‘She just dumped me.’

‘Ah.’ Rab sucked another inch off his pint. ‘In that case I take back my apology. You’re better off out of it. You know what the department’s like. A busy little hive with bees swarming all over each other and Fergus at the centre, gobbling up the golden globules of honey we lay at his feet.’

‘Pollen.’

‘What?’

‘Pollen. The bees bring the queen pollen and she makes it into honey.’

‘Pollen, honey – it’s all the same.’ Rab abandoned the analogy. ‘The place is a poisonous rumour mill. Look,’ his voice took on the fatherly tone that indicated advice was about to be proffered. ‘It’s not easy working where we do. Bad as being a diabetic in a candy shop, all those delect­able sweet things passing through your hands every day and you not even allowed the tiniest little lick.’ He laughed. ‘That was slightly filthier than I intended.’

‘It’s okay, I get your drift.’

‘You don’t have to tell me how frustrating it can be. When I started it was different but . . .’ Rab drifted off for a moment to the happy land where lecturers and students were still compatible. ‘But times change.’ He sighed, staring into the middle distance. ‘I was having a nice drink until you came in looking like Banquo’s ghost and reminded me how everything has gone to shit. You had a good time and now it’s over, just thank whatever ancient gods it is you worship that you didn’t get caught.’

‘We did. Someone saw us.’

‘Ah,’ Rab sighed. ‘I suppose that would put a different complexion on things.’ He took another sip of his pint. ‘Come on then, don’t leave me in suspense. Who?’

‘I don’t know. Someone. A porter maybe. I had my back to them.’

‘Spare me the gory details,’ Rab grunted. ‘I hope to God it wasn’t a porter. They’ll tell the cleaners, who’ll let slip to the women in the canteen, and once it gets to them you’re lost. Might as well take out a full-page ad in the Glasgow Herald, except there’d be no need.’ He shook his head. ‘If you don’t know who it was, you can’t be sure there’s a problem.’

‘They didn’t see us standing too close in the coffee lounge or exchanging notes in the quads, they saw me rogering her on the desk of my office.’

‘Rogering?’

‘“Making the beast with two backs”, “putting the horns on old Fergus”, or whatever you Romantics call it.’

‘Shagging.’

‘What do you think I should do?’

‘What can you do?’ Rab patted his arm. ‘Get a round in.’

Fowlers had quenched thirsts for at least a hundred years. Its high ceiling was iced with intricate cornicing, its windows frosted with etchings advertising whiskies and beers, which let light filter into the bar, but allowed privacy from passers-by to priests, poets, skivers, fathers on errands or men seeing about dogs, idle students and lovers budgeting towards leaving their spouses. Mrs Noon kept things tight and it was rare to wait too long to be served or to see a fight that got beyond the third punch. Fowlers should have been a nice place for a drink, but it was a dump, a prime contender for a brewery theme-pub revamp. There were no ashtrays on the table, but the ceiling retained its nicotine hue and the smell of unwashed old men, stale beer and the cheap bleach used to sluice down the toilets was no longer masked by cigarette smoke. The bar stools, which harboured men who remembered the city when it was all soot and horseshit, were as scuffed and unsteady on their pins as their occupants. The patterned orange and blue carpet, once loud enough to drown out the Saturday night crowd, had sunk to sludge. Murray tipped back his fifth pint of the evening and decided this was where he belonged.

Phyllida McWilliams and Vic Costello had left an hour or so ago, taking their quarrel to one of the West End restaurants where they were known and dreaded. Phyllida had had trouble getting her arm into the sleeve of her jacket and Murray had guided her hand into the armhole while Vic strode to the door with the single-minded purpose of the practised inebriate.

‘You’re a lovely man, Murray. Take my advice.’ She gathered her bags of shopping; ingredients for another Friday night dinner she was destined not to cook. ‘Never get involved with someone who isn’t available.’

‘What made you say that, Phyllida?’

She shrugged and gave him a silly grin. ‘I have been drinking, you know.’

Now there were three of them left. Lyle Joff, quieter after his phone call, Rab and Murray. They were still at the corner table, but in the hours they had sat there the pub had transformed from a peaceful place where men could swap confidences into a red-faced rammy. The bar was three-deep, the staff quick-pouring wine and pressing more glasses to optics than they had earlier in the evening, but it was still pints that ruled; a shining spectrum of gold, yellows, browns and liquorice black. Not that anyone stopped to admire their drink. People were knocking them back faster than it was possible to serve and from time to time a barmaid would squeeze into the throng and return with a tall column of tumblers, as if gathering ammunition for a siege.

Two thoughts were pinballing around Murray’s brain. The first was his need for another drink, the magic one that would make everything click into place. The second was that he’d drunk too much and should get home before he shipwrecked himself.

Maybe it was the bell that made him think of shipwrecks. It was loud and clanging and spoke to him of treacherous rocks and shattered hulks. What was it like to drown?

‘Pushing the boat out tonight?’

That’s what they were doing, setting out into perilous waters, and none of them in possession of their sea legs. Murray raised his head. Mrs Noon was holding a tin tray loaded with empty tumblers, their rims edged with tides of dead froth. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the woman out from behind the bar before.

‘I didn’t know you had legs, Mrs Noon.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you were a mermaid. Great singers, mermaids. They lure poor sailors to their deaths, just for the fun of it. Beautiful creatures, beautiful and cruel.’

‘You wouldn’t want to hear me sing.’ The manageress placed his half-full glass in amongst the empties on her tray. ‘That really would be a cruelty.’ She watched Rab neck the dregs of his pint then took his glass from him. ‘Time to head home, gentlemen.’

She was right. They should have left hours ago. Now here he was, drunk and sober at the same time. Each half of him disgusted at the other.

Someone had propped the doors open. The crowd was thinning, people sinking the last of their drinks, reaching for their jackets, all the heat and chatter drifting out into the night. He stretched an arm towards his beer, but Mrs Noon sailed the tray up and away, beyond his reach.

‘What happened to drinking-up time?’

It came out too loud. He caught the barman throwing Mrs Noon a questioning look and the woman’s answering shake of the head.

‘You heard the bell, that’s drinking-up time over. Do you want to get me into trouble?’

He was a lecturer in English literature at a distinguished and ancient university. He straightened himself in his chair and summoned forth the spirit of Oscar Wilde.

‘Don’t you think you may be a little old for me to get you into trouble, Mrs Noon?’

‘No need for that now.’ Rab was pulling on his jacket. ‘You’ll have to excuse my colleague. He is the recipient of bad news.’

Murray lumbered to his feet. The battle was lost, there was no more drink to be had, no possibility of reaching the required state here. The landlady disregarded Rab’s apologies and turned her practised smile on Murray: ice and glass. She’d once told him she had a daughter at the uni.

‘I was just thinking the same thing of the pair of you. You’re both too old to be getting into trouble. Go home, gentlemen.’

Outside black cabs and private hires edged along the road accompanied by the bass beat and infra-bright lights of sober boys in souped-up cars. It was another kind of rush hour, Friday night chucking-out time, louder, younger and messier than the into-work-and-home-again crowds. Here came the smashed windows, spilled noodles, lost shoes and sicked-up drinks, the pigeon breakfasts and trailing bloodstains.

Two teenage girls perched on the windowsill of the late-night Spar passing a bottle between them while a yard away their friend snogged a youth in a tracksuit, their joined mouths sealed vacuum-tight. The boy’s hand slid up the girl’s crop top. One of the drinkers tipped back a swig from the bottle, arching her body, her short skirt riding up her thighs. For an instant she looked like an advert for the elixir of youth. Then she lost her balance and bumped against her companion. Both girls giggled and the one who had nearly fallen shouted, ‘Fucking jump him if you’re gonnae or we’ll miss the bus.’

The boy broke the clinch, grinning at his audience, then pulled the girl back to him, whispering something that made her laugh, then push herself free, staggering slightly on her high heels as she tottered towards her friends.

‘Virgin,’ the teenagers taunted, passing her the bottle.

Lyle Joff gave them a stern look. ‘I should bloody hope so.’ The girls sniggered, nudging each other, and Lyle took refuge in his kebab. He didn’t speak again until they had passed the group.

‘If I caught Sarah or Emma behaving like that, I’d lock them up until they were thirty. Fuck it, thirty-five. I’d lock them up till they were thirty-five and even then I’d still want some guarantees.’

Murray looked back at the girls. They were at the bus stop now. One of them – he wasn’t sure if it was the one who’d been doing the kissing – pushed the boy. The youth stepped into a half trot, shouting something. The girls roared back, united now as they rushed at him, their high heels clattering against the pavement, laughing, full of victory as the boy ran off down the street.

Murray joined in the laughter. Some people had more talent for life.

‘Brief Encounter.’

Lyle said, ‘It’s not funny, Murray. Boys like that take advantage of young girls.’

Rab asked, ‘What age are Sarah or Emma now? Five and seven? You don’t need to worry about that for a few years.’

‘Three and six. Remind me to look up convent schools in the Yellow Pages in the morning. Here, hold this a minute.’

Lyle thrust his half-eaten kebab into Murray’s hand and nipped up a lane. Murray lifted the swaddled meat and salad to his mouth, crunching into vinegar, spices and heat. When had he last eaten? There had been a packet of crisps in the pub, but before that? Some sauce escaped the wrap and ran down his chin.

‘Hey.’ Lyle emerged from the alleyway. ‘I said hold it, not eat it.’

‘Sorry.’ Murray wiped his face. He took a second bite then handed it back. ‘I don’t know how you can stomach that stuff.’

Lyle fed the end of the kebab into his mouth and started picking at the shreds of salad and onion left in the paper. ‘I used to live on these before Marcella got her claws into me.’

His expression looked like it might crumple and he tore at the kebab with his teeth again, as if seeking solace.

They were passing the queue for The Viper Club now. Murray recognised a girl from his third-year tutorial group. She’d caught her long, straight hair back in an Alice band. Her dress was short, her white boots high. She made him think of the test-card girl, all grown up and gone kinky.

‘Hello, Dr Watson.’

He nodded, trying not to stagger. Ah, what the fuck? He was allowed a private life, wasn’t he?

Rab echoed his thoughts.

‘Sometimes you need to cut loose, connect with the elemental, remind yourself of the beauty of your own exist­ence.’

Lyle scrunched the kebab’s wrapping into a ball and tossed it into a bin already brimming with rubbish.

‘For tomorrow we may die.’

The paper trembled on the peak of the pile, and then tumbled to the ground. Rab bent over, picked up the wrapping and stuffed it carefully back into the bucket. A look of satisfaction at a job well done settled on his face.

‘Right, what den of iniquity are we headed to next?’

* * *

The thin man with the long hair and the bandanna wanted a pound before he would let them in. Rab dropped three coins into the old ice-cream tub that acted as a till and they went up the stairs and into the electric brightness of the pool hall.

‘I should head back.’ It had been Lyle Joff’s mantra since he’d phoned his wife two hours ago, but he joined the queue for the bar with the others and accepted his pint. ‘Just the one, thanks. I’ll need to be thinking about getting home.’

The room was busy with the quiet clack of billiard balls and the low murmur of conversation. They were in the first wave of pub exiles and serious pool players still out­numbered those for whom the hall was just another stop on the night’s drunken highway. It was about a year since Murray had been here, a night on the town with his brother Jack, but it was as if he’d just stepped out to take a piss. There were the same faces, the same closed looks and poker expressions. The same mix of scruff and cowboy-cool, the lavvy-brush beards, arse-hugging jeans, Cuban heels and tight-fitting waistcoats. Fuck, you’d have to be hard to wear that gear in Glasgow.

Rab lowered himself behind a free table.

‘Welcome to Indian country. What time does this place stay open till?’

‘Three.’

Rab’s sigh was contented, nothing to worry about for two hours.

Lyle stared silently at his pint, as if it might hold the possibility of enlightenment. Slowly his head sank onto his chest and his eyes closed.

A woman bent across the baize, lining up her options. Murray found himself following the seams of her jeans, up the inside of her raised thigh to the point where they met in a cross. He looked away. Would the tyranny of sex never stop?

He nodded towards Lyle.

‘Is he all right?’

The woman telescoped her cue back towards their table and Rab shifted his drink beyond its reach.

‘He’s fine, he’ll wake up in a moment.’ Rab indicated a pair of women sitting near the back of the room. ‘Why don’t you go over there and ask them if they want a drink?’

The women might have been sisters, or maybe it was simply that their style was the same. Strappy tops and short feathery hair whose copper highlights glinted under the bright lights. They were grown-up versions of the girls he’d gone to school with. They’d never have looked at him then, but now?

It was stupid. He didn’t fancy either of them, and besides, he wasn’t up to the aggressive dance of tease and semi-insults that constituted a chat-up.

‘They’ve got drinks.’

‘Well, get up, pretend you’re going to the gents’ and offer them another one en route.’

‘Is that how James Bond does it? Hello, ladies, I was on my way for a pish and wondered if I could bring you anything back? Ever wondered why it’s going to say “confirmed bachelor” on your obituary?’

‘It must be better than mooning over Ms Houghton.’

Lyle Joff awakened slowly, like an ugly toy twitching into life in a deserted nursery. The flesh beneath his eyes trembled and then the eyes themselves opened. He blinked and turned his fuzzy gaze on Murray.

‘Rachel Houghton.’ He smiled dreamily. ‘Good arse. Good everything else too.’

‘Lyle.’ Rab’s voice was warning. ‘We’re talking about a colleague.’

Lyle’s brief sleep seemed to have refreshed him. He wiped away the glue of saliva that had formed at the corners of his mouth and took a sip of his pint. ‘Listen to Professor PC. ’

Rab said, ‘Shut up, Lyle, you’re drunk.’

A couple of the pool players looked over. Murray raised his beer to his lips. It tasted of nothing.

‘We’re all drunk. Say what you were going to say, Lyle.’

‘Lyle, I’m warning you.’

Rab’s tone was low and commanding, but Lyle was too far gone to notice. He patted Rab’s shoulder.

‘Murray’s one of us, the three mouseketeers.’ He giggled. ‘It’s top secret. Rab said Fergus would have his balls strung up and made into an executive toy for his desk if he found out.’

‘The three musketeers, great swordsmen.’ Murray turned to Rab. ‘What’s the big secret?’

‘Nothing, Lyle’s just being provocative, aren’t you, Lyle?’

‘Not as provocative as Rachel.’ Lyle put an arm around Rab. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.’

Rab lifted the arm from his shoulder. His eyes met Murray’s and all of the ruined adventure was in them. There was no need to ask what had happened, but Murray said, ‘Tell me.’

Lyle looked from one to the other, wary as a barroom dog whose master is on his fourth drink.

Rab sighed wearily.

‘What’s the point? She’s a free spirit, Murray, a generous woman.’

‘I want to know.’

A little beer had slopped onto the table. Rab dipped his finger in it and drew a damp circle on the Formica. He looked his age.

‘A one-off mercy fuck, that’s all there is to it.’

‘When?’

‘The end of last term. You remember all that hoo-ha about my introduction to the new Scottish poetry anthology?’

Murray did. Rab had been forthright in his assessment that a new wave of Scottish poets were throwing off the class-consciousness, self-obsession and non-poetic subject matter of the previous generation and ushering in a golden age. The new wave had leapt to the defence of their predecessors while balking at Rab’s description of them as non-political. The elder statesmen had been vitriolic in their assessment of academics in general, and Rab in particular. It must have been a week when war and disaster had slipped from the news because the row had hit the broadsheets. Rab had been derided by academics and pundits north of the border and a source of amusement to those south of it.

‘It all blew up in my face a bit. Some people thrive on controversy, Fergus for example, but I don’t. It got me down. Rachel dropped into my office one afternoon to commiserate and we went for a few drinks, quite a few drinks. Then when the pub closed I remembered that there was another bottle at my place. There’s always another bottle at my place.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘I didn’t expect her to come and then when she did I didn’t expect anything more than a drink. I was going to tell you.’ He laughed almost shyly. ‘But a gentleman doesn’t talk about these things.’

‘You bloody talked about it to Lyle.’

‘Oh, come on, Murray. I’m an overweight fifty-five-year-old poetry lecturer and Rachel’s a thirty-five-year-old dolly bird. I had to tell someone. Anyway, I’d been drinking.’

‘You’ve generally been drinking.’

‘That’s a prime example of why I didn’t tell you. You can be such a fucking puritan, I thought you wouldn’t approve.’ He gave a low laugh. ‘And then you told me that you and she . . . Well, I was jealous, I admit, but not jealous enough to throw it back in your face.’ Rab raised his pint to his lips and then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. His tone slipped from apologetic to defensive. ‘I don’t see what you’re getting so hot under the collar for, anyway. She’s another man’s wife. She doesn’t belong to you, me or anyone else in the department she might have fucked, except maybe Fergus, and if so I’d say he’s doing a very poor job of holding onto his property.’

It was the female player’s turn again. Rab moved his drink as she pulled the cue back then fired a white ball across the baize. Murray watched it sail into the depths of a corner pocket, sure as death.

He imagined taking the pool cue from her hand and smashing it into Rab Purvis’s beer-shined face. Teeth first, then nose. He’d leave the eyes alone. He’d always been squeamish about that kind of thing.

Lyle said, ‘Are you okay, Murray?’

He didn’t answer, just got to his feet and left before any more damage could be done.

Murray had been walking for a long time. Once a police car slowed and took a look at him, he ignored them and they drove on past, but their interest seemed to be the signal for his feet to start a winding route home. He left the main road and wandered uphill into the confluence of wide lonely streets that made up Park Circus, the jewel in the crown of Glasgow’s West End. Sometime after parlour maids and footmen decided they’d rather risk their health in munitions factories or the battlefield, the smart residences had been converted into hotels and offices. Now they’d been deserted for city centre lets and were slowly being reclaimed by speculative builders. Murray drifted past the weathered To Let signs, half-seeing the sycamore shoots sprouting from neglected guttering, the broken railings and chipped steps that might tumble the unsuspecting into the dank courtyards of window-barred basements. The plague-town atmosphere of the shuttered houses and empty streets matched his mood.

He took his mobile from his pocket and accessed the number he’d taken from a list in the front office and stupidly promised himself he’d never use. The night was starting to turn. He’d reached the top gate of Kelvingrove Park. Down below in the parkland’s green valley, birds were beginning to sing to each other. Murray pressed Call and waited while his signal bounced around satellites stationed in the firmament above, or whatever it did in that pause before the connection was made. He let it ring until an automated voice told him the person he was looking for was unavailable, then hung up and pressed Redial. This time the other end picked up and Professor Fergus Baine’s voice demanded, ‘Do you know what time it is?’

Murray cut the call. He sat on a wall and listened to the birds celebrating the return of the sun, then after a minute or two his phone vibrated into the stupid jingle he’d never bothered to change. He took it out, glanced at the caller display and saw the unfamiliar number flashing on the screen.

‘Hello?’ His voice was slurred.

‘Is that you, Murray?’ Fergus sounded wide-awake. Did he never sleep? ‘What do you want? Something urgent, I imagine?’

‘I wanted to speak to Rachel.’

It was ridiculous, all of it, stupid.

‘Rachel is asleep. Perhaps you can call back in the morning?’ The professor’s politeness was damning.

Somewhere in the recesses of Murray’s brain was the knowledge that now was the time to quit, while he still had the slim chance of writing the call off as a drunken indiscretion. But in the morning he would have lost his courage.

‘I need to talk to her now.’

‘Well, you can’t. Call back at a decent hour.’

The line went dead.

Murray stood and soberly surveyed the sunrise. A door in the empty street opened and some party-goers reeled out, their voices high and excited. A young girl drifted over and draped an arm around his shoulder.

‘Look, Dr Watson.’ She pointed unsteadily across the parkland. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

The sun was fully up now and only a few streaks of pink remained smeared against the blue. The morning light glinted against the River Kelvin and caught in the trees, shifting their leaves all the greens and yellows in the spectrum. The birds had ceased their revels and calm had settled. Even the concrete hulk of hospital buildings in the distance seemed at one with the day. Murray looked at the new-minted morning and agreed that yes, it really was beautiful.