Читать книгу A Gift from Nessus - William McIlvanney - Страница 8

2

It was hot in the office. Morton crossed to the window but didn’t open it, content merely to watch the people in the cold air outside and cool down by proxy. There was no more than a faint wash of fog, just enough to blur edges and make traffic and pedestrians move in a poetic greyness where the lamp-standards flowered gently. Nice, Morton thought, from his window in Olympus, a study in degrees of confusion. The general greyness was intensified wherever people moved, each one’s breath creating a private fog about his head. Having things to do, Morton took in the sensuous pleasure of the scene quickly, swallowed it like a pill. Then he crossed to the door, opened it, and spoke into the small outer office.

‘Annette. You can bring me in that file on Mr Cameron now.’

He came back in and sat on the edge of his desk, adjusting his mind like a microscope with Cameron under it. But as soon as Annette entered the office, his concentration misted. It wasn’t just the smell of her, although her perfume, strong without being obtrusive, proclaimed her femininity in a whisper. It was more complex than that. Annette attracted indirectly, as a sort of emotional agent provocateur. Not particularly pretty, she managed to make prettiness seem a fortuitous accessory, like earrings. Wherever she moved among the men in the office, she created small skirmishes on the borders of their attention. Many a business-like thought had found itself dissipated by the rustle of her nylons, many a sombre decision had been ambushed by her scent. She had learned to live with the fact that she was proposition-prone, and spent her days pleasantly side-stepping careless hands and avoiding knees that seemed magnetically attracted to hers and innocently staring innuendoes into stone. Disillusioned juniors maintained that she was merely saving herself for lechers of more elevated rank.

Morton wondered about it as he took the file from her. He thought there was a secret submissiveness about her that only needed the right password. But he hadn’t time to play at Ali Babas just now. He opened the file.

‘Tidy up a bit in here, Annette, will you? There’s a good girl. It needs a woman’s touch.’

He wondered at once why he had said that. Certainly not because he wanted the office tidied. The simple statement, emerging without apparent reason, added a new dimension to the atmosphere in the room. Annette obeyed without comment, going through a ritual of shifting things about on his desk. Morton felt as if he had made a remark in code, the true significance of which only the two of them could have understood.

Cameron’s file. Graph of one man’s deterioration. As the sales figures degenerated, the expenses increased, as if Cameron could compensate imaginatively for the shortcomings of reality. Morton shook his head. There was only one conclusion to be reached.

‘All right to put this stuff in the basket?’ Annette asked.

‘What’s that?’

She came round beside him and held the papers in front of him while he riffled through them. He was more conscious of the fine white hairs on her arm than of the writing on the papers. The shape of her bosom affected him like an astigmatism.

‘Okay,’ he said, not sure himself whether he was passing judgment on the contents of the papers or the contents of Annette’s blouse, and he watched her cross to the wastebasket.

There was only one conclusion to be reached. He couldn’t help wondering about Annette, though.

‘These ones here, Annette. Put them in the left-hand drawer.’

Although he wasn’t in her way, he made a show of moving to let her pass, settling nearer to her than he had been. She was in no hurry to move away, tapping the edges of the sheets of paper on the desk-top.

‘A second,’ while his hand rested on her forearm. In leaning over to see the top sheet, he felt her hair brush his cheek. Her skin against the blouse sighed infinitesimally, as if deputizing for an emotion. His fingers made a small gesture of contraction on her arm. ‘Yes. They’re the ones,’ leaving pale fingermarks like a rubber-stamp on her flesh.

Only one conclusion to be reached, his mind repeated to him like a patient secretary. But duty came to him as his mother’s voice had through countless dusks when he had been involved in timeless games, distant and unreal. This was becoming an absorbing game. Annette, with the drawer closed, wasn’t so much standing as hanging, marionette on loose threads.

‘You could empty the ashtray if you’ve time.’

It was so ridiculous he almost laughed, but she did it. For a manic moment, he had a wild spatial sense that this room had broken off from everything else, was spinning in a private orbit, surrounded by eternal fog. Even more absurd requests were improvising themselves in his head. Brush my shoes. Stand on your head in the corner. He decided to halt on the verge of megalomania. He might just be suffering from overwork. After all, what signs had she given? Also, there was an uneasy ambiguity about who was the ringmaster in this subtle circus. He wasn’t sure whether he held the whip or responded to it, for he couldn’t take his eyes off her. One thing he hated was to let other people get the upper hand. This was enough for one performance.

‘All right, Annette,’ he said. ‘Thanks. You can knock off now.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr Morton.’ She invested the words with a lot of weight, like a walk-on actress trying to make her name on the strength of a line. ‘Goodbye,’ pouting on the plosive, as if she was extinguishing a delicate candle.

’Night,’ Morton called, the unnecessary volume of his voice seeming to intimate the distance she should have been from him. But his mind noted her departing buttocks like a memorandum.

Only one conclusion to be reached. He glanced at the file again. It was ludicrously obvious that Cameron was at it. A fiddle was one thing, but this lot amounted to an orchestra. Morton didn’t want to do anything too drastic. For old time’s sake, he thought. And other things. But there was this additional information. Margaret Sutton. You couldn’t expect to run a mistress on expenses. No. Steps would have to be taken.

Morton flipped the file shut and locked it in the right-hand drawer of his desk. Having decided to act, he felt better. It was now only a question of how, and Morton was good at the mechanics of a situation. He lit a cigarette. He was seeing Cameron tonight. But their wives would be there, as well as Jim Forbes and his wife. (Morton’s mind donated a smile like a penny to the image the name of Forbes always called up to him.) He decided he would merely mention to Cameron that he wanted to see him in his office first thing in the morning. Give him some doubt to sip on overnight, like black coffee.

Morton stood as still as bronze in the middle of the office and listened. He relished this moment of soft limbo when the office-building ceased to be a factory of noises and addressed itself to murmured sounds, muted as prayers. The clank of a pail, melted by distance to a coin of sound dropped into a large silence; the closing of a door, a small hardness that healed in a second; footsteps like a message in morse; the preoccupied moan of the lift complaining to itself; all sounds that were movingly self-absorbed, confined to the confessional of their private purpose. In the glare of his small linoleum sanctum, Morton smiled self-sufficiently and to himself, graven out of his own preoccupations, wreathing smoke down his nostrils like a lonely bull that manufactures its own incense.

The small cubicle adjoining his office contained a wash-hand-basin and a rack where his coat and hat hung. He washed his hands slowly and the question of how Allison Cameron would react if she knew became involved with the suds. He kneaded the issue to the point of her forced moral indignation and then washed it down the sink.

At the door of the office, he paused with his coat on, looking round. All was in order. The office looked small with familiarity and Morton felt he had all but outgrown it. He noted in the general drabness the small prophetic pockets of luxury – oriental letter-opener, expensive desk-lighter. London was next. The future lay like tracks towards it. Suddenly Cameron clicked in his mind like a signal standing against him. Morton resolved in that second that Cameron would give neither him nor the company one more day’s trouble. He would bring him out into the open. Softly, wisping up out of dim Glasgow backstreets where children stuck like flies to a lamp-post that dropped a grey bell of light over them, threaded with memories of endless games of tig and scuffed shoes and tin-can football and snot-hardened jersey-cuffs, came the words of a game they used to play: ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are, the game’s abogey’. Morton nodded in answer to their echo, closing the door.