Читать книгу A Gift from Nessus - William McIlvanney - Страница 11

5

‘I mean I was only eighteen,’ Jim Forbes was saying. ‘This was the first girl I had really fancied. And here she was, you know? Telling me to give her five minutes to go into the house, let her parents think that was her in for the night. And then slip back out, you know?’ Eileen Forbes was gazing interestedly into her husband’s face as if she hadn’t heard the story a hundred times, but her dessert-fork moved like a conductor’s baton. Elspeth Morton kept her eyebrows arched in interest while her jaws busied themselves with the gateau. Allison noticed that either Elspeth was wearing a new ring or her diamonds were putting on weight. Morton was toasting himself in secret with the last of his wine. Cameron watched a girl three tables away, fascinated by the versatility she showed in being able to eat, talk, pat her companion’s hand and run a survey of her audience-rating, all at the same time. He wondered what her feet were doing. Tramping grapes? Knitting? ‘So there I was. With Eden five minutes away. I’m telling you. My knees were knocking like a one-man band. I was standing in their back garden. About ten yards away from the house. And my breath was misting their windows. I was ready to show Romeo one or two tricks. Her window was the one above the kitchen. She’d told me that. Five minutes. And then the signal was to be the light going on in her room. A second, and then off again. I cleaned my teeth with my hanky. Combed my hair. Flexed my arms for the clinches. I mean, she was a lovely bit of stuff. And I waited. Nothing. Not a sausage. Five minutes. Ten. I thought maybe her watch is slow. But hell, it would have to be going backwards. I thought of everything. A power-cut. Her old man had coughed it kissing her goodnight. She couldn’t find the light-switch in the dark.’

‘You were always a bit of an optimist, Jim,’ Morton said.

‘ ‘Ope spregs ’ternal,’ Elspeth said suddenly, giving voice to her gateau.

‘A new ring, Elspeth?’ Allison asked, under the impression that Forbes’s anecdote was concluded.

Eileen dropped her fork on the floor.

Meanwhile, back at the asylum, Cameron thought. An incidental profundity occurred to him: perhaps Elspeth had accidentally revealed the machinery behind the unfathomable ambiguity of utterance achieved by the priestesses of Delphi. They spoke with their mouths full. Then he said: ‘And then, Jim?’

‘Well, anyway,’ Forbes continued, experiencing the sedentary equivalent of an audience walkout, for Eileen was cleaning her fork with a paper napkin and Elspeth was nodding in delayed action response to Allison’s question. ‘Fifteen minutes. And I thought: right! Some communication is called for. I had seen it done in the pictures. I lifted a piece of clay and chucked it cautiously at her window. Nothing. So I went on doing it. I was hissing: Linda! Linda! all the time. That was her name. And all the time my ammunition was getting bigger. Till I was really on the heavy bore stuff.’ And you still are, thought Morton. ‘Then, smash! Right through the window. I put in a full pane of glass. What happened after that was strictly Keystone Cops. Lights seemed to go on in every room but hers. I heard footsteps running downstairs. It sounded like a centipede with hobnailed boots. And a dog was barking. I didn’t know what the hell was happening. I was running four ways at once. Then the back-door opened and I hears this voice shouting: ‘Seize ’im, boy!’ Seize ’im? This thing like a Shetland pony comes out, going like a racehorse. I was off. I was wishing they had cut their damned hedges more often. Five feet if they were an inch. I went over with this thing hanging to my bum like a booster-rocket. It must’ve been with me for about a hundred yards. Before I broke free. Never again. I left my arse in San Francisco, right enough. That’s when I took up golf.’

They laughed.

‘It’s a lovely ring, Elspeth.’ Eileen was first with a follow-up, since she had recognised the golfing remark as epilogue.

‘Do you like it?’ Elspeth smiled, her hand turning like a lighthouse.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Allison said. ‘A good bit bigger than the other one, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. The other one’s about the size of yours, Allison. Sid’s been promising me another one for years. And this is it.’

‘Very good too,’ Allison said. ‘Though I always think nothing can replace the sentimental value of the first one. Don’t you? I mean that’s the one you got engaged with, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, I’d never part with mine.’ Eileen looked nostalgically at her own ring, each diamond of which was like a facet of the ones on Elspeth’s ring.

The women withdrew behind the purdah of diamond talk. The men lit Forbes’s cigarettes and blew out smoke signals of satiety.

He took too long, Morton was thinking. Could have taken at least two minutes off the telling. But that was typical. Forbes was one of those people who nearly always pull the punchline too late, so that the joke explodes in their face. His ego bore the marks. He kept trying. But he was one of life’s natural casualties. Amen.

They’re always against himself, Cameron thought. He watched Jim’s face brood upon the moment, hatching another anecdote perhaps. Cameron felt a tremendous liking for him. He tried so damned hard. But it was embarrassing the way he was always so funny about himself – like a cripple whose party piece was balancing on his crutches. He kept showing you his scars and asking you to laugh. Cameron remembered irrelevantly how at school Jim could walk for fifteen yards on his hands. He held the record. They had measured it. He had also been able to skid pebbles on the water more times than anybody else. That was another record. And he could weep anytime at sad films. All the qualities that weren’t viable, he had. It was sad to think that perhaps there were some men who passed their prime with conkers. He had wanted to be a missionary. Now he worked with the Electricity Board. That was a funnier joke than any he could tell – the irony that each of them had to some extent become. Hadn’t idealism festered in every one of them and healed into indifference? Only some of them, like Cameron himself, kept picking off the scab to contemplate the diminishing wound.

What happens to us? Cameron thought. We start out as real people. What makes us hide from our own dreams, submit to a cage cliche, refuse to face each other?

He looked round their table, round the restaurant. He saw them as if under glass cases. Genus suburbanus: found only in semi-detached houses. The sexual behaviour of these creatures is their only interesting feature. After mating, two offspring are produced at intervals mathematically calculated by the female. Whereupon, the female swallows the male whole and re-emits him in the form of a bank-balance. Homo aquaticus: this creature hibernates for fifty weeks of every year. For the other two weeks, it can be seen at coastal resorts being buried by its young. Unfortunately they usually dig it back up. Genus Cameron: this creature is believed to be extinct.

‘Did you hear about Charlie Slade, Eddie?’ Morton asked.

‘What was that?’

‘Died two days ago. Complained of pain in his chest. Doctor thought it was indigestion. Put him to bed with a hot water bottle. Wife called him in the morning. Dead. Thrombosis.’

The three syllables halted talk for a second, left them listening into the dissipation of the rhythmic word, imperative as a tribal tom-tom. Message received, Allison and Elspeth finished what they had been saying. And that was it, Cameron thought. Morton had delivered his cryptic, cosmic message as anonymously and impassively as a telegram boy. They had all drawn curtains for a moment to watch him, and then shut them again before the reality of it could impinge on them. But Morton wasn’t finished.

‘Funny thing is,’ he said. ‘They’ve been telling me he didn’t have any insurance policy. Nothing. Imagine that. A bloke like Charlie. Always so methodical. Canny. And leaves his wife in dire straits.’

A nice, sanitary cliche: ‘He left his wife in dire straits’. Our lives are intricately plumbed with cliches, a vast network of ready-made words to pipe away inconvenient feelings, dispose hygienically of responses: ‘It’ll all come all right in the end’, ‘It comes to us all’, ‘Why worry?’ Faced with the reality of experience, all you had to do was consign it to a cliche and flush it out of your life. How old was Charlie? Thirty-seven, thirty-eight. Three children, two marriages, years of work and worry, holidays by the seaside, plans and failures had worked patiently on his body towards that moment in the night when his heart would burst like an evil seed and flower into his dying. Offended by the clumsy pointlessness of his corpse, you covered it with a comment: ‘He left his wife in dire straits.’ And nobody need bother any further. Except Eileen.

‘His wife’s left with the three children? They still had the child from his previous marriage, didn’t they?’

‘Yes,’ Morton said. ‘Charlie got custody. His wife had committed misconduct.’

‘My God! Three children. The youngest one’s only about two. How is she going to live? My God, it’s terrible.’

Eileen was attacking her gateau as if it was a pain-killer. Her manifestation of sympathy was mechanical and controlled and didn’t disturb the elan with which she ate. Cameron had known her as a girl, very sensitive and emotional. But time had corroded her sentiment to sentimentality and rusted her reactions into gestures. Perhaps it was because she had never had any children that she had developed a vaguely maternal affection for any kind of pain that crossed her path. She moved about her life as responsive to every touch as a barrel-organ, and whatever event might turn the handle, dead relative or limping dog, it was the same worn and tinny tune it summoned forth, fretted indelibly on her heart by the dull uniformity of her life.

‘He used to work with Auld and Simpson,’ Morton ruminated. ‘By the way, Eddie. How are things going with you and them?’

‘All right. Should have something definite fairly soon. That reminds me. I’ve got a phone-call to make. Business before pleasure. Excuse me.’

‘I’ll get you out,’ Jim said, getting up. ‘I think I’ve got a watering-can for a bladder.’

Cameron had invented the phone-call as an escape hatch but Forbes’s presence trapped him in it. He had to phone somebody.

‘Have you got change?’ Jim waited with him, generously sacrificing the demands of his bladder to those of friendship.

‘Yes, thanks.’

Cameron lifted the receiver as Jim went off. He dialled TIM. ‘Pip. Pip. At the third stroke it will be nine thirty-five and ten seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip. At the third stroke it will be nine thirty-five and twenty seconds.’ The voice was cold, remote – talking marble. The pips were thawing ice. It was like being tuned in to the core of all erosion, the dripping of an unquenchable wound. When Jim patted his shoulder on the way back into the dining-room, Cameron was still listening blankly: . . . ‘it will be nine thirty-eight and forty seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip.’

He put down the receiver. He couldn’t face going back into the restaurant just yet to listen to their perfunctory voices. He wondered what Margaret was doing. Why couldn’t he be with her now, the curtains drawn, and only the two of them together, growing again into people in each other’s presence. It only needed one big, positive action to reorientate his life. To walk out now and drive to Margaret’s would be enough. He turned and made towards the door. The design of foliage on the carpet stretched before him like a jungle. The thick glass doors gave him back the hotel lobby as if the night outside was only an extension of this room. Voices came from the lounge-bar on his left and he turned desperately towards them, losing himself among them, knowing as he did so that the voice locked in the recesses of the phone was coldly deducting every second from his life.

The air of the lounge was meshed with smoke and every table was fortified by earnest talk against intrusion. Cameron saw a space at the bar beside a large balding man who stared into his drink as if he was angling it. Cameron won to the space and asked for a double whisky.

He couldn’t just walk out on Allison at a time like this. It wasn’t even practical. He was the only one with a housekey, for one thing. And he hadn’t paid his share of the bill. It was ridiculous how circumstances held the grandest intentions trapped like a staked bear while trivia snapped at it like terriers until they wore it into submission. Just when you were about to jump the moon, you tramped on your turnups.

‘Do you have any children?’

Cameron thought he was overhearing someone’s conversation and his glance was automatic. But it was at him that the large balding man was staring, his eyes muddied with drink. Cameron realised at once why there had been a space beside him at the bar. An aggressive gloom surrounded him like a railing.

‘Have you any children? I’ve got children.’

He was so drunk you could almost see each thought well to the surface of his eyes like a dead fish. Cameron decided that talk was the best method of defence.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve got two.’

‘I’ve got children. I’ve got three children. Two daughters and a son. The boy’s only ten.’

Silence followed and Cameron began to think it was finished, that the big man had been concerned merely to deliver a brief bulletin on progeny.

‘How many children have you got?’

‘I’ve got two.’

‘See that they take their sugar.’

‘They always do. Plenty of it.’

‘Their polio sugar. The vaccine. See that they take it. They’ve got to take their sugar. Ralph was taking his. One lump to go. One bloody lump. And he got polio. Calliper. His leg’s no thicker than that.’ He held up a wavering forefinger. ‘That’s him for the rest of his life. The bastards. That’s a good break to give a boy. Because there was one lump to go. One lump of sugar between him and a full life.’

The big man’s massive futility swelled Cameron’s, towered into a wave that swamped him. Surfacing for a second, Cameron reached for the first thought that came to him, and said, ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘I don’t want your bloody drink.’

The big man’s face pitched close for a second and then receded into the distance of its private storm.

Cameron came out of the lounge and stood for a moment, as if he had lost his way. It wasn’t that he had been particularly moved by the big man’s dilemma. He even doubted that what he had heard was medically feasible. But it seemed to have a certain poetic truth. In the large, pulpy face he recognised the fist-marks of his own world. That’s what he was up against too – a world in which the omission of a sugarlump could wither your leg, where the infinite ways of losing nullified all the permutations of precaution. Each day chance was infiltrating its bacilli: brakes wore; blood clotted; feet slipped; smoke tarred the lungs; worries gnawed at the struts of the mind. Some time one or more of these would win. Meanwhile the calendars hung in rooms, icons of emptiness, computing coincidence. He felt years sifting away from him, and he was left with no more concrete measurement of their passing than the spaces in his diary, bleak tundras of paper on which survived a few skeletal facts, fragile as moth’s bones, crumbling to shapelessness in a month’s turning: ‘Remember shoes – collect’, ‘Sales conference’, ‘Helen’s birthday – doll – talking or dressing’, ‘See Auld’.

It isn’t me, he thought. None of it is me. Nor is any of this – Jim Forbes’s jokes, Morton’s complacency, Eileen’s sympathy. Yet he went on acting as if they were. For how long? Until Charlie Slade’s epitaph became his own? Pass round the conversation, boys, and put a sentence in. In memory of Eddie Cameron. No. He wasn’t finished yet, he told himself. It would be nice to know who you were before you died. He felt a need to hurry. But there was nowhere to hurry to. The rest of the evening waited for him, talk and jokes and drinks in a conspiracy of slow motion, designed to strangle his urgency. So, nursing his desperation like a time-bomb, he went back to them to become part of the conspiracy again, to nod and smile and not hear what was said.

The rest of the night drifted past him in a meaningless debris of aimless actions and fragments of conversation: the banter when he came back into the dining-room and Jim Forbes’s joke about its being a fine time to phone his fancy-woman, at which Morton didn’t laugh; the journey back home in the car (Jim and Eileen were travelling with them); tailors’ dummies in eerie conclave in bright windows, a cinema disgorging anonymous gobbets of humanity onto the street; Allison and Eileen talking brightly in the back, Jim intoning the respective merits of front-and back-wheel drive (banish technicalities from the language, and what would we find to talk about?), and Morton’s car following a yard from the back fender; thanking Mrs Davis from across the road for baby-sitting; giving out drinks; eating Allison’s delicate supper; giving out drinks.

They were using the living-room because it was warm from the fire kept on for Mrs Davis. Jim’s pleas to have the children brought out of their beds had been swiftly squashed by Allison.

The new cushion interested them, gave rise to jokes. Allison had only bought it the other day. It sat on the settee, too big for it. Too big to be a cushion, really. A hybrid form. As if a car-seat had been crossed with a mattress. And this was their scion. A luxurious deformity.

‘Chinese?’ Forbes was asking.

Because of the huge dragon depicted on it. Did that make it Chinese? Do the Chinese have a monopoly on dragons?

‘Japanese. Naturally,’ Morton pronounced.

Thank you, Morton, san. Purveyor of Culture to Ignorant Masses.

‘Here’s how you should really use it.’

Morton put the cushion on the floor, pulled up his trouser-legs, and squatted cross-legged, his hands inside his jacket-sleeves.

‘All lightee?’

Sedate fountains of jolly laughter from the ladies. Morton bathing in it. May you do yourself an injury with your chopsticks.

‘We’ve got one almost exactly like that,’ Elspeth said. ‘I would say you had been copying. Except that you can’t have seen ours. It’s in the bedroom.’

Satanic oh-hos from Jim Forbes. Why did Allison buy these things anyway? Every so often the fever took her and she went forth to buy, armed only in a vague sort of covetousness. Her sorties had won them a motley assortment of booty. Her trophies were uniform only in their uselessness and their spurious ‘classiness’. One had been a painting – an abstract of bilious ugliness, which Cameron detested and which Allison could only defend wanly as being ‘really contemporary’. She had wanted to hang it in the girls’ bedroom but when Cameron objected, implying that Spock wouldn’t like it, it had been shunted to their room, where it hung above their bed like an invitation to a nightmare. Another buy had been what Allison claimed was an African mask. The face it depicted looked as if it came from darkest Gallowgate. And now the Chinese (Cameron preferred Jim Forbes’s theory) cushion. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see each other for status symbols.

‘Eddie!’ Jim’s voice was confidential. He was taking advantage of the preoccupation of the others. ‘I’ve got a very good night fixed up for us. Next week. Can you make it? Thursday.’

To judge by the furtive excitement of Jim’s tones it should be at least a free run of a harem.

‘I think so, Jim. What is it?’

‘You’re okay for Thursday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dalmeath Burns Supper. Some night. Special invitations only. We’ll have a great time.’

Cameron couldn’t think of any excuse to make.

‘Drink’s tremendous. Stag night. Good speeches. It’s tough to swing admission. But I’ve managed to get tickets. Only two, though. So keep it quiet just now. You know?’

Jim indicated with a nod to Cameron that Morton’s luck was out and then chimed in with the laughter of the others, deftly camouflaging their transaction in case there should be a stampede for tickets.

‘Fine!’ Cameron muttered, the low pitch of his voice keeping it conveniently neutral. That was another night dead. Even time came pre-packaged. In convenient capsules. To be taken like tranquillisers. Morton reminded him of more.

‘You’re not forgetting next month are you, Eddie?’ he asked.

‘What’s that?’

‘“What’s that?” he says. Some salesmen I’ve got. The conference. In London. The Big Dinner. How could you forget? Different hotel this time. That place last year was a dead loss.’

‘You salesmen have a great life right enough,’ Allison said. ‘Any excuse for a good time.’

‘It’s all business, though,’ Morton said, mock-serious. ‘Mind you, we do manage to squeeze in the odd orgy afterwards. Nero had nothing on us. Talking of orgies. An office-party next month as well. After we get back from London. You’d better lay in a heavy stock of Alka-Seltzer, Eddie. Two of the girls leaving to get married. An epidemic. And then we didn’t have our party at New Year. Thought we’d better celebrate.’

‘Now there’s a thing I’d fancy,’Jim said. ‘A genuine swinging office-party. The only kind we have are tea and buns. Three old maids discussing knitting patterns. And the blokes arguing about eight-iron shots. Your place should be able to generate some action.’

‘It has been known to,’ Morton agreed. ‘Fill in an application form and we might get you a ticket.’

Maybe Jim was regretting rashly promising the extra ticket for Dalmeath to Cameron. He could have used it to influence Morton. Strange how boyishly enthusiastic Jim was about anything that could be construed, however mildly, as a male adventure.

Cameron’s inattention scrambled their talk for several minutes before he tuned in again to Allison and Morton arguing about immigration. How did they get onto that? They were kidding each other clumsily, aware of their audience.

‘West Indians have been exploited long enough by us,’ Allison was saying. ‘We owe them something.’

‘Allison!’ Morton remonstrated. ‘Noble sentiments. But you can’t run a country on them. You’re too generous for your own good.’

‘And you’re too efficient to be altogether human. You can’t streamline human affairs the way you do your work.’

They both laughed. It wasn’t so much an argument as an exercise in verbal back-scratching.

‘How can you live with somebody as efficient as this, Elspeth?’

‘No. But seriously,’ Morton said. ‘We owe them nothing. We gave them the greatest culture in the world. We educated them. Gave them religion. Taught them democracy. Anything we took in return was what they didn’t want. Or couldn’t use. They’re our debtors. And now they want to come over here in hordes. No go. They haven’t reached our level of civilisation yet. They’ll only upset the balance.’

‘Rubbish!’ Cameron said suddenly, surprised to find that his time-bomb had exploded and was after all only a squib. ‘I have seldom heard so much bollocks in such a short space of time. Who the hell are you to set yourself above anybody else? And what have we got that’s so sacrosanct nobody else can share it? Folk like you are so bigoted you could use a thimble for a hat. It’s true that my uncle’s a negro, but that’s not why I’m defending them.’

The last remark was a weak attempt to change the tenor of what he had said, make it seem funny. But nobody was laughing. There was a strained silence until Morton saw fit to break it.

‘Report to my office first thing in the morning,’ he said.

They all laughed thankfully. It could be treated as a joke, a rather feeble one. Cameron became the butt of a few jocular remarks at which he betrayed himself so far as to smile. Morton rounded it all off by telling Cameron that he really did want to see him in the morning in his office. ‘But purely on business,’ he laughed. ‘And not necessarily first thing. Nine-thirty will do.’ How could Morton always contrive to make Cameron feel as if he was wearing short trousers?