Читать книгу A Gift from Nessus - William McIlvanney - Страница 12

6

Cameron knew that Allison was going to quarrel with him. Although she was in the kitchen and he stood in the living-room, the fact transmitted itself with absolute clarity. Roger. Over and out. He accepted it with tired resignation, not even bothering to wonder why. Obviously he had once again said or done something that offended Allison’s delicate code of hypocrisy. It was one of those things you couldn’t escape.

You could postpone it, though. He lit a cigarette, moving slowly about the room to gather up the debris of empty coffee-cups and sticky glasses. Bring out your dead, he thought, heaping them carelessly on the tray he had brought from the kitchen. They made a sad, cluttered little still life, and he sat down in front of it as if it was a shrine, smoking. What a waste of a night! They should give lessons, the lot of them. How to kill your nights stone dead. How to talk without saying anything. Bore life into submission. Cameron’s Simplified Course in Catalepsy. Instant futility. He had a quiet moment of panic wondering if it was scientifically true that each night dedicated to being nobody in particular meant that there was less of you to be realised in the future.

He felt an urge to make some grand gesture of purification. Instead, he rose and emptied the ashtray into the fire. There were no large actions available to him, he reflected. Necessity lay on him like handcuffs, curtailing every sweeping movement to a tic. He was the servant to his own life. Throwing his cigarette in the fire, he lifted the tray and carried it through to the kitchen like a waiter.

‘Nice of you to look in,’ Allison said, standing rubber-gloved like a surgeon by the sink.

Cameron let the remark pass. It was just a scalpel-sharpener. He unloaded his cargo on the draining-board, wiped the tray, and selected one of the left-over petit-fours. As he bit it, the clove in the centre prickled like a disturbed hedgehog, stinging his mouth. He grabbed a handy bottle of milk and drank from it.

‘Oh please!’ Allison said as she submerged the dishes in water.

Cameron saw that there was no way to avoid the quarrel. He hated these trip-wire situations that Allison rigged up, where no matter what you did or said, there had to be an explosion. But this was to be one of them, and he consciously donned indifference like a steel helmet.

‘Must you be so crude?’ she persisted.

‘When you’re putting out a fire, you don’t worry about the etiquette of hose-holding. That’s what you call an aphorism.’

Allison smiled, her teeth showing like a row of icicles.

‘Clever,’ she said. ‘You’re very clever for a boor. Did you have to drink it out of the bottle?’

‘Well, it’s handier than an udder, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t suppose you’d ever think of cups? That’s what they’re for, you know.’

‘Is it really? Judging by the brew you put in them, I always thought they were for holding specimens of urine.’

‘You are utterly disgusting.’

Let this chalice be taken from my lips, Cameron prayed irreverently. Let this stop at the preliminary exchanges. But at the same time he felt his own bitterness and malice gather on his tongue, as potent as anything she could give him. He lifted the dishcloth and started to dry the dishes.

‘You’re so boorish you would be black-balled from Old Macdonald’s farm.’

That was an insult a la carte, speciality of the house, and Cameron answered in kind.

‘Any moment now,’ he answered, ‘you are due to announce for the umpteen-millionth time that you went to a finishing school. Which is a good name for it. They certainly finished you. Sent you out with a hermetically sealed head.’

‘If I have said it before, it’s only because it’s true. I did go to a finishing school.’

‘Tell me. I’m really interested. What do they do in a finishing school? What did they do at your finishing school? Teach you to say ‘It’s a nice day’ in half-a-dozen languages? So that you could become an all-round, cosmopolitan idiot? How to curtsey without showing your knickers? Have classes in tea-cup-holding? I bet you passed “magna cum laude” in pinky-sticking-out.’

‘At least they taught us how to conduct ourselves decently in the company of other human beings. That’s something you’ve never learned. Look at what happened tonight.’

This was it. The rest had only been range-finders. Now the real reasons for the quarrel were about to be brought into play. They would be of no consequence, he decided, but he retracted a little inside himself just the same. Nobody is ever immune to the criticism of others. Cameron slowly polished a coffee-cup dry, making a dugout of the action.

‘You were so rude to Sid and Elspeth. Don’t you realise he’s your boss?’

‘I should. The way he keeps striking matches on my forehead. And using my breast-pocket as an ashtray.’

‘He’s the very man who could help you to make something out of yourself.’

‘What he wants to make out of me, you could make out of a Woolworth’s plastic kit and a tube of glue.’

Allison was washing the same cup over and over again as if it was Cameron’s brain.

‘You’re so stupid for yourself, I can hardly believe it. Why can’t you be nicer to people who matter?’

‘Next time I’ll unroll at the door and he can walk all over me.’

‘You’ll never be anything. Never. Not until you learn to cultivate the right friends.’

‘I’ll never be anything. Period. Look, Allison. For God’s sake put a match to your dreams of having married Charles Clore, heavily disguised as me. I’m not disguised as a bum. I am a bum. In terms of business, I’ll never be more than a tea-boy. Let’s face it now. For a time, I could make a show of it. Getting mentioned in the magazine and what not. But we’re too old to kid ourselves. Me. I couldn’t sell pound notes at a shilling a time. So lay off it, will you?’

Cameron parted the curtains and looked out of the window to meet his own reflection staring in, a taut and discontented ghost. All the houses within his vision were in darkness. Only Allison and he were still awake, guarding their enmities. Wake up, he wanted to shout. You’re in this too.

‘It’s so unnecessary to be like that. What does it achieve? “Rubbish!” you said. Even just the very fact that they’re your guests. That should’ve been enough.’

The treadmill was turning, bringing them back to the same place. Cameron couldn’t see anything he could do about it.

‘They can have the use of my chairs. Borrow my ears. Drink my whisky. But my mouth’s my own.’

‘But more than that – he’s your boss. Have you no sense at all? He’s your boss.’

‘He’s also a conceited bigot. He’s also about as sensitive as cement. The way he talks and talks. He makes the pope seem diffident.’

‘Don’t run people down just because you can’t keep up with them. You’re a fine one to talk about Sid Morton. You’re just making excuses for yourself. It’s always the same.’

Allison emptied the basin and peeled off her rubber gloves. But the operation wasn’t over yet.

‘You’re always the same. You actually go out of your way to offend people.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘How can you be so boorish?’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

‘Listen to yourself.’

‘You should never’ve married me. You know that? You should’ve hired a husband from Moss Bros.’

‘Will you never learn to be just a little nicer to people?’

‘Every night I pray for God to make me a normal healthy sycophant.’

‘I think you do it to spite yourself,’ Allison went on round the corner of his last remark. At such times, she spoke in spasmodic monologue, treating anything Cameron said like an incidental noise that merely prevented her from being heard for the moment. ‘I think it’s because you’ve given up. You’ve accepted failure. So you snipe at everybody else. You don’t care what they think of you. It won’t be any less than you think of yourself.’

Cameron suddenly realised how quietly they had been speaking. It was amazing when you thought of it. He took time off to ponder the fact, like a galley slave listening aesthetically to the sound the oars made in the water. There was something almost admirable about the skill with which they administered discreet mouthfuls of poison to each other. They were moving back and forth in the kitchen, neatly side-stepping, lifting and laying dishes, and at the same time deftly knocking nails into each other with velvet hammers, while their children were able to dream undisturbed a few feet away. It deserved some kind of award, Cameron reflected. Say, a certificate from the Institute of Masochists.

‘You can never make any prolonged attempt to be just a little better than you are. Your stamina always runs out. And you fall back on being nasty. It’s so much easier.’

Cameron stacked away the coffee-dishes and returned the leftovers to their respective tins. He became aware sadly that he knew where everything went. Everything in this house had its place, including him. He was labelled indelibly and it was too late to change his destination. He collected two teacups that had strayed from a previous meal and hung them up on their hooks beside the others. The completed row of cups glittered with malice. They waited, along with the biscuittins and the paper-rack and the aspirin-bottle, to measure out his life for him. The future came up before him like a fantastic conundrum. How many cups of tea? How many headaches? How many strokes of the brush across his teeth? For what? He seemed caught in a million measurements of his transient futility. Tubes of toothpaste. Rusting razor-blades. Hair-cuts. Nail-parings. Wearing heels, recording a loss that couldn’t be recouped with leather. And Allison’s voice, patient as a river, eroding him.

‘You’ve always been the same. If I hadn’t pushed you, we’d never have got anywhere.’

She was laying the table for breakfast. She did it swiftly and expertly, as she had done it countless times before. Cameron watched the pattern of the four set places emerge on the formica tabletop like a coat-of-arms he could never disown. He wanted to sweep the dishes onto the floor. But he noticed the small pools of water left on the draining-board by the crockery and his hand wiped them with the sponge, locking him into a small necessity. And when that was finished there would be another, and then another, each small necessity opening into another, endlessly.

‘Put out the light when you come through,’ Allison said.

She put off the gas at the main. That’s right, Cameron thought. Keep us safe from other harms. Never be hurt by anything but me. And I’ll save all my blood for you. Allison checked off the kitchen with her eyes and went through to the living-room.

Cameron lingered on a moment. He filled a glass with water, drank, and spat into the sink. His mouth still felt scummed. Putting out the light, he walked through to the living-room, where Allison stood, waiting patiently.

As soon as he came in, she started to undress, draping her clothes over the chair that tradition had made hers. The moment he pokered the fire she spoke, as if he had inaugurated the next phase of a ritual.

‘When are you going to see about the gas-fire, by the way?’

‘I already have.’

‘So where is it?’

‘Look. You can stuff the domestic catechism. You know damn well. They can’t supply the one you want. Remember?’

‘But when will they?’

‘We’ll have to wait. They’ll install one when they have them in stock.’

‘But you haven’t even been back in to see them. Of course, you’d rather have a coal-fire anyway.’

‘That’s right. I prefer the naked flame. Me and the cavemen both. I’m a primitive.’

He was undressing too now, and he padded through to their room in his stockinged feet and fetched his pyjamas and her nightdress.

‘It’s nothing so romantic,’ she said. ‘You’re just lazy. Look at that last place we were in. I was never as glad to get out of anywhere. Nothing worked. The toilet only flushed when it took the notion. Half the doors didn’t shut properly. But you were quite happy with it.’

‘I like houses that are humanised with flaws. Anyway, it’s too late at night. Don’t go into your Rosetta stone routine just now. Fragments of pre-history.’

Cameron stood stripped to the waist, contemplating his stomach. It had softened, though not too much. But at his sides small folds of fat overhung his trousers, an ominous fifth-column. He exercised fitfully for a few seconds before putting on the jacket of his pyjamas.

‘I intend to see that everything in this house is the best, anyway. The very best. Even if I have to do it without your help. You would think even for the sake of your children, you would care more. Don’t you want the best for them, and for us?’

‘Oh yes. For your birthday I’m going to get you a gold-plated thumbscrew. And you can buy me a monogrammed flagella. So I can keep my self-disgust fresh in your absence.’

She was combing her hair. Cameron lit another cigarette. The flame from the match seemed to shoot up like a flare, illuminating a future that stretched infinitely before them, an unbroken plain of such petty quarrels. The thought of it was almost comfortable. There would never be any need for them to find new weaknesses in each other. They knew them all and where to hit them. Similarly, having been hit so often in the same places, they were largely immune to each other. It meant that while they gnawed away they could get on with other things, brushing shoes, drinking tea, reading a paper.

‘For one thing, Alice and Helen should be at a fee-paying school. Like Hutchie’s. They really should.’

I’ve had enough, Cameron thought calmly. You’d better stop.

‘But you won’t hear of it. Why not? Is it just because I want them at one? Is it? Why do you want to spite all of us at every turn? You deprive us of so much. Like a vampire.’

Cameron laughed incredulously.

‘Say that again,’ he said.

‘You’re like a vampire,’ Allison said defiantly, but she couldn’t quite see herself how it applied to him.

Having her attention for a moment, Cameron started to dial on an invisible phone. After a second or so, he lifted the receiver.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Doctor? Yes. She’s having them again. Same old hallucinations. The old family trait reasserting itself, I’m afraid. Fine, you’ll be right round. Will you bring the strait-jacket or shall I?’

The silence that followed seemed as if it would be endless. Allison laid down her comb, sat in her chair, composed herself, and started to cry. Her carefully made up face unfolded like a withered flower. Running mascara spiked her eyes.

Cameron looked at her impassively. His timing had been perfect, his aim flawless. It was the sort of expertise that could only come with long acquaintance. The history of a relationship was a bit like the history of a society. At first it’s pretty disorganised. You hurt each other only fitfully. But through time everything gets categorised, centralised. Specialisation sets in. You know exactly where each pain is. Agony is on tap. Grief by the gallon, at the turn of a phrase.

‘You know exactly what to say, don’t you?’

She looked very ugly. Her voice lisped with slaver and her breathing was noisy. To Cameron, her face seemed no more than a breaking dyke that could barely hold back the snot and phlegm that shifted behind it. Her skin looked about to thaw into a watery pulp.

‘I’ve had to learn,’ he said.

It had achieved two things, anyway: it had finished their quarrel, and it proved they were still alive. Her tears were a bitter sort of manna, falling from her eyes like the grace of God. At least they were still sufficiently alive to be hurt by each other. Not all their words were powerless. They weren’t quite immune to every truth. Perhaps there was hope for them.

Allison still sat weeping in her underwear like an X-certificate Victorian etching: The Discarded Wife. The ludicrousness of her grief touched a nerve of sympathy that the grief itself had missed. Cameron felt guilty that such bitter tears should seem ridiculous to him. The reason for them was real enough to her, and perhaps his indifference was a measurement of the distance they had put between each other. The chasms that people cleft between themselves were awful, giddy, hardly to be crossed. Sifting, eroding, lives changed irrevocably, stranding people in themselves. It happened imperceptibly, grain by grain, too subtle to be noticed. But hearts were precise seismometers, and every mood, every pain, every disillusion was meticulously recorded, so that people who had once been near enough to touch could turn round and find each other miles away, with gorges that seemed impassable between them. And he and Allison had once been in love with each other. And somehow they still were. Looking at her, he could see one reason why. Her body was marvellously fluent yet. Two children had done no more than soften her hard nubility, add a nuance of more flesh. At thirty-four, her body seemed not to have yielded a pore of its prime. What a waste, he thought, remembering too those other things, of which that body seemed the last survivor, the naturalness, the quick laughter, the easy happiness, the honesty. Those other gifts had not been easily surrendered, had been won from her by long attrition, and partly by his help. What both were, both of them had helped to make, and each was responsible in some sense for the other. Feeling that, he wanted to make love to her, locking them together. All they could do was surrender to each other, go on again and again making that ultimate act of mutual submission, in the hope that from the recurrent ashes of their passion would come some kind of benediction, some kind of grace in the coolness of whose shadow they could meet. If they couldn’t irrigate the desert, at least they could lay the dust. Intermittent truce was a sort of substitute for reconciliation. But even as he made to move to her, she spoke.

‘It’s not for my own sake I worry so much. I can bear it. It’s for the children. It’s them I want to have everything.’

The mock stoicism blighted his intention instantly, the hypocrisy of it made dust of his desire. He stayed where he was. The game demanded that you forgot temporarily those things about each other you despised. She had pushed her dishonesty in his face, like a scab. He had to wait for disgust to ebb. So passion is schooled by time, chastised by circumstance, and the honesty of lust must learn the devious manners of love. Perhaps that was all love meant: teaching lust to be patient and to work towards the achievement of mutual moments. In the meantime, all he could do in the way of union with her was to acknowledge his own part in what she had become, to admit that he must share it with her, as she must take her share in what he was. As she spoke again, he felt that she was setting up an echo that would never end for him.

‘My only worry is the children. And what we can do for them.’

There was the sound of bare feet in the hall and the door opened the way doors do at moments of tension in a film, inching towards revelation. Helen stood there, her hands grubbing in her eyesockets for wakefulness. She unearthed enough vision to see her father and then ran blindly towards him, sticking to him like a burr.

‘I had a bad dream, daddy,’ she said, offering him her defencelessness like a trophy.

She was too sleepy to notice that her mother had been crying. Cameron held her to him for a second, savouring the release of her arrival like a deus ex machina, a divine simplification of all their seedy complexities.

‘Come on, love,’ he said. ‘It’s all right now.’

He scooped her off her feet and took her out. In the hall, she found she needed the toilet. She let him put on the light for her but closed the door on him, having learned dignity young. As he brought her back, Allison was waiting composedly in the hall and the two of them touched briefly over Helen, as if she was neutral territory.

In her bedroom, Cameron tripped over one of Alice’s slippers. When he laid Helen down, she still held on to his neck and her voice disturbed Alice, who wakened briefly, touched her father’s arm, and promptly fell asleep again. Cameron remained crouched over the bed while Helen drowsed. The weight of her arms on his neck reminded him of Alice’s arms and of Allison’s, and of Margaret’s. He felt weighted down and trapped by his strangely alloyed loves for all of them, caught in them like golden shackles. And he couldn’t imagine any event that would ever provide him with a hammer strong enough to free himself.